“Forced to spend large tracts of their time in their dorm rooms like ancient monastics,
when they meet in our common areas I notice their conversations take time,
and take on an extra depth.”CREDIT:
LLUSTRATION BY SIMON LETCH

Alice Pung: ‘You can have a rich interior existence despite outward circumstances’

The 25 best Australian books of 2021

By Alice Pung

December 18, 2021 — 12.00am

Being in lockdown is nothing new to me. Most of my childhood and early adolescence was spent confined to our concrete ex-housing commission home in Braybrook in Melbourne’s west. Dad saw a photo of the house where Paul Keating grew up and remarked, “If the former prime minister could live in a house that looks exactly like ours, it can’t be that bad.” But bad it was, because a rock was chucked through our window. Hoons followed us down the street in their cars when we walked home, shouting about reffos breeding like animals. Luckily, my mother didn’t understand English. So indoors was always safer. I hated it, because I knew every single object in that house and its functional use, and nothing was fun.

This pandemic has given me the secret pleasure of seeing the insides of other people’s rooms, places of personality and sometimes great beauty. At 8.30am on the dot, 80 13-year-old girls, fully dressed in blazers and ties, appear on my computer screen, each a little satellite unit in her own bedroom. Normally Book Week is the busiest week in the year for author visits, but for the past two years I’ve done this virtually. I’m in awe at how these parents and teachers have introduced such discipline and dignity into these girls’ day. 

Half an hour later, I can only see four faces at my next school. The students have their cameras switched off and the teacher doesn’t make them turn them on, but I understand. Many live in commission flats with extended family, sharing rooms and probably home-schooling younger siblings at the same time. Unlike the previous class’s polite queries about my literary inspirations and reading habits, one boy here asks: “Miss, why are you wearing a backpack?” I turn around to show him flailing limbs and a grizzling face. With his camera on, he’s a mischievous dark face against a blank, white wall. “Aww,” he says, grinning. “Sorry I woke her up.” I’ve had to carefully calibrate the sleep times of my baby for my virtual school visits, and for the most part it’s worked.

My other two children are with three older students who’ve stepped in to babysit in one-hour shifts. As artist-in-residence at Melbourne University’s Janet Clarke Hall, I am very lucky to live and work in a place where lockdown does not mean dreary isolation, but its opposite. Most university colleges are made up of separate buildings orbiting a central gathering place like a dining hall, but Janet Clarke is just one big building – it looks like the schoolhouse in the French children’s cartoon Madeline – so everyone tries to be extra careful and considerate. We wear masks downstairs in communal areas and we socially distance in the dining hall. My three-year-old son learns to be quiet down corridors during exam time because, while the university is still closed, our students do all their study and exams in their rooms. Visitors are not allowed during lockdown (not even parents) and, in the two years of the pandemic, we have never had a positive COVID case.

I see more of our college students now than I’d ever seen when they spent their days at the university and their evenings out. I see them brush their teeth as I walk down the corridor. I hear their music, smell their Uber Eats, listen to their jokes and book and film recommendations. I know their food allergies, their snack preferences. For many, this is their first time away from home to become independent adults. Forced to spend large tracts of their time in their dorm rooms like ancient monastics, when they meet in our common areas I notice their conversations take time, and take on an extra depth. Perhaps there’s no better direct route to developing a rich interior life than being denied the common coming-of-age rituals – communal drinking, hook-ups, college parties.

People who learn to share finite things – their accommodation, their common space, their time, their food, their love – are happier people.

And they see me trying to work. They probably hear me yelling at my kids. I sometimes worry that they might judge my parenting. When I was in high school, on the rare times I went out, I often had a much younger sibling with me. Older teenagers operating cash registers in our suburb sometimes gave me funny looks. “They’re my siblings!” I wanted to say, but it would have made no difference. There were too many of us.

“People who are educated are better people,” my father always believed. I am not sure I believe the same. But people who learn to share finite things – their accommodation, their common space, their time, their food, their love – are happier people. I saw it in the kind families of my childhood friends, and I see it in our relatively more privileged students who got me through Book Week and beyond.

And thousands of students from Australia and abroad – rich, poor, rural and urban schools, a School of the Air, even an arts college in Singapore – got a glimpse of one writer’s lockdown life. It wasn’t glamorous, but hopefully it made them see that you can have a rich interior existence despite outward circumstances.

Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days (Black Inc, $33) was published in June.

THE SIDNEY MORNING HERALD