앨리스 풍의 『그녀의 아버지의 딸』

Abstract

This paper explores Alice Pung’s postmemoir Her Father’s Daughter in terms of the theories of postmemory, as Pung inherits and writes about her father’s memory and testimony. Instead of using the first person narrator, Pung’s postmemoir fluctuates between the third person perspective of herself and that of her father, and contrasts her father’s memory of the Cambodian Killing Fields with her peaceful life in the western suburbs of Melbourne. Likewise, Pung's postmemoir combines fragmented and conflicting narratives rather than assigning a single authoritative voice to an individual who has experienced or is assumed to have experienced the events, and rather than chronologically arranging the events. It is because Pung, herself, did not experience the traumatic events herself, but grew up with their after-effect; that is to say, she indirectly but deeply engaged in “dismemory,” a memory that her father tried to forget and he kept secret from his children. However, these memories are transmitted between the generations, and the daughter finally digs into her father’s secrets and searches for the postmemory in the second generation, as well as in her identity as an Asian-Australian of Chinese-Cambodian descent. Pung's postmemoir does not seem to succeed in fully representing her father’s ‘unspeakable’ memories or ‘the vacuum of testimony.’ Nevertheless, the fact that Pung as an inheritor of postmemory accepts her father's traumatic experience with empathy and imagination is significant in that Pung's postmemoir evokes the ethics of 'the pain of others' by utilizing alternative narratives rather than dramatically embodying the traumatic experience.