This week, Professor Shirley Geok-Lin Lim is celebrating a big birthday. She has not only distinguished herself equally as writer, teacher, and critic, but has also played a significant role in Japanese American life as champion of Nisei women writers. I wish to explore her career and pay tribute to her for all she has done for me.
As detailed in her wonderful memoir Among the White Moon Faces, Shirley was born to an ethnic Chinese family in Malaysia (then the British colony of Malaya) and grew up in the state of Malacca. Her first poem was published in the Malacca Times when she was ten, and by the age of eleven, she had decided she wanted to be a poet.
She attended the University of Malaya, where she earned a B.A. first class honours degree in English. In 1969, following the devastating anti-Chinese riots in Malaysia, she moved to the United States to attend graduate school at Brandeis University (In her memoirs, she recounts wittily her difficult adaptation to the frigid New England winter, and her culture shock of rooming with white Canadians who were enthusiastic nudists).
After receiving a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis in 1973, Shirley was hired as an Assistant Professor at Hostos Community College, a member of the fledgling City University of New York system. There she taught English to mostly Hispanic and African American undergraduates for three years.
In 1976 she transferred to Westchester Community College, a branch of the SUNY system north of New York City. In her 14 years at WCC, she attained a level of achievement and renown that far exceeded the expectations of a conventional community college professor. In 1980, her first poetry collection, Crossing The Peninsula, appeared. It received the coveted Commonwealth Poetry Prize (a British Commonwealth counterpart of the Pulitzer Prize). Shirley was the first woman and first person of Asian ancestry ever awarded the prize.
Meanwhile, she became a founding scholar in the burgeoning field of Asian American Studies. In 1989, she published The Forbidden Stitch, a critical study of Asian American women, which received the 1990 American Book Award. An edited anthology on Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, published by the prestigious Modern Language Association (MLA) followed in 1991. In 1992 Lim brought out a co-edited anthology of literary criticism, Reading the Literatures of Asian America (Temple University Press).
Shirley’s anomalous existence as a community college teacher came to an end in 1990 when she was named Professor of English at University of California in Santa Barbara. Initially affiliated with the Asian American Studies department, she migrated in 1993 to Women Studies and served as department chair for several years. In 1999, she received the Chair Professorship in English at the University of Hong Kong, the first non-white and woman to hold that honor, and also served as Department Head. Over the next decade she served as Visiting Distinguished Professor in various Hong Kong universities, dividing her time between Santa Barbara and Hong Kong.
In fact, although based in Santa Barbara, after 2003 she traveled widely, lecturing, consulting, and serving as Visiting Professor in diverse regions: Inaugural Endowed Ngee Ann Chair, University Scholars Program, at the National University of Singapore; Visiting Professor at Valladolid University and University of Salamanca, Spain; Visiting Professor at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan; and Visiting Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In addition to teaching, her work as scholar and creative writer exploded during these years. She published 12 poetry collections, most recently In Praise of Limes (2023) and Dawns Tomorrow (2024); three short story collections, notably Two Dreams (Feminist Press,1997) ; and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces :An Asian American Memoir of Homelands, released also in 1997. It won her a second American Book Award. Tilting the Continent, an anthology of Southeast Asian writing, followed in 2000. Shirley’s first novel, Joss and Gold, appeared in 2001. A second novel, Sister Swing, followed in 2006.
She won renown as scholar and critic. In 2009, the year she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Multiethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS), she championed the creation of a new journal, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and served as a founding editor. Amid this productive activity, Shirley found time to build a family, with husband, son, and friends across the globe.
I first met Shirley in New York City in 1998 through my aunt, the feminist scholar Lillian Robinson. Shirley and Lillian had struck up a friendship on a lecture trip to Asia sponsored by the United States Information Agency. I had begun graduate research on Asian American history, knew of her immense knowledge in the field, greatly admired her writing (I often joked that her poetry was so sensuous and evocative that just reading it made me hungry!) and was excited to contact her.
After some correspondence, I learned that Shirley was coming to town to give a talk at a public library. With my then-partner, himself a Chinese-Malaysian, I secured an invitation to attend. Shirley explained that she would be visiting Greenwich Village—the district where I grew up—the following morning, and invited me to come pick her up and go to lunch. “I am spending the morning visiting a friend, this elderly Japanese artist named Okubo.”
When I arrived, I discovered the artist was Miné Okubo, that she was Nisei and not a Japanese national, and that she was the author of a book I’d already studied, Citizen 13660. Shirley had included a chapter on Okubo in The Forbidden Stitch, which brought Okubo’s work to a new audience of readers and art lovers, and in the process, she explained, they became friends.
I have elsewhere told the story of Okubo’s appearance that day, her apartment, and how she showed a selection of her extraordinary paintings. We pressed her to come out with us afterwards, and ended up walking to lunch and back, and chatting. I was captivated by this lively woman and her stories, and worked up the nerve to ask to interview her as part of my research on Japanese American history. “Oh God,” Okubo groaned, “people are always bothering me, never leaving me alone. This is why I can't get any work done!” I would have given up then and there, but Shirley intervened. She assured me that Okubo loved to complain but was actually pleased to have people contact her and to help them.
After that, I met Okubo several times; she was the first camp survivor whom I knew personally. Through my exchanges with her, I was inspired to research wartime Japanese confinement. I was so grateful to Shirley for introducing me that when my colleague Elena Tajima Creef and I published our book, Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road, Shirley was a dedicatee.
In the months after I first met Shirley, we remained in close touch. Reflecting back now, I realize how immensely generous she was. I was a grad student with no publications or reputation, while she was already a distinguished professor. Yet she treated me as an equal and took an almost motherly interest in my progress.
When I planned a research trip to the West Coast, Shirley generously invited me to visit Santa Barbara and stay with her and her husband Charles Bazerman. Hanging out with Shirley was great fun. She has a wicked sense of humor, and knew where to find scrumptious burritos. Even more significantly, she invited me to accompany her to the UCSB Davidson library for research while she did her own work.
This visit led to another revelation that shaped my career. Not only did the Library have archival collections relating to Japanese Americans, but there I found microfilm of the JACL newspaper Pacific Citizen. I had never seen the journal. On reading the microfilm, I was fascinated by the essays of editor Larry Tajiri, who became my influential guide to Nisei opinion and politics. The journal’s contents inspired my durable interest in Japanese American journalism, first as a reader and then in writing columns for Nikkei media. Some years later, I published Pacific Citizens, an anthology of writings by Larry and his partner Guyo Tajiri.
Shirley’s stalwart support was by no means exhausted with the end of my trip to Santa Barbara. When I headed on to Los Angeles, she encouraged me to contact two more friends, Nisei women writers who were also veteran social activists: Hisaye Yamamoto and Mitsuye Yamada. Space here does not permit me to recount my resulting relationships with these extraordinary women, except to affirm that my life has been enriched by them. Hisaye kindly blurbed my first book, By Order of the President. Mitsuye is still an active presence as a centenarian; I have been blessed by her friendship, and honored to receive her annual family Christmas card.
Even after I finished my PhD, I continued to work together with Shirley. In 2000, when I was a postdoc in Washington, we presented together on a panel at the American Studies Association (ASA). A few years later, when Shirley was named ASA program committee co-chair, she brought me onto the committee. Our families also grew further intertwined. After my aunt Lillian and I each settled in Montreal, Shirley put us in contact with her brother Tony Lim and his family, who became warm friends. Conversely, I introduced Shirley to my mother and father, who enjoyed her company and housed her during a trip to New York.
While Shirley was at my parents’ house, I showed her a book I had just discovered, Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear. It was the memoir of Kathleen Tamagawa, an early biracial Japanese American from Chicago, and was the first book by a Nisei ever published by a mainstream house. Shirley eagerly read it and composed a brilliant essay centering on Tamagawa’s complex discussion of her mixed identity.
Meanwhile, Elena Tajima Creef and Floyd Cheung each put together essays on Tamagawa, while I contributed a historical study of the author. Thus fortified, we proposed a new edition of the book, alongside a critical anthology of essays, to editor Leslie Mitchner at Rutgers University Press. Leslie wittily replied, “No critical editions. This is not the Talmud.” She proposed instead that we combine our disparate essays into a single introduction. I took up the task, and created a coherent text.
Rutgers insisted that only two names could be listed on the title page. I proposed “Greg Lim” and “Elena Cheung” to signal that the work was by all four of us. Shirley generously declined (as did Floyd), and insisted that only my name and Elena’s appear so that the work could proceed. The new edition of Holy Prayers appeared in 2008. I remain extremely proud of my collaboration with Shirley on the work.
I was pleased to have an opportunity to offer Shirley some of the support she had shown me. In 2006, when I was on the executive board of the Association for Asian American Studies, I asked Shirley if she planned to attend their annual meeting. Shirley wrote that she did not. Because she had left the Asian American Studies department at UCSB, she was not sure of her welcome in the field. “The AAAS will never invite me to speak at their conference,” she sighed. I immediately responded (with a touch of irony), “I have just spoken to the program committee chair for next year’s AAAS meeting in New York—a certain Greg Robinson—and that august personage has informed me that you would be welcome.”
Together with my co-chairs, I scheduled a poetry reading by Shirley as a special event. When Shirley came to do the reading, she found a full house, with students and scholars packed in. Even those who were not already standing joined in an ovation, testifying to just how much Shirley and her work have meant (and still mean) to so many people.
© 2024 Greg Robinson