Unpolished Gem
My Mother, My Grandmother And Me
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
With a home-grown accent and an imported heritage, Alice Pung grew up straddling two worlds. By the time she was born, her family had already made the perilous journey from revolutionary China and the killing fields of Cambodia to their new home in a prosperous Australian suburb. But even as Alice dives head-first into life in the only country she's ever known, she also understands her father's wonder at the magical workings of escalators, her grandmother's fervent blessings for the generosity of Father Government, and her mother's determination to toil every hour of the day and night. Warm-spirited and wonderfully wise, Unpolished Gem is a vibrant, irreverent portrait of the foreigner's fumbles, the everyday successes and the bittersweet bonds that hold one small family together in a big new country.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I was doomed, early on, to be a word-spreader," Pung writes, and her special burden was "to tell these stories that the women of my family made me promise never to tell a soul." The stories are not of scandalous secrets or shocking revelations, but of the struggles faced by three generations of Asian women as they settle in a culturally Western country. Pung, a lawyer, recounts the journey her family made over the decades from China, her grandparents' birthplace, to Cambodia, where her parents are born, through Vietnam and Thailand to Australia where, one month after their arrival, Pung is born. In retelling her grandmother's stories, the imagined is rendered credible; Pung captures her "form of magic, the magic of words that became movies in mind." In recollecting her own story, Pung loses that magic in the ordinariness of adolescence, and as the family moves toward achieving the "Great Australian Dream," it passes through familiar stages the hard work of both parents, the distance created between generations and the anxieties suffered by the younger generation ("I had done everything right, and I had turned out so wrong"). The non-European-immigrant-girl-grows-up story is a familiar one to American readers. What's new about Pung's book is the Australian setting. That twist of focus reveals how more alike than different the experience is.
