Wei-Lei and Me (Aditi Gouvernel)

Wei-Lei and Me (Aditi Gouvernel)

  1.  What word in the opening sentence means ‘short and flat’? Pug

  2.  What is so ‘Australian’ about Barry West? He has a red stained face which is because he has become so burnt from the Australian sun.

  3.  What is the opening interaction between the two characters about? They were playing tag and Barry did not want to be tipped by the author's 'dirty' hands.

  4.  What is the protagonist’s home country? India

  5.  What word means “noble and splendid”? (p75) Aristocrat

  6.  In what way is the protagonist’s home country “aristocratic”? 

  7.  Where did the protagonist’s father move his family to? Why? He moved his family to Canberra the ACT. So that their family could be added within history and the history of the new country Australia.

  8.  What is the protagonist’s attitude towards the citizenship ceremony? (pp75-6) She does not remember much which shows she did care much about being Australian unlike her parents who kept their citizenship awards locked in a vault with other precious and important items.

  9.  How is Barry West the antagonist? He bullies her a lot and is the main person within the story that she talks about the most who seems to be the 'bad guy' within the author's story.

  10.What is the irony of the comments made by Amy and Cris? (p76) Their last names suggest that they are also foreigners and it is ironic that they are bullying someone who is an immigrant but they are immigrants themselves.

  11.What is “you have to face the world” a metaphor for? (p76) It is a metaphor for suggesting to the author that she must go into the world and face any problems that are shown to her.

  12.What is the teacher’s hair compared to? Is this an example of a metaphor or simile? (p77) Her teacher's hair is compared to the warmth of the heaters because she has red hair which usually symbolises fire or heat. This is an example of a metaphor.

  13.How is the children’s cruel creativity put into action once Wei-Lei arrives? (p77) They change his last name from Lei which sounds like wee to piss which is another name for wee. They also start to tease him about his name, what he looks like and everything Asian about him.

  14. Explain the relevance of the ‘cat and toy’ metaphor. (p77) The relevance is that the cat are all of the school children who are bullying Wei-Lei and the toy is Wei-Lei who is being bullied and controlled by like a toy who is being played with by a cat.

  15.How does the children’s cruel creativity have a more sinister side? The children cruel creativity start to get Wei-Lei physically hurt by Barry West which started from just names and to physically bullying and cruelty.

  16.What does the protagonist mean by “the afternoon passed like a death sentence”? (p78) The afternoon passed as if the protagonist was being sentenced to death and the feeling that comes with that.

  17.Why does the protagonist see everything Indian “lit by a spotlight”? (p78) Because she has never had anyone come to her house before who wasn't Indian and so the culture that she lives would be completely different to someone else and she realises that when Wei-Lei arrives.

  18.How does the story build to a climax? (p79) The story builds to a climax as the author and Wei-Lei become best friends and try and avoid Barry West until they go on a school excursion which means that they may be separated and Barry West will be with one of them.

  19.What is the irony of Barry’s fate? (p80) It is ironic that Barry moves to Jakarta which is in Indonesia and is a completely foreign place which is exactly like when the author moved from her home country of India to a foreign place of Australia. This means that Barry will be the odd one out when he moves and may be bullied as the new and different kid just like the author and Wei-Lei was from Barry.

  20.Explain what the protagonist means by “as our faces changed, so did Canberra” (p81). The protagonist means that when she and Wei-Lei started to become happy and enjoying life more that Barry West had gone it was as if Canberra felt that Barry had gone and everything thing felt better and happier and filled with more joy then when he was in Canberra.

  21.What do you think the protagonists’ definition of being Australian would be? (p81) I think that the protagonist's definition of being Australian would be people who like to drink alcohol, go to university and talk to their friends about their longed for difference.

Why Does it Matter No.2?

Read any story that we haven't read yet and write a review of the story and explain why it matters. Why should anyone care about the story/read it?


Relatives of Learning My Language by Amy Choi


This story matters and is one that people should care about or take an interest in as it tells the reader about the guilt that the author faces when she realises that over her childhood years she had never wanted to listen or be with her grandfather because of the language barrier that the author had made for herself.


The author feels that the barrier between her grandfather and herself through her language  is something that she does not take to much worry about in her younger years and this is something that she should not be blamed for. Younger children, whether they are Australians or Asians do not want to talk to old people when they have friends to play with and school to go to but those feelings soon to catch up to her when she is in her late teens and the author and her family are at their grandfathers funeral 'At the funeral, my sadness was overshadowed by a sense of regret. I'd denied my grandfather the commonest of kindness.' The author feels that her relationship with her grandfather was a struggle because of the language barrier and that family is something that should never be something of an effort to be with and talk to.


The author's feeling of regret strives her to re-learn her native language and be not only willing but able to speak to Chinese elders when they want to speak to her. This feeling that the author has is one that is something that people who are not Asians feels that these people do not have and because of their differences in their culture and appearance we feel that theirs feeling will be different to ours as well. 


This story is important and one that people should care about as it tells us about the importance of family and that family should not be something that has to be stopped by a language.

Why Does it Matter?

Read any story that we haven't read yet and write a review of the story and explain why it matters. Why should anyone care about the story/read it?

The Ganges and its Tributaries by Christopher Cyrill

This story is about the rituals and feelings that the author's family brings to their home and life within Australia from India and how they create the essence of India within their Australian home.

This story matters and is one that people should care about or read as it gives a different culture perspective of immigrants who come to Australia, not just Asians but in this case Indians. This story reveals to us many of the rituals and beliefs that the author and his family have and how they incorporated their heritage into a new country and home just like many other immigrants to Australia. 

The author tells us about how his father created the map of India out of wood and indicated important places on the wood map. This reveals to us the sense of belonging that many immigrants have to their home country and that they have the same feelings and emotions as we do towards our country.
The author’s religion has many rituals and beliefs that must be incorporated into his home and daily life. This gives the reader a better insight into how people such as Indians who follow their religion of Islam and helps us to eliminate our stereotypical feelings towards these people because of that.
The importance of this story is to give the reader an insight into the author’s life and how their family deals with their new home and incorporated their religion into their daily lives and created symbols of remembrance towards their heritage and old country.

My First Kiss by Lian Low

1. How does the author describe Malaysia in regards to showing affection? Malaysia does not allow people, especially homosexuals to show affection in any way in public.

2. What happens to the author when she hits puberty? When the author hits puberty she starts to have feelings about popular girls and envisioning being a man with a flat chest.  

3. What is the author’s experience at school when she first arrives to Melbourne? When the author goes to her new school in Melbourne she is only approached by other overseas-born Asians and not any white boys or girls.

4. What is it that made the author feel that she wasn’t Australian even though she spoke English fluently? The author is placed into a Second Language Class for people who do not speak English as their first language which is all of the overseas-born Asians like herself even though she can speak English fluently and easily.

5. What else was it about the author that further alienated her from her peers? When ever the author starts to speak her peers can easily hear her Malaysian accent and the author never uses the Australian slang such as 'g'day' or 'mate'. 

6. What does the use of description like ‘crash hot’ do to the audience’s perception of the author? It gives the author the perception that she is queer and using descriptions like 'crash hot' shows that.

7. What opportunity does university give the author? What is it about university which would allow her to express herself more freely? It gives the author the opportunity to have her first kiss. She is able to do things like movies to express how she feels and the way she is through acting.

8. What role does creativity play for the author? Why do you think that creativity would be so important to her? The role of creativity helps the author to express her feelings in the way of films. It helps her overcome the worries in life that she has such as being queer.

Teenage Dreamers by Phillip Tang

1. What are the first two sentences of the story and how do they create a tension in the story? The first two sentences in the story are 'My father had a sixth sense', 'He knew when people would die'. These sentences creates tension throughout the story as it makes the reader think that the father might be a bit strange or unusual and the story will be how someone deals with him.

2. What has happened to the author’s father as a result of his wife’s death? He has become obsessed with a singer and actor named Leslie Cheung.

3. How does the description of the father removing his hands from his face as ‘unmasked’ related to the seriousness of his following statement? By removing his hands from his face to tell his son a statement which is very serious show how the father is so sure that Leslie will die the next month and that his son should not take the statement lightly. 

4. Consider how the father lives his life and conducts himself and the other people in the theatre for the film the author and his father are watching. How does this relate to the title of the story? The way that the father and other people in the cinema conduct themselves around the main actor of the movie Leslie Cheung is related to the title of the story 'Teenage Dreams' as many teenager dream of themselves being like people that they look up to such as singers or actors like Leslie Cheung.

Conversations with my Parents by Ooah Thi Tran

1. What is ironic about the way the author and the father become close? What has to happen to the father? It is ironic that the author and her father become close when the father is in hospital not when he is well. The father has become very sick.

2. How would you characterise the conversation that the author has with her parents? The conversation is very brief with no long sentences.

3. What is it that worries the author most about these conversations? That she never has a chance to say that she loves them or that she misses them.

4. There is a gap between the author’s need to express feelings common in western countries and her family’s lack of desire to express their feelings verbally. How does the family still express their feelings for their child, just not verbally? The family express' their feelings for the child by recalling memories about happy times and that they always try to call and listen to the child. They also pressure her to live like they did such as by buying Vietnamese food and talking about meals such as Banh Xeo. 

The Early Settlers by Ken Chau

1. How does this title refer to two groups of ‘settlers’? Who are they? The title refers to the Asian people who moved to Australia and the white people who settled before him. This technique is a pun.

2. How is the first line of the poem successful at being ‘forceful’ regarding the Great-Grandfather’s presence in Australia? It is successful at being 'forceful' as the name Great-Grandfather is in capital letters and is the first words in the poem. This is a declarative sentence which introduces someone. 

3. What action are the ‘early settlers’ doing that gives them equally a strong presence? They are already established and settled into life in Australia which makes them seem powerful and the more important people.

4. How is the intention of the Great-Grandfather juxtaposed to the beliefs of the ‘early settlers’? The beliefs of the 'early settlers' were that they hated any of the immigrants who came to Australia such as Ken Chau's Great-Grandfather who hated the Australians.

5. What action does the Great-Grandfather do that ties him both to the ‘early settlers’ and to his own culture? The Great-Grandfather swears about the Australians as they do to him when he arrives to Australia and is how his own culture views other cultures who come to their land as immigrants or migrants.
6. How does this short poem highlight the irony of the hatred that immigrants experience when they come to a 'settled' land like Australia? It is ironic that when immigrants arrive to Australia many Australians think of them as worthless and terrible people for coming to their country when in fact the Australians are also immigrants of the Aboriginal people who were the first colony of people to live in Australia.

The Relative Advantages of Learning my Language by Amy Choi

1. The author opens the story with an anecdote. What is the anecdote and what effect does it have on the reader? The author tells us a story about her grandfather and how he lived when he lived with her and how she died and the feelings he had about him. This has a sad feeling on the reader because the grandfather seems very kind and innocent and sadly dies due to a brain tumour. 

2. What is the author’s view of the Chinese language in the 2^nd paragraph? That it is too hard to learn or try and re-learn Chinese especially if you are always speaking to other people in English and reading and listening in English 24/7. 

3. What is symbolic about the house that the Grandfather mistakes for his own? What does it say about the assimilation of his family into Australian culture? What does it say about his understanding of Australian culture? What is ironic about the inhabitants of this house? It is a very Australian house with the Ford Falcon in the drive way and the painted mailbox, it says that the family fitted deeply into the Australian culture and had many Australians things such as a Ford Falcon and lived in an Australian way. He knows a lot about the Australian culture. It is ironic that the inhabitants of this house were people who were not Australian and actually Pakistani who had the same house and things as the Chinese did which meant they had the same living standards.

4. What does the death of her grandfather inspire the author to do? The death of her grandfather inspires the author to re-learn her skill of being able to speak the Chinese language.

5. Why is she motivated to know Chinese? What is it she wants to ensure she is able to, regretting that she couldn’t do it with her grandfather? So that people, especially elderly people, if they want to speak to her then she will be able to speak to them back in Chinese.

The author makes us consider what it really means about understanding someone's language? What basic human skill/ability is the author highlighting that cuts across all cultures? The skill or ability to be able to communicate with each other because of their language.

Describe a time when you were at fault for not communicating with someone because of your own selfishness or lack of compassion. When my brother asked me for help but I did not want to ask because I could not be bothered and felt that his question was irrelevant to what he was learning. 

Introduction and Chapter 1 Questions of GUAIA

Introduction by Alice Pung

1. What were Asian-Australians referred to as when the author was growing up? Power-points

2. How does she interpret this title? She interprets it as thinking she was so smart and she had so much untapped potential.

3. What did this title actually refer to? Did the author find this demeaning? Why/why not? The title refers to a girl who grows up in Australia as an Asian-Australian who goes through a period where she experiences many things for the first time.

4. ‘All that untapped potential! All that electrifying brain power!’ What techniques are being employed by the author? How do they highlight her misunderstanding? Metaphor, they highlight her misunderstanding by talking about things that cannot really happen to someone.

5. What did the teen author take away from teen fiction? What did she feel that she needed to do? Why? What does this say is essential to fitting in to a culture? That she has to have a lot of plastic surgery to look like the cartoons and normal.

6. Who are the authors that she turns to? Why? She turns to the authors who have been effected by being Asian-Australian and the great things they went on to do in their lives. 

7. In the third paragraph how does the author use repetition. How does it highlight the focus of this book? The author repeats the theme of 'firsts' which highlights how the stories in the book are about many peoples first experiences.

8. What metaphor does the author use to highlight the writers and the writing style in the third paragraph? The author uses the metaphor 'plucking the most garish fruit from the lowest-hanging branches of an exotic cultural tree. 

9. Why does the author use a quote in the 4^th paragraph? What does it say about her reaction to the stories in the book? The author uses this quote to show how many of these stories will relate to hundreds of people in Australia even if they are not Asian. 

10. On page 2 the author talks about the themes that she loosely choose for the collection. What are they and why is it ironic that they show up in this book? They are stories that show heroic deeds and are worthy of national pride. Because this is a book about people who have had difficulties living in Australia and have been neglected by their fellow Australian but have done great things in Australia.

11. At the bottom of pg 3 on to page 4 the author says that sociologists have described Asians as the ‘model minority’. What is meant by this? What difficulties arise out of this label for young Asian-Australians? This means that they are people who make up a small percentage of the Australian population but who strive to succeed in life. They are faced with racism and adversity.

12. What are the editor’s hopes for the collection of stories? The editor's hopes are that the collection of stories help to answer all the questions that people may have about Asian-Australians and that the reader better understands what it is like to grow up in Australia as an Asian and what it means to be an Asian-Australian.

Pigs from Home by Hop Dac

1. How does the author start this story which is in direct contrast to the title of the story? What effect does this have on the reader and their expectations of the story? She starts it with an introduction to the story. This makes the reader think about anything that they may have experiences with.

2. What core Vietnamese value is instilled in the author? They core Vietnamese value is the farming and the way they create their own food instead of buying it.

3. What is humorous about the mother’s ‘flair for natural medicine’ in regards to her personality? It is humorous because her mother is a hypochondriac and knowledgeable about herbal medicine but is always worried and paranoid about being sick or being unhealthy. 

4. How does the description of the killing of pigeons continue the style utilised in the introduction of the story? They don't really care about the pigeons and their feelings they just want them dead for food.

5. What is the author’s opinion of pigs? Give two quotes to support your conclusion. She does not like them very much.

6. In the paragraph on pgs 53-54, give two examples of alliteration employed by the author. 'Feeding frenzy' and 'Blowing raspberries on the bellies of babies'.

7. On pg 54 what simile is used to describe pigs? How does this simile work for the situation it is used? 'A pig is like an ocean' is the simile used and it works because you can't turn you back on the ocean or you will get dumped by the wave and can't turn your back on a pig because it will bite you.

8. What simile does the author use to describe her mother sunning herself? How does this relate to the core focus of the story? Tanning like a rotisserie which shows that the Chinese are very enthusiastic into cooking.

9. What does the author describe as ‘the divide between the old world and the new’? What do you think is meant by this statement? She began to see the harshness and cruelty of killing animals for food and what is necessary in order to save money and to not waste any food.

10. What is the author’s reaction to the slaughter of the pig at night? What statement does the author make about the neighbours which displays the way he feels about the whole experience? What is important about including this statement? She cannot speak and is so transfixed on the killing of the pig. She is worried that her neighbours may have heard the dying pig squeal which makes her feel worried about the whole thing.

11. Why don’t the parents have pigs anymore? How does this relate to the description of the burial of the last pig they owned? Because there is a local farmer who supplies them with bacon and ham. This is in relation to the last burial which is like being the last time they will ever have pigs any more.

12. How would you characterise the description of the mother’s treatment of the pig’s blood? Is it appetising? There treatment of pig's blood takes a lot of effort and time and does not sound very appetising with any sort of dish.

13. What is ironic about the way the author has a popular Vietnamese dish? What is it about the way the author describes the experience of having pigs that makes it ironic?

14. How does this story relate to the title Pigs from Home? Because this story is about her experience with farming and the animals in them which is what many Asians not only in Australia do.

15. Why do you think this story is in the Battlers section of the book? I think this story is in the battlers section of the book because it is about a time in someone's life who has to battle through the harsh realities of the world in order to save money and to live happily with food on the table.