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‘Clinically, women who do not have a good recovery often suffer postnatal issues like severe fatigue, lower back pain, insomnia and hair loss. These can often last for months or even years after the pregnancy.’
Indeed, this diagnosis accords with the World Health Organization’s observations that the puerperium – the six weeks following birth – is a critical period, as most maternal and infant deaths occur during this time.
Eric also mentions the importance of ‘reassuring anxious new grandparents’, something Western healthcare fails to address because of different familial structures. ‘If intergenerational conflict does arise over confinement approaches, the new father should step in to protect the mother’s wellbeing, and help remove the unsaid expectation that the daughter or daughter-in-law has to sacrifice her personal needs for the sake of harmony with the older generation.’
In becoming a mother, I’ve found I’ve also become a different daughter. My parents’ overwhelming anxious love was once a burden, and as a young adult I was either fighting or fleeing it. As a young mother, I have been unexpectedly freed from worry: the more my parents fret over our baby, the more I am able to choose to be a calm parent, to understand that this is not an innate temperament, but a feeling of safety derived from secure and comfortable circumstances. It is a gift.
When we take our baby to visit his great-grandparents, my 83-year-old grandmother tells me to drink wine with every meal. ‘It warms the qi,’ she says. ‘If you can afford it, buy the wine with the most alcohol content.’ When she gave birth to her eight children, she had to make do with homemade rice wine. ‘It was cheaper.’ She also notices our baby has a milky-white tongue, and suggests that I give him a cloth to bite on as a remedy. ‘Ma, they don’t do peasanty things like that anymore!’ scoffs my mum to her own mother.
My grandma tells me that when she had her children, a tin of formula was $9. My grandfather made $10 a day as a cook. He gave a dollar to each kid at the end of the day, and the parents each kept one for themselves. So of course they could not afford formula milk. Instead, my grandmother bought Nestlé sweetened condensed milk and diluted it with water. ‘A milk bottle with a teat was $20,’ she tells me, ‘so I got a Coke bottle and poked a hole through the lid!’ She is delighted by her own ingenuity. I come to understand that my forebears were not silly and superstitious: illiteracy and poverty robbed them of proper nutrition, and they were all just doing their best to make the next generation better and stronger. Having two cultures with very different approaches to childbirth and motherhood has made me more relaxed, knowing that there is no right way to do things.
In my grandparents’ house, I look at my baby’s father, who is kind, calm and fearless, and hope that our child will have enough of his genes to cancel out my history of fear. I look at my grandma and 95-year-old grandpa, who came to Cambodia as starving peasants from China and ended up in Australia in their twilight years, surviving together through sixty years of marriage, delighting over our son. And I look at my own mother, proudly bottle-feeding the baby with formula milk that she never would have been able to have as a baby herself. We are four generations under one roof again.
AFTERWORD & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When I was about nineteen, I began writing short stories and submitting them to publications. Eventually I had one published in Meanjin. An editor at Black Inc., Chris Feik, read the story and gave me a call out of the blue. ‘You’ve got an interesting and unique voice. Your story sounds like it’s a part of a novel. Is it?’
At the age of nineteen I wasn’t very good at short stories, so my story probably sounded unfinished.
And I said, ‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
He responded, ‘Great, I’d love to see some chapters.’
I replied, ‘Sure. They’re a bit rough, so I’ll just edit them and bring them over.’
I didn’t have any chapters, so I sat down and wrote 30,000 words. At first I wasn’t even going to visit Chris, but one evening I saw the movie Frieda with two friends. I realised how brave Frieda was. She brought her paintings to Diego Rivera and said, ‘Hey, Diego, you want to look at my paintings?’ I thought, Maybe I’ll show Chris my stories. I didn’t even call him for an appointment – I didn’t know how these things worked at that age. I just walked into his office. Chris left a meeting to accept my stories, which were presented in a font that I thought was classy but was perhaps ridiculous.
I knew I didn’t have enough words for a novel yet, so I asked, ‘Can I send you a story every month, to get me writing? You don’t have to read it. You just keep it in your inbox.’
So I sent him stories until he said, ‘Stop. Let’s put them together in a book.’
That book became Unpolished Gem.
A great editor is like a great chef – they often work with raw ingredients, and it is almost by alchemy that work is transformed, essential truths are discovered and themes realised. A great editor will often know your work better than you do. They notice your recurring obsessions with a clarity that you, through your subjectivity, lack. When Chris wrote to me last year suggesting this collection, I wasn’t sure I had written enough over the years to justify a book. But I trust Chris’s judgement. It was he who took a risk on this unknown writer who’d barely ventured beyond Melbourne’s western suburbs, let alone into the world.
Chris Feik and Julia Carlomagno have curated these stories and essays, spanning one and a half decades of my writing life, from my first published piece, ‘Unpolished Gem’ (2001), to my most recent, ‘Home Truths’ (2017). They have arranged them in a way that tells not only the story of my development as a writer, but also the story of a family, a suburb, a country and a world over a particular time.
My focus has always been on character and on narrative voice. I’ve never been interested in interviewing ‘powerful’ people who presume (or pretend) to know the answers. Perhaps the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty, and I don’t believe in fixed positions and the irrevocable power of words. After all, my own mother has never read anything I have written. She can’t read, and her life is no less rich or devoid of meaning. So these pages mostly contain stories of ordinary people, who offer – sometimes inadvertently – unusual insights.
I’ve always had faith in the power of a good story, not a didactic story, to shift one’s view about people and places that are often misunderstood or maligned, and I am thankful to all the people in this anthology who’ve generously shared their time and trust with this writer.
Alice Pung, 2018
PUBLICATION DETAILS
‘24/7’ first appeared in The Monthly, October 2008.
‘Against Calamitous Odds’ first appeared as the introduction to Ruth Park’s Swords and Crowns and Rings, Text Publishing, Melbourne 2012.
‘Ally of the Dolls’ first appeared in The Monthly, December 2008 – January 2009.
‘Caveat Emptor’ first appeared in The Monthly, October 2013.
‘Chinese New Year Dragon’ first appeared in Good Weekend, 2006.
‘Dark Fiction’ first appeared in The Guardian, 2 October 2017.
‘Executing History’ first appeared in Nataša Ďurovičová with Hugh Ferrer (eds), Fall and Rise, American Style, 91st Meridan Books, Iowa, 2015.
‘Hair Apparent’ first appeared in The Monthly, July 2010.
‘Holiday at Slacks Creek’ first appeared in The Australian, 1 March 2008.
‘Home Truths’ first appeared in The Monthly, December 2017 – January 2018.
‘It’s Time to Embrace the “F” Word’ first appeared in The Age, October 2007.
‘Katharine’s Place’ first appeared in The Monthly, July 2008.
‘Letter to A’ first appeared in Best Australian Stories 2007, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2007.
‘Little Dumplings’ first appeared in The Age, 13 March 2010.
‘Living with Racism’ first appeared in The New York Times, 7 December 2016.
‘Looking Sheepish’ first appeared in The Monthly, February 2009.
‘Mum in the Forbidden City’ first appeared in The Lifted Brow, August 2011.
‘Opportunity’ first appeared in The Monthly, March 2008.
‘Returning’ first appeared in The Lifted Brow, October 2013.
‘School Days’ first appeared in The Monthly, May 2009.
‘Screen Dumps’ first appeared in The Lifted Brow, April 2011.
‘Searching for Ai Hua in America’ first appeared in The Lifted Brow, February 2011.
‘Shunned in a Strange Land’ first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 August 2008.
‘Silence of the Phones’ first appeared in The Monthly, April 2008.
‘Spirit Chimes’ first appeared in The Age, 3 October 2009.
‘Stealing from Little Saigon’ first appeared in Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home, Affirm Press, Melbourne 2013.
‘STOP RACE MIXING!’ first appeared in the Australia-Indonesia Centre essay series, October 2016.
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ first appeared in Good Weekend, 11 November 2006.
‘The Bus’ first appeared in Susan La Marca and Pam MacIntyre (eds), Where the Shoreline Used to Be, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 2007.
‘The Field Marker’ first appeared in Griffith Review, October 2010.
‘The Flashing Green Man’ first appeared in The Age, 12 January 2012.
‘The Secret Life of Them’ first appeared in The Monthly, February 2013.
‘The Shed’ first appeared in A Journal of Learning, 22 July 2012.
‘The Winter After the Olympics’ first appeared in Strange Flowers: Australia-China Encounters in Writing and Art, Wakefield Press, 2011.
‘Throwing the Book’ first appeared in The Monthly, August 2007.
‘Two Cultures and a Baby’ first appeared in The Monthly, June 2015.
‘Unpolished Gem’ first appeared in Meanjin, vol. 61, no. 1, 2002.
‘Who is the Ordinary Reasonable Person?’ first appeared in The Monthly, May 2014.
‘Writing about My Father’ first appeared in Westerly, vol. 72, no. 2, 2012.