Poignant, provocative, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, Pung’s rollicking tale of two worlds is not to be missed.
An Australian writer grapples with her Asian heritage.
First published in Australia in 2006, Pung’s wry debut memoir depicts the struggles and successes multiple generations of her family experienced in their migration—much of it on foot—from Cambodia’s killing fields through Vietnam and a refugee camp in Thailand to a suburb of Melbourne, where the author was born soon after their arrival in 1981. “I was manufactured in Thailand but assembled in Australia,” she writes, and the crux of her story centers on the challenges she faced as a girl growing up in a culture completely foreign to her parents and elders yet native to her. Pung is fascinated by the immigrant realities of adaptation and assimilation, processes she lived through painfully but often triumphantly as a young girl. She developed her sense of self with one foot testing the comparatively laid-back standards of Australian society and the other planted in the tradition-bound soil of her family’s ethnic Chinese roots. With a painter’s eye for detail and the heightened sensibility of someone caught between lands, Pung poignantly describes the contrasts of her family’s brave new world: “The refugees staying at the Midway Migrant Hilton hoard packets of sugar, jam and honey from the breakfast table. So used to everything being finite, irrevocably gone if one does not grab it fast enough, they are bewildered when new packets appear on the breakfast table the next day.” Perhaps the most intriguing transformation she notes is assimilated immigrants’ attitude toward the newly arrived. “We felt pity and resentment and plenty of embarrassment for their eagerness and their countryside errors. But most of all, unacknowledged envy of their pure, rooted-to-the-moment, every-day-is-a-wonderland existence, because it reminded us of a distant self we once were, we of the wide-eyed, shut-mouth stupor, we of the wide-mouth, shut-eyed delirium, when things were louder and funnier and lettuce was greener and gleaming concrete seemed newer.”
Poignant, provocative, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, Pung’s rollicking tale of two worlds is not to be missed.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-452-29000-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
