AustLit

'Narrative medicine may take certain methodological cues from literary studies, linguistics and narrative theory, but until now it has remained firmly grounded in the health sector. It views storytelling and narrative as tools that can improve the performance of medical practitioners – first, by helping them process the confronting nature of their everyday jobs, and then by facilitating more effective communication with patients. Narrative competence thus provides an important supplement to the medical gaze, enhancing the clinical experience for practitioner and patient alike. But narrative medicine also has important implications from a literary point of view. It highlights the special position that the medical worker occupies in terms of being able to observe a cross-section of society. When a medical practitioner decides to engage not only with the scientific method of evidence-based medicine but also in the arts-based practice of narrative medicine, he or she has the opportunity to make an intervention in the broader culture. Consequently, the literature that emerges almost as an offshoot of narrative medicine is capable of creating forms of representation that more accurately reflect the heterogeneity of social conformance. It is a literature that draws attention to demographic sectors of society that might otherwise be denied mainstream representation.

'This essay examines the ways in which a medical practice can inform a writing practice, and vice versa. Using the work of Chinese-Australian author Melanie Cheng as a case study, I show how narrative medicine traverses an important space between the medical gaze and the empathetic instinct. Cheng has worked as a General Practitioner (GP) for over ten years, whilst developing a parallel writing career. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day (2017), functions on one level as a therapeutic outlet for Cheng’s day job. In addition, by recasting the GP as a repository of secrets, her stories provide matchless insights into the lives of people from a range of different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Cheng’s writing therefore transcends the boundaries of her own personal history and ethnicity, pointedly venturing beyond the territory expected of her as a Chinese-Australian author. Viewing Cheng’s work through the lens of her medical training shows us how the practice of medicine can work alongside that of writing to deepen our understanding of what is commonly referred to as the ‘human condition’.'

Source: Abstract.

'As the date of the twenty-first anniversary of my arrival in Australia approaches, I acutely sense the space between ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’ in ‘Asian Australian’, which is how I refer to myself. This space divides not only two words but two worlds, a fact that I, as a bilingual writer and translator of more than two decades, know only too well. Crossing this space is a process of positioning, consciously adopting and abandoning a myriad of reference points between common perceptions of what it means to be ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’.' (Introduction)

'Written over a period of nine years, Australia Day is a book of short stories by Melanie Cheng. It was the winner of the Award for an Unpublished Manuscript at the Victorian Premier’s Prize in 2016. Along with Maxine Beneba Clarke, Omar Sakr, Lachlan Brown, Michelle Cahill and Alice Pung, Cheng is part of a rising wave of culturally diverse writers concerned with the idea of Australia itself. Cheng herself has glossed Australia Day as a collection about ‘chance encounter, family, multiculturalism, identity.’' (Introduction)

‘Melanie Cheng’s Australia Day (2017) is the latest in the contemporary succession of engaging and innovative collections of short fiction by Australian writers from diverse backgrounds. since the 2008 publication of Nam Le’s The Boat, Australia’s young literary vanguard has announced itself with a series of ambitious volumes. These authors include Ryan O’Neill (The Weight of a Human Heart, 2012), Maxine Beneba Clarke (Foreign Soil, 2014), Ali Alizadeh (Transactions, 2013), Ceridwen Dovey (Only the Animals, 2014), Nic Low (Arms Race, 2014), Michelle Cahill (Letter to Pessoa, 2016), Tara June Winch (After the Carnage, 2016), and Fiona McFarlane (The High Places, 2016). There is something about the short story collection that seems well attuned to contemporary Australian society’s fragmentation and polyphony. Formally, it allows compressed scenes of localised intensity to set themselves within the complex striations of transnational or trans cultural experiences. Such collections have benefitted, perhaps, from readers’ shortened attention spans. But they have also been well positioned to take advantage of the material and cultural gains that are part of the churn and glory of contemporary literary award culture. Cheng and Beneba Clarke both won the Victorian Premier’s unpublished manuscript award with their collections, and Le and McFarlane have each received the prestigious international Dylan Thomas Prize for Young Writers.’ (Introduction)

'The characters in Melanie Cheng’s collection of short stories are all outsiders or misfits in some way. Some feel conspicuously out of place, such as the Lebanese immigrant Maha, in ‘Toy Town’, who is struggling with suburban Australian life, or the Chinese medical student Stanley, who is visiting the family farm of a friend in the titular story. Stanley freezes when he is asked at dinner to nominate his AFL team: he has never watched a game of football in his life. Other characters feel isolated owing to their beliefs or temperament.' (Introduction)