‘Hyphenated’ writer opens doors for Asians

For more than 40 years, Chinese Malaysian writer Shirley Geok-lin Lim has been writing poems, essays and fiction about the Southeast Asian experience transported into American soil. One of her most famous collection of prize-winning poems is entitled Monsoon History. Born in Malacca of Chinese immigrants, she learned English in school, took her PhD in the United States, and decided to stay there and start a professional career as a scholar and writer.

Thus, she became a hyphenated writer: a peranakan Chinese-Malaysian-American, feminist writer of postcolonial texts, growing up speaking in Chinese but later writing in English. In this wise, she descends directly from the line started by the now-iconic Maxine Hong Kingston, whose The Woman Warrior, published in 1975, followed by China Men, kicked open the door of Asian-American writing in English to the world.

She also belongs to the illustrious company of non-native speakers of English who – by dint of hard work, if not the brilliance of their genius – produced some of the most enduring works in world literature. Among these were Joseph Conrad (The Heart of Darkness), Isak Dinesen (Seven Gothic Tales), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), and Jamaica Kincaid (Lucy). We can also include here the glittering epics and lyrical poems of the Novel Prize winner Derek Wolcott, who wrote about the clash of cultures between past and present, between the ghosts of Africa and the present moments of black descendants in the Caribbean islands.

What about the kind of English they spoke, if not pinned down in their books? Generally, it was a melodious and lyrical kind of English, musical in rhythm and luxuriant in language. Because transplanted from the soil of a non-English or American imagination, the prose is seemingly lit by the tropical sun, colorful, and even strange.

The grammar is perfect, but the rhythms of the sentences and the lines glide and roll and fly, as if to capture the tropical weather, or the baroque tradition, from which the writers sprang. Think of our National Artist Nick Joaquin, whose The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Stories from the Tropical Baroque was recently published to great acclaim by Penguin Books. The National Public Radio, British Broadcasting Corporation, and Kirkus Reviews have given good notices and warm words of praise to the first book of Lolo Nick published in the West.

In the case of Geok Lin-Lim, she says that “English is my calling. I make my living teaching it to native speakers, I clean up the grammar of English professors, I dream in its rhythms, and I lose myself for whole hours and days in its words, its syntaxes, its motions and its muscled ideas. Reading and writing it is the closest experience I have ever had to feeling infinity in my presence.”

Her poems show this creative tension between past and present, between words and worlds. One of them is called “Modern Secrets.” It sounds like a confessional poem.

“Last night I dreamt in Chinese. / Eating Yankee shredded wheat/ I said it in English/ To a friend who answered/ In monosyllables: / All of which I understood. / The dream shrank to its fiction. / I had understood its end/ Many years ago. The sallow child/ Ate rice from its rice bowl/ And hides still in the cupboard/ With the china and tea leaves.”

Native language flows

Thus, even if the persona already lives in the West and breathes the English language on a daily basis, the native language flows like blood inside her. Ancient societies consult the configuration of tea leaves in the bottom of their cups to divine what the future might be. What might the future hold for our persona, who exemplifies the 21st-century person inhabiting one and many worlds, all at the same time, the selves not singular but multiple?

And yet, she continues to write in English, publishing a well-received book of nonfiction, a collection of short stories, as well as a first novel. Shirley Geok-lin Lim says that the English-language user “is grafting himself not only to a tree of language but to a larger history of human development. English is no longer that Anglo-Saxon-based speech of a few million people living on a small northern island off the Atlantic Ocean . . . .”

English, she continues, Has become a truly “global language, the first of its kind; serving more than the needs of empire, unlike Latin; more than the prestige of the originating nation. Right now, it serves the needs of every human being whose understanding and imagination would overlap tribal and national boundaries.”

And English is no longer the exclusive province, the region, or the world of the West. It has become not just one English, but several forms of English, or verily, World English.

“The student in Beijing who practices her English with tapes imported from Ohio; the Nigerian who studies for his O levels in his village school; the Indian journalist who writes his copy in English while he interviews in Marathi; to these and many more, the English language is the means by which they communicate as a species. Independent nations today no longer see English as a tool of western imperialism, but as a medium for trans-national speech communications.”

Thus, for non-Anglo American writers now using English look at it as the “language of their blood,” as Dr. Gemino H. Abad would put it. Or as National Artist Jose Garcia Villa (Doveglion) said: “Have come, am here.” That grand announcement is as real now as it was, when Garcia Villa first pronounced it more than half a century ago. My fearless forecast is that the West will continue to discover new writers – or recover the works of old masters like Nick Joaquin – and be held in thrall by the mastery of language and the tropical-baroque visions contained in the universe of their books.

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