SHARING your life story through a memoir can be somewhat nerve-wracking, particularly when your insights about your community could make some a little uncomfortable.
First-time Fremantle author Khin Myint’s Fragile Creatures will almost certainly push buttons when it’s launched at the Chesterton Lounge at Bar Orient this coming Friday (June 7), and he admits to having some nerves ahead of the event.
“I feel a mixed set of emotions about that, because it’s my local community, and then people will just know so much about my life,” Myint says.
The son of a Burmese father and English mother, he grew up in Rossmoyne struggling to fit into either the European community, or its small but growing Asian population.
• Author Khin Myint’s first book Fragile Creatures will be launched in Fremantle this week.
It was the era of notorious racist Jack van Tongeren, whose firebombing of the Man Lin restaurant in Karawara sparked fear across the city; the son of the Chan family who were the victims of the attack was a fellow Rossmoyne student.
Myint presents a searing account of the terrifying bullying he and others faced during that tense era, and while he says Perth has come a long way, he still sees racism around him.
“Racism in Fremantle is not overt, in my experience as a 40-something, mixed-race guy, but it’s definitely there.
“When I want to talk about race, ideas around race or racial identity, I often feel it’s not a welcome conversation here.”
The book also delves into mental health, with Myint’s sister Theda’s looming suicide a pervading theme.
His family, the medical establishment and the alternative healers were split on whether her illness was wholly mental or wholly physical, and he says one of the aims of the book is to challenge readers to look at a middle ground.
“I want them to remember in their own lives, and think about in their own lives, how the culture that we that we live in, that we swim in, defines how we look at the things around us and look at other people, and how there can be a lot of a lack of nuance in how we see other people.
“The culture encourages us to think in stereotypes, to think in binaries – for example, binaries around the illness.”
Myint also wants a more critical look at masculinity, arguing that there are contrary notions of how young men in particular are supposed to behave.
He says it’s largely boys and men being pulled towards the right, and he fears that’s in part from the left constantly telling them they’re the problem.
“As we’re critiquing them, I think you need to be compassionate towards that; you need to flow into it and understand what’s going on a little bit,” he said.
Fragile Creatures
Khin Myint
Launches Friday June 7,
7pm, Chesterton Lounge
by STEVE GRANT