Banana Girl
October 2013
Michele Lee / Transit Lounge
The middle child in a large Asian-Australian family, the not-yet-thirty-year-old Michelle Lee recounts her experiences growing up in a modern world that is vastly different from that of the ancient, mountain-dwelling culture of her Hmong relatives. Her mother fled Laos in the mid-70s after the so-called Secret War, and joined her father in Canberra, where Lee and her six siblings were brought up. Lee however, has broken free to live among the “subversive and ironic people living in the hipster boroughs of the inner north of Melbourne”.
As a left wing aspiring playwright Lee fits right in, and, “indifferently hip to the outside world”, isn’t afraid to lay her Gen-Y yearnings, cultural angst and relationships bare as she embraces the thrills and spills of dating in an online world. Despite being “oh-so Melbournian”, Lee is equally keen to explore Hmong culture, and having visited her extended family in Laos, prepares to commence a literary residency with Asialink, which will present her with a new set of challenges for fitting in.
Lee’s journey of self-acceptance is written with the intimacy of a private diary, and paints the picture of a complex and fascinating young woman with a unique insight into two vastly different worlds she has learnt to simultaneously embrace.
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