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| Alice Pung Photo by Michelle Tran. |
Plight of girls and women explored in Alice Pung’s fractured fairytale
June 11, 2021 — 4.00pm
Alice Pung’s latest book, a novel, is a modern-day fractured fairytale, an update on the medieval princesss imprisoned in a stone tower, with a fire-breathing dragon guarding her honour. Pung’s characters are not languishing atop a misty mountaintop but are on the 14th floor of a housing commisison flat in Melbourne’s western suburbs. There’s also no prince coming to rescue the fair maiden. He’s long since scarpered. And our heroine? She’s a pregnant teen (“and like some mythical monster, I now have two heartbeats”), kept under lock for 100 days and counting by her over-protective mother.
Alice Pung’s latest book, a novel, is a modern-day fractured fairytale, an update on the medieval princesss imprisoned in a stone tower, with a fire-breathing dragon guarding her honour. Pung’s characters are not languishing atop a misty mountaintop but are on the 14th floor of a housing commisison flat in Melbourne’s western suburbs. There’s also no prince coming to rescue the fair maiden. He’s long since scarpered. And our heroine? She’s a pregnant teen (“and like some mythical monster, I now have two heartbeats”), kept under lock for 100 days and counting by her over-protective mother.
In 16-year-old Karuna, Pung has created a portrait of a young woman struggling for personal agency, to belong only to herself, not to her parents or to the father of her baby, but “to be my own instrument” and to pull her own strings. And yet, when it’s discovered that her child is with child, Karuna’s mother decides to become master puppeteer, in charge of Karuna’s every movement. This is a world where parents and children “didn’t have conversations – your parents told you what to do and you did it. There was nothing to discuss, so no one had taught us how to talk.”
One Hundred Days explores not just the generational gap but the cultural chasm between the rules and superstitions of traditional Asian values and the adolescent’s ferocious desire for autonomy. Karuna, a biracial Chinese-Filipino Australian, spends most of the book (“Then”) addressing her child in the womb, with the last quarter (“Now”) devoted to the chaos post-birth. The friction lies in the fact that here, maternal love is equated with filial piety and obedience and “Grand Mar’s” care is suffocating. By writing down her miseries in a notebook, Karuna is able to cling onto a vestige of independence, separate from scrunity. After all, the teenager has shared a double bed with her mother since her father left, so there could be no “private spaces inside or outside for bad thoughts to bloom like fungi”.
Pung does not flinch in showing us some of the more hectoring emotional abuses enacted under the rationale of providing support. However, athough it’s tempting to see Grand Mar as a villainous jailer denying her daughter a chance to make decisions about her own welfare, Pung also garners sympathy for the lonely, abandoned, broken migrant woman working two menial jobs to eke out a precarious existence and struggling with her own mental health.
In One Hundred Days, Pung is interested in the plight of girls and women; men are mere footnotes. Karuna’s father has left the marriage and her impregnating dalliance is no longer in the story. The narrative is tightly circumscribed between the claustrophobic flat, the hairdressing/beautician store and restaurant where Grand Mar works and the public school Karuna has had to leave. As her belly increases in inverse proportion to her surroundings, the already fractious relationship between her and her mother becomes increasingly strained.
Forced to rest inside like a brooding mare, Karuna’s no longer allowed to even sweep hair and give shoulder massages at the salon to supplement the family income. She craves sweets but is fed a diet of nourishing soups and an endless list of what to avoid: pineapple may cause miscarriage, ice-cream gives you convulsions, having an ugly attitude will result in birthmarks on the baby. But what will happen after its arrival is subject to even more fraught arguments; Grand Mar has taken it upon herself to be Karuna’s sole support network and it will take much convincing for her to relinquish her grip on her only child and her impending grandchild.
One Hundred Days is written with Pung’s characteristic verve and attention to detail and dialogue. Through the plaintive voice of her Housing Commission Cinderalla, it offers provocative treatment of the dynamics of control and uneasy acquiescence, of the working-class poor, of cross-cultural relationships, teen pregnancy and second-generation migrants.
One Hundred Days, Alice Pung, Black Inc., $32.99
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