Who wrote Unpolished Gem?

Unpolished Gem was written by Alice Pung, an Australian writer born in Footscray in 1981 to ethnic-Chinese parents who fled the Cambodian genocide. It was published in 2006 and was her first book.

What type of text is Unpolished Gem?

It is a memoir, subtitled My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me, built as a loose chronology across three generations of women.

What does the title Unpolished Gem mean?

It comes from a Cambodian proverb in which a boy is a gem to be polished and a girl merely cotton wool; Pung reclaims the boy's precious word for the unvalued girl who narrates the book.

What are the main themes of Unpolished Gem?

The memoir explores belonging between cultures, language as both inheritance and barrier, gendered ideas of worth, and comedy as a means of surviving trauma.

BTA Online Resources

Unpolished Gem

by Alice PungPrescribed for HSC English 2024–2027 (NESA) · Last reviewed September 2026Unpolished Gem is a 2006 memoir by the Australian writer Alice Pung, the daughter of ethnic-Chinese parents who fled the Cambodian genocide. Set largely in Melbourne's Footscray, it follows three generations of women living between two languages.

Book a Free Consultation More free resources

Summary

Unpolished Gem is a 2006 memoir by the Australian writer Alice Pung, the daughter of ethnic-Chinese parents who fled the Cambodian genocide. Set largely in Melbourne's Footscray, it follows three generations of women living between two languages. It is set for HSC English EAL/D Module A: Language, Identity and Culture.

Alice Pung was born in Footscray, a working-class migrant suburb in Melbourne's west, in 1981, the eldest daughter of ethnic-Chinese parents who had fled the Cambodian genocide. Unpolished Gem, published in 2006, was her first book and became one of the defining Australian memoirs of the migrant second generation. It is not a misery memoir and not a triumphant success story: it is a comedy of dislocation, written from inside a family learning to live between two languages and two ideas of what a person, and especially a girl, is for.

Subtitled My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me, the memoir's real drama is a triangle of women: the storytelling grandmother Huyen Thai, the working, isolated mother Kien, and Alice caught between them as translator and spreader of words. It moves through a child's-eye comedy of arrival - Footscray footpaths studded with chewing gum rather than gold, dog food mistaken for a marvel of plenty - into the darker middle years where Kien works endlessly while her children's English slowly shuts her out of her own home. The later movements follow Alice's adolescence: the grammar school where the migrant children never fit in, a first love her mother cannot accept, and a stress-induced breakdown, before the epilogue returns Alice to her inherited role as keeper of the family's words.

The title comes from a Cambodian proverb in which a boy is a gem to be polished and a girl merely dirtiable cotton wool. The whole memoir is an act of repolishing: taking a childhood the old culture would not count as precious and making it shine on the page.

Context

Alice Pung was born in Footscray, a working-class migrant suburb in Melbourne's west, in 1981, the eldest daughter of ethnic-Chinese parents who had fled the Cambodian genocide; her father survived the Killing Fields of Pol Pot's regime. Unpolished Gem, published in 2006, was her first book and became one of the defining Australian memoirs of the migrant second generation. The memoir is written from inside a specific historical passage, the flight of ethnic-Chinese Cambodians from genocide to the multicultural Australia of the 1980s and 1990s, and from a specific position within it, the eldest daughter who becomes the family's translator and spreader of words. Its theatres are the ordinary places of migrant life - the Footscray market, the family's electrical-goods shop, a selective grammar school - and its real subject is language: the Cantonese, Teochew and Cambodian the grandmother speaks, the English the children adopt, and the widening gap of words in which the mother is stranded.

Themes and Techniques

The memoir's central question is where a Chinese-Cambodian girl raised in Footscray belongs, and Pung answers it with a colour. Her grandmother insists she is precious, gold rather than yellow, so that her death leaves Alice without the one voice that conferred that worth, while the banana children who imagine they can be white inside are the warning against assimilation as hollowing-out. At school, solidarity and exclusion become the same act, as the migrant students stick together and so never fit in.

Language is the memoir's real protagonist. It is the grandmother's gift, storytelling that turns words into pictures in the mind, and the wall that divides the family: as Alice's Chinese drains away, she no longer has the words to explain herself to her mother, and the second generation's tragedy is located in that loss of the mother tongue. Storytelling becomes a way of keeping the dead alive, and the memoir defines itself as that act.

Culture is transmitted forked, not whole. The proverb behind the title, in which a girl is cotton wool that can never be clean once dirtied and a boy a gem that shines the more it is polished, hands down a whole hierarchy in one balanced sentence, and Pung reclaims the boy's precious word for the unvalued girl. The inheritance of long-suffering womanhood is flatly declined, and Kien's portrait is one of relentless, unending work.

The comedy is the argument. Pung meets even the family's history of genocide with black humour, claiming the migrant family's right to laugh at what nearly destroyed it. Children in the new country fear swallowed chewing gum rather than ammunition, and the family's wonder at a country where even dogs have food made for them renders both the plenty of the new world and the poverty of the old. The humour disarms the reader so that the darker material - the mother's despair, the breakdown - lands harder for arriving in the middle of a joke.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which module is Unpolished Gem studied in for the HSC?: Unpolished Gem is set for HSC English EAL/D Module A: Language, Identity and Culture.
Who wrote Unpolished Gem?: Unpolished Gem was written by Alice Pung, an Australian writer born in Footscray in 1981 to ethnic-Chinese parents who fled the Cambodian genocide. It was published in 2006 and was her first book.
What type of text is Unpolished Gem?: It is a memoir, subtitled My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me, built as a loose chronology across three generations of women.
What does the title Unpolished Gem mean?: It comes from a Cambodian proverb in which a boy is a gem to be polished and a girl merely cotton wool; Pung reclaims the boy's precious word for the unvalued girl who narrates the book.
What are the main themes of Unpolished Gem?: The memoir explores belonging between cultures, language as both inheritance and barrier, gendered ideas of worth, and comedy as a means of surviving trauma.

Studying Unpolished Gem for the HSC?

Unpolished Gem is studied in HSC English EAL/D Module A: Language, Identity and Culture, which asks how language shapes and reflects individual and cultural identity, and how texts represent the relationships between them. BTA's expert English tutors work with students one-on-one on exactly that skill - find out more about English tutoring at BTA or explore our HSC English resources.

Contact Us

Ready to get started, or have a question about tutoring?

Reach our team on 1800 002 085 (free to call) or send us an enquiry through our contact page.

Unpolished Gem

More Module A texts

Contact Us