酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

Thematic Review of Night Vision by Shirley Geok-lin Lim


Poem Lyrics of Night Vision by Shirley Geok-lin Lim*


Years later, I lie awake
In the deep enclosing heart of a household.
Years later than in a crib
Floating among the white moon faces that beam and grasp.

Years later, flecking the eyes,
Faces like spheres wheeling, savouring myself.
Years later, I awake to see
Dust falling in the dark, in the house.

Review:

Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s poem, Night Vision, is a poem that looks backwards and forwards. The first stanza looks back into the past, at almost the first memory of an infant, and the second one looks toward the future of the narrator’s last moment lying on the bed. Symbolically speaking, this poem is an epitome of one’s life journey from the cradle to the grave.

In Night Vision, she characterizes each rite of passage as a threshold: a new born baby lying in a crib, surrounded by loving family members; a young adult floating among white people; a struggling woman suffering from disillusionment, wrestling with herself in her adopted society; an elder dying on a deathbed, seeing specks of dust falling around her. This poem narrates transformative stages of the life of the speaker from innocence to experience after years of quests and struggles.


Footnote:

*Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Melaka, Malaysia into a life of deprivation and in a culture that, at that time, rarely recognised girls as individuals. Lim had a pretty unhappy childhood, and reading became an escape for her. Lim had her early education under the then British colonial education system; after graduation from the University of Malaya, she entered graduate school at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts under a Fulbright scholarship, and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1973. Now, she is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an award-winning writer, who strives to bring together the multiplicities in the different threads of her cultural identity. She is also a prominent scholar in the fields of Chinese American literature and Asian American cultural studies. Her first collection of poems entitled Crossing the Peninsula won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an Asian and for a woman. Among several other awards that she has received, her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces whose title is taken from a verse line of her poem entitled Night Vision, received the 1997 American Book Award.

The key idea -- Night Vision written in a transnational Bildungsroman mode -- expressed in this review draws from Becky Chung's master thesis entitled There is a Will Resisting Resistance: A Comparative Study of Transnational Bildungsroman in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Works.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Thematic Review of Night Vision by Shirley Geok-lin Lim


Poem Lyrics of Night Vision by Shirley Geok-lin Lim*


Years later, I lie awake
In the deep enclosing heart of a household.
Years later than in a crib
Floating among the white moon faces that beam and grasp.

Years later, flecking the eyes,
Faces like spheres wheeling, savouring myself.
Years later, I awake to see
Dust falling in the dark, in the house.

Review:

Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s poem, Night Vision, is a poem that looks backwards and forwards. The first stanza looks back into the past, at almost the first memory of an infant, and the second one looks toward the future of the narrator’s last moment lying on the bed. Symbolically speaking, this poem is an epitome of one’s life journey from the cradle to the grave.

In Night Vision, she characterizes each rite of passage as a threshold: a new born baby lying in a crib, surrounded by loving family members; a young adult floating among white people; a struggling woman suffering from disillusionment, wrestling with herself in her adopted society; an elder dying on a deathbed, seeing specks of dust falling around her. This poem narrates transformative stages of the life of the speaker from innocence to experience after years of quests and struggles.


Footnote:

*Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Melaka, Malaysia into a life of deprivation and in a culture that, at that time, rarely recognised girls as individuals. Lim had a pretty unhappy childhood, and reading became an escape for her. Lim had her early education under the then British colonial education system; after graduation from the University of Malaya, she entered graduate school at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts under a Fulbright scholarship, and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1973. Now, she is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an award-winning writer, who strives to bring together the multiplicities in the different threads of her cultural identity. She is also a prominent scholar in the fields of Chinese American literature and Asian American cultural studies. Her first collection of poems entitled Crossing the Peninsula won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an Asian and for a woman. Among several other awards that she has received, her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces whose title is taken from a verse line of her poem entitled Night Vision, received the 1997 American Book Award.

The key idea -- Night Vision written in a transnational Bildungsroman mode -- expressed in this review draws from Becky Chung's master thesis entitled There is a Will Resisting Resistance: A Comparative Study of Transnational Bildungsroman in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Works.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Champagne]

Night Vision is the poetic expression of the German literary term Bildlung -- formation, cultivation, education, and development -- in the context of “the life of the speaker from innocence to experience after years of quests and struggles.”
_________________
I'm Champagne,
Bottled poetry with sparkling joy.

[[Champagne]]

Night Vision is the poetic expression of the German literary term Bildlung -- formation, cultivation, education, and development -- in the context of “the life of the speaker from innocence to experience after years of quests and struggles.”
_________________
I'm Champagne,
Bottled poetry with sparkling joy.

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]