Welcome to Peril number 3 – themed “Rebel”. We have a smorgasbord of articles, pieces and poems for you, starting with an article by Scott Brook about Vietnamese-Australian eighties fashion with its rebellious overtones.

Yumi Umiumare as ‘cross-cultural’ rebel in ‘DasSHOKU Hora!!’
Japanese-born performer Yumi Umiumare’s playful investigations of cross-cultural femininity strategically utilise in-between subjectivities to fracture cultured and gendered truths. In 1995 Umiumare devised a performance in Melbourne named Tokyo DasShoku girl.

The documentary photography of Thuy Vy
Dan choi: the Fashion Show
It’s the last event of the 2005 Big West Festival, a community-based arts festival in Melbourne’s western suburbs. We’re all sitting around on plastic chairs beside the catwalk, waiting for the show.

“Silence” is a play about three generations of Vietnamese women haunted by the spectre of one man. Their silences hold the secrets they hold from each other and the wider community. Based on true stories from Vietnamese women the play will be performed by Australian Vietnamese Youth Media in 2008 in Melbourne.

It took me the most part of my childhood to understand how my mum could be Cambodian, but born in Vietnam, at the same time. She was born in Cambodia then moved to Vietnam. During the Vietnam War she worked as a telephone operator for the American government. Needless to say when the Communists won, they didn’t like my mum very much. They put my family in one of the re-education camps.

you are supposed to be preparing your translation
class. but, here you are at it again. driving at the philosophy of it
the senselessness of it that somehow makes sense. ‘did you write about it?’
ups and downs, ups and ups’. ‘right now i’m getting beyond the point
explicity’ ‘which doesn’t mean that it’s not good’. ‘coming to terms
with it takes me 15 years, this loneliness, this solitude, in which you think
you live a death, in which you are constantly hankering after some sort of contact
of recognition, of voices at the ears’. ‘in the …

birds in nests keep their heads down
the deers’ ears are all burning
tactics are the talk of the land
but a battle takes up so little room

The deep truth is imageless.  P B Shelley
On the Road
My arms and legs are tightly bound.
But in the hills birds sing and flowers blossom.
Who can prevent my enjoying such sweet scent
and sound?
In my long trudge I might feel a little less lonesome.
—from Ho Chi Minh, Prison Diary.                                        1942