Alice Pung's Growing up Asian in Australia: The Cultural Work of Anthologized Asian-Australian Narratives of Childhood

This paper examines the 2008 literary anthology Growing up Asian in Australia, edited by the young Australian writer and award-winning memoirist, Alice Pung. Featuring a collection of auto/biographically based prose, poetry, and comics by Asian-Australian authors, each short text within the anthology focuses on coming-of-age in modern-day Australia. Informed by auto/biography and Asian-Australian studies, this paper explores the cultural work that Pung's anthology aims to do. Through a reading of the anthology's paratexts as well as the short, individual childhood autobiographies, the discussion considers the strategies Pung employs in order to attract a broad readership, and how the anthology mobilizes life narratives of childhood to intervene in debates about Australian national, local, and personal identities at the start of the twenty-first century. I argue that Pung's text skillfully balances politics and populism, critiquing fundamental issues of national identity and self-representation while simultaneously appealing to a broad readership.