Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands
 
 

bn.com Price: $10.36  Retail Price: $12.95  You Save: $2.59 (20%)  In-Stock: Ships within 24 hours  Format: Paperback, 232pp. ISBN: 1558611797 Publisher: Feminist Press at The City University of New York Pub. Date: September 1997 Edition Desc: REPRINT Other Formats: Hardcover

About the book

Synopsis

     This is an autobiography by the poet, fiction writer, and professor ofEnglish and women's studies. The author's "analysis of class, gender, and ethnic issues is {presented within} . . . stories about growing up in a large family in relative poverty, attending a British-run Malaysian convent school as a child, moving on to graduate school and an academic career in the US, and finally creating her own multiethnic family." (Choice)

From The Publisher
     Shirley Geok-lin Lim's memoir is a courageously frank and deeply affecting account of a Malaysian girlhood and of the making of an Asian-American woman. With insight, candor, and grace, Lim lays bare the material poverty and family violence of her childhood in colonized Malaysia after her father's business fails and her mother abandons the family, leaving Shirley to travel the road toward womanhood alone. Her struggles to fashion a meaningful life that will include professional achievement and a self-determined sexuality inflect her journey across and through cultural, political, and geographic borders. Throughout this extraordinary multi-cultural journey, Lim is sustained by her "warrior" spirit. Very gradually, and often painfully, she moves from a numbing alienation as a dislocated Asian woman to a new sense of identity as an Asian-American woman: professor, wife, mother of a son she is determined to raise as American, and, above all, impassioned writer.

Reviews

    From Brinda Bose - World Literature Today
      Lim's courageous stories of her early life . . . are told with the right amount of detachment that never allows her to wallow in self-pity. Instead there is warmth, and humor, and a great skill in realistically recreating a world long lost. It is only in the later sections of the book, when Lim has obviously extricated herself heroically from the debilitating circumstances of her childhood, that her continued sense of dislocation and dispossession in the New World of America begins to sound like an indulgent angst. . . . However, at the end of this extremely well-written memoir, we are indeed happy to learn that the cathartic regurgitation of her Malaysian stories has laid to rest the ghosts of Lim's past, and that the reconstruction of her fifty-year life of singular achievements appears finally to have convinced the writer that she may yet find her place in the sun that shines upon her adopted homeland.

    From Booknews
      Poet Lim's memoir describes her childhood in Malaysia, the post- colonial days of her university youth, and her eventual migration to the United States. In this cultural document of both the US and Malaysia, her poetic mastery makes the tale vivid by its evocative language and attention to emotional detail, somewhat mitigating the often characteristic triteness of immigrant stories, particularly ones like this that rely heavily on feminist and psychological ideologies. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

    From Library Journal
     In this autobiography of her wild and impoverished Malayan childhood and eventual emigration to America, critic and theorist Lim (Reading the Literature of Asian Americans, LJ 1/93) uses the same gender and ethnic issues discussed in her critical appraisals to delineate her "two lives." She describes the Third World poverty of her Chinese minority family, "the cultural imperialism of British colonial education," Chinese patriarchy and ambition, disappoinments in Malayan home rule, and the isolation of Asian graduate students in America. She offers both flattering and unflattering glimpses of American life as seen through immigrant eyes. Like many successful immigrants, Lim is a survivor with hard-won success. After years of struggle, she has gained prominence in the growing field of Asian American literature. Her revealing self-portrait is recommended for academic libraries and Asian American collections.-Margaret W. Norton, J. Sterling Morton H.S., West Berwyn, Ill.

    From Patricia Abe - Ms.
     A good memoir can read like a novel that's hard to put down; it transports the reader to another time and place, with fascinating characters and a suspense that keeps the pages turning. So it is with Shirley Geok-lin Lim's account. . . . An ethnic Chinese born into a Malayan society in which girls were 'unnecessary as individuals (and) concern(ed) nobody, unlike sons,' Lim fared better than many of her peers in having a father who valued an educated daughter, if only so that he could reap her future earnings. But the family's routinelife quickly unraveled. . . . Despite her privations--or perhaps because of them--Lim found a new world in poetry and literature. . . . Lim's bittersweet and at times comic adventures take her to Boston; Brooklyn; Westchester, New York; and Santa Barbara. She recounts her journey with a poet's eye for detail and a storyteller's gift for narrative.

    From J. Tharp - Choice
     Neither Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior (1978) nor Trinh T. Minh-ha's Woman, Native, Other (1989) quite approaches the autobiographical clarity ofLim's book. . . . Rich prose and accounts of compelling experiences make thisbook a pleasure to read. All collections.

    From Publisher's Weekly - Publishers Weekly
     Lim's autobiography certainly qualifies for a place in Feminist Press's Cross-Cultural Memoir Series. Her father, a devotee of Western movies, named her Shirley (for her dimples, he said); the convent school sisters gave her the names Agnes and Jennifer; while Geok or "Jade" was assigned by her grandfather to all the female children, "a name intended to humble, to make a child common." Born in 1944 during the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, Lim was the only girl in a family of five boys. For her, academics represented a way to distinguish herself and earn her father's love. Her mother deserted the family when she was eight, leaving Lim increasingly rebellious and determined to escape. And she succeeded: Scholarship to the University of Malaysia was followed by a Fulbright to Brandeis, and finally an academic career and family in America. She's a sharp, even harsh commentator with a vivid memory for slights. But she's also tough with herself, with her acquiescence to her father's wishes, to a lover's manipulation, to a professor's appropriation of her thesis. She also ponders her inability to reconcile her sympathy with her Puerto Rican students and her resentment of her Puerto Rican neighbors in Brooklyn. The first woman and the first Asian to win the Commonwealth Prize for her book of poetry, Crossing the Peninsula, Lim's descriptions are both lyrical and precise whether they are of the heat, bougainvillea and crowds of her home in Malacca or the wintery climate, the packaged food, the self-conscious bohemianism of New England. Photos not seen by PW. (Aug.)