That first book, Unpolished Gem, told the story of the Pung family’s complexities, comedies and pains in Melbourne’s western suburbs after having fled the disaster of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. It won her both critical and popular acclaim, not least for the voice of its telling. It was fresh, vivid and direct. As Patrick Allington put it at the time ‘she encapsulates and energises whole scenes with a single sentence’. Its publication marked the arrival not only of a new story, but of a new writer.

Five years on, Pung still regularly speaks for the book, often to school groups, where she sometimes finds herself being cast not first as the teller of individual and complex stories, but according to the much easier to digest category of cultural representative.

“Teachers get me to talk about culture like it’s this thing that’s removed,” she says. “I will talk about people first and foremost.”

It’s a problem that Pung confronted already when she came to write her second book. Having spent three months in Beijing on an Asialink residency in 2008 Pung found that she was tied to the expectations of representation, to the artistic pressure of having an epiphany in her ancestral homeland.

“I didn’t feel that,” she admits. “I felt alienated…I got severe writer’s block and that was when I realised: I don’t do culture. I don’t write ethnic stories. I write stories about people and how they manage to annoy each other and love each other.”

This unshackling from the ‘incidental’ thing of culture freed Pung to write in Her Father’s Daughter a story that is both very complex and very different to her first book, and which falls, eventually, into the four years her father endured during the Pol Pot years in Cambodia.

Tellingly though, the focus is not immediately on the horror-show of the killing fields. Instead Pung builds a story that is told in part as an imaginary, unspoken, conversation between Father and Daughter, Kuan and Alice, which is rendered in alternating third person sections.

It’s those conversations that negotiate, through a sometimes difficult, but always loving relationship, as Alice moves out of the family home and resists what she senses as her father’s overprotectiveness, a space into which Pung can retell with purpose the stories and experiences that have come into her possession through her father and his friends.

While the book is structured as a conversation, it is nevertheless Alice’s father’s story that carries greatest weight. It is the centre of the book’s gravity. The conversation is like a ball bounced between the two that gets ever closer to falling down the well of memory and the representation of her father’s experiences in Cambodia.

The drop comes, finally, when Father dismisses from the family Retravision store in Footscray a young man who has made an advance on Alice. To Alice her father’s explosion of rage is overprotective, out of proportion. But to Father it cannot be otherwise:

‘The things he’d seen.
He’d seen a smile like a curve of a sickle.
If not on this face, then on another like it.
If not in this decade, then in the ones before.
Boys were not just boys.
And the things he had heard.’

The dystopian quality of the retelling of the Pol Pot years is bleak, claustrophobic. Pung presents Kuan as having little or no control over the coming of death, he has no awareness of the larger shifts in geopolitics that will end the nightmare of existence until the day he feels the embodied thunder of the approaching Vietnamese bombing. There is no news from the outside. When an old man is killed grotesquely, the ‘Black Bandits’ of the Khmer Rouge gather the people of the field to watch: ‘Men and women were sitting in the open field, stunned sick. They weren’t allowed to look away. The ground was hot.’

Pung is able to lift suddenly from this prosaic sensory reality to the sometimes excessively lyrical, an attempt to arrive at a kind of beauty that transforms horror, that demonstrates something about the fact that after the horror all we have is language – especially when it is not our own direct experience. So in the midst of remembering the horror, Pung presents the equally awful and beautiful image of Alice standing with her father in the Cambodian field in which he had once buried victims of the Khmer Rouge: ‘There were bones beneath their feet,’ she reflects, ‘souls between their breaths’.

Throughout the book we are reminded of the impossible intimacy and knowing that underpins the retelling. While Pung can lay claim to the truth of her own voice of Alice, her own avatar, can she claim her father’s? Is this the real voice of her father?

“My father doesn’t tell stories in that kind of language,” she says. “His is not a storytelling voice. It’s not a voice that says ‘sit down and I’ll tell you a story about back when this happened.’ We talked lots of times on the phone when I was overseas when I started to find the heartbeat of this story. We’d have sessions that lasted many hours. But my father’s narration would be just what happened back then in Cambodia. But nothing to do with how he felt.”

Her Father’s Daughter resembles an hourglass. Once the full chamber of sand has run through into the dark hole of time, into what Pung calls ‘dismemory’, the retelling of the Cambodia years, there needs to be an upending, a return for it to begin again, for the relationship with her father to become richer. It’s a story that is not told in a straight line.

Her father, she says, would have liked her to tell this story in a more familiar order, first about “how he suffered a lot and then came to Australia and then made it because that was the kind of narrative he’d seen in movies, Mao’s Last Dancer and The Killing Fields, and the way a refugee story should be told.”

But Pung, characteristically perhaps, resisted the pull of expectation.

“I didn’t want to do this because he’s been here thirty years. The refugee part was the three months when he was fleeing to get to the Thai refugee camp, the one year he spent there. Once he came to Australia he was an arrival and I wanted to portray in inverse this man who has made it, who is quite successful.”

This points finally to the responsibility of representation. The weight of experience is felt unevenly across time, differently for each person connected to the same events. Whose truth weighs more in Pung’s hands? Father’s or Daughter’s?

Pung’s solution is to consciously portray her own moral collaboration in her father’s story, to become a conscious representative of his experience. In doing so she has shown herself to be a writer capable of taking on the shared ownership of those stories with great care and love. Her father should be proud.

Alice Pung will be a guest at this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival.

– David Sornig