Interview #128 — Lee Tran Lam
by Colin Ho
Lee Tran Lam is a freelance multi-tasker and journalist. She created and hosts the podcast The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry.
Her work has appeared in publications like Gourmet Traveller, Rolling Stone, The Big Issue, Time Out Sydney, Sydney Morning Herald, and SBS Food. She also hosts Local Fidelity, a show on Sydney community radio station FBi.
Lee Tran speaks to Colin Ho about the power of asking the right questions, food writing as documenting cultural practice, and what it's like to juggle so many different creative projects.
What did you read and listen to at an early age that’s influenced you as a journalist, editor and broadcaster?
I really loved zines—I remember seeing these hand-made DIY magazines on the floors of Sydney record stores that you could pick up for free. They had a freewheeling, whatever-goes nature that made it seem like everyone was one photocopier-spree away from making something readable. What made them memorable was that they were as individual as the author behind them: Vanessa Berry once made a zine about the time she visited every single Vinnies op shop in Sydney. In year 12, I was one of the far-from-cool kids and I made this alternative, irreverent version of a school yearbook that I printed at Officeworks and awkwardly stapled, one edition at a time. I was shocked when the upper ranks of the cool kids actually wanted to buy copies. That felt like a teen-movie triumph moment!
You describe yourself as a freelance multi-tasker and you often have multiple projects on the boil. How do you feel about working this way?
To be honest, sometimes it is crazy—like when you have two stories due in one day, plus ninety pages of a project to proofread before going to bed. So you just power through! Even if it means getting only two and a half hours sleep, then being momentarily mad at your alarm clock when you start again at 9am on the next thing.
As any freelancer knows, you can be super-organised and set aside a long time to do something – and you’ll still get caught out by a deadline, because every project is a totally new thing with its own challenges and it will sure as hell take longer to complete than predicted. One of the best and worst things I’ve learnt how to do is write at 3am: which is something I learnt to do while blogging in between my nine-to-five job. Sometimes to get things done, you just have to skim off your sleeping schedule and make up for it on the weekend, when you totally crash. That said, one of the best stories I wrote this year was started and finished between 3—4AM, just because there was no luxury of time-wasting, and I just had to get to the point! I don’t recommend this working mode to anyone though! If you feel a bit sleep-deprived just reading about this, I have to admit that there are upsides and I do enjoy working on lots of different things at the same time. And sometimes when you’re working on things that are purely-for-fun projects (like doing my podcast), you do have to squeeze it in between the paying jobs, and that does mean hunching over the laptop while people are normally sleeping or watching the sun go down on a Saturday after an all-day podcast-editing marathon.
You’ve said that the key to what you do is asking the right question. How do you go about finding and asking these questions?
I’m a real research nerd and I love diving into someone’s back-catalogue of interviews or skimming through three years of their instagram posts. Anything can potentially spark a good question—from the fourth page of someone’s list of acknowledgments in their book, to a throwaway comment on a menu. You know how supposedly you can get away with anything if it’s buried on the second page of Google search results, because no one looks past the first page? I love getting into the double-digit pages of Google’s outer stretches! That was how I discovered that Carlo Mirarchi was inspired to start Roberta’s Pizza after nearly drowning on the coast. After asking him about it on my podcast, it turns out he was in hospital for five days and nearly needed his foot amputated as a result! But his view of it was so sunny and positive – the stay only cost him $200—’and I got to keep the crutches’!
There’s a wonderful sense of clarity and collegiality in your writing—like good speech, it’s conversational and honest. In what ways, if any, does your work as a host and broadcaster influence your writing process and style?
Thanks, that’s super-nice of you to say! I always like writing that seems really direct and welcoming. I remember painfully tripping over those long, twisty Charles Dickens sentences that ran for endless pages or having to re-read passages in textbooks that were written in an inaccessible code designed to shut humans out. The best kind of writing to me is inviting. I think that goes back to enjoying zines, early on, where every one had a ‘hey, do you want to hang out for a bit?’ tone. Zines were often made by people who wondered who else liked the same stuff that they did and so there was always that invitational pull to them.
As any freelancer knows, you can be super-organised and set aside a long time to do something – and you’ll still get caught out by a deadline, because every project is a totally new thing with its own challenges and it will sure as hell take longer to complete than predicted.
What do stories mean to you? What stories do you feel still need to be told?
I think stories can be so powerful. Why does everyone remember that image of the lone protester standing up to that line of Chinese tanks at Tiananmen Square? Because an entire story—one of bravery and resistance against a massive exertion of power—is obvious in that one shot. And then there are these other spin-off stories, like how Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin got his picture of this confrontation because other members of the press had gone searching for burgers—and missed this historic moment. And then there’s that unsaid story about what ultimately happened to the protester we call Tank Man.
I think we know how powerful stories can be because the Australian government makes it so hard for the press to cover what’s happening in offshore detention centres. I think if we got to tell the human stories of the people being detained, the political case for letting these people languish would crack. Also, imagine if we could cover Australia’s grim asylum seeker policy beyond ‘it wins votes, so therefore we’re stuck with it’? Instead of polls taking some phony brutish view (‘do you support Australia being tough on border policy?’), what if we framed the question with humanitarian honesty (‘do you support spending billions on caging a few people in conditions condemned by the UN and Amnesty International – when letting them contribute to Australian society costs 10 times less?’), then could we possibly move attitudes on this subject?
You’ve been in every single MCA zine fair bar one. What draws you to making zines and what do you find meaningful about them?
Because zines are affordable to make and their worth isn’t ruled by sales—but how one-of-a-kind they are—they’re a really democratic format, and a super accessible way of telling stories. And often they’re fuelled by a fandom that’s really infectious: I remember being certain I’d love something because the author had just campaigned so enthusiastically and personally for, say, a totally obscure band or TV show. And I enjoy how singular zines can be; I bought one that featured drawings of every dish someone had eaten during a trip in New York (that was by Anna Vu, who later became Gourmet Traveller’s creative director – we’d end up doing an exhibition together, probably a decade after I bought her zine!) Also, as a journalist, you’re often dealing with tight word counts and you can only cover things that are timely or if someone is famous enough to justify a story. Zines are great because nothing holds you back (except your printing budget)! You can bust through word counts and do whatever you like. One of the best stories I ever ran was about a friend recounting all the different car crashes she had in Sydney. It was so memorable, funny and sharply honest. I felt lucky to have it in my zine.
In your work, there’s a lot that deals with the senses and the tactile. There’s an anecdote about how in the late 2000s you and your friends saved up to eat at Bentley Restaurant & Bar and you’re so blown away by the experience you started your food-focused blog, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry. What do you find compelling about sensuous experiences like music and food? And what drives you to document these experiences and talk to the people behind them?
Until that Bentley dinner, I’d only ever had ‘pizza money’—enough money to get a pizza and not much more than that. And then suddenly, to have money to splash out on a next-level dinner every now and again was a real novelty. And because the Bentley meal was so memorable—but so quick—I wanted to flash-freeze that experience by writing about it. That turned out to be really fortuitous, because it set off a career of writing about food that I never expected. And I can still remember that night—the fizz of the mandarin and white chocolate dessert especially. I think conveying these experiences can be a democratic way of making them open to everyone, regardless of whether they only have pizza money (and to be honest, most of the time, I only have pizza money—it takes a while to save up for those special dinners)!
Food is often more than just about being fed—it often is about geography, culture, the environment, ethics (or lack of), money, immigration, Indigenous history, the humans who make the food, the humans who get to experience it. Eating at Noma Australia involved a lot of saved pennies, but it ultimately made me zoom out and think about the Australian landscape—and the many ingredients that grow in the tough terrain of this country and how we should be more familiar with the Indigenous connections to such food. I think about the bunya nut, which goes back to the dinosaur age, and was so tough to grow that First Nations people would throw a ‘bunya nut party’ when they did successfully harvest it.
You grew up in Cabramatta before you and your family moved to another suburb and now you’re based in the inner west of Sydney. As someone who values communities bounded and unbounded by geography – how has this shifting sense of place, community and belonging influenced you?
Oh wow, that was a real culture shock. Cabramatta was super multicultural and very inclusive. You sat on the schoolbus with kids from the Balkans or Asia or wherever, but there was never a sense of cold dividing lines. Everyone was automatically friendly. I don’t think I even knew what racism was until I moved to a significantly less multicultural suburb. Most people were actually nice, but ... I was so culturally sheltered! It’s like I had herd immunity from racism, until that moment I moved into a place where I was really in the minority.
I was one of three Asian kids in the entire school playground and until then, I didn’t realise that cultural difference could be used against you. One teacher told another student to talk to me so I could ‘practice my English’, even though I had topped my grade in that very subject at my previous school (and could understand exactly what she was saying). Until then, I didn’t know that people would just assume you were ‘lesser’ by the way you looked. In high school, when we were shocked by the rise of Pauline Hanson and school students actually marched against racism (this happened, I remember protesting in Hyde Park!).
I still remember being shocked learning about an Asian-Australian who got spat on at the Art Gallery of NSW around the time of Hanson’s anti-Asian rhetoric. Our school principal went on TV and said she gave her support to students who had their parents’ permission to join the anti-racism protest. For that, our school got threatening phone calls from all around Australia and some One Nation supporters plastered our school with posters of Pauline Hanson. I remember seeing one in my English class and wondering how on earth it had gotten there.
I’m a real research nerd and I love diving into someone’s back-catalogue of interviews or skimming through three years of their instagram posts.
One of your first jobs was working at the corner store your parents owned. What influence does your family and upbringing have on your work and the values in your work?
I’m aware that my parents are both people who fled Vietnam—my dad actually tried to escape three times and the first time he was unsuccessful and spent six months in a labour camp, where he was constantly hungry. Imagine experiencing that in your twenties! He actually tells me that when he was in a refugee camp in Thailand, Australia was the most humanitarian country to approach the camp. It’s unspeakably sad that we no longer have that reputation (and our politicians, in fact, go out of their way to achieve the opposite).
I think that’s why it’s important to remember the reason why so many Vietnamese refugees got to settle in Australia is thanks to Malcolm Fraser: he made a stand and supported this move—despite knowing it could be politically unpopular— because he believed it was the morally right thing to do. That’s why there were so many Vietnamese-Australian tributes to him when he died.
We’re seeing more writers with diasporic and minority backgrounds like Soleil Ho and Tejal Rao being published in outlets like the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. How do you feel about this and how do you think diasporic writers add to or challenge the prevailing discourses we have about food and food as a cultural practice?
I think it’s awesome! And Texas Monthly recently hired a taco editor. Food is so often about identity, culture and geography – but as Soleil Ho pointed out, often food is written about as if it can only be seen through the lens of white people. Like when there are explainers for bubble tea (The New York Times got dragged for its kinda judgey headline: ‘The blobs in your tea? They're supposed to be there’). Only this year, this sentence got printed in a mainstream newspaper: ‘Five years ago, jackfruit was just a spectacularly ugly, smelly, unfarmed, unharvested pest-plant native to India. Some people ate it, but only if they had nothing better to eat.’ I remember feeling so queasy when I read that condescending quote. Jackfruit is delicious! I’ve voluntarily eaten it so many times! And it’s key to so many Asian cuisines, for much longer than five years! Someone who has had turon (a Filipino fried banana fritter) with jackfruit would not dismiss it as gross. Also, this (white) writer had her first encounter with jackfruit in a Starbucks wrap! To wholesale put down this Asian ingredient based on this narrow assumption that jackfruit was something ‘discovered’ by white vegans recently … Yikes. This is exactly why we need more diversity in food media. That’s not to say that only Asian people can cover Asian food, but the best coverage on any topic is done with respect, open-mindedness and context—which that story was sorely lacking.
Food is so often about identity, culture and geography—but as Soleil Ho pointed out, often food is written about as if it can only be seen through the lens of white people.
That’s not to say that only Asian people can cover Asian food, but the best coverage on any topic is done with respect, open-mindedness and context—which that story was sorely lacking.
Do you have any advice for emerging freelance multi-taskers?
Be pro-active, curious and be you. Be genuinely nice, because the industry is small. Work with good people. Read as much as you can. Go above and beyond. Make things easier for other people, where you can.
Also, take this advice from Jason Concepcion (whom I admire hugely): ‘You need to eat and pay rent and clothe yourself. You don't dive off a ship, you build a raft. What are concrete things (small and simple) that will move you even an inch closer to where you want to go? Find these things and do them a lot.’
What are you listening to?
Lots of Australian music for my show, Local Fidelity. I’m impressed by Lara Andallo, who is a 19-year-old Filipino-Australian. Her latest singles – 180 and Said&Done – are super accomplished and catchy.
What are you reading?
I’ve just started Know My Name by Chanel Miller. Her victim impact statement went viral when it got published on Buzzfeed. It’s an astonishing piece of writing. She had such a horrific thing happen to her (her assailant was Brock Turner, who famously received a shockingly short sentence for what he did), and for a while, she understandably kept her identity hidden: when people came over to her home, she’d throw a bag over the Glamour Woman of the Year award that she got for writing that moving statement as Emily Doe. That she is now reclaiming her story – and being recognised for her writing, is amazing.
How do you practice self-care?
Is it weird that I kind of flinch at the term ‘self-care’? Maybe it bugs me like the word ‘wellness’. It sounds, maybe without meaning to, kind of smug. Like, ‘I’m an important person, listen to me talk about self-care!’, haha. Not shots to anyone who is into self-care. Can I change that to question ‘How do I have fun?’ Then the answer would be watching popcorn flicks, eating with friends, plotting trips to Japan and finally reading the books I’ve been meaning to.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
I’m still figuring it out! One story I’d really love to write one day is about the chefs who are translating their Asian-Australian identity into their food—from Kylie Kwong, who has embraced Indigenous ingredients in her dumplings and pancakes to Thi Le, who is drawing on Chinese medicine in her food.
There are ways where I’m really protective about Asian culture: like when someone complained about MSG making them feel ill after going to a Vietnamese restaurant, I pointed out that MSG naturally occurs in cheese and tomatoes and the idea that MSG makes people sick is based on one very random letter in a journal decades ago.
Or when people roll their eyes at fake meat, I note that mock meat has a history that goes back centuries and was a way Buddhist monks could make people feel included. But in other ways, I feel like ‘a bad Asian’ because there are so many gaps in my knowledge. I guess I’m still working on it all!
There are ways where I’m really protective about Asian culture: like when someone complained about MSG making them feel ill after going to a Vietnamese restaurant, I pointed out that MSG naturally occurs in cheese and tomatoes and the idea that MSG makes people sick is based on one very random letter in a journal decades ago.
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Interview by Colin Ho
Photographs by Teresa Tan