at the heart of all relationships—not to celebrate
but to intimate that fearful intimacy.
What do you think of women (or men for that
matter) telling all? Would you say even when
there are big battles to be fought there are good
reasons why a writer must not go beyond certain
time-honored boundaries of telling, of revealing?
Is it ever possible to tell all? One person’s all
may very well be another’s nothing or trifle. The
boundaries that concern me are not the trivial-
ities of whether we use the ‘‘f’’ word or describe
degrees of wet or dry, but boundaries of how
stories work, how language and form work,
how cultural and deeply psychic understandings
halt and how we can break out of such haltings.
What are you working on now? Are you going
to follow up with another memoir?
I am working on a second novel. At the same
time, I am preparing three edited and co-edited
scholarly and literary volumes for publication
this year, another two for publication in the
year 2000, and a critical book. All this leaves
me no time for poetry.
As the world shrinks and we move away from
issues of national/cultural identities to larger
questions of technological imperatives, do you
think it behooves writers to enter more the world
of science, the world of technology?
Of course it behooves us all, writers and
non-writers, to enter the world of science and
technology. My son is in the school of engineer-
ing, studying Computer Science. He is fully in
this world. Yet he reads postmodern authors
such as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo,
adores dramatists such as Samuel Beckett and
Tom Stoppard, and writes deliciously witty
postmodern plays himself, one of which was
performed by the Drama Department of the
University of California (Santa Barbara) when
he was sixteen years old. He is at home in both
the Arts and the Sciences; his creativity is
impressive. In comparison, I find myself limited,
still struggling with ancient questions of identity,
subjectivity, and the literary.
Would you say that in the final count being
recognized as a truly international writer, while
being very, very good, is still smaller than that
wonderful recognition given us by those we love
and who say, ‘‘You are a good human being’’?
I love it that you say I am a good human
being. That is important to me, for it validates
my struggle to be a decent person, to be sensitive
to those poorer, weaker, and less able. As a
colonized child, I was also poor, weak, and
powerless, and my identification with that con-
dition is primary. But I do not see this desire for
validation as a good human being as on the same
plane as recognition for one’s writing. The good
thing about recognition is that it may bring you
readers and perhaps improved conditions for
more writing. But whether one is recognized as
a good person or recognized as a good writer—
these are very different domains.
Source:Kirpal Singh, ‘‘An Interview with Shirley Geok-
lin Lim,’’ inAriel: A Review of International English
Literature, Vol. 30, No. 4, October 1999, pp. 135–41.Brinda Bose
In the following review, Bose evaluates the poetry
in Lim’s collectionMonsoon History.
Laurel Means, in her introduction to Shirley
Geoklin Lim’s selected poems,Monsoon His-
tory,accords her a ‘‘rightful place’’ in postcolo-
nial Malaysian writing in English, yielding her
also a legitimate claim within the Chinese Amer-
ican canon. It is befitting that Means concludes
her introduction with a discussion of Lim’s
‘‘place’’ and ‘‘claim’’ within the English literary
canon, because it is apparent that location, iden-
tity, and language—in their various complex
interrelations—are the overriding concerns of
Lim’s writing. To this extent, the organization
of this selection of her poems ‘‘in six sections
more or less chronologically aligned with [her]
personal history’’ manages to convey a vivid
sense of Lim’s life and visions; many of her
particular concerns are further explicated in the
short essay ‘‘Tongue and Root: Language in
Exile’’ that is reproduced as an afterword to the
selection of poems.
Clearly, Lim is a typical product of the post-
colonial migrant generation, whose diasporic
experience has been, in her own evaluation,
empowering even while being somewhat disquiet-
ing. The biographical details of her life—growing
up in British Malacca, being educated in the Eng-
lish medium in a convent school, going on to a
‘‘first class Honours English’’ B.A. degree from
the University of Malaya, and then coming to
America for graduate studies and staying on to
work and live there—may read like a case study
of any of the millions of the diasporic elite in
twentieth-century America; but in fact they hold
the key to understanding, and appreciating, much
of Lim’s creative (and, in fact, critical) work.Pantoun for Chinese Women