Growing up Asian in Australia - Book Reviews - Books - Entertainment. Everyone has their battle scars from primary school.
One of my worst was turning up at my school, a newly arrived child-migrant, attending her first sports day. My problem was sartorial - I wasn't wearing shorts like everyone else in grade 3. My mother, in the Sri Lankan style, had insisted I wear a lovely short smock - garish green for my house - with a matching set of (handmade) knickers. It was the Age of Aquarius - the mid-1970s - but it wasn't exactly the outfit to perform the mandatory somersault in. Of course, I couldn't get out of it. Despite the shrill call of some politician under the spell of elections, Australia has absorbed successive waves of migrants for more than 200 years. Blog - alicepung. Over the past weeks, I have been asked many questions about Laurinda at launches, public talks and over the radio, so I thought I would share these written answers with readers about the book: How much does Laurinda draw on my own life experiences?
Growing up, I went to five different high schools, and I have always been fascinated by the way institutions shape individuals. In each new high school I felt like I was a slightly different person - not because anything about me had immediately changed - but because people’s perceptions of me had. Texts in the City: Growing Up Asian in Australia — The Wheeler Centre.
Growing up Asian in Australia - The Book Show. Sunday School - Growing Up Asian in Australia by Alice Pung. Sunday School - Growing Up Asian in Australia by Alice Pung May 27, 2012 , 9:04 AM by KuljaCoulston Libbi Gorr and Christopher Creek from Bayside Christian College in Langwarrin South, discuss identity and belonging, drawing from the VCE English text Growing Up Asian in Australia, the collection of stories by Asian Australians.
Issues in Alice Pung's anthology relate to identity formation, cultural identity, conformity versus individuality, inclusion and exclusion. This text gives us a variety of insights about how this might happen in a cross cultural sense. Six key issues can be explored but there are others; the place of language, school and family, racism and stereotyping, clash of cultures, the notion of home and finally, the caught between or the amalgam. Listen to the whole discussion using the audio link below. Kutcha Edwards - Little Day Out Following Sunday School, Libbi Gorr continues the discussion about identity with Mutti Mutti man and singer songwriter Kutcha Edwards. Asialink - Alice Pung: 'My book is meant to be funny!' Writers Talk Alice Pung: Cultural Perspective. Author Alice Pung on her childhood as part of an immigrant family in Australia.
Black Inc. Publishing. Alice Pung is a writer, editor, teacher and lawyer based in Melbourne.
Born a month after her Chinese parents fled from Cambodia to Australia as asylum seekers from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge Regime, Alice has used her shared family's experiences to write stories that captivate all readers. She has won numerous awards including the 2007 Newcomer of the Year Award in the Australia Book Industry Awards for her first book Unpolished Gem (Black Inc). What I Wrote. Alice Pung has also provided some Writer's Tips Alice Pung discusses writing her memoirs Unpolished Gem and Her Father’s Daughter, including the joys and the pitfalls.
She talks about how her cultural upbringing shaped her writing life and discusses the importance of humour and hope in her work. The original introduction to “Growing Up Asian in Australia” When I first wrote my introduction to Growing Up Asian in Australia, I felt that the stories and their authors were so brave, so witty, funny, generous with their experience, that it deserved a weighty introduction worthy of such a significant collection – an introduction that highlighted the historical reasons for the dearth of Asian-Australian literature that did not fit into conventional ‘migrant narrative’.
After the below introduction was completed and edited, I was told by a trusted adviser who had decades of experience in the book publishing industry, that this type of heavy introduction might not make people want to pick up the book at Borders. She was absolutely right. Academics and students might be interested in the history of Asian-Australians, but we as a popular culture are perhaps not ready. Alice Pung In 1770, Captain Cook stuck his flag up next to a pile of rocks, conveniently forgetting about the indigenous population, and claimed the land for the British Empire. On The Move 2011: Alice Pung (Writers in Motion: Decline and Recovery) Teacher and student resources on multiculturalism, cultural diversity and tolerance.