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