Unpolished Gem: Part 3 Summary & Analysis

“Ah!” yells Kien as she sits straight up in bed. She has felt little peace since the Pungs moved into their new house, and she has finally figured out why. “It’s our toilet!” she cries. “Our ensuite toilet!” The family’s Buddhist shrine, the one with An Pung’s picture on it, is located downstairs, directly under the toilet. “We are crapping on our gods and ancestors,” Alice says. “That is why there is no peace in this new house.”

The Pungs take dreams and ancestors very seriously, and dreams are discussed as a family at meals. Kuan had avoided going back to Cambodia for years now because his dead grandfather told him not to in a dream. Kuan’s brothers own six new banks in Cambodia and are doing very well, but the ominous dream keeps him in Australia. Now, he has abandoned the idea of going back to Cambodia altogether and is focused on the “Great Australian Dream.”

Alice thinks about how Huyen Thai had saved all her money from the plastic bag factory to buy a terrace house in Phnom Penh back in Cambodia. Before she even had the chance to move in, Pol Pot’s regime forced her to the countryside to work. It’s seems obvious to Alice that Kuan should feel leery about going back. When they began to build the new house in Australia, Kuan had “poured over the details” each night. “Such a big house for such little people,” Alice’s friends said when they saw the plans.

While the Pungs were building their new house, Alice continues, they would drive each weekend to the construction site to assess the progress. “This was our weekly Sunday trip,” Alice says, “to watch the temple being constructed and to worship the fruits of our labour.” Kien even dressed Alison and Alina in dresses for the drive. Alice and Alexander would grow bored at the building site, but Kuan and Kien stood for hours, pointing at this or that, planning the future.

In the new house, the colorful and tacky knickknacks and paper chains are gone. Here, things are “different, things are whitewashed. Nothing can look too peasanty.” The house is decorated in pale pastels, and the Pungs are the envy of their entire family.

Kien has felt uneasy in the house ever since they moved in, so she tries to distract herself by working in the garage. Moving the Buddha shrine does little to make her feel better, and she realizes that she must be feeling uneasy because she cannot find the glass jars of gold she had buried in the yard at the old house in Braybrook. She keeps the jars “as a residue of the fear left from the old country.” Under Pol Pot, money became “worthless pieces of dirty paper,” but gold retained value. Kien is convinced she has left four jars buried in their old backyard.

The next day, Kien calls the Cantonese woman who bought their old house and tells her that there are the remains of Pung ancestors buried in her yard. The woman is “scared to death of the ancestors, everybody is,” and she tells Kien to come and dig them up right away. Kien and Que dig several holes, but they don’t find any gold.

“Kim” is both Vietnamese and Chinese for gold, Alice says, so the jewelry stores in Footscray are collectively called the Kims. One day after school, Alice goes with Kien to the Kims to collect money for her gold and jewelry. Alice notes that the Vietnamese Kims are stylish and the women wear fashionable clothes and hairstyles. The Chinese Kims, she says, are much “less chic” and have a “turnip-and-carrot-soup sort of existence.” The Chinese Kims, Alice says, are just like her mother. They do not own gold or wear gold— “the gold owns them.”

 Sometimes the Kims go bankrupt, and even though they know that they are closing, they still accept gold from Kien. The next week, when she comes to collect, their shops are boarded up and they are gone. One Kim has owed her for months, so Kien sits in the store all day, staring at them behind the counter. “Chinese people shouldn’t owe any debts,” Kien says. The Kims insist they have no money, so they give Kien a gold bracelet as surety until they can pay.

Kien is constantly haggling prices and payments, and many of the Kims try to undercut her. They say that because Kien’s husband owns two Hi-Fi stores, she doesn’t need the money as much as they do. They question why she even works at all. Surely, she doesn’t need to. What the Kims don’t know is that as they undercut her prices, “they are also stripping away her sense of purpose.” Kien still has a good twenty-five working years left in her, and she can’t imagine spending them at home.

 Alice notes that Kien is “not a talker,” but “a shouter.” She is especially loud in the car, and Alice wears headphones under a scarf to drown out the noise. “The less she has to say,” Alice says, “the louder she gets.” She mostly shouts about money and how much everything costs, and the cost of Alice’s education is at the top of her list. “Not every family can send their kids to such a school,” she tells Alice. “Especially not the girls.”

Kien tells Alice that when she was a child, all the Chinese schools were shut down. Kien has worked most of her life, and she believes that instead of making kids brighter, too much school leads to becoming “limp and lazy.” She gets angry because Alice can’t explain the bank statements to her—even “with all that education”—and says that she should “at least know the simplest things.” Alice is ashamed because her mother is right; she can’t explain the bank statements—in Chinese. She is “running out of words.”

Since she is running out of words, Alice doesn’t talk much, and even at school she is quiet. “One wrong word could mean being found out for a philistine,” Alice says. At home, Kien gets louder. At the dinner table, her family speaks mostly in English, and they don’t acknowledge that Kien can’t understand them.

A classmate at school tells Alice that “migrants don’t assimilate. They all come here and stick together, and don’t bother to learn the language.” But Kien insists on learning English. She has Alice find an address for a language school on map. “I’m going to learn it now,” she says, “no matter what.” The class is only ten dollars per term— “a bargain,” Kien thinks.

Kien asks everyone to start speaking to her in English, so Alice talks to her mother in slow, broken words and phrases. She asks how she is doing and if she had a good day. “Stop asking crazy pointless questions,” Kien yells, “and let me learn something useful!”

All of the migrants in the English class speak varying levels of English. Kien doesn’t understand the worksheets that the instructor hands out, and she thinks the simple sentences and phrases are senseless when she does figure them out. “Who gives a crap about the man with tin can over his head? Stupid idiot.” Alice helps her read one of Alina’s children’s books, and they read it three times. Alice applauds Kien for reading the entire book, but she dismisses her. “I don’t know what it says,” Kien says. “I just memorized the whole thing when you first read it to me.”

Alice continues to sink further into quiet isolation, and the more she studies, the less she speaks. She says that she always checks the “English as a second language” box on every form she fills out, but she is “beginning to think in English.” “At least I am losing my word-spreading status,” Alice thinks to herself.

Kien continues to have difficulties learning English, and she frequently cries and yells that everyone is going to leave her. “I am getting old and you are all going to leave me because I don’t know the English!” she screams. But she is still determined to learn, and she constantly asks Alice how to say this or that, until Kien’s “questions became more difficult to answer than the literature Alice has to study in class.”

One day during a holiday from school, Kien takes Alice with her to visit one of the aunts. The women trade their stories of suffering and woe, and Alice “realizes that it is the same everywhere.” Inside all these Chinese homes are “countless silent women” who are “living the dream lives of the rich and idle in Phnom Penh, and yet their imposed idleness makes them inarticulate and loud.” Alice’s aunt laments that her teenage children no longer talk to her—they go straight to their rooms after school. “Aiyohh,” Kien says, “yours don’t speak to you anymore? Well, I have it worse. Mine can’t speak to me anymore!”

“At least you have a daughter,” Alice’s aunt tells Kien. “Yes,” says Kien, “but she’s gone with the ghosts already. She’s going to marry one, and then it will be the end of us.” The women decide they are “doomed” because they don’t know English. Their children are likely to ship them off to a nursing home, like the Australians do. “Kids these days have no loyalty,” Kien says.

Later, when she burns the taro cakes while cooking dinner, Alice feels like she can do nothing right. She asks Kien to teach her to cook, but Kien tells her she doesn’t need to learn. “When you get married,” Kien says, “you’re going to be making ghost food for your ghost husband.” Plus, Kien says, why should she teach Alice anything if she is just going to leave her anyway? Alice remembers that her mother has English class in the morning, but Kien says she has stopped going. “Who would I speak the English to, I ask you?” she questions.

Sometime later, the Pungs hang a new chandelier in their sitting room. Alice flips the switch to watch the light dance around the crystals, and Kien screams, “Turn it off! What are you doing? Stupid, turning it on and off like that wasting energy!” The light is only to be used for visitors—just like the couch and the dining room table.

Kien tells Alice that it is time to go pick up Alina and Alison from school. But it is already too late. Alice had walked the long way home from school and stopped by her sisters’ school because she figured her mother would forget. She did. Kien’s shoulders “slump.” “Another failure,” she thinks. She can’t take care of her kids properly, and she hasn’t been able to work lately either.

The chemicals Kien uses to process the gold have begun to affect her lungs and make her cough. The cough has failed to improve, so she has not been going out into the garage. Instead, her workspace is dark and covered with an old bedspread.

Kuan wants Kien to sell all her gold processing equipment and just stay home with the kids, but she can’t see herself doing such a thing. Still, she is getting old and running all over Footscray is becoming difficult, and she worries a purse-snatcher will take her bag of gold. Plus, the skin on her hands has blackened and begun to crack from the chemicals. Like “a coal miner’s hands,” Alice thinks.

Kien wishes that she could work in Kuan’s shop counting the money like Que, but she doesn’t speak English. “I am a useless person!” Kien cries. Her doctor diagnoses her with depression, and she complains of her constant “scattered thoughts.” She is given little white Zoloft pills and told to wait.

Kien can’t stand staying home and she has a hard time occupying her days with housework. She does the grocery shopping, but even a good deal fails to cheer her up. She begins to obsess about the cleanliness of the house, and yells over any stains or scratches.

Kuan knows that Kien needs to work again if she is ever to get any better, so he decides that she should come to work at his store despite her poor English. Kuan asks Alice to look after the house while Kien goes back to work, and she is “exuberant.” Alice sees her mother going back to work as “the best thing that has happened in a long time” and doesn’t mind having more work because of it.

Kuan hires Kien as a salesperson. She is given a time-card and put in the toilet-cleaning rotation (his store is now big enough to have one), and he brings home invoices to familiarize her with the language. Kuan teaches her how to write “washing machine,” “hair dryer,” and “toaster.” Kien writes the words over and over, and tapes scraps of paper all over the house with new words on them. Alice watches as her mother “persists.”

Kien does well at the store until she must print a receipt, then “she is stumped.” She grows frustrated and hits random keys, claiming, “Sometimes receipts print, sometimes not.” At home, Alice keeps the house clean and makes all the meals. Kuan even drives her to the market to do the shopping. She babysits Alison and Alina, and they play games and laugh. “Wah, look how good the house looks!” Kien says. “I am doing an excellent job,” Alice thinks.

The next week, when Alice returns home from a walk with her sisters, she is surprised to see Kien’s car in the driveway during the middle of the day. Kien tells Alice she was given the wrong amount of money to take to the bank—she was one hundred dollars short—and that Kuan “wants her gone at any cost.” “I can’t work there any longer!” Kien cries. Kuan swears it was a simple mistake, but she is convinced he only wants to humiliate her. Alice soon comes down with the flu, and Kien takes the week off to care for the house and kids. “We all know by the end of that week that it will probably be forever,” Alice says.