Category Archives: Australian
Unpolished Gem: My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me by Alice Pung
Already a many-time-many-variety award-winner in her native Australia, Alice Pung‘s debut memoir arrives Stateside filled with humor and bittersweet grace. Born one month after her family arrived in Melbourne, Australia, after fleeing the killing fields of Cambodia, Pung’s father chooses her name for “a story translated from English that he read in his youth, about an enchanted land in which a little girl finds herself. This new daughter of his will grow up in this Wonder Land and take for granted things like security, abundance, democracy and the little green man on the traffic lights. She will grow up not ever knowing what it is like to starve.”
Surrounded by her extended family (ever growing), like many children of new immigrants, Pung grows up treading between the new culture into which she is born and the sometimes conflicting traditions most comfortable for her parents and grandparents. She comes of age, trying to please both her distant mother and her indulgent paternal grandmother. As the oldest child – and a girl even! – she is reminded again and again of the Cambodian saying, “A girl is like white cotton wool – once dirtied it can never be clean again. A boy is like a gem – the more you polish it, the more it shines.” In spite of a debilitating period of depression near high school’s end, Pung manages to shine and more.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2009 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Australian, Cambodian
Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan
From the genius mind that brought you the wordlessly breathtaking bestseller, The Arrival, comes a collection of 15 short stories for all ages, uniquely illustrated in Tan’s signature enigmatic style. The second story, “Eric,” about the visit by a foreign exchange student like no one has ever seen, ends in one of those delightful gasps that leave you almost teary with just pure joy. Tan’s latest is a collection to be savored, with or without your kids.
Readers: Children, Middle Grade
Published: 2009 (United States) Continue reading
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
A spectacular book-without-words that traces one family’s immigration story with brilliant imagination. In an unnamed troubled land, a man leaves his wife and young daughter behind in search of freedom in a new country. His adjustments are initially overwhelming and disorienting, but with the help of new friends, he slowly finds his way and is eventually reunited with his family.
Review: “TBR’s Editors’ Favorites of 2007,” The Bloomsbury Review, November/December 2007
Readers: Children, Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2007 (United States) Continue reading
My Name is Sei Shonagon by Jan Blensdorf
What’s wrong with this picture? An Australian journalist spends two years living in Tokyo and writes her first novel, which the PR materials refer to as “an intoxicating addition to the literature of Japan.” It’s not even written in Japanese and the un-Japanese author presumably doesn’t know the historical difference between the two alphabet systems, katakana and hiragana, not to mention the editors that don’t catch her mistake. As it is, Name is about a hapa Japanese American girl who goes to Japan with her widowed mother, to a very restrictive (and abusive) existence in the home of her maternal uncle. As a young woman, she inherits an incense factory, becomes a confessor of sorts to lonely men behind a screen, refuses to give her name and uses the Sei Shonagon moniker instead. She has a bad marriage along the way, from which she escapes. And it’s all told through the unnecessary framing device of her being in a hospital bed and recalling her life in silence. Go figure.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, February 6, 2004
Readers: Adult
Published: 2003 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Australian, Hapa, Japanese
The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera
The captivating inspiration for the award-winning film of the same title about 8-year-old Kahu, who must convince her great-grandfather that females can carry on ancient Maori traditions just as well – if not better! – than the too-stubborn men.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, August 1, 2003
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2003 (paperback re-issue) Continue reading
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