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    A Study Guide for Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's "Ah Mah"
    A Study Guide for Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's "Ah Mah"
    A Study Guide for Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's "Ah Mah"
    Ebook40 pages28 minutes

    A Study Guide for Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's "Ah Mah"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's "Ah Mah," 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535817745
    A Study Guide for Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's "Ah Mah"

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      A Study Guide for Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's "Ah Mah" - Gale

      14

      Ah Mah

      Shirley Geok-lin Lim

      1989

      Introduction

      Ah Mah was written by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and first published in her fourth collection of poetry, Modern Secrets (1989). The poem was then republished a year later in Poetry Review. Lim's poem focuses on only one woman's life in China but contains an abundance of information about the cultural life of a Chinese woman born into wealth. The grandmother described in the poem is little more than a child when she is married to a much older man. Thus readers learn something about marriage customs during the indeterminate period in which the poem is set. Lim also uses Ah Mah as a format for presenting images of the broken and grotesquely shaped feet that result from the practice of binding a woman's feet when she is a young child. As a result, beyond describing foot binding, the poem also serves as social commentary.

      Lim employs traditional Chinese flower symbolism in describing the grandmother's life. Like a flower, the grandmother is effectively tied to the ground, and to a life where she cannot move unless assisted by two servants. Lim's poem reveals the oppression that women have historically faced in China and the effect this has had on women's lives. Ah Mah was included in several anthologies in 1994: Into the Nineties: Postcolonial Women's Writing, Bridges: Literature across Cultures and Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English.

      Author Biography

      Lim was born in Malacca (or Melaka), now part of Malaysia, on December 27, 1944. Lim's father named her Shirley, after the movie star Shirley Temple, but raised his only daughter as a culturally traditional Chinese woman. Her father, Chin Som, her mother, Chye Neo Ang, and Lim and her brothers all lived with her paternal grandfather and her grandfather's other children and grandchildren until she was five years old. When she was five, her father opened a shoe store, and the family moved into their own home. Lim was eight years old when her mother abandoned the family. The states of modern Malaysia constituted a British colony, and so Lim received a British colonial education. English was her primary language as a child, and she was educated at a British Catholic convent school. In 1967, she received a BA with first-class honors in English from the University of Malaya, in Kuala Lumpur, where she continued with graduate

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