"If you looked at darkness through rose-coloured glasses, all you got was a congealed blood colour. A colour that should have a specific name, like blug, a clotty mixture of mucus and blood."
"Good god, he thought, if he took his daughter back to Cambodia there would be no end to her slack-jawed awe. She’d even think it was a proud thing to have come from such a bloody history. She’d probably cry for days on end, wasting energy on emotions that were vicarious."
This is extraordinary non-fiction writing communicating something vital yet delicate to capture. I'm trying to resist calling it creative non-fiction because that somehow implies that this isn't 'true', which it is, and literary non-fiction implies a focus on the writing over the subject, which isn't true. So I'll just stick with "really good"
Pung has made choices that at first seem odd - the book is written in the third person, switching perspectives and using titles - "daughter" and "father" - to label the sections. She starts the book on her own solitary trip to China - no father, no Cambodia - and only wends her way around to the latter towards the end of the book.
But as the book progressed, I realised with the former that Pung intends the reader to recognise that they are reading a created work. This is especially needed because it is not only her story but her father's. Pung inserts a reflection, part way through the book, of her relief that her parents recognise that her first book is not their internal lives. No story gets told without choices, of content, of style, of voice. In creating her father's thoughts, she provides reflections on her own role as narrator of his story. This story isn't untrue, but it is packaged truth, and it is Pung's packaging.
We start the narrative with her because this is a book about being someone's daughter. And we need to start by understanding her life, and her relationship with her parents - to see them as she does (or chooses to reflect). They are painted as rounded people, with joys and idiosyncrasies, not simply a collection of overprotectiveness, although this is there as well.
By the time the book gets to the very difficult content, you know and love these people, you see them as human and rounded - perhaps with their funnier edges sharpened - but the trauma fleshes them out, it doesn't define them. It helps us to understand why her father can't stop his worries for her, why they lean overprotective, and why being surrounded by electronics might feel safe. It makes the hard stuff harder because these aren't cartoon characters. It helps to understand that this constitutes four years of their lives without minimising the reverberating impact.
All of this meant that this book, possibly partly because of the time I read it*, undid me. It felt for a while, at least, as if all my attempts to put one foot in front of the other had to be suspended to let myself deal with the emotion. Two images really stay with me - one is around a disturbing story involving kittens, which Pung gently visits and revisits. After we have read about the horrors of the killing fields, she brings us back to the kittens to understand both her parents' reactions to suffering and how it might feel to have that gulf between you and your parents. And the second, initially and always slightly played for laughs, is of a father trying to cut the tip of a knife with another knife, so his adult children do not face the smallest danger. To bring myself back, I had to remind myself this is ultimately a story about love and resilience, which manages never to make things neatly tied or to place them beyond interrogation.

*the second half was one long insomniac stretch, it was the day after some stressful long-term planning confronting realities of climate change and after two years of 'unprecedented')