'As the date of the twenty-first anniversary of my arrival in Australia approaches, I acutely sense the space between ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’ in ‘Asian Australian’, which is how I refer to myself. This space divides not only two words but two worlds, a fact that I, as a bilingual writer and translator of more than two decades, know only too well. Crossing this space is a process of positioning, consciously adopting and abandoning a myriad of reference points between common perceptions of what it means to be ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’.' (Introduction)

'Written over a period of nine years, Australia Day is a book of short stories by Melanie Cheng. It was the winner of the Award for an Unpublished Manuscript at the Victorian Premier’s Prize in 2016. Along with Maxine Beneba Clarke, Omar Sakr, Lachlan Brown, Michelle Cahill and Alice Pung, Cheng is part of a rising wave of culturally diverse writers concerned with the idea of Australia itself. Cheng herself has glossed Australia Day as a collection about ‘chance encounter, family, multiculturalism, identity.’' (Introduction)

‘Melanie Cheng’s Australia Day (2017) is the latest in the contemporary succession of engaging and innovative collections of short fiction by Australian writers from diverse backgrounds. since the 2008 publication of Nam Le’s The Boat, Australia’s young literary vanguard has announced itself with a series of ambitious volumes. These authors include Ryan O’Neill (The Weight of a Human Heart, 2012), Maxine Beneba Clarke (Foreign Soil, 2014), Ali Alizadeh (Transactions, 2013), Ceridwen Dovey (Only the Animals, 2014), Nic Low (Arms Race, 2014), Michelle Cahill (Letter to Pessoa, 2016), Tara June Winch (After the Carnage, 2016), and Fiona McFarlane (The High Places, 2016). There is something about the short story collection that seems well attuned to contemporary Australian society’s fragmentation and polyphony. Formally, it allows compressed scenes of localised intensity to set themselves within the complex striations of transnational or trans cultural experiences. Such collections have benefitted, perhaps, from readers’ shortened attention spans. But they have also been well positioned to take advantage of the material and cultural gains that are part of the churn and glory of contemporary literary award culture. Cheng and Beneba Clarke both won the Victorian Premier’s unpublished manuscript award with their collections, and Le and McFarlane have each received the prestigious international Dylan Thomas Prize for Young Writers.’ (Introduction)

'The characters in Melanie Cheng’s collection of short stories are all outsiders or misfits in some way. Some feel conspicuously out of place, such as the Lebanese immigrant Maha, in ‘Toy Town’, who is struggling with suburban Australian life, or the Chinese medical student Stanley, who is visiting the family farm of a friend in the titular story. Stanley freezes when he is asked at dinner to nominate his AFL team: he has never watched a game of football in his life. Other characters feel isolated owing to their beliefs or temperament.' (Introduction)

'These two books capture a profound diversity in contemporary Australian short-story writing. Seven Stories is a collection of short stories from Tasmanian writers published by the elusive Dewhurst Jennings Institute. The stories are set around the world, the seven writers connected only by dint of being Tasmanian. In contrast, the slow-burn stories in Melanie Cheng’s Australia Day speak of middle Australia. They are an examination of some quiet lives in contemporary Melbourne.'