Book Review : Sister Swing

by Carmen Nge

Sister Swing is a robust and enticing piece of fiction. Even though its author has claimed American citizenship, this novel has deep Malaysian roots that refuse to wither. It takes us on multiple journeys of escape and enlightenment, single and shared road trips of Malaysian-American encounters that shape our understanding of growing up woman, different, intelligent, stifled.

In this second and most recent novel, Shirley Lim allows three Wing sisters—Swee, Yen and Peik—to tell their own stories of growing up in the shadow of a tycoon elderly father and his first wife and family. This first phase of their narration, firmly ensconced within a Malaysian environment, is resplendent with familiar sights and smells: “hot curry puffs and fried noodles” at recess time in school; bean curd “looking just like duck-breasts, beef-balls, red meat, pork cutlets, chicken livers, gizzards” at a funeral.

The three girls learn English in school, trying on foreign-sounding words that intrigue and empower: “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.”

Sisters Swee and Peik are adroit with their English, and Swee particularly so. Like all post-colonial subjects well-versed in the colonial mother tongue, it seemed inevitable that the sisters would leave the cocoon of their childhood for greener pastures in the English-speaking West.

Swee chooses America, although we never find out why. Running away from arranged marriages and conservative traditions, she puts her incisive intellect to good use even as she embraces solitude and social uncertainty in an alien country. An illicit affair with a married Puerto Rican professor ends her New York adventures and she returns home only to leave again, this time bound for the West coast and California with her elder sister Yen in tow.

Unlike Swee, Yen lives in the realm of the senses and the sensual. She simultaneously embraces her new home and all its excesses without losing the pragmatism and wits derived from growing up Malaysian. Narrating in Manglish, Yen boldly announces her difference through inconsistent grammar and awkwardly constructed sentences. But never once does she berate herself for this linguistic deficiency, preferring instead to claim it with pride and gusto.

The two sisters take in an America that is a far cry from the liberal, intellectual bastion of the East Coast. Beer guzzling Vietnam veterans, fervently patriotic Harley Davidson aficionados, biker chicks and white supremacist groups—these are the characters who people the second half of Shirley Lim’s novel.

Later on, when youngest sister, Peik, comes to California toting a bible and preaching the Gospel, we are introduced to a non-white majority who zealously redeem their low-paid, illegal immigrant existence by attending service at the Mission of Eternal Light. Parishioners from Central America, the West Indies, East and Southeast Asia break bread with their Malaysian spiritual leaders, partaking in a ritual that unites them in voracious eating.

Sister Swing is a novel that slowly sucks its readers into an American milieu that is both familiar yet strange. We desire to fathom why a white supremacist would want to fall in love with a Malaysian woman but we also understand how a Vietnam veteran could so greedily devour sticks of satay with relish.

This is a novel about appetites sexual, physical, emotional and ultimately, linguistic. Some appetites have to be nurtured because they fragile, some are transformed in the interest of survival, and others are denied in an effort to be sane. But throughout the narratives of the three sisters, one appetite remains rich and riotous— the appetite for words, for linguistic mastery, for poetic succor and for literary empowerment.

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This review was first published in Off The Edge magazine, June 2006 issue.