回家　論林玉玲的回憶錄

Going Home on Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Memoir

本文嘗試以若干與離散相關的議題探討林玉玲（Shirley Geok-lin Lim）的回憶錄《月白的臉》（Among the White Moon Faces）。林玉玲的回憶錄在結構上明顯分成兩大部分：第一部分主要敘述其少女時代在馬來（西）亞的成長經驗；第二部分則涉及她在1969年五月十三日的馬來西亞種族暴動之後移民美國的故事。在林玉玲的整個敘事過程中，流離與錯置的現象無所不在；尤其是回憶錄的第二部分，這種現象益形明顯。林玉玲甚至覺得她必須以陌生人的身分流落在她所身處的美國。林玉玲在其離散生活中所經驗的是一種失去方位的無根狀態，她的想像也經常游移於公民與外僑、放逐與移民、旅人與難民、國族主義者與世界主義者之間，這些游移現象相互交織，互為張力，造成離散生活中特有的陌生感。

This paper intends to look into Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands (Southeast Asian edition subtitled: Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist) in terms of the concept of diaspora. Lim's memoir can be divided into two distinctive parts: the first part is about her girlhood life which she experienced as an ethnic Chinese growing up in colonial Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia; and the second part tells the story of her migration to the United States after the racial riots of 13 May 1969 in Malaysia. The sense of dislocation and displacement pervades Lim's narration. This is all the more overt in the second part of her memoir. At some point she even confesses that she ”must continue in the United States to be a stranger in a strange land.” This paper then examines how Lim regards herself as a third-world expatriate living a diasporic life and experiencing ”an absence of place” in the United States and how her imagination is often webbed by interstices falling between citizen and alien, exile and immigrant, traveler and refugee, national and cosmopolitan.