Alice Pung, Unpolished Gem, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2006. RRP $24.95, 282pp. Paperback, ISBN 1-86395-158-X
The controversy over proposed English tests for prospective Australian citizens suggests an essentially selfish attitude to immigrants. When most migrants face huge cultural barriers to resettlement, it seems highly Anglo-centric to think that tests are more appropriate than encouragement and sensitive assistance. In Unpolished Gem, narrator Alice and her mother overcome a huge range of difficulties in their lonely efforts to pursue the "Great Australian Dream".
Alice is born in Melbourne shortly after her parents and her paternal grandmother and aunt arrive from a refugee camp in Vietnam. Chinese Cambodians, they are already twice displaced and are desperate to succeed in Australia. The story opens with the "Wah-sers" agog at the city sights and sounds, thrilled with the cheap plastic products, and grateful for the largesse of "Father Government" and Brother Laurence. Through hard work they move from a hostel into rented accommodation in Footscray, a modest house in Braybrook, and on to the home they build in Avondale Heights.
Alice’s father manages electrical appliance franchises. He chooses this kind of retail because "every Lee and Lah" opens Asian grocery stores. Her mother however, works in more traditional Indo-Chinese style as an "outworker", making jewellery at home and hawking it to shops. Unfortunately, Alice’s mother is unhappy because she feels oppressed by her mother-in-law. Her heart is variously described as "a little red bullet, poking around in her chest, searching for a way out", and a "demented red bullet ... Going ballistic and making holes everywhere, holes in places where no hole should be".
The grandmother insists on the maintenance of Chinese traditions. Alice sleeps in her bed, and addresses both mother and grandmother as "Ma" although "two tones different". Telling tales of both, she becomes a "word-spreader" until realising that her grandmother’s words contained sharp "bones" and that being thought a spy would bring disaster.
Words and their importance permeate this story. When Alice goes through a stage of wetting her pants, she cannot find the language to tell the teacher she must go. She says that "foreign words do not seem to slip out of me as easily as the contents of my bladder". In senior high school, she finds that she lost so many Teochew words that there seemed no hope of recovering them. "Although I ticked 'English as a second language' on all