Cutting sarcasm with earnestness, I’m interested in how you’ve chosen such a distinct voice within your writing.

A while back, I did a reading at a bar in Melbourne. On the walls hung giant paintings of luchadores with clown makeup smeared onto their faces. In my reading, I sang Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Favourite Colour’, making unwavering eye contact with this mid-twenties white guy in the crowd with smooth, almost pore-less skin, a tastefully tattered puffer jacket, and a mullet that screamed ‘art school’ rather than ‘always profiled by pigs’. He and the people around him stood fixed, faces twitching as they gawked back. I know that I am not a strong singer, but I did it in service of the piece, which was about sincerity. The flat response of the hip young Melbourne crowd suggested that they did not know how to respond to my unapologetic vulnerability.

I had performed the same reading a week earlier in Sydney and the crowd, which was decidedly more mixed in age, race, and class, had laughed along. Their warm reception had suggested to me that they understood that I understood that I was making a fool of myself and I went along anyway. We worked off the common assumption that writing, and reading in public, is inherently vulnerable. That allowed us to bounce off each other’s energy.

As I’ve argued in my essay ‘Good Reader’, making a disclaimer for sincerity in writing is demand for unconditional validation from the audience while shielding the writer from the risks of vulnerability. In these white, middle-class, ostensibly ‘cool’ spaces, writers and audience members gesture towards sincerity and poverty in lieu of having experienced structural vulnerabilities in the intersections between ableism, sexism, racism, and financial insecurity.

In We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, bell hooks writes that

black male “cool” was defined by the ways in which black men confronted the hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged.

Cool, according to hooks, is about preserving dignity in the face of anti-Black violence. Without oppression, white ‘cool’ is just neoliberal detachment. Being a writer from a working-class, Vietnamese-Australian background, I can never substitute sincerity for craft like this. Occupying space as a writer is a privilege, especially when those from marginalized backgrounds are subject to what British-Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall calls the burden of representation. Imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy superimposes the messages of the few from oppressed communities that do speak upon the many it silences. No matter how much I insist that I only speak for myself, White Australia makes me represent all Vietnamese-Australians. I can’t afford to fuck up. I have to navigate craft, critical distance, and self-awareness to write against the ways that I may be pigeonholed and warped by white supremacy.

In this dearth of working-class Vietnamese-Australian voices, I find the responsibility to speak to, rather than for, the many, most terrifying. I am most vulnerable when I am trying to tread the line between writing explicit political commentary that my community understands and an aesthetic sensibility that may snub this as didacticism, or, as with ‘Meat pies and bitter melon’ shrug it off as corny diaspora blues. But the stakes are too high for me to give up without trying like white middle-class writers. Whether or not it succeeds, my writing is a record of me doing my best and hoping someone connects with it.