Myriad 2017

Art by Rishita Parikh

PAST. PRESENT. FUTURE.

E

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Alessandra Celine Lau Trent Vu Kaavya Jha Pansilu Sannasgala A. P. Veera Ramayah Belinda Lea Bhatia Cornelius Darel Sunjaro Dilpreet Kaur Julie Ja Kareena Dhaliwal Lihini Jayathillake Garima Sharma Antonia Yip Piriye Kaine Altraide Mannik Singh Mark Yin Amanda Tan Alessandra Kerr Belle Gill Ayonti Maureen Huq Grace Chia Ilsa Harun KarenOne Michelle Leong Morgan-Lee Snell Qaisara Adlina Mohamad Iqbal Rishita Parikh Shriya Niranjan Rao Sophie Chauhan

52 EGG

by Celine Lau

38 HORRORSCOPES

17 THE DEVIL

by Amanda Tan

by Piriye Kaine Altraide

60 EXPRESSION

by Ilsa Harun

25 CRITICAL

by Pansilu Sannasgala

48 AROMATIC OF SAUDADE

by Mannik Singh

14 DUCK BUMS

by A.P.

One day we went home and asked our girlfriend for a

baby. It was the twenty-ninth time we had had The Baby Conversation, but this was the time she finally conceded.

We conceived the baby in a supermarket, aisle five, surrounded by dry pasta and tomato sauce. Our girlfriend bought some shaved ham from the butcher’s before we went home. We went into labour two weeks later. 1368 grueling hours on the birthing table. No epidurals here.

Natural birth. We’re a little worse for wear perhaps, but we made it, and are pleased to announce that our bundle of joy arrived at 9:46am on the 20th of September 2017, weighing in at zero pounds, 89 ounces. We called her Myriad.

But seriously. Making this magazine has been, for all of us, much like having a child. It’s scary and we kind of didn’t know what we were doing most of the time, but somehow our kid turned out okay. And now with a mixture of pride and fear we’re sending her out into the real world to stand on her own two feet.

To our contributors who lent us their words and their art, to anyone who submitted their work and told us they have been wishing for a Myriad - thank you for helping us and believing in us.

Myriad means a lot of things to us, but mainly she’s a protest. The Australia we live in was founded by white people for white people. Myriad was founded by people of colour for people of colour. It’s content we can read, content we can relate to in this frightening and colourless climate. It’s the voices silenced by other, whiter publications. She’s eye-opening and she’s exciting. But most importantly Myriad is a community. A safe space. A haven.

We hope you love her as much as we do. xo Clara, Celine, Morgan, Wing, Vicky, Stephanie, Kevin, Hiruni, Edwin and Baya

CLASS OF 2017

Dear White People, Let’s Talk…

Words by Veera Ramayah Art by Clara Cruz Jose

D

ear White People,

On the off chance that you’re ‘woke’ enough to read this, let’s talk.

Let’s talk about how you claim to ‘love’ us, whilst only bringing us down from your trophy cabinet when you’re around people you want to impress.

I love being your brown china doll.

Let’s talk about these themed parties you throw. ‘Exotic’ is just a synonym for cultural appropriation, right? After all, all you’re doing is draping brightly coloured cloth around your living room and sitting on floor cushions, eating shish kebab appetisers with toothpicks instead of manicured fingers. Wouldn’t want to keep too in theme though, people who eat with their hands are ‘savages’, after all.

Let’s talk about your fashion ‘awakening’. Let’s talk about wearing saris to Indian weddings and admiring the life that is our culture. Can we also talk about the racist jokes that are always preceded by, “no offence”? That combination goes together almost as well as dhosai and sambar. What about your St Kilda Festival bindhis and ‘tribal’ face paint? Let’s talk about how when you do it, it’s a ‘forehead jewel’, but when we do it, we get ‘dothead’ and calls to assimilate. This isn’t India, it’s Australia, right?

Dear White People, Let’s talk.

Let’s talk about your compliments.

“You’re so lucky you don’t get pale in the winter!”

Funny how 200 years later, you covet our brownness. The same brownness that followed my ancestors everywhere in British India like a warning sign. Our bodies, our brownness is so politicised, even before we are born. Our brownness is the subject of debate, of immigration, of assimilation, of discrimination. Let’s talk about how your self-tanner is lathered on to the point where we can use the same foundation colour. But it’s just the tan you want, right? Not the discrimination that comes with shade NC20? Never mind, though, who are we to stop Bondi Sands from profiting off of colourism?

10

Dear White People,

Let’s talk. Let’s talk about how some days your stares are laced with bleach, as if by staring at us for long enough we will somehow lose our brown hue and “fit right in”. Blue eyes seem to absorb Clorox so easily, compared to the chocolate brown eyes that keep sparkling in the sunlight.

Dear White People,

Let’s talk about the hottest fashion accessory this season: social justice, paired with limited edition ‘woke’. Let’s talk about our culture being nothing more than an afterthought. Like chucking on a matching scarf before you leave the house.

Dear White People,

Let’s talk about these food trends. Coconut oil everywhere and turmeric on everything are all new concepts invented by your fitspos, right? Let’s throwback to when bringing Indian food to school for lunch came with a side of being teased for eating ‘yellow’ food. But now that you’ve claimed turmeric as your own, suddenly it’s trendy to put in everything. Let’s talk about how we’ve been putting coconut oil in our hair years before you even realised you could drink coconut water. It’s probably why we don’t need your volumizing shampoo. Just saying.

It’s the trend, not the history, you want, right?

Dear White People,

Let’s talk about how when we’re trying to explain colourism to you, you pipe in with an anecdote about feeling the same way as we do, since Barbie was always more tan than you. Let’s talk about how our calls for ‘increased representation’ are deemed unnecessary in the whiteblonde sea of Hollywood. Brown actors can’t possibly play brown roles better than White people, right?

Dear White People,

These double standards cannot be all-encompassing. We aren’t a pick ‘n’ mix station, where you can decide when you want to be problematic, or a social justice warrior. Being ‘woke’ isn’t an accessory. Saris aren’t a costume. And sprinkling turmeric on everything isn’t a novel concept. You want our culture, just not us.

Dear White People, Let’s talk.

11

No. 1

By Qaisara Mohamad

I took a pair of scissors to the copy of Twilight I read when I was twelve.

By Kareena Dhaliwal

13

Duck Bums

Content Warning:

Epudam quo idit officto et officidit

Words By Alessandra Art By Clara Cruz Jose

I

’ve spent 21 years with my dad and these are the things that I’ve found out about his life.

I know that he went to the coloured school. I know that he slept on the porch for most of his childhood because there were five children and only three bedrooms. I know that once his family didn’t have enough money for food, so for weeks all they ate were the leftover duck bums from his parents’ Chinese takeaway. I know that he was enlisted by the Rhodesian government to fight in their war. I know that he’s partially deaf in one ear because of the bombs. I know that he couldn’t go to university until the Rhodesian government lost the war.

It’s easy to understand the facts of colonialism – to recite that Zimbabwe was colonised in 1888 and that a decade later Europeans began to invade the country, and so on. It’s difficult to imagine experiencing colonisation.

My dad was the son of two Chinese immigrants that arrived in Rhodesia in the early 1900s, so while my family never experienced having our country taken away from us or the colonial violence that many black Zimbabweans have, we were still categorised as coloured and on this basis were segregated with the other Asian and black people.

My aunt tells me stories about the White children that taunted them as they walked home from school and the signs that prevented them from entering public spaces.

I used to make fun of my dad for never learning how to swim, until I learned it was because coloured people weren’t allowed in public pools.

I know most of these things from cursory moments anecdotes that my family tell at birthdays and dinner parties, always phrased as quips and followed by laughter.

But I have never heard my dad talk about the taunting or about the segregation. My dad’s version of his life is absent of any mention of colonialism and racism, of the structures that sent him to war and excluded him from universities and pools.

My dad rarely speaks about his experiences, but everyday I see the way that they have shaped and changed him. After my family arrived in Australia, my dad would regularly come home from the supermarket with months worth of meat that he stored in the freezer in case we couldn’t get any in the future. This is an echo of his past, the cumulative impact of the financial precarity that he has lived with for much of his life. Other times, he tells me about the chronic asthma that nearly killed him as a child because it was untreated, and laughs. He tells me about the grenades that detonated and killed other soldiers during the war. I question him further about these things to interrogate what structures predisposed him to these experiences or to discuss the effect it has on his mental health, but he always gives me aphorisms like ‘old habits die hard’ or ‘it’s just the way things are’ and walks away.

For many people belonging to migrant and ethnic communities in Australia, mental health problems are often closely connected to histories of colonial trauma.

In particular, men from migrant and ethnic backgrounds face an intersection of colonialism and patriarchy that often leaves their pain silenced. Men endure racism and violence, but arepressured to remain emotionally stoic so that they can continue working and surviving.

Additionally, colonialism takes away so much of their dignity that they are often pressured into performing masculinity and strength for approval. This is worsened by the limited access that these communities have to health care. As a result, these structural forces have created a stigma surrounding mental illness.

Migration doesn’t solve these problems but often creates new pressures that compound them. These communities continue to confront racism, particularly in countries such as Australia that are also colonised and systemically racist. Moreover, in order to achieve financial stability, many immigrants must continuously work long hours, which prevents them from accessing health care services. At the end of each year, my dad counts the number of paid days off that he hasn’t taken as if they are medals. This is reinforced by the desire for immigrants to be model minorities, which tells them that they should project success and stability, and shouldn’t show vulnerability. Due to these issues, stigma remains entrenched in these communities.

Unfortunately, mainstream mental health organisations often fail to address the specific needs of these families. In Australia, the two major mental health

organisations are Beyond Blue and R U OK? R U OK? focuses on encouraging people to ask others if they are okay, and seeks to increase these types of conversations about mental health. However, R U OK’s services don’t acknowledge different cultural backgrounds, and how these may affect mental health stigma. Their campaigns also use language such as ‘Aussie’ and ‘mate’, and thus frame their audience as being an average White Australian. When my dad sees R U OK?’s campaigns, he assumes that they are speaking to younger, Whiter Australians and not to him. As a result, R U OK? doesn’t acknowledge the problems that people from migrant and ethnic communities might have in starting and participating in these conversations.

Beyond Blue, on the other hand, is starting to discuss the way that racial discrimination affects mental health problems for both communities, and has versions of their mental health guides that are culturally specific and translated. They also work with the Mental Health in Multicultural Australia organisation to improve services for migrant and ethnic communities. Additionally, they are involved in a program called New Roots, which directed at men from Arabic, Farsi-Dari and Tamil speaking communities. It seems that Beyond Blue is attempting to address the issues confronting migrant and ethnic communities.

But even when this tailored care exists, many people in these families are unwilling to seek it out because of stigma and a lack of knowledge. For men such as my dad, accessing mental health care seems like an overreaction to a past that they believe they have moved beyond.

Therefore, men that are affected by colonial trauma need access to discussions about mental health that are generationally and culturally appropriate to them.

In order to make these services more accessible, we must begin by encouraging men from these communities to discuss their experiences of colonialism and racism.

As a result, they can understand how they have been affected by their pasts, so they can start toacknowledge their trauma and pain. Organisations like R U OK? have the potential to contribute to this by providing resources on how to begin conversations about colonialism and migration. This would encourage men to access the tailored services that are provided by groups such as Beyond Blue.

Moreover, mental health services must be culturally specific and promoted as such, so that immigrants can access providers with language capabilities and similar ethnic backgrounds. Through this, mental health care can become more approachable and normalised for immigrants.

When I think about how my dad ate duck bums and fought in wars but never learnt how to talk about any of it, I cry because I wish he knew that he could start now. I want to expose the shape of the colonialism that traumatised him, and give him the words to understand the ways that he was hurt. I want to but I don’t know how, and I wish that someone could teach me. I want to reach across the dinner table, take him by the shoulders, and say: I’m so sorry, dad. Say: it wasn’t your fault, dad. Say: tell me how it felt, dad. Instead, I ask him to pass me the salt.

15

GHOSTS

By Piriye Kaine Altraide

Ghosts

Egusi soup trails.

Pepper soup stories.

Pounded yam, ingra fish theories.

Parents chatter Nigeria in the background.

Your favourite was the mango, salted avocado, fleshy yellow, green.

Roasted peanuts cracked from shells.

Charcoaled suya sticks Laden with chilli.

Akara balls and sugary sweet puff-puff.

You wonder if you spoke two languages; Pigeon-English flowing from lips just as easily as the real thing.

Tongue sprinkled with flavours of lost language.

One day the driver couldn’t get you to school roads blocked, fighting broke out.

A man runs past bleeding. Gunshot wound.

You drew a picture of it in class.

Compound kids spitting on your head as they saw you and your sister over the walls, in the ‘oyibo’ school.

Chasing baby chickens in the yard, that’s how you got that scar on your heel.

Cutting your foot on corrugated iron.

Fireflies decorating night walks to visit uncles and friends drinking beer.

“Here try this one, it’s malt-flavoured.”

Some kids caught jars of insects.

Long days of wandering, of coming home when dusk dawned.

Would life have been better if you stayed here?

She was five, but already knew what love was not.

By Piriye Kaine Altraide

By Grace Chia

OPEN LETTER TO Words by Celine Lau

We have a problem, pals (and it’s not the economy).

You heard me right, I’m talking about the representation of Asian women in Western media because that shit is PROBLEMATIC. And no, I’m not going to talk about The Bachelor and how there is literally zero diversity amongst the contestants (that’s a story for another time, my friends). My main beef with Western media is the fact that during the rare times we do see lovely Asian visages on screen and in print, they all seem to depict the few popular stereotypes in rotation.

Ladies, I think we deserve better than this.

Without minimising the problems with representation all women face in the media, I want to point out that we, as Asian women, are stuck with a whole new kettle of fish.

The intersection between gender and race, and the impact of this over the objectification of the female body, means that Asian women are doubly objectified in Western media.

Objectification occurs when we derive pleasure from subjecting images of women to a controlling gaze. And I don’t mean ‘gaze’ as in ‘staring super intently because you have my full attention’ – this type of gaze reduces women to mere objects for our viewing pleasure. ‘Object’ is the crucial word here. Because when you reduce someone to the level of an object, she is no longer human, and you can project all your nasty little desires on her without any regard for her agency or autonomy.

The issue then, for where Asian women are concerned, is how race comes into play in this complex issue of objectification. Asian women are further objectified as a result of subconscious associations between ethnicity and Oriental traits. A true blue double whammy of degradation, if I may put it so kindly. Edward Said, author of the book Orientalism, claims that there is an imperialist construct that sets up a series of oppositions between the West and the East. The West is seen as masculine, heroic, dominant, rational, self-controlled, and therefore superior. The East is seen as feminine, indolent, passive, submissive, exotic, luxurious, sexually mysterious, tempting and therefore inferior.

This dichotomy helped justify European imperialist interests during colonisation and has since pervaded modern society, creating a simplified and fanciful account of Eastern and Middle-Eastern cultures and peoples.

Unluckily for us, modern media representations of Asian women have inherited these mindsets.

While representations of Caucasian women are relatively diverse, depictions of Asian women in Western society are few and far between. For East Asian women, we are reduced to either the authoritative and salacious role of the ‘Dragon Lady’ or the modest yet sensual role of the ‘Lotus Blossom’. And don’t forget the perpetually popular stereotype of ‘Tiger Mum’. By the names of these stereotypes, you probably already have an idea of what they entail. For an Asian woman to conform to the Dragon Lady stereotype, she must radiate the qualities of a strong, manipulative, exotic and licentious woman. Just think of Lucy Liu in the roles of Ling Woo (Ally McBeal), Alex Munday (Charlie’s Angels), O-Ren Ishii (Kill Bill) and you get the picture. The Lotus Blossom, on the other hand, is submissive, delicate, vulnerable, and docile yet sensual. I’m thinking Miss Saigon and contemporary misrepresentations of Geishas as prostitutes. It’s like choosing between a high-class dominatrix (Irene Adlerstyle) or the secretly-a-sex-fiend shy girl in Calc 2 that just craves the touch of a White man. Neither of which accurately represent your average Asian gal pal in reality.

The stereotype of Tiger Mum is slightly different.

Unlike Dragon Ladies and Lotus Blossoms, which predominantly function as sex symbols, the Tiger Mum is an Asian maternal figure whose punchline is almost always: “Why aren’t you studying?”. You see this representation in sitcoms and comedy shows such as Jessica from Fresh Off the Boat or Ronny Chieng’s mum in Ronny Chieng: International Student. Tiger Mums feed into the general Asian stereotype that we’re all just studious math geeks focused on getting those pesky H1s. These cultural expectations of us can and do get annoying, especially if they are casually thrown around

by Non-Asian people as fodder for mockery. But I have to admit that I do find the Tiger Mum joke funny and somewhat relatable. Relating to cultural in-jokes like these make you feel connected to your other Asian mates.

THE

WEST

Like, when you’re newly introduced to another Asian person and you’re struggling for conversation starters, you assume you can bond over common experiences and cultural stereotypes like these ones, knowing that they’d probably have their own perspectives to share. In this sense, Tiger Mums and other in-jokes are quite powerful in creating that community atmosphere.

The stereotype of Tiger Mum is slightly different.

Unlike Dragon Ladies and Lotus Blossoms, which predominantly function as sex symbols, the Tiger Mum is an Asian maternal figure whose punchline is almost always: “Why aren’t you studying?”. You see this representation in sitcoms and in comedy shows such as Jessica from Fresh Off the Boat or Ronny Chieng’s mum in Ronny Chieng: International Student. Tiger Mums feed into the general Asian stereotype that we’re all just studious math geeks focused on getting those pesky H1s. These cultural expectations of us can and do get annoying, especially if they are casually thrown around

by Non-Asian people as fodder for mockery.. But I have to admit that I do find the Tiger Mum joke funny and somewhat relatable. Relating to cultural in-jokes like these make you feel connected to your other Asian mates.

Like, when you’re newly introduced to another Asian person and you’re struggling for conversation starters, you assume you can bond over common experiences and cultural stereotypes like these ones, knowing that they’d probably have their own perspectives to share. In this sense, Tiger Mums and other in-jokes are quite powerful in creating that community atmosphere.

But as fun as it is to relate to the archetype of a Tiger Mum, the blasé equation of Asian motherhood to strict discipline and dominance is harmful. Because angry Tiger Mums aren’t the reality for many Asian children and alternative accounts of motherhood are silenced. Where are the mums who collect Tang-dynasty antiques and start every phone conversation with “have you eaten yet?”.

Where are the mums who love to dance to 60s Mandopop and Elvis Presley while cleaning the house? Where are the mums who work too hard to have time to tell their kids to study, yet never fail to recount bedtime stories about monkey kings, dragons and New Year monsters?

What is so damaging about these popular archetypes for Asian women is the reduction of myriad life experiences and personalities to a few defining stereotypes you can list with one hand. We all know that what we see on screens and in print affect the way we view ourselves and our identity. (I know I definitely get excited when I see someone on television or in movies who even remotely looks East Asian). The severity of this problem is highlighted when we consider the effects that stereotypical representation can have on children. A study in the US found that kids in high school who were exposed to a great deal of stereotypical media were more inclined to accept those stereotypes than the kids who weren’t exposed to copious amounts of stereotypes.

While this study was mainly concerned with gendered stereotypes, I think we can extrapolate these findings to a racial level as well. It’s not a big leap to say that kids exposed to more racial and gendered stereotypes are then more inclined to believe those same stereotypes. And at an age where belonging is so important and deviations from popular norms are faced with intolerance, Asian girls in particular may find themselves pressured to fit themselves into those cookie-cutter moulds of Dragon Ladies and Lotus Blossoms. And even if you are fortunate enough to have strong, independent female role models in your life who don’t cop no neo-colonial Orientalist bullshit”, these stereotypes still affect the way Asian women are imagined and treated.

The story doesn’t end there. The insidiousness of prevalent Oriental stereotypes extends to the realm of love, sex and romantic relationships. Have you heard of yellow fever? I’m not referring to the viral disease transmitted by mosquitos. (If you haven’t seen it already, I’d highly encourage you to watch Anna Akana’s youtube video, ‘Why Guys Like Asian Girls’). Yellow fever is basically when a man’s only basis for romantic and sexual interest in a woman is the fact that she’s Asian.

It’s revolting. It’s one thing to have personal preferences and completely another to disregard individual interests, idiosyncrasies and personalities for ethnicity in your discernment of romantic and sexual intentions. These guys are the people who say, “I only date Asian women”.

What the fuck, man? We don’t automatically share the same submissive, exotic, sensual Oriental characteristics.

We’re women who live, laugh, love just like our Caucasian counterparts. We’re women who come from all sorts of different backgrounds and have diverse life stories. We’re women who are becoming sick of this shit.

Ultimately, a broader representation of Asian women in Western media would jointly resolve the reductive portrayals of Asian female realities and break down these Orientalist lens with which the wider community uses to view Asian women.

Surely, with some imagination, we can move Asian representation in Western media beyond the simple rotation of tempting and exotic goddess, cold and ferocious warrior, and the overly-concerned-withacademics-to-the-point-of-psychological-damage maternal figure.

We can start by telling our Asian brothers and sisters that their stories are worth hearing. We can support the voices of Asian creatives in film, television or even YouTube. We can continue to call out prejudiced casting decisions and the pay gap between Asian and Caucasian actors and actresses. And when we see something on screen that truly resonates with us, we can celebrate the shit out of it so Hollywood gets the message that they should do it again.

It’s not going to be easy fighting for more diversity in Western media, but dear God am I excited.

IT’S NOT A PHASE, MUM.

by Trent Vu

The formative years of your youth are a pivotal time in your life. It’s the time when you fall, you learn, you grow, you change and you love with a burning passion. We’ve all had those periods in our past where something really resonated with us, whether that be a television show, an album, or a piece of literature, only for our cherished discovery to be casted to the wayside when we discovered the next greatest thing. All of us have gone through certain weird phases in our childhood and teen years that we look back on with regret and embarrassment.

But it’s these very phases which have pieced together thwe massive Pinterest board of a human being that I am today. To honour the supposed ‘cringeworthiness’ of these awkward moments in our pasts, here are some of my own phases.

Animals: 3-8 years old As far back into my childhood as I remember, I was always obsessed with animals. And no, not the domesticated, basic bitches of the animal kingdom (pets).

I’m talking about the ones you’d find in the Serengeti plains or the Amazon rainforest.

The earliest memory I have is receiving the book The Waterhole by Graeme Base from my auntie’s friend Dianne. She was kind of strange and had those really long acrylic nails that still creep me out to this day. I vividly remember spending hours searching for the creatures hidden in the beautiful nature scenes on each page. In fact, most of the pages have been patched up with sticky tape because of all the rips I made from the sheer amount of times I read the book. Clearly, I was an overzealous child.

I didn’t have many friends as a child, so my parents bought me more books to occupy my time. Obviously I couldn’t read very well back then, so I would just look at all the pictures. But as I grew older and started to make sense of the words on a page, I came to learn more and more about the fauna of different countries. To this day, I still have a pretty impressive catalogue of fun facts that I’ve collected over the years from the many animal encyclopaedias that I’ve read and that still adorn my bookshelf. Did you know that naked mole rats have a queen? Or that flamingos are naturally white, but turn pink because of their diet? Or that the nine-banded armadillo always gives birth to identical quadruplets? Or that… Okay, I’ll stop.

Greek mythology: 9 years old When I was in Year 4, I discovered The Kingfisher Book of Mythology in the history section of my primary school’s library. I also may or may not have stolen the book when I moved schools, but that’s a whole other thing. The book explores the mythologies of different ancient cultures and gives short biographies of key figures in each of these worlds. I was especially fascinated by the mythology of the Ancient Greeks because it took up most of the space in the book. Also, I had a few Greek friends in primary school.

Being the impressionable nine year old that I was, I totally believed that the Greek Gods were real and that they were somewhere in the sky living on Mount Olympus. I distinctly remember a conversation I had with someone in Grade 4. He told me that they weren’t real. I told him that Zeus might strike him down with lightning.

And that’s why I didn’t have any friends.

Of course, I eventually realised that he was right. But while my wild sense of imagination led me to believe in tales of gods, heroes and mythical creatures, it helped to shape the creativity that I pride myself on (except apparently my first year Creative Writing: Ideas & Practices tutor didn’t agree).

Vanessa Carlton: 10-12 years old Just like everybody else, I was first introduced to Vanessa Carlton with her one hit wonder A Thousand Miles from her debut album Be Not Nobody. I remember first hearing it when my auntie played it off of her computer. This was so long ago that Windows Media Player still had those weird psychedelic visuals that would match the beat of the song.

Being a typical Asian migrant child, I was also learning piano at the time. Up until this point, my piano teacher, a 20-something year old Polish woman who smelled like potatoes, encouraged me to play all these dull classical pieces. But one day, I took it upon myself to download the sheet music for A Thousand Miles and asked her to teach me how to play it. This was the first time I actually enjoyed playing the piano and consequently formed a deep connection to Vanessa Carlton. This also led to me innocently signing up for a soiree in Year 6 to perform her song White Houses (from Vanessa’s second album Harmonium). This was before a teacher told me that it’s a song about losing your virginity.

When I tell people that Vanessa Carlton is one of my favourite music artists of all time, I often receive the same response: “I didn’t know she had more than one song!”.

Well how dare you. The woman actually has five studio albums out, each as underrated as the other. Her ability to craft a lyric that touches your heart, and then match it perfectly with a piano melody that sends a shiver down your spine, makes her one of the best singer-songwriters of the 21st century. In fact, Home (a song off of her album Heroes & Thieves) is still one of my favourite songs to cry to during one of my regular mental breakdowns. And she’s also pretty funny – I regularly scroll through her Twitter feed to see what shady tweets she’s been sending to Donald Trump to get a good laugh. Not that I’m still stalking her or anything.

Rent the Musical: 14-15 years old The first time I ever heard one of the songs from Jonathan Larson’s Rent was in Year 8. I don’t recall the exact circumstances but for some reason, I was alone with my music teacher in his classroom. He pulled up a YouTube video of the final number, Finale B, from the movie version of the musical, telling me that he wanted to do the song with our choir. Even though I had no prior knowledge of the song’s context – at this point in the musical, Mimi, a heroin-addicted and HIV+ exotic dancer, is (spoilers) on the verge of death – I still remember getting goosebumps because of how powerfully the song’s final line ‘No day but today’ resonated with me. Tragically, our choir never ended up performing the song, but I fell in love with Rent anyway.

To this very day, I still know every single word to the seven-minute long La Vie Boheme (nine minutes if you include Part B). I still dance alone in my room to Out Tonight. And I still cry when I listen to the heartbreaking

I’ll Cover You (Reprise). Despite a number of (strongly worded) suggestions from yours truly, my high school never did Rent as a production. Apparently it’s too raunchy.

Over the years, Rent has come to mean so much more to me as I now have a greater understanding of the significance of the musical’s open discourse on sexuality, HIV/AIDS, homelessness, drug addiction and death. Above all else, from that moment I first heard the musical’s closing number in my music teacher’s room, Rent has taught me to live life to its fullest and experience every moment like it’s my last. There’s no day but today.

Little Mix: 20 years old My love for the British girl group Little Mix is a true testament to how my opinions change drastically over time. Just a year ago, I couldn’t stand them. I hated every one of their singles – probably because I heard them way too many times on the radio. But it all changed when I heard their song Touch. It was like a religious revelation.

I was #woke. If I’m going to be honest, I was mainly there for the lyrical content (the song is basically an ode to getting fingered and orgasming), but I stayed because it’s a bop.

This song rocked my world. I’ve watched the music video no less than 400 times. I’ve made all my friends add it to their party playlists. And I dance to it alone in my bedroom almost every night. But my Little Mix love eventually extended to the rest of their songs – even ones I used to hate like Hair, Black Magic and Shoutout To My Ex. The moment I officially became a Mixer was when I bought tickets to their Melbourne concert. I lived my best life that night. My snapchat story was on fire and I popped my pussy so hard to Touch alongside all the seven-year-old girls wearing their light up bunny ears (and their parents). A year ago, I would never have imagined myself doing body rolls in my room at 10 o’clock at night while listening to a song with such lyrics as “Fingers on my buttons and now you’re playing”.

Being a Mixer has taught me that we should never be embarrassed about our musical taste. There will always be people who won’t hesitate to squeal with you when a new single drops, or get down and dirty with you to your ‘cringeworthy’ guilty pleasure bangers – even if they are seven years old.

Adolescence is a weird time in everyone’s lives, full of tears, acne, fights with your mum because she doesn’t understand you and just generally being a hot mess. But it’s also the time when you learn about who you are. So you shouldn’t be embarrassed by your emo haircut or your Belieber Facebook status; your phases have made you.

Photography by Michelle Leong

Scene 192 Words sounded strange coming from her lips. Computer hadn’t shut down for two days. Scene 185 She didn’t see anyone anymore. The painstaking work of an archaeologist, she collected artefacts. A toe there. A piece of heart.

Shard of dignity. Ray of youth. Sometimes she could see all of her. Scene 131 Raised voices bring on heart palpitations. Scene 133 She checks the definition of “trauma” on Google. Scene 105 He beat her. But the watching of others was worse.

The surrealism. Washing her face in the mirror sometime later: the disturbed red around her eyes staring back. Not her eyes. Not her face. Not her father. Scene 134 ‘Typical responses to trauma include burial. Include filling moon craters with all the brainlessness that doesn’t scare you. Your life is being written in the city’s bars. Your torment in cups of wine. Autobiographies in foreign beds. Dignity has dissolved in an intersection of frustration and sorrow.’ Scene 106 The watching of others was worse.

That involuntary leaping back of struck flesh. Her adult head spins away from her younger body. There have already been so many next times. Scene 154“Forgiveness is the only answer,” says the pastor. “You must learn to forgive,” says the person praying for her. She hates the word. He preaches the Bible too. How come nobody in that damned church rescued us? Scene 160 Andrew, Jake, Fred. Whoever. Too many names. Too many beds. All the same. She thinks how his eyes don’t match his hair. In this she has learnt nothing, except how not to think. Scene 167 She took two showers that day – one for the heat, the other for the guilt. Scene 135 ‘Typical responses to trauma include denial, separation. Younger self and older self become two different people, peeled apart like orange segments. Typical responses include gagging when she tries to speak. Reprimanding her for making things up. Typical responses include submerging her. Typical responses include drowning her.’ Scene 179 Body gleams silver moonlight. Large torso looming over her to cover inner questions. Bucking to forget the indignities. Exorcise her greatest demons. Exorcise herself. Zion beckons from his hips. Salvation from thin veneers of affection. At the dying of yesterday his large arm loops over her shoulder blade and rests in the crevice of sheet before her.

There is eternity between a wrist and an elbow. She leans in but finds no comfort.

Scene 187 She’s trying to write “piece” but writes “peace”. Action is constant amnesia. And over and over again it happens: How do you spell…? What is 9 x 6?

Scene 191 She kept a tally of the number of times her father exploded. She found it in her scratchy elementary handwriting while going through old things. Why should a child have to do this? Scene 201 She checks the definition of “social anxiety” on Google. Scene 266 INSTRUCTIONS: Try to act normal. Keep in control. You must try to act normal. Scene 267 ‘Social anxiety is vicious loops; sweat floods, a tongue spent – try to act normal. Panic quakes, sweat floods, speech impaired – act normal.

Act normal – inferiority, self-consciousness, anxiety, 300 bpm. Palpitating heart. Panic quakes – act normal. Dammit, act normal. Scene 267 The world is a prison bar. Calm and control are fiends who mock. This time it’s real. Will there be a consummation?

Scene 267 Her mind is – the computer hasn’t shut down for two days. Hasn’t shut down for two years. Hasn’t shut down forever. It has walked out. Slipped through her feet. It is the computer jammed, short-circuited, stuck like a- stuck like a- stuck like a...

Scene 267 That night she asks God to stop making her fight. He doesn’t listen. The next day she is still alive.

FEMINISM Art by Ayonti Huq Words by Garima Sharma

I have been thinking about feminism for a while now. On hearing and reading curious conjectures on its meaning, I have been beginning to wonder what it really is. I have, for my whole life, tolerat-ed this idea of staying within my limits – the limits placed upon me because I am a girl. I have my whole life tolerated this idea of women being considered ‘objects’. Tolerated the idea that strong women who defy the stereotypes of womanhood are not considered women. There are young la-dies who are being taught to be ‘coy’.

There’s a newborn baby girl who is considered a ‘liability’ for the Indian family she is born into. And the subtle and overt oppressions that I experienced daily in India are still the things I experience here in Australia. So obviously I’m a feminist. In this world I have no other choice. But does feminism mean loathing snotty men who are immersed in their male chauvinism from head-to-toe? Or, does it mean trotting out the wretchedness of a woman? Or, does it have to be any of these? For me, feminism is a patio of illuminating thoughts and ac-tions. My feminism is a life without prejudice against anyone.

My feminism teaches me to be bold and independent - for it is no bad thing. I have constantly been taught to shoulder the same responsibilities that a man is expected to and my mind is weighted with the belief that I am no less than my male counterparts.

My feminism reminds me, constantly, of my aspirations and goals.

My feminism enkindles my dreams.

My feminism means my friendships with boys are ‘allowed’. My feminism doesn’t label me a ‘slut’ because I’m friends with a lot of guys. My feminism perceives gender on a spectrum and not as two conflicting sets of ideals.

My feminism goads me, every day, to question the patriarchal beliefs of the society I live in. It en-courages me to broaden the narrow-mindedness of the narrow-minded.

My feminism reiterates the fact that I make my parents proud because I was born as a daughter. My feminism reminds me that this was never a reason for them to love me any less.

My feminism lets me wear any kind of clothes that I’m comfortable in. My feminism doesn’t sexu-alize me when I’m drunk or not in control. My feminism assures me that I don’t become impure during my period. It tells me that my carnal desires are purely my right and my decision over my body. It reprises me that I’m human!

My feminism allows me to be sensitive and strong at the same time. It lets me grow.

It talks about real changes rather than just tokenistic gestures. It teaches me to help everyone. It shows me about the kindliness present on the earth and encourages me to be a teensy part of it. My femi-nism doesn’t let people define me by what I’m not - it defines me by what I am. It prompts me to create my own identity and follow my own footsteps.

It allows me to dispel any fears that I may have, let loose and break free. It makes choices and accepts the consequences of those choices. It gives respect and commands respect. It lives and lets live.

Although it often confuses me that there are women who passively allow patriarchal values to swallow them, my feminism knows its place. My feminism doesn’t believe in superiority of ‘wom-anhood’, but rather reinforces the belief that all women should be allowed to do whatever they want.

My feminism demands freedom for a woman to stand equal with dignity in this largely patriarchal world, which is no more and no less than what every human deserves.

Chapter 1: The Translucency of Cultural Identity Words and art by Julie Ja

The other day, I was with a close friend of mine and we were discussing our sense of cultural identity growing up within a very privileged and Western society whilst having parents who grew up in an entirely different culture. My friend is of Iranian descent and was telling me about what it was like growing up before the Islamic Revolution. Her mother and her friends used to spend two hours getting ready to go out and meet up with boys – just the typical teenage girl thing to do. There was no need to cover her head and they wouldn’t get thrown into jail if they spent time out with people of the opposite sex in public. A year later, just as her mother finished high school, the overthrow of the Pahlavi Dynasty resulted in a rich and diverse history disappearing. Women were no longer allowed out of their houses, they had to wear shawls around their heads when out in public and if they were seen out with men who were not their family members, these ‘promiscuous’ women would be jailed and the men would be caned to death.

Though the circumstance of her mother’s situation wasn’t exactly the same as my own parents’, I feel as though the struggle for freedom was essentially quite similar. Like my friend’s mother’s situation, my mother was born into quite a privileged Chinese family in 1966 in Phnom Penh. Her father had migrated from China when he was a little boy – attempting to escape Mao in communist China. Her father owned a convenience store that sold French products and their shop and house existed in the same building of a French hospital. My mother described this time as one of the happiest times in her life. Her father had received education in France during the time when Cambodia was part of French Indochina and the amount of Western influence was slowly beginning to shape and discriminate the people of Cambodia based on class. My father was born in 1965, and unlike my mother, he was born into a very poor rural area - miles away from the country’s capital Phnom Penh.

Whilst my mother had maids and caretakers taking her to Chinese school and helping her wash up, my father was learning how to build wooden houses and whacking cattle with sticks for grazing. Whilst my mother had the liberty of taking many adorable photographs, where family pride and honour was evident, my father was often disciplined by his mother for small things like crying for not getting a toy aeroplane.

Despite the discrepancy of privilege and power in both my mother and father’s childhoods, their fate was ultimately united and doomed in 1975.

1975 was the year that Pol Pot (Saloth Sar), who was a very educated man, decided to completely fuck up Cambodia – resulting in the death of 25% of Cambodia’s population; based on an idea that he could start from the Year ‘Zero’. He wanted to create a Communist peasant farming society, ultimately stripping neighbours and

families of their love and loyalty for one another.

In 1975, this idealistic dream was encouraged after the Communist Party of Kampuchea became the ruling party. Now if someone was attempting to strip a nation of its history and culture, how else would they have done it other than sentencing doctors, lawyers, teachers and other educated individuals to their deaths? Watches, glasses, books and anything that remained of a civilised society with a rich history was destroyed and in turn, an attempt to create Year Zero was seemingly achievable.

‘City’ people were forced to walk from their homes for miles into the country. My mother told me of how multiple amounts of gold and money were hidden in their clothing so that they could trade for rice and other goods.

Of course, money became redundant in the country where everyone was forced to work. People were sorted into different camps, based on their age and sex. My mother was 9 years of age when the Communist Party of Kampuchea took over Cambodia. And after four years of sickness, death and cruelty, my mother finally made it out after the Vietnamese invaded her camp. However, she did not come out unscathed. Her two younger siblings had died of some unknown sickness and she had lost her father. She was the first to know that her father had died after she’d gone to the ‘hospital’ to visit him. I don’t think I’ve mentioned, but during these four years, the preservation of my mother’s native Hokkien Chinese dialect had to be spoken in secret. If anybody were caught speaking any language other than Khmer, they would be executed.

As lucky as these situations can get, my father was already a labourer and didn’t find it hard to adjust to the lifestyle of spending copious amounts of time in the fields. He came from a family of 10, having 8 siblings and a mother and father. He was the 3rd son and 6th child.

His oldest brother died during a bomb attack a long time ago before he was old enough to remember him.

Similar to how I speak my Chinese dialects at home and consider English my first language, Khmer was my father’s first language and the adjustment to speaking it fulltime for him both inside and outside of home wasn’t such a difficult thing to do.

After the Khmer Rouge Regime ended in 1979, my mother was fortunate enough to have family members who had emigrated to Vietnam before the Khmer Rouge Regime, resulting in her being able to spend a little over a decade in Vietnam with her mother, older sister and a younger brother selling cigarettes and coffee in a small street cart every day in the streets of Saigon. My father – on the other hand – wasn’t as lucky. Despite having been released after spending two years in the regime in 1977, he also went to Vietnam but was captured again about three years later at the age of 15, putting him in a refugee camp for ten years. My parents met when my father would visit my mother in Saigon to trade goods with her. My father had the opportunity of migrating to Australia in 1988, leaving my mother behind in Vietnam. He used to call her all the time, and when my mother moved to New Zealand, they used to call each other as well.

I guess it’s time to really explain what I meant by the title ‘Translucency of Cultural

Identity’, after sharing with you a brief account of my parents’ childhood and struggle before emigrating to the West. I realised, as I was talking to my friend the other day, that my parents’ sense of identity and belonging is even more convoluted than mine. Dear reader, I have not shared much of myself with you yet. But I promise you that I will get around to that. This is supposed to be a progressive thing where I try to share with you my experiences of identity and belonging. However, I felt it necessary to start off with my parents – the people who have ultimately forced me to realise this clash of cultural expectations. I think that most people form their sense of identity through a plethora of factors such as their parents’ upbringing, school, fashion and music trends at a certain time.

From the beginning where I started to really think about who I was and where I belonged, I realised that I was at a loss. It seemed pretty common for people who have grown up in a certain culture that is different outside of their homes, to have what people call a “hybrid” sense of cultural identity – where they belong to more than one culture. This can also be called transnationalism or collective identity.

According to a guy called Ian McAllister, “national identity is the feeling of being associated with a national group, defined by a common heritage which may be based on many attributes, the most common being race, history territory, language and history”. This is something that I’ve realised that I don’t have and talking about it the other day made it even clearer that neither do my parents – that is, a cultural identity. Despite being raised up in a Chinese-like culture, I ultimately consider myself as Australian. I was born in Australia and despite being raised by Chinese-like parents, I have spent 9-10 hours five days a week for nine months each year for the past thirteen years being taught to feel, think and flow in an extremely Western world.

I have been able to develop my own sense of identity through my external upbringing but

despite this, for some reason I still feel like a complete outsider despite considering myself Australian. I will explain this in my next chapter, but I just want to make it clear how identity is so translucent. Though I was able to develop my own sense of cultural identity – no matter how convoluted it may be – my parents didn’t have the same opportunity. During childhood and adolescence, my parents never really had the opportunity to ‘settle’ in a place for a sufficient amount of time for them to be able to form some sort of relationship with their external environment. It is unsurprisingly that they seem to have such a strong devotion to their parents - clinging to every word that they say. During a time when there was no body else that could have possibly have wanted better for them and where there was nothing familiar except for their family, my parents were taught about their own history and culture in secrecy, and in places where there was ultimately no culture.

INTO BOXES

by Piriye Kaine Altraide

I put myself in boxes. Class an image before anyone has uttered a word. I am the biggest kind of

hypocrite. It is the effect of disillusion. It is the effect of institutionalisation. It is the effect of starting to discover my own mind, only when it’s too late. Yet into boxes I put myself. Trying to unpack mysteries of mistreatments and the lingering effects like fingers- the reaching into of entrails. The pernicious remnants of a cancer.

Underestimating the effects of the burial of abuse.

This is not a call for justification. A cry for repatriation.

This is not the mourning of diaspora, the scattered citizens of self. I am only waiting for the day when I wake up, and forget to be afraid. Domestic violence leaves a gaping hole where your mouth should be.

There is a time when I will sit still and know what safety feels like. Until then I let my future self tell my former self that this is a time of testing patience. A time of trial in the wilderness. This is going through the growing pains of anger submerged. Of trauma ignored. And when it resurges it is karma, punishing you for sins you never committed. Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.

Forgiveness is a word too harsh to utter, bringing back the rightness of memories too wrong. Come back confidence! Come back youth! Come back new day! It is time to rescue the child, trapped in a woman’s body. It is time to rescue the woman, trapped in a child’s body. I am a big fish, ready for a city to grow in me. Or maybe it is me, ready to grow to the size of a city. It is time to find the mind that leaves me be. I dream of silence… I imagine hearing the thoughts of my own freedom. Feeling my skin, the strangeness too alien to know it is mine. I dream of hearing internalisation peel away from me. A distinctness unfolding, revealing the purity of calling one’s self their own. It is hard to peel the layers- inside discovering a stranger. Strangely familiar. But this is me, unpacking. This is speaking about life in metaphors.

Depicting a struggle like Israelites in Egypt. Obstacles large as the river Jordan. Demons worthy of exorcism.

This is the last exorcism… Promised Land gleaming.

The angry bees are settling. I see them. They are the floating epiphanies, they are the bits of lava cooled by time and indifference. They are the quiet voices screamed at in day-mares. My eyes are dry now, but the tears are still there. I remember dreaming. I keep seeing stars,

reminders of a parallel universe. My mind has long gone, but now I know that reality is my fraud and fraud is my reality. And this? This is recuperating, going back for the life that was robbed. The subject must return. It is the slow and painful process of rebuilding an unperson. I see her, the completeness of what isn’t there. But when I try to take the bulbous fire in my hands, pin her down and say that she is mine I realise - it is just shadows playing tricks on me. Oscillating between a victory, and a most tormenting kind of burial. The type in which you are still alive. It is the worst kind of groundhog’s day. A waking up to the same hopes and realisations, becoming lost hope in realisations. A place where torment is your only constant.

But like a fractal I believe that once upon a time I will look back on it, and see the masterpiece. This final peace.

There are glimpses of what is meant for me in a journey that is far from over. But hallelujah, to the light that has begun. And see - redemption comes. I see my queen, in all her glory…

I’ve learnt the long way that rising doesn’t always start from the bottom. Sometimes it starts with falling off a false edifice, reaching further than the other side of dust, returning to ground like a seed – only to build kingdoms all over again. Perhaps then we will feel the warmth that the day never promised. If I have come home, then why am I still unpacking? Did I miss something? Is it lost in the luggage? I keep reading all the signs. I will keep on reading. In this process of rising and re-rising I owe only one responsibility. The responsibility to listen. To listen to myself.

I am not the greatest kind of hypocrite… I have found myself within the very same boxes, in which I am put.

The ones created on my behalf.

A continuous dismantling ensues. A revealing of what is yet liveable. A joy without the past… The unbearable lightness. The larger than life.

And when this sensation lands, it feels like a bulbous fire unmuted. A forest ablaze. A crossing of the Red Sea, too large an overcoming to be contained. It feels like the soft-edged happiness of ends, the sinking of walls. The demise of every yesterday.

It feels like the outside of every box.

by Ilsa Harun

Horrorscopes Words by Amanda Tan

VIRGO

23 August – 22 September

LIBRA 23 September – 22 October

There’s something about you that seems different. Your perfume? Your lipstick? The vacant look in your eyes? Your fingers curling into talons?. Your teeth growing sharp? These are not the hands I’ve held... these are not the eyes I know.

Can you hear me? What monster has taken over your body? What blood courses through your veins? Libra?

LIBRA?! LIB-

The figure at the corner of your vision has something to say. His eyes are red; oh, his

eyes are glowing. What will he finish first: his sentence

or you? Do not move; do not attempt to close your eyes. He has something to say and he will not SCORPIO falter. Best not to struggle – accept the fate you have crafted for yourself.23 October – 21 November

At 1:17am, the world as you know it loses all meaning. You find yourself trembling in an elevator you don’t remember entering. You have so many questions. You want to understand. When the doors open, you want to step out into the darkness. Do

not.

For they are there, waiting.

They have been CAPRICORN

SAGITTARIUSwaiting for a long, long time. They will not spare you; you will not escape. Stay 22in December – 19 January 22 November – 21 December the elevator and wait for the doors to close.

She knocks and she answers. Fiery We would tell you to prepare for a world torturous flame, you have suffered for so long. of suffering, but then we would just be telling The damned are worthy of your envy. The you to be human. So… be human. Be so terrifyingly, unforgiving blade of time has whittled family into horribly human. Enjoy the rest of your life – or at least, strangers. Would they recognise your eyes, your enjoy it as much as humans can. Disgusting, vile father’s eyes? They are the only part of you she creatures, the lot of you. hasn’t touched. She is leaving them for last. She knocks and she answers.

AQUARIUS She closes the door.

20 January – 18 February For all the pain you’ve caused me, I don’t wish you a death at all. You deserve a dull eternity, an aimless forever, a pain you can’t quite place and a sadness so deep underneath your skin you couldn’t claw it out if you tried. I wish you immortality in its most mundane form. These words are true: I don’t wish you a death at all. For all the pain you’ve caused me, I don’t wish you a death at all.

ARIES 21 March – 19 April

Step out of the flaming pit you call your comfort zone and make the most of your day! Spring’s the season fo adventure – why not jump off a cliff becau you’re an indestructible entity and nothing can kill Imagine telling that story over smoked salm tartlets at your next party – the guests w guffaw!

PISCES 19 February – 20 March

AWAKEN MIGHTY BEAST OF BABYLON I SUMMON YOU FROM SICK DESIRE VENI, OMNIPOTENS AETERNE DIABOLUS AWAKEN FROM YOUR BED OF FIRE Proceed by throwing three green Haribo Goldbears into the cauldron. Await further instructions, which will be provided in next week’s horoscope.

TAURUS

20 April – 20 May

Got a crush you just can’t shake? Whi simple human sacrifice is typically the solution, take a different approach this weekend. Ge creative – try a new hobby like fire walking or raving’ with GEMINIyour dead ancestors. If all else fails, that alta still be around for you to offer the bodies o romantic conquests to the gods abov 21 May – 20 June

Angered any entities lately? It’s probably time to patch up rocky relationships, before they start getting really angry and clawing at your door in the middle of

the night, threatening to snap your neck. There’s no real

CANCER danger – unless you possess a particularly weak, frail

21 June – 22 July neck, like the average human – but there’s no harm in staying on their good side either!

Yes, you’ve had a rough week – that cute girl was actually a banshee and every potential soulmate on Tinder turns out to be a vampire. But look on the bright side – did you read Virgo’s horoscope? Of course you didn’t, you narcissistic fuck. Try thinking of other people for a

LEO change, instead of daydreaming about places to

stick your dick

23 July – 22 August into.

You know the genderless being in the red dress that hovers an inch above you while you’re sleeping? The one whose presence you identify by the faint smell of baby powder and blood? Well it’s getting married, and you’re invited! Dress code is whatever you were already planning to wear that day, doused in gasoline.

R FOR RIOT Words by Dilpreet Kaur Photography by Grace Chia

I am you, in rage and in fire, in anger we hold dear.

I am you in religion deemed fit to hire, no matter how good the God-like choir.

I am you thirteen and craving sex, locking doors and jerking off to regret.

I am you, a riot in the ink that you use to abuse.

I am you, a riot, you might want to lose.

When I stay inside you cuddled up like a dove I am you at the highest peak of selfless love.

I am you, yes I am!

Don’t mind the headlines.

They don’t like me very much.

They?

They who teach you.

Who teach you I am bad, ugly, maker of violent history.

They, Yes, they who teach you I am the cause and the reason and the excuse for a treason.

Don’t mind, don’t listen.

I might be the riot but they they forced me out of home so quiet Out of yours.

Out of mine.

Out on a blast or two.

Never mind the wine, the shine of the sword that cut a bearded man in half as he cried for more time!

Never mind, sir.

Never mind me.

Me, a riot an emotion that got spilled much too quickly, sir only to become another stalled session of the Parliament, sir.

Instagram

Life in Liminal Space Words by Alessandra Kerr Art by Clara Cruz Jose

40

I

am ethnically half-English, half-ChineseSingaporean, I hold dual Australian-British citizenship and for those trying to break the tie and decide where I’m really from, I was born in Spain. Now: decide.

Identity, for me, is a complex issue. Life, a maze of people asking me where I’m from and me trying to figure out what answer they want. See, I get this a lot, and no wonder! An anecdote about my childhood or a comment about languages and people are thrown in to a whirlwind of confusion. Then there’s my accent and maybe sometimes, my eyes. So they ask, for clarity. What follows is generally a hurried, abridged version of my whole life story. Or, when I’m tired, I might just pick a part of it to share. If it’s not the right answer they’ll ask again anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to sit here complaining like my life is hard. My life is in fact remarkably simple: I have the dubious privilege of passing as white.

All I need do is show you a picture of my father and you’ll see that, excluding the possibility of adoption, I am 100 per cent half-Asian. The world, however, doesn’t see me that way, which means I get to enjoy some very interesting interactions.

On the lighter end of the spectrum I get asked by Asian acquaintances if I can eat spicy food, if I’ve ever tried [insert generically ‘Asian’ food here] or if I can use chopsticks. I get guys of all ethnicities trying to impress me with tales of ‘foreign’ destinations, or that one time they had raw fish.

On a more serious note, for the most part I don’t face the discrimination, but I still feel the fear. Looking less Asian doesn’t make me any less Asian, and time and time again the problem is not cultural but genetic. Apparently.

I don’t tend to watch ‘outrage videos’, with screaming headlines about public harassment or abuse. I don’t care how they end; those glimpses of society make me feel a little less hope for the world every time. Yet, my mind jumps back to a video that started to autoplay on my Facebook timeline:

A middle-aged white woman is yelling at a boy in a school uniform, all of maybe 15 years old, on a bus. He is standing up, and had been chatting with his friends before she started her tirade. Who knows, maybe they’d been loud and obnoxious. But they aren’t the source of her ire, he is. He is Asian and somehow that is enough.

He was born here, raised here, and is culturally Australian in every way. And yet his features, the specific arrangement of lines and shapes on his face, are cause enough for her to refute his identity. How dare he, being unlike her, looking unlike her, not only exist but claim her flag as his own? His accent is broad and thick, and even though this shouldn’t matter, it does. Because it highlights that, in literally every sense, this boy has a stronger claim to Australian identity than I do.

She might claim it is because of his race, but I would never be yelled at on a bus like that.

My father, growing up in Perth in the 1970s, tells stories of the fights he got into with humour. How his mates are his mates because they were picked on too, and because they brawled together. He’ll flippantly talk about how he was called “slope head” and how he had to wait on the street when visiting his friends because their Italian immigrant mothers didn’t want “his kind” anywhere near their homes.

My parents eloped, because my grandparents did not approve of the Asian man my mum was marrying.

There is a funny sort of guilt that comes with my identity. My dad was adopted; I have no family in any kind of motherland. I cannot claim my heritage proudly because I am culturally white. At the same time, I am not white. I feel it in every bone of my body. It is there in every tale of conflict in my father’s life.

It’s not so much about holding on to my ethnicity because I should be proud to be part-Chinese; I don’t feel any obligation to claim an identity which I have questionable right to in the first place. It’s not that I feel distinctly Asian; it is that I am acutely aware of how, if I had a different nose or chin or forehead or whatever else marks race on a person, I could experience a completely different world than the one I do now. It is deeply personal.

I am just as Asian as the boy I dated whose whole identity at school was based on where his mother came from. I am perhaps less Asian than the boy on the bus, but for a stroke of fate I could have looked just as Asian. I am the daughter of a man who could fight for his country, but was faced with hostility when returning home. The arbitrary treatment of those I love as less-than stirs a fire in me that I struggle to explain.

So I use my ethnic ambiguity as a weapon. At house parties when stoned white men start anecdotes with phrases like, “you know how there’s that group of annoying but smart Asians at every school”, I let them talk. Then I ask them what they think I am. With a smile, of course. I live for the shock and horror of their having mistaken me as one of them.

It is in reminding people of exactly what they’re saying – in highlighting the problem of the comfort they feel saying something to me, as a white woman, but not to me as an Asian woman – that I feel comfortable owning my identity. In fighting for the cause of good, as it were. But in spaces for people of colour, I feel like an imposter. I never try to include myself. I don’t have the same context, but more than that, I don’t experience even a tenth of the struggles they face daily.

I live a weird dual life where I am acutely aware of the trials of someone like me without ever having been subjected to them. It leaves me always on the outside.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not hard passing as white, but feeling like a fraud in every space you inhabit is its own kind of loneliness. Feeling both the guilt of the privileged and the outrage of the oppressed is like drowning whilst being tied to the ocean floor. I see myself in both sides of a conflict which I am powerless to resolve.

41

I don’t like novels.

It’s okay to be lost sometimes. I’m always.

Being in a law school doesn’t make you a lawyer.

FITS AND STARTS

by Garima Sharma

I feel sad sometimes. It’s better than feeling nothing at all.

I think chocolates are like anti-depressants.

I wish I had a time machine.

I think I’m funny. Not everyone agrees.

I think I’m strong-headed. Everyone agrees.

Whatsapp is more addictive than coffee.

I want my newly textured lobby wall to look resplendent.

How is soup an appetizer?

I feel hallucinations.

Momos - but vegetarian, please! A little happiness treat.

I think I have a beautiful smile.

I see a lot of faceless people in my dreams.

I think babies are an unparalleled creation of God. I’m just too lazy.

I fear being stuck in an elevator. I get goose bumps going up and down.

Some people deserve a knee-blow.

Hormones undergo a change every week.

General knowledge is overrated.

My husband thinks I am a joker.

Having a tequila-shot is safe.

I get panicky easily.

I overthink a lot.

Dadaji by Sophie Chauhan

5 Ways to disappoint my parents ...The Revised Edition

by Belinda Bhatia

Step Two: Being in a relationship with a person of the ‘wrong’ ethnicity and the ‘wrong’ religion Recently I was feeling nostalgic and decided to flip though my Year 11 scrapbook. I came across a piece I wrote for VCE English entitled: “5 Ways to Disappoint my Indian Father and Maltese Mother”, a piece that I was quite proud of back then. Upon rereading it, I realise it is quite sensationalised. I had painted my mum and dad in a bad light and felt horrified whilst reading it again all this time later. It left a sour taste in my mouth.

So, I come here today to redeem myself. To start over.

To give this piece some major tweaking.

Step One: Choosing a career… that isn’t medicine

Step One: Choosing a career… and making a mistake Since high school, a lot has changed. And no, I’m not referring to growing taller. In this case, I refer to my parents becoming open and interested in the career path I wished to take. They are pretty fine with me pursuing something that interests me wholeheartedly. My father would give me an extended glare, my mother a concerned stare. They were saying with their eyes, “it’s ok, you’ll be fine.”

I guess when I was a kid, mum and dad expected big things. And who wouldn’t? But as time passes they discover what really made me tick. That’s a good thing I guess. They support me through my journey as a teacher, because that’s what makes me tick. In fact, my father would have actually been disappointed if I didn’t have my own personal career aspirations. I guess everyone’s parents think the same.

Step Two: Choosing the wrong guy

In the original piece, I wrote some things making my mum and dad sound racist. They are far from that. They are genuinely lovely people. From birth, they made sure I tasted the spice of an Indian curry, the crunch of a Maltese pastizz and the Australian caravan holiday. They are people who I hope to become when I have children of my own.

I don’t recall my father recently telling me who I should be with, nor my mother. They wanted me to be happy.

Though, when I was young, they would jokingly threaten me with the prospect of an arranged marriage. My father would afterwards wink at me and whisper “you can find your own husband,” I’d always breathe a sigh of relief. To be honest, my mother would be disappointed if I didn’t get married at all, and instead, became the dog lady of the family.

Step Three: Having a boyfriend to begin with

Step Three: Having a boyfriend to begin with… some things never change My father’s philosophy is for me to get educated and find a decent job before finding a partner. Even though finding love can never be planned, I do understand his logic. I mean, I do need to stand on my own two feet before I can commit to another person. But despite this, I cannot help but wonder what would happen if I did find someone ‘prematurely’, so to speak. I might have been told to pack my bags and live under a bridge with the troll.

Or, perhaps they would surprise me and be cool with it.

We just can’t time these things. They just, well… happen.

Step Four: Failing to reach their ridiculous standards in school Step Four: Wasting your valuable education

Now, while I write this, I am thinking about the exaggerated crap I wrote for this section. Honestly, I think I was only trying to impress my teacher, because I don’t recall my parents literally setting standards.

Wait, they did set standards.

But what I mean is they never developed a grade system of their own. But, I always felt as though it existed. Here is the grade system I thought was imposed: “‘A’ means average. If you receive an ‘A’ in any subject, your parents are not likely to award you; they will just say “keep it up” ‘B’ means below average. This indicates you are not applying yourself as well as you should.

‘C’ means crap. This result brings shame to the family, not only the immediate, extended family too. And family friends are also included. They basically turns into Mushu at this point.

And finally, ‘D’ means dumb and disappointed.”

‘E’ never existed in the old version of this piece.

Probably because an ‘E’ was not worth talking about.

Today, I can confidently say no alternative system exists because education means more than just good grades.

They know my education is about applying myself and becoming motivated to do better next time. My mother would always reassure me in her high-pitched tone, reminding me of that unconditional attention I received from birth.

To me, this is a much more valuable philosophy to follow.

Thanks mum and dad!

Step Five: Having a bad attitude Step Five: Having a bad attitude

It’s true of any situation. I’ll give them that one.

I remember feeling bratty and bothered in Year 11. All I did was snap at my mum and rolled my eyes. In Indian culture, touching the hands of mothers, fathers, sons and daughters is a sign of respect. My father’s warm hands would always be there to make me feel safe, my mother standing beside me, hand on my shoulder.

Aromatic of Saudade Words by Mannik Singh Art by Shriya Rao

I often recall the conversations I had with my parents; once I get out of India, I would not be eating homemade Indian food anymore, I’d be doing the things my way, I’ll finally be an independent person who can do his work on his own. True enough, once I got here and when I started living on my own, I admit, almost sheepishly, Indian food is the only thing which gives me a sense of peace and comfort. It’s the only thing which gives a sense of fullness.

It’s the only thing I find familiar where everything else is just so foreign. I still look for the familiar faces in a crowd of millions of people, crave to hear the sound of the same tongue I have been used to hearing my entire life, strangely yearn for the same cuss words I used to hear around every corner in India and long for the aroma of the tempered spices that used to go into the daal every evening.

Moving to Melbourne after living in India my entire life, away from home and family, was a thought that first instilled in me a great sense of excitement with a touch of fear and insecurity. Now, after so many months, excitement has vanished, and that what remains is a mundane life, still with a touch of fear and insecurity — of being judged, of being misunderstood and of misunderstanding others.

Out of all the spices which gave India the label “The land of Spices”, there is one which is used so frequently that more often than not is it overlooked. It is cylindrical with tapering ends, comes in various shades of brown, from raw umber to burnt umber to russet. On its own it’s so diminutive that one can only see the ridges if one looks closely. It is so small and so inconsequential, but when used in numbers, it packs a punch — it is the cumin seed.

The roasting of this tiny little seed sends everyone into a coughing fit, but to me it signifies a sense of belonging, a certainty, a security in a place so foreign. It is what makes a house a ‘home’ for me. It was only while learning about the process involved in making the best curries, or even just rice, did I realise the importance of cumin seeds. It is used in everything! Only now have I realised that it is as much a part of me as my family and other relationships are.

The thing that I miss the most about India is its culture.

When I moved to Melbourne, I wouldn’t say I experienced a ‘culture-shock’, but I began seeing cultures from a different perspective, even my own. Every day, through new experiences, I learn not just about the other cultures but about my own identity and where I come from. I relate cumin seeds to my culture, to certain feelings that I am by-default programmed with, the expressions that have been inscribed in me since I was born. Culture, I didn’t realise until I was here, was how I lived my entire life. It’s the ‘every day in one’s society’, and only once I was away from a place where this culture was very predominant did I realise what a big part of my identity my culture was.

My current situation is akin to a cumin seed in a mouth that doesn’t recognise its flavour. I am in a land where every morning I wake up to the same empty feeling that I go back to sleep with. I reside in a room to which I return from a busy day, with no one to welcome me with a smile.

I often ask myself how I manage to feel such a strange feeling in this beautiful place, a place which has the best of everything. However, time and time again I end up answering myself, home is not a place ‘home’ is a feeling.

I am cumin seed in a mouth to which I am foreign, and to me this place is foreign. Here no one knows me, no one fully knows where I come from, or recognises me.

However, this is what gives me the freedom to be the person who I want to be. Here I can explore myself and understand myself for who I am ‘individually’ and not ‘collectively’.

Every now and then, I wish I was back home, sleeping in my bed for as long as I wanted to, or to be woken up

by Mum’s constant tries to wake me up. Every now and then I just want to sleep through all the alarms and just stay right there — under my blanket, doing nothing, just feeling the warmth of the blanket which makes up for the warmth of home. Often, I want to have a proper Indian breakfast served to me in my bed, the parathas rich with ghee and spices! Just thinking about it makes my mouth water. Most of all, I just want it to feel like home.

This transition to independence is analogous to a child who cannot swim being thrown into a water. Initially, the child can only follow his instinct and splashes around, gradually figuring out certain movements that keep him afloat. I feel that I am in these strange waters, and my instinct is all that I have learnt until now. These ‘instincts’ are all the beliefs that have been instilled into me, the ideals, the notions, values that have been amalgamated into me, moulded and shaped to make the person I am today. In these strange waters, like a cumin in a mouth that doesn’t fully apprehend its flavour, the only thing that I can survive on are my instincts, which comes to me without a conscious effort. My identity, my essence, my flavour are the things that come naturally, things which reveal themselves at their own will. These natural tendencies are reflected in every action that I take, just like a cumin seed being roasted, revealing its true identity, flavour, essence, and aroma into its surroundings.

Similar to the cumin seeds, that are used in almost every single Indian dish, I carry my culture, my beliefs and ideals wherever I go, and in whatever I do. Its familiar taste makes me think of home, and simultaneously helps me build a home here in Melbourne. It reminds me of all the memories associated with home — bitter and sweet.

It’s such a small ingredient, yet has the tendency to change the flavour of an entire dish. It reminds me of all the meals that I have shared with my friends, with my family, with my cousins… the festivities, the celebrations, even the most mundane of family dinners.

I like to watch the sun set, standing on the bridge over the Yarra River; breathing in the scent of the breeze that blows, with the weak rays of sunlight grazing my eyes. I just hope for this beautiful city to feel as much of a home to me, as India feels like. Every morning, I wake up with a hope to find a perfect family of friends to transform this city into a home. Every evening I hope that there are new flavours I get to taste, and new things to experience which will eventually transform these strange faces into faces of a ménage. Hoping, every second to find a perfect metaphor, perhaps a spice to relate to this city, so that this feeling, this new home, felt more intimate than strange, simultaneously wishing for those mouths that don’t fully understand the flavour of cumin, to slowly acclimatise to the aroma, the scent and the beauty of this amazing spice.

This small, minuscule little cumin seed is like a bridge, a direct link between me, my family and my culture, between where I am now and from where I come from, between learning things from new experiences and acknowledging learnings from the past. It’s a link between my identity, my culture and I.

Untitled #1

Photography by Karen Ong

ODES TO EGG

by Celine Lau

1. a woke yolk, it is sunny side up, dancing feet wow. look at it go

2. see the birds flying, yellow sits legs akimbo, how peaceful this feels

3. is this all there is? lying down flat it wonders, what else is missing

RETURNING HOME

by Cornelius Darrell

During your brief absence from your home country as you’ve enrolled to a prestigious Australian uni, let’s assume you have managed to made many connections with local and international students, landed on a couple of parttime jobs (got enough money to go on tour around the outback) and also an internship with a really cool and helpful supervisor, and finally after years of hard work, you’ve finally finished your degree in Accounting and Macroeconomics (or maybe in Arts if you’re *cough* keen enough) with an H1 average.

Then, you’re super happy to hear that your parents will be coming to your graduation ceremony which also means that you’ll get a nice dinner for once, instead of some microwaveable meal that you eat almost everyday. Everything went super great for you until your parents started asking you to go back home and helping the family business, which means that you will leave Australia for an indefinite period of time.

To return or not to return, that is (the question) one of the difficult choices us international students must resolve one day. Obviously, depending on where you are from and what kind of environment you were exposed to before, making that decision to go back can range from being easy peasy to as complicated as quantum physics, and in case of Indonesia I confidently claim it’s the latter.

Now where should I start, oh right nationalism.

One of the most common reasons why Indonesians go back is because of their personal love for the country, much like a love of a child for their parents who have been taking care of them for so damn long. In contrast, if an Indonesian decides to stay and work in a ‘foreign’ country, then they would be typically labelled as not nationalistic (obviously not a fair conclusion, but unfortunately it is the status quo). Cool beans, but let’s take a look at nationalism even further. I still remember quite vividly starting from elementary to high school, we had to attend a ceremony every Monday morning where we had to sing the national anthem, raising the flag, and memorise a bunch of mantras about our country, etc. A common saying is that an important piece of knowledge should be repeated over and over again, till it reaches absurdity, so that we won’t forget, and I suppose that was the whole point, they’re trying to tell us that nationalism is important for us.

Looking back now as a barely functioning adult, I find myself questioning that statement. Is nationalism really important for us? And if so, is it important enough to go back and work there possibly for the rest of your life? Considering that we have lived in one of the most global and multicultural countries in the world and have seen our country from a whole new perspective, it becomes very much, a tricky topic. For example, let’s say you personally support gay marriage and LGBT rights while you were in Australia (which has a significant amount of support). But when you go back to Indonesia, you will find that 93% of the people there are absolutely against what you believe in, and not to mention that most of them have violent methods of keeping it that way . Not so easy now eh?

This might be the point where some readers might disagree with me, but I will say it anyways, if we were to genuinely endorse nationalism, like any other ideology, it must be done such that we chose to agree upon it on our own terms. That is, to choose our own fate in a ontologically existentialist fashion. This means that we are not hard-wired to always pick our home country and no amount of national propaganda can ever influence us unless we let them. To use a really sleazy analogy to make a point, a penguin, due to several biological reasons, requires itself to live in a relatively cold climate, if not then they wouldn’t survive. Hence, that cold climate is a requirement for the penguin’s survival.

If we take a look at humans on the other hand, we are extremely good at adapting, both biologically or socially. Especially with the advent of a global society, nationalism is no longer a strict requirement for our survival (whether we like it or not). It also means that if we found no good reason or if we are not able to justify our sense of nationalism (yes, it needs to be justified whether by personal or objective reasons) then rejecting it would be the best idea. But in case that you do choose to go back to Indonesia, you’ll be greeted with hundreds of wonderful dishes and you’ll probably go fat very quickly.

Once again, I would like to stress on how difficult this issue is with all things considered, and not to promote one side or the other, that question must strictly be answered personally, so no cheating!

*I’m not joking guys, http://jakartaglobe.id/news/indonesia-still-far-from-a-rainbow-nation/

Skin

Words by A.JPArt by Clara Cruz Jose

Coast

I

don’t like the beach. Never have, never will. There’s the awful sensation of sand between your toes, the seawater that crusts your skin, and the overcrowding.

Which of these three equally valid reasons is the most to blame is uncertain. What is certain is that you’d never catch me suggesting a trip to the beach (unless it’s to snorkel because fish make everything better).

And it’s not just because the beach is full of inconveniences. When you think about it, there’s not a lot to actually do at a beach y’know?

Take pretty pictures? Sure.

Eat overpriced food? Why not?

Sunbathing? Why would you want darker skin?

Wait.

You may have read that last part and thought that it sounded either extremely racist or colourist. And if you didn’t, don’t blame yourself. Not too long ago I wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong with it, either, because the idea that darker skin is undesirable was just that deeply ingrained.

At this point, all you beach aficionados can rejoice, for the slander against The Place Where Water Dehydrates Instead of Rehydrates has ended. Now, the real topic at hand– My Personal Experience with Skin Colour and How I (Kinda) Unlearned It– can begin.

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Content Warning:

Skin Lightening

I will say beforehand that everything I say is anecdotal and completely subjective. There really isn’t a lot of theory I can add here. Firstly, because I haven’t read other people’s opinions regarding the issue in any real depth.

Secondly, because I’d much rather discuss what I think and what I’ve experienced. If you want something with sources instead, consider going to a library.

The first thing I want to talk about is how this prejudice actually manifests itself. No, you won’t find people saying “darker skin is gross and I consider darker-skinned people beneath me.” What you will find is behaviour that reflects this sentiment, and when you know what to look for, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb.

One of the easiest ways to spot these attitudes is through someone’s sense of humour. Telling a darkerskinned (Southeast Asian) classmate to “go back to Africa”, or that they’re invisible in the dark, is an unmistakeable expression of colourist attitudes. At other times these attitudes aren’t so overt, but still pretty easy to spot once you know what you’re looking for. Here’s just one example: let’s forget what I promised earlier and go back to the beach one last time. Only, instead of going there to swim or build sandcastles, let’s just sit under some palm trees and watch everyone else have fun. Why? Because we don’t want to develop darker skin melanoma, obviously! Or at least, that’s what we tell ourselves. The reality is probably a blurry mix of self-preservation and

Tan

ingrained prejudice (leaning very heavily towards the latter).

So why are we, as a whole, so fixated by light skin?

At its core, I think it has to do with ‘cleanliness.’ A controversial commercial for Chinese detergent brand, Qiaobi, does a pretty good job of summarising what I mean. In the commercial, a black man is thrown into a washing machine and comes back out as a light-skinned Asian. The message is clear: dark = dirty, light = clean.

‘Cleanliness’ also brings along with it a slew of other positive connotations. Like that you’re also clean on the inside, or that you’re loaded and aren’t exposed to the sun every day like the working class.

As a logical extension to this, people with consistently light skin, i.e.– white people, are looked upon favourably in Southeast Asian society. I don’t know what came first in this proverbial chicken-egg relationship. Are white people held in such high regard because of their skin colour, or is pale skin preferred because of its colonial roots? Either way, it’s clear that there’s an element of reverence at play.

It’s certainly the only explanation I can think of for why students who constantly ignored local teachers listened to white ones. I think it’s also one of the reasons why there are so many international students here in Australia (even ones that aren’t attending universities as prestigious as Melbourne Uni).

Of course, it goes without saying that all of this is objectively a load of doo-doo. Lighter skin doesn’t make you an inherently better or worse person. There’s no correlation! r = 0! There’s no obvious pattern in the graph!

You get my point.

So how did I, then, learn to unlearn this deeplyingrained bias? I guess this would be the time to tell you that I haven’t unlearned it completely. Not 100%, anyway.

In my own version of the Five Stages of Grief I’m still at the first step: acceptance. Mainly, accepting the fact that I don’t have to continue believing everything I believed in growing up, as well as accepting the fact that I grew up with certain biases and prejudices that I needed to let go.

I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all method to helping people realize these things. That being said, moving to Melbourne was what kickstarted the entire process for me. When you spend every day of the current chapter in your life in a predominantly-white society, seeing them for the equally flawed humans that they really are becomes much easier .

P.S.– Seeing Nazis in the news a lot helped too.

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Words by Morgan-Lee Snell Photography by Isha Ram Das

KALYANI MUMTAZ

How did you come to music?

My family is musical – my grandpa was a blues musician, and he wrote Give Me a Home Among the Gumtrees. Mum sings, dad sings. Being a Hare Krishna, that’s what you do; you go to the temple, you sing, you dance. Then I just started writing because that’s what we all did. Living in the country having nothing to do you’d end up just being creative.

How was playing Splendour this year?

It was really nice. I got to be with my family, so I was in a good frame of mind. Lots of people showed up. It’s been a few years since we’ve put out a body of work, so you still get that feeling sometimes like, “oh is anyone gonna show up?” But then lots of people showed up, and they were all singing along... it was a really nice crowd – that’s one of the most important things for me – making sure that everyone feels safe and positive I remember reading in a past interview that some guy hassled you about having hairy legs when you were only 14.

In the beginning, because I was so young people, felt more like they could do whatever they wanted and get away with it. Which is true! Because when you’re young, you don’t really know how to defend yourself, or how to hold your own ground and hold your own space.

Even recently during a show, I turned around and some girl grabbed my butt. That’s something that I’m really realizing – a lot of women feel like they have a right to your body because they’re women. But they don’t. It’s really confronting. I’m really trying to prioritize making sure everyone feels safe, including myself – because otherwise I can’t give myself to the crowd 100% if I’m feeling in a place where I’m feeling compromised.

What’s your favourite song you’ve written?

Dvaraka part II. It was the first single from our most recent set of releases.

It was our first foray into the more four-on-the-floor, house-y feel. We’d never done anything like it before. But the best thing about it is that it’s about the effects of climate change on First Nations people, and how climate change is affecting marginalized communities before it’s affecting anyone else. And we’re not necessarily the people who contribute the most to it. I love that song because it’s about something that I care about so deeply, but it’s still accessible.

Could you talk a little bit about Guardian and Be Kind to Yourself and this message of loving yourself and being unashamedly yourself that is so prevalent in your music?

There’s importance in finding contentment through doing things that you love – in art or in music, or whatever it is that you love, rather than searching for it in other people. Especially in the age we live in, where we’re constantly being held up to these outside standards and we’re constantly seeking affirmation from everyone. It’s lame but it’s true and it’s really hard.

How do you navigate being a feminist in a heterosexual relationship? I find power dynamics in a relationship can really be effected by oppression outside of the relationship.

You’re right, it’s hard. I think feminism for me is not a standard to which I have to hold myself. That’s really important to me – to be intersectional with my feminism, even for myself. So if I want to be a woman who is completely submissive, I can be, and that’s good feminism. In saying that, that’s not what I want. I try to keep my things like songwriting, working on my own projects. That’s how I maintain my sense of self and my identity.

Tell me about your Aboriginal heritage.

I’m a Tasmanian Aboriginal – my family descend from Pyemmairenner country. I’m hoping to visit my country in December.

I’m at the point where I just need to learn more about my mob and my Pyemmairenner ancestors – it’s easy to get disconnected from your Aboriginal heritage because that was the point [of colonialism], and it still is every day. But no amount of displacement can truly affect the connection that you have to your land. I’m just trying grateful for how much knowledge I have, even if it is miniscule, because some people just don’t have that privilege You were recently in an exhibition alongside Sean Miles, Peter Lemalu and Tyson Campbell at Blak Dot gallery. Was visual art something you’ve always practiced or is it something you’ve come to more recently?

Music can be very heady – it’s all happening in the vibrations in the air and it’s all in your head. So then to just grab some paint and smack it down is so freeing. Visual art is something I’ve always done as a kind of therapy. But I was very lucky to have my work exhibited at Blak Dot alongside some other really great artists.

How does being a woman of colour inform your artistic practices, your identity, your life?

I think that being a woman of colour informs the way that you think about everything. In really heavy ways and in really beautiful ways. I’m grateful for everything I’ve been given, but also, due to colonization, a lot wasn’t given to me. I feel like my life is a process of finding what was taken.

I feel a very deep responsibility to my ancestors to create for them, and create for us. That really drives me and inspires me. With the sense of loss come the sense of purpose.

Untranslatable Emotions Words by Antonia Yip Siew Pin “天下无不散之筵席” “tiān xià wú bù sàn yán xí” Translation: No feast in the world can last a lifetime. It is time for us to part as all great things must come to an end. Nothing can last forever.

On a stormy night in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a lorry performed an illegal U-turn. The lorry driver did not notice my dad’s car. The front of my dad’s maroon Toyota Harrier folded like a flat coca-cola can. The lorry driver survived the crash. My dad had no surface injuries, but internally his brain had scattered. Billions and millions of fragments. He was announced brain dead at the age of 56.

Four hours before the car crash, my father told me, “wait up for me, alright?” It was the night of my 11th birthday, and I was waiting eagerly for him to come home and cut the birthday cake with me.

I waited. Stayed up late. Sat in front of my birthday cake, unwilling to blow out the candles.

The clock struck midnight. Candles melted. Night turned colder. I fell asleep on the brown sofa in the living room. My brother carried me up to my room and tucked me into my bed.

I kept my promise, I waited, but he never came back.

Could never be home, not anymore.

When my sister-in-law woke me up around 2am, she moved rigidly and had red eyes. I thought she had just fought with my brother, but she asked me to get changed.

She said my dad was in a car accident and he got admitted to the ICU section in the hospital at Putrajaya, Kuala Lumpur. I can only remember crying. Tears from uncles, from aunties. From my mum and my brother From me.

My sister, in Melbourne, sent her tears through the phone.

She had to fly home from Australia using the emergency credit card that dad had given her.

A Chinese consolation phrase, “節哀順變” “jié āi shùn biàn” A direct translation:

Restrain your grief, make yourself flexible, and accustom yourself to changes.

An English translation:

My condolences or I’m sorry for your loss.

My interpretation of these translations:

What are you sorry for? I do not need your pity. Feed it to the homeless. Restrain my grief or stop crying? Maybe you should stop eating or peeing.

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The day my sister arrived was the day my dad stopped breathing. Maybe dad knew that it would be a tough decision for us; whether to pull the plug on the ventilator or not. Dr. Kumar, our neighbour of ten years visited my dad and said that my dad could hear us, he just couldn’t respond. So maybe my dad was waiting for my sister to be back and see her for one last time. Or maybe it was a coincidence.

But all I can remember is a long beep.

I stood next to the bed, 11, telling myself: “from now on, you won’t have a dad anymore.”

When I had tossed that handful of mushy wet soil onto my father’s grave in Nirvana Memorial Park at Semenyih, I did not bury my love for him. Not when his last words were for me to wait up for him. The last words that he left me still follow me. Nine years on, I still wait.

A high school friend in Malaysia, Howard, lost his mum when he was 17 years old. Chong Pei Pei passed away due to a sudden stroke at the age of 47. She was announced brain dead before she made it to the hospital.

He told me, “when a group of people are talking about family or mums, I want to join in too. But I feel awkward. Because I want to share the moments. I’m afraid that I’ll bring the mood down. For those who know about my mum, they automatically avoid talking about this topic or signal others to stop. For me, I do not like this. I can talk about that too. I wish to join in too. I am just worried about their reaction.”

“Because it happened so suddenly, did you feel like you needed to find a way to come to terms with it? With the hole in your heart now, do you have to find some sort of things to fill that hole up?”

“I yearn for hugs. I like hugging things, it’s as though I’m revisiting that feeling of hugging my mum. My mum was a plump woman, so whenever I’d hug her. It felt really good to be within her embrace. Every day after school, I used to go into her room when she has the air conditioner turned on. The room would be cold and I’d hug my mom around her tummy. I like to be engulfed in her huge hug.

Now, when I hug someone soft like my mum, I get that feeling again. But that warmth is still different from my mom. I wouldn’t want anyone to be a replacement for my mum’s hugs.”

When a wave of grief hits you, it is like you are a computer and you got hit by a bucket of water.

You get short circuit, your screen goes on and off with weird images flashing, you have smoke coming out from the ventilator of the computer and it shakes. You cannot help it. You get these episodes every now and then.

Maybe you pass by a bookshop, see a book by his favourite author and get a little twitch in your arm or leg.

A little glitch that has been lurking around. It doesn’t

always make sense. And it’s hard to explain to people who have not been through what you have been through. It’s like you’re speaking a foreign language. They will never be able to understand how you feel exactly.

Chie Gee lost her father when she was 16. Chung Eng Koon passed away due to an accident at work on a construction site at Klang, Malaysia. He fell from the sixth floor while inspecting the progress of the construction.

He was already in a coma when they found him. The paramedics pronounced him brain dead at the age of 43. When I spoke to Chie Gee, she answered all of my questions in a measured and calm way.

“When dealing with this sudden tragedy, how did your mum and your sisters react to it?”

“My mama still went to the market. She smiled and talked cheerfully like always. People at the market said nasty things like, ‘her husband just passed away, but look at her, still laughing and smiling.’ No one saw how mama cried in her room every day. When we went to Longhua Temple, the monk addressed my sisters and I as being immature, and questioned how could we still laugh and smile happily when our father just died. Does laughing and smiling equate to being immature?”

In Mandarin, we have this saying, “我心伤悲， 莫知我哀” “wǒ xīn shāng bēi, mò zhī wǒ āi” The translation of this proverb is,

the sadness and brokenness that I feel in my heart could not be understood by anyone else, but me.

The grief that is part of me now, can never be defined by any words, expression, or person.

To grieve is like trying to translate a word or phrase from a foreign language; with some words you think you can find a good substitute in English, but it still doesn’t do justice to the exact meaning. Sometimes you think you’ve gotten better, but mention anything about him and your brain will struggle to put together words to describe this confused numbness. You thought you’d gotten better, you thought you’d found an alternative.

The echoes of this untranslatable word frustrate you.

You cannot find another word to replace it. These foreign words often express your emotions so well that you let them linger and remain as they are, since no other language could do better.

59

Expression World of Colour

By Ilsa Harun

61

eurocentric standards of beauty exist and that’s

why blondes have more fun.

by Kaavya Jha

At this stage, it’s an undisputable fact. We’ve seen dozens of outraged articles from rightfully angry women of colour point out the myriad of ways that Eurocentric beauty standards permeate our everyday interactions with mass media – through the whitewashing of celebrities, the lack of diversity on magazine covers, and the many advertisements for skin-lightening products.

As somebody who is aware and comfortable with the fact that I will never be able to pull off luscious golden locks à la Blake Lively, I am still surprised by the number of times I find myself as a perpetrator of internalised racism while browsing through Instagram.

Growing up, I subconsciously longed for some of those glossy-haired, long-legged models to have darker skin and the deep-set dark-circled eyes which I, and hundreds of millions of other South Asian women share. When I hit my teen years and discovered Instagram with its ability to connect you to a seemingly infinite quantity of physically flawless models and bloggers, I was excited by the prospect of seeing more diverse representations of beauty. I purposefully tried to seek out models of South Asian descent, and followed the posts of Vogue India and the newer Vogue Arabia with a fervent level of dedication.

However, since becoming aware of my own internalised racism browsing Instagram has transformed into an uncomfortable experience. Only recently, I found myself mentally comparing two gorgeous bloggers of South Asian descent and after an unintentional assessment, decided that one girl was much prettier and followed only her. I realised instantly, to my utmost horror and disgust, that she was the one with far more Eurocentric features. Of course, having Eurocentric features is not an inherently bad thing but if we make judgements on attractiveness based on how white someone’s features are then there exists a major area for concern. Prejudice against non-Eurocentric physical features can lead to people of colour feeling a need to downplay their background and heritage, and can encourage procedures such as ethnic rhinoplasty and double eyelid surgeries.

Why did I feel the need to follow only one of the two bloggers, to compare the women in the first place?

There’s never been a limit to the number of white models and bloggers on the app, however, just like TV casts and fashion runways, there’s only room for one brown girl.

On a wider level, how does internalised racism intertwine with a person of colour’s conceptualisations of beauty on social media?

If power is the means to influence and to shape the perceptions of a group, then Instagram followers are the hot commodity that all the brands want in on. Despite

making up almost a fifth of the world’s population, South Asians are relatively underrepresented on social media platforms. Deepika Padukone, India’s most popular Instagram user, has a mere 19.6 million followers compared to Selena Gomez, the world’s most followed user, with 126 million. Vogue India’s recent 10 Year Anniversary Cover demonstrated the magazine’s disturbing preference of people with Eurocentric features, over their responsibility of representation.

Controversy surrounded the fashion magazine’s decision to choose Kendall Jenner as the cover model rather than a woman of colour, as the edition was celebrating the country’s rich heritage. The decision implied internalised racism, or at the very least, a disregard of their duty to support the domestic modelling industry, in favour of garnering the most double taps. Indeed, on Instagram, white models and bloggers are far more favoured for collaboration opportunities with worldwide cosmetic brands. Clothing boutiques almost exclusively prefer the sponsoring of girls and women who fit the white standard of a perfect body shape, ignoring the existence of a range of body types from women around the world.

Nonetheless, it is unfair to say that the usage of Instagram has only enforced the typical beauty ideals without room for the self-expression of people of colour. We are witnessing the rise of pages such as ‘@ blkgirls’ and ‘@unfairandlovely_’, accounts with tens and hundreds of thousands of followers that celebrate the diverse range of beauty among women of colour. For individuals who have felt isolated for appearing different their entire lives, these accounts provide empowerment, and the agency to construct their own representations.

But at what point do Instagram accounts that purposefully celebrate a particular ethnicity deteriorate into fetishism? The answer is encapsulated by racial power structures. The distinction between celebrating and fetishising a race depends on who is in control of the dialogue, or in this scenario, the creators of the accounts.

Internalised racism reveals itself in a multifaceted approach within social media. For people of colour, acknowledging and overcoming the blatant favouritism towards Eurocentric beauty standards, by both individuals and corporations, is the first step towards forging a more inclusive platform which celebrates an ethnically diverse range of users. Recognising the prejudice within ourselves can be difficult to come to terms with, but we must keep pushing to learn to love and celebrate the rich and magnificent heritages from where we come if we are to thoroughly eradicate internalised racism.

NOT QWHITE RIGHT

by Belle Gill

Mainstream media has finally realised diversity sells and oh boy, are they pushing it. That would be great in an ideal world. Unfortunately, their idea of diversity is nothing more than white female leads surrounded by men with the occasional appearance of a character of colour so they can point to them and say “Look!!

Representation!”. The worse part is that the biggest perpetrator of poor representation in the media is by straight, white woman. These women completely fail to understand the importance of supporting women and other people of colour, leading to a gross celebration of white feminism in mainstream media today.

A prime example would be the American television sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. As someone who has not seen much of Tina Fey’s work, I didn’t have many expectations other than that the show was supposed to be funny. However, the more I watched it, the more uncomfortable I got. At first it was the complete lack of any women of colour as a part of the main cast. Then, it was a white character playing a Native American (a ‘whitewashed’ one, but still).

The last straw for me was when at the beginning of season 2, Titus Andromedon – Kimmy’s roommate – staged a one-man show recounting his past life as a geisha. When faced with backlash from a group AsianAmerican social justice bloggers, Titus was upset but decided to stage the show anyway. The show ends with Titus, dressed as a geisha, singing a beautiful Japanese song and the Asian-Americans realising that they were wrong to criticise him. However, the worst part is the episode was filled with jokes making fun of the ‘haters’ on the internet who obviously just don’t ‘get’ art. It entirely dismisses people of colour who speak out against mainstream media for white washing, erasing people of colour narratives and characters. Tina Fey, in response to the backlash said, “There’s a real culture of demanding apologies, and I’m opting out of that.”

Tina Fey’s blindness to her own privilege is pretty astounding. How nice to be able to opt out of a conversation as the consequences of your actions have no impact on you whatsoever! Fey obviously fails to see that there are instances where apologies are warranted, when creators have a responsibility to learn from their mistakes and do better. This blind insistence on wanting create art while ignoring any kind of social context is rapidly leading to a celebration of white feminism in the media.

Shows like Grace & Frankie, Supergirl and Jessica Jones which are heralded as being ‘feminist’ while failing to properly tell stories of or have women of colour in their main cast is continuing this narrative.

The main concept that white woman like Tina Fey has failed to grasp is that being a feminist isn’t one-size fits all. The identity and voices of minorities matter when it comes to the fight for equality. This is a concept many, white woman in particular, have failed to grasp. Scarlett Johansson is a perfect example when she insisted that her casting as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell was “about feminism and not race”, clearly failing to see that the two might overlap. Tilda Swinston also echoed similar sentiments when dealing with the backlash from her casting as The Ancient One in Dr. Strange.

White actresses taking roles meant for women of colour and calling it a victory for feminism is becoming a tiring norm. In a world where Karen Fukuhara hardly had any lines while playing Katana in Suicide Squad, it’s difficult to believe that casting more white women in major lead roles can be called any kind of acheivment anymore. After all, look at the number of white woman playing leading roles in multimillion dollar franchises.

The Hunger Games, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Star Wars all feature a brunette white woman playing a ‘strong-female character’ while women of colour only play minor roles or are hardly anywhere to be found.

It’s tiring to see countless incidents where women of colour are casted in films only to be side-lined. Women of colour are often relegated to playing an ‘exotic’, seductive role with unnecessary accents like Deepika Padukone in xXx : Return of Xander Cage or a submissive stereotype like Mantis in Guardians of the Galaxy 2. It is particularly hurtful when characters like Mantis and Katana have rich, complicated back stories in the Marvel and DC comics but their silver screen portrayals is ruined so spectacularly. White women who point to these movies when people of colour ask for representation are clearly missing the point.

I do not know the solution to this other than to seek out art and media created by people of colour and that involves people of colour. There are some rays of hope, for example, the new Star Trek series which feature two women of colour, Sonequa Martin and Michelle Yeoh, as leads. Shows like this need to be supported so that mainstream media and ‘feminist’ creators like Tina Fey can stop dismissing the voices of people – especially women – of colour. People of colour do not have to be satisfied with poor representation and stop telling us to be.

Myriad Magazine was made in the city of Melbourne, situated at the heart of Wurundjeri land. A key member of the Kulin Nations, we pay our respects to the Wurundjeri elders, both past and present, and acknowledge that the land we are on was never ceded.