Unpacking Vociferate | 詠 with Emily Sun

An interview by Adele Aria

Emily Sun, a Western Australian writer, has released an eloquent poetic collection that is generous in the way she shares interrogations of  the individual and collective experience. This debut collection is thoughtfully provocative. Writing and existing are inherently political acts and Vociferate | 詠 presents a polemical examination of issues and experiences that spans from the mid-20th century to the contemporary period. She provides insight into the perspective of a writer who was born in Hong Kong and moved to England before finally finding a home in Perth.  

The collection creates an intimate journey, alongside Emily, of experiences that are simultaneously unique yet universal.  Emily’s poetry and prose have previously been published in various journals and anthologies including  Meanjin,  Growing Up Asian in Australia,  Cordite Poetry Review  and  Australian Poetry Journal.  Speaking with Emily, we explored her poetic practice, her voice and the way she uses language to convey contemplations of identity, belonging, culture, legacy, relationships, and more. 

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Adele Aria
What is the significance of the book title and your reason for laying out the collection in three sections? Does the order reflect the chronology of your life, when they were written, or the timing of particular topics you were exploring? 

Emily Sun
Vociferate means to protest and to shout loudly, whereas 詠 is the verb for reciting, chanting, or singing Ancient Chinese poetry. 詠 is also my real name, one that I’ve not publicly used outside the first three years of my life and my time in Beijing. In Hong Kong, I went by the Cantonese version of the name, which sounds like ‘Wing’ but at home, and in Beijing, I’m ‘Yong,’ the Mandarin pronunciation. It probably is still quite unusual for Hong Kong-born Chinese to use the Mandarin version of their name, but Mandarin was the lingua franca where Dad grew up; my paternal grandmother gave me the name. I always had the idea to put my real name on the cover of the book and I decided to balance it with ‘Vociferate’ because I am not always singing and chanting!   

I didn’t set out to write a semi-autobiographical collection but it is, more or less, a chronology of the events that have shaped my world. Once I worked out the structure, I wrote more poems for the middle section because I would have skipped my twenties, a significant period in anyone’s life, if I hadn’t. I also had to kill many of ‘my darlings’, the poems that didn’t quite fit, which was a really hard thing to do! 

Adele Aria
What is translanguaging and why did you choose to adopt this approach but translate some languages and not others?    

Emily Sun
Translanguaging is an education term coined by Cem Williams, a Welsh researcher involved in bringing Welsh back into classrooms in Wales. The practice encourages students to use all their linguistic abilities in the classroom and differs from bilingual education because it rejects the idea of a ‘pure language.’ This means that whatever they communicate is accepted as a ‘whole language,’ and there is no code-switching. I wrote the poems in this collection with this in mind.  

I was born in Hong Kong so my mother tongue is Cantonese, but I am only able to hold semi-intelligent conversations in a unique form of Cantonese because I learnt Mandarin as a second language in my 20s. Without my formal Chinese education, I wouldn’t have been able to write in Chinese nor elevate my Cantonese repertoire, which even now is rather unsophisticated. I’m only able to write in Chinese through translation apps and Google. My parents sometimes struggle to make sense of my Cantonese because mine is a mash-up of my maternal grandmother’s – who spoke an early-mid 20th Century Canton/Hong Kong vernacular – and an old school Malaysian/Singapore variety because that’s also part of my heritage. I realised when I was using voice-based apps that I have a very strong Australian accent so the algorithms didn’t always understand what I was saying. What’s also interesting is that I sometimes mix up French and Mandarin because neither are not naturally acquired languages.   

Adele Aria
Place, belonging and identity are key themes in your book.  Why did you explore these themes?  

Emily Sun
I was going to say because I grew up in Perth in the 1980s and 90s, but it’s possible that I would explore place, belonging, and identity even if we had not left Hong Kong. I remember when I was in my 20s, before 1997, a Hong Kong friend who was a few years older than me, said that if I’d grown up in Hong Kong, I’d be even more confused about my identity. She had mixed feelings about the handover as she felt she was culturally very different to her mainland counterparts. She also had grandparents who were sojourners to South East Asia at the turn of the 20th Century.  

I have definitely inherited the feelings of displacement and dysphoria from my parents, especially my father who grew up in wartime British-Colonial Malaya. He always vacillated between being proud of being Chinese, yet distanced himself from South-East Asian Chinese culture, even though he is a South-East Asian Chinese. He always romanticised the idea of finding a homeland in China, to the point where instead of taking up a scholarship at an Australian university he went to join Mao’s Great Leap Forward with his friends who were Chinese educated (back then, Chinese students went to either private Chinese schools or British run public schools). Paradoxically, he valorised British culture because he went to a colonial school modelled on the English grammar school system. Even now, in what is supposedly a post-humanist era, people still have a dualist perspective so you can imagine how confusing it would have been back then for people. One thing I remember him saying to me is that he didn’t have an identity when he was growing up and that comment has stayed with me to this day.  

Although growing up in a home where there were so many incongruous beliefs has enriched my writing and introduced me to pluralist perspective and critical thinking early in life, it was also very confusing. I used to speak only English to my father but I made the conscious decision to speak only Chinese during the Pauline Hanson years. It was during those years that I really felt a loss of ‘my culture’ and wondered why I’d even believed in a multicultural Australia in the first place. I really have to thank Pauline Hanson because if I didn’t feel the violence and loss, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this collection! Perhaps if the Australia I’d arrived in back in the 1980s was a truly multicultural country, and one that accepted Asian immigrants as ‘Australian’, then I would have been happy to abandon my Chineseness – which I don’t have a strong sense of to this day, but something I know I have and still value.  

Adele Aria
What was your thinking behind challenging and acknowledging stereotypes? 

Emily Sun
I didn’t set out to write a collection about stereotypes but when you’ve spent a lifetime being subjected to classed, gendered, and racialised stereotypes. There is that danger of reinforcing stereotypes when you acknowledge them without having the space to engage in further discussion. Poetry is a form where you can express the complexities without writing a thesis-length response.  

I think it would have been more surprising if I hadn’t addressed this in a debut collection. You hear established writers speak about how their first book is always the most personal, and I suppose I needed to express all of this before I was able to move onto other things I want to write about.  

With this book, I have the chance to begin the conversation and I am aware that this is a privilege that has been afforded to me. However, it has taken a long time to get here as I had to accumulate my cultural and social capital through my public school and university education. I was fortunate enough to complete school when there were not as many barriers to social mobility.  

Adele Aria
You have written in different forms and previously mentioned that you thought that your first book would be a short story collection and not a poetry collection.  Why did you, ultimately, choose poetry to interrogate experiences and sense-making?  

Emily Sun
This collection is very much about my ineffable ‘minor feelings’, a term popularised by American poet Cathy Park Hong, and poetry was the form that worked for me at the time. I started writing poetry to free up my creative writing which had become quite terse and formulaic because I was writing and practicing academic writing. I’ve always written poetry for fun but didn’t really think to publish any until more recently. I also access a different part of my brain when I write poetry. I’m definitely accessing a more instinctual part of my brain and there’s less pressure to parse logical sentences in poetry. I can also work with sounds and evoke dream-like thoughts that I don’t have the skills to paint. I know you can do this in experimental prose as well, which is why my prose is also often experimental.  

Adele Aria
What’s it been like for you to develop your debut publication? 

Emily Sun
Once I decided to arrange the poems chronologically, the project became a personal one. In many of my pieces, I explore ideas around having both an imposed and self-ascribed ‘Asian-Australian’ identity – or if you want to be even more specific ‘Chinese-Australian,’ and diasporic-Chinese identity. I think this comes through especially in the first two sections of the book. What really stood out for me when I revisited the collection recently is that in the final section, I address the other identities I’ve accumulated over the decades such as, worker, partner, cancer survivor, and carer. 

The introvert in me is nervous about publishing such a personal work, but the extrovert is very excited and is shouting out to the world, ‘Hey, has anyone felt this way too?’, which I suppose is why we write for publication.  

I had a lot of fun writing the poems and loved working with my editor, Tracy Ryan, and my publisher, Georgia Richter. I felt very comfortable around both of them and have nothing but praise for the Fremantle Press team at every stage of the development process. The photo on the cover is of my mother as a young woman in the 1960s and the stunning graphic design is by Anna Maley-Fadgyas. When I saw the book jacket, I had to add Anna to my acknowledgements because she took so much care with the design and it was based upon her interpretation of my poems.  

I dedicated my book to my mother and my two grandmothers, who are – and were – exceedingly intelligent and strong women, and people who would have fared better in life had the world been a more equitable place when they were in their prime. Strangely enough, the book will be launched upon the anniversary of both my grandmothers’ deaths – they died on the same day 15 years apart. There is something serendipitous about that and I hope that I have been able to honour their lives in some way.  

Adele Aria 
You navigate many commitments outside of writing. What does your writing routine and process look like?   

Emily Sun
I just started my PhD so I don’t really have one at the moment. I don’t usually come up with ideas at a desk, and I rarely draft or come up with ideas when I’m staring at a blank word document. I have a family so writing is not my only priority. I’m also an introvert which means I feel drained when I don’t make the time for myself to read, think, and write. Paradoxically, because I am on the extroverted end of introversion, I need to be around people and get a lot of energy from engaging with others in person, especially people who share similar intellectual interests. I also need to be engaged with the wider world and other creative activities in order to write; this is why I call myself an extroverted introvert.  

Adele Aria
What is something you hope readers will experience when they read Vociferate | 詠?

Emily Sun
It’s the same thing as what I hope people experience when I talk to them about the things that are important to me; that they find it interesting enough to engage them in conversation, even if it’s just with a hypothetical me. I actually don’t know how my work will be received. Poetry is a form that is really subjective, so I don’t expect everyone to like it. In fact, I’m sure there are already people who’ve read it and hate the way I’ve, in their eyes, disrupted conventions that they hold dear. Who knows? I guess I’ll find out once it’s out there!