Unpolished Gem Literary Elements

Autobiography/Memoir/History

Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge and Australia in its aftermath following the safe passage there by the family.

First person point-of-view through the perspective of the author.

Nostalgic, wistful, rebellious, embarrassed, and optimistic.

Protagonist: Alice Pung. Antagonist: The culture clash created by the conflicting demands upon Alice of assimilating into western culture while maintaining strong bonds with her Asian heritage.

The conflict is driven by the culture clash in which familial devotion is pitted against the rebellious desire to fit with the surrounding culture.

Alice breaks up with her non-Asian Australian boyfriend in order to fulfil familial expectations.

The reference to a ghost alludes to Asian girls dating white boys which foreshadows Alice’s eventual relationship with Michael which stimulates so much conflict: "Yes, but she's gone with the ghosts already. She's going to marry one, and then it will be the end of us.

The quality of understatement actually becomes another source of cultural conflict in the story as the result of a gift of a very small bouquet of flowers from Michael: “My mother didn't understand that sometimes the more understated things cost the most. All she knew was that the bigger and brighter, the better.”

Alice’s descent into depression as a result of feelings of isolation and alienation from the world around here is made more tangible through an allusion to the similar emotional state of a famously reclusive poet: “I felt a funeral in my brain, and we hadn't even studied Emily Dickinson yet.”

Just prior to the allusion to Dickinson, Pung paints a portrait of her emotional disconnection through a visceral example of imagery: “I woke up one morning with a false skin on my face. This skin was made of rubber, and it took great effort to move the muscles. I put my fingers on either side of my face and pinched, but no red came, not even patchy fingermarks. I could not prise off this rubber death-mask.”

An Pung, the author’s grandfather, believes he has been cursed because he keeps producing daughters instead of sons only to paradoxically get upset precisely because Ah Di—earning the nickname Little Brother—exhibits exactly the very same masculine traits he prizes so highly: “You’ve not given me a son, but a daughter who like a son! Woe, what could be worse?”

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“Ah Pot” is a metonymic reference to the Cambodian tyrant who ruled during Cambodia’s genocidal regime, Pol Pot, which serves to encompass every terrible aspect of his dominion.

"`Buddha bless Father Government!’ She calls it Father Government, like Father Christmas, as if he is a tangible benign white-bearded guru with an everlasting bag of cheques slung over one shoulder.”