The Conflicts of Traditional and Modern Values As Seen In

SYNOPSIS The Serpent’s Tooth is a novel by Catherine Lim written in 1982. It has marked her development of her writing from short works to the one sustained length. The novel tells about an extended Chinese family who live in Singapore. There is the character of Angela who represents the Chinese Singaporean woman who lives in the 1980s and 1990s. Angela is married to a rich and successful man named Ah Boon. Both Angela and her husband along with their three children (Mark, Michele, and Michael) are the typical of a modern (Western) family. Angela herself is also the representation of today’s Chinese Singaporean who embraces the Western way of life. Her chief preoccupation is to raise her children free from the dreadful irrationalities and weirdness of their forebears. The second main character will be Angela’s mother-in-law’s named Old Mother. She is the representation of the first Chinese immigrant who arrived in Singapore. In the novel, Lim describes Old Mother as a very conservative person who fanatically worships her traditional (Chinese) values. Her eternal despair relates to the fact that she lives in the household of a dying patriarch. The eldest Wee Tiong symbolizes the xenophobic Oriental who hates his (Western) rich brother and sister- in-law, while second son Wee Boon and his wife Angela are Western in thinking and lifestyle. The third son Wee Nam, although not playing a significant role, marries a Eurasian girl, thereby representing a cross-cultural outlook. The youngest, Wee Tiong lives in Australia and cohabits with a local woman who later abandons him. Old Mother and his husband use to live in small wooden house at Cangi. However, ever since her husband died, Angela makes Old Mother to stay with her so she can take care of Old Mother. Ironically, the decision put them in the middle of a serious conflict. The conflict starts at a family funeral ceremony. Old Mother is very shocked when Angela along with Old Mother’ s sons decide to buy a modern (Western) coffin for their dead father-in-law. The example of their conflict also occurs over the affection of Angela’s youngest child, Michael. Not simply a conflict of interfering mother-in-law and jealous mother, it symbolizes the struggle for the consciousness of the young. While Mark and Michele, reject Old Mother, Michael loves his grandmother’s stories. Eventually, Old Mother desperately decides to escape from her daughter-in-law’s house. Being very depress, Old Mother is found in the House of Death. She insists to be with an old favored maid named Ah Siew Chae who already died years ago. The story ends when Old Mother dies and Angela decides to burn a great deal of her mother-in-law’s weird and superstitious things 70 BIOGRAPHY In 1942, Catherine Lim was born in Penang (Malaya) as Catherine Chew Imm. She is the eighth child of ten girl and four boys. Little Lim grew up in a small community on Kedah, Malaya. In 1949, she attended her first school at the convent of Holy Infant Jesus (Malaya). Since she was a teenager, Lim already found herself deeply interested to the world of literature. This talent was inherited by her father who loved story telling and her mother’s literary gift. Realizing her talent in writing, Lim decided to go forward-by attending school majoring in literature. In 1968, she was a student of English Literature at the University of Malaya and achieved her bachelor’s degree in English. Four years after that, Lim immigrated to Singapore. It was at this city where Lim got her first job as a teacher in English language and literature in various secondary schools and general paper at a junior college. The year 1978 was unforgettable for Catherine Lim because at that time she wrote her first collection titled Little Ironies, which also became her first debut. It was actually a writing experiment that finally became very well accepted by the public. Besides writing short stories Lim had also been working for several years for the CDIS (Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore) as a project director and administrator. In 1982, Lim wrote her first novel The Serpent’s Tooth which was also a proof that she is able to write a longer piece of writing. Six years later, Catherine Lim got the Ph. D. title sociolinguistic at the National University of Singapore and joined RELC (Regional English Language Centre) as a lecturer. Shortly after that, she had the opportunity to expand her knowledge in literature in the foreign countries by entering Colombia University in New York and University of California in Berkeley, USA, on a Fullbright scholarship. Lim’s works are based mainly on the experiences and observations of the members of the Chinese community. Most of her works are told from the perspective of a female narrator. Lots of her readers assume that the narrator is Lim herself. It might be true since she stated that her stories are inspired by real incidents and people 70 that she had observed or known. In 1992, she gave up her job as a lecturer and become a full-time writer. .

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