Author Alice Pung and the two minds behind a new adaptation reflect on the beloved story of a girl navigating high school – Mean Girls meets Fight Club, with an Asian-Australian twist
‘I definitely don’t feel like my peers were equipped with the nous that young people are now’ … Ngoc Phan as Lucy and Gemma Chua-Tran as Linh.‘I definitely don’t feel like my peers were equipped with the nous that young people are now’ … Ngoc Phan as Lucy and Gemma Chua-Tran as Linh.lice Pung’s young adult novel Laurinda opens with a simple epigraph: “Life is nothing but high school.
Nguyen remembers being a child in 1996 when Pauline Hanson made her infamous maiden speech in which she claimed that Australia was being “swamped by Asians”. When Nguyen began adapting Laurinda in 2020, waves of anti-Asian sentiment were again washing over the world after China was identified as the origin of Covid-19.
Nguyen had read Laurinda years ago. “I was quite triggered by it,” she says. “It’s not overt racism but subtle racism, and I felt Alice did such a great job of naming what Lucy went through. When I think about the courage of any young person who has ever faced racism, that’s what we’ve created – an enduring play about a woman who lives it through school, but it travels with her through her life.
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