Prologue

The first time I heard Shakespeare quoted, it was as a joke. Malayans speaking pidgin English would doleftilly break out into Elizabethan lines, "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?" before bursting into chortles and sly looks. 'Aiyah! Dia Romeo, Iah!"-"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 ffirtation, 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 swaggen winks, laughs, gossip, increased tolerance, as well as disapproval and scandal. The Romeo dressed 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 conflision.      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 dandehon-whirly-heads in sugared drinks. The siguificant name, appearing first, belongs to the family, its xing: Lim. There are mlllions 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$' a double male, formed from the hieroglyphs for two upright trees resembling two pines or firs, the Chinese name is the same despite its English-translated differences.      To be sure of my existence, however, Baba gave me other names. So everyone would know that I was from the female third generation of Grandfather's line, I was named "Geok)' the second name giving descent position. Every granddaughter wrote her name as "Geok$' the Hokkien version of that most common of Chinese female names, jade:' Tens of mlllions 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 changeflil colors, from greenish white to leaf-gold to the darkest hue of rich moss, were believed to signal the health of the wearen      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. Unnecessaay as individuals, girls need concern nobody, unlike sons, especially first sons, on whose goodwill mothers measured their fliture. My girl cousins 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 conflise 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 "Shifley" 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 193Os. I knew the story of my name. "It's your dimples;' Baba told me from the begmimig. "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 blick patent leather shoes, her ringlets bouncing to the music. I know the details now: golden hair, blue eyes, Maryjanes 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 tixities of race and class, that this presumption was less colonized mimicry than bold experiment. Looking at the dozens of nieces duplicated for a domestic fliture, 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 conflised 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 reallty;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.      When I was baptized at the age of eleven, Father Lourdes said I had to choose a Catholic name, the name of a saint. Baba had shown no interest one way or another when I told bim that I wanted to become a Catholic. He signed a form agreeing to my baptism with no discussion; it could have been a form for participation in a School Day parade. The looming question that almost turned me away from the moment of baptism was, what would I call myself? Unlike Baba I knew that baptism intended a serious change of identity; At eleven I didn't know who I wanted to be. Saint Martha? Saint Lucy? Saint Bernadette? Saint josephine? If I was going to change from Shirley to Martha, I wanted to know what I was exchanging my star status fon who were these saints and what kinds of lives had they led?      In the sales annex of the convent school, I looked through the holy pictures, glossy cards which featured images of sainted women on one side and brief biographies on the othen The nuns' favorite presents to successflil students, these holy pictures showed white women in long robes clasping their hands upward with piteous expressions.The stories were equally unvarying; saints died to preserve Christianity and their virginity I chose Agnes, a virgin condernned to be devoured by lions because she had reffised the seduction of a Roman tyrant. Agnes had a young noble face cast toward a stream of sunlight, and she rested her hands casually on the manes of a couple of lions who lay by her sandaled fret like overgrown house cats. I knew no one named Agnes in Malacca. It would seem a difficult name for my aunts to pronounce: Ah Agnes. For a few months after my baptism the nuns called for Agnes, had to call for Agnes again and again, before I recognized it as my name.      Then in a year there was confirmation. "You must choose a confirmation name," Father Lourdes said. More sophisticated, I checked out the Hollywood actresses whose looks I liked. Jennifer Jones matched with a Saint Jennifer, but Jennifer Jones had breasts, dark hair, a sultry look. Unlike Saint Jennifer of the holy picture, she was a moving image, a woman larger than lik on the screen in the Rex Cinema. I wrote my name down as Agnes Jennifer on the cover of my school exercise books. Jenny was a friendlier version, but I already knew of at least three Jennies in Malacca; it would be too conflising to take their names.      I tried writing my names down: Shirley Agnes Jennifrr Lim Geok Lin. But after months of trying one or another, only Shirley stuck. It was the name Baba had given me out of his fantasy of the West, what he saw when he saw me for the first time, his only daughter, with dimples, in a Hollywood halo. Shifley was Baba's version of the beloved girl-child, played back without the Mary Janes, without the blue eyes and golden ringlets, without anything Western in it for a Malayan daughter except the language of the West.      Whether I have had too many names or never received my right name still isn't clear to me. Malayans, imagining Romeo 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 lifr that we could not see it. Names also stuck on us: Chinese names, Malay names, Tarnil names, English names, Portuguese names, Dutch names, Hollywood names, Roman names, Catholic names, Hindu names. They stuck, and they peeled oft, became tangled like strings of DNA matten Too many names, too many identities, too many languages.      But it was never certain that this conflision should lead to comedy or tragedy For my mother's people, the pcrnnakans~ distinctive Malayan-born people of Chinese descent assimilated into Malay and Western cultures-mockery and laughter accompanied our mehuge 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, BeTiang Hong, titled his first book of poems I of the Many Facci He meant the title as an angst4oaded 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 reconsidervirginiaWoolf'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: mother, aunts, cousins, rivals, and friends. In my second life as an irnmigrant Asian American, I find thatWestern 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.