MEMBER'S NEWS - New Work from Chi Vu [29.06.2010]
Chi Vu
AASRN member Chi Vu has had her short story ‘Vietnam: a Psychic Guide’ published in The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (General Editor: Nicholas Jose).
The Anthology website includes video excerpts of the work, as well as a Teaching Guide.
http://www.macquariepenanthology.com.au/aust_filmclips.html
http://www.macquariepenanthology.com.au/files/unit_10.pdf
Chi recently completed her Master of Arts (Creative Writing) through the University of Melbourne. Her dissertation, entitled ‘The 1.5 Generation Writer as Post-Colonial Translator and Traitor’, explores contemporary transnationalism through the creative texts written by the Vietnamese diaspora. It analyses works produced by Vietnamese-born 1.5 Generation authors residing in Australia and the USA, using post-colonial translation theory, in order to define the generational impact on this emerging literature. The creative component of the Masters, ‘Anguli Ma’, is a novella based on a traditional Buddhist tale. The eponymous character is a deranged killer who wears a garland of his victims' fingers around his neck. He meets the Buddha and eventually attains enlightenment. Chi Vu’s version is set in a newly-arrived refugee community living in Melbourne’s western suburbs in the early 1980s. The gory traditional tale is ‘translated’ (across the seas) to a post-colonial Australian setting, and transformed into a Buddhist-Gothic tale of meditation and murder.