Post-Memory: Migration and Return

This paper investigated Alice Pung’s portrayals of post-memory and her return as a second-generation subject of both memory and migration, in her life-writing, Her Father’s Daughter (2012). Marriane Hirsch (1996, 2008, 2012), post-memory refers to inherited or second-hand traumatic memory which is often passed across generations. Interestingly, Watkins (2016) proposed ‘diasporic slide’ as she believed that diasporic condition and consciousness can be transferred to second-generation children, similar to when memory is transferred across generations. Hirsch (1996, 2008, 2012), Hirsch and Spitzer (2002), Hoffman (2004) examined the intricacy of return that is not always physical but, abstract. Alice Pung and her memoir are subjected to the entanglements of post-memory and return as she has written how her father’s first-hand experiences of Cambodia’s genocide have affected her life in Australia and triggered her emotional and physical return. She is not only ‘Asian’ through inheritance but, she also carries the burden of her father’s past. This paper discovered that Pung’s ‘return’ reflected post-memory as she could not make sense of her physical return to her father’s or ancestor’s hometown. Pung is unable to return physically but, she often returns to her post-memory as her father has passed his first-hand experiences of traumatic past.