This was published 5 years ago
The five places that changed my life: Alice Pung, author
Alice Pung.
SITKA, ALASKA
I spent a few weeks in Sitka, Alaska in 2009, staying in a house with the ocean and whales visible through the back window, and brown bears hibernating in the forest out the front.
Like Darwin, Alaska is frontier territory – people often have an interesting reason to live there: environmentalists, eccentrics, and those escaping from someone or something. I
became very close to my neighbour, Joan, and we visited art fairs, quilting workshops and forests. She even took me to the nursing home where she planned to live in her old age.
When I was back in Australia, she sent me a message about reaching a "detour" in life – inoperable cancer. Joan died a few months later in her early 60s. I loved her so much and still miss her.
BEIJING, CHINA
The first time I visited Beijing with my family I was 13. Bicycles were everywhere, and the first McDonald's had just opened. Almost 15 years later, I returned by myself and
the city was unrecognisable – the bikes had been replaced by cars and skyscrapers. During my writing residency at Peking University, I thought about my late grandma a lot.
As the first educated girl in her family, she had to flee China for Cambodia because she wrote articles denouncing landlords who stole peasants' livelihoods. I realised I'd never had to sacrifice my home or family for my writing, and this made me value the gift of having a voice even more.
THE KILLING FIELDS, CAMBODIA
I visited the birth country of my parents for the first time at 29. My uncle took us to a field where half our family were buried during the Khmer Rouge reign. There were no
gravestones or markers – just empty flat dirt. The Buddhist monks in their saffron robes said prayers, and we lay down food and lit incense, offering the dead what they'd been deprived of in life – food and dignity.
MANDALAY, MYANMAR
When I was 20, I began writing to a Burmese pen-friend who lived in a Thai refugee camp. Her letters were short but full of life and loss – sometimes the camp would flood, her
parents died, she met her husband and had a daughter. We are still friends. Last year, I visited Myanmar for the first time and saw that the often powerless, ordinary people of a country are not the same as their powerful, genocidal government.
CORRYONG, VICTORIA
The Man from Snowy River is purported to come from here and this is where my husband grew up. Every year during Christmas we drive the six hours up to visit Nick's family. It's a very special idyll for us – full of kindness and peace.
.Alice Pung is an award-winning writer, editor, teacher and lawyer based in Melbourne. In 2006, she published Unpolished Gem, a memoir of growing up Chinese-Australian in working-class Footscray and has since written or edited several more. Her new book is Close to Home – Selected Writings (Black Inc., $32.99). See blackincbooks.com
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