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

            • The Cross-Cultural Memoir Series

            • Winner of an American Book Award

    “[Lim’s] fascinating autobiography reads like a novel, with interesting stories stitched into the quilt of her life.”
    – Washington Post Book World

    “Lim’s descriptions are both lyrical and precise whether they are of the heat, bouganvillea and crowds of her home  in Malacca or the wintry climate, the packaged food, the self-conscious bohemianism of New England.”
    – Publishers Weekly

    “The Malaysian section is stunning: evocative writing bolstered by insights into colonialism, race relations, and the concept of the ’other’. . . . This is an entrancing memoir.”
    – Kirkus Reviews

    “[Lim] recounts her journey with a poet’s eye for detail and a storyteller’s gift for narrative.”
    – Ms.

    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, writer, and teacher.

    With insight, candor, and grace, Lim reveals the material poverty and violence of her childhood in colonized and then war-torn Malaysia after her father’s business fails and her mother abandons the family, leaving Shirley to travel the road toward womanhood alone. Lim’s decision in 1968 to leave Malaysia and the man she loves for a Fulbright Scholarship at Brandeis University marks a crucial turning point in her life.

    Grappling to secure a place for herself in the United States, Lim is often caught between the stifling traditions of the old world and the harsh challenges of the new. But throughout her journey, she 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 determines to raise as an American, and, above all, impassioned writer.

    In AMONG THE WHITE MOON FACES, Shirley Lim offers a memorable rendering of immigrant women’s experiences, and a haunting reflection upon the homelands we leave behind, the homelands we discover, and the homelands we hold within ourselves.

    SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM is a poet, fiction writer, and critic. She won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Book (1980) for Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems and the American Book Award (1990) for co-editing The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology, and is author of TWO DREAMS: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES (The Feminist Press). She is professor of English and women’s studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

248 pages / 9 b&w photos / ISBN 1-55861-179-7 / $12.95 paper
ISBN 1-55861-144-4 / $22.95 hardcover
 

From AMONG THE WHITE MOON FACES
An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands

by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

    Sample excerpts from the prologue of Shirley Lim’s critically acclaimed, award-winning memoir of growing up in Malaysia and of finding her voice as a writer and an Asian-American woman.
 

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    The first time I heard Shakespeare quoted, it was as a joke. Malayans speaking pidgin English would dolefully break out into Elizabethan lines, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” before bursting into chortles and sly looks. “Aiyah! Dia Romeo, lah!” – “He’s a Romeo!” – I heard said over and over again of any number of men, including my father, Baba. “Romeo” was a name recognized equally by English, Malay, Indian, and Chinese speakers. As a child I thought it meant the kind of thing men did to women; not so much in the dark that no one could see it, but sufficiently outside the pale that it was marked with an English word. That thing was a male effect – erotic heat combined with suave flirtation, distributed promiscuously, promising a social spectacle and unhappiness for women.

    “Romeo” was both an English and a Malayan word. “Hey, Romeo!” the young men said of each other as they slicked Brylcream into their glossy black hair and preened before mirrors. The performance of the Romeo was their version of Western romantic love. It had nothing to do with tragedy or social divisions, and everything to do with the zany male freedom permitted under Westernization. It included a swagger, winks, laughs, gossip, increased tolerance, as well as disapproval and scandal. The Romeo dresses to kill, a butterfly sipping on the honey of fresh blossoms, salaciously deliberate about his intentions. Although there was a Romeo around every corner for as long as I could remember, I did not learn of Juliet’s existence until I finally read the play at fourteen. By then, my imagination had hardened over the exclusion. For me, there were no Malayan Juliets, and sexual males were always Westernized.

    This was Shakespeare in my tropics, and romantic love, and the English language: mashed and chewed, then served up in a pattering patois which was our very own. Our very own confusion.

    I didn’t know about Juliet, but I knew my name. On my birth certificate, my name appears as Lim Geok Lin, a name selected from the list that Grandfather had prepared for his sons’ children. It is a name intended to humble, to make a child common and same, like the seeds of the hot basil plant that puff up as hundreds of dandelion-whirly-heads in sugared drinks. The significant name, appearing first, belongs to the family, its xing: Lim. There are millions of Lims on this planet, spelled Lin, Ling, Lum, Lam, Leng, and so forth, depending on the anglophone bureaucrat who first transcribed the phoneme. Drawn as two figures for “man,” a double male, formed the hieroglyphs for two upright trees resembling two pines or firs, the Chinese name is the same despite its English-translated differences.

    To be sure of my existence, however, Baba gave me other names. So everyone would know that I was from the female third generation of Grandfather’s line, I was named “Geok,” the second name giving descent position. Every granddaughter wrote her name as “Geok,” the Hokkien version of that most common of Chinese female names, “Jade.” Tens of millions of Chinese baby girls over the millennia have been optimistically named “Jade,” the stone treasured above all stones, smooth as deep running water fossilized in a moment of alchemical mystery, whose changeful colors, from greenish white to leaf-gold to the darkest hue of rich moss, were believed to signal the health of the wearer.

    My name birthed me in a culture so ancient and enduring “I” might as well have not been born. Instead, “we” were daughters, members of a family that placed its hope in sons. Something condescending and dismissive, careless and anonymous, accented the tones in which we were addressed. Girls were interchangeable. They fetched, obeyed, served, poured tea, balanced their baby brothers and sisters on their hips while they stood in the outer circles of older women. Unnecessary as individuals, girls need concern nobody, unlike sons, especially first sons, on whose goodwill mothers measured their future. My girl cousin and I, collectively named Precious Jade, were destined someday to leave our parents’ homes, claimed by strangers, like jewels given up to the emperor of patriarchs. No wonder we were valued generically as girls and seldom as individuals.

    Like my cousins I received a personal name, my ming. So as not to confuse me with Geok Lan, Geok Phan, Geok Pei, Geok Mui, or any other Geok, I was named Geok Lin. All my girl cousins answered to their Chinese ming. Ah Lan. Ah Mui. Ah Pei. But I was always “Shirley” to everyone. “Ah Shirley,” my aunts called me.

    Shirley, after Shirley Temple. Because we both had dimples. Because Baba had loved her in the movies in the 1930s. I knew the story of my name. “It’s your dimples,” Baba told me from the beginning. “You look just like Shirley Temple.” I thought Shirley Temple was an untidy child, burnt brown, with straight black hair, a Hollywood star whose fame ensured my own as a Chinese girl.

    The first time I saw the child actress in the 1934 movie “Bright Eyes,” decades later in a television clip on New York public television, she was tap dancing in shiny black patent leather shoes, her ringlets bouncing to the music. I know the details now: golden hair, blue eyes, Mary Janes on her feet. We could not have been more different as babies and little girls. But growing up I was assured that I was like Shirley Temple; a child star, reborn in Malacca, the glory atoms just the same.

    It remains a mystery to me what strange racial yearnings moved Baba to name me after a blond child. I’d like to think he was not tied to the fixities of race and class, that this presumption was less colonized mimicry than bold experiment. Looking at the dozens of nieces duplicated for a domestic future, did he rebel for me? Although, unarguably, he had written in his neat English script my Chinese name on my birth certificate, he never called me anything but Shirley, a Hollywood name for a daughter for whom he wished, despite everything his heritage dictated, a life freer than his own.

    I was confused when I first went to school and the Irish nuns called for “Geok Lin.” For the first few years I had to remember that I was "Geok Lin" in English school and “Shirley” in my home. It did not occur to me then that my scrambled names were a particular problem. Language mixes and mix-ups were Malayan everyday reality. Your own name tripped on your tongue, a series of hesitations, till you stopped noticing the hesitations, and the name flowed as yours, as a series of names.

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    Whether I have had too many names or never received my right name still isn’t clear to me. Malayans, imagining Roemo as a comic outlaw, transformed the play into a comedy of sexual manners because the tragedy of naming was so much a part of everyday life that we could not see it. Names also stuck on us: Chinese names, Malay names, Tamil names, English names, Portuguese names, Dutch names, Hollywood names, Roman names, Catholic names, Hindu names. They stuck, and they peeled off, became tangled like strings of DNA matter. Too many names, too many identities, too many languages.

    But it was never certain that this confusion should lead to comedy or tragedy. For my mother’s people, the peranakans – a distinctive Malayan-born people of Chinese descent assimilated into Malay and Western cultures – mockery and laughter accompanied our mÇlange of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Portuguese, British, and American cultural practices. Laughter acknowledged we were never pure. We spoke a little of this, a little of that, stole favorite foods from every group, paid for Taoist chants, and dressed from Western fashion magazines, copying manners we fancied. One of the earliest peranakan writers in English, Ee Tiang Hong, titled his first book of poems I of the Many Faces. He meant the title as an angst-loaded lamentation, but angst also is one of the many stances of the peranakans, one of their elaborate cultural plays between Chinese and Malay, Asian and Western. They, we were neither one nor the other; true peranakan copies, mixes, looking like nothing else in the world than ourselves.

    I begin my memoir in the United States at a moment when a female heroic of autonomy and resistance seems to have lost some of its persuasive edge. Perhaps that is why now more than ever we need to reconsider Virginia Woolf’s plea that women think back through their mothers. For many of us, it is the story of our mothers that makes a female heroic so necessary, yet also so impossible. In my first life, growing up as a Malaysian woman, I only could write of Asian women whose identities intertwined with mine: mothers, aunts, cousins, rivals, and friends. In my second life as an immigrant Asian American, I find that Western women have also helped me plot my life, as I write forward: women of all colors – workers, neighbors, colleagues, mentors, and sisters. This book is for all these women in my life.

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© 1996 by Shirley Geok-lin Lim. All rights reserved.
Published by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York.
No part of this excerpt may be sold, reproduced, disseminated, or used in any way without prior written permission from The Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

248 pages / 9 b&w photos / ISBN 1-55861-179-7 / $12.95 paperback / ISBN 1-55861-144-4 / $22.95 jacketed hardcover /