AUTHOR Alice Pung says growing up as one of the first Asian schoolgirls in Braybrook was surreal.
“My Chinese-Cambodian family was part of the first wave of Asian immigration in the western suburbs and it was a very special time to grow up,” she recalls.
“The government had just removed its White Australia Policy and I saw the change in cultures people moving to the area grow around me.
“By the time I went to university I didn’t realise there was such a thing as a white Australia. I thought every area in Melbourne was as rich in cultural diversity as the western suburbs.”
The award-winning author of Her Father’s Daughter and editor of the short story collection Growing Up Asian divides her time between being between being a writer, lawyer and teacher.
As a teenager Pung always had her head in a book and says her greatest inspiration was author John Marsden.
“I loved his writing because he never shied away from the complexities of growing up.”
Pung says by reading the works of others she learnt her own voice and the importance of giving her own “heartbeat” to a story.
The title of her best-selling book Unpolished Gem was derived from a Chinese-Cambodian proverb: ‘A girl is like cotton wool — once she’s dirtied, she can never be clean again. A boy is like a gem — the more you polish it, the brighter it shines.’
Pung’s advice for aspiring writers is simple. “Just do it. Never think of yourself as a proper noun, a ‘writer’, but a verb. Just write. That way you are there for the experience of writing and not the title attached to being a writer.
“Young people are always frightened to write, but a lot of the time they have the most interesting stories to tell.”
Pung will host a workshop for migrants as part of the Brimbank Writers Festival. Focusing on the contributions of migrants to Australian literature, it runs from 6.30-7.30pm on September 18.
The festival continues until September 28.
Full details: brimbank.vic.gov.au/writersfestival.
