The stories of Shirley Geok-lin Lim reflect the complex mosaic
of her world and of her own personal journey as a woman and an
Asian American. The setting of these sometimes wryly funny,
sometimes heartbreaking stories, shifts from the war-torn,
tradition-bound Malaysia of Lim's childhood to the liberating but
confusing and often harsh United States of her childhood. Her
memory is undiluted by nostalgia, her ear is perfectly tuned to the
voices of both her old country and her new, and her eye is sharp to
the special dilemmas faced by girls and women. Shirley Lim
captures, as few writers have, the poignant and perplexing
experience of immigrant women, who, torn between two cultures, must
build their own values and their own homelands from within.
Two Dreams draws together the best of Lim's short fiction from
nearly three decades, most of it never before available in the
United States, and includes important new work. In the new story
"Sisters," Su Swee Wing finds escape from her overbearing,
traditional father by excelling in school and applying to college
in the United States, while the older sister she adores-the
fearless, wise-cracking, "no-good" Yen-is pushed into an arranged
marriage. "Hunger" is the painfully vivid story of a girl,
abandoned by her mother, who is literally starving for lack of
attention and love, but hides her hunger from the world because she
is ashamed. In the title story, a young woman emigre dreams through
the cold New York winter of her hometown in Malaysia, "of the warm
salty sea of her childhood, like emryonic fluid...to which she
returned in her sleep." But when she visits Malaysia, her dreams
reveal that she is no longer at home in the land of her birth.
Much of the drama of Lim's stories is played out in the
"in-between" spaces where differences meet: old values and new,
Asia and America, parents and children, men and women. Thsi terrain
is fraught with ambivalence and thus with danger-but also with
possibility. Lim has explored this territory throughout her writing
life; among her mementos are the haunting, corrageously original
stories of Two Dreams.
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