![]() She gets her a job in the salon, where’s she’s paid $5 a day as an apprentice (“We’ll need every cent we can get,” her mother explains because “soon there will be three mouths to feed”) but in reality, does nothing more than sweep the floors and make tea for clients. Karuna wants to carry on her life as normal, going to school, hanging out with her friends, but her headstrong mother has other ideas. When I don’t answer, she says, “Do you even know who it is? Because if you don’t know who it is, we can get the police to look for them and catch them and lock them away.” She says this to me like I am five years old and don’t know about the law. I can feel her head turning on the pillow, and then she asks, “Who is it?” ![]() When 16-year-old Karuna, who is smart and bright, falls pregnant to “a boy I liked” she refuses to tell her mother who the father is. By day she works as a hairdresser in a busy salon run by the indomitable but kind-hearted Mrs Osman, and by night she works in a Thai restaurant. She once ran her own make-up business for wedding parties but had to give that up when Karuna’s Greek father moved out of the family home to live with a much younger girlfriend. ![]() Karuna’s mother (referred to as “Grand Mar” throughout) is a Chinese Filipino, whose life is dictated by tradition and superstition. The pair live together in a one-bedroom housing commission flat in Melbourne, where they share a bed, making privacy between mother and daughter near on impossible. Until then, I believed her fairytales, because I was at the centre of them. Until the summer I turned thirteen, I hadn’t realised that she had been narrating the story of my life, including the dialogue. It was both deliberate and accidental, the way most important decisions are. In this gripping story, certainly one of the best I have read in 2021 (I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t make my top 10 at the end of the year), teenage Karuna is smothered by her mother’s desire to protect her.īecause she didn’t have many small things when she was growing up, she made me her Big Thing. I have previously read Pung’s extraordinary memoir Her Father’s Daughter, a moving account of what it was like growing up in Australia with Cambodian parents who had fled the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, so I was keen to read this one. Fiction – paperback Black Inc 244 pages 2021.Ī mother’s obsessive love for her daughter is at the heart of Alice Pung’s profoundly moving novel One Hundred Days.
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