Lang Leav, Instapoet with a new novel, writes for her Teochew-speaking parents

SINGAPORE – Critics hate on Lang Leav’s verses as generic, watery stanzas; fans adore her simple, relatable poems and gave her fame on Instagram and Tumblr.

But above the din of disparagement and adulation, the best-selling Australian writer tells The Straits Times over a Zoom video call from New Zealand that she has a more intimate audience in mind: She writes for her Teochew-speaking parents.

The 43-year-old credits her ear for simplicity to her relationship with language as an immigrant daughter to two Chinese-Cambodian parents. “As kids, we were translators for our parents. It was about simplifying language and honing it down, and that’s had an effect on my writing.”

Her parents fled the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, and Leav’s mother gave birth to her in a Thai refugee camp.

Leav’s family subsequently settled in Cabramatta – where she spent her childhood and where her parents still live at – a suburb in south-western Sydney which had waves of immigrants from Cambodia, Vietnam, Turkey, Albania and elsewhere.

Leav’s debut adult novel, Others Were Emeralds (2023), is dedicated to her parents and written in her simple, unfussy prose. The fictional coming-of-age narrative follows Ai, also a daughter of Cambodian refugees, as her innocent Cabramatta childhood in the 1990s is shattered by an act of anti-Asian violence.

While the book recounts some of her parents’ experience – one episode Leav writes about involves her father building a slingshot to knock a mango out of its tree while on the run – she learnt of many of these stories through second-hand accounts.

“You kind of hear it in a phone conversation or when you’re having dinner somewhere and one of their friends brings up something that happened in the past,” she says, adding that it was only with time that her parents have offered their stories more readily.

Leav never met her grandparents and many of her extended family members were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which also burned photographs in an attempt to control memory.

“Before a certain period, there are no pictures of my parents and I find that really, really sad,” she adds.

“I think we are hungry for those stories, to know where we came from,” says Leav, whose childhood friends feel the same way.

It was not only her parents, but also Leav who had to overcome a resistance to talking about this part of her history.

She recalls her start in poetry: “When my work went viral on Tumblr and I posted a picture for the first time, everyone was shocked. Everyone thought I was a white guy.

“I used to have this intense and great fear, with all my success and social media following, that people were just speculating a lot about my life based on what they read about me and not my actual work.”

The Covid-19 pandemic turned out to be a time of self-reflection for Leav and, as she turned 40, she felt that “in a strange way, the further away you get from your life, the more of it you can see and make sense of”.

In 2019, Leav and her mother took what turned out to be one final pre-pandemic trip – to Malaysia and Singapore –and it was an experience that stuck for the duo. Leav says: “She absolutely loved it, she felt very much at home speaking Teochew to random people on the street.”

She reveals that her mother, too, is the unlikely inspiration behind her earlier love poems from Love & Misadventure (2013) and Lullabies (2014). “Despite it being interpreted as romance, there are a lot of poems in my books that are about my mum, the sacrifices that she made and the trauma that she has obviously passed on as a parent who is an immigrant.”

It is a source of pride for Leav that her newest book honours her parents and their heritage, even as she recognises the difficulty of conveying the true extent of her inner life to them.

Leav’s parents, who read in Chinese, will not be able to peruse her latest book.

She winces with regret that a deeper connection is still elusive because of the language barrier. “Everything is so rudimentary, and I wish I could have a conversation with them. That would be my dream, maybe in another life and I can sit and speak to them in the way we are speaking now, on a deeper level,” she says.

“If it ever gets translated into Chinese, maybe they’ll be able to read. I would love that, if they could read it.”

Others Were Emeralds by Lang Leav ($23.88) is available from Amazon SG (amzn.to/3Rj6f2K).