A Study Guide for Shirley Geok-lin Lim's "Pantoum for Chinese Women"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Shirley Geok-lin Lim's "Pantoum for Chinese Women," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535830553

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08

Pantoun for Chinese Women

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

1985

Introduction

Pantoun for Chinese Women was first published in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's third poetry collection, No Man's Grove, and Other Poems, which was published in 1985. Pantoun for Chinese Women is one of Lim's most frequently discussed poems, in part because of its stark description of murder. The poem personifies the epigraph, which describes the increase in female infanticide in 1980s China, by providing a singular example of female infanticide. Readers are thus forced to confront a social reality that is too often hidden away. They are also exposed to the helplessness experienced by Chinese women who must accept a tradition that values sons and devalues daughters. The ambivalence of the mother who agrees to the murder of her infant daughter is a powerful image that forces Lim's readers to consider the complexity of motherhood and marriage in such a culture.

The pantoun style, also spelled pantun, is a Malaysian technique that involves a very intricate repetition of lines. In Lim's poem, the tight construction of the pantoun, with its iterations, creates a greater emphasis on the injustice and oppression that Chinese women face. Lim weaves themes of infanticide, motherhood, and the implications of long-established cultural tradition into a poem that turns a statistic into a very real vision. Lim's poem reveals the injustice and oppression that women face and the effect this culture has on women's lives in China. Pantoun for Chinese Women has been reprinted in the anthology The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology, published in 1989, and in Lim's Monsoon History: Selected Poems, published in 1995.

Author Biography

Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca (later Malaya), Malaysia on December 27, 1944. Lim's father named her Shirley, after the movie star Shirley Temple, but he raised his only daughter as a culturally traditional Chinese woman. Lim, her father, Chin Som, her mother, Chye Neo Ang, and her brothers all lived with her paternal grandfather