Shirley Geok-lin Lim: A Biographical Essay

(Draft copy)
Published in Mohammad A. Quayum, One Sky, Many Horizons: Studies in Malaysian Literature in
Engliush. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2014
Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, short story writer and critic. She is
the author of five volumes of poetry, three collections of short stories, a memoir and a novel. She
has also authored two volumes of criticism on South and Southeast Asian literature, and edited or coedited several collections of essays on Asian American literature. Lims work reflects the ambivalent
and complex imagination of a writer who is Malaysian-Chinese and Asian-American at the same time.
In her 2003 interview, she explains that in spite of her exploration in multiple genres, her work is
essentially ontological, [which] has to do with questions about the relation of an individual to the
exigencies of making sense of itself in the world, with or without others. She further maintains that
the thematic strains that fascinate her are, [the] social forces of race and ethnic divisiveness, colonial
and gender tensions, [and] the crises brought about by modern and intercultural politics.
Lim was born on 27 December 1944 in the historic town of Malacca, on the west coast of the Malay
Peninsula (in British Malaya), to a Hokkein-Malayan father, Chin Som Lim and a Singaporean
Chinese-Peranakan mother, Chye Neo Ang Lim. In an interview with Norman Simms, Lim points out
that she grew up in a big family of ten children, of which she was the third and the only girl of six
children borne by her mother, who later left the family when Lim was eight. Her father remarried
and the second wife, Lims stepmother, bore him four more children.
Lim was born at a particularly difficult time for the family as well as the colony. Until she was five,
her family lived in her paternal grandfathers house with the grandfathers other children and their
families. They moved into their own home when Lims father opened a shoe store, but shortly, the
business failed and plunged the family into poverty. Her mothers sudden desertion also exacerbated
the crisis, leaving Lim hungry not only for food but also affection an experience she movingly
delineates in her short story, Hunger. This was also the time of Second World War, when Malaya, a
British colony since 1874, came under Japanese occupation; consequently, its export economy
collapsed, and as Andaya and Andaya point out, there was widespread unemployment, food
shortages, poverty, poor health and general uncertainty.
The departure of the Japanese army and the return of the British colonial government after the war,
in 1945, however, paved the way for Lim to enter a Roman Catholic convent school in Malacca,
where she received her early education. Later she went to the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur
and earned a B.A. degree in English with first class honours in 1967. After teaching at the University
of Malaya for two years, Lim went on to the United States in 1969, on Fulbright and Wien
International fellowships, for postgraduate studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Lim received her M.A. degree in 1971 and married Charles Bazerman, an American Jew of
Romanian-Polish descent, who had been Lims fellow graduate student at Brandeis, the following
year. She was a teaching assistant at Brandeis, 1971-1972 and a teaching fellow at Queens College of
the City University of New York in Flushing, 1972-1973. In 1973 Lim completed her Ph.D. in
English and American Literature at Brandeis and briefly returned to Universiti Sains Malaysia in
Penang, before taking up a position of assistant professor at Hostos Community College of the City
University of New York in the South Bronx.

In 1976 Lim moved to Westchester College of the State University of New York in Valhalla as
associate professor. Her and Bazermans only child, Gershom Kean, was born in 1980. The same
______________________________________________________________________________
Originally published in David Smyth ed. Twentieth Century Southeast Asian Fiction: Dictionary of Literary Biography,
Bruccoli Clark Layman, USA, 2007.

year she published her first collection of poetry, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, for which she
was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Book, making her the first Asian and the
first woman to receive the prize.
Lim published her first collection of short fiction, Another Country and Other Stories, in 1982, the year
she received the Asiaweek Short Story Competition Second Prize for Mr. Tangs Girls, a story
which was included in this volume. Readers who are familiar with Lims autobiographical work,
Among the White Moon Faces, will recognise that several of the stories in the book, such as Hunger,
All My Uncles, The Good Old Days, and Transportation in Westchester, are based on her
personal life. Reading the memoir will, therefore, help readers to better appreciate the contexts and
realism in the stories. However, although not all the stories are drawn from Lims personal life, they
are still rooted in her life experiences in Malaysia and the United States the two societies in which
she has lived both as insider and outsider and holds dear to her heart. It is her penetrating
observation and intimate knowledge of these societies the rural, rustic and traditional life in
Malaysia, as well as the urbane, high-pitched, highfalutin life in the United States which enable her
to depict the characters and cultures in her stories with accuracy of detail and trenchant realism.
The books title story, Another Country, deals with the interracial relationship between three
characters in a hospital in Kuala Lumpur Su Weng, a young Chinese woman, who has been
hospitalised following a serious accident; Mrs. Hashim, a middle-aged Malay woman, suffering from
leukaemia; and Chun Hong, a university student in Australia, currently distressed by stomach ulcers.
Their encounters at a moment of adversity and the relationships that grow between them, is what the
writer emphasises in the story. Mrs. Hashims gesture of friendship towards the two Chinese
characters, in spite of her own mortal illness, and against a backdrop of the strained relationship
between the races in the country especially in the wake of the riots of 13 May 1969 and the
subsequent New Economic Policy which enshrines certain privileges to the Malays, thereby
marginalising the Chinese, Indians and other minorities corroborates the storys title, Another
Country; it is a country of cross-cultural equanimity and harmony which Malaysia could attain, away
from its current dissonance and hostility, if the racial binary could be dismantled and people were
allowed to live in mutual trust and horizontal relationships. In this sense, the story reads like a
political allegory, similar to some of Lims other stories, or her novel Joss and Gold, published much
later.
Lims second volume of poetry, No Mans Grove, was published in 1985, which was followed by
Modern Secrets: New and Selected Poems in 1989. The same year she also published The Forbidden Stitch: An
Asian American Womens Anthology, which she co-edited with Mayumi Tsutakawa and Margarita
Donnelly. The volume won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in
1990, the year in which Lim moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, as professor of
English and womens studies, and where she has been living since with her family.
Lims second edited collection of essays, Approaches to Teaching Kingstons The Warrior Woman, came
out in 1991. Reading the Literatures of Asian America, a co-edited anthology of Asian American literary
criticism and One World of Literature, a widely used text in undergraduate English courses in the US,
were both published in 1992. In 1993 she brought out her first authored book of criticism,
Nationalism and Literature: English-Language Writing from the Philippines and Singapore. Monsoon History:
Selected Poems, which brings together poems from Lims previous collections, and Writing South
East/Asia: Against the Grain, a compilation of her own essays on South and Southeast Asian writings

in English, came out simultaneously in 1994. The following year, Lim published her second volume
of short stories, Lifes Mysteries: The Best of Shirley Lim, which was an expanded edition of Another
Country and includes stories from 1967-1990.
Many of the stories in the volume deal with the intersecting themes of gender, class and ethnicity;
Lims own sense of dislocation as a diasporic and transnational writer; the ambivalence and
possibility of dwelling in-between two nations and cultures; and the interactions and conflicts
between East and West, Asia and America, tradition and modernisation. Journey, Lims first story,
written when she was an undergraduate student at the University of Malaya, and republished in In
Blue Silk Girdle: Stories from Malaysia and Singapore, is about a young girl who witnesses her mothers
distress in an abortion and comes to recognise the helpless circumstance of the mother, who is
victimised by her own body and an indifferent, worthless father, in spite of her inner resourcefulness
and strength of character.
The Touring Company, penned during her stint of part-time tutoring at the university before her
departure for the US, is the story of a young undergraduate student who, while writing an essay on
Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream, suddenly remembers of her own performance in the play,
with a touring Shakespeare Company from the UK, when she was ten. The flashback awakens the
narrator to the reality of her conflicts with her boyfriend and lifes choices between a secure world
promised by marriage and the possibility of freedom in an unfettered and mobile life chosen by the
actors of the touring company. Lim explains that the storys protagonist experiences the dilemma and
emotional shuttlings between two lives experienced by many young women at the time. The
books title story, Lifes Mysteries, reveals the ten year old Swee Liangs anxieties about being a girl
instead of a boy, which she thinks has been mysteriously causing her parents to drift apart. In her
innocent, childlike mind the girl considers a sex change operation for herself so that she could
become a boy and get the love and attention of her father and reunite her parents.
Lim was a Fulbright distinguished lecturer at Nanyang Technological University in 1996, the year her
memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, was published. It was her second book to win an American
Book Award. She began a two-year term as chairperson of Womens Studies at the University of
California at Santa Barbara in 1997. Two Dreams: New and Selected Stories also came out the same year.
Again, many of the stories in this volume were drawn from her previous collections, Another Country
and Lifes Mysteries. In the Preface, Lim compares her stories to a furoshiki, a kind of a patterned
handkerchief [or] a fabric of many colours, spun deliberately for display, which emphasises the
craftsmanship and love involved in the writing of her stories.
Two Dreams contains nineteen stories, divided into three sections: Girl consists of six stories about
girls, though their contents are not restricted to girlhood; Country also has six stories that
demonstrate how the colonialist and post-colonialist interventions by the west have shaped peoples
lives in Malaysia on various levels; and Woman comprises seven stories about women who are
caught in a repressive patriarchy and contrary cultures. The title piece, Two Dreams, is an ironic
story that begins with the protagonist Marthas dream in the US of riding her brothers bicycle on a
beach in Malacca, and ends with her dream in Malaysia of how all the students were leaving her
friend Harrys classroom, because the police were beating them on the head. These two dreams
show Marthas ambivalent feelings for the two countries she considers home; her sense of
dislocation and exile in New York and the nostalgic love for her country of origin in the first dream,
and her discomfiture and disappointment at how Malaysia is turning into a police state and
authoritarian society in the second dream. Paradoxically, it appears that with two homes, Martha
remains a homeless person, unable to find peace in any of the societies or cultures she straddles.
Lim has been a member of board of directors of Teachers for a Democratic Culture since 1998, the
year she published What the Fortune Teller Didnt Say. She served as distinguished lecturer at the

University of Western Australia in 1999, and held dual appointments at the University of California
and at the University of Hong Kong, where she was chair professor of English and head of the
English department, 1999-2001. In 2003 she went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as
visiting professor, and came to the University of Hong Kong in September 2005, again, on a visiting
position.
Lims only novel to date, Joss and Gold was published in 2001. The novel is divided into three Books
and set in three different countries: Book I, Crossing, is set in Kuala Lumpur, during the volatile
period of the riots of 13 May 1969 a defining moment in the nations history; Book II, Circling,
in the up-scale suburb of Westchester, New York, in 1980; and Book III, Landing, in the postindustrialised, stony paradise, city-state of Singapore, in 1981. In her 2003 interview, Lim suggests
that the novel was written over a period of twenty-one years, in stages, and at different places and
times:
Twenty-one years, beginning around the summer of 1979, and really completing the final
writing around 2000. [T]he first part [was written] at the East-West Centre in Honolulu,
the second as Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Singapore, and the last tying up of its
many strands at a writers retreat on Puget Sound near Seattle.
The novel centres on the extra-marital relationship between Li An, a Malaysian, and Chester, an
American, and their love child Su Yin. The vivacious, westernised, English graduate Li An, with an
insecure, abused childhood, marries Henry, a science graduate and the son of a towkay, from whim
and for security. The arrival of Chester to Kuala Lumpur as a Peace Corpse volunteer, changes the
fabric of that relationship. Li An increasingly falls in love with Chester and eventually ends up
spending the night of the riots with him. Their one night stand brings Su Yin into the world, but
Chester who leaves Malaysia after the riots has no interest to know his daughter. He marries Meryl, a
strong, ambitious woman, and becomes a professor at Columbia. The arrival of Su Yin breaks up Li
Ans marriage with Henry, and subsequently she moves to Singapore to find a new life and career for
herself and to bring up her daughter there. Finally, Chester comes to Singapore to claim Su Yin, after
a vasectomy that has disabled him from fathering a child, but Henry has also become close to the girl
in the meantime because her grandmother (Henrys stepmother) has left behind a will that requires
Su Yin and Henry to act as joint executors. The novel ends with Su Yin getting to know her
biological father but feeling more attached to Henry, who has taken up the role of her social father.
Joss and Gold examines the post-colonial, intersecting and overlapping thematics of race, gender and
nation. In Book I of the novel, the focus is not only on the circumstances of women in a tradition
bound, androcentric society but also on how the newly-emergent Malaysia could form a harmonious,
unitary nation, in the midst of its pluralism and cultural heterogeneity. The writers advice is that
women ought to take charge of their lives to find their dignity and autonomy, like Li An does after
she is abandoned by the two men in her life; and for the races, it is important to shun all exclusivist,
monologic ideas for dialogism and syncretism, so that Malaysia could gradually evolve into an
inclusivist and a rainbow nation. In Book II, the focus is largely on dismantling gender hierarchy and
restoring women to their rightful place in society through an extended interrogation of the
matrimonial relationship of Chester and his self-reliant, self-assertive wife, Meryl. However, a part of
the writers energy is also invested in scrutinising the race relations and nation formation in her
adopted homeland, America, where she notices a recurring binary between the mainstream whites
and the migrant Asians, as many in the first group consider the latter as inferior and the other. In
Book III, again the writer revisits the same themes to show the cultural deficiency and the vertical
hierarchy in Singapore society, in spite of its being a diasporic nation, and suggests ways so that
Singapore could overcome its prejudices to accommodate its people better despite their ethnicity,
gender and religion. On the whole, the novel advocates dialogism and syncretism, or transculturation
and creative negotiations, as a way of forming a wholesome and holistic society or nation.

At the time of writing this article, Lims second novel, Sister Swing, is in press and is due to come out
in March 2006. The novel is being published by Marshall Cavendish in Singapore, and the
publishers summary of the book reads as follows, Sister Swing chronicles the growing up years of
three sisters. It follows their transplant from a relatively sheltered life in Malaysia to the raw realities
of the United States. It illuminates the complex relationships between the sisters, and gently but
firmly explores the morals, values and mindsets of growing up Asian in a Western world.
WORKS CITED
Andaya, Barbara Watson and Leonard Y. Andaya. A History of Malaysia. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave
2001.
Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf and Mohammad A. Quayum. Colonial to Global: Malaysian Womens Writing
in English, 1940s-1990s. Kuala Lumpur: International Islamic University Press, 2003.
Quayum, Mohammad A., ed. In Blue Silk Girdle: Stories from Malaysia and Singapore. Selangor: Universiti
Putra Malaysia Press, 1998.
Quayum, Mohammad A. Shirley Geok-lin Lim: An Interview. MELUS 28. 4 (2003): 83-100.
Simms, Norman. Writers from the South Pacific: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Encyclopaedia. Washington
D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1991.