
www.lifenarrative.net The Life Writing Site

Main Menu

Home

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM (1944-) In the field of life writing, Shirley Geok-lin Lim is equally significant as a life writer and as a critic. Her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American memoir of homelands (1996), is a landmark text, weaving together feminist, ethnic and immigrant aspects of identity with a distinctive cross-cultural perspective on the self.

Born in 1944 in Malacca, in the British Federation of Malaya, Lim was educated at a local convent school, and later at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. In 1969 she took up a Fulbright scholarship at Brandeis University in the United States, where she completed a doctoral dissertation on American literature in 1973. She taught first at Hostos Community College in New York, and later at a college in Westchester. In 1990 she was appointed professor in Asian American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her first volume of poetry, Crossing the Peninsula, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1980. Among the White Moon Faces received the American Book Award in 1997.

Among the White Moon Faces is a moving and often rawly personal memoir. It lays bare the author’s fraught love for her father, with whom she had a warmly physical bond, and who actively encouraged her education, earning her her brothers’ resentment, but was also prone to erratic violence, beating her in fits of rage. Lim’s father ran a shoeshop, but went bankrupt when Shirley was seven, and was forced to return to live with his family in his father’s house, where they sometimes came close to starving. The shame of this powerfully marked Lim’s childhood. Her mother abandoned the family when Shirley was eight, after her husband took up with the daughter of a former servant; Lim writes of the ambivalence her mother continues to inspire in her, even after her death, despite Lim’s attempts to imaginatively reconstruct her perspective. She recalls the loneliness of her first years in the U.S., the tension between her commitment to ethnic equality and uneasy relationship with working-class Puerto Rican neighbours in Brooklyn, the rewards and constraints of teaching in a community college, and her hopes for her “American” son, Gershom.

Lim draws attention to the complexity of linguistic and ethnic identity, showing how these aspects of self do not always cohere in predictable ways. Born into a Chinese Malayan family, her mother tongue was Malay, the language her mother nursed her in. From the age of six she spoke mostly English with her father and brothers; her father, entranced by American popular culture, had named her after Shirley Temple. Although her father’s family were Hokkien speakers, she did not develop a strong connection to Hokkien. These relatives were hostile to her mother as a peranakan, a member of the community of assimilated, Malay-speaking Chinese who had lived in the Malay peninsula since the 16th century. Lim writes: “As a child of a Hokkien community, I should have felt that propulsive abrasive dialect in my genes. Instead, when I speak Hokkien it is at the level of a five-year-old” (27); she notes that she does not remember her mother as a Chinese woman in the way that she does her Hokkien-speaking aunts.

Lim considers the colonial and post-colonial contexts of her childhood, evoking the traumatic impact of the British-declared State of Emergency against the Malayan Chinese Communist insurgents, which forced ethnic Chinese to carry identity cards as proof of loyalty, bringing home to them their precarious status. Her memoir brings out the contradictions involved in being an ethnic Chinese in the newly independent state of Malaya (post-1957), growing up with an unquestioned sense of herself as Malayan, but increasingly marginalized in the wake of the May 1969 anti-Chinese riots. It highlights cultural as well as political aspects of her colonial education. Lim recalls the repressiveness of the Cambridge examination system, yet sees her love of English and of Romantic poetry as having seeded her growth as a writer. She presents the figure of the “jolly miller” of the English folk song as emblematic of a kind of self-sufficiency she found alluring, alien to the “pomegranate, thickly seeded” that was her family life in Malacca (102). Long after moving to the United States, Lim felt impelled to send money to her widowed stepmother to support her half-siblings in Malacca: “How could one eat well if one’s family was starving. … For Chinese… [o]ur fathers’ children are also ourselves. The self is paltry, phantasmagoric.. It is the family … that signif[ies] the meaning of the self” (251).

This kind of comparative perspective on Malaysian Chinese and American takes on the self marks Lim’s memoir out within contemporary Asian American autobiography. Many of her concerns overlap with those of second-generation Asian American autobiographers like Maxine Hong Kingston: a focus on ethnic identity, race and American citizenship, complexities of gender - her memoir is written out of a strong feminist consciousness. Yet her immersion in Chinese Malay cultures as a child and young adult gives her memoir a different tonality, since she shows herself to be deeply shaped by the culture with which she depicts herself as having struggled.

Lim is renowned for her critical studies of Southeast Asian and Asian American literature (eg. Writing S.E/Asia in English: against the grain, focus on Asian English-language literature (London: Skoob Books, 1994) and, coedited with Amy Ling, Reading the Literatures of Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992)). The latter focusses on life writing as well as on other genres. As Lim’s critical work shows, autobiography is at least as significant as fiction within Asian American writing, featuring such major texts as Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Lydia Minatoya’s Talking to the High Monks in the Snow. Her edited collection of essays, Approaches to Teaching Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1991) is a major critical resource on that text. Lim has won acclaim for her poetry and fiction as well as memoir, and has edited anthologies of Asian American writing (for an extended bibliography, see Morgan). Her first novel, Joss and Gold (Feminist Press) appeared in 2001.

Mary Besemeres

Further reading