Author Alice Pung. Alice Pung's signature humour remains in her new memoir, but in smaller doses and tinged with melancholy. Photo: Rodger Cummins
Her Father's Daughter by Alice Pung.
Rebecca Starford
September 17, 2011
''THE real miracle was that he could love.'' So writes Alice Pung at the end of her new memoir when she visits the Cambodian killing fields. ''Dad buried bodies here,'' she realises. ''There were bones beneath their feet, souls between their breaths.'' Nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population died under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.
Unsurprisingly, her father's relationship with Cambodia is over. He's rather dispassionate about his return; the fields provoke no real feeling. To live a happy life, he says, ''you need a healthy short-term memory, a slate that can be wiped clean every morning'', and Australia is now his home. It is this tension - between father and daughter, truth and expectation, reality and imagination - that drives this startling book.
In Unpolished Gem, Pung's first memoir, she was depicted as a migrant child whose immersion in contrasting cultures made her an interpreter and sharp observer. Much of the book's comedy was generated from this position. We laughed as Pung described her grandmother's reverence for ''Father Government'' and his welfare payments, her mother's parsimoniousness and her father's quaint anxiety whenever she was out after 6 o'clock at night.
In this world, Cambodia remained nebulous and foreign - far from Pung's imagination. Her focus was elsewhere: on school and study, working at her family's Retravision store, on a ''white ghost'' boy. It certainly wasn't on the horror of the killing fields or refugee camps. She had, she acknowledges, ''refused, just as her father did, to look beyond the here and now''. Pung has since grown up - she has moved out of home, had her first taste of love - and she needs experiential answers.
Her quest for understanding, however, is labyrinthine and often unsatisfactory. We begin in Beijing, where she has travelled for a writing residency. Typically, her father frets the whole time she's away. He can't understand why she needs to go to China at all; he can tell her the stories himself.
For Pung, it's as if ''the further she travels, the less she understands''. Similarly, her ill-fated love affair quashes the romance-abroad cliche. ''What was the matter with her?'' she wonders - and so does the reader. A curious detachment perpetuates, as though Pung is always a step removed from her own visceral being. Writing in the third person fuels this sense of impartiality.
The beating heart of the book is Pung's father, a kind, modest and intelligent man who has lived through horrors most of us would fail to imagine. The chapters retelling his and his family's four years in Cambodia living in camps under the command of the ''Black Bandits'' make your hair stand on end, chilling as they are in their calm depiction of inhumanity. It is brilliant writing.
The signature humour remains in Her Father's Daughter, though it's in smaller doses and tinged with melancholy. Yet Pung never overworks the pathos and other insights demonstrate her capacity for empathy and her sharp eye for the smallest, most telling human detail. Chinese cups, for instance, ''were very small … you could not hug them in your hands and lean back on the couch, ready for a yarn. The size of a cup was probably the measure of a society's loquaciousness''. This is poignant, sophisticated prose, some of the finest you'll read in the genre.
In the end, Pung does come away with a clearer sense of herself and her family's past. But in all this questing, the story takes on a new focus: love. Her Father's Daughter is a celebration of her father's love for his wife, for his children, for life after Cambodia. Most of all, it's a moving demonstration of the respect and admiration Pung has for her parents, who have fought so tirelessly for her life to be one of safety and opportunity.
■Rebecca Starford is associate publisher at Affirm Press and editor of Kill Your Darlings.
Her Father's Daughter by Alice Pung.
Rebecca Starford
September 17, 2011
''THE real miracle was that he could love.'' So writes Alice Pung at the end of her new memoir when she visits the Cambodian killing fields. ''Dad buried bodies here,'' she realises. ''There were bones beneath their feet, souls between their breaths.'' Nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population died under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.
Unsurprisingly, her father's relationship with Cambodia is over. He's rather dispassionate about his return; the fields provoke no real feeling. To live a happy life, he says, ''you need a healthy short-term memory, a slate that can be wiped clean every morning'', and Australia is now his home. It is this tension - between father and daughter, truth and expectation, reality and imagination - that drives this startling book.
In Unpolished Gem, Pung's first memoir, she was depicted as a migrant child whose immersion in contrasting cultures made her an interpreter and sharp observer. Much of the book's comedy was generated from this position. We laughed as Pung described her grandmother's reverence for ''Father Government'' and his welfare payments, her mother's parsimoniousness and her father's quaint anxiety whenever she was out after 6 o'clock at night.
In this world, Cambodia remained nebulous and foreign - far from Pung's imagination. Her focus was elsewhere: on school and study, working at her family's Retravision store, on a ''white ghost'' boy. It certainly wasn't on the horror of the killing fields or refugee camps. She had, she acknowledges, ''refused, just as her father did, to look beyond the here and now''. Pung has since grown up - she has moved out of home, had her first taste of love - and she needs experiential answers.
Her quest for understanding, however, is labyrinthine and often unsatisfactory. We begin in Beijing, where she has travelled for a writing residency. Typically, her father frets the whole time she's away. He can't understand why she needs to go to China at all; he can tell her the stories himself.
For Pung, it's as if ''the further she travels, the less she understands''. Similarly, her ill-fated love affair quashes the romance-abroad cliche. ''What was the matter with her?'' she wonders - and so does the reader. A curious detachment perpetuates, as though Pung is always a step removed from her own visceral being. Writing in the third person fuels this sense of impartiality.
The beating heart of the book is Pung's father, a kind, modest and intelligent man who has lived through horrors most of us would fail to imagine. The chapters retelling his and his family's four years in Cambodia living in camps under the command of the ''Black Bandits'' make your hair stand on end, chilling as they are in their calm depiction of inhumanity. It is brilliant writing.
The signature humour remains in Her Father's Daughter, though it's in smaller doses and tinged with melancholy. Yet Pung never overworks the pathos and other insights demonstrate her capacity for empathy and her sharp eye for the smallest, most telling human detail. Chinese cups, for instance, ''were very small … you could not hug them in your hands and lean back on the couch, ready for a yarn. The size of a cup was probably the measure of a society's loquaciousness''. This is poignant, sophisticated prose, some of the finest you'll read in the genre.
In the end, Pung does come away with a clearer sense of herself and her family's past. But in all this questing, the story takes on a new focus: love. Her Father's Daughter is a celebration of her father's love for his wife, for his children, for life after Cambodia. Most of all, it's a moving demonstration of the respect and admiration Pung has for her parents, who have fought so tirelessly for her life to be one of safety and opportunity.
■Rebecca Starford is associate publisher at Affirm Press and editor of Kill Your Darlings.
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