Family Murmurings

A short-story collection with echoes of Tony Birch’s Shadowboxing and Nam Le’s The Boat, Ken Chan’s fictional accounts are hewn from fragmented childhood memories of life in an Chinese-Australian family in the 1950s and ’60s.

Featuring full-colour artwork by award-winning artist Nancy Liang and an introduction by award-winning author Alice Pung.

Set principally in Sydney but also in Darwin, the stories explore memories of family and the clashes, conflicts and vicissitudes that beset a fictional Chinese family in 1950s and ’60s Australia. The stories deal with the ups and downs of one community, focussing on one extended family. While standing as individual tales, the stories have interconnected recurring characters who grapple with broken dreams, personal disappointments, tensions and quarrels within the family. 

The stories expose human weakness, moments of melancholy and feelings of failure interwoven with the whimsical, the quirky, and the funny. They endeavour to enrich our understanding of what it means to be Chinese in an Australian setting – from large family gatherings where marathon games of mahjong are played to replicating Western debutante balls. While the stories reflect a Chinese-Australian family’s distinctive experiences in inner suburban Sydney (and Darwin), the collection resonates with universal themes of family: the bonds that are forged at birth that – over a lifetime of struggles, frustrations and challenges – are tested; from the ones that bind to those that fray and sometimes break.

"The stories in Family Murmurings tell a tale as old as human civilisation with its petty squabbles, soaring hopes and desires, urgings of the heart and lonelinesses of the soul. And yet Ken’s words have spun them at speeds and intensities that have forged new and beautiful shapes for generations to come." — Alice Pung, OAM and bestselling author