Book Review
Nyonya in Exile
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Book Review
Nyonya in Exile |
| Shirley Temple SHIRLEY LIM IS QUITE RIGHT to describe her book, "Among the White Moonfaces," as "the Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist". Her father, a Malacca Baba, married a sarong-kebaya clad Malay speaking Nyonya, one of whose ancestors was a Malay woman. Her Hollywood addict father called her Shirley, after Shirley Temple, the Nyonyas' darling child actress of the 1930's. The adoption of Christian names was already widespread in Malacca when Shirley was born, but not in Penang where the Babas stubbornly clung to Hokkien names, at least until the 1950's when school girls, in Penang as well as in Hong Kong, started the fashion of calling one another after the names of their favourite Hollywood stars and overturned the tradition. Much of Malacca's Nyonya and Baba habits, hobbies, recreations, customs and superstitions will be familiar to the Penang Nyonya. However, Shirley's father did not accept that a wife be chosen for him. But instead he wooed and won his future wife with a mandolin. His wife used Pond's Cold Cream and Yardley Talc as well as bedak - white refined rice ground to a fine powder dampened wth rain water, beauty aids popular also with the Penang Nyonya. Her first language was Malay but she could also read magazines in English, mainly about about Hollywood stars. She prayed to Ganesha, Kuan Im - the goddess of mercy , Kwan Ti - God of Literature, War, and Justice. Superstition demanded that when son Wilson was born he was to be given to maternal first grandaunt to bring up. A prediction had warned that Wilson would be a difficult child who would bring disaster to his parents Shirley's Queen's Scout and Senior Cambridge Certificate father regularly read "Silver Screen" and "Motion Picture." She grew up surrounded by photographs of the stars. Favourites were Leslie Caron, Doris Day, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Esther Williams and the dog Lassie. Readers Digest, National Geographic magazine, the Tatler, and Tit-Bits magazine were also digested. Her brothers were brought up on Desperate Dan, Billy Bunter, Dennis the Menace and Gnasher. Father's music came out of a hand cranked gramophone whose horn brought forth such songs as "Oh Rosemarie, I love you, I'm always dreaming of you" and her favourite, " The Mocking Bird's Song." The family would sometimes spend their evenings at an amusement park where a "carousel of metal horses and large painted eyes and flying manes swirled giddily" (Penang folk would call it "circus"), and the dance hall with taxi dancers. In the park she listened to the beat of the joget. |
| Mimic
people When grandfather dies funeral clothes and sack cloth are ordered, loud weeping and a brass band follow the lorry carrying the coffin. Father goes bankrupt and gives up his "Bata" shoe shop. The family is reduced to one room in grandfather's ornately tiled and quarried marble and fired red clay house on Heeren Street. They can no longer afford evening drives in father's Morris Minor to makan angin. It is a period of acute deprivation with hunger as a constant companion. Even the unlikely cherry tree was a source of of food. "Driven by hunger we clambered higher and higher, moving from one branch to another above it where cherries waved just out of our reach till one afternoon Chien came crashing down and lay moaning on the ground". Brother Chien suffered a broken wrist which did not heal for want of money to pay the doctor. They were hungry for two years Shirley is now a distinguished poet and a writer of short stories and a professor of English at an American university . She does not resent her English education. She rejects Naipal's "reading of colonialist corruption of the original pure culture Corruption is inherent in every culture, if we think of corruption as a will to break out, to rupture, to break down, to decay, and thus to change. We are all [Naipal's] mimic people, born to cultures that push us, shape us and pummel us; and we are all agents, with the power of the subject, no matter how puny or inarticulate, to push back and to struggle against such shaping. So I have seen myself not so much sucking at the teat of British colonial culture as actively appropriating those aspects of it that I needed to escape that other familial/gender self. I actively sought corruption to break out of the pomegranate shell of being Chinese and a girl." It was the convent school that gave her her first weapon with which to wreck her familial culture. At the University of Malaya she was already moving towards the view that "home is the place where our stories are told." Her early maturity was dissatisfed with the poems of Ee Tiang Hong and Wong Phui Nam, puzzling over their "images of displacement", and noting the absence Malayan identity in their content. The contrasting stance is at once apparent when we read her poems and her stories. She won a Fulbiright Scholarship but was at first reluctant to leave her home. She had hoped to get a job at the university but the fact that she was a woman and prejudices, "the product of a small-town religious bigotry," rejected her. She understood that she had no future in the "Malay-dominant race-preferential practice" of this country. Once upon a time, "as urbanised and English educated students, we anticipated a future which would include us and in which we were told repeatedly we would be the leaders of tomorrow." She was put off by the "cultural parochialism" that took shape in the aftermath of the May 13 riots. "Malaysian" had seemed more and more to be a "vacuous political fiction, a public relations performance like those put on for Western tourists at state-run cultural centres". She is shocked when a contemporary says "We don't need the Chinese We will be happy to sit on the floor if that's what it means to do without the Chinese." |
| You don't
belong In the USA she discovers that there are many ways in which America tells you you don't belong. "The United States, a nation of immigrants , makes strangers only of those who are visibly different , including the indigenous people of the continent". She finally settles in California where she finds a home and ceases to be an immigrant. She discovers that "setting out from a nation that denied people like me an equal homeland I find myself, ironically, making a home in a state that had once barred people like me from its territory. The United states, despite instances of still invidious discrimination, is now ideologically where Malaysia may yet be someday." But has Shirley at long last found a home? She has written elsewhere of "voluntary exile" and asks, "Is voluntary exile the condition by which an individual chooses to remove himself from a centre from which he has been excluded?" The exile writes: "Absence [her mother who left father when she was a little girl] was the story my mother taught me, that being the story of her migrant people the Malacca pernakans. But perhaps she was teaching me that home is the place where our stories are told." Her stories carry with them the "dominant imprint" of a Malaysian homeland. The author continues "to feel an abiding identity with Malaysia's soil..." Until a book comes along to tell us the Penang Nyonya story we shall have to make do with Shirley Lim's "Among the White Moonfaces - Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist" # K L Chai |
| The BOOKSHOP , Chow Thye Road, stocks Penang Sketchbook as well as books previously reviewed in The Penang File such as : Tan Sooi Beng: Bangsawan ; Machiko Katayama; The Philosophy of Ikebana ; Dato J J Raj Jr: The War Years and After ; Lim Kean Siew: The Eye Over the Golden Sands ; Lim Kean Siew: Blood on the Golden Sands ; Malaysia Nature Society, Penang branch: Nature Trails of Penang Island . Lim Kean Siew: The Beauty of Chinese Tixing Teapots and the Finer Art of Tea Drinking ; Said Zahari: Dark Clouds at Dawn ; Eric Lawlor ; Friends of the Botonical Gardens: ; T N Harper: The End of the Empire and the Making of Malaya. (Telephone 228 2252) |
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| The Penang File Issue 29 |