Customer Reviews

Unpolished Gem: My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me

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In UNPOLISHED GEM, author Alice Pung successfully describes what it means to be sentenced to be a first-generation daughter born to Chinese immigrants in Australia. But, given the similarities of her experiences to, say, the protagonist's in Amy Tan's THE JOY LUCK CLUB, she could just as well been born in the United States. As in THE JOY LUCK CLUB, Pung is expected to adhere to traditional Chinese customs without benefit of being surrounded by Chinese culture. She clearly relates the turmoil, guilt, and depression this causes her. She also shares her relatives' expressions and behavior-endearingly so.

Pung less successfully ties her life to her mother and grandmother's lives, to their upbringing and experiences in China and war ravaged Cambodia. Her intellectual connection to them comes through, especially when she tells of her mother's jewelry making career, but her emotional/heart connection does not. Her youth may be responsible for this lack; she was born in 1980. (Youth is not a criticism.)

I encourage Pang to revisit this story ten years from now. I suspect she will see greater opportunities to polish her story, opportunities she can't possibly imagine now. I look forward to seeing what she writes then.

Do I suggest you read UNPOLISHED GEM? For entertainment? Sure. As an example of a well developed memoir? No.

I was hooked by the time I had read the prologue. I loved the way this explored what it means to be an immigrant in Australia and the way offspring of immigrants have to try to exist in the cultural realities of where they live and where they come from. Although this occasionally read as a not quite truthful account of past events, it also had a real honesty and poignancy, as the emotion attached to the events and memories always felt genuine. There was a lot of humour in the book, I laughed a lot and then stopped to examine what had actually just been said, to discover that it was really quite sad; I found this to be very effective - it made the material accessible instead of confronting, which I like as it enables me to ponder as much or as little as I like. It was a testament to how much I was involved in Alice's life and her story-telling, that when the book was finished I wondered if there were more - I would definitely have picked up a sequel if there had been one available.

Alice Pung - lawyer, author, raconteur, all round great storyteller: what a huge disappointment to her mother! With a mix of humour and sadness Alice gives us her first hand insight into the plight of the first generation migrant - through the uncertain years of adolescence and early adulthood, trying to find her place in the world - in an adopted country and a society with radically different values and expectations to those of world her parents brought with them when they fled Cambodia.

Looming large is Alice's domineering mother - though when the traditional Asian expectation that she will control every aspect of Alice's life, meets the traditional Aussie expectation of self-reliance things are bound to get ugly. When the breathtaking double standard of her parent's cultural attitudes to women is added to the mix, it's no wonder that Alice experiences paranoia and begins to question her sanity.

Until enters the 'unpolished gem' of the title - an interracial relationship which forces her parents to confront some of their deeply held attitudes. This very personal story is excellently told, it had me feeling frustrated then happy in turns as Alice gradually plucks up the courage to... well, you'll have to read it yourself!

There's something about the tale of a new immigrant that allows us to see our own world in a new way. In this debut nonfiction memoir by Alice Pung, the stories contained within "Unpolished Gem" reflect the conflicts (both internal and external) of a person straddling two worlds, the ultimate outsider, never comfortable in either. Even though Pung herself was born in Australia (her parents landed there from the killing fields of Cambodia when her mother was eight months pregnant with her), her life was confined to a very small world in the suburbs of Melbourne, populated by other refugees.

She would remain caught in this "middle world" growing up, never comfortable in either. She also lived in the middle world within her own family, where she was the "word-spreader," relaying stories of what her mother and grandmother (long at odds with each other but forced to live under the same roof) each had to say about the other. Torn by love for both, she could never satisfy either woman.

The memoir is also about the place of women generally. Indeed the very title captures a Cambodian proverb that reflects the fact that "a girl is like white cotton wool--once dirtied can never be clean again, whereas a boy is like a gem--the more you polish, the more it shines." Even in the Western world of Australia, where Pung has become a lawyer in her own right, she is constricted by the expectations of family and culture even in the 21st century.

Pung is not afraid to reveal the estrangement, the push and pull of Australian life and immigrant demands. Her writing is sure and true and compelling. Each person is fully drawn, and the stories flow seamlessly. Perhaps the only disappointing part of the book is the fact that Pung is still so young that her story has yet to come full circle. She still has a lot of life to live...and share through her writing. What is clear is that she has given her first book a strength and honesty that makes her story worth knowing. You can't ask for more than that!

Christine Zibas, Book Pleasures

In her debut memoir, Unpolished Gem, Alice Pung narrates the story of her family's settling in Australia. They arrive from Cambodia with nothing except the expectation of a new baby in a month's time. When the child is born, her father names her Alice because he thought Australia to be a wonderland. This is really the story of Alice, her mother, her grandmother and their assimilation into a culture so very different from their own.

Alice's mother and grandmother are still clinging to a lot of their Chinese heritage whereas Alice's only frame of reference is Australia. She recounts how difficult it is for her mother to acclimatize herself to the new country; learning English, conducting her jewelry business and just everyday life. Her grandmother seems to adapt more easily. Alice becomes the go-between to her mother and grandmother and this creates some tension at times. Alice feels like she is Chinese at home and Australian outside. Alice says the life of a Chinese woman is constantly, sighing, lying and dying and that she wants no part of it. Growing up amid two different cultures is not always easy.

Throughout the story, Alice was very attached to her grandmother and her story telling. Unfortunately, when her grandmother passed away, Alice lost her sense of youthful security and knowing exactly who she was while growing up and trying to find her proper place in the world. Alice felt that her grandmother had affirmed Alice's existence. During adolescence, Alice experienced a severe depression and extreme angst dealing with the realities of becoming a young woman. Her self esteem suffered as did her hopes for the future. How her parents thought she should conduct herself and their hopes for her were not quite the same as what Alice thought. This is normally the case between parents and children but when there are different cultural ideals it is harder to deal with.

This is where the story began to lose some of my interest. The writing seemed more rambling to me. In the beginning, there were a lot of humorous accounts of everday life and some wonderful flashback moments of life before emigration; how her parents met, their engagement and how they, along with Alice's grandmother and aunt had walked through several countries before they finally emigrated to Australia. The differences between the cultures was extremely interesting and the characterizations were very well done. It was very easy to imagine Alice's mother and grandmother. The last quarter of the book was not quite so engaging. I think I would have liked to have seen more of the back story but it was a book about blending in a new culture. Maybe Ms. Pung should consider a pre-quel because that would be an interesting stroy. Overall, it is still a reasonably good book,just not a great one. If you enjoy memoirs and cultural differences, you might like this one. 3***

Pung's family escaped the killing fields of Cambodia, walking from Vietnam to a refugee camp in Thailand. Pung was born in 1981, one month after her family (i.e., father, mother, and father's mother and sister) arrived in Melbourne, Australia. Being only twenty-seven years old, Pung's memoir is only of her first eighteen years.

In the memoir of her early childhood, Pung recounts her family's life before Australia. These stories captured Pung's childhood imagination, as evident in her retelling. She conjures up images of her mother riding on the back of her father's bicycle in Vietnam, trying to lose her aunt who accompanied the unmarried couple everywhere; her grandmother trying to swap one of her five sons for a girl. Through vivid details Pung paints a portrait of her family in Australia - the bowl haircuts; the used, brightly colored, mismatched clothing; the house full of plastic knickknacks.

The familiar starts to set in when Pung relates her family's endeavor to achieve the Australian dream; hard-working, insular immigrant parents who cannot connect with their child who is growing up in a different culture and a child suffering anxiety from cultural clashes and the pressure to excel in school.

Pung fails to portray her own story with any real depth. She writes of the turmoil of abiding by Chinese customs while living in Western society; however, the reader is not quite convinced. She portrays her own story as that of ordinary adolescent angst - the struggle between becoming an individual and family expectations. The reader does not learn who Pung is beyond her family - what she journals about; who her friends are.

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