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Introduction

SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM’S Two Dreams: New and Selected Stories is a book at once haunting and haunted: haunting, because after you have read the stories, the characters and their lives stay with you; haunted, because the stories hold something both intimate and strange, something so enticing and elusive that you want to return to them to re-encounter the people, re-experience the places, and re-think things over. This effect is similar to what Toni Morrison, talking about her own work, calls “a quality of hunger and disturbance that never ends.”¹

The attraction of Lim’s characters lies in their vulnerability and strength, their complexity and ambivalence, as well as in their distinct personalities. These attributes reflect the complicated everyday realities of life in the multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural societies of Malaysia and the United States. They also characterize the situations of individuals, families, and communities in the process of transition from traditional values of the East to new ideas and lifestyles of the West. In this process, the traditional Eastern values are challenged; but at the same time, Western values are tested and questioned as they are absorbed in another country, or even on their homeground by immigrants.

Much of the drama in Lim’s stories is played out in the meeting places of different peoples and cultures, which are also “in-between” spaces of ambivalence and possibility. Indeed, most of Lim’s stories grow out of the interactions and conflicts between East and West, between Asia and America. The geographical and cultural tension in Lim’s stories is perfectly captured in the book’s title, Two Dreams, taken from the story of a woman whose dreams reveal the deep ambivalence she feels toward her two homelands, Malaysia and the United States.

Readers who are familiar with Lim’s autobiographical work Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands will recognize the parallels between Lim’s own life and the lives of the characters in such stories as “Hunger,” “All My Uncles,” “The Good Old Days,” and “Transportation in Westchester.” In fact, Lim’s memoir can serve as a companion book to her story collection, which can be better understood in the context of her life and the places she has lived. Although most of the stories in Two Dreams are not based on Lim’s life, they are rooted in her life experience in Malaysia and the United States. Lim’s own experience as an immigrant in America, and her intimate knowledge of life in both countries, have enabled her to portray Asian and Asian-American characters and their lives, cultures, and communities with accurate details and penetrating observations.

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim was born in the town of Malacca, on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. Her early life took place during a time of turmoil and change in Malaysia. At the time of her birth, during World War II, her homeland was under Japanese occupation. After the war Great Britain re-established its longstanding colonial rule over the region, but in 1957, Malaysia became an independent state within the British Commonwealth.

Malaysia had long been a multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious society, with a large population of ethnic Chinese (including Shirley Lim) and a sizable Indian minority as well as native Malays. The decades preceding and following independence were marked by tensions—and sometimes violent clashes—between the groups.

Lim’s childhood was also marked by turmoil and instability within her own family. When Lim was still a young girl, the failure of her father’s business plunged the family into poverty; a short time later, her mother abandoned the family. The only girl among five brothers, Shirley received little attention from her father, and was for years left hungry, for food as well as affection. She excelled in her studies, however, receiving her early education in English at a Roman Catholic convent school in Malacca. Later she went to the University of Malaya in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, where she received a B.A. with First Class Honours in English. After teaching at the University of Malaya for two years, Lim came to the United States and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. She first taught in the New York City area, at Hostos Community College and at Westchester College, SUNY. In 1990 she took a position at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches English and women’s studies. She lives in Santa Barbara with her husband, Charles Bazerman, and son, Gershom Kean Bazerman.

Two Dreams contains nineteen stories written over three decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s. The stories are arranged into three groups, in accordance with the perspectives and central concerns. The first group, under the section title “Girl,” consists of six stories, all of which deal with the lives of girls, though their content is not restricted to girlhood. In “Hunger,” for instance, questions concerning the obligations of motherhood, choices between individual freedom and the mother’s responsibility for the lives of her children, are implicitly raised. These questions, however, remain under the surface of the story, which centers on the physical, psychological, and emotional experience of the girl protagonist, Chai.

Chai suffers from a double lack—the lack of food and the lack of a mother. Lim weaves the sensation of hunger and the emotion of longing seamlessly into the girl’s everyday life through Chai’s observations of details. Walking to school with her schoolmate Suleng, Chai notices that Suleng’s uniform “was starched and ironed, the creases sharp and straight, the folds thick like her slice of bread and the yellow margarine spread with a fat knife. The starch made Suleng’s royal blue cotton uniform gleam, like the fat sugar crystals glistening on the margarine on top of the bread” (25–26). Through the association of images, Lim enables the reader to experience Chai’s hunger and loneliness along with her daily activities and surrounding world.

Association of images is also Lim’s strategy for moving the narrative from one situation to another. Chai’s memories of her mother and her painful feelings over her mother’s absence are unexpectedly and spontaneously revealed through images. The bright blue eyes of Sister Finnigan, a teacher at Chai’s school, remind her of the gems in the jewelery stores her mother had once taken her to. The colorless diamond stones, “clear as clear, like looking through water and seeing no bottom, no sky, no eyes looking back,” reflect both the mother’s absence and Chai’s keen awareness of it (28). Again, as Chai wanders to the seawall her desolation is rendered by the undercurrents of meaning in Lim’s description of the waves as seen through Chai’s eyes: “They were blue like the sky brought close to hand, yet they were no-colour when she put her face down to look” (32).

Two of Lim’s recurring subjects are women’s social position and their relationships with men. These subjects are explored in a variety of forms, and often through the eyes of a girl. “Native Daughter,” for instance, deals with gender relationships, especially the relationship between husbands and wives in the patriarchal society of Malaysia, through the perception and experience of six-year-old Mei Sim. Mei Sim’s consciousness of gender difference emerges from listening to her mother’s conversations with Grandaunty. She finds out that “women were different from men who were bodoh [stupid] and had to be trained to be what women wanted them to be. If women were carts, men were like kerbau [buffalo] hitched to them” (38). From their conversation, Mei discovers that her mother is talking to Grandaunty about her father’s infidelity.

At age six, Mei learns that in a patriarchal society, where men’s privilege and interest are protected by law and women are subordinate to and dependent on men, wives must be tactful in their dealings with their husbands. “‘The only thing that women have is their cunning,’” Grandaunty advises her mother. “‘What do you want, a faithful man or a man who will support you and your children? . . . Talk to him sweet-sweet every time he comes home late. . . . Make him open the purse-strings’” (39). Grandaunty’s practical advice, apparently devoid of any emotional or moral considerations, lays bare the stark reality of women’s vulnerable status even after they are married to wealthy men. In their disempowered position, women have to use submissiveness as camouflage, and niceness as a weapon for their own survival and the survival and benefit of their children. Grandaunty’s attitudes reflect the values of her patriarchal society, which has shaped the relationships and behaviors of both men and women.

Two other stories of the first group, “Mr. Tang’s Girls” and “Life’s Mysteries,” further indicate that the family structure is ultimately a power structure, that male-female relationships are power relationships which condition the characters’ emotional and sexual lives. Though protected by law, individual male power is not as absolute and stable as the institutionalized patriarchy. Grandaunty in “Native Daughter,” for instance, is the matriarch who dominates her husband and sons as well as enslaving her daughter. And in “Mr. Tang’s Girls,” each of the four women—a wealthy man’s second wife and three daughters of his second family—knows exactly what to say and how to act in front of the father in order to get what she wants from him. Mr. Tang’s authority is threatened by his daughters, who have grown up under Western influence. His oldest daughter’s rebellious behaviour and undisguised sexual desire infuriate and disturb him. Shortly after Mr. Tang announces an arranged marriage for her, she kills him as he is dozing off. This parricide seems to be indirectly the result of the mixture of East and West, the ancient and the modern, which renders impossible the harmony and control Mr. Tang wants to maintain within a family based on a centuries-old Asian patriarchal system now infiltrated by modern Western lifestyles and values. In this and several other stories, Lim seems to suggest that superficially imported Western ideas and values can be dangerously seductive and potentially destructive.

However, not everything Western can be categorized in these terms in Lim’s stories. In “The Touring Company,” a Malaysian schoolgirl’s participation as a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and her encounter with the actresses and actors from England make a lasting positive impact on her. The world around her takes on a magical new look; her imagination begins to reach beyond the confines of here and now.

The last story in this group, “Sisters,” is an excerpt from Lim’s novel-in-progress. The story begins with the childhood of two sisters, Yen and Su Swee, and their Western education in English at a Methodist school in Malacca. Their family structure and their relationship with their wealthy elderly father are similar to those of “Mr. Tang’s Girls.” But in the later story, the sisters are much closer to each other, and the plot that leads to the father’s death is quite different. In fact, the story’s comic penultimate scene suggests one of the themes Lim will explore in her novel: the paradoxes faced by young Asian and Asian-American women, raised in traditional families but exposed to modern Western values, as they seek to take charge of their own sexualities.

The deeply disturbing and catalytic effects of interactions between different cultures and peoples underlie many of Lim’s stories, particularly those in the second group, under the section title “Country.” Colonization and intervention by the West has molded the lives of people in Malaysia on different levels. In “Blindness,” England and its literature play an important role in shaping the lives and relationships of a Chinese Malaysian family. In “The Bridge,” the Western ideas of democracy and justice which a young girl, Gek Neo, has learned at school move her to report to the school principal, Mr. Blake, about some workmen’s extortions of money and food from local people, who are too afraid to do anything about it. Ironically, Gek Neo knows that Mr. Blake, a white man in colonized Malaysia, has the power to help the Malaysians who are victimized by local corruption and power. In “Thirst,” James Thamby McNair, a Eurasian, gives up his pursuit of medicine to marry a Catholic Sinhalese girl, and elopes with her to Malaysia, where he works as a “lowly dispenser” on a plantation in the jungle. After many years of marriage he becomes estranged from his wife and children, who have adopted their mother’s religion and despise and pity their father for his sins and lack of religious faith. McNair turns to alcohol for comfort and eventually gives in to the seduction of the Malaysian gardener’s daughter.

Invasions by foreign powers and interactions of different cultures not only condition people’s interpersonal relationships and private lives, but also bring changes in the relationships within and between families, as shown in “All My Uncles” and “The Good Old Days.” These two stories can be read as companion pieces about the decline of family fortune, the intrigues and conflicts between five households of five sons of a Straits Chinese patriarch in Malaysia. The loss of family wealth in these stories is in a way connected to the Japanese occupation and to the Western practice of litigation, which is adopted by the five families in hope of getting a good portion of an inheritance, but eventually leads them all into debt. Exposed to the forces and practices of Western values, the traditional Confucian harmony, hierarchy, and familial loyalty erode and finally collapse. Lim subtly blends comedy and tragedy in these stories. Out of the shattered past, new social practices and relationships are formed. As the narrator in “The Good Old Days” notes, though her father and her uncles never became rich businessmen as her grandfather used to be, her eldest brother “is now a top lawyer with his own firm in the capital city,” her second brother is a successful accountant, and she herself teaches “Economics in the University” (115).

The interlacing narratives within a narrative in these two stories demonstrate Lim’s talent in weaving different strands of story line with ease. In particular, Lim excels at integrating women’s oral tradition—in this case, the aunts’ gossip—into the structure of her written form. The numerous colorful characters in these stories also illustrate Lim’s ability to create unforgettable personalities through her descriptive skill and her use of the characters’ idiosyncratic English, without allowing their speech to become stereotypical pidgin English.

But Lim also portrays characters and conveys their experience without relying on their speech. In “The Farmer’s Wife,” Lim’s narrative technique and character portrayal are distinctly different from those in her other stories. Throughout the story, silence remains a dominant effect and serves several functions. First, it recreates the atmosphere of a quiet life on an isolated farm. Second, it enhances the dislocation and loneliness of the farmer’s wife, an immigrant from Canton, a large city in China. Third, it adds to the foreboding hush and the intense suspense that has been building up as the narrative progresses through the approach of nightfall and the arrival of morning, but without the farmer’s return from the market. Finally, the silence, maintained while the farmer’s wife is picked up by a white man in uniform and driven to town, reflects the alienation between the colonialists and the colonized people. This alienation and the colonial officer’s self-assumed superiority are powerfully conveyed when the silence is broken at the end of the story. “‘Faugh!’ the sergeant said to the Englishman. ‘These are truly foul-smelling, unfeeling, Godless people!’” (119)

In the third group of stories, under the section title “Woman,” interactions between people of different genders, races, and ethnicities become even more complex. All the protagonists in these stories are women, but their emotional, psychological, and sexual experiences are shaped not only by a patriarchal system, but also by the tensions between cultures. In “Haunting,” a Chinese-Malaysian woman, Jenny, suffers from anxiety and obsession with the sounds of ghosts in her indigenous Malaysian mother-in-law’s old house because of the alienation she feels in the household. This alienation is due in part to the language barrier that separates Jenny from her mother-in-law and their servant, who speak only Malay, and in part to the generation gap, which implies a great difference in lifestyle and values as well as in age. In “Conversations of Young Women,” Mary, a glamorous and successful reporter, is raped by her Chinese father’s friends as a punishment for her insistence on dating an Indian man.

These intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity, which exist in all of Lim’s writing, come to the forefront in this third group of narratives. In “Keng Hua,” Weng, a thirty-six-year-old single woman with a successful college teaching career, begins to feel something missing in her life. She invites her American colleague, Peter, along with her friend Siew and Siew’s husband, to her apartment for a drink. Siew is hopeful that Peter will fall in love with Weng, but Weng has no patience for Siew’s sentimentality about love. She takes her affairs lightly and feels no emotional attachment to the numerous men in her life. In fact, Weng has declined Peter’s invitations for a date in various forms before. Now she seems to be willing to give it a try despite Peter’s ungainly height and bulk, the “roll of fat above his trousers and thickly coiled dark hair over his bare arms, springing up from the back of his hands,” and even his white people’s body odor, which Peter does not bother to mask with cologne (179). But Peter’s rude manner and behavior humiliate Weng; the evening which seems so full of promise turns into a disaster. This incident forces Weng to confront what she has missed in life, and she cries that night.

The implied moment of revelation Weng experiences—and the narrative strategy which leads to this moment—are reminiscent of the epiphanies of James Joyce’s Dubliners. There are similar moments of epiphany in other stories, including “Another Country” and “Two Dreams.” The protagonist in the title story experiences a powerful moment of insight, although the epiphany is implied rather than described. “Two Dreams” begins with Martha’s dream of riding on her brother’s bicycle on the beach and ends with her dream of her Malaysian friend Harry’s lecture, in which “all his students were leaving because the police were beating them on the head.” The first dream reveals Martha’s feelings of exile in New York and nostalgia for her childhood in Malaysia; the second one displays her horror and disappointment at the Malaysian police’s brutality toward the weak and helpless in society and the politicians’ indifference to it. These two dreams reflect Martha’s ambivalent feelings about the two countries which have been her homes.

The emotional and psychological tensions and conflicts of living as an immigrant in America are also dramatized in “Transportation in Westchester” and “A Pot of Rice.” Although the narrator in “Transportation in Westchester,” a lonely young Chinese woman who teaches English at a suburban college, witnesses racial division and experiences racial hostility every day on her long hours of commuting between Brooklyn and Westchester, the tension in the foreground of the story is rooted in class divisions. The narrator avoids the companionship of a fellow commuter, Mrs. Callaghan, an elderly African-American woman, whose lengthy monologues bore her, and whose eager friendliness offends her because she realizes that Mrs. Callaghan is “a domestic,” and takes her “for one of her own”—that is, one of the poor, unprofessional working class.

Lim’s choice of words and tone for the narrator strategically reveals the narrator’s naiveté and self-righteousness, and the fact that her education in classical and English literatures has shaped her perception of the world and people. At the same time, Lim also represents an interesting and unforgettable Mrs. Callaghan through her manner of speech—the syntax, cadence, and rhythm of her monologues. But Lim refuses to portray her characters through binary oppositions between good and evil, right and wrong. Despite her apparent snobbishness, there is much to admire in the narrator, who is struggling as an immigrant in New York with endurance, courage, and unshakable determination to get to a place where she will never suffer again from the hunger she experienced in her impoverished childhood, which still haunts her.

In “A Pot of Rice,” gender relationships within an interracial marriage are complicated by cultural differences. Su Yu’s ritual of ancestor worship in memory of her dead father offends her American husband, who resents not being served first. As in “Transportation in Westchester,” a sense of alienation and loneliness accompanies the immigrant character’s embrace of America’s opportunities and promise for a better life. With the increasing number of Asians and Asian immigrants in the United States, Lim’s exploration of multilayered cross-cultural experiences offers a timely, intimate representation of the special internal and external challenges faced by newly arrived Asians and Asian Americans.

Lim occupies a unique position in contemporary Asian-American literature. Much of this literature is by writers who are American-born, and the Asian places, cultures, and lives it depicts are for the most part imagined, invented, and re-created through intertextual appropriations and revisions of Asian myths, legends, and literatures. Lim’s stories, embedded in everyday lives in Asia, have something different to offer the reader.

In spite of the difference, Lim’s work has much in common with other Asian-American writings, particularly writings by women. Her characters’ emotional and psychological state of being in-between two worlds is characteristic of the Asian-American experience, and has provided recurring subject matter in Asian-American literature. The exploratory side of Lim’s stories—a delicate and innovative groping after half-sensed realities, mysterious states of mind, and complicated relationships—is reminiscent of the writings of a generation ago by Diana Chang and Hisaye Yamamoto. Lim’s representation of Asian women as subjects of their own destinies, like the representation of women by writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and David Henry Hwang, counters the stereotypes of Asian women as exotic creatures and submissive victims. In her sensitivity to issues of colonialism, nationalism, race, ethnicity, gender, and class, Lim’s writings are closely linked to the work of Theresa Jak Kyung Cha. The intersections of gender, class, and ethnic and racial tensions and conflicts in the lives of Southeast Asians and Malaysian immigrants in America in Lim’s stories mark both a new arrival and a new departure in Asian American literature.

With their predominant concerns with women’s issues and experiences, Lim’s stories share many qualities with other literary writings by women, particularly by women of color. Because of the differences of race, ethnicity, and class, the preoccupations of these writers of color are bound to differ from those of white European and American women writers. In her introduction to The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women (1995), Hermione Lee identifies speaking to “the secret self” as one of “the particular qualities of women’s stories.” Lee quotes Katherine Mansfield’s ambition for the short story (expressed in a letter written in 1921): “One tries to go deep—to speak to the secret self we all have—to acknowledge that.”² The notion of “the secret self” waiting to be discovered and confronted is undermined in Lim’s stories. In these stories, the self is unstable; it is constantly being reconstructed and reinvented in different ways by conditions and forces which include racial tensions, class divisions, social changes, and the political climate. Rather than trying to reveal a supposed “secret self,” Lim’s stories—like the stories of many other women of color, including Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sandra Cisneros—are concerned with the process of the making of the gendered, ethnic, colonized and racialized self in a particular society and historical moment. At the same time, Lim’s stories explore the possibilities of empowering, reinscribing, and reinventing this self, without failing to confront the vulnerablities and ambivalences involved in this process.

Finally, the hybrid cultures and the multiracial and multiethnic societies in Lim’s stories challenge notions of the purity and stability of cultures and identities. In this sense, her work is also part of the emergent world literature of postcolonial migration and diaspora.

Up to this time, Shirley Lim has been better known as a poet and short story writer in Southeast Asia and Great Britain than in the United States. Her first collection of poetry, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, was published in the British Commonwealth in 1980, and received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the best first book of poetry. She has written three other collections of poetry, No Man’s Grove and Other Poems (Singapore: National University of Singapore English Department, 1985), Modern Secrets: New and Selected Poems (London: Dangeroo Press, 1989), and Monsoon History: Selected Poems (London: Skoob Pacifica, 1994). Lim also published two collections of short stories with Times Editions in Singapore—Another Country and Other Stories (1982) and Life’s Mysteries: The Best of Shirley Lim (1995)—from which many of the stories in Two Dreams are drawn. She received an Asiaweek Short Story award in 1982.

In 1990 Lim co-edited, with Mayumi Tsutakawa and Margarita Donnelly, The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology, which won the American Book Award (1990). Her memoir Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands was published in 1996 by the Feminist Press, and subsequently by Times Editions in Singapore.

Although she has been well known internationally as a critic of Southeast Asian and Asian-American literature, and although her poetry and short stories have appeared in North American periodicals and anthologies, Lim’s fiction has not been available in the United States in book form. Thanks to the Feminist Press, American readers now have access to Shirley Lim’s stories. In the haunted house of Two Dreams, readers can enjoy exploring the elusive, confronting the irrational, and being surprised by the unexpected.

Zhou Xiaojing

Buffalo, New York

1996

NOTES

1. Toni Morrison, Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1994), 155.

2. Hermione Lee, ed., The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women (London: Phoenix, 1995), x.