AustLit

'Alice Pung’s postmemoir of the after-effects of political violence maps a discursive trajectory from (1) her father’s survivor memory of the Cambodian genocide, to (2) her own postmemory as a second-generation Asian-Australian, to (3) the latter’s remediation as social memory within the Australian (trans)national imaginary. Hirsch describes the family as ‘the privileged site of the memorial transmission’ of trauma. In Her Father’s Daughter, Pung parallels the heroic narrative of her father’s survival of ‘a real and bloody social revolution’ (HFD, 48) with the more modest narrative of her own embodied travails with ‘authentic feeling’ (21) regarding her affective connectivity with her extended family and the cultural and geographical landscapes they inhabited. Her postmemorial journey is one into her own heart, variously described as ‘a deformed dumpling’ (28) and ‘rotting fruit’ (32). Literary texts such as Pung’s can bring about the timely reanimation of the post-settler state’s archives through investing them with familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. In Her Father’s Daughter, disaporic subjectivity is articulated through the mapping of transnational and transgenerational histories.' (Publication abstract)