Malaysian-born Shirley Geok-lin Lim is Chair Professor of English and head of the English Department at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published five volumes of poems, Crossing The Peninsula, No Man's Grove, Modern Secrets, Monsoon History and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say; three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, which won the 1997 American Book Award. Joss & Gold is her first novel
Describe Joss & Gold.
It's a reversal of a hoary East-West romance, the Madame Butterfly story. The novel looks at Asian women as complex and strong characters, at Americans as confused adventurers in Asia. It is a story about a man discovering fatherhood, and women trying to make lives for themselves without men. But it is above all a story about the politics of race and language in Malaysia and Singapore.
What are you reading now?
I am reading about the poems that children write in order to write an introduction for an anthology of Hong Kong children's writing for Hong Kong University Press.
Which living author do you most admire?
