A family’s survival through Cambodian genocide

• Sharon Verghis

  @SVerghis

  
• 11:00PM December 14, 2018
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A world away, Alice Pung, another child of genocide, examines her own inherited shackles: family stories and recollections from a slice of time so dark it is branded Year Zero.

In Close to Home, Pung, an award-winning Melbourne writer and lawyer, wrestles, like Motro, with how to make peace with transgenerational trauma.

On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge marched into Cambodia, seizing control of Phnom Penh. Pung’s parents, Kuan and Kien, ethnic Teochew Chinese, are caught up in the nationwide wave of terror. Pung’s father is assigned to burying bodies in mass graves on high ground so corpses won’t contaminate the Mekong River.

The dead are all around. In the next village, more than 3000 people die. In the end, up to two million Cambodians will die during the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge. The death toll includes more than half of Pung’s extended family.

But Pung’s father survives. He uses his acupuncture skills to treat village chiefs. He eats rats and scorpions. One day, he takes off his belt and buries it. Later, he uncovers it, cuts it into small strips and boils it for hours in secret, feeding it to his family to keep them alive.

On December 25, 1978, Vietnam invades Cambodia; on January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh falls and Pol Pot is deposed. Pung’s skeletal fath­er leads his little sister, his heavily pregnant wife and his mother on a three-month jungle trek across Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand before making it to a Thai refugee camp and eventually to Australia.

Pung is born in Melbourne in 1981. She, a child of hope, is named Alice “because I was delivered in wonderland”. The family cautiously, warily, put down roots. In their struggling, working-class town “noxious with carpet factory fumes”, Pung grows up in the narrow crawlspace between two cultures: the industrious Asian newcomers — the “chingas” — and the old Australian locals, the “white ghosts”.

Her grandmother dresses her in padded Mao suits. She attends weekend Mandarin classes. She eats birds nests made from the saliva of little birds, webbed duck feet, pig’s tongue and duck embryo eggs.

Her parents keep their heads low. They work hard. Pung helps her father sell toasters and heaters at his electronics shop. She also helps her mother, who works 15-hour days making jewellery in the backyard shed.

At times, Pung’s school blazer pocket is filled with $1000 worth of 24-carat gold. “I am scared shitless at school about losing them,” she writes.

Bit by bit, her parents attain their great Australian dream. Her father’s store flourishes. Her mother’s hands, scarred from welding torches and surgical scalpel cuts, get to rest. They buy a ramshackle Queenslander investment property. Look, her dad exclaims, a house on stilts. In Cambodia, he says, there would be buffaloes tied underneath. Later, they buy a “booming birthday-cake mansion on the hill”.

But even as the bulwarks against misfortune are built, the scaffolding and foundations of new lives laid, this hard-won safe harbour is not free of ghosts. Pung’s father obsessively checks every door and window before turning in, counts every knife in the house: their edges are all deliberately filed to a blunt nub. He will forever remain terrified of authority, from police to parking inspectors.

It is as if her parents live on the edge of an abyss, Pung writes. A corrosive anxiety is always under the surface. Migrants fleeing persecution will forever think “there will a be a knock on the door, their houses will be burnt down, their tongues cut off, bodies carted away in trucks, ­accented sons bashed up in the street”.

In recession-ravaged Melbourne, struggling Australian families sullenly observe the ascent of these alien outsiders. When she is eight, someone throws a rock through their front window. Pung’s parents do not get it fixed. Instead, her mother permanently lowers the blinds and they retreat.

At 10, Pung is rebuffed by a grasscutter when she asks him, on behalf of her mother, to mow their lawn: “I don’t do youse,” he snarls. At 16, as a sales assistant in her father’s store, she hears old women request an “Australian salesman”.

Years later, as a successful lawyer and seven months pregnant, she and her Anglo-Australian husband Nick find a leaflet on their car windscreen. It is a badly photocopied image of a black boy and a white girl seen through the scope of a gun. Written on it in big black letters is “Stop race mixing.”

Language, words and writing became Pung's true passion. Now she can give voice to the voiceless: her isolated, illiterate mother; her ­father who was once threatened with having his tongue cut out for speaking his native tongue; all those migrants toiling in working-class ­suburbs: the African hairdresser, the Vietnamese chemist, the Mediterranean restaurant owner, the “guy from the warehouse who has hands like leather gloves and who can dismantle a fridge box in a few minutes”.

“[They] know they’ll never be in the paper unless they do something dodgy and that’s fine. Their hope is for their kid to be better educated and to have a voice.”

Pung has used her voice to powerful effect, through works such as her memoir Unpolished Gem and its sequel Her Father’s Daughter, and as a public speaker and workplace lawyer.

As with her previous work, Close to Home mixes vivid personal stories (trips to doll museums and wigmakers, trawling the aisles of Kmart at 3am, a poignant pilgrimage to another burial ground, Gettysburg) with a sharply ­nuanced examination of Australia’s knotty, ­turbulent race history, from the drafting of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901 to the rise of Pauline Hanson in the 1990s.

She notes the shift in racial bogeymen from Asians to Muslims, the witches’ brew of xenophobic ideologies spreading all over the world,the strange common bond of fear and anxiety shared by racists and their victims, and even the patronising attitude of some progressives towards migrants.

The idea of home — shelter, roots, what it means to the uprooted — is central: in one of the book’s more arresting insights, Pung writes: “Your home is a place where your suffering can take shelter. Homeless people in the street disturb us because their misery is naked.”

The Chinese family ideal — four generations living together — traditionally has symbolised harmony, happiness and longevity. This was her father’s ultimate wish — a sanctuary, safe from the killing fields, war, the stone thrown through the window, the shouts of “Go home!” from a car, the note on the windshield. At the book’s end, he gets his wish when the family, including Pung’s 95-year-old grandfather, gathers around her newborn son.

Sharon Verghis is a writer and editor.

Close to Home: Selected Writings

By Alice Pung

Black Inc, 288pp, $32.99

Sharon Verghis

@SVerghis