So this book, I feel it has been stripped of the sarcasm in my first book, but I don't feel that necessarily is a bad thing. I finished Her Father's Daughter when I was 30, and that is the same age as my father was when he came out of the killing fields. It's an older voice because I started writing the stories for Unpolished Gem when I was 19, and I was still at university then. But there's a real change I think in the spirit and the telling of this story compared to the first book Unpolished Gem, isn't there.Īlice Pung: There is. Sometimes I write.Īnita Barraud: It's a very busy life though.Īnita Barraud: I must admit that when I discovered I was going to be interviewing you and talking to you I thought, oh lovely, poignant funny stories about growing up the child of Chinese Cambodian parents, stories like when your mum makes you get a perm to get rid of nits, and wearing the Mao suit to school, and funny little stories like that. Welcome to The Book Show.Īnita Barraud: You must either have a lot of energy or a very disciplined life to fit in all the things that you do.Īlice Pung: Well, I work part-time in my legal research job, I work three days a week, Wednesdays to Fridays, and Mondays and Tuesdays I visit schools and I talk to students. Still only in her 30s, Alice Pung has also edited the book Growing Up Asian in Australia which is studied in many secondary schools and universities, and she works as a lawyer, visits schools, and is also a regular contributor to The Monthly, Meanjin and other journals and newspapers. It's at times very uncomfortable reading.

Her latest, Her Father's Daughter, is also biographical, but it takes the reader beyond the comfortable, witty accounts of loving and overprotective family to the killing fields of Cambodia. Anita Barraud: Today a conversation with Melbourne writer Alice Pung about her latest book Her Father's Daughter.Īlice Pung's first novel Unpolished Gem is an affectionate, sometimes satirical look at growing up in an Asian Australian family.

Her Father's Daughter by Alice Pung