Joss and Gold

AFTERWORD

AFTERWORD Joss and Gold, Shirley Geok-lin Lim's first novel, is characterized by sensibilities that have distinguished her work as a poet, fiction writer, scholar, and autobiographer. Crafted and complex in style, engaging and thought-provoking in substance , the novel explores the possibilities for individual fulfillment in love, work, and family in a world in which the postfeminist, postcolonial, and multicultural have left indelible marks. In the process, it interrogates stereotypes ofAsian women and their identities, and provides a provocative alternative to the Madame Butterfly myth. Begun in 1979, Joss and Gold took over twenty years to complete . Its protracted status as a work in progress, and the revisions and rewriting that it must have undergone, indicate both an author whose competing commitments as an academic, a writer, activist, wife, and mother have interrupted the project , and one whose patience and tenacity have allowed the negotiation and development of narrative vision over time. The growing body of not only academic and scholarly works, but also creative and autobiographical writings by Lim suggests that the writing ofJoss and Gold has been preceded as well as attended by the author's production of other writings and experience of lives lived. Lim's first book of poetry, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems (1980), won the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the best first collection published in the British Commonwealth. Four collections of new and selected poems have followed: No Man's Grove (1985), Modern Secrets (1989), Monsoon History (1994), and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998). Lim's short fiction first appeared in Another Country and Other Stories (1982). Four stories were added to the first collection's fifteen in Life's Mysteries: The Best of Shirley Lim (1995), and five to the edition published in the United States as Two Dreams: New and Selected Stories (1997). The autobiographical Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands (1996), published in Singapore as Among the White Moon Faces: Memoirs ofa Nyonya Feminist, won an American Book Award JOSS and GOLD in 1996. With Joss and Gold finally published, Lim is work~ ing on a new collection of poems, Passports. Three countries share the narrative territory of this international , cross-cultural novel, reflective of a world where air travel has made distant countries and their disparate cultures mere days apart (a characteristic made even more salient now by postcolonial globalization): Malaysia ("Book One: Crossing"), the United States ("Book Two: Circling"), Singapore ("Book Three: Landing"). Not coincidentally, all are countries where the author has lived. Malacca-born Lim grew up in Malaysia and studied English at the University of Malaya, leaving in 1969 to pursue graduate studies in the United States, where she eventually settled and, in 1980, became an American citizen. Though she has spent the greater part of her working life in the United States, Lim, now professor of English and women's studies (and former chair of women's studies) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has siblings and relatives in Malaysia and Singapore, countries to which she regularly returns. Lim has held visiting academic appointments in Singapore and as chair professor of English at the University of Hong Kong (in 1999 through 2001). We first meet Li An, Lim's protagonist, as a recent graduate of the University of Malaya and newly employed there as a tutor in English literature. The social and political backdrop is a multiracial, young, and developing country where issues of race, religion, identity, and nationalism are in ferment . In the lively exchanges of Li An and her Malay, Chinese, and Indian friends, the Malaysian chapters provide vignettes of evocative detail. Set against the Malaysians' debate and banter, Princeton-educated Chester Brookfield, a Peace Corps volunteer, is an outsider/sojourner. This tall and long-haired American puts the tomboyish Li An, already married to a diffident and dependable biogeneticist, Henry Yeh, a modern version of the Chinese mandarin, on the defensive. Li An's interest in Chester is largely founded on his exotic difference : unlike the relatively reserved English academics she has encountered in more formal surroundings, he is the transparently outspoken, loud-voiced, questioning American. Skeptical of the relevance or value of English literature 268 AFTERWORD except as a conduit for the promotion of British culture in a country which should have little use for it or its language, Chester is critically observant of the persistence of...