Solving (some of) Shirley Lim's life's mysteries

Shirley Lim was born in Melaka in 1944 and left the homeland of her early life for the United States of America in 1969. She went on to become an acclaimed critic and writer, and is now a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Life's Mysteries: 1he Best of Shirley Lim is a collection of nineteen of Lim's most memorable short stories, written over four decades from the 1960s to the 1990s. Malaysian scholar and critic, Andrew Ng, notes that despite Lim's more than four decades of self-imposed exile and her Western-influenced development as a feminist and Asian-American critic, Lim "has never relinquished her Malaysian identity" and repeatedly revisits the setting of her "first" life - Malaysia - in her fiction (20 11:157). In this paper I will perform a hermeneutical reading of three pieces taken from Lim's Life's Mysteries: Two Dreams, The Good Old Days, and the eponymous Life's Mysteries. Although these stories address themselves to a wide variety of issues, in this short essay I will perforce limit my attention primarily to a consideration of nostalgia, both in tone and as a theme.