Pomegranates and English Education

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 13, No. 10/11. (Jul., 1996), pp. 9-11.

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http://www.jstor.org Wed Apr 2 21:51:01 2008 "He's so smart!" my mother replied sweetly. "I don't know what to do about Malcolm. I got another call from school today. The principal says he's smart. He scores high on the IQ tests, but he doesn't try. And rude! No me digar." "Pomegranates and Then Esmerelda would put her two cents in. "He misses his father, manita," she would say, "Boys need their fathers." "I know," my mother would say, "I know." There was never any talk about me or what I needed. I was just a quick rest stop in English education" their marathon conversations. "And Veronica?" they would say eventually. by Shirley Geok-lin Lim "She's fine. All A's as usual," she would say. And I could tell from her voice that she was sad, thinking about Malcolm. She never used the proud, bragging tone that P~MEGRANATETREE grew in a pot on the open-air balcony at the back of the Delores did when she spoke about Ernesto. second floor. It was a small skinny tree, even to a small skinny child like me. It I almost would have preferred if they just ignored me altogether. Esmerelda would Ahad many fruits, marble-sized, dark green, shiny like overwaxed coats. Few take it upon herself to start bossing me around. She never called on my brother to do grew to any size. The branches were sparse and graceful, as were the tear-shaped leaves anything, because like most Panamanian women, she thought housework was a girl's that fluttered in the slightest breeze. Once a fruit grew round and large, we watched it domain. every day. It grew lighter, then streaked with yellow and red. Finally we ate it, the "Veronica! !!" she would scream, even though the apartment was only so big. And most purple and crimson seeds bursting with a tart liquid as we cracked the dry tough skin of the time I would be sitting behind the kitchen door eavesdropping, as she well knew. into segments to be shared by our many hands and mouths. "Yes," I would say politely. My mother hated it when I said, Yeah? We were many. Looking back it seems to me that we had always been many. Beng "Come take these glasses and put them in the sink. You've got to start helping was the fierce brother, the growly eldest son. Chien was the gentle second brother, born around the house now. You're a big girl and your mother could use a break," Esmerelda with a squint eye. Seven other children followed after me: Jen, Wun, Wilson, Hui, Lui. would go on and on. She reminded me of the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoon* Seng, and Marie, the last four my half-siblings. I was third, the only daughter through after a while her voice would just tum into gibberish in my head. a succession of eight boys and, as far as real life goes, measured in rice bowls and in What really worked my nerves was how my mother never objected to what they the bones of morning, I have remained an only daughter in my memory. said. After they left, when I would complain, my mother would say, "In Panama, every We were as many as the blood-seeds we chewed, sucked, and spat out, the indigest- elder is considered the parent of the child. You could be walking down the street and ible cores pulped and gray while their juice ran down our chins and stained our mouths if someone asked you to carry home a bag of groceries, you'd have to do it." with triumphant color. I still hold that crimson in memary, the original color of Chinese "Oh yeah, well, this isn't Panama," I'd say, giving her my most evil look. "And if prosperity and health, now transformed to the beny shine of wine, the pump of blood your friend isn't careful, I'm going to call Immigration on her." in test tubes and smeared on glass plates to prophesy one's future from the wriggles of "That isn't funny!" she would say, but I could see the smile on her face. a virus. My Chinese life in Malaysia up to 1%9 was a pomegranate, thickly seeded. "Try me," I would say, mischievously. It was an idle threat, mostly because by this When Beng and Chien began attending the Bandar Hilir Primary School, they time, all of my mother's friends were citizens. But the thought of shipping those bossy brought home textbooks, British readers with thick linen-rag covers, strong slick paper, women back to Panama, especially Esmerelda, was always a tantalizing daydream. and lots of short stories and poems accompanied by colorful pictures in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. The story of the three Billy Goats Gruff who killed the Troll under WANIED MY MOTHER to talk to me like she talked to these women. There was so much the bridge was stark and compressed, illustrated by golden kids daintily trotting over a going on and because I didn't speak Spanish, I could only make out bits and pieces. rope bridge and a dark squat figure peering from the ravine below. Wee Willie Winkie II knew that besides the fact that he hardly ever showed up for his scheduled Saturday ran through a starry night wearing only a white night cap and gown. The goats, the troll; visits, my father had not paid one single child-support check and my mother had already and Willie Winkie were equally phantasms to me, for whoever saw anything like a taken him to court once. I wanted my mother to know that I was brave enough to hear flowing white gown on a boy or a pointy night cap in Malaya? her problems, courageous enough to face the severity that defined our day-to-day lives. How to explain the disorienting power of story and picture? Things never seen or That December, I heard my mother tell Esmerelda that she was only going to be able thought of in Malayan experience took on a vividness that ordinary life could not to spend a hundred dollars on presents for my brother and me. She'd have to spend the possess. These British childhood texts materialized for me, a five- and six-year-old rest of her Christmas bonus on bills. child, the kind of hyper-reality that television images hold for a later a I sat down with the Sears Christmas catalog. Every year my brother and I would flip reality, moreover, that was consolidated by colonial education. through it in search of presents until the pages started to fall out. But this year, I decided At five, I memorized the melody and lyrics to "The Jolly Miller" from my brother's to make a list of presents that totaled exactly fifty dollars or less. This did not take a school rendition: very long time. So I made another list, then another, with different combinations of There lived a jolly miller once presents. Along the River Dee. Barbie dolls (1 Barbie, 1 Ken) and a Holly Hobby Bake Set = $50, or He worked and sang from mom till night, No lark more blithe than he. One Christie (the black Barbie doll) plus a Barbie Corvette = $36, or And this the burden of his song One Operation board game and the Holly Hobby Bake set = $45. As always used to be, I care for nobody, no not I, I must have come up with ten different combinations. One night before I went to And nobody cares for me. bed, I gave it to my mother. She looked horrified. I was scared she was mad at me. So often she was so quick and cruel in the way she said no to our requests. "I will not beg, It was my first English poem, my first English song, and my first English lesson. borrow. or steal for you kids," she would say. "You'll make do with what I can The song ran through my head mutely, obsessively, on hundreds of occasion$. What provide." But this evening, she held that list and just looked down at the floor. catechism did I learn as I sang the words aloud? I knew nothing of millers or of larks. "What did I do wrong?" I asked. As a preschool child, I ate bread, that exotic food, only on rare and unwelcome "Nothing," she said quickly, kissing me good night. "Go to bed." occasions. The miller working alone had no analogue in the Malayan world. In The next day I told my brother to make a reasonable list of presents within my Malacca, everyone was surrounded by everyone else. A hawker needed his regular mother's budget, but he refused, too young to see the gap between the hundred or so customers, a storefront the stream of pedestrians who shoppcd on the move. Caring was presents he'd request and the three or four presents he'd receive. He knew my mother not a concept that signified. Necessity, the relations between and among many and was Santa Claus, but he didn't think that it could also mean that she was poor. He knew diverse people, composed the bonds of Malaccan society. Caring denoted a field of what he wanted even if he wasn't going to get it. I envied his sense of entitlement, the choice, of individual voluntary action, that was foreign to family. the place of compul- way he always thought the world would unfold for him, no matter what. I had always sory relations. Western ideological subversion, cultural colonialism, whatever we call reveled in Wing the "smarty pants" in the family, but this was a time when knowledge those forces that have changed societies under forced political domination, for me began to work against me. I had seen too many bad things and eavesdropped on too began with something as simple as an old English folk song. many of my mother's conversations ever to dream the way he was able to dream.* The pomegranate is a fruit of the East, coming originally from Persia. The language of the West, English, and all its many manifestations in stories, songs, illustrations. Reprinted by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a division of the Putnam Berkley films, school, and government, does not teach the lesson of the pomegranate. English Group, Inc., from Mama's Girl by Veronica Chambers. Copyright O 1996 by Veronica iaught me the lesson of the individual, the miller who is happy alone, and who affirms Chambers. the principle of not caring for community. Why was it so easy for me to learn that lesson? Was it because within the pomegranate's hundreds of seeds is also contained

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Tbe Women's Review of Books / Vol. XIII, Nos. 10-11 /July 1996 9 the drive for singularity that will finally allowed to go out. The community was al- produce one tree from one seed? Or was it This memoir is not just &out me; it talks lowed into the chapel every Sunday to attend because my grandparents' Hokkien and S about my parents and the communities I the masses held for the nuns and the orphans nonya societies had become irremediably 3 grew up h-my father's Chh-immig~ant who lived in the convent. damaged by British colonial domination, 9 community, and my mother's assimilated But if the convent closed its face to the their cultural confidence never to be 5 Malaysian community. town of men and unbelievers, it lay open at recovered intact, so that Western notions of the back to the Malacca Straits. Every recess the individual took over collective imagina- It's being simultaneously published in Sin- I joined hundreds of girls milling at the can- tions, making of us, as V.S. Naipaul has gopore, in the where my t- counters for little plates of noodles, live. I expect condemnation there, on a nurn- coined it, "mimic" people? cT puffs with potatoes, peas and But I resist this reading of colonialist cor- ber of levels. There are skeletons in the traces of meat, and vile orangecolored ruption of an original pure culture. Corrup- Shirley Ceok-lin Lim. ckOS&-llliCit citXUd licdsoIlS, child abmdon- sugared drink. The food never held me for tion is inherent in every culture. if we think ment. I'm telling stories that aren't just per- long. Instead I spent recess by the sea wall, a of corruption as a will to break out, to rup- s0nal, pcdnful Ones but social OUtd stories. In the United States people stone barrier free of bristling glass. Standing ture, to break down, to decay, and thus to are concerned about self%xposurercrther than community exposure. In before the sandy ground that separated the change. We are all mimic people, born to Asia people are really concerned about the exposure of the community. field and summer house from the water. I cultures that push us, shape us, and pummel But the -PomegrancrtBS-section is veD( scde. I'm dealing with the gazed at high tide as the waves threw them- us; and we are all agents, with the power of selves against the wall with the peculiar contact between the West crnd local point the subject, no matter how puny or inarticu- peoples. From a of view there would be a great deal of sympathy for that, because I'm tell- repeated whoosh and sigh that I never late, to push back and to struggle against such ing about damage that has been done to that community rather than wearied of hearing. Until I saw the huge shaping. So I have seen myself not so much pounding surf of the itself. Osun, I sucking at the teat of British colonial culture damage the community has done to believed all the world's water to be dancing, as actively appropriating those aspects of it The second half of the memoir deals with my struggle to 'rebjrV1' another diarnond-bright surfaced, a hypnotic medita- that I needed to escape that other homeland. It's really been the first time I've struggled to write about how tive space in which shallow and deep seemed familidgenderhative culture that violently I am an American. It's easy for recent immigrants to focus on the past, one and the same. Once inside the convent hammered out only one shape for self. I ac- and the futureof their children. The present tense, 'How me you an gates, one was overtaken by a similar sense tivel~sought corruption to break out of the American now?' is something that is not often dealt with. -4GL of an overwhelming becalmedness, as if one pomegranate shell of being Chinese and girl. had fallen asleep, out of worldliness, and entered the security of a busy dream. T WAS THE CONVENT SCHOOL that gave me the first weapons with which to wreck my During recess the little girls sang, "In and out the window, in and out the window, as we familial culture. On the first day, Ah Chan took me, a six-year-old, in a mshaw to have done before." and skipped in and out of arching linked hands, in a mindless pleasure Ithe Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus. She waited outside the classroom the entire ofrepeated movement, repeating the desire for safety. formtine, and for the linked circular day with a chun, a tiffin carrier, filled with steamed rice, soup, and meat, fed me this enclosure of the women's community that would take me in fxurn six'to seventeen. lunch at eleven-thii, then took me home in a trishaw at two. I wore a starched blue My teacher was an elderly nun of uncertain European nationality, perhaps French, pinafore over a white cotton blouse and stared at the words, See Jane run. Can Jane who didn't speak English well. She spoke with a lisp, mispronounced my name, calling run? Jane can run. After the first week, I begged to attend school without Ah Chan me "Chtrie" instead of "Shirley." and, perhaps accordingly, showed more affection to present. Baba drove me to school after he dropped my older brothers at their school a me than to the other children in her class. Sister Josie was the first Europe.an I knew. mile before the convent; I was now, like my brothers, free of domestic female Even in her voluminous black robes and hood, she was an image of powder-white and attachment. pink smiles. Bending over my small desk to guide my fingers, and peering into my teary The convent school stood quiet and still behind thick cement walls that hid the eyes, she spoke my name with a tender concern. She was my first experience of an buildings and its inhabitants from the road and muffled the sounds of passing traffic. enveloping, unconditional, and safe physical affection. She smelled sweet, like fresh The high walls also served to snuff out the world once you entered the gates, which yeast, and as I grew braver each day and strayed from my desk, she would upbraid me were always kept shut except at the opening and closing of the school day. Shards of in the most remorseful of tones, "ChCrie," which carried with it an approving smile. broken bottles embedded in the top of the walls glinted in the hot tropical sunshine, a In retum I applied myself to Jane and Dick and Spot and to copying the alphabet provocative signal that the convent women were daily conscious of dangers intruding letter by letterrepeatedly. Sister Josie couldn't teach anything beyond the alphabet and on their seclusion. For the eleven years that I entered through those gates, I seldom met simple vocabulary. In a few years, she was retired to the position of gatekeeper at the a man on the grounds, except for the Jesuit brought to officiate at the annual retreat. A chapel annex. When I visited her six years later, as a child of twelve, at the small annex shared public area was the chapel, a small low dark structure made sacred by stained in which a store of holy pictures, medals, and lace veils were displayed for sale, Sister glass windows, hard wooden benches, and the sacristy oil lamp whose light was never Josie's smile was still as fond. But to my mature ears, her English speech was halting, her grammar and vocabulary fractured. It was only to a six-year-old new to English that dear Sister Josie could have appeared as a native speaker of the English language. It was my extreme good fortune to have this early missionary mother. Her gcntlc, undemanding care remains memorialized as a type of human relation not found in the fierce self-involvements of my family. My narrowly sensory world broadened not only with the magical letters she taught that spelled lives beyond what my single dreaming could imagine, but differently with her gentle greetings, in her palpable affection. Nurturing is a human act that overleaps categories, but it is not free of history. It is not innocent. For the next eleven years nuns like Sister Josie broke down the domain of my infancy.

HE NUNS WORE the heavy wool habit of the missionary, full black blouses with wide sleeves like bat wings, long voluminous black skirts, black stockings, and shoes. TDeep white hoods covered their heads and fell ova their shoulders, and a white skull cap came down over their brows Inexplicably they were collectively named "the French Convent," like a French colony or the foreign legion, but they were not chiefly white or European Even in the early 1950s. some were Chinese and Eurasian "sisters." Yet. despite their uniform habits and sisterly titles, a ranking regulated by race was obvious, even to the youngest Malayan child. Mother Superior was always white. A few white sisters. Sister Sean, Sister Patricia, and Sister Peter, taught the upper grades; or they performed special duties, like Sister Maria who gave singing lessons, or Sister Bernadette, who taught cooking and controlled the kitchen and the canteen. "Clear, authentic voice." "Intimate and engaging, humorous and honest." Sister Maria was the only woman who was recognizably French. Her accent was "What an odysseyl" "Deeply moving." A conv~onamong bends who are srarnining itself music to us as she led us through years of Scottish and Irish ballads. No one asked Vivid tale of a midlife woman returning to the fears, feelings, and discoveries about why "Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon" or "The Minstrel Boy" formed our music school and finding herself. growing older curriculum, why Indian, Eurasian, Malay, and Chinese children should be singing, Pm 0-963832743 $16.95 Pm 0-9638327-1-9 $14.95 off-key, week after week in a faintly French-accented manner, the melancholic at- titudes of Celtic gloom. What was the place of Celt ballads in a Malayan future? What Redefining Mythmaking: did they instruct of a history of feelings, of British bloodshed and patriotism? Or were Success: Heal Your the curriculum setters in the Colonial Office in London reproducing in fortissimo an Women \ Past, Claim imperial narrative-the tragedy of failed Scottish and Irish nationalism, the first of Unique Your Future England's colonies-in the physical pulses of the newly colonized? Patbs Of the non-missionary teachers from Malacca, many were Eurasian, and a few were PATRICIA Indian, and Chinese. The sole Malay teacher appeared only after the British ceded NANCY MONTGOMERY, PH.D. independence to the Federation of Malaya in 1957. Chik Guru taught us the Malay JOHNSON language in my last two years at the convent, just as now in the United States in many colleges and universities, the only African American or Latino or Asian American professor a student may meet teaches African American or Latino or Asian American "Modem pioneers and an inspiration!" ''Healing, transformative tool." studies. Up to the end of the 1950s. and perhaps right up to the violence of the May 13 Heartwarming stories of 24 remarkable The power of telling your story and revelaing race riots in 1969, the educational structure in Malaya was British colonial. women who discuss their sometimes bumpy cultural myths. Exercises. 30 myths written by My first inkling of race preference was formed by these earliest teachers. In primary midlife women. paths to success. 25 stunning photos. school, my teachers were almost all European expatriates or native-born Eurasian PUER 0-9638327-5-1 $18.05 PAPER 0-9658327-3-5 $14.95 Catholics bearing such Hispanic and Dutch names as De Souza, De Witt, Minjoot, Aerea, and De Costa. They were the descendants of Portuguese soldiers and sailors who had captured Malacca from the Malay Sultanate in 151 1, when Portugal was a small, PUBLICATIONS y#L poorly populated state. Expanding into the Spice Islands in the East, the Govemor- Giving Voice to Women Generals of the Indies encouraged intermarriage between Portuguese males and native

10 Tbc Women's Review of Books l Vol. XIII, Nos. 10-1 1 /July 19% thousand fighting men. For over four hundred years, the mestizos of Malacca had identified themselves as Portuguese. The Eurasian teachers were physically distinguished from me. I learned this in ( "The fall of Louis" Primary Two with Mrs. Damien, a white-haired, very large woman whose fat dimpled arms fascinated me. While she demonstrated how to embroider a daisy stitch as we crowded around her chair, I poked my finger into the dimples and creases that formed by Eunice Lipton in the pale flesh that flowed over her shoulders and sagged in her upper arms. She was a fair Eurasian who dressed as a British matron, in sleeveless flowered print frocks with Y FATHER.LOUfs (pronounced in the French manner), falls in Israel, so he can't squarecut collars for coolness. Her exposed arms and chest presented dazzling mounds come to my wedding. He loves me, but he crossed the street in Netanya and of white flesh that aroused my ardent admiration. I do not remember learning anything M before he knew it he was on the ground. He's 72, and virile, was a boxer, a else in her class. good swimmer, a strong handball player. The widows agree he's still handsome, or so A few Eurasian girls were among my classmates. While they were not as coddled he thinks and so does his wife, Lena. So, he telephones and says, Sweetheart, I can't as the white daughters of plantation managers, they had an air of ease and inclusion make it, I'm soyrneydelah, you know how much I'd like to be there, I love you. I shrug that I envied. Their hair, which often had a copper sheen to it, was braided, while we it off. Okay, so he won't be coming. He fell. Ken expresses some regret, but he doesn't Chinese girls had black, pudding-bowl cropped hair. By the time we were twelve and know Louis. My father sends a couple of thousand dollars and says, This is towards the thirteen, and still flatchested, they had budded into bosomy women whose presence in wedding, a present. Sunday masses attracted the attention of young Catholic males. The royal blue pleated The ceremony with a blues-singer-turned-rabbi from Ken's past takes place in pinafores that covered our prim skinny bodies like cardboard folded teasingly over their Lotte's loft. I'm 42, Ken is 33. Looking back on pictures of that day, I see I look 20, chests and hips. The difference between us and the early maturity of Eurasian girls was moonbeams dancing off my face. a symptom of the difference between our Chinese Malaccan culture and that dangerous Ken makes a hupa of midnight-blue velvet, the same velvet we use to wrap the two Western culture made visible in their lushness. They were overtly religious, controlled settings of silverware we exchange instead of rings; we like to eat. Ken wears white, I by their strict mothers and the Ten Commandments that we had all memorized by black. It's May 31st, my wedding day, and my father's birthday. pre-adolescence. But their breasts and hips that made swing skirts swing pronounced I miss him. There's not going to be any giving away this time, but still my father, I them ready for that unspoken but pervasive excitement we knew simply as "boys." love him. I wanted him to be here, smiling, happy for me. Rut he's in Israel, in bed I The convent held a number of orphans, girls abandoned as babies on the convent imagine. How did he fall? It is not his thing, falling. He is a determined walker, like doorsteps, or given over to the nuns to raise by relatives too poor to pay for their upkeep. everything he does. I can see him waving off Lena: No goodbyes please-the absolute During school hours these "orphaned" girls were indistinguishable from the rest of us. opposite of Grandpa Max stretching farewells out, silently weeping and waving in They wore the school uniforms, white short-sleevcd blouses under sleeveless blue linen fedora and topcoat-putting on his hat against the sun, already dreaming, walking down smocks that were fashioned with triple overpleats on both sides so that burgeoning the steps smiling to himself. He smells the sea, feels a breeze upon his face, crosses the breasts were multiply overlayered with folds of starched fabric. But once school hours street to walk along the beach. He waves at people, sometimes touches the brim of his were over they changed into pink or blue gingham dresses that buttoned right up to the hat. narrow Peter Pan collars. Those loose shapeless dresses, worn by sullen girls who But instead he falls? He never makes it across the street that day? Well, maybe he is earned their keep by helping in the kitchen and laundry, formed some of my early not smiling coming down the steps. Maybe he has the baseball hat on, but underneath images of a class to be shunned. the peak, his long nose hangs down, closed in on himself brooding: Eunie getting Instead I longed to be like the privileged boarders, almost all of whom were British, married, I didn't think it possible. She must be in her forties already. Not going to have whose parents lived in remote and dangerous plantations or administrative outposts in children, he's ten years younger. He'll never stay. Why is she getting married again? the interior. These girls wore polished black leather shoes and fashionable skirts and She doesn't want children. She doesn't need a man, I told her that a long time ago: She's blouses after school. In our classes, they sang unfamiliar songs, showed us how to smarter than most men, than 'most anybody. She earns her own living, she goes to dance, jerking their necks like hieroglyphic Egyptians. In the convent classroom where France whenever she wants. Why should she get married? She hasn't had any luck with silence and stillness were enforced as standard behavior, they giggled and joked, men. Maybe they don't like her, or she doesn't like them. Her first husband, Mcl, was shifting beams of sunshine, and were never reprimanded. To every schoolgirl it was a nice guy, a gentle guy, his own person. Came from money, but I felt comfortable with obvious that something about a white child made the good nuns benevolent. his parents. They owned a furniture store, nice people. We met the day they got married. The Chinese nuns and teachers looked like us, yet they had social status and power. The rabbi was the one who buried my mother. He was the only one we knew. They looked nice, the two of them, reserved. They didn't talk much. Mel always did what he VEN AS SOME TEACHERS acted badly, in ways that suggested they were not wanted, but very politely. He was a fine boy. You never felt he wasn't being nice to you, infallible, we were told that teachers were objects of reverence: they could do no he had a way about him. Well, the marriage didn't work, 1 don't know why. I think he Ewrong. Many teachers were openly unfair and harsh, yet at the same time we had another woman. Eunice was working too hard. She should've had a kid, stayed were ceaselessly indoctrinated with their moral superiority. home, then he would've too. A man doesn't want his wife running around. I don't blame My lessons in the pedagogy of terror began in Primary Three, when our teacher, him. She took it hard though. She always took things hard, ever since that first Mrs. Voon, asked if any of us had played the Ouija board. Ignorant of the game, we all boyfriend, Gary. She got crazy, wouldn't eat, cried constantly, wouldn't come out of answered in the negative. She chose two of us, her best pupils, to report this to Sister Arthur who was investigating the matter. Pleased at being let out of the classroom even for n short errand, we ran to the Primary Five classroom, where Sister Arthur, a dark-complexioned Chinese nun with pronounced flat cheekbones and owlish glasses, was teaching. When I announced that no one in our class had ever played with a Ouija board, Sister Arthur's gaze bore down on me. "No, no," she exclaimed, "your teacher sent you here because you-oo are the one who has played the game!" I protested that it was not so; she only had to ask Mrs. Voon herself. "No, no, I know how wicked you are, I can see it for myself. You-oo are the one who has been playing this devil's board." LlLlTH is the legendary predecessor of I burst into tears, but Sister Arthur held firm. "You are not getting out of my class. You ( Eve who insisted on equality with Adam. are a liar and you'll stay here until I decide what to do with you." She sent my After the Holy One created the first human being, Adam, the Holy One companion to report to Mrs. Voon that I was detained, and I stood sobbing in front of created a woman, also from the earth, and called her Lilith. Lilith said: the older children for the rest of the school day. It was only later in the afternoon that "We are equal because we both come from the earth. .." Sister Arthur sent me away. "I hope you have learned your lesson now," she said, and -Alphabet of Ben Sfra 23a-b I womed for weeks about what that lesson could be. I Mrs. Voon never explained what had happened, and it seemed to me that only I Each quarterly issue of LlLlTH provides lively reporting, knew that a homble injustice had occurred. I hated Sister Arthur from then on, and analysis, resources, interviews, historical essays, remember hardening myself for years as her pupil. She taught art for all classes from reviews, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and art. LlLlTH Primary Four upwards, and there was no way convent girls could have avoided being features such compelling Jewish women as Gloria in Sister Arthur's class at least once a week until they left the school. Goldreich, Blu Greenberg, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Sister Arthur was vigilant against any form of talk during her class hours, and irrepressible child that I was, I could not help occasionally whispering words to the Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Adrienne Rich. girls around me. Turning around quick as a gekko from the blackboard where she was writing directions, she would command me to stand up on the desk chair. Then, selecting a stick of chalk, she strolled up to me and asked me to place the chalk upright in my mouth. While the jaws ached from the forced open position, my saliva flowed copiously. To avoid the humiliation of slobbering over my pinafore, I worked my throat and kept swallowing my own bodily fluid. As the minutes changed into hours, the chalk disintegrated with the saliva and I kept choking down this foul combination of spit and gritty chalk, until such time as she allowed me down from my public perch. My first meeting with Sister Arthur coincided with the year that my father lost his shop on Kampong Pantai, we lost our home and moved back to Grandfather's house on Heeren Street, and my mother left us for Singapore. In a year of such misery, I turned Sister Arthur into a joke, Old Battle-ax. Her penetrating voice was to be immediately exorcised with ridicule. Her myopic gaze allegedly unearthing evil thoughts in our faces taught me that the convent, like my own disintegrated family, held no certainty of trust or goodness. In one sense Sister Arthur was correct. Though I had not used a Ouija board, I was full of questions that no known spirits in my family or in the convent could answer. I talked back to my teachers not because I was defiant but because my thoughts in response to their actions and statements appeared irresistibly logical. It always surprised me when teachers were offended by my answers and remarks, though they were frequently, it is true, unsolicited. I did not understand why they were angry, even inflamed, when I said something that appeared to me obviously correct. This pattern of punishment in the convent school for speaking what appeared transparently true continued for years. *

Reprinted by permission from Among (he While Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands, forthcoming from the Feminist Press at CUM: by Shirley Gwk-lin Li.Copyright O 19% Shirley Geok-lin Lim.

The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XIII, Nos. 10-11 /July 1996 11