Survival requires that a person gets through every dangerous moment, without lapse.
Karuna Kelly is a 16-year-old, and she is pregnant. Her mother is a Chinese Filipina, and her father is an older Aussie. Her father jokingly calls her Tool Kitty and spoils her now and again with treats and money. Karuna’s mother has a very fixed sense of the world from her Chinese Pilipino upbringing. She is illiterate, but determined to show she knows things about people and the world. Her pronouncements strike Karuna’s ear as illogical and overblown. Her father takes potshots at Karuna’s mother and diminishes her in front of Karuna. The family dynamics are not particularly healthy.
Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days follows the period when Karuna’s parents have divorced, and Karuna’s father has gone absent and totally non-supportive of his ex-wife and young teenage daughter financially. Karuna and her overbearing mother have moved into a small one-bedroom in a Melbourne public housing project. She has started to show. Her mother, illiterate, abandoned, takes on menial jobs at a restaurant and then at a salon, in order to try to make ends meet.
The daughter and mother are at each other’s throats. Grand Mar (Karuna’s mother, the unborn baby’s grandmother) has been trying to keep Karuna locked up in the 14th floor unit because she is eye-catchingly beautiful. She turns heads, and she attracts excessive male attention. Grand Mar is also bitter because she had upended her own life back in the Philippines to make a go at marriage with Grand Par, who has not turned out to be the man she thought he was.
This novel is spoken through the perspective and voice of Karuna, who narrates the story to her as-yet unborn child. The as-yet unborn child is her captive audience and is only ally in her mind. She uses euphemisms to protect her unborn child’s feelings as she talks to her/him in her mind:
Being so close to her makes me curl up inside myself like a cashew. Your Grand Mar wishes she could have known about you when you were the size of a nut, because then she could have found a way to shake you from your shell. But even I didn’t know about you then.
She is isolated in their public housing apartment, and she sees little of her friends once she has dropped out of her Christian school. She is bright but naïve. She is often in the grip of her own intense emotions. She feels like she is in a trap of her mother’s own making, and her urges to escape put her at risk. She is willful, and she is risk-taking.
What follows are harrowing times, with Karuna and her mother caught up in an intense power struggle.
The “100 days” of the title are the remaining months of Karuna’s pregnancy that she spends working at the salon where her mother works off-the-books. This family of mother and daughter lives close to the edge, with virtually no margin for missteps or accidents.
In One Hundred Days, a 16-year-old comes of age. She learns how to parse the mixed signals from the people around her. She learns about the fragility of human commitments. She learns about human nature and the tradeoffs with friendships. She makes secret-keeping a core part of her identity, given her need to keep out her imperious mother from intruding into her business.
Melbourne, Australia reads as an insular place, with clear racial (racist) hierarchies. It reads as a place where immigrants have to fend for themselves, with whatever skills and wits they may have. Karuna’s family themselves value her white skin as a baby until she started to age out of babyhood cuteness and forming freckles. The characters are also socially aware. A friend of hers in school wants her to strive for popularity, to go for the social climb.
Neither Tweezer nor your Grand Mar realized that I was like a dusty, back-of-the-shelf version of a white girl, one of those dusky Barbies that gets shoved in the discount pile; and among the Asian girls at school I was a dumb-arse giantess. Those girls cooed over my chocolate hair and light lion eyes, but I knew they didn’t take my smarts seriously. I looked nice but no one really wanted me.
Karuna was outside the realm of the familiar sufficient to be considered attractive.
Alice Pung writes with potency and a sharp sense of observation. She writes of how Grand Mar wrote an address for one of Karuna’s friend’s fathers “in the careful, letter-by-letter way of the illiterate.” She captures well the racial politics of a family in microcosm, reflecting the macrocosm. Within the Chinese diaspora, there is an understood hierarchy:
Aunt Yenny was from Timor, which, according to your Grand Mar’s hierarchy of Chineseness, meant that she should have been beneath us, hailing from such an annexed, backwater land, whereas the Philippines was so sought after that two colonial powers had fought over it.
She immerses readers in Karuna’s awakening to desire:
Everything I felt that summer of my fourteenth year suddenly had a gravitational pull, and he was it—the molten centre. I’d desired things before—toys, a Cabbage Patch doll, a silver lamé jacket—but now I realized that people could desire each other, that it wasn’t the same at all as desiring an object, and it was different again from wanting the love of a parent or a friend or even a boyfriend.
No, this was something I couldn’t control, because if I could have chosen, I would not have chosen David Bowie.
At one point, her father asks her—half Chinese Filipina and half Caucasia — if she’d had her baby tested for Down’s syndrome… He then refers to what she looked like as a baby and quips, “Like, you can’t tell whether it’s Down’s syndrome or just Asian eyes, you know what I mean?” He is fully part of the family dynamic of engaging in passive-aggressive hostility.
The novel is extreme but rings authentic. It is emotionally harrowing given the family dynamics. There are redeeming lessons in grit and strength and forbearance. At heart, it is an inspiring work.
Alice Pung is a qualified lawyer and works as a legal researcher. She is married and is an Artist in Residence in the University of Melbourne. She has published works in both fiction and nonfiction. She received a medal of the Order of Australia.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
