During the first lockdown, I stopped reading. The act required a receptiveness I felt incapable of giving in those early months. But some time around May, as the coronavirus numbers trended down and my anxiety levels followed suit, I began perusing my bookshelves again.
As I stared at the neat rows of yellowed spines, I found myself wondering which of these stories would be best at shepherding me through such apocalyptic times. On the one hand, I wanted an escape from the nightmare we were all living, but on the other hand, escapism seemed facile – like a Band-Aid on a necrotic wound. What I really needed was a book that could speak to the existential emergency humanity was facing, but also offer a blueprint for how to get through it.
Some of the Australians seemed to think that if you had a near-death experience, or if you experienced a great fear for your life, then it put everything else in perspective. True, but only for a little while. After a while, missing the bus to work, not understanding the growl of countryside Australians when spending a day picking fruit, waiting for your child after school – those were just as stressful. You began to sweat the small stuff again. Minor collisions happened in your head every day, and these entirely avoidable mishaps inevitably raised your fear premium.
Alice Pung’s parents, Kuan and Kien, are survivors. They endured life in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and they lived to tell the tale. 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. 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.
The memoir is notable for being told in the third person, in chapters that alternate between the voice of Pung and her father. Unlike confessional memoirs, the third person point of view gives Pung a detachment that is both refreshing and affecting. One is struck by her ability to be mercilessly critical of herself, particularly in the scenes told from Kuan’s perspective. 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.
But Her Father’s Daughter is not an oppressive story of intergenerational trauma. 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. Indeed, the memoir is home to one of my favourite laugh-out-loud scenes of any book: one in which Kuan recounts his horror at the so-called good food served at Alice’s graduation ceremony, things like blue cheese and Camembert that tasted like “various solidifications of vomit”.
At its essence though, Her Father’s Daughter is an honest, unflinching and humorous account of what happens when human beings are forced to confront the fragility of life.
Dad buried bodies here, she realised, bodies that needed to be held, that once moved and exhaled and blinked just as she and he were doing. Bodies no one would ever talk about again. She looked around at her family. There were bones beneath their feet, souls between their breaths. The distance between the living and the dead was only a heartbeat’s fade away. She felt a sudden need to grab them, her loved ones; to hold them close, to make sure they were not going to dissolve.
In a society obsessed with resilience, fragility can be confused with expendability and weakness. What Pung shows us is that it is this very fragility that renders life precious, a thing to be savoured and cherished. As Alice stands on the ground above the remains of the bodies her father buried, she is struck with awe: not so much with the fact that her father’s heart is still beating, but with the knowledge that his heart still beats with love.
We may not have a cure or vaccine for the virus that currently plagues us, but until we do, books like Pung’s provide a much-needed balm for our souls.
