Abstract
In her collection What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say, Shirley Geok-lin Lim doesn't deal directly with the subject of love. Indeed, throughout the book, she uses the word love only rarely. But behind the pain of childhood abandonment, the denigration faced by those born female, and the anxieties experienced by exiles--themes that dominate the collection--is the need for love. Not only do figures in the poems have difficulty securing it, but they also have difficulty expressing it. This, essentially, is the dilemma faced by Lim's various personae: the daughter who has only a poem to offer her deceased parent in "Father in China"; the immigrant in "Learning to Love America"; the girl who talks sweetly to please her stepmother in "Presumed Guilty." They all express a fundamental longing for love that they can't find or describe in words.
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