that are hidden within the poem. In each reading
of Lim’s poem, readers find something new hid-
den within the images. In this poem, what
emerges is the voice of a woman who has not
been given any other way to express her pain.
The brief newspaper reference from the epigraph
does not tell a story of suffering and anguish; it
tells of a serious social problem, but the scope of
loss is not articulated. That task is for the poet to
perform. Ng asserts that ‘‘Lim’s poems, by re-
imagining the lives of marginalized women,
effectively return these forgotten victims to
contemporaneity, and directly articulate their
suffering and trauma.’’ To ignore these women’s
voices is to ignore social history. Lim is not
about to let that happen.
Source:Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on ‘‘Pan-
toun for Chinese Women,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale,
Cengage Learning, 2009.
Mohammed A. Quayam
In the following excerpt from an interview, Lim
contrasts writing poetry with academic writing
and discusses her Malaysian-Chinese heritage.
...[Mohammed A. Quayum:] Why do you
write? Is it for the sheer joy of writing—the joy of
telling a story, for example—or because you have
some ideas to convey, some instructions perhaps?
Is writing an obsessive, compulsive activity for you
or is it a way of solving problems, private or
societal?
[Shirley Geok-lin Lim:]When I was much
younger I might have replied that I wrote for the
‘‘sheer joy’’ of writing, but this has not been the
case for a long time. That I feel driven to write is
clear. That writing provides me with a deeply
satisfying sense of coming to who I am, becom-
ing who I believe myself to be, is also clear. But I
am less certain now that ‘‘joy’’ has anything to do
with it.
More often than not, writing means long
hours and days of loneliness, isolation, doubt.
And more and more I feel the absence of time for
the kind of writing I want to do. Working on this
interview with you, for example, means losing
time for writing. Entire months and even years
go by with very little time for the kind of writing
you are asking me about.
Writing is surely no way to go about solving
problems. I would like to think that my poems
and prose works offer symbolic action and so
participate in a significant way in the social
world—in a political public sphere, but that is a
faint hope and as easily winked out even during
my lucid moments.
Is writing obsessive for me? Not in the psycho-
neurotic sense, the way an obsessive-compulsive
has no rational control over her actions. My
sense of duty, my work ethic, is very strong, and I
spend most of my life devoted to my salaried pro-
fession as a university teacher and citizen. Social
responsibilities take up an enormous amount of
my energy, whether they were/are childcare,
housekeeping chores or community services. If I
did not have to work for a living, I would probably
have devoted myself to the work of poetry and
fiction and be a different kind of writer.
MAQ: You had a difficult childhood and
adolescence I understand. How have those early
experiences helped to shape the writer you are?
SL:It is perhaps those early years that have
made it so difficult for me to disengage from the
academic profession, which offers steady employ-
ment and social respect, to enter fully into the life
of writing. In that way, those years have made me
a discontinuous writer. I am always amazed to
hear anyone say that I am a ‘‘prolific’’ writer.
Compared with prose authors such as Charles
Dickens, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Virginia
Woolf, or, in our time, Doris Lessing, Salman
Rushdie, Anita Desai, or poets such as Adrienne
Rich—and I do not mean to claim equal standing
with them, merely use them as known figures for
illustrative purpose—my literary output is mea-
gre. All these figures lived their lives professio-
nally and socially as writers. I have not.
I feel profoundly that I have not become the
writer I may have been if I had taken the risk to
leave academia. But then, knowing how difficult
if not impossible it is to make a living out of
selling one’s books, I might have been tempted
to write to please the market. My writing has
remained quirky, not attuned to a popular read-
ership, really ‘‘minor,’’ ‘‘deterritorialized,’’ in theI FEEL PROFOUNDLY THAT I HAVE NOT BECOME
THE WRITER I MAY HAVE BEEN IF I HAD TAKEN THE RISK
TO LEAVE ACADEMIA.’’Pantoun for Chinese Women