Mimi Kwa is an Australian television personality and descendant of a Chinese family with a rich history. Her book, House of Kwa, tells about four generations of this family.
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Mimi Kwa is an Australian television personality and descendant of a Chinese family with a rich history. Her book, House of Kwa, tells about four generations of this family.
House of Kwa opens with a scene from the recent present, when Mimi Kwa discovers that her father is suing her. “My hair literally turned gray overnight […] when I got the paperwork from my dad suing me over my late auntie’s estate. It wasn’t because she’d left everything to me, it was because she’d left me in charge, and my dad, being a traditional Chinese man, decided that he did not want a woman, let alone his daughter, to be in charge of this very important execution of his sister’s will.”
The memoir then returns to the past, three generations earlier, when the Kwa family was a rich silk trading family in China. “My great-great-grandfather was a silk trader, lived in the royal Imperial compound in Beijing, and had multiple wives and lots of children. He then left the compound to start his own silk trading business, and traveled down through China to the southernmost part, close to Hong Kong, and lived in a place called Swatow. They were very successful in their trade, and then the Second World War happened and changed everything.”
Mimi follows the story of her family’s fortunes during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, then recounts how her Aunt Theresa arranged for her father to emigrate to Australia. “She was the first Chinese air hostess for British Airways, which was BOAC at the time, in Hong Kong. That was a very great honor to be chosen for that job. It was a very glamorous position. Theresa shipped my dad off to have an opportunity.”
Mimi’s father arrived in Australia to study “during the White Australia policy. If you were migrating to Australia and you were any race but white, then you needed to have a very good reason to be here. Migration to Australia was very difficult in those days, and there was a lot of racism. When you came to Australia, and you were not white, you were required to assimilate, which meant not speak your language and not practice your customs. He moved to a town where he was one of only a handful of other Chinese people in the town, and of course, stereotypically, because it’s all that they could do, they ran the Chinese restaurant and the Chinese laundry, and my dad went to work for them.”
He stayed in Australia and eventually “ended up opening the biggest backpackers [hostel] in the southern hemisphere. So I, as a girl, grew up with 100 people sleeping over at my place every night.” Many years later, one day, when Mimi had her first job in television, “This raw news feed was coming through that there had been a murder at Mandarin Gardens. Mandarin Gardens was the name of my dad’s hostel. I looked at the screen, and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my house.’ I called my dad, and I said, ‘Dad, don’t speak to anybody. Don’t speak to the media. This is not a good news story.’ And my dad said, ‘Oh, daughter, daughter, you don’t understand the media. I know what’s going on.’ And so the next minute, I see my dad coming in on the raw news feed talking to an opposition TV station, so not even my TV station, saying, ‘Have you got the pool in the background?’”
When Mimi found Scrivener, it changed the way she approached writing this book. “When I discovered that Scrivener existed, it changed my entire writing life. I don’t know how I could have written the book without it. I started off with a bit of a Time Traveler’s Wife: two timelines, jumping between the two from present to past. That became too overwhelming because my book does traverse four generations in three different countries. What Scrivener helped me to do was to rearrange it from that past and present alternation of chapters to a chronological order.”
Given the number of siblings Mimi’s father had, the extended Kwa family is spread out around the world. “I guess it’s a microcosm of the diaspora of the Chinese people around the world. We are everywhere. And my book has just brought so many Kwas out of the woodwork. People have contacted me from Germany, from America, from the UK, and even from within Australia that I didn’t know existed. Not everybody is interested in their family history, but I think more and more people tend to be because there’s this fascination with the presence of the past. The past is always present in our lives, even just when we look in the mirror, we’re seeing the generations of our lineage reflected back to us.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.