 |
| Alice Pung |
“One Hundred Days” by Alice Pung
Melanie HoWhen 16-year-old Karuna becomes pregnant, Karuna’s mother decides to lock her daughter inside their fourteenth-story public housing flat as a means to keep her safe. Karuna, who has spent years trying to escape her mother, now finds herself with her mother as her only company.
Set in Melbourne in the 1980s, Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days is a coming-of-age story about a mother-daughter relationship and the fine balance between love and control.
From her confinement (in this novel the confinement is pre-, not post-, partum), Karuna addresses her story to her unborn child; she keeps a journal in English, a language her mother cannot read. The gulf between mother and daughter continues to widen even as their physical proximity—they share a double bed—is closer than ever.
 |
| Alice Pung |
I know your Grand Mar stares at me in the blackness. I can feel her head turning on her pillow, and then she asks, ‘Who is it?’
When I don’t answer, she says, ‘Do you even know who it is? Because if you don’t know who it is, we can get the police to look for them and catch them and lock them away.’ She says this to me like I am five years old and don’t know about the law. ‘In jail,’ she adds.
When I still won’t talk, she mutters, ‘Never knew any girl could be so dumb.’
Karuna’s father has left the family, divorcing Karuna’s mother and forcing Karuna to change high schools and the family to move into their housing commission flat. Karuna’s mother finds work at a beauty salon and at a restaurant. That summer, her mother suggests that Karuna attend a free study group in the local community centre, where she meets a tutor; a whirlwind romance follows.
Karuna’s Chinese-Filipino-Australian identity is a large part of the story. Her immigrant mother always had great expectations for her daughter; her overprotectiveness is layered with the idea that Karuna has always been her mother’s “Big Thing”. This is contrasted both by her experiences with her white father, whom she idolizes despite his absence, and at school among her peers, where she doesn’t feel she is part of either group:
I was like a dusty, back-of-the-shelf version of a white girl, one of those dusky Barbies that gets shoved in the discount pile; and among the Asian girls at school I was a dumb-arse giantess. Those girls cooed over my chocolate hair and light lion eyes, but I knew they didn’t take my smarts seriously. I looked nice but no one really wanted me.
As Karuna’s pregnancy progresses, her world on one hand narrowing with her confinement and expanding with impending motherhood, Pung writes of some of the cultural clashes between mother and daughter. Her mother tries to ban Karuna from watching television out of fear of deforming the baby or she tells her daughter that her long hair is sapping nutrients from the baby. An argument over vitamins (Karuna’s mother refuses to let Karuna take them) is accompanied by the order to drink milk for the baby’s skin to be white.
 |
| Alice Pung |
Pung’s writing is crisp and nuanced, the story taut and full of tension. Perhaps because the story is so focused, so intense, there is a rawness, honesty and fierceness to the writing that linger long after the novel finishes. Stripped of accompaniments, a soloist shines.
Melanie Ho is the author of Journey to the West: He Hui, a Chinese Soprano in the World of Italian Opera.
No comments:
Post a Comment