Analysis Of Unpolished Gem By Alice Pung

As we grow up one of the most important things we wish to discover is who we are as a person. Thus our understanding of our identity is vital in order to find our place in the world and is emphasised significantly in or modern culture. However trying to discover your sense of self can be a difficult time for any adolescence. Yet it can become even more complicated and stressful when you have to compete with drastically different cultural expectations. This is apparent in the children born to Asian Migrants in Australia; Author Alice Pung makes this abundantly clear in her memoir Unpolished Gem. This essay will explore how Pung has incorporated her struggle not only for own identity, but the strain of having to juggle the cultural expectations of her Asian family that she was raised with and the Australian culture she must live in, into her story.

Pung begins her story with the words “This story does not begin on a boat” (Pung, 1), immediately notifying the reader that this is not a tale about refugees and their struggle to make it to Australia.

Pung explains that “This was a deliberate and light-hearted attempt to shift away from the two decades of ‘migrant’ or ‘ethnic’ literature narratives that have been published in Australia” (Arcangelo,1). Yet the beginning of the story is scattered with examples of the Pung family mirroring this expectation, though how she describes the way her family marvels at new resources Australia has to offer “Wah, so many things about this new country that are so taken-for-granted!” (9). The amazement that there is no one needs to “walk like they have to hide” (9) and “no bomb is ever going to fall on top of them”(9) nor will they find any one “pissing in the street” (9)that was “so gleaming spick-and-span clean” with “beautiful food” and “pretty packages” (11) makes it difficult to disassociate the familiar stereotypes from Pung’s

writing.
Therefore it can be said that “Unpolished Gem sends two seemingly contradictory messages to its readers. One the one hand, it refuses victimization. On the other, it suggests that such stories inform the life, and the writing of the young author” (Ommundsen, 504). This suggests that from the beginning of her memoir Pung is demonstrating the struggle between conflicting identities. Throughout her memoir Pung illustrates her struggle to counterbalance the expectations of her family and conforming the Australian way of life. However Pung is not the only one who struggles to come to terms with changing identities.
Throughout the memoir both Pung’s mother and grandmother experience times of identity crises. Pung sprinkles flashbacks of her family’s life in Asia amongst her own experiences. At the beginning of the flashbacks Huven Thai is seen as an inadequate mother who can’t take care of her first surviving daughter “your daughter is so naughty, always climbing here and there!” (Pung, 7). It is during this time that Thai wishes she had a son instead of a daughter because then her child’s behavior would be deemed appropriate rather than naughty (not to mention that traditionally in Asian culture boys were more favored than girls).
However once Thai begins to have sons and her daughter is killed in an accident, her identity begins to change; both how she is perceived by others and what she wants for herself. Once her sons are born Thai’s reputation as a parent becomes much more positive “she sure knows how to bring up children, doesn’t she? Ah, look at your boys, so good and clever!” (Pung, 41). Furthermore, Huven Thai is now desperate for daughter, now that she has had multiple sons her priorities have changed. She is so desperate to have a child she even became complicit in her husband’s ploy to swap their youngest son for a girl.
Pung comments on how frightening it is to think that her mother could commit such an act but then writes “characters are only fixed through experience, and usually bad experience. Before character there is only personality, and who knows what type of person my grandmother was back then?” (Pung, 47). This implies that a person’s identity is not a fixed entity that cannot be changed. Additionally a person does not consist entirely of a goodness or badness. That is a one dimensional way of thinking that just isn’t representative of how complex our identities are. Yet this narrow mindedness is ever present in our society which has a tendency to confuse us. This is a fact that Pung implements throughout her memoir. She adds particular emphasis on her own struggles with this social norm.
As mentioned previously Pung enlightens the reader of her difficulties trying to place herself in tapestry of Australian culture and her own Asian heritage.