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| Nevenka dress, bra top and pants, Skull & Pearl bracelets, Essen shoes.MICHELLE TRAN |
‘Babies shouldn’t eat vegetables’ and other myths author Alice Pung had to battle
Alice Pung had finished her novel One Hundred Days – about a pregnant teen whose overprotective mother locks her in their housing commission flat – when her life started to follow suit.
Alice Pung was almost 40, not 16, and pregnant with her third child, not her first, when she moved in with her parents in Melbourne during lockdown last year, accompanied by her husband Nick and their two boys, aged six and two. But as with her new novel’s adolescent narrator, Karuna, Alice found herself at times stifled by her mother’s “practical kind of love”.
“It was so weird. I went back into the book when I was editing it and I thought, ‘Oh, these lines were authentic because that’s what I said to my mum three days ago and I feel guilty about it,’ ” Alice says, laughing.
Mother-and-daughter relationships – and the questions they raise about the intersection of love, control and freedom – are at the heart of One Hundred Days. Karuna, a Chinese-Filipino Australian, is 16 when she falls pregnant after a brief affair with an older homework tutor named Ray.
Her single mother runs an impossibly strict regime during her pregnancy, fuelled by cultural superstitions (pineapples cause miscarriages and boiled watermelon is safe for the spleen) rather than science. “When I ask why, she tells me that two thousand years of history cannot be wrong. And it’s for my own good,” Karuna writes.
After the baby is born, her mother locks Karuna inside their flat on the 14th floor of a housing commission building in Melbourne’s western suburbs for 100 days as part of a postpartum confinement tradition.
Karuna is frustrated, torn between her desire to take control of her life and her recognition that she is reliant on her mother. As her mother’s employer at a beauty salon aptly tells her: “Your mother may not know how to love you the best. But she love you the most.” The problem is never a lack of love, it’s too much love, in a love story complicated by culture and class.
Alice knows the “too much love” feeling. Her mother, Kien, expected her to enter confinement after she gave birth to her third child in lockdown eight months ago. In its strict iteration, the confinement would mean not leaving the house or showering during the postpartum period.
“She was really angry at me when I went for a walk, so livid,” Alice says. “She told all my aunties, ‘Look how bad she is,’ but I just needed some fresh air. She goes, ‘If you need to walk, just walk in circles in the lounge room.’ ”
There were other differences that emerged during their co-habitation, too, including her mother’s belief that babies shouldn’t eat vegetables and her reliance on YouTube educational videos to put the children to bed.
“I can understand her. I feel great compassion towards her, but in the heat of the moment you’re just filled with rage because you’re 16 again,” says Alice.
“It would’ve been hard for them as well to have their daughter back with all these ideas about parenting that are completely different from their own.”
“You’re 40 but you’re also 16 again in that deeply embedded part of your emotions. You revert back to being sulky and sarcastic. I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t like this person I’m reverting back to.’ The rational part of your brain switches off when you talk to your parents and they push the wrong buttons. It’s a horrible thing.
“It would’ve been hard for them as well to have their daughter back with all these ideas about parenting that are completely different from their own.”
But there were also big benefits. Delicious food – everything with ginger, ginger and more ginger – and the relief of having grandparents who will look after your kids.
Alice is funny and frank when she talks about her family. Her mother can’t read or write, so perhaps there’s some freedom in knowing that she won’t trigger round two of the “should babies eat vegetables?” debate.
Her parents are ethnic Chinese refugees who arrived in Australia from Cambodia after fleeing the Khmer Rouge. Her father, Kuan, spent four years in the killing fields before he and Kien made their way to a refugee camp in Thailand.
Kien was pregnant with Alice when they came to Australia, and she was named after Lewis Carroll’s story because her father thought of Australia as a wonderland. Her mother was an outworker who made jewellery in the garage, while her father opened an electrical store. Alice grew up in Footscray and Braybrook in Melbourne’s west, the oldest of four siblings whom she was responsible for looking after from a young age.
“Writing was my way of venting.”
“I was such an anxious and unhappy and depressed child because I was scared something bad would happen to these babies all the time,” Alice says. “And then, when I became an adult and felt completely in control, I thought, ‘I can do this. This is a piece of cake compared to looking after a two-year-old and an 11-year-old at home by yourself.’ ”
Alice captured her family story and experiences in two acclaimed memoirs: Unpolished Gem, published in 2006, and Her Father’s Daughter in 2010.
When Alice moved back in with her parents last year, it was the first time she had lived with them since she moved to Janet Clarke Hall, at the University of Melbourne, when she was 23 to work as a residential tutor. (She is now artist-in-residence at the college, as well as a qualified lawyer.)
“I couldn’t move out of home unless I got married – it just was not the done thing,” she says. “So I decided to apply for this job as a residential tutor, and I got it. My dad was so understanding, he said, ‘This might be really good for you.’
So he let me move out at 23, but because I lived at the college and I was tutoring, he could tell his friends that I was living at my workplace, so he didn’t have this unmarried daughter moving out to have premarital sex or anything – I was just working. And I never left.”
She met her husband, Nick, a project manager, at the university and they now live in a flat converted from three student rooms with a bathroom and kitchen attached. When they returned to Alice’s parents’ home in the early days of the pandemic (they stayed for about a year), Alice slept in her old room alongside her old diaries, which she wrote prolifically from when she was eight until she moved out. Not that she could bring herself to look at them.
“The reason they’re embarrassing is that I was just so angry. Writing was my way of venting. My mum said you should never shake a baby because it will give them brain damage. I knew not to do that but I had no outlet. I had no Facebook to tell friends how frustrated I was stuck at home. So I wrote in my diary.”
It’s Alice’s insight into a teenager’s sense of powerlessness about their own life that has made her two novels, Laurinda and now One Hundred Days, so poignant. “I mean, most of us were lucky enough to have loving parents,” she says. “Like, cerebrally, in our brains, we know they love us because of all
the things they do for us. But there are moments where you absolutely hate your parents, in all honesty. And I had to write One Hundred Days from the 16-year-old’s perspective, and not that of an older person looking back with more compassion.
“Those moments are real, when you dislike your parents, and your parents don’t like you – and there have been moments in my life when I know my parents have disliked me immensely. They didn’t have to say anything. And all kids know that, even kids whose parents speak very nicely to them.”
“There are moments where you absolutely hate your parents, in all honesty. And I had to write One Hundred Days from the 16-year-old’s perspective, and not that of an older person looking back with more compassion.”
Alice wrote One Hundred Days over the course of four years, in between having three children, inspired by an article she’d written about the cultural aspects of postpartum confinement, followed by a short story featuring
a pregnant teenager.
Sex was taboo when Alice was growing up; she had a friend who fell pregnant and “disappeared off the face of the earth”. She later discovered that her friend’s mother had given her an ultimatum, one that Karuna shares in her novel: she could have the child, but it would be raised as her sister, rather than as her daughter.
Alice set the novel in 1987, which means Karuna has no access to a smartphone to research her mother’s long list of warnings and advice for pregnancy and motherhood. But even if she had, they’d still be hard to shake.
Alice grew up with many such cultural beliefs, including an edict to not wear white in her hair because it signifies death. And even though she regards it as a superstition, she avoids doing so anyway. That might not be the only thing to be passed down and embedded. Alice’s first children’s book, out next year, is about a six-year-old boy called Xiao Xin, which translates from Mandarin as “be careful”.
One Hundred Days (Black Inc.) by Alice Pung is out now.
Photography by Michelle Tran. Styling by Melissa Boyle. Hair and make-up Blanka Dudas.
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