The novel Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung highlights the life surrounding Asian-Australian family where Alice, the main character, parents moved to Australia to seek refuge from war ongoing in their country. Australia was a place of wonder for them as the place seems to welcome them with open hand and full of things that they have not known before. Alice was therefore named after the main character in Alice in wonderland as a commemoration of them living in the ‘wonderland’.
As the novel progresses, conflicts slowly begin to unfold in their life. Alice was stuck between the frequent fights between her mother and grandmother, her parents struggle to support the family, and Alice also later on struggle with depression while playing her role as the ‘good daughter’. The novel did not show the flowery path or life of immigrants finding life in Australia, rather it shows the reality that people in the third space has to face and the conflict of maintaining their tradition and identity while assimilating to the new place that they are calling ‘home’.
Through the perspective of poststructuralism, Unpolished Gem can be seen as a novel that foreground the binary opposition of White/Other where the typically White is placed closest to the centre of the structure. Unpolished Gem is centralized around the life of Chinese-Cambodian living in Australia, a group that belongs to the Other or more specifically, in the Third space. Therefore, it deconstructs the binary opposition of White/Other, showing more sides of the Other that frequently depicted in a negative way with very minimal details.
In some part of the novel, the authors also portrayed the White as disliked figure that were given names or certain nicknamed to be referred to rather than their own name. For example, Alice’s cousin got married to an Anglo-Australian that was usually nicknamed ‘skip’ which refers to Skippy, the bush kangaroo. He was later referred as “Round Red-haired Demon” by all the relatives rather than his real name. Thus, this novel deconstructs the usual structure of White/Other while depicting White as the unfavoured figure that are negatively viewed by majority of the characters in the novel. Strangely enough, the author also mentioned that despite their disliked towards White, her relatives boasted of his son-in-law’s influence as White to other relatives.
This novel also explores how Alice struggle to balance between the tradition in her culture and the liberal ideas or lifestyle of Australia. The binary opposition of traditional/liberal for Asians would put the traditional as being closest to its centre. On the other hand, western would be more inclined to liberal/traditional binary opposition where the liberal is the closest to the centre. Alice has to learn to balance the line between these two binary opposites instead of succumbing solely to one part of it. Tradition was important to Alice as it holds her identity, but she was also unable to follow the tradition completely since she has to assimilate to Australian way of life to certain degree.
The binary opposition between truth/lies also seems to have not been as preferred in the novel. This can be seen when Alice was asked to be a spy to her mother by her grandmother and also a spy to her grandmother by her mother. Alice was caught between telling the truth of what the other party said about another or lying so that they would not fight against one another. In this case, truth no longer seems to be a better option as it only tore apart her family even more and made her the victim of the situation.
In conclusion, literary works does, according to Derrida inclined to breaks the structure that typically seen in language. The deconstruction of the structure makes the literary text stands out and gives it unique characteristics that people tend to ignore. However, Unpolished Gem is not just a literary text, it is a memoir of a true journey of Chinese-Cambodian in the land they thought as Wonderland.