Sister Swing

Shirley Lim

Description

Sister Swing chronicles the growing up years of three sisters. It follows their transplant from a relatively sheltered life in Malaysia to the raw realities of the United States. It illuminates the complex relationships between the sisters, and gently but firmly explores the morals, values and mindsets of growing up Asian in a Western world.

Informations

• Publié par: MarshallCavendishM
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814484381
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

2006 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited
Cover concept and design by Lock Hong Liang Photos by Billy Alexander (ba1969/SXC.hu), Casey Decker (decca1o/SXC.hu), David Ritter (dlritter/RGBStock.com), Diego Medrano (coscurro/SXC.hu), Elvis Santana (tome213/SXC.hu), J. Lurie-Terrell (flavors.me/jlt), John Evans (winjohn/SXC.hu), Lena Povrzenic (zitherica/sxc.hu), Marina Nisi (manisi/SXC.hu), Michael Slonecker (slonecker/SXC.hu), Sarah Thomson (the scarer/SXC.hu) and Valerie Robinson (robcomm/SXC.hu).
This edition published in 2011 by Marshall Cavendish Editions An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196
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Marshall Cavendish is a trademark of Times Publishing Limited
National Library Board Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data Lim, Shirley.
Sister swing / Shirley Geok-lin Lim. - Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2011. c2006.
p. cm. eISBN : 978 981 4484 38 1
1. Racism - Fiction. 2. Sisters - Fiction. 3. Family - Fiction. 4. United States - Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.I459
813.54 - dc22
OCN711829655
Printed by Fabulous Printers Pte Ltd
Dedication
To Gershom With the hope that he may find many sisters.
This novel was not written in isolation. It has grown in the presence of numerous readers, friends, and funders.
I thank Hedgebrook, for the initial support of time and place;
The University of California, Santa Barbara, and my colleagues who believe in the creative life, with particular thanks to Richard Helgerson, Barry Spacks, and Porter Abbott for reading the draft;
My amazing students and my friends at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, particularly Isabelle d Courtivron and Michelle Oshima;
The English Department staff and faculty at the University of Hong Kong, for their support;
Melissa Heng, my editor, whose work cannot be sufficiently praised;
Aria Ting for her hard work;
The many women whose passionate minds continue to guide me, including Nancy Miller, Florence Howe and others;
And as always my family, Charles Bazerman and Gershom Kean Bazerman, for being family all these years.
One
It was Yen who began calling me Sister Swing. Yen, my oldest sister, who grew up to become younger than me and who shared the secret of how we came to kill our father. We didn t kill him because he wanted to get rid of Yen by sending her into a stranger s hands. In fact, although she denied it later, she was willing to marry, eager to learn what a man might do to her. She had a notion of something to be gained from an arranged marriage, something more than what we shared at home. Still, we both knew Ah Kong died because of what he had seen us do as sisters, but whether we were guilty my bad dreams could never resolve.
I always liked Yen, even when she kicked and bit me. Mama said she was a no-good eldest sister, but Yen only wanted me to grow up faster so we could play better together. When I was five, she took me to the playground at the corner kindergarten and placed me on a swing. Swing, swing! she chanted, pushing the dangling seat into the air, and I felt the rush of a strange animal against my cheeks. It rustled its paws in my hair. I could smell its breath up close - something sharp and sourish - before I wetted myself. Aiiyah, Yen scolded, good for nothing, scaredy cat!
Ah Chee, our amah , grumbled when she changed me out of my wet underpants and skirt. Not so little anymore, how will you marry if you cannot keep your pee in?
Swing, swing, I mumbled, trying to keep the new word in my mouth a little longer.
Sister Swing! Yen cried out triumphantly, having gotten me into trouble yet again.
Because of Yen s early teaching, I grew to believe English words were a form of magic. I remembered when she first came home from Methodist School speaking a strange new language which broke in her mouth in ways nothing like Chinese. It brought a different force into the world, and one better for being black magic to Ah Chee, who snapped at us in Chinese as we spoke more and more English to each other, leaving her ignorant of our wicked ways.
Yen carried home different words each day, like coloured beads or dried plasticine shapes. Father. Mother. Man. Woman. Dog. Cat. House. Tree. Bird. See. Run. England. Asia. She laughed because they scratched and tumbled when I tried them out, but I liked these sounds pulling me out of Ah Chee s lap and into some place she couldn t follow.
Little wonder when I began school - not Yen s Methodist School, I went to the Government English School - I liked it so much. I liked the playground with its ten swings and the earth scraped hard by hundreds of pairs of canvas shoes everyday. I liked the hot blue sky reeling as I ran with the other children, without Ah Chee or Mama shouting, Don t be a tomboy! Don t get burned in the sun! Don t fall down! Don t get dirty! Don t sweat! I liked dancing down a long line, singing, Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!
Every recess, instead of crowding into the tuck-shop for hot curry puffs and fried noodles, I planted my feet solidly on the grassless hollow, then pushed off alone on the swing. Once in the air I stood up on the plank seat and pumped the swing higher and higher, till I was soaring above ixora and hibiscus, higher than the young coconut palms by the toilets, almost a bird rushing up through the warm air, if I would only let go of my grip on the chains. Sweeping up, then plunging down, hands fastened tight to the steel chains, wind humming under me, addicted to flying and afraid of falling, I would gradually slow down and stop, breathless and hungry.
Soon, I found English books that carried me higher than swings in the playground. I looked up from Noddy, naughty Golliwog, and later Wendy and Peter Pan, and imagined them, children in places far, far away, viewed through the other end of a flying telescope, yet seeing them so close, as if I was pressed against them and breathing with their breaths.
Neither teachers nor Mama, who didn t like my rough play, ever reproved me for my addiction to reading, and so I became a very good student. In school, I learned English words and more words everyday. Word lists, spelling lists, vocabulary tests, adjectives, adverbs, synonyms and antonyms, prefixes, suffixes, roots. School was full of eye-words, coloring pictures not in Malacca. Words sprouted vines, branched into pages, rustled in forests of books in which I hid all day.
Of the words I learned to write, I liked my name best, although it wasn t really English. Wing Su Swee - the last name teachers read from their roll-books, like a favorite sweet kept for last or an almost forgotten secret. Wing, the family name for Ah Kong and Mama, Yen and me. For Peik, who was so different from us Yen and I sometimes forgot we had a younger sister. Swee, for me, or Swee Swee, Chinese for pretty, my classmates joked, and sometimes my Malay classmates teased me, Su-Su, for milk. And, of course, Sister Swing, Yen s funny name for me.
With a family name stretching so many languages and meanings, I became more possessive of it as I grew older. Malacca had no other Wing family. It had hundreds of Wongs. Humdrum name. Wong, all wrong, I hummed to myself. Thousands of Tans and Lims, but only one Wing family. An occult name, I daydreamed, conjuring feathers and flight as Malacca turned sooty purple in the evenings. Bird freedom. Starlings, magpies, grackles, crows, fish gulls, the bats and flying foxes swooping in and out of raggedy eaves in the narrow streets, bringing the sun and moon down.
But what was the good of magic in Malacca if it didn t do something for us? By seventeen, I became impatient for something to happen, something promised in our family name.
That was before Ah Kong died. You are very wicked not to cry! Ah Chee scolded. She would have cried at his funeral, except she couldn t attend it as it was held at Ah Kong s first home in Singapore. I supposed I would cry monsoon rains when Mama died, but Ah Kong was a different kind of family.
During the memorial Sunday service, Pastor Fung told his parishioners about us. He described us as a fairy tale, Ah Kong s three daughters.
Even what Mama asked us to call our father was part of the fairy tale. Ah Kong. Chinese for king, highness, the grand vizier in A Thousand and one Nights , grandfather, all rolled into one note. Or King-Kong, as Yen complained.
And he was old enough to have been our grandfather, the creepy part about being a Wing.
Ah Kong was so aged he had hair growing out of every aperture - nostrils, ears, curling over