Australian icon Kylie Minogue is the musical muse for this sparkling new anthology, Spinning Around: The Kylie Playlist.
Twenty-four writers used a Kylie Minogue song as the springboard for a new, original piece of work, covering the genres of crime, memoir, speculative fiction, poetry and science fiction – from Kylie’s 1987 release ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ all the way through to her newest album ‘Tension’.
Read on for an extract …
Put Yourself in My Place
by Alice Pung
Every month at the New Saigon Restaurant and Bar the owners put on ‘Superstar Night’, a set banquet of eight courses, including lobster, and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Sixty-five dollars a head, kids ate free. It was supposed to bring our community together. Old men and women, the middle-aged, the young with children and babies: those who’d had their family trees cut off at the root or sprouting new branches, even bearing fruit.
Our community had invested in a huge state-of-the-art, art-of-war sound system and mother of all 1990s karaoke machines. The oldies loved to hear us sing. There was no more surefire way to squeeze the tears out of Old Man Hoc’s eyes than a shot of Johnnie Walker and a young woman in a ruched dress on New Saigon’s little stage, singing her heart out.
Old Man Hoc was the Chinese patriarch, the benevolent Godfather, the Marlon Brando of the Australian Southeast Asian community. He’d bought the little restaurant that became the classiest establishment this side of town. He was always chuckling at something when he wasn’t weeping. His wife was the opposite. She’d gone back to Vietnam to get plastic surgery and now looked exactly like La Toya Jackson. Smiling probably still hurt her.
For that generation, everything hurt. Dominique lost two fingers from the cleaver meant for the roast duck’s neck. Mrs Lee had burned feet from dropping a vat of boiling soup at the Pho King restaurant. Most of the women had back pain and eye trouble from early mornings sewing in their garages.
Superstar Night was an evening for the elders to show off their children. Who knew that out of the scrappy remnants of war could emerge something better, something milk-fed and healthy, a generation with all their limbs intact. The progeny not on the stage singing were sitting quietly at their tables, noses wedged in a book, while their mums and dads whinge-bragged about how they only got ninety-seven percent in their last maths test.
I sang the French song, but for some reason on their pirated VHS video the next song up was ‘The Loco-Motion’, and just as I was about to step off stage, Dad urgently gestured for me to stay on, to emote and locomote, to bring the room into a frenzy of wild railroad-action, to bounce and dance and forget.
At New Saigon, I’d become the Southeast Asian Princess of Pop. People always had trouble with my first name, Ky. They’d rhyme it with thigh, even though it was actually pronounced ‘Kee’. And my surname, Ly – who knew one syllable could be mangled? Lie? Lee? Most called me Keeley, but one teacher in primary school had called me ‘Kylie’, and it stuck.
My stage name became Ky Ly Minnow. My first name, my surname, followed by something with scales because I was good at piano. I chose Minnow because the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodians could pronounce that better than they could ‘Minogue’, and also in homage to the shark minnow, one of the most common river fish found in the Mekong Delta.
I had a fishy name, but I was anything but. My voice was sweet. I smelt like Impulse Harmony. I had a flat bum and no boobs, but so what. I made a killing those Saturday evenings – five hundred, six hundred dollars, in tips. On nights where there was a huge wedding, I’d get close to eight hundred dollars. There were talks of flying me to Orange County, California, to film a Paris by Night video alongside Elvis Phuong.
I did Kylie’s whole discography, from the boppy but ubiquitous ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ to the Gallic ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi’, from ‘Hand on Your Heart’ – where all could put their hands to their chests and declare their affection – to ‘Give Me Just a Little More Time’, a late-night siren song to lull sleepy aunts and uncles to part with final tips.
Back in high school, the Australian girls would come up to be friendly and ask me nothing except about my difference. Did I think the canteen did a good enough job making dim sims? Did I like Lucy Liu? No, fuckers, I love Kylie, and we understand her in a way youse never will. We understand the power of that vivacity, that vigour. You may look like her, but I am the embodiment of her. We are the same height. Same shoe size. Arched brows. Our calves are the same length as our thighs, so when we bend our knees to squat, our feet rest just beneath at our bums. We are a perfectly proportioned petite, not the bobble-head-stumpy-leg variety. I am her Asian sister from another mister.
In Kylie’s songs, everyone could join in the chorus, and dance – from your tiny toddler in the godawful tulle dress to the old toothless grannies – pretending to be a choo-choo train. Ka-mon, I’d sing, Do. Do. Do. The loco-moshun with me, and they’d all get up. They loved me.
When I sang ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, one or two audience members might be named Lucky (or Freedom or Visa), and so it was like I was singing to them and they’d shove folded notes at me, legal tender, and sometimes they tried in illegal tender places too, until they saw my dad, right at the front, getting ready to smash a VB bottle and rearrange their faces. I was safe, because everyone was watching out for me, the pride of the town.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Pung was born in Footscray, Victoria, a month after her parents Kuan and Kien arrived in Australia. Alice’s father, Kuan – a survivor of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime – named her after Lewis Carroll’s character because after surviving the Killing Fields, he thought Australia was a Wonderland.
Alice grew up in Footscray and Braybrook, and changed high schools five times – almost once every year! These experiences have shaped her as a writer because they taught her how to pay attention to the quiet children and young adults that others might overlook or miss.
Alice Pung’s first book, Unpolished Gem, is an Australian bestseller which won the Australian Book Industry Newcomer of the Year Award and was shortlisted in the Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Literary awards. It was published in the UK and USA in separate editions and has been translated into several languages including Italian, German and Indonesian.
Alice’s next book, Her Father’s Daughter, won the Western Australia Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Literary awards and the Queensland Literary Awards.
Alice’s YA book Laurinda won the NSW Premiers Award Ethel Turner Prize in 2016, and was been shortlisted for numerous other awards.
One Hundred Days, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and Voss literary awards, and has recently been optioned to be made into a film by Michelle Law.
Alice’s writing for children include the Marly books from the Our Australian Girl series, When Granny Came to Stay, and the bilingual children’s picture book, illustrated by Sher Rill Ng, Be Careful, Xiao Xin!
Alice is a qualified lawyer and still works as a legal researcher in the area of minimum wages and pay equity. She lives with her husband Nick and three children at Janet Clarke Hall, the University of Melbourne, where she is the Artist in Residence.
In 2022 Alice was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for her services to literature.
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