person or book cover
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y separately published work icon Her Father's Daughter single work   autobiography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2011... 2011 Her Father's Daughter
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'At twenty-something, Alice is eager for the milestones of adulthood: leaving home, choosing a career, finding friendship and love on her own terms. But with each step she takes she feels the sharp tug of invisible threads: the love and worry of her parents, who want more than anything to keep her from harm. Her father fears for her safety to an extraordinary degree - but why?

'As she digs further into her father's story, Alice embarks on a journey of painful discovery: of memories lost and found, of her own fears for the future, of history and how it echoes down the years. Set in Melbourne, China and Cambodia, Her Father's Daughter captures a father-daughter relationship in a moving and astonishingly powerful way.' (From the publisher's website.)

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Teaching resources via publisher's website.

Notes

  • Dedication: Dedicated to Dad and Mum
  • Epigraph:
    I said to my soul to be still and wait without hope
    For hope would be hope of the wrong thing
    Wait without love
    For love would be love of the wrong thing
    Yet there is faith
    But the faith and the love and the hope
    Are all in the waiting.

    - T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Collingwood, Fitzroy - Collingwood area, Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,: Black Inc. , 2011 .
      person or book cover
      Image courtesy of Black Inc.
      Extent: 241p.
      Note/s:
      • Publication date: September 2011.
      ISBN: 9781863955423 (pbk)
    • Collingwood, Fitzroy - Collingwood area, Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,: Black Inc. , 2013 .
      person or book cover
      Courtesy of Black Inc.
      Extent: 256p.
      Note/s:
      • Publication date: February 2013
      ISBN: 9781863955904

Other Formats

  • Also sound recording.

Works about this Work

What I’m Reading Imbi Neeme , 2020 single work column
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2020;
Remembering and Rewriting the Familial Traumascape in Alice Pung’s Memoir Her Father’s Daughter Suzanne Hermanoczki , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue Website Series , no. 42 2017;

'Often in immigrant literature, the familial landscape or homeland is considered a traumascape, which as Maria Tumarkin explains, is a place ‘marked by traumatic legacies of violence, suffering and loss’ (2005: 12). For many first-generation immigrants and refugees forced into leaving their homelands, the familial traumascape is also trapped in a past that no longer exists, or exists only in memories that are subject to traumatic ‘visual and sensory triggers’ (Tumarkin 2005: 12). This paper will show how second-generation immigrant writer Alice Pung has used her father’s first generation trigger memories of place in her memoir Her Father’s Daughter (2011) to direct her own writing. A textual analysis of the father’s present day narrative will reveal details of the traumatic events of an unliveable homeland and the intergenerational impact of this familial traumascape on his daughter. It will also discuss how, at the heart of Her Father’s Daughter, is the Barthesian idea of the punctum and its connection with testimony; and how the father’s homeland or familial landscape becomes the traumatic wounded site of painful trigger memories. Examining the writing from the site of the wound, this paper shows how the father’s traumatised memories of his homeland are able to be transformed as postmemories of place and belonging for the second-generation/daughter in her memoir.' (Publication abstract)

On Necessary Disjointedness : The Pol Pot Period in Alice Pung’s Memoirs Patrick Allington , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Life Writing , vol. 14 no. 4 2017; (p. 465-474)

'This paper analyses the memoirs of Australian writer Alice Pung in the contexts of her suburban Melbourne upbringing, her parents’ status as refugees, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot period. The author discusses the changed way Pung deals with the Pol Pot period from Unpolished Gem (2006) to Her Father’s Daughter (2011), and in particular the necessary disjointedness that is a consequence of the latter memoir’s more direct and deep focus on Pung’s father’s experiences during the Pol Pot period. The author concludes by locating Pung’s works, particularly Her Father’s Daughter, among various other memoirs of the Pol Pot period, including poet U Sam Oeur’s memoir, Crossing Three Wildernesses (2005). Placed among other memoirs of survival and loss, the author suggests, Pung brings a distinctive perspective as the child of a survivor of the Pol Pot period.'  (Publication abstract)

Remembering Violence in Alice Pung’s Her Father’s Daughter : The Postmemoir and Diasporisation Anne Brewster , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Life Writing , vol. 14 no. 3 2017; (p. 313-325) The Limits of Life Writing 2018;

'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)

Writing About My Father in Her Father's Daughter Alice Pung , 2012 single work autobiography
— Appears in: Westerly , November vol. 57 no. 2 2012; (p. 41-47) Editor's Desk - 2017 2017;
Alice Pung discusses writing techniques employed in her work, Her Father's Daughter, q.v.
Happily Out of the Ordinary Delia Falconer , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 3 - 4 August 2011; (p. 24)

— Review of Her Father's Daughter Alice Pung , 2011 single work autobiography
Daughters in a Family Minefield Diane Stubbings , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 10 September 2011; (p. 26)

— Review of Her Father's Daughter Alice Pung , 2011 single work autobiography ; Bite Your Tongue Francesca Rendle-Short , 2008 single work novel
Filial Love Song Thuy On , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 334 2011; (p. 24)

— Review of Her Father's Daughter Alice Pung , 2011 single work autobiography
Love Lies at the Heart of a Harrowing Tale Rebecca Starford , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Age , 17 September 2011; (p. 29)

— Review of Her Father's Daughter Alice Pung , 2011 single work autobiography
[Review] Her Father's Daughter Max Oliver , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , August vol. 91 no. 2 2011; (p. 32)

— Review of Her Father's Daughter Alice Pung , 2011 single work autobiography
Memories of Relative Unease Jane Sullivan , 2011 single work biography
— Appears in: The Saturday Age , 20 August 2011; (p. 30-31)
Her Father's Daughter Zoe Nikakis , 2011 single work column
— Appears in: Voice , 12 September - 9 October vol. 7 no. 9 2011;
The Name and the Face Jinghua Qian , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Overland , Spring no. 208 2012; (p. 27-32)
Writing About My Father in Her Father's Daughter Alice Pung , 2012 single work autobiography
— Appears in: Westerly , November vol. 57 no. 2 2012; (p. 41-47) Editor's Desk - 2017 2017;
Alice Pung discusses writing techniques employed in her work, Her Father's Daughter, q.v.
Remembering Violence in Alice Pung’s Her Father’s Daughter : The Postmemoir and Diasporisation Anne Brewster , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Life Writing , vol. 14 no. 3 2017; (p. 313-325) The Limits of Life Writing 2018;

'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)

Last amended 14 Dec 2017 13:18:01
Subjects:
  • Melbourne, Victoria,
  • c
    China,
    c
    East Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
  • c
    Cambodia,
    c
    Southeast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
Settings:
  • Melbourne, Victoria,
  • c
    China,
    c
    East Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
  • c
    Cambodia,
    c
    Southeast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
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