I came to cold snowy Boston in 1969. Having lived in the United States for almost as long as I have been writing stories, I have stored-up tales of America yet to write. Two Dreams returns to the place where these stories began, imagining a past different from the one that I have lived—perhaps a past that looks forward to a place where the possessive can ring, not like loss but like love.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Santa Barbara, California
1996
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