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Manoa 13.2 (2001) 201-204



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Book Review

What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say


What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say by Shirley Geok-lin Lim. Albuquerque: West End Press, 1998. 83 pages, paper $8.95.

In her collection What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say, Shirley Geok-lin Lim doesn't deal directly with the subject of love. Indeed, throughout the book, she uses the word love only rarely. But behind the pain of childhood abandonment, the denigration faced by those born female, and the anxieties experienced by exiles--themes that dominate the collection--is the need for love. Not only do figures in the poems have difficulty securing it, but they also have difficulty expressing it. This, essentially, is the dilemma faced by Lim's various personae: the daughter who has only a poem to offer her deceased parent in "Father in China"; the immigrant in "Learning to Love America"; the girl who talks sweetly to please her stepmother in "Presumed Guilty." They all express a fundamental longing for love that they can't find or describe in words.

The structure of the collection strongly suggests that most of the personae represent the numerous selves of a single person who has experienced unexpected [End Page 201] turns and extreme adversity. Self-imposed exile becomes an exit from a male-dominated society, and the narrator seeks fulfillment in America as a writer and a person. The words sleep, dream, ghost, and stranger keep popping up in the book: to sleep, perchance to dream, and in those dreams to have the chance to rebel, reject, shake off the shackles of feminine bondage, be able to "tell those who taught me to be/a girl, I'm not, not, not, not, not," as the narrator says in "The Rebel."

Such a life is haunted by ghosts, chief of which in Lim's book is the mother, the narrator's "purveyer." In the poem "My Mother Wasn't," the mother is also deserter, materialist, and perpetuator of female subservience. And her ghost will remain ever present because her daughter cannot let her go:

. . . I will not forgive you
till I have made you pay the full
debt of your abandonment.

With her mother having gone her own way, the father "labored to keep us/a family." Later, cancer-stricken, he seeks a cure in China; at the time, the daughter is "unhoused/in yet another country." After his death, she has only his photograph to remember him by and wants, she says in "Black and White,"

to weep, to hold his body for once,
as a woman holds her child,
so that her caring may be cleansed.

Lim's control is a source of power in her poetry. Detachment, resilience, and good sense keep her wary, critical, surviving. For instance, though she resents the oppression of women, she doesn't reject men. Furthermore, she is capable of sharp, candid insights into such matters as her exile. In "What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say," she notes that immigrants fear travelling and

fear the malice of citizens
and dull shutterings of those
who hate you whatever you do.

There are numerous poems throughout the book about travel and its accompanying anxieties: "The landscape/of newness nauseates," she writes in one. She continually dreams of the home country she left behind: "In her sleep, she's lost,/ wakes up, five,/under another moon." The return to her childhood is a return home--a far cry from her new, adopted land, which is an ironic paradise where "A young man exposes himself,/coughs in the green shade/like Adam in a new orchard," and where people like "The Whistler" have the potential to kill, "to crush my breasts and brains/between stones and make a lesson of me."

In America, the narrator is a stranger in a stranger's house. And, as Lim writes, "If you come to a land with no ancestors/to bless you, you have to be your own/ ancestor." And to make it more difficult, "an immigrant without home ghosts/ cannot believe...

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