Escape from genocide

Complex: Alice Pung talks about her latest book.Picture: Rodger Cummins/The Age

31 Aug, 2011
Maribyrnong Weekly (Australia)

IT began with the knives. A long way from home, writing a short story about the way her father Kuan would make sure there were only blunt knives in the family home, Alice Pung realised this wasn’t an average tale.

It dawned on the Footscray-born writer and lawyer that there were reasons behind her father’s behaviour and a complex history that shaped their own relationship.

This realisation grew slowly into Pung’s new book, Her Father’s Daughter, launched on Sunday as a follow-up to her award-winning debut Unpolished Gem.

Set in Melbourne, China and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot-era Cambodia, the story traces the journey her father undertakes on his way to a quiet family life in the shadows of western Melbourne’s factories.

The story also gives insight into the influence Kuan has had on his four children.

“There is not much literature about the children of survivors of the Cambodian genocide, but if you look at what has been written about the children of those who escaped the Nazi genocide you see some very similar things,” Pung says.

At the time of her parent’s arrival in Australia just over 30 years ago, there was an expectation people would simply forget what they had seen and experienced.

But these suppressed memories and feelings bubble to the surface and even filter into the lives of their children in unexpected ways.

Pung said her father had been open and honest about his past, but it wasn’t until she left home that she could really understand its impact in shaping his protectiveness towards his children.

“If I hadn’t moved out I would still be coddled,” the author says.

“A few of my friends rebelled, while some stayed behind and got themselves caught within those expectations.”

The portion of the book tracing her father’s time under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime is an eye-opening account of the horrors inflicted by the “Black Bandits”.

Many of her father’s family perished and his own escape was hard-won.

“It was a very difficult story to write. I realised that this story is not going to have any easy epiphanies; a genocide does not have any easy epiphanies.”

Her Father’s Daughter is out now through Black Inc.