About me
Hello there. My full name is Rhonda Ho Yee Mason but, once upon a time, it was Chan Ho Yee—a phonetic translation of my Chinese name, 陳灝怡. Some years after we moved to Australia back in the eighties, my parents added ‘Rhonda’ to my name because, believe it or not, my father was partial to a certain Japanese car manufacturer. When Rick and I married twenty years ago, I adopted his surname but kept Ho Yee as my middle name: 灝 means ‘vast’ and 怡 means ‘harmony’. (You can read the full story about my name here.)
I am a writer, a designer, and a visual artist, and I live in Sydney with my husband and five1 of our six boys. In 2007, our first son, Cameron, died in utero at forty-one weeks, and we love him and miss him dearly. Six days after Cameron died, I started an online journal called Life Without Cameron, and the words I shared in that space eventually became the manuscript for Cameron’s book, which was published in 2016. As well as writing about Cameron, I blogged as Pink Ronnie for over twelve years during the golden era of blogging, and from 2013 to 2018, I was the main writer and editor of the Life Captured Inc blog. (You can read all about my writing journey here.)
Alongside my writing, I have worked in marketing, branding, and graphic design since 2005, and it is something that I enjoy doing to this day. In 2018, I decided to venture into artmaking, and two years ago, I began attending Julian Ashton Art School in The Rocks, Sydney, as a part-time student.
About Anthology
This newsletter is an anthology of the things I think about and the things I want to remember.
As such, you can expect journal excerpts, funny stories, and personal essays on being a freelancer, a minimalist, a mother of six, an only child, a working artist, and a first generation Asian-Australian.
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Thank you for being here!
Apart from Cameron, my sons’ real names will not be published on this Substack in the interests of protecting their privacy.
