Will you sell me, also, down the river of nationalism, my sometimes brother,
who know your accent, can speak your poetry?
Your family and mine, croaking, drank from the same well.
Now you are grown rich….
Shall I sink silently to the stream’s muddy bottom while gold flecks rise to your hands like scum?
But you need me, my brother. How else to find the thorn of martyrdom,
rose of the east, your history’s self?
—Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“Song of an Old Malayan” in Monsoon History
Claiming English as my own was my first step out of the iron cage and into a voice, and who is to say it is not my own language and not my voice?
—Shirley Geok-lin Lim Writing S.E./Asia in English On the 13th of May, 1969, less than thirteen years after the official Merdeka (independence) of the Federation of Malaysia, violent race riots took place in the nation’s capital, Kuala Lumpur. Political rallies after the federal elections of May 10, 1969, in which the Alliance government was deprived of the two-thirds majority it needed, eventually led to the four days of riots. De-spite the fact that even today people are still debating about the “real cause”
of these riots, they are generally regarded as the result of the long history of Sino-Malay friction. The more immediate background of the riots involved a series of educational, language and economic policies of the Malaysian gov-ernment which sought to redistribute wealth among the ethnic communities.
When these policies misfired, they led to “Malaysian resentment against the government for having created a system where the Chinese prospered while they continued to cope with severe poverty” and “a sense of discontent in the Chinese community that special privileges were accorded to the Malays and that their interests were not served” (Tay 291). The May 13 incident has been regarded as a watershed event in postcolonial Malaysian history. Asian
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American scholar and writer Shirley Geok-lin Lim comments on the terrible consequences of the riots in her memoir Among The White Moon Faces (1996): “In the process of formation of a Malaysian elite, the May 13 riots provided the bloody revolution that changed Malaysia from the ideal of a multicultural egalitarian future—an ideal already tested by hostilities over power-sharing—to the Malay-dominant race-preferential practice in place today” (136). Apparently the racial riots constitute a traumatic memory to which Lim has to return in her writings in order to reconfigure her Malaysian identity.
The challenge for Shirley Lim, as for many other creative artists who engage traumatic experiences, is how to put these experiences into narrative form without an overabundance of aestheticization or sensationalization. In addition to her direct address of the race riots and their consequences in her memoir, Lim provides in her poem “Song of an Old Malayan” a poetic ren-dition on the pain of unjust division. The lament of the narrator in the poem, which seemingly describes the rupture of an old friendship because of class and money, takes on another level of meaning when phrases such as “the river/of nationalism” and “history’s self” are considered (30). With a native Malayan as her persona and from the perspective of Chinese Malaysians, Lim comments on the great divide within the Malaysia created by the Malay nationalist ideology. An implicit irony within these lines suggests that a sus-tained argument against the Chinese Malaysian community focuses on the Chinese economic dominance over the Malays. In her debut novel Joss and Gold (2001), Lim again turns to the May 13 riots, embedding it in a story of transnational encounters and female bodily experiences. Without sentimental lamentation, in Joss and Gold Lim uncovers a violent episode of national history and its aftermath in relation to its female characters, offering us an exemplary feminist narrative of history based on personal lived experience.
Joss and Gold is the Bildungsroman of Li An, who at the beginning of the novel is a senior at the University of Malaya and dreams about going to study in the United States. Instead of going abroad and fulfilling her Ameri-can dream, she marries the rich and gentle Yeh Henry and becomes a lecturer of English literature at the university. The riots of May 13, 1969 completely change her life. She has a one-night affair with Chester, an American who works for the Peace Corps, and gives birth to a daughter Yeh Suyin after Chester returns to the States. Book II describes Chester’s unfulfilled life in New York. At 35, Chester is an anthropologist whose wife, Meryl, a career woman on the rise, talks him into having a vasectomy. In Book III Chester travels to Singapore where the divorced Li An is working and bringing up Suyin with the help of her mother-in-law, Grandma Yeh, and her friend Ellen.
Henry shows up as a father figure when Suyin inherits the estate after Grandma Yeh’s death. Previously fatherless, Suyin now has to choose
be-National History and Transnational Narration 113 tween her two fathers.
Although a summary can hardly do justice to the richness and com-plexity of the novel, it reveals the novel’s ambitious take on the issues of ancestral heritage, national/racial identities and histories, imperialism and postcoloniality, as well as white and Third-World feminisms. This postcolo-nial rendition of the Orientalist stereotype also performs a kind of “body politics” that enables women to represent different positions in the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. The tripartite form of the narrative that spreads out in temporal and spatial terms—from Kuala Lumpur in 1968 to 1969, New York in 1980, to Singapore in 1981—can also be read as the meta-phorical birth and growth of a new diasporic womanhood engendered at the moment of a national trauma and embodied by the biracial Suyin, the off-spring of an interracial liaison. Lim thus presents a routing of Malaysian history through the interracial and transnational narrative. This chapter pro-vides a reading of Joss and Gold as an example of narrating national history based on female bodily experiences. By tracing the development of this form of diasporic womanhood, this reading will embody the double national and transnational frameworks. In the first part, Lim’s writing is placed within the historical and social framework of (post)colonial Malaysia in order to ad-dress the intersecting issues of language, nation and identity. The second part is a close reading of the novel which posits the protagonist Li An as the key to unraveling the entanglement of Chinese Malaysian identification vis-à-vis the national discourse in the novel. Also central to the novelistic discourse are the problematics of interracial relationships. Hence, I propose a reading of the formation of diasporic womanhood within the interracial discourse in the novel with specific focus on the biracial character Suyin.1
The Southeast Asian Context
As a former colonial subject writing and teaching in the colonizer’s language, Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s works shed light on postcolonial and diasporic con-ditions. Her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, published both in New York and Singapore, and winner of an American Book Award, is the poetic Bildung of a colonial child, an artist and an academic who has struggled with abandonment, injustice, and issues connected to sexuality. Questions of lan-guage, race, and gender especially stand out in this memoir and in her other writings. In her memoir, she refutes V. S. Naipaul’s reading of postcolonial
1 Lim voices her hope that instead of being read as an expatriate, her works will be read within “both Malaysian/national and U.S./transnational frames, the Third-World intersecting with a late-capitalist First-World, frame” (“First-World ‘Expats’ and Expatriate Writing in a Third-World Frame”18). My strategy of reading Joss and Gold in this essay attends to the double frameworks suggested by Lim.
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people as those who “mimic” the colonizer’s culture and declares her inde-pendence from traditional cultural and gender positions. Thus she talks about appropriating British colonial culture “to escape that other famil-ial/gender/native culture that violently hammered out only one shape for self” and actively seeks the state of cultural “corruption to break out of the pomegranate shell of being Chinese and girl” (64).2 Educated in the British educational system, Lim claims English as her mother tongue and yet at the same time is conscious of the danger of being dispossessed of this very lan-guage. As a Chinese Malaysian author, moreover, she discovers that her writing in English is marginal to the nationalist cultural agenda which privi-leges writings in indigenous Malay. Like other Malaysian writers in English, she is therefore “doubly dispossessed.”3 In both her creative and critical writings she reveals what is at stake for a transnational woman. For many readers, Lim is unique because she has formulated multinational attachments in her migratory trajectory while identifying strongly with the Asian dias-poric subject who travels because of historical contingencies and different configurations of power.
Moreover, as a Chinese Malaysian now residing in the United States, Lim exemplifies the model of multiple migrations common in this age of transnationalism, and which places her squarely, in her own words, in the
“tradition of writing by transnationals of multiple diasporas” (“Immigration and Diaspora” 289). “Such works,” as Lim observes in a critical essay that explores the different discourses of immigrant and diasporic literature, “con-struct a confrontational relation between place and identity and compose a tradition of ‘global literature’ complexly differentiated from the tradition of nationally bounded and divided identities that has conventionally organized our understanding of ‘world literature’” (“Immigration and Diaspora” 299).
Clearly, Lim’s own writing contributes to this tradition of global literature.
Hence we understand her unease at the label “expatriate writer” and why she feels it necessary to distinguish First-World expatriate writing from the Third-World model. For Lim, the difference lies in that, on the one hand, in First-World expatriate writing “home is not only always possible but has never been abandoned, merely put on temporary hold”; the Third-World ex-patriate imagination, on the other hand, “is webbed by interstices falling
2 Pomegranates symbolize traditional Chinese values and familial system. The crimson color of the juice of the fruit represents “the original color of Chinese prosperity and health.” To Lim, her “Chinese life in Malaysia up to 1969 was pomegranate, thickly seeded” (Among the White Moon Faces 64).
3 Lim points out that it is “symptomatic of an emerging group of Malaysian writers who, in the process of nationalism, find themselves doubly dispossessed. For, initially dispossessed by their use of English, after the introduction of Bahasa (Malay) as the national language, now find themselves dispossessed a second time in a country in which both their native and adopted cultures have only a minority status” (“Gods Who Fail” 49).
National History and Transnational Narration 115 between citizen and alien, exile and immigrant, traveler and refugee, national and cosmopolitan. Not either/or or both/and but transient, contingent, iden-tity-in-process, under the gun of obliterating history, a marginal subject that is centrally narcissistic, and potentially political in its unsettling of the regu-lations of state-craft identity” (“First-World ‘Expats’ and Expatriate Writing”
3). While Lim’s writing, inspired by the Third-World expatriate imagination, certainly represents her individual negotiation with her diasporic experience, her works, as part of the tradition of Southeast Asian writing in English that grows out of colonial and postcolonial conditions, are also historically and geopolitically specific. To better situate Joss and Gold, in which Malaysian post-independent history looms prominently, an account of these specificities is needed to fully address issues of identity, language, and gender. These is-sues, essential to Lim’s writings, have become problematic due to Malaysia’s colonial history and postcolonial nationalism.
The history of the Chinese settling in Malaysia goes as far back as the thirteenth century (Comber 1); the first Chinese settlement in Peninsular Malaya took place in the fifteenth century, during the time of the Malacca Sultanate (Yen 2). Before the twentieth century the native Malays did not feel seriously threatened by the commercial prosperity and dominance of the Chinese since the majority of the Chinese did not intend to settle perma-nently in Malaya. When an increasing number of local-born Chinese began to demand citizenship rights and political involvement, and when the 1931 Census showed that for the first time the Malays were outnumbered by the non-Malays, serious Sino-Malay conflicts of interest were looming on the horizon (Comber 4-6). As Tan Chee-Beng points out, in the process of na-tion-building in Malaysia, each ethnic group tends to have a heightened sense of its own ethnic identity (“National-Building”155) since politically
“the communally oriented political processes of post-independence Malaysia have increased rather than decreased the ethnic consciousness of all ethnic groups” (159). In another study of Southeast Asian Chinese identities in the global context, Tan observes that even today the position of the Chinese in the region is still precarious due to China’s growing prosperity. Since 1990 the rapid economic growth of China has propagated “the China theory,”
which has now extended into a “Chinese threat theory.” When ethnic Chi-nese communities invest in the ChiChi-nese market, their connection with China is formulated as a new form of “red terror” or “yellow peril”; thus “Chinese in Southeast Asia endured the suspicion and discrimination propagated by narrow communal nationalism and the fifth column theory during the Cold War period of 1948 to 1989. The China and Chinese threat theories amount to a revised fifth column view applied to ethnic Chinese worldwide” (“Chi-nese in Southeast Asia” 210-11). Apparently ethnic Chi(“Chi-nese communities in the Southeast Asian region are always under suspicion regarding their
na-National History and Transnational Narration 116
tional loyalty, exacting from them a heavy toll in all aspects of their lives.
In addition to the question of national loyalty, there is also the sustained problem of linguistic affiliation, which is of special importance for creative writers in the region. The choice of an official language in a multiracial and multiethnic society is never easy. Under a nationalist mandate in postcolonial Malaysia, indigenous Malay is the official language, and the government persistently promotes this language policy with all kinds of propaganda ma-terials. In 1967, for instance, the Malaysian government passed the National Language Act, and the former Prime Minister Abdul Rahman advocated the use of Malay as the national language under the slogan “Bahasa Jiwa Bang-sa (Language is the Soul of the Nation),” appealing directly to the nationalist sentiment of the Malay community (Comber 62). For the Chinese commu-nity, however, the fundamentalist definition of Malaysian identity is unjustly based on a policy of enforcing homogenous language, religion, and ethnicity:
“To be Malay, therefore, is to speak Malay and to practice Islam….Malaysia demands standards of assimilation which, in effect, will debar the mass of the Chinese from Malay identity and from the rights and privileges that go with it” (Pan 254). This practice of linguistic, religious and ethnic monolo-gism becomes a de facto “form of internal colonialism,” as Eddie Tay argues (294). The Chinese Malaysian community is thus faced with a postcolonial dilemma, virtually obliged to decide upon their national identity. Moreover, choices of identification become yoked to choices of linguistic expressions.
Writers who choose to write in the colonial language of English find it even more difficult to resolve the tension between the nationalist mandate and artistic choice. Under Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa, writing in the colonizer’s language becomes almost an act of treason. Lim succinctly points out the postcolonial legacy that stands in the way of the development of literature in English for the former British colonies and its paradoxical standings in the postcolonial context:
Literature in English rose from the historical situation of English as the language of colonial administration and its contemporary position as the language of government, inter-ethnic equality and communication, international trade and social prestige. National literatures in English, therefore, occupy paradoxical positions in the national culture: they are suspects as carriers of colonial attitudes and as products of a negative imperialist domination. They are attacked as posing a regressive obstacle to the advancement of indigenous culture and sentiments. At the same time, also, they are perceived (sometimes by the same observers) as evidence of the nation’s international standing and participation in the broader world community and as manifesting a successful moderniza-tion process. (Namoderniza-tionalism and Literature 12)
National History and Transnational Narration 117 With all the complex emotions involved in the creation of literature of Eng-lish, however, Lim still chooses English as her medium of artistic expression because she regards it as her “first step out of the iron cage and into a voice,”
as stated in the epigraph. And yet this choice can hardly be an easy way out;
moreover, as mentioned earlier, it can lead to a marginalized state of “double dispossession” typical of the postcolonial condition. In an essay entitled
“Dispossession, Possession and Domestication,” literary historian Koh Tai Ann explores the relationship of English writers of Chinese descent in the Southeast Asian region with the language they use in terms of possession, dispossession, and domestication. Her analysis in fact identifies a pattern for many postcolonial nations in terms of linguistic and literary developments.
In their struggle to take possession of the colonizer’s language, postcolonial writers have to either domesticate or creolize the language. Anglophone writers therefore experience a sense of linguistic dispossession or double dispossession.4
Ironically, the emergence of literature in English in the Straits Settle-ments and peninsular Malaya, which came into being only after the Second World War, was in fact inspired by a utopian vision that literature written in English could transcend ethnic and linguistic barriers, and hold the diversi-fied nation together. As Koh puts it,
The emergence of a literature in English in Malaya and Singapore thus coincided with the realization among intellectuals of the Eng-lish-educated class that in a multiracial society they must cease to per-ceive or merely articulate themselves as ethnic entities. As the commu-nity which comprised the majority ethnic group in Singapore and a large minority in Malaya/Malaysia, the Chinese of more recent immigrant origin must regard themselves as no longer sojourners or huaqiao [overseas Chinese] while the strait-born Chinese whose interests coin-cided with those of their British rulers should no longer define them-selves in terms of their colonial identity as the ‘Queen’s Chinese.’
(“Dispossession, Possession and Domestication” 154)
While this view of English as a bridge language among the different racial groups in the former British colonies echoes a class-bound colonial ideology, it also highlights the wish among the younger generations of Chinese Ma-laysians for a way out of the linguistic impasse. Neither huaqiao nor the
While this view of English as a bridge language among the different racial groups in the former British colonies echoes a class-bound colonial ideology, it also highlights the wish among the younger generations of Chinese Ma-laysians for a way out of the linguistic impasse. Neither huaqiao nor the