Family Murmurings: A Collection of Short Stories

 
About the authors and books_Book 2 | A literary celebration of Lunar New Year launch event | 6 Feb 2025 Readings Hawthorn, 6pm

About the book

Author: Ken Chan with artwork by Nancy Liang and an introduction by Alice Pung | $39.99 | Paperback full colour | 234 x 160 mm | 260 pp | 10 stories, colour artworks | 9781763542716

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK "The stories in Family Murmurings tell a tale as old as human civilisation with its petty squabbles, soaring hopes and desires, urgings of the heart and lonelinesses of the soul. And yet Ken’s words have spun them at speeds and intensities that have forged new and beautiful shapes for generations to come." —ALICE PUNG, OAM & AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR

A short-story collection with echoes of Tony Birch’s Shadow Boxing and Nam Le’sThe Boat, Ken Chan’s fictional accounts are hewn from fragmented childhood memories of life in an Chinese-Australian family in the 1950s and ’60s.

Featuring full-colour artwork by award-winning artist Nancy Liang and an introduction by award-winning author Alice Pung.

About the stories

Set principally in Sydney but also in Darwin, the stories explore memories of family and the clashes, conflicts and vicissitudes that beset a fictional Chinese family in 1950s and ’60s Australia. The stories deal with the ups and downs of one community, focussing on one extended family. While standing as individual tales, the stories have interconnected recurring characters who grapple with broken dreams, personal disappointments, tensions and quarrels within the family. 

 

The stories expose human weakness, moments of melancholy and feelings of failure interwoven with the whimsical, the quirky, and the funny. They endeavour to enrich our understanding of what it means to be Chinese in an Australian setting – from large family gatherings where marathon games of mahjong are played to replicating Western debutante balls. While the stories reflect a Chinese-Australian family’s distinctive experiences in inner suburban Sydney (and Darwin), the collection resonates with universal themes of family: the bonds that are forged at birth that – over a lifetime of struggles, frustrations and challenges – are tested; from the ones that bind to those that fray and sometimes break.

 

Available 3 Feb 2025

Publisher Pop Art Press

About the author

Ken Chan was born in Shanghai and came to Australia as a young child. However, his father’s family had already been living in Australia for four generations. Ken has a PhD in Political Studies and a PhD in Creative Writing. He worked as an Australian diplomat, an Administrator of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and was a member of the Refugee Review Tribunal. In addition to writing fiction, he has written about contested identities, belonging and otherness in Australia.

In early 2022, Ken’s stories were the subject of Family Murmurings, an exhibition, supported by the Australia Council, City of Melbourne, Museum of Chinese Australian History and the NT Chinese Museum. Ken worked with artist Nancy Liang and digital artist Oliver Clifton to produce the artwork and VR exhibition based on his short stories, which was held at the Museum of Chinese Australian History, Melbourne, and the NT Chinese Museum, Darwin. While one of these stories was published in Black Inc.’s 2008 book Growing Up Asian in Australia, this book presents all these stories in full for the first time.