Narrowing the Culture Gap
By admin on 2015-01-07

I did not recognize Alice Pung as she walked toward me, because she didn't look much like her picture on the Internet. Wearing a vermilion turtleneck and a black skirt, her hair loosely tied back, she said "hi" with a sweet smile, more like the girl next door than a professional lawyer and a successful writer.

I asked where her passion for writing comes from. "I just enjoy doing what I do," she said, with honesty and modesty.

Her visit was her first to China since a three-month stay at Peking University in 2008. "It's like coming home. It's wonderful!" she said.

Pung, who was attending this year's Australian Writers' Week and the Bookworm Literary Festival, published her bestselling memoir Unpolished Gem to critical acclaim in 2006.

The book, a story of an Asian immigrant family rebuilding their lives after Cambodia's appalling Pol Pot years, won the 2007 Australian Newcomer of the Year award at the Australian Book Industry Awards and was shortlisted for several other prizes.

She is also the editor of Growing Up Asian in Australia, a collection of 55 memoirs, discussing and reflecting the Asian-Australian experience.

Born in 1980 in Australia and speaking Chinese with an Australian accent, Pung said she is very Asian in culture. "My Asian background is part of me. It's my identity."

Compared with the 5,000-year history of China, Australia only has a history of 200 years since colonization. So how to explain to people a culture that is so much older is very difficult, she said.

"From federation to colonization and onwards, our literature is a lot about the landscape, about convicts in a tough environment. Therefore, Australian literature was white, male-centric, tough and Western. It is difficult as an Asian writer because you have the Australian mainstream and then you have the Asian background."

Pung said that sometimes people don't recognize [Asian immigrants' writing] as Australian literature. "They think you are writing about something exotic. If they have never read my books, they would think it is about living in a different country."

Pung started writing fiction. Later she realized that there are more interesting things that happen in real life to write about, so she turned to non-fiction.

Her trip to her family's ancestral village in southern China also inspired her new book, which is partly about a different China, a contrast to the China in her grandmother's memories.

She visited China on a writer's residency to find her roots in 2008. Cherishing her grandmother's old memories, Pung went to her grandmother's village in Chaozhou, Guangdong Province. In her grandmother's memories, the village was next to a beautiful lake, where she had a small house and she knew all the families there.

When she arrived at the original location of the village, "the first thing I saw was a big city, second was McDonald's and third is that young people are so fashionable and so modern," Pung recalled. She found nothing that matched the stories she had heard from her grandmother as a child.

"She gave me this memory of 1920 and I came in 2008...It's like a different world...the idea in my head did not correspond with the realities in China today."

It's hard to have a preset mind as a writer," she continued, "if you have fixed ideas it's hard to see anything new...it would be a big shock if you do."

As a classic migrant child, Pung's immersion in two cultures made her an interpreter. She was a "word-spreader" between her grandmother and her mother, who all "keep these secrets and tell them to the 4-year-olds who cannot possibly understand the complicated channel of hatred."

Now as an Australian writer of Asian background and considering the history of Australia, Pung commented that, "it's more important for me to foster understanding if I can bring up my cultural background."

If I bring something separate that would alienate people, people would think Asian culture is so different and exotic," she said.

"What I aim to do in my book is to make it very much a part of Australian life."

Alice Pung's new book, which is about China and how a Cambodian father and his daughter try to understand each other, is set to be published in 2011.