Published in the United States and Canada by
The Feminist Press at The City University of New York
311 East 94th Street, New York, New York 10128-5684
First Feminist Press edition, 1997
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 5 4 3 2 1
Stories originally published, in different arrangement and excluding “Sisters,” preface, and introduction, as Life’s Mysteries: The Best of Shirley Lim by Times Books International, an imprint of Times Editions Pte Ltd, in 1995. © 1995 Times Edition Pte Ltd. All rights reserved.
Compilation, preface, and “Sisters” © 1997 by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Introduction © 1997 by Zhou Xiaojing
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from The Feminist Press at The City University of New York except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lim, Shirley.
Two dreams: new and selected stories / Shirley Geok-lin Lim.—1st Feminist Press ed.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: Life’s mysteries, 1995.
ISBN 978-1-93693-233-7 (ebook)
1. Malaysia—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Malaysians—United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. 3. Women—Malaysia—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Lim, Shirley. Life’s mysteries. II. Title.
PS3562. 1459T97 1997
813’ .54—dc21
96-52523
CIP
This publication is made possible, in part, by a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts. The Feminist Press would also like to thank Joanne Markell and Genevieve Vaughan for their generosity.
Typeset by CompuDesign, Jackson Heights, New York.
Contents
For my mother and her people
I CONSIDER THIS collection of short stories a furoshiki, a kind of patterned handkerchief that a woman folds in pleats and bows to carry a small package—a gift of fruit, for example, or her lunch. It is a shawl, such as another woman at the end of another story threw over herself to cover her shoulders for warmth; a sort of scarf, to cloak a woman’s head for modesty, and also a fabric of many colors, spun deliberately for display.
The stories in the collection span the years from 1969 to 1996. The earliest stories were composed when I had just barely turned a woman, neither at ease in a modern world of choices and freedom—including the freedom to end at the bottom of an emotional and social scrapheap—nor able to live gracefully with the moral constraints that had structured Chinese Malaysian women’s lives for centuries, before they cracked in the contact with Western ideas, more dangerous than seducers or midnight lovers.
I have been writing in between America and Asia, and in between chores and duties, for over thirty years. I began writing as a poet. Poetry, the liberal taskperson, requires adventuring into critical essay and interpretation, narrative and imagination. The stories collected here happened when I gave myself permission to slip the traces of academe, and to trace instead the deceptive wavering line of “once upon a time.”
Once upon a time, there was a country called . . .
In many of these stories, that country lies in the past, in a place that is neither history nor memory, neither family nor nation, but nonetheless a place real to Malaysians—and I hope also to American readers who wish to know what was to be seen and heard and felt in another country in which English and British were as fantastic as Chinese and indigenous, and all made a brew of rich misery and meanings which only storytelling can retrieve.
Some of these stories retell themselves, with new details and with added voices, despite the old ghosts. Looking for women as desperately as I have all my life, I imagine sisters again and again—women who measure each other, betray each other, warm each other with talk and food. So a more contemporary story, “Sisters,” rewrites “Mr. Tang’s Girls,” written almost fifteen years earlier, as, sisterless, I reimagine women of my blood, from my blood, entering the world of the page.
But