60 seconds with Hoa Pham

Award-winning writer, playwright, Peril founder and newest MCWH project officer!

What are you enjoying doing at the moment?
Stopping and smelling the flowers.

What is the best thing that happened to you today?
Hugging my children.

If you were a super-heroine, what powers would you like to have?
The ability to fly.

What talent would you most like to possess?
Musical.

What is your best quality or attribute?
Writing ability…

What is the best part of your day?
Writing!

If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?
Professional writing!!

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a woman from an immigrant or refugee background?
People not understanding my creative work from a cultural perspective.

Can you describe a time when you felt discriminated against as a woman or as someone with an immigrant or refugee background?

Where do I start? Most recently dealing with my last manager who made fun of my name behind my back in front of my colleagues.

For you, what’s the best thing about being a woman from an immigrant/refugee background?
Having access to another world/culture than the mainstream Anglo-Saxon Australia.

If you could invite any woman (dead or living) to dinner tonight, who would it be?
Jeanette Winterson or Margaret Atwood or Octavia Butler or Ursula Le Guin… the list of women writers goes on.

What are you reading right now?
Aliette de Bodard a Vietnamese-French American fantasy writer whose fantasy worlds include a Paris with Vietnamese water dragons in the “The House of Shattered Wings” trilogy.

What does multiculturalism mean to you?
Diversity and the ability to share difference.

If you could convince the world of one thing, what would it be?
Peace is the next step.

If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
End violence against women.

If you could meet the Prime Minister tomorrow, what would like to tell him?
To treat Indigenous and refugee peoples as human beings with rights.

Finish this sentence: “We need feminism because…”
The dishes don’t do themselves.