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Unpolished Gem: My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me, by Alice Pung
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After Alice Pung’s family fled to Australia from the killing fields of Cambodia, her father chose Alice as her name because he thought their new country was a Wonderland. In this lyrical, bittersweet debut memoir—already an award-winning bestseller when it was published in Australia—Alice grows up straddling two worlds, East and West, her insular family and the Australia outside. With wisdom beyond her years and a keen eye for comedy in everyday life, she writes of the trials of assimilation and cultural misunderstanding, and of the tender but fraught relationships between three generations of women trying to live the Australian dream without losing themselves. Unpolished Gem is a moving, vivid journey about identity and the ultimate search for acceptance and healing, delivered by a writer possessed of rare empathy, penetrating insight, and undeniable narrative gifts.
Download a revised version of the Pung and Chia family trees that appear in Unpolished Gem.
- Sales Rank: #2011661 in Books
- Brand: Pung, Alice
- Published on: 2009-01-27
- Released on: 2009-01-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.92" h x .62" w x 5.32" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 282 pages
- ISBN13: 9780452290006
- Condition: USED - Very Good
- Notes: 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Publishers Weekly
I was doomed, early on, to be a word-spreader, Pung writes, and her special burden was to tell these stories that the women of my family made me promise never to tell a soul. The stories are not of scandalous secrets or shocking revelations, but of the struggles faced by three generations of Asian women as they settle in a culturally Western country. Pung, a lawyer, recounts the journey her family made over the decades—from China, her grandparents' birthplace, to Cambodia, where her parents are born, through Vietnam and Thailand to Australia where, one month after their arrival, Pung is born. In retelling her grandmother's stories, the imagined is rendered credible; Pung captures her form of magic, the magic of words that became movies in mind. In recollecting her own story, Pung loses that magic in the ordinariness of adolescence, and as the family moves toward achieving the Great Australian Dream, it passes through familiar stages—the hard work of both parents, the distance created between generations and the anxieties suffered by the younger generation (I had done everything right, and I had turned out so wrong). The non-European-immigrant-girl-grows-up story is a familiar one to American readers. What's new about Pung's book is the Australian setting. That twist of focus reveals how more alike than different the experience is. (Jan.)
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From Booklist
Pung’s edifying memoir illuminates not only the cultural clash experienced by her Cambodian family after they landed in Australia in 1980 just before she was born but also her personal travails as a young woman coping with a mother and grandmothers steeped in centuries-old traditions. Throughout her school years, Alice struggles to cope with being the different one, while within her own family, she is under constant pressure to be an example to her younger siblings. She regrets not being a boy because her grandmothers hint that all that matters for girls is that they can make a good pot of rice, have a pretty face, and be fertile. She achieves the usual Asian High-Achiever marks in high school, but suffers from depression her senior year, barely able to appear in public. She passes her university exams, but even in college she feels pressure to conform to her parents’ expectations, and feels as though she’s wearing a mask. Pung offers thoughtful commentary on the immigrant experience, seen through the eyes of one who has successfully emerged. --Deborah Donovan
Review
“This is a sophisticated and fiercely intelligent book… There’s something striking on every page."
—Helen Garner, author of Postcards from Surfers
“Alice Pung is a gem. Her voice is the real thing.”
—Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club
“Revelations about her painful adolescence and bouts with depression are brutally honest and recounted with superlative narrative skills.”
—USA Today
A fascinating book about the place that is known only by the second-generation immigrant—the place between. Alice Pung tells her story with a keen intelligence, an observant precision, and a transformative grace.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club
“Poignant, provocative, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, Pung’s rollicking tale of two worlds is not to be missed.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Memoir
By Amazon Customer
In her debut memoir, Unpolished Gem, Alice Pung narrates the story of her family's settling in Australia. They arrive from Cambodia with nothing except the expectation of a new baby in a month's time. When the child is born, her father names her Alice because he thought Australia to be a wonderland. This is really the story of Alice, her mother, her grandmother and their assimilation into a culture so very different from their own.
Alice's mother and grandmother are still clinging to a lot of their Chinese heritage whereas Alice's only frame of reference is Australia. She recounts how difficult it is for her mother to acclimatize herself to the new country; learning English, conducting her jewelry business and just everyday life. Her grandmother seems to adapt more easily. Alice becomes the go-between to her mother and grandmother and this creates some tension at times. Alice feels like she is Chinese at home and Australian outside. Alice says the life of a Chinese woman is constantly, sighing, lying and dying and that she wants no part of it. Growing up amid two different cultures is not always easy.
Throughout the story, Alice was very attached to her grandmother and her story telling. Unfortunately, when her grandmother passed away, Alice lost her sense of youthful security and knowing exactly who she was while growing up and trying to find her proper place in the world. Alice felt that her grandmother had affirmed Alice's existence. During adolescence, Alice experienced a severe depression and extreme angst dealing with the realities of becoming a young woman. Her self esteem suffered as did her hopes for the future. How her parents thought she should conduct herself and their hopes for her were not quite the same as what Alice thought. This is normally the case between parents and children but when there are different cultural ideals it is harder to deal with.
This is where the story began to lose some of my interest. The writing seemed more rambling to me. In the beginning, there were a lot of humorous accounts of everday life and some wonderful flashback moments of life before emigration; how her parents met, their engagement and how they, along with Alice's grandmother and aunt had walked through several countries before they finally emigrated to Australia. The differences between the cultures was extremely interesting and the characterizations were very well done. It was very easy to imagine Alice's mother and grandmother. The last quarter of the book was not quite so engaging. I think I would have liked to have seen more of the back story but it was a book about blending in a new culture. Maybe Ms. Pung should consider a pre-quel because that would be an interesting stroy. Overall, it is still a reasonably good book,just not a great one. If you enjoy memoirs and cultural differences, you might like this one. 3***
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Unpolished Gem
By DavieK
Pung's family escaped the killing fields of Cambodia, walking from Vietnam to a refugee camp in Thailand. Pung was born in 1981, one month after her family (i.e., father, mother, and father's mother and sister) arrived in Melbourne, Australia. Being only twenty-seven years old, Pung's memoir is only of her first eighteen years.
In the memoir of her early childhood, Pung recounts her family's life before Australia. These stories captured Pung's childhood imagination, as evident in her retelling. She conjures up images of her mother riding on the back of her father's bicycle in Vietnam, trying to lose her aunt who accompanied the unmarried couple everywhere; her grandmother trying to swap one of her five sons for a girl. Through vivid details Pung paints a portrait of her family in Australia - the bowl haircuts; the used, brightly colored, mismatched clothing; the house full of plastic knickknacks.
The familiar starts to set in when Pung relates her family's endeavor to achieve the Australian dream; hard-working, insular immigrant parents who cannot connect with their child who is growing up in a different culture and a child suffering anxiety from cultural clashes and the pressure to excel in school.
Pung fails to portray her own story with any real depth. She writes of the turmoil of abiding by Chinese customs while living in Western society; however, the reader is not quite convinced. She portrays her own story as that of ordinary adolescent angst - the struggle between becoming an individual and family expectations. The reader does not learn who Pung is beyond her family - what she journals about; who her friends are.
For the full review see [...] (click More under Quick Book Reviews).
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
UNpolished Gem? Yes
By FQH
In UNPOLISHED GEM, author Alice Pung successfully describes what it means to be sentenced to be a first-generation daughter born to Chinese immigrants in Australia. But, given the similarities of her experiences to, say, the protagonist's in Amy Tan's THE JOY LUCK CLUB, she could just as well been born in the United States. As in THE JOY LUCK CLUB, Pung is expected to adhere to traditional Chinese customs without benefit of being surrounded by Chinese culture. She clearly relates the turmoil, guilt, and depression this causes her. She also shares her relatives' expressions and behavior-endearingly so.
Pung less successfully ties her life to her mother and grandmother's lives, to their upbringing and experiences in China and war ravaged Cambodia. Her intellectual connection to them comes through, especially when she tells of her mother's jewelry making career, but her emotional/heart connection does not. Her youth may be responsible for this lack; she was born in 1980. (Youth is not a criticism.)
I encourage Pang to revisit this story ten years from now. I suspect she will see greater opportunities to polish her story, opportunities she can't possibly imagine now. I look forward to seeing what she writes then.
Do I suggest you read UNPOLISHED GEM? For entertainment? Sure. As an example of a well developed memoir? No.
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