Read a Q&A with Vivian Pham, author of The Coconut Children

Vivian Pham is a Vietnamese-Australian fiction writer, closet poet, amateur screenwriter, university student and hopeful dropout if any of the aforementioned ventures take flight. Her father was a Vietnamese boat refugee, and she grew up loving stories because she knew there was one inside of him. Her debut novel is The Coconut Children, a novel about childhood friendship and growing up in a troubled neighbourhood.

We asked Vivian a few questions about her new book – read on!

Vivian Pham

Please tell us about your book, The Coconut Children!

VP: Gladly! The Coconut Children is the story of Sonny and Vince, two teenagers growing up in a neighbourhood troubled by violence and drug addiction. Their community is one displaced by war, and though their parents left Vietnam long before they were born, the repressed memories of past generations loom large in their present.

You wrote this book while still in high school. What was that like?

VP: It was a weird feeling – to have my story, something that was, for once, entirely my own, and to be in the final years of an education system which I’ve always felt I was going through to please someone else. Writing a novel made me notice how deeply flawed the way we teach English in our classrooms is. It’s not that teachers are underqualified – they are being strangled by a syllabus that only cares about preparing students for examinations.

It felt like I was living in a dream at times, too. I remember struggling to decide which publishing house to go with in the beginning of Year 12. I was in the library, and I was trying to get out of doing my assignment, so I turned to my favourite teacher, Mr McCredden, for life guidance. He flipped a coin–heads was Penguin Random House.

How do you handle the pressure of being a debut novelist at such a young age?

VP: The only way to handle this pressure is to recognise that it shouldn’t be there in the first place. If I don’t think about age, and if I focus on seeing others for who they are instead of how old they are, I’m hopeful they will do the same for me.

Why was it important to you to set The Coconut Children in the time and place that you did?

VP: The Coconut Children is set in Cabramatta, a southwestern Sydney suburb where my family has done our grocery shopping since I can remember. Since the arrival of Vietnamese refugees, Cabramatta has been vilified by the media. I wanted to tell a story about our community from the inside out, not the outside in.

Because of the crime and violence that characterised Cabra in the ’80s and ’90s, a time before I was born, its history has always felt like folklore to me, a little like being Vietnamese feels. What I mean is that, you feel there is a history that belongs to you, but which you don’t yet know, and don’t know how to know. So my intention in setting this novel in Cabramatta, in 1998, was to have some sort of grasp over the past, even if that meant fictionalising it.

Why does fiction appeal to you over other literary forms like poetry or memoir? Do you ever write in other mediums?

VP: Fiction doesn’t appeal to me over other forms – it just seemed to be the most fitting way to tell this particular story because it allowed me to weave together multiple histories into one present. It was also important for me to experiment with the idea of the main characters trying and struggling to narrate their own lives, and I feel I could only have done that in a novel.

I write poetry and essays, and screenplays with my sister, Kim. I was going to mention that I write a haiku a day, because that was one of my (already-abandoned) new year’s resolutions, even though I don’t and I’m a fraud.

When writing, do you start with a plot or do the key characters emerge first?

VP: When I began writing The Coconut Children, there was Vince. I saw him vividly. The rest of the book became a matter of what would happen to him, and a question of whether or not he’d be destroyed by it.

Do you have a favourite author? Who is it and why do you love their work so much?

James Baldwin

VP: I’ve always been an enthusiastic reader but until I found James Baldwin, all the authors of my favourite books remained largely faceless to me. It was only when I read Giovanni’s Room that I gained a sense of the writer; someone made of flesh, someone who lived in the world and wanted justice from it. Baldwin cared about people. I’ll try not to say too much else here, only because I’m already pretty certain I’ll be spending the rest of my life referencing him.

In 2018 and 2019, you attended the International Congress of Youth Voices and shared a stage with writers and activists like Dave Eggers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Khaled Hosseini. What was that like?

VP: It was an intensely nerve-racking (and exhilarating!) experience to sit before an audience of two thousand, especially for someone whose heart would pound even when their name was called out for attendance in class. The Congress brings together earnest young people who want to change the world, and people like Dave Eggers who have spent much of their lives doing just that.

I did a speech that night in 2018 at the Nourse Theatre, and I said something about how easy it would be, in that setting, to ‘hold hands and chant together by the fire of our own righteousness’ – I think I was quoting Paul Gilroy here. I believe that fire can be a force, but completely futile if you’re just using it to warm your own ego. I think I’ve been guilty of that (without knowing, if ignorance is any defense).

What do you hope to achieve with The Coconut Children?

VP: If just one person were to read the book and feel a little less alone, that would make writing it worth it. But my most ambitious hope would be for the iconography of The Coconut Children to have a place in our collective consciousness akin to the poetry of Dylan Thomas, the films of Hayao Miyazaki, or Britney Spears’ 2001 performance at the MTV Video Music Awards during which she sang I’m a Slave 4 U while holding a two-metre-long Burmese albino python.

And finally, what’s up next for you?

VP: At the moment, I’m spending a lot of time with my dogs and working on a screenplay for a Vietnamese TV series with my sister. On my own, I’m writing another novel set in Australia with a Wodehousian perspective on identity politics. There is also a book of aphorisms written by my great friend and mentor, Daniel Carrington, which has had a huge influence on me, and which I would love to pitch to publishing houses. I wouldn’t be against getting a scholarship to study at Oxford, and I have always wanted to open an arcade/restaurant in Cabra and live upstairs. Since we were little, my sister and I have always known we would one day become humanitarians, even though that seems to be the calling of people who already have lot of money.

Thanks Vivian!

Thank you!

The Coconut Children

by Vivian Pham

Life in a troubled neighbourhood demands too much too young. But Sonny wouldn’t really know.

Watching the world from her bedroom window, she exists only in second-hand romance novels and falls for any fast-food employee who happens to spare her a glance. Everything changes with the return of Vince, a boy who became a legend after he was hauled away in handcuffs at fourteen. Sonny and Vince used to be childhood friends. But with all that happened in-between, childhood seems so long ago...

Order NowRead More

No comments Share:

About the Contributor

Booktopia