Unpolished Gem: Prologue Summary & Analysis

Alice Pung begins her story at a marketplace in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, and she is quick to point out that her story “does not begin on a boat.” Alice’s father, Kuan, is shopping at the market full of “fat pigs and thin people,” and all around him migrants negotiate in broken English. Alice’s mother, Kien, is not at the market—she is in an Australian hospital waiting to give birth to Alice.

 As Kuan walks through the market, the ground is saturated with watered-down blood from the butchers’ cleaning hoses, and he thinks about pig’s blood jelly. Kuan loves the jelly, but now he thinks about the unsanitary way the blood is collected from a hanging carcass, allowing urine and other unappetizing bodily fluids to drain into the blood and become part of the jelly. He does not think about his former life in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where he frequently ate food contaminated with dirt and disease.

The shoppers and vendors speak a wide variety of languages, and many do not understand each other. In order to communicate, they shout and make hand gestures, poking their fingers in the direction of their desired commodity. Kuan notes that “the loudest pokers always win, and the loudest pokers are usually women.”

Kuan leaves the Footscray market after purchasing a bag of pigs’ feet and walks through the crowd of people. Mothers are busy scolding their children and yelling at them to not swallow their chewing gum. In this “wondrous new country,” children and mothers worry about chewing gum instead of stepping on “a condensed milk tin filled with ammunition.”

As Kuan watches the mothers and their children, he wonders if his new baby will be a boy or a girl. He smiles to himself as he pushes the button on the traffic light and remembers the first time that he “encountered these ticking poles.”