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