This article repositions Alice Pung’s Unpolished Gem as a critical intervention in contemporary diasporic life writing. Rather than conforming to familiar refugee trauma or multicultural success narratives, Pung’s memoir constructs identity as a relational and intergenerational process shaped by maternal storytelling, linguistic fracture, and gendered regulation. Drawing on feminist theories of relational autobiography and postcolonial accounts of memory transmission, this article argues that Pung stages the autobiographical self not as autonomous or resolved, but as dialogically formed through negotiation with maternal lineage. Through strategic deployments of silence, narrative distance, and cultural ‘double agency’, Unpolished Gem reveals second-generation diasporic subjectivity as an ongoing practice of mediation – between generations, between languages, and between competing models of femininity. By foregrounding relational becoming over assimilation or rupture, Pung expands the formal and ethical possibilities of contemporary life writing.
Tian Zhuoling (Thu,) studied this question.