Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands:
A Summary, A Memoir by Shirley Goek-Lin Lim

    Shirley Lim subtitles her memoir as An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands.  This use of the plural Homelands is intentional since it constitutes her desire to adopt a position of belonging to the United States without severing her bonds to her ancestral home, Malaysia.
     The book tells us about her childhood in an English- speaking home in Malaysia as the third child and only daughter among six. Her father consciously immersed his children in Western culture and British education thus creating for them a priviledged status in Malaysian society but separating them from their paternal grandfather's family and language. This consciousness of " the other " was inherent in her nuclear family since her mother was a peranaken Malayan who lived in "a foreign Hokkien environment " .
    Along with the descriptions of her somewhat unconventional parents as childhood agents of pleasure , love and sensuality , she also describes experiences of poverty and hunger (after her father's bankruptcy) and being subjected to violent abuse by the father she adored . But what seems to have accentuated Lim's natural feminist tendency at an early age, was her mother's abandonment of the six children when they were all very young. This disappearance of a mother figure, at such a critical time for the family, stimulated Lim's energetic quest for attachment and acceptance into her brothers' world despite her gender. Their rejection of her on those very grounds, seems to be Lim's first attempts at coming to terms with her sexual identity "...I stood outside a door and felt my sex make me unwelcome. I decided my brothers' acceptence was preferable to my father's favoritism. I rejected the identity of girl". This was perhaps Lim's initial formulation of what was to become Lim's feminist.position later on in life.
    Lim's childhood experiences both at home and at school fluctuate between positive, nurturing ones and those of physical and emotional abuse. Yet she emerges throughout as self-confident, outspoken and rebellious even within a constrained colonial British educational system and deprivation at home. This rebelliousness influences her decision
to leave her Malaysian homeland and also a meaningful romantic attachment when she receives both a Fulbright and a Wien International fellowship at Brandeis. After experiencing a case of sexual and racial discrimination when a Muslim male colleague was given a position in the English Department of her University despite her more superior credentials, she made a conscious decision to follow her own desire to grow rather than settle down and " be a wife".
    She leaves for the States and describes the years that followed as years of isolation, hardship and disorientation in the maze of the American cultural and social setting. Yet they are also years of intellectual and creative growth. Her existence as " a stranger" is an integral part of her personal identity . Her status as an alien resident together with her British accent and brown color isolates her from American society even though she "belongs" to priviledged academic circles and achieves success in the university departments where she studies and later in the colleges she works in. This feeling of being discluded from mainstream society seems to be tied to guilt and feelings of estrangement that she experiences especially after her father's death . She commits herself to the financial support of her father's wife and sons. That seems to be a means of re-affirming the validity of her bonds with her family in her Malaysian homeland. On the other hand , it is also an act of "exorcism" of those oppressive ties in order to allow for new bonds to be made with her chosen homeland, the United States.
    Her marriage to Charles, anAmerican," brought her calm," as she states but even after she was neutralized as an American citizen and had given birth to her American son Lim experienced discrimination and rejection from its society.
    In Brooklyn , where she and her husband made their first home, she was introduced to other aspects of living in multi-cultural, multi-class , democratic American society. As a property owner of a town-house, she was resentfully labelled by her lower class Puerto Rican and African -American neighbors as priviledged . Lim admits guiltily of having her own racist feelings towards those whose cultural practices impinged on her private space and violated her norms of behavior within the public space. Yet it is here, in a situation of close intimacy with a multi-cultural society torn by class distinctions that she employs her energetic optimism and belief in the American ethos of activism in order to bring a change to the neighborhood. Her observations about the formation of the "block association" by people whose only common concern was their of property served as a lesson to her in U.S. politics and civic identity. As such, it seemed to confirm her choice of this new homeland which allowed "continuous fresh construction of civic identities and affiliations over her own tightly knitted society, stratified by race, religion and familial bonds.
    But despite the ongoing efforts to improve the common "air space" and to feel comfortable there, things changed for the worse. The fragmented, artificial society of "the block association" and its incapability to make radical changes in the neighborhood did not make Lim feel any more comfortable. The couple chose to move to an almost wholly white, middle- class suburban community in Westchester County where she got a position in a suburban community college.
    Lim's work Crossing the Peninsula, was awarded the Commonwealth Prize in 1980, a few months after her son was born and a collection of her stories were published by Times Books. At about the same time but strangely enough in her old homeland and not in the United States , she was asked to take a stand as a feminist, as a woman writer representing her sex for the first time in her career.
    It seems that Lim's own non- assimilation into American society influenced her conscious decision to raise her son as a fully American child without burdening him with affiliation to any other homeland other than his own. She, on the other hand, has accepted the fact that ties with her Malaysian are cricial even at this point of her career in order in order to refresh " her literary identity and originality" and that her own assimilation into American society is an ongoing process which has not yet ended.