Others Were Emeralds

July 31, 2023
Poet Leav (Self-Love for Small-Town Girls) makes her adult fiction debut in this heartrending novel about how one Asian Australian’s insecurities influence her relationships. The daughter of Cambodian immigrants who fled the Khmer Rogue, 17-year-old Ai grows up in the small town of Whitlam, Australia in the 1990s, where she and her friends feel the brunt of anti-immigrant tensions. Ai becomes close friends with the beautiful Brigitte, who is French Vietnamese. She teaches Ai how to cook while Ai teaches her how to bookbind; Brigitte also briefly dated Bowie before he became Ai’s first boyfriend. Then, Ai overhears a conversation between Brigitte and her mother that confirms Ai’s self-doubts about her looks and place in Bowie’s heart, which are spurred on by classmate Sying, who often voices her irritation with Brigitte. After a confrontation the girls have with a pair of racists during an outing at the lake, Bowie and Brigitte meet with tragedy, an event that continues to haunt Ai even as she graduates and follows her dream of working with textiles as a college student in Sydney. Leav skillfully captures the details of senior-year high school life, but is even better in depicting Ai’s parents’ stories of surviving war and persecution and Ai’s teenage experiences with microaggressions and outward racism. It’s a resonant portrayal of how paranoia and jealousy can turn relationships sour.

July 25, 2023
The year is 1997—the era of Jerry Maguire and Scream, dial-up modems, and rising anti-Asian sentiment in the heavily politicised Australian town of Whitlam. Poet Lang Leav’s debut novel revolves around a tight-knit group of friends—introspective, creative Ai; mercurial, brilliant Brigitte; affable high-school sweetheart Bowie; and inscrutable, kind Tin—as their lives and group are cleaved in two by a senseless, tragic incident. Others Were Emeralds is rich with lush descriptions and an unmistakeable sense of place, from baguettes ‘baked fresh each morning with crackling, paper-thin crust giving way to the fluffy, light-as-air interior’ to Whitlam with its ‘chain-link fences and overgrown lawns strewn with junk and burnt-out cars’. In a similar vein to Western Sydney writers Shirley Le, Tracey Lien and Vivian Pham, Leav seamlessly inhabits the painful experience of growing up in a community only ever reflected as a ‘rolling montage of drugs, chronic unemployment, and gang violence’ in the media. But there’s a beautiful specificity in Leav’s evocation of life as a second-generation Cambodian-Australian, from the way Ai’s mother switches between Teochew, Mandarin and broken English to the chive cakes Ai exchanges for her classmate’s stuffed vine leaves. The novel, demarcated into two parts, has a portentous air as Ai walks through the corridors of her memories for closure, where the accretion of seemingly insignificant moments suddenly collapses in one big crescendo.