Creative writing: Mum

Writing prompt: Choose a family photograph and write a short biographical introduction to your subject. In no more than 250 words, try to paint a telling portrait in words.

Mum

In the photo, a young Thai woman smiles shyly into the camera. In her arms, she cradles a pale, pudgy baby, no older than six months. The woman, in her early thirties, has beautiful warm skin and jet-black hair down past her shoulders. She wears an oversized lilac t-shirt, a wardrobe staple of the early 1990s.

"My darling girl is a good little girl", the woman croons sweetly, bopping gently with her child.

You wouldn't notice it at first glance, but as the woman holds her child in the grainy image, she is trying to hide her hands beneath the baby's small white dress. She's embarrassed by the contrast between her child's porcelain skin and her own. On the back of the photograph, the date is marked June 1993.

Well into the decade, the White Australia policy — although abolished in 1973 — still radiates its racist ideals into the country's core. An all-too-familiar image on national television is right-wing politician and One Nation party leader, Pauline Hanson, a whirlwind of fire-red hair and an icon of anti-Asian sentiment.

But the woman in the photograph, my mum, is one to be reckoned with. She is no stranger to adversity, growing up in rural northern Thailand in the 1950s. She will overcome the language and cultural barriers that await her in Australia. She leaves behind her hometown of Udon Thani to marry her farang husband and raise two girls. Decades later, she will make a name for herself, establishing herself as a successful and charismatic restaurateur in Melbourne, where she lives and works for the next thirty years.