“Would you like some Pol Pot? It’s made with 100% fresh-ground suffering.”
The novel is a tale of the immigrant experience and cultural assimilation. The background for this particular story is the movement of a family from Southeast Asia to Australia that covers the period of time when that region was the most explosive, blood, violent, corrupt, and controversial in the world. Pol Pot is the name of the Cambodian dictator infamous for the Killing Fields thought to be responsible for somewhere between 1.5 and two million deaths with some politically motivated estimates reaching even higher. That malevolent foundation on which the family story is constructed is not ignored or underplayed, but it is presented as kind of a fuzzy backdrop which is always present, but never dominates the present of the narrative. The narrator quickly establishes this structural foundation in relation both to how Cambodia shaped their future and to the fact that the country’s most notorious figure does not exactly have the name recognition of similar mass murderers with this imaginative response to the average person hearing the name.
Why were white people so proud of their chop-stick-wielding skills instead of seeing the abysmally low standards we set for them?
It is a novel about assimilation, after all, and that is a process which works both ways. The process of immigration brings new cultures into a place where they had not existed before and in which their traditions and customs place them into the unusual position of being in the minority. The expectation is to slowly adopt at the very least the most necessary conventions of the dominant culture relative to facilitating interaction. Most, of course, will go beyond that and adopt those cultural modes of expression not necessary to interaction. The reverse generally holds true for the dominant culture; they rarely adopt necessary customs and instead attempt interaction by seeking to make connections through defining cultural practices related to things like sports, food, entertainment, etc. Soccer and ska belong to the same generalized concept as eating with chopsticks. By comparison, playing soccer or being in a ska band is a poor substitute for understanding the cultures which bring those new experiences into the mix.
“Migrants don’t assimilate. They all come here and stick together, and don’t bother to learn the language.”
This is the standard argument forwarded by xenophobes looking to justify their racial bias and cultural prejudices. The flimsiness of the argument is as obvious as the obliviousness of the speaker. If migrants never bother learning the native language then how on earth it is possible for them to take away so many jobs, which is, of course, another standard line of argument. The possibility of millions of foreigners pouring into a country, not learning to speak the language and somehow managing to steal away all the jobs sounds ridiculous when said that way and yet that is exactly the logical conclusion being made every day by hundreds of millions of people in countries around the planet complaining about the impact of an unstoppable overflow of migrants. The expression of this ideologically unsound premise voiced by the other student has turned out to be one of those myths that never fades away; remaining every bit as viable to substantial portions of the world’s population as it ever has. This is what makes book about the migrant experience and assimilation still necessary.
Coming of Age for boys was infinitely more interesting, I thought, when I watched Stand by Me and Dead Poets Society. Boys formed friendships by discovering cadavers. They walked on railway tracks, started secret clubs, cried over their own cowardice and occasionally shot themselves in the head when pushed too far. It didn’t matter if girls were cowards, there was no opportunity or reason for us to test our bravery. All that mattered was that we could make a good pot of rice, had a pretty face and were fertile.
Migrant culture and assimilation is not the only focus of the story. The trek through past and present is also a portrait of gender inequality precisely because it is a girl’s story. A girl with very protective parents who is shielded and sheltered through the prism of one culture even as she is growing up firmly within the environment of an often completely different set of societal rules and codes of behavior. Culture clashes are almost always situated within the context of gender complications. Because gender roles are drawn distinctly within any given cultural subset, when taken out of the protective cocoon and forced to face (if not accept) the pressures of assimilating within foreign cultural expectations, the story will rarely if ever be exactly the same if when presented from both a male and female perspective.
