Unpolished Gem By Alice Pung

As we grow up one of the most important things we wish to discover is who we are as a person. Thus our understanding of our identity is vital in order to find our place in the world and is emphasised significantly in or modern culture. However trying to discover your sense of self can be a difficult time for any adolescence. Yet it can become even more complicated and stressful when you have to compete with drastically different cultural expectations. This is apparent in the children born to Asian Migrants in Australia; Author Alice Pung makes this abundantly clear in her memoir Unpolished Gem. This essay will explore how Pung has incorporated her struggle not only for own identity, but the strain of having to juggle the cultural expectations

Pung explains that “This was a deliberate and light-hearted attempt to shift away from the two decades of ‘migrant’ or ‘ethnic’ literature narratives that have been published in Australia” (Arcangelo,1). Yet the beginning of the story is scattered with examples of the Pung family mirroring this expectation, though how she describes the way her family marvels at new resources Australia has to offer “Wah, so many things about this new country that are so taken-for-granted!” (9).

Therefore it can be said that “Unpolished Gem sends two seemingly contradictory messages to its readers. One the one hand, it refuses victimization. On the other, it suggests that such stories inform the life, and the writing of the young author” (Ommundsen, 504). This suggests that from the beginning of her memoir Pung is demonstrating the struggle between conflicting identities. Throughout her memoir Pung illustrates her struggle to counterbalance the expectations of her family and conforming the Australian way of life. However Pung is not the only one who struggles to come to terms with changing

As the Pung family vigorously works to obtain the “Great Australian Dream” (127) Alice realises that it isn’t the happy existence that it promised. Despite the fact that the family were now wealthy enough to afford a lavish home and send their children to private school the Pung family still feel displaced. Alice does not feel she fits in her new school “”I never said a word in class unless the teacher picked on me, one wrong word could mean being found out for the philistine I was.” (143) nor could her mother feel comfortable in their new home “in the house she could not stand still. It was so hollow, so many hours to fill” (156). This demonstrates that regardless of the effort the family they are not fully accepted by the rest of