Malacca-born poet and writer Prof Shirley Lim Geok-lin, who is now based in the United States, took writing seriously even before she became a writer.

"Writing was never a hobby but an obsession. For a long time, I felt that I was my truest self when I was writing," she says, adding that writing made her feel emotionally whole.

Fact file
Name: Prof Shirley Lim Geok-lin

Age: 59

Marital status: Married

Hometown: Malacca

Education: Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (primary and secondary education) in Malacca, High School Malacca and Universiti Malaya where she graduated with a First Class Honours in English

Years abroad: 35

Profession: Poet, writer and professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the United States

Current base: California

Awards: The Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first book of poems, Crossing the Peninsula, in 1980; The American Book Award in 1997 for her book, Among the White Moon Faces; An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands.

"It was something that I kept going back to. My self-identity as a writer was very, very strong."

Some professionals, she cites, see themselves as scholars and love spending time in the library doing research. She, too, frequents the library for research now and then but given a choice, she prefers to "sit and write creatively – fiction, poetry or short stories".

Surprisingly, "I write better when I'm sad," says Prof Lim, 59, who has published over 100 scholarly articles and chapters. Her short stories and poems appear in over 65 anthologies and in as many journals.

"When I feel emotionally in a turmoil or troubled, writing allows me to work out things. Writing is an artwork, much like a potter at work at the wheel and shaping his clay into something aesthetic. When I write, I leave my troubles behind. I get very absorbed in this act of shaping; this aesthetic work."

She reads a lot in her profession as a scholar and publisher of critical works.

"But I don't read a lot in order to write creatively. I read a lot because that's my profession, that's my job. But I wouldn't be the writer I am if I haven't read everything that I've read. I don't read to be a writer but I became a writer because I was a reader," says Prof Lim, who has achieved international recognition for her works.

Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands, Prof Lim's memoirs, is the story of her community – the Malaysian Chinese and the Peranakans. She wrote about her parents, the Japanese Occupation and the Chinese in Malaysia.

She also wrote about the history of Malacca, the oldest Chinese town in Malaysia, her hopes for Malaysia, the May 13 incident, and her leaving the country.

The second half of the book traces her early problems trying to find a place in the United States and her professional career. She also writes about her experiences as a mother, trying to raise a child of mixed parentage.

Prof Lim's son, who is 24 years old, has a degree in computer science and is doing African-American studies as well. He is also very interested in writing, post-modern being his style.

"He contributes articles once or twice a month to The Village Voice, a weekly newspaper in New York and the hippest publication in America," says Prof Lim.

In 1990, she started writing journals when she moved to California and since then has been keeping journals fairly regularly.

She has about a dozen journals ("personal jottings of where I am and what's happening to me").

"I also have poems about my dad and his sufferings. It's in my imagination. He ended up with 10 kids. My father's sadness appears in my dreams. His young body was dying of responsibilities. He really loved his children. He sacrificed his whole life feeding these mouths. He died before he was 60."

Writers who resonate

For someone so passionate about reading and writing, Prof Lim considers both (reading and writing) as "completely inextricably intertwined."

Reading for her is "never utilitarian" but "a pleasure and a consolation".

Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she tells students in her creative writing class that "the only way to learn how to write is by reading a lot".

However, she points out that if the students don't have the passion for reading, you can't teach that to them."

The world is full of wonderful writers, if you ask Prof Lim.

She grew up liking Doris Lessing, who grew up in Africa. Her other favourite authors include V.S. Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize recently, and African writer Chinua Achebe.

Among the poets she likes are Stamus Heaney (an Irish writer who won the Nobel prize for poetry) and Pablo Neruda from Chile. She is also fond of the works of Narayan, Tagore and Anita Desai (thrice short-listed for the Booker Prize).

She also loves in translation the writing of Lu Xun of China, who wrote a famous short story, The Diary of a Mad Man.

Even as a child, reading fascinated her. "I read a lot because I went to the library every day. We didn't buy books," she recalls.

To promote the reading habit early, she says: "You've to put books in the hands of children. Singapore has libraries all over the place. Singaporean parents know that the children's educational future lies in them becoming readers early. The libraries are so accessible."

A typical day

Her days are "very busy". A normal day starts at about 8.30am and ends at about 5pm or 6pm.

In her office, she checks e-mails, attends to her students or checks their work. She also handles administrative work or goes for meetings.

"I also have to prepare for my lectures. I never repeat the same old thing. I'm always reading new books to teach and researching new ideas on how to teach. I spend a lot of time on the Internet doing my research," she says, adding that sometimes, she also has to prepare "scholarly lectures or papers to be delivered at other universities".

After a hard day's work, Prof Lim is exhausted by the time she gets home.

"Sometimes I don't cook and sometimes I cook," she says. But, for sure, she likes to "veg out" like "a news hound" in front of the television to watch the news.

She subscribes to 10 journals to keep her abreast with the latest news in various fields. The journals include The New Yorker, Scientific America, Discovery, The PMLA (the journal of the Modern Language Association of America), The Women's Review of Books and The New York Review of Books.

It comes as no surprise when she says she hardly socialises or goes to the movies. "My favourite activity is reading, then eating."

Prof Lim is married to Charles Bazerman, professor of Education and chair of the Education Department at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Her husband works longer hours. He might be home at 7.30pm or 8pm and unwinds by playing solitary chess and solitaire on the Internet. Other than reading, his interests include tai chi and voice lessons.

"We live in Santa Barbara, a very pretty town, in Central California. It's notorious now because that's where Michael Jackson has his home and Oprah Winfrey too. The town is so pretty that a lot of famous people buy big, big places. My house is much smaller," she quips.

Occasionally, the couple take a walk on the beach, which is seven minutes away by car. "There are a lot of beaches in California, so they're never crowded. We'll take a walk for about an hour, up and down the Pacific Ocean," she says.

She comes back to Malaysia once every two years and usually visits a brother in Malacca. She also has brothers in Kuala Lumpur and one in Singapore and friends all over Malaysia.

Childhood and poverty

Third in the family, Prof Lim was the only girl until the last child, the tenth sibling, came along.

Prof Lim's father ran a shoe shop before he went bankrupt and later became a petition writer. After their mother left the family, they went to live with an uncle. She was eight at that time when her family's fortunes changed as a result of her father's business failure.

She says: "We became very, very poor. We went from middle class to absolute poverty. My childhood was difficult but we found companionship in each other. Children will always find ways to be happy because they are very resilient."

Despite the hardship, she feels "fortunate to have a very devoted father". In the evenings, she and her brothers sang songs together while their father played the guitar. She remembers that even though they were poor, they were "a tightly knit family".

"We're always hungry and I never forgot the feeling of hunger. There was nothing to eat in the house, not even a cookie. We went to school with no breakfast and lunch. When my father came home, he would send our eldest brother with a tiffin carrier to buy food," she says.

Having etched the memories of those hungry childhood years, her heart easily goes out to the poor.

For years, she has been giving to Oxfam (Oxfam is an international non-government organisation that works with the poor and hungry in the world. It has its original headquarters in Britain but it's all over the world now, operating in Africa and Asia), she says. The money is for building wells, building solar ovens, teaching people better farming, setting up schools and helping the refugees and the famine-stricken.

Poverty is no excuse not to study. She studied even harder. She would borrow study books from her friends and took notes from the books.

As it was noisy in the day with so many children at home, Prof Lim would study at night from 9pm until 6am or 7am. Then she would go to school. After school, she would come back and take her nap.

When writers meet

When she was growing up, she wanted to be a writer but knew that she could not make a living out of it. Then, somehow, she aspired to be a university professor.

"I knew that if I wanted to be at the top, I'd have to be better than anybody else because I'm a Chinese and a woman," she says.

When her circle of writers meet (quite frequently now), they talk about ideas and books and, the aesthetic values they have in common.

"We know each other's struggles. There's always the pressure to write a popular book. The publishers want their books to sell. So they're always pressuring you to write a book that would sell," she says.

"If a writer is not careful, she will give in to that pressure instead of asking herself, ‘What is the book I want to write? What do I believe is the way the story should be told and who are the characters that live in my mind?'"

She deems it "always a real struggle to stay true to one's own vision".

Still, she sees writers whose works are "commercialised" as "performing a real function for the rest of the world".

"Millions of people enjoy their stories; millions of people sit in aeroplanes and get lost in their stories instead of suffering from flight hysteria," she says.

"Harry Potter has gotten millions of children to read especially children who don't love to read. It's given adults a great deal of pleasure watching The Lord of the Rings. I'm not putting them (these popular writers) down at all. I'm saying it's a different kind of writing. They equally engage the imagination but in a different kind of way."

Tomorrow: Shirley Lim on writing for a living and getting published.

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