Peril magazine

Of Dogs and Dialects

Violet Kieu — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:14:01 +0000

I am Vietnamese-Australian, yet I speak English better than any other language. All my reading, writing and thinking is limited to combinations and permutations of the twenty-six lettered Roman alphabet. So do I still have use for another language? As a little girl, I saw language as a burden. When I was ten years old, learning Vietnamese was a great big bore. A waste of three hours every Saturday morning at Richmond West Primary School. I didn’t know why I had to learn to speak differently from other people. How did learning ...

Shu Yi

Maxine Beneba Clarke — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:13:37 +0000

1989, and the hottest summer on record, at least since I’d been born. Salt ‘n’ Pepa were all over the airways and in our tiny suburb, between crimping fringes and rearranging fluoro bobby socks, all of the other third-grade girls were singing let’s talk about sex. We didn’t realise the real revolution wasn’t bumping and grinding at eight and a half, but two unbroken young brown women, loud and giving the finger to the world on Video Hits. I wanted to be as far away from those two condiment shakers ...

Letter to John Safran: About the two-headed beast

Rosey Chang — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:12:41 +0000

I get it, I really do. I saw your tv episode about being Jewish and feeling attracted to Asian women. I understand your conflicting feelings.

Poetry

Poetry Authors — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:11:38 +0000

Poetry by Liang Yu-Jing, Matt Hetherington, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Susan Hawthorne

Interview with Daniel Lee

Owen Leong — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:10:20 +0000

Daniel Lee has always been fascinated by the relationship between humans and animals.

The Impossible Princess

Benjamin Law — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:09:25 +0000

To win Thailand’s biggest transsexual beauty pageant, you need a number of near-impossible things on your side. It helps if you’re tall, although big hands and feet are a minus. You’ll be told you need to look “natural”, even though organisers and judges have been known to pull contestants aside, and encourage them to undertake more cosmetic surgery. Above all, the judges will want you to look like a “real girl”, even though the competition’s premise is that you were originally born with male sex organs. “The whole idea,” one ...

Editorials

Lian Low — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:06:06 +0000

Editorials from Peril prose editor Lian Low and poetry editor Miriam Lo.

Interview with Owen Leong

Lian Low — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:05:07 +0000

Owen Leong’s solo exhibition Birthmark recently opened at Anna Pappas Gallery in Prahran, Melbourne. In Birthmark, twelve half-human, half-creature photographic portraits are displayed along the walls of the gallery. Their gazes resist an easy reading, their commonality their shared Asian-Australian identities and the Australian native moths that mark their faces. Whether the moths are masks or part of the skin is a concept that Leong plays with. Situated on a separate wall is a portrait of Tom Cho; unlike his moth-marked companions, he has a nasty cut across his cheekbone with pink liquid oozing upwards into his sideburn. Cho’s image is the cover of his book, Look Who’s Morphing.

Guest House

Amy McDonald — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 23:51:23 +0000

When the man climbed out of the ute I picked up my backpack, dusted off my shorts and walked over. ‘Meghan?’ His accent was Australian, his eyes green with flecks of yellow. I stuck out my hand and we shook. He took my backpack and hauled it into the back. Town after dusty town whizzed by. In between were paddies of rice, plantations of cassava, fields of buffalo. The Australian pulled the ute off the highway and it bumped down a dirt road. A large lake stretched out to the left. White birds pulled fish ...

Here’s Kamahl!

Andy Quan — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:15:22 +0000

Kamahl laughs when I remind him of the reason for this interview, but none of us at Peril knew, long ago when the theme of this issue was chosen, that Kamahl would soon be thrust back into the spotlight. “Let me tell you the origin of that phrase,” he begins in the voice that made him famous. I could try to describe its depth and resonance, the way it draws you in, but most of Australia, as well as international fans, know that already. Flying out from Amsterdam from a November 13th ...