Alice Pung has given birth four times in the past five years: to three babies and to her new book One Hundred Days, a novel about the relationship between a Filipino-Australian migrant mum and her mixed-race, 16-year-old daughter Karuna who surprises them both by announcing her pregnancy.
“The book was less painful than the other three from a physical perspective,” Pung laughs.
Unlike with her previous books, Laurinda and Her Father’s Daughter, written pre-kids and marriage to husband Nick, Pung says she didn’t have luxury of long philosophical sentences and spilling words to pool the best. Instead, she worked in exacting fashion, tweezing exact short sentences in snatches of time.
“The writing was always interrupted, but the great thing was every time I had a baby it was still (a reminder) to me of what it was like, so the book never lost its momentum and the characters never lost their spark.”
Set in Melbourne’s 1980s housing commission flats, the result is a masterful exploration of the tensions of family and a literary portrait of mothers and daughters. Overlaid with the exacerbating tensions of immigration, race and class, at its heart it’s a powerful meditation of loving across unreachable gulfs, the need to control, and the generational damage that can be done in families enacting love within cycles of trauma.
“I’m so glad you mentioned the universality of it - so grateful for that because I didn’t want people to pick it up and think this is another Asian-Australian story by Alice Pung.
“I’ve grown up with friends who were in religious cults, their experiences were similar of being cut off from the world, out of the great love of their parents had for them to be saved," she says.
“It’s pretty universal - this urge to control your children….even in very white, middle class families they are still trying to mould their kids into a certain type of person. Future leaders, environmentalists, whatever they are trying to make their kids become; we all do it.”
Set deliberately in a pre-internet era, Karuna grows up in the isolation of a closeted world, excluded from sex education; and with no support systems outside of home and school. She is also an Aussie girl who watches Rage on TV, imbibes a fixation with outer appearances through pageants and her mother's make-up business, and struggles with the dysphoria of being mixed race - lauded for her Caucasian features; and leered at for her Asian ones.
Alice Pung. Source: Supplied
“We live the immigrant experience and no experience is identical. We have defining markers of being outsiders but beyond that it’s all different in each family isn’t it? Families have always been a source of literature because they are interesting, sometimes they absolutely hate each other. In fact; they hate each other more than you’d hate a stranger when things go wrong.”
Pung rose to the national prominence after her first book, Unpolished Gem, a memoir about growing up Chinese-Australian, was published in 2006. At 40, she says her perspective has softened, a grace you can see extended to the novel's mother who extends harsh criticisms, but also works two jobs to support Karuna, endures racial jeering and objectification by white men; and is surviving the loneliness of her own emotionally impoverished childhood.
“I am glad I wrote it at the time because I don’t think I have the courage as a 40-year-old to be so blunt with my family! I did think I was pretty brave. I thought I was going to write the anti-immigrant success narrative, because all the stories at the time were about immigrants coming on boats and 'making it'.”
We live the immigrant experience and no experience is identical.
At the core of Pung’s work is a fearless emotional honesty and unapologetic exploration of what it means to be human, that refuses to censor - a bind that was itself is a kind of self-conscious response to a dominant culture.
“I knew that an audience that wasn’t from an immigrant family would read quite a bit of it as abuse, emotional abuse or whatever kind of abuse you could call Kid's Helpline for,” she says. But the nuances of having writers of colour explore these themes with specificity, she says, was an antidote to the dearth of those stories she experienced growing up; a space often co-opted by caricatured stereotypes or careful, boring takes.
“Back then we were written about - if we found any books about people like us, it was always a book called ‘Zainab’s journey’ or ‘Quong’s Odyssey’ and the characters weren’t written by Asian people, they were always by well-intentioned white people who couldn’t really put real flaws in.
“I don’t pull back any punches. If the mother is controlling - she is a controlling mum and Karuna absolutely loathes her at parts of the book. You can love someone without liking them on a day to day basis is what I’ve learned from writing this book."
You can love someone without liking them on a day to day basis is what I’ve learned from writing this book.
Instead, Pung deftly bypasses the white gaze, the book's narrator addressing the novel as a letter to her own daughter. It mirrors Pung’s own decision to write letters to her kids at each of their births.The result is an uninterrupted entrance into the emotional lives of women rarely reflected in art.
“I didn’t want to put false feelings in there. The struggle is real! When you’re 16 and you are in the moment of feeling absolute rage towards your mother - you are not thinking compassionately about intergenerational trauma or big issues like that. You are just angry at your mum because she’s trying to control every aspect of your life and I guess that’s where the glory of being a writer comes in. You can take an omniscient perspective and see what it’s like for the mum and see what it’s like for Karuna from her perspective."
Pung captures the confusion and fury of adolescence; while at the same time, offering a bigger perspective that leaves the reader with no easy answers, only the uneasy complication of being human.
“There is great love there, but great love can do great damage and that’s the struggle of many immigrant families isn’t it?”
One Hundred Days by Alice Pung, published by Black Inc. is available from bookshops and online from June 1.
