Her Father's Daughter by Alice Pung

Author:Alice Pung
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Alice Pung, Her Father's Daughter, Unpolished Gem
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2011-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

MENU USING WARTIME RATIONS

In 1969 and 1970 Nixon and Kissinger, names which made you think of cartoon characters with sweet puckered lips, bombed a neutral land without the knowledge of their own country-folk and called it ‘Operation Breakfast’. Breakfast was hanging by a thin strip of meat the colour of prosciutto, a boy’s arm from a torn T-shirt sleeve, swinging like a hock of ham, well smoked. Fried eggs in the womb of a young woman, fully cooked.

But breakfast was not enough. It was as if they could not find the cheap plastic toy in the cereal packet. Their B-52s could not dislodge the Vietcong from their bases, so they decided that a full ‘Menu’ operation was in order.

Lunch: slow roasted ragged folks thin as tarantulas, seasoned with sweat and the salt of the earth.

Snack: crackling skin with beautiful blisters, Lady Fingers, already peeled.

Supper: rare, medium or well done, small ones squealing like piglets, medium-sized ones bleating like hoary goats. There were no large ones.

Dessert: sweet young girls, blouses burst open, tender as pink cupcakes. Hundreds and thousands on top.

As the Vietcong moved deeper into Cambodia, so did the bombing. It sucked the air from people’s lungs. The ground shook, disgorging the visceral fruits of the earth. Split-open brains and sweet blood leaked from lives in a cacophony of colour. When the giant insects of metal buzzed in the sky, people had to act as though they were already cadavers. They crossed their arms, hugged their shoulders and lay on the ground. They taught their children to do the same. They lay like mummies and bred a whole generation of drop-dead-at-the-drop-of-a-bomb babies.

Sixty days later, when 11,000 were dead, Nixon declared this the ‘most successful operation of the war’.

From Beijing, the father-prince of Cambodia, Sihanouk, felt the sting of what was happening to his country. ‘Brothers and sisters,’ he entreated, ‘go to the jungle and join the guerrillas.’ No wonder the guerrillas emerged from the jungles burning with hatred for technology: the bomb, the mine, the gun, the giant prehistoric insects in the sky.

*

War pumped up business for Kuan’s family, which his elder brother Kiv ran. Their factory was thriving. With all the men off at the war to fight the Vietcong, they hired children, girls of twelve to fifteen. Girls had nimble fingers and seemed more docile. They were filling orders from the overseas aid agencies, who needed plastic bags for food distribution. Peasant-farmer refugees who had lost their homes were now gathering at the edges of the city, starving, selling their labour, begging.

Every day an unknown and faceless black force seemed to be creeping closer and closer to the city. They were rumoured to be a nationalistic group known as the Khmer Rouge, the guerrilla army that Sihanouk, the good Prince of the Land, had summoned to defend the country. The land was theirs, they had been tilling it for thousands of years, and they were coming to reclaim it. Dressed entirely in black, they grew like mushrooms in

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