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Through compelling representations of culture and family, responders are invited to consider how language raises important questions about the fluid and diverse nature of cultural identity.

These questions are explored throughout the Contemporary Asian Australian Poets anthology, which moves beyond stereotypical and homogenised portrayals of migration to celebrate voices often marginalised.

In Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s Home and Vuong Pham’s Mother, the poets reflect on the significance of homeland and family, exploring the resilience and sacrifice central to shaping migrant identities.

 Through authentic depictions of displacement, intergenerational storytelling and cultural hybridity, both texts encourage deeper reflection on the migrant experience.

Lo challenges the notion of home as fixed

showing a constant negotiation between spiritula and emotionally of a migrant journey.

By centruing the migrant journey from longing and full of burden

to the reluctant acceptance as her own diasporic identity and knowing of selfhood is rooted in the absense of culture.

Stanza 1, presents the migrant identity as a constant process of reconsutriction

where the persona’s idealsied home transcends traditonal definitoons.

The layerd cultural food in “fried ikan billis, roast lamb and mangoes”

creates a sensory convergence of East and Western culutes, of past and present, presenting her diasporic identity built on fragementation and adaption.

In Stanza 2, Lo’s persona pushes the limitsof expression in metapohor “corrupt langauge of my body”

illustrating the perosnas ;s ecaspulating guilt tied to the comforts of her home, as she is not able to embrace her new life knowing the sacfrice her parents went through.

Just as Lo battles with guilt and fragementation her loss in heritage in “and then it was quite forgetten

shapes her identity can fade and be replaced.

Pham’s mother explores how diasporing idneityes shaped by

intergentational relationships though love, gratitude and inhertied trauma, forming a hybrid selfin the wake of displacement.

The romatised imagery in “freedom of her hair… landscapes of water buffallo”

shows the cultrual reconstruction, first gen migrant negation with to form a sense of identiy

her chinese name “pristine” symbolic of her emotionally unanchored connection to family like Pham,

Constrasts the lack of storyelling to build her identiy to recived unexpectedly.

The tonal shift in “childhood wonder” to “I know now”

becomes a site of reconsilliation building his identity.

Through the portrayals of intergentation displacement and dissonance,

Lo and Pham reveal how diasporirc identity necessiates resilience and sacrifice.

Lo shows the tension between present privlidge and ancestral hardship “enough books for a dowager empress” while her father is born into a room that houses a family”

hyper bolic abundence is contrasted by the sacrifice as her idenity is not reclaimed through return but by reflection on her ancestral sacrifice.

Pham constructs, indentity not ny adaption byt legacy of sacrifice, through the metaphor “the teaching legacy passed down to me”

identity is not inherited in full but reassembled by LOVE, GRATITUDE etc.

Contrast Ten’s internal stress of identity with LO and PHAM resileince in wake of sacrifice. The RQ IN “do I to it belong?”

shows the emotional estrangement of her name, suggesting diasporic individuals may not be seamlessly passed down but actively interrogated.