- It took me a while to get hooked by this new novel from Alice Pung. A young teen coming of age. A harsh, miserable mother. A broken family. A private school/state school melodrama. It's hardly an original story.
- But as it proceeds Pung turns this narrative into a gritty and utterly absorbing exploration.
- This element - electric, pulsating prose - is original:
Just when Nurse Chin least expected it, along came this demanding peasant yakking away about her daughter being duped, like this was a chickenshit village instead of a big world where smart Asian women could get opportunity and independence.
- Her mother steals the meagre wages her daughter makes at the hairdressing salon, and the generous amounts of money her father gives her. Her justification is that she's the one paying the rent and buying all the food.
- But only rarely does the daughter vocalise her thoughts and feelings to her controlling mother. She only thinks them, which is very frustrating for the reader. She should be railing at her, loudly expressing her anger. Thankfully in the end she does, and it pays off in spades.
- Only an Asian writer could bring Asian family dynamics so vividly to life. Pung has a full grasp of the traditional habits, prejudices, beliefs and superstitions of the older generation, their anti-Western bias setting them against modern science and medicine. This makes for some measure of comedy but it's well and truly overridden by the resulting ugliness and horror experienced by their children and grandchildren. Modernity is a harshly contested zone.
- But Pung also castigates this so-called modernity when needed. The incidental contacts with males dotted throughout, on buses and streets, depict ugly, low rent, feral racists. The mother's urge to protect her daughter and her new baby is not entirely unjustifiable.
- A thoroughly satisfying read, magnificently written.
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