Alice Pung, Her Father’s Daughter (Black Inc, 2011), 238 pages, $29.95. This is a complex, darkly shining book, a memoir spanning thirty-five years, two generations, and three countries. With the immediacy of a novel and the intimacy of a conversation, it explores the relationship between Cambodian refugees and their Australian daughter—the bemused irritations of the cultural divide within a loving family, Alice Pung’s deepening understanding of why her parents “were not like other parents”, and their anxious acceptance of her need for independence. It is also the story of her father Kuan, who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, and of…
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