Unpolished Gem

Alice Pung's memoir traces three generations of women in a Chinese-Cambodian family, from their survival of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, the communist regime that devastated Cambodia in the 1970s, to their resettlement in working-class Melbourne, Australia. Pung reflects on her childhood as the eldest daughter caught between her warring grandmother and mother, her adolescent struggles with identity and mental health, and her first steps toward independence.

In 1980, Pung's father Kuan, her mother Kien, her paternal grandmother Huyen Thai, and her father's sister Auntie Que arrived in Australia with a single empty suitcase. Kien was eight months pregnant. The family had survived the Khmer Rouge regime, which killed over 2 million civilians through forced labor and execution. As ethnic Chinese, they were targeted. They escaped on foot through Vietnam to a refugee camp in Thailand, where they spent a year and where Alice was conceived. Born one month after her parents' arrival, Alice grew up in Braybrook and Footscray, working-class suburbs in Victoria, shortly after Australia repealed its White Australia Policy and began accepting Southeast Asian refugees.

Pung opens with Kuan standing in Footscray Market, buying pig trotters while Kien awaits Alice's birth in hospital. The family's early days were marked by wonder: traffic lights that stopped cars for pedestrians astonished a grandmother from a country where cars ran people down, and clean tap water, escalators, and supermarkets provoked exclamations of "Wah!" When Kien and Auntie Que bought cheap canned meat, they discovered from a television commercial that it was dog food and marveled that dogs in this country ate so well. Kuan named his daughter "Good News" in Chinese and chose Alice as her English name, considering Australia a wonderland.

Beneath this hopeful surface, a bitter conflict festered between the grandmother and Alice's mother. The grandmother controlled the household finances, doling out exactly 20 dollars for weekly groceries while Kien handed over all her earnings. From age four, Alice became an informer, carrying stories between the two women in exchange for sweets and hair-ties. In despair, her mother threatened to take Alice's brother Alexander and disappear or to kill herself. Alice lay awake at night terrified, planning to barricade the doors. Both used the child as a conduit for unspoken grievances.

Pung interweaves this conflict with the grandmother's backstory. In Cambodia, Huyen Thai bore five healthy sons and was reputed to have healing powers. Her deepest wounds involved her first two daughters. The first, Ah Bo, fell sick at three months and died within a day. The second, nicknamed Little Brother for her sturdy build, died as a toddler during a family celebration when she climbed a shelf to reach a tray of candy and fell with a lollipop stick in her mouth. The grandmother later told Alice cautionary tales about never running with pencils or pens.

Alice's own childhood was shaped by language barriers and social exclusion. At kindergarten, she wore a Mao suit, a Chinese-style padded outfit, and wet her pants rather than speak English. In Grade Two, a classmate asked why she was wearing pajamas during a colonial dress-up parade. Head lice brought further humiliation: when Alice and Alexander were left at family friend Aunt Meili's house, Meili's children confined them to the sofa and floor. After failed treatments and a devastating perm, Alice threw a tantrum, howling for the loss of her hair and her best friend Beatrice.

Pung recounts how Kien first encountered Kuan when she was a teenager working at the grandmother's factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Alice's grandfather died of starvation under the Khmer Rouge, and the families reunited years later in Saigon, Vietnam. Kuan proposed by including Kien on refugee forms for Thailand, and the couple walked through jungles to reach the camp. When accepted as refugees, Kuan chose Australia over Canada because Canada had snow.

As Alice entered adolescence, her father built his electronics business from a tiny shop into a Retravision franchise. Her mother took over goldsmithing, creating wax molds, pouring gold, and polishing finished pieces for jewelry shops across Melbourne, all without English. Alice shouldered caretaking for her younger siblings. When her infant sister Alison rolled off the bed on Alice's watch, Alice contemplated eating poisonous oleander flowers, terrified she had caused brain damage. Her parents' restrictions tightened as she grew older; at 15, a boy's phone call triggered an interrogation and two weeks of house arrest. Before her death, her grandmother advised Alice to "love sensibly," a caution rooted in her own passionate youth: She had studied at a women's college in China and written about land rights before fleeing to Cambodia.

After moving to a new house in Avondale Heights, fulfilling the Great Australian Dream, Kien spiraled into depression. The jewelry shops replaced her with a cheaper competitor. She could neither read nor speak English and watched her husband and children pepper their conversations with English words, feeling like a stranger at her own table. A doctor diagnosed depression, but Kien described her condition as "scattered thoughts" and "a sickness in the heart." When the family hired her at the shop on trial, the arrangement collapsed within days.

The grandmother suffered a stroke, and Alice's own mental health collapsed during her final year of high school. She woke with what she described as a false rubber skin on her face. She was prescribed multiple medications but spat them out. She could not read, could not see friends, could not get out of bed. When her five-year-old sister Alina came in and started crying, Alice resolved to act, beginning by cleaning the cutlery drawer and talking herself through each motion. Despite her condition, she sat her final exams and gained entry to Arts/Law at Melbourne University.

The grandmother died after catching a cold, her immune system weakened by years of illness. On the same day, Kien suffered third-degree burns from her soldering torch and permanently ended her goldsmithing career. When a vacancy opened at the family's Springvale shop, Kien surprised everyone by volunteering. She discovered she did not need technical specifications to sell a television, only the right price. She chased customers down the street and identified with new migrants from Sudan and Ethiopia, knowing what products they needed. She became one of the top salespeople.

At university, Alice met Michael, a white Australian studying law and Asian studies. They dated secretly; Alice told her mother she was at the library. Her mother catalogued ethnic objections: Australians slept around, Cantonese gambled, Vietnamese spent too much. The relationship became a performance under surveillance. On Michael's last evening before leaving for Perth, Alice told him she loved him but could not continue. She did not want a lifelong decision at 18. Michael cried, and Alice wiped his nose with her sleeve. She drove home to find her parents sharing a mango at the dining table, eating with the unselfconscious ease of 20 years of marriage.

In the epilogue, Alice lay on the grass at her grandmother's grave while her family arranged dishes and plastic flowers around the headstone. The memoir closes with a childhood memory: At seven, Alice's grandmother brought home Easter eggs from the supermarket. While her brother and cousin ate theirs immediately, Alice hoarded hers in a box for four weeks. When she opened the drawer, she found ants, melted chocolate, and ruin. Her grandmother promised to buy new ones, but Alice replied that she did not want new ones. New ones would not be the same.