By Jonathan Chan

In Praise of Limes
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Sungold Editions (2022) / 106 pages / SGD 30.50

In the 1980s, my granduncle and grandaunt decided to move from Kuala Lumpur to California. My granduncle, having studied in Scotland and trained in England, took the opportunity to find work as a civil engineer on the West Coast. They brought over their children and settled into Concord, California, building a new life stitched of new routines and new affections. I remember visiting their Concord home, like a time capsule from the 1980s in its furnishing and décor. My granduncle, for all his years in America, remains stubbornly loyal to his neighbourhood Chinese restaurant.

Shirley Lim is 12 years younger than my granduncle, but arrived in the US roughly a decade earlier. In 1969 at the age of 24, fresh from the University of Malaya, she began a doctorate in English at Brandeis University on a Fulbright; just four years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson would sign the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, removing de facto discrimination against Southern and Eastern Europeans, Asians and other ethnic groups from American immigration policy. This loosening would correspond directly to the influx of immigrants from across Asia, with particular preference given to professionals and individuals with specialised skills. This set in motion the demographic transformations that have shaped much of Asian America today.  

Lim, with her PhD, would fit neatly within these parameters as an ideal immigrant, stitched into the fabric of American civic life through her marriage to fellow literary scholar Charles Bazerman. She would go on to be known primarily as a professor of Asian American cultural studies, postcolonial literature, pedagogy and feminist theory, and secondarily for her poetry. She would teach on the East and West Coasts, in Singapore and in Hong Kong. One wonders if her scholarship was part of the compartmentalisation enacted by the American academy, as if to say her identity was the primary marker of her research interests – her advantage within the professoriate lay with her being a postcolonial, Asian, woman subject.

And yet, the Shirley Lim of In Praise of Limes (2022) is not the Shirley Lim of Crossing the Peninsula (1980) nor the Shirley Lim of Among the White Moon Faces (1996). It is not the Shirley Lim haunted by the "illegitimate status" of Malaysian Anglophone literature, of the Malaysia in the 1970s where there "had been little public support for English-language cultural expressions, few forms of publication outlets, fewer awards and very little social recognition" (Lim, 'English in Malaysia: Identity and the Market Place', 2015). This Shirley Lim is no longer haunted by the prospect of always looking back to Asia, or Malaysia, no longer assuming a telescopic view of a past home:

We dream like grey gulls blown inland,
Or as one-eyed ships, blow, espying
The bright-shelled peninsula.

(Crossing the Peninsula, 1980)

Rather, the Shirley Lim of In Praise of Limes is assuredly Californian. In Praise of Limes features a subject that represents what emerges after the fact of migration, one that is able to claim to belonging to a place without a particular need for caveats or qualifications. In the poem 'Tabula Rasa', Lim rejects the notion that immigration entails a clean slate, the vacancy of empty roads drawing the memory of "a Malacca cross-road, / emak disappeared, baba disappeared", the "first knowledge of loss". Lim comes to an American position in a kind of wholeness and consistency between lives past and present. This impression is strengthened by the collection having been written during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic – a good portion of the collection consists of poems Lim wrote under lockdown conditions, her attention turned to her local environs. The way through which Lim expresses this feeling of indigeneity, of having an intimate and particular affection for and relationship with the land, is ecological. Lim reflects on California's rugged landscapes, the plenitude of its harvests, and the minutiae of her neighbourhood's environment. Consider her collection's opening poem, 'Passing Through':

The mountains are brown, close enough
to see dry ridges and scarred trails.
Ocean's a reflection in the sky.
Winter rain promises in little puffs,
gray, silver-tint, then gone to sunny glow.
Santa Barbara, Santa Ynez,
Santa Claus: saints of history
flash past by south to San Diego.
If poetry is imitation, California
is a poem, easy on the eye

Lim's speaker reveals no misgivings, whether related to a need to justify an Americanness or an authority to describe the land. The vividness of a familiar mountain range rouses its own visual vocabulary, one which Lim captures in texture and in colour. There is an almost ekphrastic sense to the poem, evocative of the California Impressionists, capturing both the energy of the landscape and the flashes caught in a moving vehicle. The beauty of the Californian scenery makes it predisposed to "imitation", to rendering. The irony, then, of the poem's title is its own claim to transience, speaker rolling through the state from north to south.

In Praise of Limes is a late, mature work. It reveals a kind of settled self in Lim's speakers, though also a crawling sense of mortality. A growing environmental consciousness is complemented by the encroachment of mass death during the Covid-19 pandemic, held taut in the stillness of daily routine. Through Lim's call and response with the locality of Santa Barbara, her home of over 20 years, one sees naturalisation as not merely a kind of interior, psychological process, but one that is equally informed by a literal feeling of being bound to a place.

The arrival of the climate crisis complicates this entwining; the landscape itself is scarred and decimated by the extremities of intense heat, particularly droughts and fires. Lim organises In Praise of Limes in three sections: 'Passing Through', 'The Fire Land' and 'Wild Life', with 32, 10 and 21 poems respectively. The first section holds poems that address the neighbourhoods and localities Lim has come to call her own, the second details the aftermath of fires raging across the California landscape, and the third contains Lim's experiments in poems about animals, juxtaposed against the period of pandemic constriction.

The most resplendent of Lim's poems in her collection reflect a deep wisdom and sense of hope amid the quotidian elements of her life in California. The collection's titular poem, 'In Praise of Limes', is a standout. The poem details the appearance of limes "on sidewalks" by "late March", a natural bounty yielded by the land of her new home. The poem proceeds:

Careless branches
drop sweet-sour green-yellow fruit, like flinging
gum to a crowd all through April and May,
until neighbors tire of plenty; excepting
the newcomers, for whom, decades passing,
plenty remains a miracle. Each day
unexpected, each morning miraculous
sunrise in a new country.

Lim's description of the fruiting of limes, their appearance an indication of the seasons, sparkles with wonder. Lim's adjectives capture a lush sense of gratitude: the kennings of "sweet-sour" and "green-yellow", the abundance of "plenty" and of "plenty" as "miracle", the days "unexpected" in a country that is "new". There is a sense of the beatific that is not unlike the poems of Derek Walcott, and a sense of gratitude not unlike that of Jericho Brown or Naomi Shihab Nye. One might bristle against the belief that the lot of an immigrant is to remain thankful, yet one detects no trace of cynicism in Lim's account.

Lim's speaker, however, is not blind to the socioeconomic inequalities that have riven California, jarring the state's place in the popular consciousness as being progressive and warm. She reflects:

Although want-want
blows like Santa Anas sparking ashes
on roof shingles, lounges and awnings,
under dry fronds above bungalows, although
coyote lairs in brittle eucalyptus
burn. Although in uneasy zigzag land
rifts, although thirst and desert brown
the homeless children of plenty,
although new and old split apart, unknown
to each other, we will persist in praising
the lime tree spring, newcomers to our town,
too many for the breaking earth to tear down.

The anaphoric "although" is the crux of the poem. Lim's speaker lists the litany of deprivations that litter her beloved home state. Unmet desires are likened to the dry winds that affect Southern California, rolling through obvious emblems of opulence. The acres of eucalyptus "burn", impinging on natural habitats. The roads are uneven and the dust covers the unhoused. The "new and old" perhaps reflects the contrasts of Silicon Valley and blue-collar work, old wealth and new immigrants, or even the relentless spirit of procession that has been ingrained in California as the apotheosis of manifest destiny. Yet, Lim insists that "we will persist in praising / the lime tree spring", "too many for the breaking earth to tear down". I am reminded of Adam Zagajewski's instruction to "Praise the mutilated world", or Ross Gay's to "Say only, thank you." Lim's poem functions not only as tribute to her neighbourhood but as homage to Auden, who writes in 'In Praise of Limestone':

when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

These themes of natural decay, brought about by the destructive force of heat waves and droughts, reveal a sense of urgency in relation to the climate crisis. One might be cynical to express that such sentiments are merely fashionable, though this would be perhaps too uncharitable a reading of Lim's poems. In the book's second section 'The Fire Land', Lim crafts poems that stress this sense of anxiety. The section's epigraph is from Eliot's The Waste Land (1922): "HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME." A call to action. "Stillness is the door ajar, / cornucopia the flames before it," mulls the speaker in 'Evacuation'. "Los Angeles is burning," declares the speaker in 'Smoke'. So too in "Home in Asia / where smoke is smog is / dying." This is brought about more forcefully in the poem 'Sunrise in the West':

Sunrise, a long glow in the West,
along the horizon ridge, false
daylight. The east turns a dim blue
filter. No one walks this poisonous
morning. Yesterday's ash drifts,
imperceptible kills.

The skies are obscured by a cover of ash, discoloured as if ill. The air is "poisonous" to the breath, creating respiratory harm. The speaker notes the seeming irony of there being "elves and reindeer" draped in "Christmas fairy lights" that are "ash-snow-covered, Target-points-earned, / beside where it's burning, has burnt, will burn". The juxtaposition of ash and snowflake brings to mind Boey Kim Cheng's poem 'Clear Brightness'.

There is something crass of the fantasy of snow, seemingly blithely ignorant of the devastation caused by the flames. Lim addresses this in the poem 'This Frost', describing a frost

no scraping can clear.
Wintery fig trees bear
branches stippled with ashes

that will not melt

The ravages of wildfires have an effect on chemical composition, affecting frost's ability to melt or even be scraped off. In 'Eucalyptus Country', a poem in the collection's final section, the speaker writes:

This May's early sundowners prepare
for fire season when eucalyptus flare
like matchstick bunches lighting California.
For now, we welcome this evening air
stirring through every sunburnt unbuilt ground,
virus cleared—between plague and fire, locked down—

To love California, its rugged physicality, its picturesque beauty, is to come to an understanding of its cycles of destruction. Eucalyptus was brought to California by Australian workers in the 19th century, but, as evidenced by their mention in Lim's poems, are just as representative of its environs. The increasing frequency of the fires, perhaps heightened by the anxiety induced by the pandemic, is enough to stir Lim's call for action against the climate crisis. The poet turns to poetry, contending for the attitudinal change that must result in a more forgiving environment.

Although Lim's speakers in this collection seem not to be preoccupied with her own Malaysian past, some of her other outstanding poems examine other elements of Asian American life and history. In particular, the genesis of specific Asian American communities in American military interventions in Asia. Here, I refer to the diptych 'Farmer's Market' and 'Monday Morning Road' in the book's first section. Both deal, principally, with the afterlives of the War in Vietnam, that the animating fact of so many Asian American communities is this: "we are here because you were there." Or as scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen articulates, "My very existence and that of many other Vietnamese and Asian Americans in this country, we are here because of wars that the United States fought in Asia."

'Farmers' Market' makes a lived sense of Asian America present in its listing of produce: "Beets, leeks, fennel, kailan," "Thai basil, scallions, / lemon grass, bok choy, onions." The lacuna of the poem is "The vet, self-proclaimed, in the wheelchair" by the "Hmong stall" who "wasn't / at his corner the last two Saturdays". The poem lapses into description: "Bone and skin, under the lap / cover layered over knees, no / begging sign." The speaker ruminates:

If he isn't at the market,
I'd know he's passed. Not all gray-
Headed, disheveled, wheel-chaired, gray-
Bearded men are vets with no home.
Nor did all vets serve in Vietnam.

There is a cool sobriety to the speaker's logic, surmising whether the ostensibly Hmong man she sees each week is really a veteran, really homeless, and implicitly, really a wartime ally of the United States turned refugee. Even as the market reveals to Lim's speaker, describing how the "Flash of Asia's wet-/markets in cool California" are her "weekly nostalgia", her comfort rests uneasily against the absence of the veteran. He is perhaps "lying in a nursing home, / rusting knee hinges, withered ham", stultified images of a body turned into an object. The poem concludes:

Am I who I say I am? Are you?
There is enough guilt for those who
come with tides, ocean-borne, who are
born in the soil—all bound to America.

The flash of the past for Lim's speaker seems not to suggest a fundamental instability or uncertainty to her American identity. Rather, it seems to suggest a feeling of imposture, a masquerade of Americanness, a performance of belonging. The "guilt" Lim's speaker describes is suggestive of a kind of survivor's guilt, perhaps of the privileged migrant shielded by educational or economic opportunity, or of the refugee who has lived through war. The homonyms "borne" and "born" illuminate the reality that there are Asian Americans who arrive in the country and strive toward naturalisation, and that there are others born in the United States who become American by jus soli, or the rights of the soil. It is an effective poem, suspicious of the familiarity roused in spaces common between America and Asia, alluding to the reality that there are working-class Asian Americans such as the farmers who provide the "Garlic, fish sauce, soy stir-fry" that keep the speaker "unbound". The consumption of produce itself reflects another intimacy with the land, though the speaker questions, "How do I know / the farmers are from Fresno?" The project of an Asian American identity, political in its inception and inclusive in its ideal parameters, continues to remain fraught.  

The poem that follows, 'Monday Morning Road', is similarly determined by the scars of the War in Vietnam. It is dedicated to an unnamed person with the epitaph "(1969–2016)", who assumes a place as the poem's speaker. It echoes 'In Praise of Limes' in its opening lines:

I pick heavy Hass avocados
off a sidewalk, inveterate scrounging others' excesses
in a country's sidewalks, fruited like plains viewed
from a Greyhound through grassy flatness of
green stalks just before late-August tractors harvest corn
to feed the nation of tall sons headed off to 'Nam.

The bounty of a few limes is juxtaposed against the desperation that leads to the taking of avocados. The starvation of a beggar is juxtaposed against the soldiers-to-be who are to be kept fed. The scarcity of the urban is set against the abundance of corn fields. The speaker introduces himself as having "fled, counter-wise, malarial jungle steam, / to find myself in killing snow". A refugee, presumably, encountering a temperate poverty, far removed from any American plenty. If the veteran of 'Farmers' Market' fails to receive any material protection, so too, does it seem, of the speaker of 'Monday Morning Road'. He recounts sardonically, "Now 'Nam is a story / another generation won't read." The poem concludes, dour:

No one escapes those jungle memories
Grafted in the breaks straitened where the healing should be.

The past continues to reside in the mind, the wounds of war years exacerbated by the mental pressures of poverty. Perhaps it is a reflection of my own biases that these poems moved me, thinking as they do about diasporic identity through contradiction and the weight of particular decisions. Lim is surely cognisant of the conceptual challenges that Asian America has continued to face, punctuated by spasms of violence through the pandemic. These poems make clear the divisions that exist along class and ethnic lines among Asian Americans.

If Lim's most arresting poems balance beauty and suspicion, wonder and contradiction, belonging and a questioning of comfort, it is a pity that In Praise of Limes also holds other poems that do not arrive at a similar power. One gets a sense that Lim may have been in a hurry to publish her collection, perhaps owing to the urgency summoned of the pandemic. As a result, many of the poems that circle similar concerns – her neighbourhood and her community, the environment, wildlife – also succumb to the grip of clichés, especially in their closing lines. Others might have benefited from longer periods of gestation. Consider the poem 'Otherness', which describes otherness as "all around us, at us: unremembered, / familiar", the antithesis to "Americans / at home in their Americanness", ending with the questions, "Where am I? Where the way home? Who am I?" Or the pointedly titled 'Illegitimi Non Carborundum', a rebuke to "the day's dispirited grinding round", with the repeated lines "don't let the bastards grind you down". Lim has addressed such questions of belonging with greater forcefulness, subtlety and acuity elsewhere.

Consider Lim's Covid poems, including 'Social Distancing', which describes monarch butterflies as "sentient non-Sapiens in the navel / orange branches" that keep distance to "stave / off heavy-bellied Sapiens". Or the poem 'Akin', starting with the quote "We are all in this together" from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, with the lines,

the meanest flower is akin to me,
who's akin to a hundred thousand and growing neighbors,
who're akin to three hundred and fifty thousand and growing
   extended family,
who're akin to six and a half billion distant cousins
who're akin to billions of passenger pigeons
who were akin to uncountable trilobites that sank into the
   Paleozoic waters.

Some of these poems that attempt a kind of expansive, inclusive conception of natural harmony straddle uncomfortably between genuine relations between humans and non-humans, and a series of facile statements. Sonically, 'Akin' also reads as somewhat garbled.

This awkward juxtaposition also comes through in Lim's anthropomorphic poems. Take 'Owl Says', for example:

Owl says at midnight:
Give away everything
So you can get what you want.

Owl says at daybreak:
If you have nothing
You have nothing

Or 'Wild Life', describing a field mouse:

The lives above—below,
your cramped barrow! —are running wild,
wide and broad and tall, while
their nice ladies shriek at your
disappearing shadow.

The invocation of animals as figurative, common in fables and nursery rhymes, always bears the danger of being read as unserious subject matter, even when unintended. Lim's activation of owls and mice, whether in aphorism facsimiles or a kind of Victorian pastiche, feels like a misfire. So, too, in other poems such as 'Wake!', which reads like a pastiche of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Wake! Skies will blue in bleakest season.
Wake! Tipping on the horizon, the sun,
One, only, for eternity, if eternity
is, rises. Wake! December moves on,
a name that arbitrates nothing.

The approximation of Hopkins' sprung rhythm is well-wrought, but something about it perhaps does not sound like Lim. Or consider 'Saving My Own Skin', a riff on Rabbi Hillel and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo that agonisingly spells out the geographic transmission of Covid-19:

It is here in Wuhan, in Hubei, here now.
It is here in Hong Kong, here now.
It is here in Taiwan, here now.
It is here in Singapore, here now.

            […]

It is here in Zimbabwe, here now.
It is here in Russia, here now.
It is everywhere, here now.
Saving my own skin, here now.
What am I, here now?

The poem crawls to its denouement, rehashing the spread of the virus across locales before arriving at a moment of surprisingly deflated subjectivity.

There are other poems that hold glimmers of better, more compelling poems within them, perhaps had Lim had more time to revise them before they were published. I am aware that I bear these poems up to some fictive standard of perfection; as Ben Lerner has argued in his essay 'The Hatred of Poetry', "poetry" often denotes an impossible demand, that poems themselves can fail to "preserve the glimmer of the unreal".

Nevertheless, I do believe that some of these poems of Lim's might have benefitted from more time, more thought, more revisions, especially those that reach but never seem to fully grapple with their subjects. These span from engagements with flora, fauna and the landscape to meditations on the pandemic at large. I think of 'The Creek', which juxtaposes the dry "sand bed" of "Maria Ygnacio Creek" and "skunks and possums" treading to "backyard bins filled / with uneaten dinners". The poem concludes: "the rivulet / stays dry, our bins fill and overflow". The contrast of empty river and full bins is a relationship that perhaps requires a stronger argumentative rather than observational connection. I think of 'Gopher Stones' that considers the "invisible gophers / whose busy cities make holes / out of gardens and lawns". Lim's speaker picks the stones that the gophers dredge out "pocketful by pocketful", uses them "in garden pots", then considers how they have risen "millennia on millennia / from a core ceaselessly molten". The folding from the behaviour of a gopher to a kind of geologic imagination is a shrewd way of building a sense of natural interconnection, but falters in a more meaningful kind of assertion. I am reminded of Ada Limón's poem 'Give Me This', in which a groundhog is described as "a funny creature and earnest", "doing what she can to survive". No such characterisation is extended to the industrious gopher.

Or I think of Lim's 'Ode to Covid-19', which reflects her engagement with the slogans that were repeated ad nauseam during the peak of the pandemic:

                        Every spring
springs unprecedented. In nature
the normal is always unprecedented
ever the new normal.
                        The aged mortal
is the normal
            rage against the dying.
Moral resignation
                        resigned to the dying

Lim's reference to Dylan Thomas and her ruminations over the saturated rhetoric of sacrifice and survival somehow read hollow. Again, I am wary of the critique that such thoughts needed more time, but that remains my primary sentiment after reading some of these poems. Perhaps part of the challenge of reading lockdown poems is the fact that they have become utterly ubiquitous, such that it can be a challenge for a poet to write something that feels completely striking. 'Ode to Covid-19' does, however, end with the moving thought: "Before this power / how small we are / I am under / the pan-shadow of this tiniest / viral speck."

Taken in its entirety, in spite of the poems that detracted from the overall strength of its vision, Shirley Lim's In Praise of Limes is a fine addition to her oeuvre. It reveals a poet active and contemplative through the intensities of the pandemic, one for whom the landscape offered a means of release from the mental instabilities of stasis under lockdown. It reveals an ekphrastic, wondrous lens through which to consider the locales of Santa Barbara and other parts of California. It reveals a deep measure of thought that has shaped the sum of a Malaysian American life. All of these revolve around a kind of depth that reflects a lived wisdom, a kind of gratitude attentive to the complexities that have surrounded Lim's life as an immigrant. In his afterword, Boey Kim Cheng writes,

It feels as though the question of home which Lim's work has pursued over the years in relentless Trans-Pacific movements between coasts, between worlds, has finally found some resolution, if not an answer.

I am inclined to agree.

_____