Alice’s inspiration

This resource supports the Australian Curriculum: English Years 7, 8, 9, 10 Literature (308) strands. It supports elements of the cross-curriculum priorities: Asia and Australia´s engagement with Asia.

In New South Wales, Alice Pung’s Unpolished Gem is one of the prescribed texts in Stage 6 English Syllabus, Standard, Module C: Texts and Society and ESL: Language Study within an Area of Study

The videos, and related classroom discussion and learning activities, enable students to:

• explore the features of stories and concepts developed by current writers whose work is acknowledged for its significance (Higher-order thinking)

• recognise and explore connections to values and attitudes. The writer’s narratives can assist students to reflect on the way stories affect the perception of self in the community (Connectedness)

• experience specialist expertise (the author) and develop an understanding of the role of the author and of the concepts and ideas that inform and motivate the writing of their stories (Deep knowledge)

• make meaningful connections between the author’s approach to writing and their own to address outcomes across key learning areas (Knowledge integration)

• use the metalanguage of literary criticism and language use (Metalanguage)

• learn through focusing questions that knowledge is socially constructed with multiple layers and personal interpretations (Problematic knowledge).

Websites

Review from The Age

Review from The Australian

Books by Alice Pung

Unpolished Gem (2007) was shortlisted for several literary awards and won the 2007 Australian Book Industry Awards Newcomer of the Year. It was also chosen for the 2007 Books Alive Great Reads Guide.

Growing up Asian in Australia (2008), edited by Alice Pung - a collection of stories about growing up Asian and Australian. Contributors to the collection include Jenny Kee, Jason Yat-Sen Li, Caroline Tran, Quan Yeomans, Shaun Tan, Annette Shun Wah, Tom Cho and many more.

Interviewer Christine McGuigan: Thanks for being with us today, Alice.

Alice Pung: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Interviewer: Can you tell us what inspires you as a writer?

Alice: What inspires me as a writer is just the small incidences of life. A lot of my work is set in a very specific area, very small suburb, in a very small neighbourhood, in, you know, a very specific location. And they're just about a small group of people. And how I came to write this way was when I first went to university, I was in a class with a lot of people with so much more life experience. They'd travelled overseas; I'd never been outside of Footscray or Springvale you know. They had had different experiences happen all throughout their lives. I'd grown up in two neighbourhoods and I'd spent most my life inside a house looking after small children. So I thought, well I can't pretend to be anything other than what I am. So I thought these small incidences were the important things in life, or at least in my life.

Christine: In your first book, Unpolished Gem, you write about your personal experiences and the relationships in your family. What motivated this choice of subject?

Alice: Oh, just because I realised later in life that they were quite different to everyone else's families. People say that every family is unique, every family is different, but I grew up with my parents having come from Cambodia, they'd survived the Killing Fields, and they came to Australia and brought us up. And what motivated me to write in particular about the things that happened within my family was that there was a lot of migrant literature around at that time. They always told a very particular narrative about success, you know, a very migrant narrative success story. You had 'Wild Swans', you had 'Falling Leaves', 'Mao's Last Dancer' most recently. They're wonderful stories, wonderful allegorical narratives about really conquering tough things and triumphing in the end. And I thought well, there are, there are many other ways to tell a migrant story. Usually it's not all about a narrative of success, small incidences happen and these incidences would have been erased by this narrative. For example, my parents wore a lot of second hand clothes from The Brotherhood of St. Lawrence when they first came here. They were so proud of those clothes. They posed for so many photographs wearing them. But if I'd asked my family, if I'd interviewed them and said, you know, 'can you tell me what happened when you came here so I can write this book', they would have told me a completely different story that accords with a success narrative. They would of said 'oh, it's so horrible, you know, we had to wear second hand clothes, it was the most humiliating thing'. And it wasn't, I've seen the photographs, they were so proud.

Christine: Alice, are you the ‘unpolished gem’?

Alice: No, I'm not the ‘unpolished gem’. The ‘unpolished gem’ refers to a sentence in my book in one of the chapters. There's this Chinese-Cambodian saying. I can't remember whether it's Chinese or it's Cambodian. It's a very old one that I read somewhere. It goes something like this: A girl is like cotton wool, once she's dirtied, she can never be clean again, a boy on the other hand, well it doesn't matter how dirty you get a boy because a boy is like a gem, the more you polish a gem, you know, the brighter it shines. And that was, I thought that was a perfect title for this book, because growing up with friends - Australian friends, Maltese friends, Turkish friends - it's not that, that saying is not some archaic fundamentalist, you know, Chinese-Cambodian cultural saying, it's very applicable. When I talk to schools today even, you know, you see the young women in the audience, they get it, they understand what I mean. And some of the young boys will clutch their belts and say 'aw, we're legends Miss'. So it's a terrible double standard in which we live. And it's hard for a young person growing up.