Sheila Ngọc Phạm is a writer, editor, producer, curator and an experienced facilitator of public conversations for the Sydney Writers' Festival, Fairfield City Museum and Gallery, SXSW Sydney, and OzAsia Festival. She recently curated MÌNH at Fairfield City Museum and Gallery, was a co-artistic Director of the Addi Road Writers' Festival, leads The Finishing School writing collective, serves on the Advisory Board of Sydney Review of Books and volunteers for the P&C at her daughter's public school. For the Sydney Writers Festival this year, Sheila co-organized “Eat Your Words,” a culinary tour in words and stories hosted at Parramatta Artists’ Studios Granville.
I called Sheila from the Gadigal Clan land of the Darug Nation. It was a privilege to conduct this interview on Gadigal Country, where knowledge and storytelling have persisted for tens of thousands of years. I acknowledge custodianship and extend my respects to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people reading this article.
In our interview, Sheila speaks about her journey and identity as a Vietnamese-Australian, and what it means to raise the next generation with these multiple belongings.
Hi Sheila, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk to me. I'm also a Vietnamese-Australian uni student as you were, so I'm very excited for our conversation. Before we delve into your journey as a writer, I'd love to know if there are any writing projects that you're working on right now.
I've actually had to slow down a little bit with extra writing projects. I'm trying to finish my PhD, which is due in September. I've dragged it out for years, so I've just got to finish it this year. But, I have some big ideas. The main thing is that I'm working on a major play. I received more than $47,000 in funding; part of the money goes to me to support my writing, but also to pay for dramaturgs, directors, and other people to help me with this play. The play’s going to be fiction. It's going to be about mothers and daughters and the Vietnam War and the mother having a secret past as a singer. I want it to feature language and music as well because I think it could be a really powerful story.
That's beautiful. I'm very keen to hear about this play. How much can you reveal?
In 2012, I was working at the ABC and I had a chance to fulfill an idea that I'd had for a couple of years by that point—and that was I wanted to know what was the rock music in Vietnam during the time of the war. I was born and raised in Australia. I assume you are too. And Vietnam was quite distant. I never went to Vietnam, even as a child. I only got to go for the first time when I was about 29, almost 30 already, and it was around that time that I also started thinking more about trying to understand what life was like for my parents growing up in Vietnam. It's really hard to imagine, you know? Growing up in south-west Sydney, just trying to visualize that. I'd heard stories but it was a very distant place.
But as I got older, I became more curious about documentaries. My parents hadn’t really talked about music so much, but I became interested in music anyway. In 2012, I actually spent most of that year learning how to make a full-length documentary feature for ABC Radio National and it was really a good experience for me. I called it "Saigon's wartime beat" and it looks at the history of rock music in Vietnam. Part of the twist was that I found out my mother had been a singer in the war and I didn't really know much about that history.
After I finished that documentary, I thought there was more I wanted to do with that story. In 2021 I heard again from a producer who I had met during the making of that documentary in 2012. His name is Mark Gergis and he's an Iraqi-American music producer. He compiled a really cool record in 2010 called Saigon Rock & Soul. He’d started collecting all this random Vietnamese rock music on cassette tapes and CDs he made this really cool compilation. Anyway, he told me about the story of Phương Tâm, which confirmed I was on the right track with my play.
It’s clever how you're turning to the play not only as a medium, but also a space to let people experience that music together in one present moment. What about the rock genre that compels you?
It’s cool, for one thing! But I also grew up listening to a lot of rock music. For a short time, from around the end of uni and for a couple years after I actually tried to be a music journalist too. I interviewed a lot of bands. I wrote for the uni magazine as well as websites and street press. So, yeah, like there's a big chunk of my early 20s where I was heavily into writing about music.
But then I stopped that after a few years because I realised I actually just didn't know enough about music history. This is where I felt there was a bit of a cultural gap because I grew up in a Vietnamese family. I felt like I would never be able to catch up.
It's interesting because I'm married now and my husband is Anglo. He and his dad, for example, are both Bob Dylan fans, and that lineage is something that I have not experienced through my own family.
But when I look at something like rock music in Vietnam (even though my parents weren't listening to this kind of music), it’s a way for me personally to be able to bridge that gap. It's from Vietnam, but it's a musical form that's influenced by the West. Whereas a lot of other Vietnamese music is somehow just a little bit out of reach for me and I think that it's hard for me to try and find my way back to that personally.
I experienced that growing up too. Among my sisters, whenever my mum would play Vietnamese music in the car, we used to reject it as “lame.”
Exactly. Same. Especially with weddings or just really sad karaoke music. Even now, I don't think I could naturally listen to that. I mean I can listen to it; sometimes I will listen to it, but it's not gonna be the first thing I reach for. I'm too Australianised now and I guess I've just taken a different path through life. In my 20s I really wanted to spend a year in Vietnam, but my parents were very against that, so I've never been able to spend more than just a few weeks at a time in Vietnam. I find that it's hard to re-immerse myself in that culture because I just haven't really had the opportunity to.
Is there a particular reason that your parents were against you spending too long in Vietnam?
My parents left Vietnam in 1980. It's a classic boat people story. That's how they met too, actually. They ended up in a refugee camp on the east-coast of Malaysia, Pulau Bidong, for about five months. Then they were resettled in Australia, in Adelaide, in 1980. And I was born less than a year after they arrived here. That makes me not quite second-generation, I feel, because I was born straight after they got here. I'm kind of closer to a 1.5-1.75 generation.
I grew up quite close to my parents’ experience and very close to their trauma too. And because of that I felt very conflicted about Vietnam growing up because it was such a difficult thing. As a child, I really had no protection from what my parents went through, because I was right in the thick of it all. There’s other kids that have been returning, or visiting family, but my parents, for lots of reasons—they've never returned. My mum's family had come over here already and my dad just was very distant from his family that was left in Vietnam.
But by the time I got to my uni years, I was curious about Vietnam. I wanted to visit it. Everyone was going. I applied a couple of times to go to these different volunteer programs, but the first time my dad heard about it, he basically tried to disown me if I went. And I was really shocked because I was like, ‘wait, but you're always talking about going back to Vietnam.’ He just was not accepting of that and so I just left it.
But then I ended up living in Thailand instead. I moved to Thailand when I was 28, so then that was when I felt like, ‘okay, well, now here's my chance. I'm so close and I'm living away from my parents anyway, I think I need to go to Vietnam.’ So that's what I did in 2010. I just went off to Vietnam. When I lived in Thailand, I visited Vietnam maybe like three or four times in one year, and since then I've been a lot more times. For me I feel a very strong connection to Vietnam as it is now, even though I'm still sort of trying to understand what it was from the 60s and 70s.
I remember reading in your article, “Western Sydney is dead. Long live western Sydney” that 2010 was the first time you went to Vietnam. You wrote that you realised that you felt like a foreigner there. That you felt an odd sense of grief. I feel like a lot of us second-generation children connect to this. Is that something that you still feel now?
I think the first few times you go as a Việt kiều—it's funny, I use the word Việt kiều, but I noticed that there's some kind of sensitivity around that, so I don't use it as much now. But, when you're in Vietnam you are a Việt kiều. That's kind of the only way to describe yourself, because you're not really one of them and you never will be actually. You can repatriate, but you're still an expat. But what I will say is that because I've been to Vietnam eight or nine times now, I've noticed that the last few times, I don't think about the war as much.
I have a very different relationship to Vietnam now. I actually see it as a living, breathing place now. Even with the work that I've been able to do in the last few years. I just wrote an article a few months ago which was just published last month; I did a 3,000-word story about the evolution of Vietnamese typography for a British magazine [Disegno]. Through that commissioned assignment I interviewed all these designers in Vietnam and others in the diaspora. I love talking to people in Vietnam. I did another piece last year on a young Vietnamese artist, that the editor reached out me about as well. I just find that I think the history and the government itself is a whole other thing but, it’s the people I feel a very strong sense of connection to.
When I meet creatives from Vietnam, I feel like we're in sync, even though I'm from another place. I feel like we can talk across the divides because we're interested in similar things. For example, when I interviewed these designers, I just felt very collegial with them. We all understand the sensitivities of Vietnam. I understand the context they're working in and they know it too. But they're very open. I find Vietnamese people in Vietnam are very outward looking, very open-minded.
When I was living in Thailand, I really felt Vietnamese in a way there, which was interesting. I just felt that Thais have a very different way of moving through the world. Even though we're part of the diaspora, I think intrinsically, there's still something that really ties us to the place and the people of Vietnam. I think it's mutual. I find that when I'm in Vietnam, I find the Vietnamese are very chatty and interested in talking to me too. I just have very good experiences.
I really like how you're bridging that divide by reaching out to other artists in particular. I think that's very inspiring for someone like me. I was watching your podcast episode with Kenneth Nguyen and I remember you said how the war is obviously an important and significant part of our history, but it shouldn't be the only part. I was wondering, then, how you see diasporic literature changing, say, in 10, 20, even 50 years.
That's a good question and I don't know if I can do the answer justice. But I spent some time recently with a group of Vietnamese-Americans, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, who actually grew up in France, and Viet's wife Lan Duong as well. They're very instrumental in helping to shape Vietnamese-American literature. The three of them, they're all basically in their 50s, so they're a generation ahead of me. I see the trajectory of what's happened in America. It's something that I guess we can look to in Australia. But the thing is, the scale is different. We're much smaller in Australia. It's just going to be like a lot less literature produced by Vietnamese-Australians.
But I've been thinking about this problem for 10 years or so, because I guess I see myself as part of it as well. I always watch with interest what's being published in Australia; what are the stories being told? I suppose the interesting gap that I have felt is that there's a whole crop of new writers coming up, including yourself, Vivian Pham, all these people. But you're all very young. You're in your 20s. And then there are people who are slightly ahead. Someone that I really admire is Chi Vu: she's a playwright based in Geelong now. She wrote a novella called Anguli Ma: a Gothic Tale, which I think is pretty powerful. It's short, a Gothic telling of the Vietnamese refugee experience set in Melbourne. For me, that book is probably one of the most significant of the Vietnamese-Australian literature that's been produced. There are other writers as well that are working on stories, but there's still a lot that's untold. There's a lot of experience that we haven't written about yet. In America, they've kind of mapped out the terrain a little bit more over the decades and they just have a lot more writers working across all these different genres as well. I've seen, like you know, YA, then fantasy to social realism, to graphic novels, like in America. Whereas I think we're still early on in Australia.
The thing that I thought was interesting is, there's Tracey Lien, who moved to the US, and then there's Vivian; they both wrote about the 90s in Cabramatta. I find it interesting because that's the time that I grew up in, but I didn't really want to write about it. Now, there's a lot of curiosity about the past. Now, there’s historical fiction. I met another young writer, Robert Hoang, and he's working on another book set in 1994 I think, in Cabramatta. There'll be more to come. I thought I might be off the hook about writing a book about that time, but maybe I'm not. Maybe I need to write this book because I guess I'm old enough. I'm in my early 40s now, so I'm a bit ahead of all of you and in between the others as well.
I feel like I'm part of this wedge generation now. I'm not the very first like Viet Thanh Nguyen and co—they're older than me and they're producing very significant literature. But then there are probably people in their 30s and 40s that need to be telling these stories as well, because our memories and understandings are a little bit different to your generation, who are in their 20s.
Did you ever feel, this is going to be poorly phrased, a ‘burden of responsibility’ to articulate certain experiences when, say, you might have wanted to write about something else in your life?
It's not poorly phrased. I think about this all the time. I feel a huge burden. My parents now are that classic first-generation boat people. They're in their 70s and they're not getting any younger. So then it's really their children, which is me and my cohort in our 40s. We're going to be passed the mantle, but we're all conflicted because we've all got this hybridized identity in the literature and art space.
A lot of us artists don't really have the majority experience of the Vietnamese diaspora, because we're a bit weird, basically. Because I meet other people who just are really normal and they're working in the corporate space or something. They’re a very different kind of Vietnamese-Australian. But those of us who have now taken it upon ourselves to express cultural identity—we do feel this burden. It can be quite limiting. The burden comes in different ways: the actual burden of having your parents' generation and that whole legacy of the war and refugee experience on your shoulders; then there's this kind of other burden that that you know that mainstream Australia might place on you, or certainly in the art space, where you're expected to be the spokespeople. Even if you want to be a spokesperson in some way, ultimately you speak for yourself. Who am I speaking on behalf of? Everyone's life is very particular. I definitely would not want to say that I represent anyone else's perspective.
The burden is felt in different ways and I feel it all the time. There's another burden, which came up in a recent public conversation I organised between Viet Thanh Nguyen and Nam Le. Interestingly, both of their new books defy conventional form. Viet's memoir tries to break the memoir form a little bit. And then Nam wrote a book of poetry which is not typical at all. I think I understand that impulse too. I had this idea of wanting to just write a great Australian novel about Vietnamese people. But then I think, ‘is that selling out as well? Maybe I need to do something a bit more interesting.’ It's just so conflicted on every side and I think that's why I wouldn't just write a memoir. A lot of publishers have contacted me. If I told them I'm gonna write a memoir about how hard it was growing up as a Vietnamese-Australian in South-West Sydney, I’d get a book deal the next day. That's the trauma porn thing, which I'm really against. But I think we do need to talk about these things.
That's the hard thing. You're going to find a way to talk about it that feels authentic and truthful on your own terms, regardless of what publishers’ expectations are or what society's expectations are. That's a difficult space to navigate, I think. Especially when you're a minority in Australia. There's heaps of traps everywhere you look. Especially when you're young and starting out, you don't know what all the traps are. Of course, you don't.
I was kind of lucky in that when I grew up in the 90s to the 2000s in that it was a lot less of a racialized space. Interestingly, I was never tokenized in the same way around my race. I've noticed that since the last 10 years or so, that's changed. Suddenly everyone woke up to racism. But then how they handle it can be a little bit harmful, at least in helping young people develop writing skills. And that is, from a young age you're just expected to write about Vietnamese stuff, and that's a huge burden to place on someone who's just trying to find a voice. You shouldn't just be defined by your race, because all of us are multi-faceted. Of course, cultural heritage is intrinsic to who we are and our experience of life, but it's not the only thing.
I'm always torn in different directions with my interests. I don't want to box myself in as just writing about Vietnamese stuff. I want to write about religion or science or health and all these other topics as well.
That’s why I feel very lucky that we have suburbs like Bankstown, like Cabramatta, to come home to. These places keep me grounded.
Yeah, it's really important. When I started having children, I moved back to the area, like five years ago, and it's been amazing for me. I really appreciate the cultural richness. I understand it's not the most beautiful area living around here. There’s certainly more beautiful parts of Sydney, but then I think that those areas are devoid of the things that I really value: multiculturalism. I got an education, I went and lived overseas, did other things, but somehow, we all belong to south-west Sydney and I feel that.
Did you ever feel like a minority when you were in Sefton? Because when I was there, everyone was South Asian and Southeast Asian for the most part.
No. I think that this is another story that bothers me, that gets perpetuated a lot in the media as well, about being an outsider. It's actually not true for a lot of us who grew up in contexts where we're in Asian-dominant spaces. For me, I only experienced that kind of otherness probably for about two and a half years. I changed to primary schools a few times. Later in Year 4 I went to Georges Hall Public School and back then it had almost no Asians. Now, it's very Asian there. So I did experience that alienation for a couple of years and then I got to Sefton High and it was such a relief. There were heaps of people with the same surname as me and lots of them were from refugee families; a lot of Chinese, Cambodians, etc. We never needed to talk about the refugee experience. It was kind of a given, and I think there's something very freeing about that.
But there’s a narrative you see a lot in the media because the Asians who end up writing and getting involved with journalism - they're the ones who grew up as the only Asian kid in a very white school etc. Quite a lot of the media personalities I can think of have that experience. Then people start to think that that's representative, whereas I would argue that that's the minority experience. Then there’s people like you and I who went to Sefton High School. Though in my year in Sefton, I think I'm one of the only ones who did become a writer, for example, so obviously not many people actually followed a path of telling these stories later.
It's so interesting. Like you said, you grow up in a space where your family's history is a given, and so you never really learn how to articulate it, until you actually leave these suburbs and leave school.
But that's not a bad thing. I think being forced to articulate it when you're young can be very difficult and challenging to emphasize your ‘otherness’. Whereas when you're older, you're better equipped emotionally to deal with those kinds of questions. I never really understood all that stuff until after I left high school and then I got to Sydney Uni and meeting kids who went to private schools—all this exposure to new people who I had never really had any contact with growing up in south-western Sydney. Thinking about Sefton, I was really grateful about how there was never any sense of displacement for me. I didn't feel any shame about my background. If I did, it was more about the things that I found hard to talk about, like the violence at home. None of us could talk about that stuff because that stuff was shameful. The shame was other things, not race: the household trauma, family issues, the stigmatised stuff inside the culture. Sexism and patriarchy.
I think there was a lot of humour between us as high school students, dark humour, just to deal with these things. For example, I remember there was one girl. When the assessment marks came out, she’d joke about sleeping in a tent that night.
I don't think that happened much in my generation, the humor. It was a little bit too raw still in the 90s. In the 90s, things like drugs and gangs and violence was pretty close to a lot of us, even me as a nerdy girl. I wrote an essay about Vivian Pham’s book The Coconut Children and I talked about this a little bit. In the 90s, even someone like me, knew people who ended up in jail. It was very much a part of the community. We would joke about other things.
You said that in school, we're not minorities, and if we are, it's in a different way in the fact that we're writers and readers and want to pursue that path, which is sort of atypical for our communities. Did you ever face any pressure from your family to pursue a certain discipline?
I did, but I guess I've always just gone my own path anyway. During high school, I definitely felt a lot of pressure to do well in the HSC, like a lot of us. I think about it now because I have children myself. Towards the end of high school, I was kind of over it. I wanted to just get out and experience uni and just do other things with my life. I found school very constricting by the end, and I think my parents were really worried because by year 12 I had stopped studying as hard. In the end I still got more than 95, so it wasn't like I bombed or anything like that. My mom was relieved because, you know, anything less than 95 was a ‘fail.’ At that stage I tossed up between journalism and psychology. I kept doing these career quizzes. In the end I just thought, ‘oh, maybe journalism is too general and I'd like to do psychology instead.’ My parents weren't that cool with that either, but then I guess someone told them you make a lot of money as a psychologist and they kind of accepted it.
Ultimately, though, like I just didn't really listen to them because I just understood from an early age that they don't understand this world. I was going to have to navigate this myself. They didn't know about careers in Australia, like why would they? They grew up in Vietnam and life was very different there.
I'm 42 now. This is like 20 years later after finishing uni. I'm successful in some way, although my mum doesn't really understand my success since I don't make much money. She understands my middle brother's success because he makes a decent income. I did feel pressure in different ways, but I just kept resisting them. I guess I was a quiet rebel.
My parents really have no idea what I do. They know I'm finishing a PhD, for example, but they wouldn't even be able to tell you what it was on. My life is really unusual, I suppose, because I don't really have one defined career path.
I really admire that about you. You’re showing my generation that this creative life is possible.
How old are your parents? What's their story?
My mum's pretty much 60. My dad's just a couple of years younger. It's only in the last year that I've started to have open conversations about their journey and their history. All I know, particularly about my mum, is that she was 16 when she came over here and she didn't have her parents, so she was supporting her siblings as the oldest girl. I think she spent a week at sea and then she was in Malaysia before she came to Canberra.
I'm really interested in this generation too. Your parents came as teenagers right?
Just my mum. My dad was nine or younger, so he doesn't remember as much.
So he's even younger. They're much more the classic ‘one-and-a-half gen.’ That's why, their attitude towards you and their struggle is going to be very different to my parents' who were 29 already when they had me. Your parents are more free with you. That should be the pattern—there's a loosening up over the generations as well. It's rare to meet a Vietnamese parent, who’s my age, who's very strict with their kids. I think, naturally, we don't want to be. The ones who are probably haven't really processed their own trauma.
Your parents, even though they grew up partly in another country too, their life has been pretty much formed in Australia, whereas my parents are more conflicted since they came here as fully formed adults. I wouldn't say that they undermine me or anything, but I just got used to the idea from a very young age that they'll just never fully accept me. But it's okay. I know some people spend their whole life looking for their parents' approval. I think I just realised that I'll just never get that because they just don't know how to approve of me.
I find that a lot more realistic. And it's not a pessimistic thing as well.
No, it's not pessimistic. You just have to work hard. That's why I have been able to take a bit of a weird path through life, because I just realised I just had to do it this way.
You said that you noticed that there's like a ‘loosening’ in the way that the younger generations are raised?
To give you an example, my daughter (she's only seven years old) told me recently she wanted to go to a good school and I said, ‘do you want to go to a selective school?’ She's like ‘yeah.’ I said ‘okay, hon, I think you're going to have to study a bit more to get to a selective school.’ We tried Kumon and she hated it. I wanted to give her an opportunity, like I'm not forcing her, and she raised it first. But then she hated the whole experience after a week I just had to let her quit. This is not how I grew up at all.
I feel for a lot of young people and kids being forced to do so much tutoring all the time. Whereas my daughter, I really want her to be more well-rounded than that. She does Irish dancing, she does swimming. She was doing hip-hop before as well. I want to have other extracurricular activities, but I do still value education, both my husband and I. My husband has a PhD and I'm trying to finish one now. I just think education is so empowering but I don't want it at the expense of her mental health and other important things in life, like friendships and the sort of stuff that a lot of young Asian kids end up missing out on because their parents don't understand how important those other facets are.
I’m very excited to see your generation raise the next generation. I was also talking to a woman I met through badminton and she’s a Vietnamese-Australian mother as well. She’s got two kids in primary school. She said that there's so many things from her childhood that she has to unlearn so she doesn't have to replicate that towards her own kids. And you know, it starts with tutoring, methods of discipline.
It's interesting because you also realise that there are some things that your parents did that weren't bad either, so it's just trying to work out what that balance is. Even the way that I grew up eating certain kinds of food. My mum cooks and I want my kids to have grown up with a strong sense of food and cultural heritage. The language stuff is even harder. So that's something that I've been working hard on with my daughter and my son. She goes to Vietnamese school on the weekends. I definitely feel that my daughter seems to have a real sense of pride in her Vietnamese identity.
We have these kinds of conversations all the time at home, because I really want my kids to try and grasp the reality that they are multi-racial. It's a very comfortable topic for us.
That gives me a lot of comfort and that gives me a lot of hope that your conversations with your daughter are so open and that she's proud of her culture. For me it always comes back to food. My Vietnamese is quite limited, but I found comfort being able to read, at bare minimum, the menus at Viet restaurants.
Same with me. My parents never let me go to Vietnamese school so I never learned how to read or write properly, but I could read menus because I knew those words. With my kids, in terms of passing on language, I would love them to be able to walk into a restaurant and just confidently order some food. Practically speaking, in Australia you don't really need much more Vietnamese than that, but it is good to have language for lots of other reasons.
Even when I go to the shops, the servers, who are part of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation, are very open and keen whenever they hear young people order in Vietnamese. They're open to helping us out, testing our words, occasionally teasing.
Looking at multilingualism in terms of trajectory, if you look at what's happened in America, Vietnamese has fallen off quite quickly after two generations because, essentially, Vietnamese are really good at assimilation. We intermarry more. Even at the Vietnamese school, there are plenty of kids there whose parents are both Vietnamese, and they all just speak English to each other. I think that's why people want to help out the next generation. I get a sense of that now, that I'm in the thick of it too, because people realise how easy it is for the Vietnamese language to disappear in this context.
It's very scary how quickly a language can be phased out of a household. I grew up speaking Viet until I hit kindergarten. And then from there it became very normal for me to speak English to my parents whilst they speak Viet to me.
That is the pattern of transition through a couple of generations. I mean, the fact that you probably just speak even some Vietnamese is quite good. That has been a source of trauma in a way too, that you are fully ethnically Vietnamese, your parents are both from Vietnam, and yet somehow you only all speak English to each other. There can be a real sense of loss there.
I think we understand that diaspora is much more fluid. We're up to 50 years now since the war ended, so things have changed and I think everyone can see that, even with language. We can't hold on to the same ways, and the traditions, and then there's still this ongoing fraught relationship with Vietnam itself that's not resolved either.
I didn't realise until you said it. But to lose and grieve. I'm cautious to use that word as well, because when you say you've grieved something, you're not opening yourself up to say relearning the language or relearning traditions.
Exactly, and I probably should be careful too. I run a Facebook group called ‘Vietnamese bilingual parenting.’ It has more than 5,000 members now from around the world. And I keep trying to emphasise to people that it's never too late. It's hard, of course. All these things are hard. But just because you don't learn something when you're young, it’s not like ‘that's it.’ You can learn things later. Just because your Vietnamese isn't good now, it doesn't mean you can't improve. One of my goals after my PhD is over is I want to try and improve my own Vietnamese. I do kind of feel annoyed that I didn't get to go to Vietnamese school when I was young and learn how to read and write properly, but now I can, so it's up to me as an adult to take responsibility for that.
You're inspiring me to improve my own Vietnamese and learn it properly as well! I want to finish off with a final question for our readers. This interview is for UNSWeetened. A lot of the readers are also writers who are being published with us for the first time. Many are students who have pursued art degrees, very fully aware of the job and financial precarity. Many are in disciplines that are unconventional in their communities. What advice would you give to young, particularly Vietnamese, creatives who don't have a definitive pathway but who know they want their careers to allow them to create?
For one thing I wouldn't stress about writing too much when you're young. Sure, write if you want to get published. Read a lot. But in terms of career, you've got to think about it like a marathon. If you're like a career writer or a career creative of some kind, it's a long-term thing. I will probably be writing 10, 20, 30 years from now; I'm in it for the long haul.
Having mentored young writers in their 20s, for example, I think there's a lot of pressure, and probably because of the visibility of social media and the internet, to be productive and to churn out stuff. I would really discourage that kind of thinking. Feel free to write a lot if you want, but don't do it because you feel like your peers are outperforming you. And you don't know what all the circumstances are. Like they could be the children of millionaires. In the writing sector there are people who come from very wealthy backgrounds and they don't have to work, they can just become a writer.
At a young age, I think it's just more important to just take some risks as well. Just live and do interesting things. Then you'll have plenty of stuff to write about later, which is kind of where I'm sitting now. I've got so much untapped material from my 20s. I spent a whole year living in England. I've pretty much never written about that year, even though it's a very formative experience in my life. In my 20s I did publish a little bit. I was living and working and just doing different things. Learning how to develop professional writing skills was really good in those jobs as well. I did communications work after uni and I don't think you can underestimate the value of learning how to write in a non-creative way as well.
If you do have the creative fire and that burning desire, it'll still be there. But there's no point forcing that either. You also will find that there will probably be a big gap between what you would like to produce and what you can produce at a young age as well. There’s an idea for a novel that I started thinking about in my early 20s, but it's taken me 20 years to develop the skills to write it.
That's really good advice. Thank you so much, Sheila, for talking to me. This was a really refreshing, insightful conversation.
Thanks for taking the time to call me. I'm really flattered!
Sheila is no doubt a woman of many literary and professional talents. With humility, she listens and probes as much as she writes and expresses her own experiences. This is what makes her so attuned to Australia's literary voices. The moments of identification I had in our conversation felt like an indulgence, which I think speaks to a very particular literary deprivation I hold as a Vietnamese-Australian reader in my 20s. Perhaps this deprivation is institutional. Perhaps it’s self-imposed. I have relished in reading to understand the experiences of other cultures, older generations—a project of empathy that cannot be overstated in significance, especially now. As Vivian Pham puts it, writing and reading “lets us truly realise how the ability to acknowledge the fullness of someone else’s humanity asserts our own.” But other than my warming encounters with Vivian, it is rare that I have the pleasure of speaking to someone like Sheila, whose formative years have looked so similar to mine in many ways. At times, we must give ourselves permission to read things written for us. Sheila is such a writer for us second-generation Vietnamese-Australians. She models writing as an act of community. You can find more of her writing here.
