Coming to Terms with Traumatic Experience in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces (U.S. Women's Multicultural Life-Writings 03-12-13)

 Joseph Melanson

U.S. Women’s Multicultural Life-Writings

Prof. Koplewitz

02 December 2012

Coming to Terms with Traumatic Experience in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of the Homelands.

          

             It is said that in order to make sense out of traumas of the past, one must tell a story about the event in order to move toward a better understanding of the experience. In regards to the story that Shirley Geok-Lin Lim tells in her book Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of the Homelands, and in my own life, I find that this is true. Shirley Lim relates in her book many traumatic events of her youth and early adulthood, two of which were the trauma of her mother’s abandonment of Lim’s family, and the trauma of her family’s fall into poverty. Comparing my own experiences of traumatic events to those of Lim, I realize that there is a relationship in relating traumatic experience and being able to understand that experience. In relating traumatic experience, the writer is now capable of perspectives that may not have been possible before the traumatic event is reexamined from a distance of time and space. 

            In Among the White Moon Faces, Shirley Lim writes about the trauma of her mother’s abandonment of both her, and her family, when she was a young girl. “I did not learn to love my mother, who left us when I was eight, though she is perhaps more to be pitied than my father” Lim writes (34). “As a grown woman, I know that her life was harder than his, the odds in her struggles for a good life unfairly stacked against her” (Lim 34). “But as her daughter”, Lim writes, “when I think about her, I feel instead a stubborn resistance against pity and forgiveness, an adolescent resentment that will not grow up” (34). After her mother’s abandonment, Lim writes, “Mother became a huge silence” (52). “We never spoke of her to Father, nor to each other”, as talk of her mother was “forbidden”, about “someone who was not dead and also not alive” (Lim 52). Lim realizes that her mother loved her, in her own way, “at least later in life” (35). When Lim was sixteen, or eight years after her mother’s abandonment, they visited each other in Singapore where her mother was working. Her mother introduces the young Lim to all the mother’s fellow coworkers with pride. “Her pride was so evident during that social ritual, which continued in the afternoon and evening with taxi rides to numerous of her brothers and sisters homes, was a kind of love” (Lim 35). “But as my father’s daughter,” Lim writes, “I knew love as familial and daily proximity, not as social ritual” (35). Lim writes that her mother’s “abandoning family for society”, would never get over her estrangement to her mother (35). The loss of her mother had the significant effect of not giving her someone to model her behavior after, of assisting a young Lim in making decision, and being able to take one’s bearings in life. “The problem that confused me for years, until the years themselves shaped their own ironic answer, was what to do with my life as a woman: not simply, what kind of work I wanted, but how to grow up as a woman” (Lim 101). “Perhaps” her mother’s “physical and emotional abandonment had led to my despair,” Lim writes, “to my profound distrust of any available protection”, (101). “My childhood education, illuminating, powerful adults as unloving, unjust, and violent, had driven me underground to avoid further damage, exchanging the hurts of trust for the hurts of futility” (Lim 137). “Absence was the story my mother taught me,” Lim reflects later in life, but had I more time to talk to Mother, perhaps I could have learned to forgive, listening to her stories” (137). Comparing Lim’s experience with her mother, to that of my relationship to my mother, there are many similarities. My mother had me when she was only seventeen, a very young age to be saddled with the responsibility of having to raise a child. She gave me to my grandparents at an early age and that is the only experience that I have with parents. My mother, like Lim’s mother, related to me in the same way, as a responsibility, a chore, a child that one must take with them along on their own selfish pursuits. I was made to do things that were more appropriate for enjoyment by adults, rather than children. There were the boring trips to Winterfest, Balloonfest, and countless gatherings where drinking alcohol was the main concern. I realized that I became a social ritual for my mother, a thing that must occasionally be shown attention to. The majority of our relationship though, was marked by long absences, periods of time that ranged six months or more between our awkward visits. I saw my mother as a hassle as well, someone whose inclinations had to be entertained from time to time, and so I want along with her on these gatherings which consisted of the drunks that she met in bars and considered her friends. These gatherings only ever left me feeling irritable and bored, and left me wondering for many years if there was something wrong with me, that perhaps I was miserable and didn’t want to “have fun”. There were many good times in my relationship with her before she died of asthma in 2009. Looking back on my relationship with my mother, and comparing it to Lim’s relationship with hers, I have been able to put this experience with my mother into a better perspective. Like Lim, I realize that my mother was a culmination of various forces at work, forces that will only ever be known to her. Lim’s mother, like my own mother, only acted to the best of their capacities, were unfinished pieces in a larger whole, moving in the world in the only way that they knew how relate to it. I understand, like Lim understands, that a person is only the stories that they tell, and like Lim, I would only ever have gotten to truly know her if I had only had the chance to listen to my mother tell her own.

In her book Shirley Geok-Lin Lim writes about the trauma of falling from a comfortable existence to a life of poverty in her early youth. Lim’s family lost their house and was forced to move in with relatives. She remembers reflecting on her new situation while lying in bed one evening in her youth. “For the first time in my life I felt hunger” Lim recalls, adding that “my stomach growled and I pressed back against the lumpy mattress with a lassitude that came from being alone and from not having eaten all day” (43). She defines this new “odd sensation” of  hunger as “an emptiness,” that left her “giddy and weak” (43). After a while of suffering this hunger from her family’s new found state of poverty, the Lim children are tempted into stealing from her grandfather’s hardware store. Lim writes that her and her brothers stole “pipes, copper wires, shiny steel faucets, brass knobs, and iron hooks” to sell to another store on the “next street over” (49). “We knew we were stealing, although it did not occur to us that it was our own Lim family we were devastating with our thievery” (Lim 49). “How rare were those ten-and twenty-cent coins”, Lim writes, holding them “tightly in my palm” a young Lim “considered everything I could buy with them – dried lemon skins, pickled plums, sugared cuttlefish, preserved fruit” (49). “I longed for salty sweet tidbits that I nibbled slowly so that five-cents worth lasted and lasted all day”, Lim writes, “my thrift was that of the survivor who hoarded against starvation” (49). Lim writes about the trauma of losing a comfortable existence in which she had grown accustomed, for a life of poverty and all the uncertainties and difficulties that come with it. When I was young, I suffered a similar experience as well. My grandfather became very ill after coming down with cancer, and I went to live with my mother for a while. I did not have the run of the place that I was used to, my mother wasn’t as good a cook as my grandmother, and my childish selfishness had me more concerned with my state of boredom than my grandfather’s health and well-being. I stole from my grandfather’s coin collection and used them to play video games at the mall, and buy snacks. I had no understanding or appreciation for my grandfather’s hobby, only seeing the coins for what I could trade for them. These thefts only satiated a temporary sensation and relieved a temporary state of boredom. Like Lim and her siblings, I traded family loyalty for childish preoccupations when the circumstances made allowances for it. After my grandfather died, there was one less thing for our family to remember him, one more reminder of my lack of appreciation and gratitude for my relatives.

            Shirley Lim had suffered many traumas in her life, many of which occurred in the same short period of time during her early years, the loss of her mother, her families fall into destitution are only two of them. In writing about traumatic events, the writer is able to come to better terms with the events, now able to look at these events with more clarity and insight that one may have been capable of at the time. Generally when we suffer some traumatic event, we are only capable of a limited perspective, and one that is clouded by emotions. It is only through later revisiting these traumatic moments of our lives in our writings, can we not only put our past in clearer terms, but also clarify how the events still affect us to this day.

Abstract Analysis:

Writing about traumatic experience may be one of the most difficult things to try to accomplish in one’s life time. Traumatic events cause the sufferer to want to shut down in order to prevent more suffering, may result in various addictions and dangerous behavior in order to distract or deal with the trauma. Not coming to terms with early traumas can have us unknowingly pursuing habits and behaviors that only continue to harm us in some way throughout our lives. These habits and behaviors may not only hurt us, but other the other people in our lives as well. 

Writing about traumatic events allows us to put events into perspective, not only of the event at the time, but also in how we perceive ourselves in the present moment. Rather than a victim of circumstances, we are actually agents of change and action, it is only that we learn this lesson much later in life. When traumatic events occur we are often blind sighted by them, caught totally unaware and unprepared for these events as they occur. Instead of knowing how to react or even think, we instead shut down to the traumatic event, or lash out, not knowing how to proceed or act from the event. As each individual is a reflection of various influences, we can only proceed from what we are taught from our care takers when we are young when traumatic events occur. Later as we mature, our influences help us to better understand events as they occur, allowing us a broader range of ways in which to react and manage stressful situations.

It is only after maturing, that when we choose to write about painful moments of our past that we can analyze and examine these moments with the proper detachment, making sense of these moments and assigning them a more honest meaning through understanding, without the strength of emotions and feelings clouding our thinking. For instance, in the behavior of the nuns toward Lim, Lim relates this experience as harsh, once having to stand on a chair before the rest of her class, with a piece of chalk in her mouth for hours after getting caught talking in class. To a young Lim, this may seem harsh and abusive, perhaps even racist. But perhaps Lim intuited after writing about the time of her schooling that she played a part in the nuns decisions as well. The nuns may actually have had positive intentions in their forms of punishment towards Lim and her socially negative behavior. The nuns may only have treated Lim as they would have any other child, only punishing Lim for her behavior, and not intentionally singling her out like a youngster may lead herself to believe. Perhaps the nuns, despite their different ethnicity, only treated a young Lim as they had been treated during their school years, only following what was seen as appropriate within the educational system of that time. The nuns were supposed to teach proper social behavior, as well as the school’s curriculum. Perhaps the nuns believed that this form of punishment was necessary to keep control of the class, that if the children weren’t set these examples the school would end up in chaos. This view, while painful, may show Lim that a traumatic event may actually only be the experience of our being within certain circumstances, and that others actions and decisions are only the product of many other forces and influences. Writing about traumatic events allows us to see them in a new and different light, giving these new events meanings that we may not have been capable of at the time, and giving us a new light in which to shine upon the events that most disrupted and changed our lives.

Works Cited:

Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands. New York: The Feminist Press. 1997. Print


GRADE: 96
Joseph, greetings. You have written with a poignant, heartfelt sense of the difficulties of Lim's life, including her mother's abandonment of the family and Lim's later trauma of poverty and having to move in with relatives. The analytical and experiential basis of your narrative is filled with many observations from your own life, the conflicts and difficulties of reconciling how to interact with your own mother, and then later, examining your relationship in terms of family memories and your grandfather.  The complexities of looking back and examining how one feels, in retrospect, with painful childhood experiences, can be quite revelatory and even healing, but it is not easy to do. I appreciate your courageousness in speaking candidly about your own life story, and your thoughts about Lim are compassionate, focused, and articulate.

Thank you for another very finely written essay.  All best,  Prof. LK.