Web: www.alicepung.net
Publications: See a list of Alice’s books here
TRANSCRIPT
Noè
Welcome to Why Write, a super short podcast that asks writers just that, why they write. Hi, I’m Noè Harsel, a writer and Chair of Writers Victoria, and I’m excited to chat to a diverse group of writers and simply ask, why write? I’m glad you’re here with me.
Today we have Alice Pung, Alice is a best selling Australian writer whose award winning books include Unpolished Gem, Laurinda, and Her Father’s Daughter. Her latest book is 100 Days.
So welcome to Why Write, Alice. Firstly, congratulations on your Order of Australia, it couldn’t be more well deserved. You write essays, YA, memoir, adult fiction, and have won awards across all of these. Your books are always among my favourites. So obviously, I am pretty excited to talk to you today. Let’s get right to the big question. The reason why we are here. Tell us Alice, why do you write?
Alice
Why I’ve write? Well, I grew up as an introvert and I’m still quite introverted. And I’ve got a lot better at this now, at speaking, but I wasn’t very good at talking to anybody, as a young person, and even as an emerging adult. So the wonderful YA author John Green, he said, an introvert is someone who usually has a story that they’re burning to tell you, but they don’t want to look you in the eye while they’re telling you the story. So the written word is something I’m much more comfortable with then the spoken word. And I think some of it has to do with my cultural background, as with a lot of immigrant children, you’re taught to be seen and not heard, you’re taught to be a good immigrant. So but then you also have all this responsibility. Where the power of literacy is, is the literal power of life and death. From a young age, because my mum can’t read or write, she would get me to read the labels on her medication. And so you’re holding this medication and you think, well, you know, if I did this wrong, I could, I could cause terrible things to happen to the grown ups in my life. And it’s this superpower, I always felt I have, the power of being able to read. And then I thought, ah, it extends into writing as well.
Noè
But like, I mean, it’s so powerful and such a big responsibility to hold in yourself, isn’t it? So I’m just curious, like, how’s your voice or your reason for writing, has it changed, as you’ve seen, and, and I want to say the development or the expansion, and maybe I’m being too overblown, in that phrase, but in have you, as you’ve seen the growth in Australian literature, have more diverse voices? Or has your reason for writing changed, as you’ve seen more diverse voices in Australian literature?
Alice
To be honest, maybe 70% of my writing isn’t published at all, I write letters, I write diaries. So writing, it’s a part of life for me. And so what you see, my public output is just not, not the writing that matters, or, of course, it matters on a grand scale. It’s the writing I write for an audience, but the very personal writing a lot of it, I do, because maybe I’m too cheap to get therapy or something. But it really helps me on a personal level. So I’ve always done that. And so this huge explosion of diverse voices is such a wonderful thing. In terms of my own writing for publication. It’s given me the permission to venture out into young adult and children’s books. I don’t have to be a representative of telling the first generation immigrant Asian Australian story. I never felt I was that, especially since my second book was this anthology called Growing Up Asian in Australia, which introduced about 50 diverse voices.
Noè
Yeah, that’s so true. I mean, I just going back on that as well, like that whole notion of you being that representative voice of Asian identity or Asian literature, or how hard has that been for you to be that voice for Australian literature?
Alice
Oh, look, it hasn’t been that hard to be honest. Because I never considered myself. Well, it’s just the voice of an individual. And you know, you don’t like to, people don’t like to read didactic stories about immigrants made good or you know, we didn’t or people trying to prove that they belong in Australia by virtue of the good deeds they do and how helpful they are to society. So I, my first book was about three illiterate women. Oh, they’re not illiterate, but they’re illiterate, according to Australian society, which is not the narrative of the good and successful immigrant that we’re all looking for.
Noè
It’s so true. And I’m just interested as well, like, as you write about your family directly in memorial, but also through fiction, I’m wondering, and maybe I’m projecting here, so do forgive me, but do you ever worry about your mother or your family’s reaction to your writing? Have they always been supportive?
Alice
Oh, they have. And I thought, that’s always my worry, of course, because a lot of my work is based on not true events, but true feelings. If I might have been really, really pissed off at her mother, essentially, I probably have those feelings in my own life. So I worry about that. I also worry because my mother can’t read or write that I have voice and she doesn’t. But then on the other hand, I think it’s really important. Not self important to, to the skewer voice to the voiceless by I think it’s important to portray our relationships in all the complexity and not sugarcoat that.
Noè
Yeah. And also, and so have you ever found yourself, second guessing the things that you may want to say or be worried about the reactions of those emotions?
Alice
All the time, especially when I wrote my first book, which is about 16 years ago now. That, you know, I was so worried because I wrote about bouts of, you know, arguments I had with my mum as a teenager, really rocky relationship in my teens. So when I was trying to gain some degree of independence, and I told my mum, look, I was, you know, we were angry at each other, and I wrote about that. And my mom said, I didn’t worry about that. I was angry at my own mom. And, you know, I stopped talking to her for a while, at least you kept talking to me. But then my mum had got really angry a couple of months after the book was published, and she was angry because one of my Auntie’s said that I wrote that she was secondhand wedding dress. And that was actually a very loving paragraph because my mom didn’t have a proper wedding in Cambodia because a war was going on. One of my aunts kindly lent her wedding dress. So that was actually a passage I thought reflected really well, but she said, I can’t show my face in public for the next week. You know how embarrassing it is. So you never know.
Noè
You never know what it’s going to be that actually is a thing that grabs someone’s heart, do you?
Alice
You don’t, you don’t.
Noè
Ah, unbelievable. Thank you so much for your time, Alice. I really appreciate it. You have given us so much to think about.
Alice
Well, thanks so much. Noe, thank you for this interview.
Noè
You’re amazing. Thank you so much for your time Alice spy speaks so thank you. Bye.
Thanks for listening. We would love to hear why you write, tell me at whywrite.com.au
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