At sixteen, Karuna becomes pregnant to Ray, a nineteen-year-old after school homework tutor. Unfortunately, Karuna will have to understand this much sooner than her mother anticipates. When you have children, you’ll understand these things.”’ She does not return home until late every evening: ‘“I’m so busy,” your Grand Mar is always railing, “so busy all the time that it feels like I’m rush-rushing towards death. Her mother, whom she refers to as ‘Grand Mar’ in her story to her unborn child, starts working two jobs- at a hairdresser during the day and at a Thai restaurant called Siamese Please at night. She is taken out of a private Catholic girls’ school and put into the local state school.
When her parents divorce, Karuna’s world irreversibly changes, and she and her mother move to a cramped housing commission flat. And like many fairy tales that are about coming of age, this novel also explores girlhood, but a girlhood that is indelibly formed by race and most of all - by class.Īt the beginning of Karuna’s story, her father is a mechanic and her mother runs a beauty salon at home. Here is a young woman trying to find her way in the world - actually, this could be a fairy tale.
Karuna lives in a housing commission flat with her struggling mother, has an absent father who has more or less abandoned them, and deals with the challenges of being mixed race. Instead, it is real life in Melbourne in the eighties. But it’s just me and you and your Grand Mar and the dark… It would be nice if I could start off with a fairy tale, something that makes you think that the world is much bigger than us beneath our ceiling.
While pregnant and confined, Karuna-the child of a white Australian father and a Chinese Filipino mother-begins writing down the story of her life in a secret diary, addressing her unborn child. Karuna is locked up by her mother in their flat after she gets pregnant at sixteen.
#One hundred days song movie#
Just as fairy tales can work on many levels, the references to them in One Hundred Days are also multi-layered, from the numerous invocations of the classic 80s modern fairy tale movie Labyrinth, to the plot itself, that draws on the story of Rapunzel, locked up in her tower. Fairy tales can operate on many levels - they can entertain children, warn of dangers, provide heroes or heroines who are able to overcome obstacles for Jungian analysts, they can be an expression of the collective unconscious. Fairy tales are a running motif in Alice Pung’s new novel, One Hundred Days.
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