Alice Pung

This story does not begin on a boat. Nor does it contain any wild swans or falling leaves. In a wonderland called Footscray, a girl named Alice and her Chinese-Cambodian family pursue the Australian Dream - Asian style. Armed with an ocker accent, Alice dives head-first into schooling, romance and the getting of wisdom. Her mother becomes an Aussie battler - an outworker, that is. Her father embraces the miracle of franchising and opens an electrical-appliance store. And every day her grandmother blesses Father Government for giving old people money. Unpolished Gemis a book rich in comedy, a loving and irreverent portrait of a family, its everyday struggles and bittersweet triumphs. With it, Australian writing gains an unforgettable new voice. 'This is a sophisticated and fiercely intelligent book.' Helen Garner'A memoir so vivid that images from it linger behind your eyelids.' The Age'Unpolished Gemis virtuoso storytelling.' The Australian

Unpolished Gem

Beatrix

… my grandmother was possessed of a form of magic, the magic of words that became movies in the mind. The people she spoke about came alive through her voice, her pauses, her animated eyebrows, and the distinction between reality and fantasy no longer had any force.

I howled with my mouth stretched into the gaping sign of infinity.

her mother walking the streets of Footscray 

She walked as if she were completely oblivious to her diminutive size. A person of such petite proportions was neant to be delicate, breakable, breathless. Yet my mother defied every law of her own physiology. Biologically she was destined to be delicate, to age into a thin, tiny woman. Yet the decades of work filled out her frame, widened her shoulders, gave her hands like cracked coal and the pounding walk like thunder.

Diseased with love, they called it, those who watched like hawks to note any departure from sense. They said things like, “Woe and wah, she is diseased with him very deeply,” as if the two people were rotted by love, and already melding into one contagious sticky miasma. It was a terminal illness.

After all, time was so finite, it was the only thing you couldn't buy. "You can't buy old people," my grandmother had told me the last time I visited her, "you can hand over some money and buy a little child, but you can't buy old people. So remember, Agheare, to spend your time well with your parents." Then I remembered another thing she said to me, punctuated with the deepest saddest sigh her old lungs could exhale: “But who would want to buy a useless old person like me anyway?"

Here I was iust nobody, really; nobody distinctive, nobody important. But here I was somebody loved for being precisely that.

…you blow little things into big grotesque carnival floats that cast shadows over perfect summer afternoons.

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