I am Vietnamese-Australian, yet I speak English better than any other language.  All my reading, writing and thinking is limited to combinations and permutations of the twenty-six lettered Roman alphabet. So do I still have use for another language?
As a little girl, I saw language as a burden.
When I was ten years old, learning Vietnamese was a great big bore. A waste of three hours every Saturday morning at Richmond West Primary School. I didn’t know why I had to learn to speak differently from other people. How did learning …

1989, and the hottest summer on record, at least since I’d been born. Salt ‘n’ Pepa were all over the airways and in our tiny suburb, between crimping fringes and rearranging fluoro bobby socks, all of the other third-grade girls were singing let’s talk about sex. We didn’t  realise the real revolution wasn’t bumping and grinding at eight and a half, but two unbroken young brown women, loud and giving the finger to the world on Video Hits.  I wanted to be as far away from those two condiment shakers …

I get it, I really do. I saw your tv episode about being Jewish and feeling attracted to Asian women. I understand your conflicting feelings.

Poetry by Liang Yu-Jing, Matt Hetherington, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Susan Hawthorne

Daniel Lee has always been fascinated by the relationship between humans and animals.

To win Thailand’s biggest transsexual beauty pageant, you need a number of near-impossible things on your side. It helps if you’re tall, although big hands and feet are a minus. You’ll be told you need to look “natural”, even though organisers and judges have been known to pull contestants aside, and encourage them to undertake more cosmetic surgery. Above all, the judges will want you to look like a “real girl”, even though the competition’s premise is that you were originally born with male sex organs. “The whole idea,” one …

Editorials from Peril prose editor Lian Low and poetry editor Miriam Lo.

Owen Leong’s solo exhibition Birthmark recently opened at Anna Pappas Gallery in Prahran, Melbourne. In Birthmark, twelve half-human, half-creature photographic portraits are displayed along the walls of the gallery. Their gazes resist an easy reading, their commonality their shared Asian-Australian identities and the Australian native moths that mark their faces. Whether the moths are masks or part of the skin is a concept that Leong plays with. Situated on a separate wall is a portrait of Tom Cho; unlike his moth-marked companions, he has a nasty cut across his cheekbone with pink liquid oozing upwards into his sideburn. Cho’s image is the cover of his book, Look Who’s Morphing.

When the man climbed out of the ute I picked up my backpack, dusted off my shorts and walked over.
‘Meghan?’ His accent was Australian, his eyes green with flecks of yellow.
I stuck out my hand and we shook.
He took my backpack and hauled it into the back.
Town after dusty town whizzed by. In between were paddies of rice, plantations of cassava, fields of buffalo.
The Australian pulled the ute off the highway and it bumped down a dirt road. A large lake stretched out to the left. White birds pulled fish …