Moving Her Self

Shirley Geok-lin Lim's memoir is a courageously frank and deeply affecting account of a Malaysian girlhood and of the making of an Asian-American woman. With insight, candor, and grace, Lim lays bare the material poverty and family violence of her childhood in colonized Malaysia after her father's business fails and her mother abandons the family, leaving Shirley to travel the road toward womanhood alone. Her struggles to fashion a meaningful life that will include professional achievement and a self-determined sexuality inflect her journey across and through cultural, political, and geographic borders. Throughout this extraordinary multi-cultural journey, Lim is sustained by her "warrior" spirit. Very gradually, and often painfully, she moves from a numbing alienation as a dislocated Asian woman to a new sense of identity as an Asian-American woman: professor, wife, mother of a son she is determined to raise as American, and, above all, impassioned writer.