[Book Review] Two Asian American Women's Memoirs

Quiet Odyssey and Among the White Moon Faces

Lee, Mary Paik. Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America. Edited by Sucheng Chan. University of Washington Press, 1990.

Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands. The Feminist Press, 1996.

Quiet Odyssey

Cover image: Quiet Odyssey by Mary Paik Lee. Image reproduced for purposes of review and commentary.

Mary Paik Lee’s Quiet Odyssey serves not only as a personal memoir but also as a valuable sociohistorical record of Asian immigrant experiences in early twentieth-century America. The memoir offers firsthand perspectives on Korea under Japanese colonial rule, the impact of American Christianity on Korean communities, and the participation of overseas Koreans in the independence movement. Through Lee’s restrained yet powerful storytelling, individual hardship becomes a means of exploring larger histories of immigration, racial discrimination, religious faith, and political commitment.

One of the memoir’s central concerns is the difficult reality of immigrant life in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Like many Asian immigrants of her generation, Lee encountered racism, cultural and linguistic challenges, and severe economic hardship. Early in the memoir, she describes the racist treatment she and her brother experienced upon entering a California school, where white children ridiculed Asian students through a cruel playground ritual that culminated in physical violence. This episode reveals how racial prejudice was normalized and passed on even among children. Such discrimination continued throughout Lee’s education. As a high school student, she confronted a teacher who consistently gave lower grades to non-white students and was told to leave if she objected. Another teacher openly expressed hostility toward Asian peoples and characterized Korea as a primitive nation supposedly improved only through Japanese influence. When Lee challenged him, he avoided the issue by simply omitting the section on Asian history. These experiences reveal both the widespread nature of racial prejudice and Lee’s quiet determination to oppose it.

Beyond racial discrimination, Lee and her family endured extreme poverty and periods of hunger. Although America was often imagined as a land of opportunity and prosperity, her family frequently struggled to obtain enough food. Lee recalls drinking water to ease her hunger and watching her mother dilute milk to make it last longer. One of the memoir’s most emotionally powerful scenes occurs when she observes her parents crying together because they cannot provide sufficiently for their children. Instead of creating resentment, these hardships strengthen Lee’s admiration for her parents’ sacrifices. Throughout the memoir, she emphasizes perseverance, gratitude, and family loyalty rather than anger or bitterness.

Despite the injustices she experienced, Lee does not portray America exclusively as a place of oppression. She continues to believe in American ideals because she also encountered compassion and generosity from many individuals. She views racism as a human failure rather than an unavoidable reality and understands her experiences within a broader historical framework. Christian faith also provides an important source of strength for her family. Lee and her brother were baptized by Samuel Austin Moffett, a prominent Presbyterian missionary to Korea, while her father, a Presbyterian minister, instilled in his children a strong religious foundation. His guidance encouraged Lee to understand cultural conflicts historically, allowing her to maintain gratitude toward American missionaries while acknowledging the prejudice she encountered among some American Christians.

Quiet Odyssey also highlights Korean immigrants’ enduring connections to their homeland and their involvement in transnational struggles. Despite their own economic difficulties, Korean Americans supported relatives in Korea and contributed to the independence movement. Lee’s father continued to send financial assistance to family members abroad, while Korean immigrants collectively supported efforts to free Korea from colonial rule. Her meeting with Syngman Rhee, who later became the first president of South Korea, illustrates the connection between ordinary immigrant experiences and larger historical developments. Through these accounts, Lee presents Korean Americans not merely as displaced immigrants but as active participants in both American life and Korean history.

At the end of Quiet Odyssey, Lee reflects on her long life in America with a sense of acceptance and gratitude. After decades of work, including many years serving as an interpreter for Korean immigrants, she retires at the age of eighty-five and embraces a quieter existence of reflection. Her choice to attend a predominantly Black church because she feels most comfortable there is especially significant, suggesting a bond formed through shared experiences of exclusion, hardship, and resilience. Ultimately, Lee’s memoir suggests that survival requires more than endurance; it involves creating meaningful relationships across racial, cultural, and historical boundaries.

Among the White Moon Faces

Cover image: Among the White Moon Faces by Shirley Geok-lin Lim. Image reproduced for purposes of review and commentary.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s memoir Among the White Moon Faces is a thoughtful and often painful exploration of identity, language, and cultural displacement. Growing up in colonial Malaysia, Lim navigates a world shaped by Malay, Chinese, and British influences. Her reflections on language reveal the complexity of her identity: Hokkien, associated with her ethnic community, is a language she resists; Malay, learned from her mother, becomes emotionally intimate; and English, acquired through colonial education, becomes the language of intellectual opportunity. Although she recognizes the inequalities of colonialism, she does not reject the education that shaped her life. Instead, she presents it with honesty and complexity, acknowledging both its limitations and its lasting influence.

Family conflict forms one of the memoir’s central emotional themes. Lim’s mother’s gradual abandonment leaves a lasting psychological wound, while her relationship with her father remains complicated by both affection and disappointment. She experiences an unusual emotional closeness with her father, yet she also recognizes his failures, especially his decision to bring a harsh stepmother into the household. The family’s emotional distance is intensified by poverty and unspoken tensions. Years later, after her father’s death, Lim and her stepmother are unexpectedly brought together in grief. Their shared mourning reveals the complicated ways love, resentment, and loss can coexist.

Economic hardship is another defining experience in Lim’s childhood. Despite her father’s employment, the family falls into severe poverty after financial difficulties, forcing them to endure hunger and deprivation. Hunger becomes a constant presence, shaping Lim’s understanding of vulnerability and gratitude. Her memories of stealing fruit with her siblings and witnessing her brother’s untreated injury reveal the harsh realities of poverty. These experiences demonstrate that economic hardship is not merely a temporary struggle but a force that shapes identity, memory, and personal development.

The memoir also confronts painful experiences of sexual trauma during Lim’s childhood. Her account of her early sexual awareness is presented without shame, but this innocence is later violated by abuse from a family member. Lim writes about these experiences with restraint, focusing on the child’s confusion, fear, and instinct for survival. These passages reveal how trauma becomes intertwined with memory and identity, while also demonstrating her ability to examine painful experiences with honesty and maturity.

Beyond her childhood in Malaysia, Among the White Moon Faces traces Lim’s transformation into an immigrant, scholar, and writer in the United States. Her academic achievements do not erase the wounds of her early life but provide her with new ways of understanding them. As an Asian American living between cultures, Lim rejects simple definitions of belonging and instead embraces a transnational identity shaped by migration, education, and language. Her experiences teaching English in American colleges reveal both the curiosity and prejudice that Asian American professionals often encounter. Students’ reactions to her foreignness reflect a mixture of admiration, misunderstanding, and stereotyping, while Lim recognizes that cultural difference exists on both sides.

Ultimately, Among the White Moon Faces is a memoir of survival, transformation, and self-discovery. Lim demonstrates how experiences of abandonment, poverty, abuse, and displacement can become sources of intellectual insight and personal strength. Her journey from colonial Malaysia to the American academy illustrates the complexity of a hyphenated identity and the challenges of belonging across nations and cultures. As a cross-cultural immigrant narrative, the memoir offers valuable insight into the experiences of Asian Americans negotiating memory, identity, and belonging in a global world.

About the Author

Professor of English and Creative Writing and Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Theology, Missouri Baptist University

John J. Han, PhD, is the author, editor, co-editor, or translator of 35 books. His forthcoming book, Echoes from the Hills: Critical Essays on Ozarks Literature (co-edited with C. Clark Triplett), will be published by the University of Arkansas Press. He has also published nearly 3,000 poems in a wide range of journals and anthologies. In addition to his long tenure at Missouri Baptist University, he has taught at Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Washington University in St. Louis. He has also served as a visiting scholar at Georgia College & State University and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

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