Reading Literary Broads: A Woman from Malaya

The Teardrop Story Woman was the most conventional of the three women. In the beginning Mei Kwei rebelled against the patriarchy, the male-dominated society of Luping, Malaya. But then inexplicably, she began to behave in the most predictable ways. She displayed an unfortunate tendency to play to stereotype--the cold beauty rising from the scum of colonial Luping. The Native falling in love with a European. The Faithful Wife Wrongfully Accused of Infidelity. Catherine Lim, the story woman, also borrows a page from Colleen McCullough (The Thorn Birds). In both books the heroines experience Impossible Forbidden Love. I got impatient and I read the ending. I could see where this was headed, and I was right. Lim lost her voice, the one at the beginning that introduced us to the irony of being born female and Chinese. But instead of being an insightful account of the condition of Chinese women, Mei Kwei's story reveals a woman who cynically prostitutes her beauty to survive; first by marrying a handsome rich man, then by taking on a rich lover when her husband abandons her. There is nothing tragic in it because we don't get a sense that she has a fatal flaw, like Scarlett O'Hara's single mindedness that blinds her from recognizing true love until it is too late. Mei Kwei's beauty is not flawed; it is merely a necessary tool for survival. This is not a new insight; there have been rich concubines, not all of them literary.