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Bron Sibree

Writers from China's diaspora

Within a few minutes of our meeting, Su-chen Christine Lim launches into  tales about the permutations of Chinese culture in Malaysia, where she grew up, and in her new home, Singapore.

The author of the novels Ricebowl, A Bit of Earth and A Fistful of Colours interrupts talk about her books to veer down the nooks and crannies of a history that has taken root in new soil. The twists of her heritage and the stories of people in the margins of history interest her , she says.

'I want to give voice to those who are voiceless,' she says. 'Fiction is like a mirror. It reinterprets reality in a way that helps us to see secret places and listen to voices unheard.'

Perak-born Lim says she grew up with no interest in writing. 'I wanted to be someone who could change society - Singapore society.  I became a teacher.'

In a moment of boredom, she wrote what she thought was going to be a children's story. It grew into Ricebowl. Published in 1988, it tells of a Chinese Catholic nun who, in organising a peace march against the Vietnam war, led her students to question the society developing in Singapore. 'That got me noticed - and also ignored, for a while,' she says. 'At first, people thought I might get into trouble because of it.'

After reinventing her career, Lim redefined what it means to be a contemporary Singaporean with A Fistful of Colours, which won  the inaugural Singapore Literature prize in 1992.  Its success locally and abroad - it's a recommended text at universities in the US and in Australia - established Lim as a key literary voice in the region. She judged the Commonwealth Literature Prize (Asia-Pacific region) in 1999, and became international writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa in 2000.

'My entire writing philosophy is to reflect the various voices in a multicultural society and to develop an aesthetic that does that. I'm in a good position to negotiate, to act like a cultural bridge between these different communities.'

She likens her relationship with China to 'a daughter who has married out'. Such daughters speak their mind, says the third-generation  descendant  of illiterate Chinese immigrants. 'There are many ways of expressing one's Chineseness,' she says. 'I want to show that the sons of the daughters from the bottom of society have made it outside of China; that the descendants of coolies and amahs, bondmaids, concubines and prostitutes have made a success of their lives in many parts of the world; that if people are given the opportunity to earn a living, they will make something of their lives.'

For Lim, the present is always profoundly coloured by 'the ghosts of history'. While writing Ricebowl she began to grasp the plight of those early Chinese sojourners to Southeast Asia. It inspired her to co-write a play, The Amah: A Portrait in Black and White, based on the life of her own amah. 'What motivated me to write was the sadness of the lives of women who defied their families, tradition and the emperor to come out here to work. Women who dared to say no to marriage in those days - the 1840s - and who ran away.'

Lim's sadness is clear as she speaks of the thousands of women, like her maternal Cantonese grandmother, or her two paternal grandmothers from  Fujian province, who left China  'to seek a measure of financial independence, and to carve a life for themselves'.

'They sent all their hard-earned money back so their families  in China could have schools, money to buy food. And all their lives,  [these women] had to oppress their own feelings and individuality for the sake of  their families in China. There was  so much self-sacrifice there.

'My grandmother saw herself as the planter of the fruit tree, and that the later generations, like me, would be the harvester. So I am reaping the fruit of their sacrifice.'

Chinese culture influenced the circular narrative of A Fistful of Colours. 'I chucked out all the novels of the Victorian and romantic period and replaced it with novels written by Asians about Asia. Novels by Salman Rushdie  and Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan,  and later those  like The Glass Palace by Amitav Gosh.  I rediscovered Han Suyin's  novels and books like The Importance of Living  by Lin Yutang,  the Chinese philosopher.

'I wanted to move away from seeing the past through the eyes of western historians and to rediscover  our own past.'

This impulse compelled her to write A Bit of Earth, which subverts colonial stereotypes with its story of the rise of a Chinese man from tin miner to tycoon to a clan leader who questioned British colonial laws.

She is writing a history of the Chinese in Southeast Asia. Hua Song: Celebrating the Overseas Chinese will be published this year. 'You cannot escape your ethnicity,' she says. 'But I see the cultural boundaries between ethnic communities as porous. Culture is something that's alive and as plastic as clay, and it's the writer's role to express all its permutations.'



Su-chen Christine Lim