Memories of relative unease [A tale of a daughter of the Killing Fields]

Alice Pung struggled to detail her father's experiences in the killing fields of Cambodia.
Photo: Rodger Cummins

By Jane Sullivan
August 20, 2011
The Sydney Morning Herald
Via Cambodia Watch

ABOUT halfway through Alice Pung's new memoir, Her Father's Daughter, comes a section that hits the reader like a sledgehammer. We're taken from contemporary Melbourne to Cambodia in Year Zero. The people of Phnom Penh, relieved the civil war is over, are smiling and welcoming their Khmer Rouge liberators. ''They were an army of children,'' Pung writes. ''They did not smile back.''

The surreal atrocities of Pol Pot's killing fields are well documented but Pung's story has all the more impact here because the ''Black Bandits'' do dreadful things to a man we have come to know well: her father, Kuan, and his extended family, many of whom were murdered. After reading these chapters, I had trouble sleeping.
Pung had trouble writing this, too, particularly towards the end. Even now she worries how Her Father's Daughter is going to be received.
''Will the high school students ask: 'Where's all the humour and sarcasm'?'' she says.
The humour and sarcasm provided the charm and bite in Pung's best-selling and much-loved first book, Unpolished Gem. Her memoir of a girl high on education and achievement but low on self-esteem, growing up in a Chinese-Cambodian family in Braybrook, won the Australian Book Industry newcomer of the year award and was shortlisted for the Victorian and New South Wales premiers' literary awards and The Age book of the year.
Sure, it had its dark side: Pung wrote graphically about the nervous breakdown she suffered in her teens. But it subverted the conventional migrant misery story and made it funny. She went on to edit a book of other peoples' stories, Growing Up Asian in Australia.
When she began her second book, Pung at first thought she would use the same sassy first-person voice that had been so successful in Unpolished Gem. ''It didn't work,'' she says. ''You can't be so disrespectful of the terrible things that happened in Cambodia.''
She was in her early 20s when she wrote Unpolished Gem, ''with a certain way of looking at the world and a sense of irony and satire that I don't have now. I used them like weapons and I learnt to lay down those weapons with this book. The voices that emerge may be simple but they seem more pure - they won't hide behind satire.''
Pung is a wisp of a young woman, dressed in black, charmingly earnest. We're having tea and lamingtons in her apartment at Janet Clarke Hall at the University of Melbourne, where she is writer in residence. On her shelves are books, Buddhas and a kitschy Michael Jackson statue - she's a fan.
She works part time as a minimum-wage lawyer and gives regular talks to high school students. Which doesn't leave much time for writing - but then she tends to feel guilty when she's writing, unless she's on a residency. When she started Unpolished Gem at home, she felt bad because her mother was in the garage, making her jewellery, doing real work.
She always wanted to write about her father and his history and believed that would be her first book - but she wasn't ready. And Her Father's Daughter had a very roundabout beginning. She tried to start the book on a three-month Asialink residency in Beijing. At that time, she thought it would be about exploring her Chinese cultural roots. She ended up scrapping about 30,000 words: ''They were bad stories.''
The trouble was that China was a culture she had never had. ''My father had raised us up to be Australian, so we wouldn't be seen as refugees,'' she says. ''And secondly, we had to have the proud cultural heritage of being Chinese. But he omitted a huge part: he was born in Cambodia - and China was a place he visited when he was 16.
''So I was a complete foreigner in China. I enjoyed being there but the irony was I was supposed to be inspired by China and I felt such alienation.''
It wasn't until Pung had moved to the US and was teaching at universities that she found the key to her book.
''My father used to call me up on Skype and because of my conversations with him I wrote a short piece, which is the last chapter of the book,'' she says. ''It's a story about a man preparing for bed and locking up his house and hiding the kitchen knives. I realised there was something in this that wasn't in any story I'd written in China.''
So Her Father's Daughter is based on conversations with her father, on both the spoken words and the unspoken thoughts behind them. It's written in two third-person voices: Alice the daughter and Kuan the father.
Much more sombre in tone than Unpolished Gem, it reads like a detective story. Why does this ridiculously overprotective father do such crazy things as hiding the knives? ''I started with his life in Melbourne,'' Pung says. ''Dad's been here for 31 years. He's quite successful: he's got a shop, he's raised four kids but he can never sleep without lights on and every single knife in the house is blunt. And if my mum catches the wrong tram, he panics and won't be able to sit still.''
Of course, she could have started the book at Year Zero. But it's not a book about refugees, she says. Refugees are people who run away and her father stopped running 30 years ago. Nor is it the kind of story her father might have wanted: about a migrant who triumphs over the bad times.
''It would have been bestseller material with all the bad stuff at the front,'' she says. ''But that's not who my father is. He's not the sum of his bad experiences. He's a man who has managed to transcend that. The most important thing about this book was that he was able to love us in an extraordinary way.''
This meant that no matter how paranoid that love became, she could never win an argument with her father, with someone who wanted so much for her, whose very arguments were motivated by this love. And that love has had its own profound, if unintended, effect on her personal life: she documents honestly how hard it has been to commit to a relationship, let alone any thoughts of marriage or children.
Pung, her brother and two sisters grew up with stories around the kitchen table, of families and names (''Remember Needle, she was so good at sewing - and they killed her''). But she didn't connect the stories with her father's behaviour. When she came to write the book, she used her university studies of genocide, had help from a friend - ''a Holocaust professor'' - and talked to other Cambodians.
''But mainly the stories came from my father and I asked him, or he volunteered, to tell me,'' she says. ''Whatever he gave me was a rare and wonderful gift. The funny thing was, it wasn't painful for him. He's been talking to University of Melbourne students about genocide for the past two years and he tells things in quite a humorous way. It was more painful for me, seeing how all the pieces fitted together. Then I knew my father was doing his best to protect me and it all made sense.''
Kuan spent four years in the killing fields and finally escaped with his new wife, Alice's mother, Kien, via Vietnam, on a harrowing journey to a United Nations refugee camp at the border with Thailand. From there they came to Melbourne: ''He was 30 years old, the same age as I was when I finished writing the book.''
The hardest time spent on the book was the final two weeks. ''I didn't even want to look at it or touch the thing,'' she says. ''When the typeset pages came in, I had to look over it 17 or 18 times and it took its toll on me. I was in a really bad state. I was thinking, 'Half our family died. What the hell is happening here?' So I had to get friends to read it for me. I didn't even want it to be published. I thought, 'This is the most horrible thing I've ever read in my life. No one's going to want to read this.'''
Fortunately, Pung's publishers had faith when she had lost it herself. She continues to worry about what Cambodians might think of the book but she's relieved by her father's reaction.
''I showed it to him as I went along,'' she says. ''He wouldn't comment, he would only correct me on technical mistakes - the houses looked like this, the river wasn't that wide. But he seems to be quite proud. He's calling up all his friends for the book launch.''
As for her mother, she can't comment because she can't read the book. ''It's like having a child who can speak Botswanan, that's how mum reacts to my writing,'' she says. ''Literate people think it's so important to read. But my mother doesn't need that. She watches TV, she reads Bi-Lo and Safeway and Coles ads. I take her to writers festivals interstate and sometimes overseas. And she's very proud of me.''

■Alice Pung is a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Her Father's Daughter is published by Black Inc.