In fact, Pung’s greatest skill is her light and unsentimental touch – a trait one can’t help but suspect she inherited from her no-nonsense parents. Readers are given the sense that Pung is discovering truths about her family even as she puts pen to paper, and this makes for a moving reading experience – an awareness that in the telling of the tale, the author is growing ever closer to her long-misunderstood father.īut Her Father’s Daughter is not an oppressive story of intergenerational trauma. One is struck by her ability to be mercilessly critical of herself, particularly in the scenes told from Kuan’s perspective. Unlike confessional memoirs, the third person point of view gives Pung a detachment that is both refreshing and affecting. The memoir is notable for being told in the third person, in chapters that alternate between the voice of Pung and her father. Whether it be her father’s paralysing flashback during her sister’s martial arts exhibition, or his fear of plastic bags (a tool used for asphyxiation by the Khmer Rouge), Pung shows us how such tragedies cast their long and haunting shadows. In Pung’s second memoir, 2013’s Her Father’s Daughter, she chronicles their traumas and documents how they manifested in her own life, growing up as a first-generation Australian in the comparatively peaceful world of 1990s Melbourne. They endured life in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and they lived to tell the tale.
Alice Pung’s parents, Kuan and Kien, are survivors.
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