By Yong Shu Hoong

In award-winning Unpolished Gem (2006), Alice Pung captures her life growing up in Footscray, a suburb 5km west of Melbourne, Australia, where she was born into a family headed by Chinese refugees from Cambodia.

At the Singapore Writers Festival 2011, she shared about her latest memoir, Her Father's Daughter (2011), which delves deeper into the story of her father, a Killing Fields survivor, as well as her own relationship with him.

She files her answers to this questionnaire from Melbourne, where she now works as a writer, teacher and qualified lawyer practising in the area of minimum wages.

1) What are you reading right now?
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke. It is really funny and I like how the main character is the antithesis of the enlightened and self-reflective literary hero, as he seems to completely lack self-awareness.

2) If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
I would be Jay Gatsby. And instead of losing myself to a materialistic dream and a vacuous love interest, I would run for President and alleviate the effects of the Great Depression to follow.

3) What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I am a refugee born in Vietnam.

4) Name one living author and one dead author you most identify with, and tell us why.
1. Anne Tyler, because she finds the extraordinary in the ordinary.

2. Robert Cormier, because he seemed to have lived a very balanced, stable and private life in the same small town in Leominster, Massachusetts, and yet was interested in exploring darkness.

5) Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I don't believe in writer's block. I believe people run out of ideas. It is then that they should do something else – walk the dog, bake blueberry muffins, or try and find gainful employment. If they sit there tormenting themselves, then they're creating writer's block.

6) What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
Generosity and humility.

7) What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
Writers who talk excessively about the writing process and the woes of it, or how hard it is to be a writer. No other profession gets to legitimately whinge so much about what they do to a public audience. You never hear accountants talk publicly about the "accounting process", or firemen talk about the "fire-fighting process".

8) Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
"If I wrote only when I felt inspired, I would only write three times a year." – Robert Cormier.

9) Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
Collect children's books at writers' festivals and ask the authors to sign them for my future children.

10) Over easy, or hard boiled, which?
Scrambled.

11) What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Favourite word: Lollies. Least favourite: any used in corporate-speak ("problematise", "synergise", "incentivise").

12) Moving beyond memoirs, what fictional characters or setting would you be keen to create for a future book?
I would like to create fiction based on the small but consequential dynamics that go on inside friendships and families. Beyond that, I'm not sure yet.

13) What object is indispensable to you when you write?
Cheap 35c notebooks from the supermarket.

14) What is the best time of the day for writing?
Mornings.

15) If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soirée?
Khalil Gibran, John Pilger and Nicole Krauss.

16) What's the darndest thing that a kid had said to you during one of your school visits to teach or speak about writing?
"Miss, can you sign my chest?"

17) What would you write on your own tombstone?
"For in that sleep... / What dreams may come"

_____