“Cultural exchange” happens in myriad ways, as in the WrICE workshops at Sun Yat-sen University. The workshop leaders, fresh from their own immersive writing experience in Yangshuo, ran three two-hour sessions on 12 April for mostly Chinese English-language and creative writing students. The space, organised by Professor DAI Fan, was a light-infused corner room amid the treetops.

Australian writers Alice Pung and Michele Lee ran the first workshop, “Telling Stories”. Alice began with an activity. “Write about your birth from the point of view of someone other than yourself,” said Alice. “But there are two rules. You must not tell us your birthplace and the period in which you were born.” These were to be described.

In the sharing of the students’ vignettes, we heard of the intimate and personal drawn on the big canvas of history. Indeed, this correspondence between personal and political, private and public, threaded a morning of writing and sharing stories. I was struck by the participants’ enthusiasm for story as a way of making sense of the world – of a gay uncle lost to a mental institution during the Cultural Revolution; of the untended rice paddies and the old people left behind as the young head for the cities. Universal stories animated by their specificity.

Indonesian writers Eliza Vitri Handayani and Maggie Tiojakin also know what it is to write from life. But this day their focus was on fiction. Eliza, whose own writing explores the student protests against Suharto in the 1990s, encouraged the students to think about personalising the big events, to centre the story on character. Asking the “what if” question of real events was one technique. Maggie extended this with a three-step approach to developing a story from historical events – start with an idea or event, frame a “what if” question, then in the answer find the story. “Think about the potential of the story, not what the audience wants,” said Maggie. “Write stories you fall in love with.”

The WrICE banner by the door reminded everyone why they were there: “fostering connections between Australian and Asian writers and writing.” But I suspect people came for their own reasons. Regardless, this corner room offered a safe space for beginning and emerging writers to learn from published writers from other lands, and to begin to write and share their own stories. There was a bravery in this, especially when the story touched something deep and painful. This was when the exchange went both ways: these stories, spoken about and read out, raw and true, felt like a gift.

Story: Penny Johnson