Not a refugee, an arrival: a conversation with Alice Pung

At the recent annual dinner for Catholic Social Services Victoria, award-winning author and lawyer Alice Pung sat down with Caritas mission director and writer Michael McGirr to share some of her story.

The dinner was an opportunity for people at the coalface of the sector—those who work with the homeless, sick and elderly, marginalised and most traumatised people in society—to connect and regroup. Against the background of the Catholic social services ethos of being places of peace in a storm, Ms Pung said there is a need to rethink what it means to offer refuge.

She began by challenging the label ‘refugee’. Her ethnic Chinese family fled the Killing Fields of Cambodia, lucky not to be among the estimated 1.3 million people murdered by the Pol Pot regime. They were refugees under the United Nations definition—people who are forced to flee persecution—since Chinese Cambodians were persecuted in that era, part of a broader policy of ethnic cleansing.

But she rejects the idea that this defines her: ‘You know that the act of fleeing is a verb, and so to me, the state of being a refugee is a transient one,’ she said. ‘It’s a verb, and once the action is complete, it’s no longer a state that we should occupy forever.’

My family were given a literal new lease on life when they arrived here.

Once her parents had left Cambodia, traversed Vietnam and spent time in a refugee camp in Thailand, getting to Australia was no longer flight but arrival; and that is how Ms Pung, born in Australia one month after her parents landed in Melbourne, sees herself. ‘I am not a refugee … I come to you tonight as “an arrival”,’ she stated.

‘My family were given a literal new lease on life when they arrived here, and when I was born at the Western General Hospital in Footscray, my dad named me Alice because, when he was a teenager, he read a story about a young girl who finds herself in an incredible, magical land.’

Ms Pung spoke about her father’s need to feel he had left Cambodia behind and was starting afresh in Australia, ‘a wonderland’. Her parents went back to Cambodia recently to visit family and were proud of getting sick while there. For her father, that was a sign that he was a ‘first world person’, clean and strong, unable to tolerate the old life.

Yet starting from scratch did not mean an escape from memories of a bad time. Decades after leaving Cambodia, her father still hid knives at night, blunting them so they could not be used against the family. Ms Pung described this as ‘Dismemory’, quoting from her book My Father’s Daughter: ‘There should be a word for a memory that you had deliberately forgotten to remember: a Dismemory. This is what her father had.’

Life was not all trauma, and this was Ms Pung’s point about refugee status being transient. As arrivals, her family were making a new life for themselves as best they could, and amid the relentless hard work and the memories they tried to avoid were love, hilarity and wonder.

And alongside them, ‘from the very beginning’, were Catholic social services. One of Ms Pung’s earliest memories was of her devout Buddhist grandmother praying. ‘She would say, “Lord Buddha, please bless Jesus Christ and his three brothers: St Lawrence, St Vincent, and De Paul.”’ Ms Pung laughed, realising, of course, that they were not Jesus’ brothers, but that they did do things for her family, providing clothing and shoes, a fridge and a television.

She recalls her parents buying cans of meat but not realising until they saw a television advertisement for dog food that that was what they were eating. Rather than being disgusted, Alice says, her mother was happily amazed that dogs in Australia ate better than humans in Cambodia did at that time.

Referring to organisations like the House of Welcome in Ballarat and the Brigidine Asylum-Seekers Project, Ms Pung said it was clear those working in the Catholic social justice sphere feel empathy for refugees. But she urged those in the room to think differently about them, to expand their idea of who needs refuge.

‘When a woman flees an abusive household, she’s a refugee. She falls within that [United Nations] definition. But the woman who escapes may also thrive as a mother or grandmother, an employee, a mentor, a community leader.’

In other words, our goal should be that a person is not defined by the act of fleeing: that ‘they won’t have to revisit their refugee status ever again if they don’t want to; never have to use it to justify why they belong in society; never have to have their workplace single them out on Harmony Day to re-live their trauma and prove their sense of belonging; never have to use their refugee status to “make the nation proud”.’

She praised Jesuit Social Services in particular for offering shelter without fanfare. When a family tragedy struck, she went to a JSS counsellor named Anne, who didn’t demand payment or probe her faith or make her feel uncomfortable about seeking help.

‘Anne saw the stranger in need,’ Ms Pung said. ‘And that’s who I wanted to be—a stranger, not a well-known Melbourne author—and Anne helped that stranger go on.’

Expressing her personal appreciation for the work done by those gathered at the dinner, she said, ‘Catholic social services saved my life, and they did not make a big deal of it. And I know, firsthand, you continue to save and change lives every single day.’

As Michael McGirr put it at the end of the evening, Ms Pung ‘filled the sails’ of everyone present by acknowledging that the work on the ground is taxing and demanding, but so vital. And she left them with food for thought: the need for refuge is temporary, and offering it is about letting people move beyond their worst moments.