Alice Pung's Growing up Asian in Australia: The Cultural Work of Anthologized Asian-Australian Narratives of Childhood

Abstract

This paper examines the 2008 literary anthology Growing up Asian in Australia, edited by the young Australian writer and award-winning memoirist, Alice Pung. Featuring a collection of auto/biographically based prose, poetry, and comics by “Asian-Australian” authors, each short text within the anthology focuses on coming-of-age in modern-day Australia. Informed by auto/biography and Asian-Australian studies, this paper explores the cultural work that Pung's anthology aims to do. Through a reading of the anthology's paratexts as well as the short, individual childhood autobiographies, the discussion considers the strategies Pung employs in order to attract a broad readership, and how the anthology mobilizes life narratives of childhood to intervene in debates about Australian national, local, and personal identities at the start of the twenty-first century. I argue that Pung's text skillfully balances politics and populism, critiquing fundamental issues of national identity and self-representation while simultaneously appealing to a broad readership.

Keywords:

• Asian Australian
• life writing
• Alice Pung
• anthology
• national identity
• childhood memoirs

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tully Barnett, Kylie Cardell, Rocío Davis, Kate Douglas, Hannah Kent, Leena Kurvet-Käosaar, Claire Lynch, and Julie Rak for their helpful feedback on this paper at the Flinders University Life Narrative Research Group's “Autobiographies of Childhood” symposium in July 2012.

Notes

 1. In an Australian context, the term “Asian” tends to be used to refer to people who are from East or South East Asia, or have such heritage. Representations of Asian people in various Australian media have mostly consisted of stereotypes that present Asian people variously as exotic, devious, or ridiculous. Some of the most prominent representations include nineteenth-century images like the “Mongolian Octopus” cartoon or the pigtail-wearing character of “cookie” on the goldfields, to more contemporary stereotypes like reality television William Hung's Australian equivalent, “whacky Asian” Zhuo “Flynn” Lui, who appeared on Australian Idol in 2004. For an up-to-date discussion and analysis of Asian Australian representation on Australian television, see Law (2009).

 2. It is important to note that the White Australia Policy also functioned to marginalize and dispossess Aboriginal people, whose cultures were, and continue to be, doubly impacted by immigration to Australia. See Morton-Robinson (2003, 23–40).

 3. For example, in November 2012, the Australian Government released the findings of its report entitled Australia in the Asian Century where it outlined numerous recommendations aimed at making Australia “a more Asia-literate and Asia-capable nation.” See Australian Government. Australia in the Asian Century.

 4. See, for example, the Asian Australian Studies Research Network website, the Asian Australian Film Forum, and the online magazine, Peril .

 5. Pung writes for a range of Australian publications, but is probably best known for her 2006 memoir, Unpolished Gem (2006) that relates Pung's childhood and adolescence growing up in a Chinese-Cambodian family in suburban Melbourne. She has also recently written a second memoir, Her Father's Daughter (2011).

 6. For a discussion of Australian “multicultural” anthologies, see also Gunew (1994, 6–10).

 7. Jillian Sandell, citing Barbara Benedict, says: “anthologies have been an important genre for minority literatures because it allows for what Barbara Benedict calls a ‘heteroglossia of diverse voices’ to be published within a single text.” Benedict (1996, 29) qtd. in Sandell (2005, 293).

 8. On the constructed nature of autobiographical acts see, for example, Smith and Watson (eds.) (1998).

 9. “Model minority” refers to the way Asian people in countries like the USA and Australia are frequently represented as ‘good’, model citizens, who work hard, gain professional status, and live according to so-called “traditional family values”. As Maria Lo points out, “model minority discourse…is essentially a discourse of containment.” It is a way of fixing an identity for anyone who looks “Asian.” Lo (2008, 97). For a discussion of the “model minority” stereotype in Australia, see T. Khoo (2003, 33).

10. For Pung's explanation of this process, see Pung's, “Original Introduction.”

11. Robyn Morris highlights that “In constructions of ‘Australianness’, the cast is historically male dominated…heroic, hyper-masculinised, white and heterosexual—figures such as the stoic bushman, brash bushranger or the fearless ANZAC solider are routinely resurrected in cultural celebrations of Australian nationhood” (152).

12. For a detailed discussion about the covers of autobiographies of childhood, see Douglas (2010, 44).

13. For a discussion and analysis of school photographs, see Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer's “About Class Photos.”

14. Following Henry Jenkins’ work, Douglas contends that “the child figure has been, and continues to be important in a range of political and ideological battles…‘almost every political battle of the twentieth century has been fought on the backs of children.’” See Douglas (2010, 4).

15. Wenche Ommunsen notes that “the success of diasporic Chinese writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Jung Chang and Adeline Yen Mah produced a receptive audience throughout the Western world and spawned numerous imitations. The ‘Wild Swans factor’ has also returned to haunt other writers, creating an arbitrary standard against which they have been judged, reinforcing cultural stereotypes for Western consumption.” Ommundsen (2002, 68)

16. Jacqueline Lo's concept of “happy hybridity” argues that there are models of hybridity that deny the complexity of hybrid identities in favor of a celebratory view. According to Lo, “the happy hybridity model celebrates the proliferation of difference” with “the end result” being “harmonious fusion” Lo (2000, 166).