Succour for the Spirit – Issue 3
Sunday Reading with writer & academic
Elizabeth Tan
Talking about beef ho fun, making kokedama, coming to terms with grief and vulnerability, and much more. #SuccourfortheSpirit #SilentDialogueEvents
“At once, the room was full of another time … It wasn’t right the way these moments, the worst moments, could rear out of their resting places. As if nothing ever passed into history, as if everything was only another layer of now, sticking over and over itself like old wallpaper. The past kept showing through. She just wanted it gone.”
“This passage (above by Mills) describes both how I’m feeling right now – being a little too alone with my thoughts and memories – and also how I tend to keep revisiting the same themes and anxieties in my creative practice, always folding back on old wounds.
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In Conversation
with Elizabeth Tan (ET) & correspondences’ Emma Thomson (ET2)
Nature, food or art?
ET—Food
Eating beef ho fun at Billy Lee's in Chinatown, Perth
All-time favourite meal
ET—My favourite meal is beef ho fun with egg sauce. The flat rice noodles are fried until they are slightly charred, and they are served in a thick silky gravy made of egg and cornstarch. The other ingredients can vary (seafood, chicken), but my favourite is when the noodles are served with sliced beef and kai-lan. This meal is glossy, soft, and smoky.
As children, my siblings and I would sometimes have to accompany our parents to their office during the school holidays. Our parents would take us out for a big lunch, which was always the highlight of the day. I first ate beef ho fun at one of these lunches, at a restaurant called Yen Do, which doesn’t exist anymore.
When I moved out of home, my relationship with my parents improved a lot. My dad would occasionally invite me to lunch and then walk with him while he played golf. We would always share a large plate of beef ho fun at a Chinese restaurant near the golf course. It was during this time that I think my dad really made an effort to get to know me as an adult.
Here’s a photo of me about to eat beef ho fun after my PhD graduation in 2016. I’m at Billy Lee’s in Chinatown, which sells the best ho fun in Perth. My mum treated my friends and me to dinner here after the ceremony. At this time, my dad was very sick with cancer, so he could not come to the ceremony. He died later that year in June.
As tends to be the case with comfort food, it’s always hard to explain why I like this meal so much, especially to non-Chinese friends, but I guess it’s similar to the pleasure you’d get from pasta – a sloppy, slurpy, saucy pile of carbs.
Food you're dreaming about
Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes, 1963, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.
ET—When we were in our teens, my sister set Cakes (1963) by Wayne Thiebaud as the background on our family laptop. Though I rarely eat cake, I love staring at cake displays, especially the ones at Utopia and Breadtop.
I remember my sister relishing the cheerful and unsettling quality of Thiebaud’s work – the greasy colours, the severe shadows, the menacing rows.
As our family laptop grew older, we would have to stare at Thiebaud’s cakes for longer and longer as we waited for the desktop to load. When I imagine eating a slice of one of Thiebaud’s cakes, I think of something slick and creamy, the hum of ailing hardware, icons stuttering into existence.
What are you cooking lately?
ET—A couple of nights ago, my partner and I made 'Honey Joys' from old cornflakes in the pantry – we had two open boxes. The honey joys didn’t turn out as crisp as usual, and we’re not sure if this is because we used too much Nuttelex or because of the staleness of the cornflakes. They were still nice to snack on, and it was good to clear some space in the pantry. We still have more cornflakes, so we might try to make another batch on the weekend.
What are you making?
ET—I’m making kokedama (moss balls). While my partner was getting supplies for home repairs at Bunnings earlier this week, he managed to buy two little plants for me, a fittonia and a freckle face. He said that there wasn’t very much tube stock available – most of the plants of this size were gone. Before social distancing I used to browse nurseries and make kokedama nearly every fortnight, so it’s an activity I miss terribly.
Elizabeth's beautiful kokedama.
All-time favourite musician(s)?
ET—The Go! Team is my go-to choice for: (1) music for getting chores done; (2) car music; and, (3) dance music.
Tell us about one of your creations
Cover design by Roy Chen & Jon MacDonald
Elizabeth has chosen to share one of her wonderful short stories which will also appear in her short story collection which is forthcoming from Brio Books. More details below. The title of the short story is ‘Washing Day’, and it was first published in Mascara Literary Review in June 2018.
Why did you choose this particular work?
ET—I’ve been thinking about how many of us at the moment are going through a kind of grief that we feel unentitled to claim, like we’re not sure what is the proportionate and true volume of sadness or anxiety to feel. While of course the protagonist’s ordeal in this story is of a different scale, I think she’s grappling with a manifestation of that grief which seems, to her, simultaneously trivial and devastating.
What was the starting point?
ET—I can trace back this story to a prompt from the creative writing textbook Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway, Elizabeth Stuckey-French and Ned Stuckey-French, which asks you to write a story ‘in which a single impossible event happens in the everyday world’. In general, this has been a fruitful strategy for pushing me to get started on a story: just take the familiar world and introduce one unexplainable glitch.
What were you striving to explore?
ET—In hindsight, I can see that I was exploring my ambivalent relationship with my body and with clothing, the vulnerability and fragility of it, and the hollowness and futility of fitness culture’s calls to ‘honour your body’.
What are you working on now that we can learn more about?
ET—‘Washing Day’ will also appear in my short story collection Smart Ovens for Lonely People, which is due for release in June 2020 from Brio Books.
ET2—You can pre-order a copy of Smart Ovens for Lonely People here. Meanwhile, listen to a short reading of Elizabeth's incredible book Rubik below. It is one of our favourites.
What else can supporters do?
Pre purchase our book for Silent Dialogue with Elizabeth's words → here. Featuring Elizabeth's piece and ten other original pieces of writing by some of the country's finest writers alongside beautiful imagery from our participating visual artists, it is going to be special.
Share our news via email & social media via i: silent_dialogue & f: silentdialogueevents. It introduces us to new supporters!
Follow Elizabeth at: @ElzbthT
Biography
Contributing essayist Elizabeth Tan is a Perth writer and sessional academic at Curtin University. Her first book of fiction, Rubik, was published in 2017 by Brio Books, and went on to be published in North America and the United Kingdom. Elizabeth's work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Overland, Stories of Perth, Catapult, Mascara Literary Review and Westerly. She was the co-editor of the anthology In This Desert, There Were Seeds, a collaboration between Margaret River Press of Western Australia and Ethos Books of Singapore. Elizabeth's second book of fiction, Smart Ovens For Lonely People, was released in 2020 from Brio Books to rave reviews.
Image credit (banner): Elizabeth's beautiful kokedama.
