Hoa Pham Penulis Australia Menemukan Jati Diri Setelah Mengunjungi Negeri Asal

Hoa Pham started writing books for children because she knew what it was like to feel left out.

Her parents had come to Australia from Vietnam in the 1970s to study and they settled in Hobart, where Hoa was born. But childhood wasn’t always easy for Hoa, and as an Asian-Australian she says she wasn’t comfortable with the “hyphen” in her identity.

“In my primary school, there were only three Asian people and two of them were me and my brother and so I didn’t really get the sense of being Vietnamese and being proud of it until later in my life,” she says.

At the age of 15, Hoa saw an interview with Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kingston and realised she wanted to be a writer like her.

She began writing books for children from non-English-speaking backgrounds because she wanted them have stories they could relate to.

“The freedom and power of imagination is the best,” she says.

In her first novel ‘No one like me’ Hoa writes of an isolated schoolgirl, Huong, who feels there is no one like her at school.

Ghosts and spirits are also recurring themes in her works. But while her writing often deals with darkness, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a theme that clearly resonates with readers: Her fifth novel ‘The Other Shore’ recently won the Viva Novella 2 prize for 2014.

A journey to home, and back

In 1997 Hoa visited Vietnam for the first time – it was a journey that did not turn out quite as she expected.

“I just felt really displaced because it appeared to me that I was more Australian than Vietnamese,” she says.

During her trip Hoa had the opportunity to travel with Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. She began to feel a connection to the land and realised that while she was not Vietnamese, the country was in many ways her spiritual home.

Hoa met other Vietnamese-Australian artists living in Melbourne, like Chi Vu, Dominic Golding and Phuong Ngo, and as she became part of a community she began to finally embrace her identity.

With a group of like-minded artists she co-founded ‘Peril’ in 2007, an Asian-Australian online magazine of art and culture that works to represent Asian-Australian perspectives and creativity.

“I looked at Ricepaper from Canada and Hyphen in America and felt that we should have something like these Asian diasporic magazines here in Australia,” she says.  

The publication invites submissions along themes including political and cultural commentary as well as fiction and poetry.

“Occasionally, I wonder if we still need Peril given the success of writers like Alice Pung, Tom Cho and Nam Le,” she says. “But then something happens, like the proposed amendments to 18C in the [Australian] Racial Discrimination act and it shows we still need critical racially-specific debate in Australia.

“I’ve been told that it’s the only magazine that Asians can feel is about them and for them. We received Australia Council funding six years in a row which speaks for itself really.”

The drive to tell stories that represent a broad range of experiences remains Hoa’s inspiration.

“I think the more Asian stories out there the better," she says. 

– See more at: http://www.australiaplus.com/international/2014-07-21/vietnameseaustralian-writer-finds-herself-at-home-in-stories/1343257#sthash.MgL3z0sl.dpuf