How can the first and second generation of Vietnamese-Australians come to terms with themselves, with each other and with the past?
The Vietnamese diaspora has been in Australia for more than 30 years. We are now seeing second-generation artists emerge to tell many stories. How have these artists come to deal with the past and history, and what do they foresee in the future?
CHI VU (INTERSTATE) CHI VU was born in Vietnam, and arrived in Australia in 1979. She currently works at Arts Victoria as an arts officer. Chi won a Playbox Asialink Award for her play A Story of Soil. Her short stories have been published in Meanjin, The Age, Refo and in anthologies by Random House, Picador, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and Black Inc publishing houses. In 2000 Chi was awarded an Asialink writer’s residency to Vietnam where she wrote the critically acclaimed work Vietnam: A Psychic Guide. It was later adapted into a bilingual cross-disciplinary performance. In 2006 she received the prestigious arts residency to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland by the Australia Council for the Arts.
HOA PHAM (INTERSTATE) HOA PHAM is an author and a playwright. Her books include Vixen, which was awarded The Sydney Morning Herald Young Writers Award, Quicksilver, 49 Ghosts and No One Like Me. Her latest play, Silence, will be performed at Carlton Courthouse in November 2009. She is also the founding editor of Peril Magazine, an online Asian-Australian arts and culture magazine at www.peril.com.au
KHOA DO (LOCAL) KHOA DO is an actor, writer and director who received the Young Australian of the Year award in 2005. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Khoa Do and his family arrived in Sydney as refugees in 1980 (his brother is the comedian Anh Do). He received a scholarship to attend St Aloysius' College in Milsons Point. He graduated in 1996 and went on to study Arts at the University of Sydney. He is the director of the play Mother Fish and films Footy Legends and The Unfinished People.
IVOR INDYK (LOCAL) IVOR INDYK is founding editor and publisher of HEAT magazine and Giramondo Publishing, and Whitlam professor in Writing and Society at the University of Western Sydney. A critic, essayist and reviewer, he has written a monograph on David Malouf, and essays on many aspects of Australian literature, art and architecture.
NATHALIE NGUYEN (INTERSTATE) NATHALIE NGUYEN holds an ARC Australian Research Fellowship at the Australian Centre, the University of Melbourne for her project “Vietnamese Women: Voices and Narratives of the Diaspora”. She is also the recipient of a 2007 Harold White Fellowship at the National Library of Australia. A graduate of the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford, she is the author of Vietnamese Voices: Gender and Cultural Identity in the Vietnamese Francophone Novel (2003) and Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women’s Narratives (2005), which was shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier’s Literary Award. Her latest book Memory is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora is forthcoming in 2009.
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