Memories and Dismemories

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 her mother Kien, who left her family to follow him to Australia. The day-to-day reality of the killing fields from Year Zero, April 25, 1975, is compellingly presented through the experiences of Kuan and his extended family. It seems unbelievable that only now, thirty-seven years later, are Pol Pot’s deputy and two other leaders being tried for their part in the regime of enslavement and terror which killed a quarter of Cambodia’s population of eight million.

The structure of the memoir is kaleidoscopic, with shifts in place from Melbourne to China to Cambodia and back, and with unpredictable memory leaps that recreate the rich texture of ordinary and extraordinary lives. It begins with a personal odyssey, Alice Pung’s trip to her grandparents’ birthplace, Jieyang in China, with a side trip to Macau to meet a lover; the essential journey, however, is towards a fuller understanding of her parents as survivors. Alice Pung writes of herself in the third person. The resulting narrative freedom allows her many younger selves their own changing perspectives and voices, and also gives her father’s voice and viewpoint equal weight, for much of the book is composed of thought monologues, short chapters alternating between the voices of Father and Daughter. As if in a dance of associations towards understanding, Daughter gradually learns the full horror of what has made her father anxious and over-protective, and Father comes to accept his daughter’s surprising new way of life.

Alice Pung conveys character and personality with acuity, often through lively dialogue. She has a quick eye and an excellent memory for the incongruities of cultural misunderstanding and so-called “assimilation”. Much of the book is, in fact, quite funny, as when she and her father argue about his matchmaking suggestions: 

Her father was wearing his Smiling Monkey pyjamas. A fifty-something man in boy’s flannelette pyjamas. It was the same when her mother wore her Western Bulldogs beanie and her puffy red polyester vest. It was difficult to be angry at your parents when they were dressed like sleep-befuddled children from a 1981 Target ad. 

She also has a poetic gift for simile and metaphor. These links are sometimes humorous, sometimes aphoristic, even chilling. The dark tone of the middle section of the book is prefigured in harsh images from Alice’s childhood: the dying kittens under the house, and her father’s anxiety about his daughters’ orthodontic braces: “What if they were playing sports at school and a ball hit them in the mouth? Would their teeth be ripped out in a row, like an industrial zipper coming bloodily undone?”

Pung presents the experience of new migrants and her father’s reaction to his new country with inside knowledge of his wonder and gratitude and relief. He realises why the seagulls in the city are so complacent: “No one ate them. Human beings provided bread without expecting a pound of flesh in return.” Kuan and Kien work tirelessly, start a business, invest in run-down properties, and educate their four children. Daughter gains a law degree, leaves home and becomes a university tutor, writes her highly praised first book then begins another. Where Unpolished Gem was largely about her relationship with her mother and grandmother, the substance of much of this second book comes to her through her father. Kuan had taken her when she was eighteen to meet his friends and learn about their lives in the time of Pol Pot: 

The bus, the man said. It loaded us on, and then it took us to the top of a mountain and dumped us there. The mountain was dotted with land mines. At the top there was no food or water, so we went down and exploded and died.

As she sips Chinese tea and listens, she realises that “the size of a cup was probably the measure of a society’s loquaciousness”, and that Cambodians are good at “telling a story using the most direct route”. This is certainly a skill Pung can deploy, especially when conveying the atrocities of the killing fields. There are sudden shifts from fast-paced facts to detailed description; the style is, by turns, incisive or sinuous, and the tone correspondingly dramatic or relaxed. There is some reiteration of incidents but this overlapping or braiding effect adds tensile strength and fresh insights. 

Salient images or moments suggest the shadow of the past: her father removing the sharp tips of knives, her mother’s frantic state at getting on the wrong tram to her daughter’s reading. Pung is good at expressing mixed emotions and the elucidations and rationalisations that spring from dark knowledge. The dark knowledge of Cambodia Year Zero: Kien and her family have joined the exodus from Phnom Penh to Vietnam; Kuan and his family are just too late. They are forced out into the country to slave on the collective of “Base people” and “New people”.

It has become a generalised horror story now, the initial killing of the skilled and educated by the Khmer Rouge—the “Black Bandits”—and the subsequent torture and murder, even of children. Pung confronts us with individual stories: the thirteen-year-old forced to bury her two brothers alive; the baby boy dashed to death against a palm tree; the girl smeared in the honey she craved, and left for the ants; the nine-year-old girl tied up and promised death in the morning. “‘Who would do this to another person?’ … the city people asked themselves when they entered the end of time.”

Decades later, in spite of his memories and dismemories, Kuan takes Alice and her sister Alison back to visit his brother, their rich Uncle Kiv, who had returned to Cambodia, “planted his feet firmly and rebuilt”, while Kuan had stayed in Australia, developed his business, and taught his children to “tread lightly”. They visit the killing fields, where there is a chance meeting with an old man, the former head of the children’s army in Kuan’s collective. Alice cannot believe that her father and uncle can talk to him, a murderer of children, so calmly and casually. The real miracle, she realises, is not that her father had lived; “The real miracle was that he could love.”

This extraordinary book is a witness to the extremes of human nature and a reminder of how Australia is enriched by the resilience and initiative of newcomers. It is also a warm and fascinating portrayal of cultural differences and family love. 

Some more of Jan Owen’s translations of Baudelaire will appear shortly in Quadrant.