They were survivors of the killing fields and Mao’s China – and their shop was not just their existence, it was their second chance at redemption, writes author Alice Pung

It is the last day for my parents to pack their stock, peel off the handwritten “SALE: please ask for Special” posters and close their Springvale shop of almost 35 years.

We aren’t supposed to open the doors, because we’re still packing, but my mother insists. We aren’t just boxing toasters and air fryers and blenders, speakers and sandwich presses, but more curious things not found in regular Betta stores: cloth-covered shopping trolleys, wooden-handled umbrellas (marked at a bargain $10) and a dozen pink glitter pencil cases my mother had bought during a post-Christmas Kmart sale to gift to children so their parents would stay longer and hopefully buy that fridge they’d been looking at for the past 40 minutes.

Alice Pung is an award-winning author, artist-in-residence at the University of Melbourne’s Janet Clarke Hall and an adjunct professor at RMIT University