Rhea Cai, Questions I’m Scared to Ask At Parties

‘Cai captures both the tender and the shocking, demonstrated by her ability to chart the vast and uncertain terrains of love, friendship and family against her lived experience as Chinese-Australian woman.’

DONNALYN XU

Bringing forward a luminous, intimate exploration of the Chinese Australian experience, Questions I’m Scared to Ask at Parties navigates questions of femininity, desire, love, filial piety, and cultural identity. The collection draws from the traditional Chinese concept of mian zi, or ‘saving face’, and is steeped in the pain of inherited silences, self-censorship and cultural anxieties around womanhood. However, such silences are always couched side by side with subversiveness, survival, and hard-won joy, surfacing in each poem through unexpected images—a cooked trout, a field of white snow, mango cakes. Hybrid in form and experimental in content, the collection asks the reader to contemplate the limitations of the English language on colonised land: ‘In another life, I would still have words, / but not these words.’ Questions I’m Scared to Ask at Parties deftly weaves together the emotional, the domestic, and the political, introducing a vital new voice to Australian poetry. 

‘What stands out in this collection is the sound of a unique and compelling poetic voice. Emerging poets often have the beginnings of what will become their singular tone but in a more tentative register. There is nothing tentative about Cai. She writes with the ferocity and conviction of a poet in full command of her craft. I have no doubt she is a writer who will quickly establish herself as a key voice in Australian and international poetry and whose work we will be reading for many years to come.’ 

EMILIE COLLYER

Rhea Cai is a poet and writer based in Sydney. As a poet, she is interested in writing about the unsayable/untranslatable, generational memory, and the diaspora experience. In her fiction writing, she is interested in science fiction, fantasy, and strange, but familiar worlds. Her work has appeared in the Cordite Poetry Review and The Australian Poetry Journal. She has an Honours degree in English Literature from Sydney University, where she also won the Australian Federation of Graduate Women (NSW) Prize for Essays in English (2017 and 2018) and was the University of Sydney Union Creative Awards (Word) Winner in 2017. Questions I’m Scared to Ask at Parties is her first poetry collection, and you can find more of her reading and writing antics at @rheaisreading on Instagram.

Rhea Cai, Questions I’m Scared to Ask At Parties
September 2026. 148mm x 210mm. 64pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-87-1 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.