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larrys 's review for:
Unpolished Gem
by Alice Pung
Alice Pung's Laurinda was one of my favourite books of last year, and because I read that so recently it was a little difficult at first to separate the fictional family of Laurinda from Pung's real family in this book.
Unfortunately, I listened to the audio book instead of reading inside my head, and the narrator was faced with the same problem all audio book narrators are faced with when rendering non-native English speakers: How to make two different voices from the same person sound like the same person? Naturally when Alice's mother and aunties spoke they would have been speaking in their native tongues, so there was really no need to affect on a condescending, lispy foreign accent when rendering their dialogue in English. Do people imagine that immigrants speak pidgin versions of their own native languages just because their English isn't good? As pointed out by Pung, her mother spoke at least 5 languages, though not English.
So this affected my reaction to this book -- I feel that the fictional family of Laurinda was actually rendered in a much more sympathetic fashion than these woman immigrants. I felt I was encouraged to other them at every step, criticising their old-fashioned attitudes and mystical beliefs. And maybe I should be critical of those. It certainly worked to paint a portrait of a difficult bicultural life for first gen immigrant children.
Alice isn't allowed to lie on the grass, and is a little envious of the carefree way in which her first boyfriend lies down and looks at the sky. I had Chinese friends through high school in New Zealand, so wasn't all that surprised when I went to Japan as an exchange student and found that I was breaking some terrible gender taboo by simply sitting in 'agura' position -- only boys are permitted to sit comfortably on the ground with their legs crossed. Girls must sit with both legs together and to one side, bending the spine and making it harder to sit in general, reminiscent of how women were once expected to ride horses in the West. I wonder if anything has changed for Asian immigrant children since the 90s?
By the end of this book I was impressed at how Alice Pung can write in metaphors, and I especially admire the funny connections which are left for readers to piece together ourselves, like the inevitable comparison between virginity and ant-infested easter eggs in the epilogue.
Unfortunately, I listened to the audio book instead of reading inside my head, and the narrator was faced with the same problem all audio book narrators are faced with when rendering non-native English speakers: How to make two different voices from the same person sound like the same person? Naturally when Alice's mother and aunties spoke they would have been speaking in their native tongues, so there was really no need to affect on a condescending, lispy foreign accent when rendering their dialogue in English. Do people imagine that immigrants speak pidgin versions of their own native languages just because their English isn't good? As pointed out by Pung, her mother spoke at least 5 languages, though not English.
So this affected my reaction to this book -- I feel that the fictional family of Laurinda was actually rendered in a much more sympathetic fashion than these woman immigrants. I felt I was encouraged to other them at every step, criticising their old-fashioned attitudes and mystical beliefs. And maybe I should be critical of those. It certainly worked to paint a portrait of a difficult bicultural life for first gen immigrant children.
Alice isn't allowed to lie on the grass, and is a little envious of the carefree way in which her first boyfriend lies down and looks at the sky. I had Chinese friends through high school in New Zealand, so wasn't all that surprised when I went to Japan as an exchange student and found that I was breaking some terrible gender taboo by simply sitting in 'agura' position -- only boys are permitted to sit comfortably on the ground with their legs crossed. Girls must sit with both legs together and to one side, bending the spine and making it harder to sit in general, reminiscent of how women were once expected to ride horses in the West. I wonder if anything has changed for Asian immigrant children since the 90s?
By the end of this book I was impressed at how Alice Pung can write in metaphors, and I especially admire the funny connections which are left for readers to piece together ourselves, like the inevitable comparison between virginity and ant-infested easter eggs in the epilogue.