Am beginning to read sci-fi short stories. I loved sci-fi/fantasy as a kid but haven’t read much sci-fi as an adult…though I have to admit dystopian fiction is one of my favourite genres. I’m hoping that once I have exorcised these demons, issues, questions of racial identity etc…in this MA paper, I can move on to work on my dystopian world.
I love speculative fiction – what if…. Maybe it is to do with feeling rootless, homeless and having an arbitrary identity…maybe writing about aliens is an offshoot of alienation or maybe I just like aliens.
Work is okay. I just made it worse than it actually is, though despite having an okay day – I really don’t want to do this next year. I’m not coping with the workload of home stuff, family, study, writing and a part-time job that requires a fair amount of preparation and patience.
“Think of the money,” a friend told me, but it’s really not enough money. I feel a bit slack sometimes because my parents never had the choice of saying, “nah….don’t feel like working anymore.” They just stuck their heads down and did whatever work that came their way with the goal of raising two children. They didn’t really consider things like, “quality time with child” as that was not a luxury they could afford. I had my grandma around.
Today some student kept asking me where I was from. I just explained I was Australian-Chinese. She kept asking, so I said I was an Overseas Chinese. That shut her up for a while because there’s an understanding that Overseas Chinese are a collective breed of Chinese who have never been on the mainland. Some people hate this so called imposed identity, but I just find it convenient to use this label as it stops people from asking further questions. Except this woman who was relentless. So I gave her the birth town of my great-great-grand father, since that was the last time all my ancestors were on the mainland, a point of origin – and she looked at me and said, “ahhh I knew when I walked into the classroom that you were Hokien.”
Good thing I’ve spent time getting to know my roots etc… I find that I am more comfortable around Chinese people from the big Guangdong cities. Maybe it’s because I’m more familiar with the language and culture, even though most of my people are Hokien. Yeah gotto find a job where I don’t have to keep inventing the story of my origins.
I just tell different stories according to how I feel on a particular day.
Last term I was feeling far too westernized, so I went native for a while… This term, I’m into speculative fiction…maybe I’ll tell them I’m from a parallel universe.
