Back in the ’90s, we were the gangs: Alice Pung
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Growing up in Melbourne’s western melting pot, Alice Pung never felt threatened by the drug culture among the migrant kids around her, but she was very much aware of it.
Though a self-confessed “anxious and slightly depressed” girl, the author-to-be could recognise even then that Asian kids using and selling heroin were from families which, like her Cambodian-Chinese refugee parents, had escaped trauma.
Alice Pung lives on campus at Melbourne University as a college artist-in-residence, but her roots are still firmly in Footscray.
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Alice Pung was almost 40, not 16, and pregnant with her third child, not her first, when she moved in with her parents in Melbourne during lockdown last year, accompanied by her husband Nick and their two boys, aged six and two. But as with her new novel’s adolescent narrator, Karuna, Alice found herself at times stifled by her mother’s “practical kind of love”.
“It was so weird. I went back into the book when I was editing it and I thought, ‘Oh, these lines were authentic because that’s what I said to my mum three days ago and I feel guilty about it,’ ” Alice says, laughing.
Author Alice Pung on the inspiration behind One Hundred Days smh.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from smh.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.