Instead, Kuan rubs Alice’s feet when she is upset and teaches her that Adam, not Eve, is the one who is really responsible for the fall of man. He is very different from his own father, An Pung, who values only sons and is bored by daughters. More than a decade after her best-selling debut, Unpolished Gem, Alice Pung remains one of Australia’s most beloved authors for her gentle yet forthright prose. He builds his business “up from scratch,” and achieves the “Great Australian Dream.” Kuan spends most of his time at work, and even though he is strict, he and Alice share a close and comfortable relationship. Once the Pungs leave Cambodia, Kien still buries gold in the backyard to remind her of her life in the old. In Phnom Penh under the Khmer Rouge regime, Pol Pot closes the banks and turns their money into worthless pieces of dirty paper, and only gold retains its value.

He works several jobs before managing to open his own electronics store, and after years of hard work, he finally owns two Retravision franchises. Gold symbolizes security, wealth, and success within Unpolished Gem. He takes classes to learn the English language and even works as a translator at the Migrant Hostel. Kuan is fully committed to assimilating to Australia culture when he arrives safely in Victoria after a year in a Thai refugee camp. He is kind and funny, and deeply in love with his wife.

Kuan escapes the Killing Fields of Cambodia and walks through three countries with his wife, mother, and sister, just to try to have a better life away from the death and suffering of Southeast Asia. Unpolished Gem is a book rich in comedy, a loving and irreverent portrait of a family, its everyday struggles and bittersweet triumphs. Alice’s father, Kien’s husband, and Huyen Thai’s son. Unpolished Gem is a moving, vivid journey about identity and the ultimate search for acceptance and healing, delivered by a writer possessed of rare. Unpolished Gem tells the autobiographical story of Alice Pung, an Australian of Chinese-Cambodian background, from birth to starting university in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

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