tend to over-value the ‘‘surface’’ of creative works
while somehow missing the essential ‘‘artistic’’
qualities? Do you enjoy detailed analyses of your
poems in terms of their stylistic experiments, or do
you prefer to have your works read in terms of
their larger social/political/cultural content and
voice?
I do not see how scholar-critics ever over-
value the surface of creative works. That is a
failure I find in my undergraduate students
whose theoretical apparatus is weak. You may
mean something else by that word than I do. I do
not separate the qualities of a work into ‘‘sur-
face’’ and ‘‘artistic,’’ as surface is art polished,
and art is manifested through surface as well. I
seldom read critical works on my writing,
although recently I have been receiving quite a
few articles, chapters of dissertations and books
that treat my writing. I cannot say I ‘‘enjoy’’ such
reading. It makes me happy when a reader finds
something valuable about my work, but after
reading the chapter or article, I move on and
do not re-read it.
Why have you not written more fiction? Are
you more comfortable writing poetry? Or are the
kinds of experiences you wish to share and express
more readily voiced through poetry rather than
through prose?
Oddly enough, I believe that it is factually
correct to say that I have written much more
prose than I have poetry. I am working on a
second novel. If all goes well, the first novel
may yet be published. I have written probably
too many critical articles and books. My memoir
has brought me more critical and popular atten-
tion than any of my books of poetry. I agree that
I have not written that many short stories. I have
all kinds of stories in my head, but unfortunately
I have only one life and 24 hours in a day. Most
of that life is spent as an academic, a critic,
scholar, and housekeeper. Poems are much
more difficult to voice than fiction or other
prose genres. It takes a lot of time and space
for a poem to emerge, if at all, which explains
why I have not written that much poetry.
By the standard of recent autobiographies,
yours is considered by many to be ‘‘tame,’’ ‘‘safe.’’
Would you apply these labels yourself? There are so
many hints at more urgent matters that crave
expression in your memoir. Were you overly ‘‘self-
conscious’’ and therefore unnecessarily censorious?
Looking back at it now, do you think there were
things you could/would have stated differently?
I am not sure who these ‘‘many’’ are who
consider my memoir to be tame and safe. A
critically astute scholar said to me that he con-
sidered the portrayal of the daughter-father rela-
tionship risque ́. Others have talked about my
courage and so forth. Perhaps among academic
women, the frankness of my discussion of emer-
gent sexuality may be considered not so safe.
What are you comparing my memoir to? To
Sybil Kathigasu’sNo Dram of Mercyor Janet
Lim’sSold for Silveror Maxine Hong King-
ston’sThe Woman Warrior? I did not write the
memoir to shock but to inscribe a history of a
community and a particular experience of gen-
der and colonial education, as well as to produce
a work that would ‘‘stand’’ on its use of lan-
guage, a contribution to the long line of other
literary productions recognized as memoirs, but
with its insistent inflection on the Malaysian
gendered, colonial, and immigrant subject.
With age comes mellowness in some cases. In
your case your poems and stories reveal a maturity
in excess of your age when you wrote them. Is this
because of the suffering you yourself endured from
a very early age? Did your relationships with your
parents emphasize a stance which you have since
found wanting in terms of what your writing
demands?
I assume that you are complimenting me on
early maturity in my writing. I do not think that
‘‘literary’’ maturity has anything to do with ‘‘suf-
fering.’’ One is in language, the other in life
experience. If suffering resulted in literary
maturity, then our greatest writers should come
from the poor, dispossessed, diseased, and so
forth. As to the second part of your question,
you seem to express criticism of what you call ‘‘a
stance’’ in my writing. Do you mean that the
relationship to father and mother that my writ-
ing sometimes constructs has resulted in a
‘‘stance’’ that leads to an inadequacy in my writ-
ing? I am not certain what kinds of dynamics are
being suggested here. Of course, as my first novel
shows, I am capable of imagining other forms of
these relationships. But I am careful not to con-
fuse what you may see as ‘‘real’’ or autobio-
graphical relationships with relationships
imagined in texts, be they poems or stories. I
could, if I wanted to, valorize mothers and
fathers—and I have read very loving poems
that do exactly this. But this is not what I wish
to say or explore. I wish to explore the fierce
complexities, contradictions, and ambivalencesPantoun for Chinese Women