Longing and Belonging, Exile and Home in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s <i>Joss and Gold</i>

Abstract

In Abdul R. JanMohammed’s seminal work “Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual,†he poignantly explores the themes of home, exile and homelessness through an analysis of Edward Said’s and Richard Wright’s works. He explains that both the syncretic intellectual and the specular border intellectual are posited between at least two different cultures. 

    "The syncretic intellectual, more 'at home' in both cultures than his or her specular counterpart, is able to combine  elements of the two cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and experiences….

    By contrast, the specular border intellectual, while perhaps equally familiar with two cultures, finds himself or herself unable or unwilling to be at home in these societies. Caught between several cultures or groups, none of which are deemed sufficiently enabling or productive, the specular intellectual subjects the cultures to analytic scrutiny rather than combining them; he or she utilizes his or her interstitial cultural space as a vantage point from which to define, implicitly or explicitly, other, utopian possibilities of group formation. (97)"

Set against the backdrop of the 1969 race riots in Malaysia, the multifaceted 1980s United States and the “second-most globalized country in the world†(Holden 2) Singapore, Shirley Lim’s first novel Joss and Gold traces the female protagonist Li An’s trajectory to find a sense of home and belonging in multivalent Malaysia and Singapore. Utilizing JanMohamed’s theory of the syncretic and specular intellectual, this paper intends to examine the themes of longing and belonging, exile and home in Shirley Lim’s Joss and Gold, and focuses on Li An’s journey from an emotionally homeless orphan, a specular, to a syncretic intellectual.