Mauleon, Maureen Mae A.

Miriam Wei Wei Lo

Miriam Wei Wei Lo was born in Canada, raised in Singapore, and has lived in Australia
since 1993. She is of Chinese-Malaysian descent on her fathers side and Anglo-Australian on
her mothers side. Los poetry explores family, home and heritage, unfolding the histories that
underwrite the everyday realities of living in relation to others in the intimate space of the family
and within the broader context and tangled knots of ethnicity and nationality. Her poetry
explores family histories with openness, sincerity and a gift for characterisation, giving detail and
depth to the conflicts and prejudice, nurturing and love, of the strong women of her family.

In an adroit sequence of poems tracing her familys history from country Australia, China,
and Malaysia, Los formidable grandmothers Liang Yue Xian and Eva Sounness are vividly
present. Coming into focus through Los work is a deeper portrait of the ethnic, cultural and
political divisions and contradictions from which contemporary Australian identity evolves, as
well as a vital and realistic picture of how the minutiae of culture and identity reshape us over
generations. Los more recent work celebrates the present moment of love, embracing the daily
and domestic metamorphoses with clarity and passion.

Lo has studied writing at the universities of Western Australia and Queensland. Her first
collection, Against Certain Capture, won the West Australian Premiers Prize for Poetry in 2005.
Her output over the last five years has been small, due to her radical commitment to intensively
personal child-rearing, however, the poems she has produced have been widely anthologised,
appearing in collections such as Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia,
Windchimes: Asia in Australian Poetry and the most recent Penguin Anthology of Australian
Poetry. Miriam currently lives in Margaret River (Western Australia), and when she is not writing,
she cooks, cleans, edits her husbands sermons, and entertains three young children. Her next
book is forthcoming with Salt Publishing.

Through this radical commitment Los work extends to an acute interrogation of

contemporary domestic and familial spaces and relations. She comments, It really bothers me
when anyone fails to see the value of this work, but I constantly encounter people who see
housework as less important work; these are the people I meet in Singapore who assume that
housework and child-minding are maids jobs, these are the people in Australia who cant
understand why I dont hire a cleaner and put the kids in daycare so I can get on with being an
academic or writer, these are the societies whose views of the importance of housework are
reflected in the amounts they pay to people who do these jobs for them, so they can be free
from everyday life to do . . . more important things (whatever they are). OK, if Kevin Rudd had
to wash the dishes after all his parties, or if Barack Obama had to keep the White House clean,
they wouldnt have time to do much else, but there was a reason for Gandhis famous assertion
that politicians ought to clean their own toilets. It is in this context that everyday life has
become a charged topic for me and for my writing.