Biography
Hello, I’m Jen and smoulder is my creation.
I am so pleased you have come to visit. Please hang around,
explore, and have some fun with me.
Have you ever felt the burn?
Have you ever been through a difficult situation, where you have felt like your insides are crumbling, you feel stressed, sad and like there is a sinking feeling in your body. Have you ever had your heart broken, or seen your family such as your parents or friends go through it? Have you been betrayed by a friend or work colleague.
The sad truth is that this will inevitably happen to everyone. This is ultimately how life unfolds. However, I feel that every time it happens if we can pick up and keep going, we grow stronger.
“Let yourself feel the Smoulder, let it burn, but don’t stay there too long. Pick yourself up and fight.”
That’s when we learn to become our own best friend and we learn to look at ourselves with a kind eye. We learn to support our own dreams are nurture our future.
Why Smoulder?
I created Smoulder as I wanted to give women the opportunity to express themselves, to make them feel strong, beautiful, stylish, special, and confident. I deeply want women to feel strong and find that silver lining no matter what adversity they face in life.
Smoulder has several meanings; but I have chosen this name as it means to burn slowly or to keep a strong emotion hidden. This is the feeling you have when you lust after someone at the very beginning of a love story, the butterflies you get when you see them across the room. However, it’s equally, the feeling you get when you are betrayed, burnt or hurt by someone close to you and had your heart broken.
I liked the polar opposite meanings of this word, or my interpretation of it anyway.
The Constant Refugee
My mum's life is a big inspiration for Smoulder. The themes of the collections are framed around her story, first, the theme of heartbreak, followed by work, finding yourself and finally dreams. This is some of her story.
My mother is of Vietnamese decent. There was however a point where there was some sort of power struggle or conflict where her father's family had to flee Vietnam to Cambodia. That's why my mother grew up in Cambodia in a very impoverished setting, she was the oldest of six children.
Unfortunately, due to the impoverished way in which they grew up with hardly any dairy or other nourishing foods two or her siblings died in childhood.
Because of the family finances my mother was only allowed to go to school until Year 9 as her family could not afford the cost. Her father told her she didn't need an education anyway as "her husband would work and look after her when she was older", so she didn't need an education.
When my mother was a teenager, conflict started to brew in Cambodia. Stories started to circulate around her neighborhood about Vietnamese people being rounded up and murdered. Her family, decided to pack their belongings and flee back to Vietnam. There they lived in a refugee camp until my grandparents could salvage enough money to build a wooden, stilt home on the river in Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City as it is known now). There was one shared living space where everyone slept in hammocks and a small kitchen.
In her early twenties, mum had an interest in learning French and had worked up a little bit of money to enroll in language lessons for a few hours a week. At the same time, a young foreigner named Anthony from Australia held a senior position in the Australian Government and was on posting to Vietnam. In Vietnam he went to enrolled in French classes as he had a love of languages. He took an instant liking to my mother, he said he liked her smile and thought she was beautiful. He started to write her love letters in French. She thought he was a little strange at first, this foreign white man, but he was kind and made her laugh.
He didn't speak Vietnamese and she didn't speak English, so they used their common, but somewhat broken understanding of French to speak to each other and get to know each other. Eventually however, he had to move back to Australia, but they kept in touch and wrote letters back and forth.
All the while war was raging in Vietnam and mum spoke of constant bombing of the city. Her family hid inside their wooden stilt home as the bombing grew more intense. The streets became deserted as people feared what may happen next. My father had seen the bombing on the television and wrote in many letters declaring his love and worry for her safety. Saigon fell in April 1975 to North Vietnamese forces. In 1979 however my dad sponsored my mother to Australia as his fiancé, they were married in 1980 and I was born a year later.
Smoulder and burn
When I was around 18 months old though, our family was posted again, this time to Manilla in the Phillipines. Manilla was a beautiful busy city - bustling with people, markets, and hot weahter.
My mother however noticed that my father had started to act strange and cold. Eventually he decided she had enough and decided to return to Australia with me. She later found out he had met another woman and she was heartbroken.
We had nowhere to live in Australia, and my mother only had very limited English.
Building a fire in the rain
We moved several times, living from place to place including at my grandmothers (dads mum) and another Vietnamese family's cucumber farm.
She found work wherever she could in low skilled jobs due to her language and education barriers.
My mother got to work, firstly as a kitchen hand in restaurants and then then as a supermarket shop assistant to raise me, give me an education and put food on the table.
My father, although absent, always contacted and visited. Years went by and my mother never took a new husband.
When I was 15 years old, my father asked if he could return to our family. Although my mother harbored a lot of anger, deep down she always loved him and felt a sense of owing and gratefulness for bringing her out of war-torn and poverty-stricken Vietnam where she grew up.
Finding herself
She took him back and he lived with us as a family for 12 beautiful years. They travelled and enjoyed lifer, she was able to explore and do things that she enjoyed but sadly it was short live. In 2007, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. My mum was devastated and nursed him through the disease. He very sadly succumbed to the disease six months after his diagnosis.
Dreams
Today I am in my forties, despite all the challenges we faced, I had a very good childhood. I always felt loved and taken care of and I put it down wholly to my mother's strength and determination. She showed an ability to 'smoulder and burn' through so many difficulties and hardships and always be able to pick herself up and keep going.
She is a huge inspiration in my life and is the inspiration for Smoulder and its collections. A dream of a great future for her where she can do things she likes, travelling, enjoying time with friends.