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Kuan Pung
Alice’s white, Australian boyfriend, and the “white ghost” Kien fears her daughter will marry. Michael, like Alice, is studying to become a lawyer. He has wanted to be a lawyer ever since he watched Gandhi in the tenth grade, and he is an exceedingly kind and gentle young man. Michael has an excellent sense of humor and is a very likable character. He is clumsy and charming when he asks Alice out for the first time, and she has a hard time turning him down. Michael is patient with Alice’s strict and confined life, and he tries very hard to win Kien and Kuan’s approval. He genuinely loves Alice, and he even agrees to eat meat—including venison—when Kien looks at him suspiciously for being a vegetarian. Alice breaks up with Michael before he goes back to college because she isn’t ready for a serious relationship (and because her mother disapproves of him). The fact that Michael is such a good catch and Alice breaks up with him anyway underscores her dedication to her family and her respect for love and the sanctity of marriage.
Michael Quotes in Unpolished Gem
The Unpolished Gem quotes below are all either spoken by Michael or refer to Michael. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part 5
Quotes
I thought, if I were a young man I would be scared of my parents too. Perhaps not my father so much, because he was able to sit down and reason things out. But my mother—there was no way she would be able to understand an alien, let alone an alien her own daughter had chosen. My mother saw the differences as insurmountable—she was only comfortable with the familiar, yet she still believed that Princess Diana was the most dazzling creature ever to grace the earth, and that white women were more beautiful than we could ever be.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Unpolished Gem LitChart as a printable PDF.
Michael Quotes in Unpolished Gem
The Unpolished Gem quotes below are all either spoken by Michael or refer to Michael. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part 5
Quotes
I thought, if I were a young man I would be scared of my parents too. Perhaps not my father so much, because he was able to sit down and reason things out. But my mother—there was no way she would be able to understand an alien, let alone an alien her own daughter had chosen. My mother saw the differences as insurmountable—she was only comfortable with the familiar, yet she still believed that Princess Diana was the most dazzling creature ever to grace the earth, and that white women were more beautiful than we could ever be.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
