Dark Night of the Soul
The friendships that Lim developed in his Vancouver activism – with Johnstone, Laba, Rose, MacLean, Linda Galloway, and others – became crucial to his own wellbeing and continued creative and political work as his health began to decline in October 1991.[1] Once he required a cane to walk and lost vision in one eye to cytomegalovirus retinitis, Lim’s preferred modes of creative expression, such as dance and visual art, became frustratingly inaccessible. Johnstone encouraged Lim to turn to poetry instead.[2] Although self-conscious about his English and his inexperience as a writer, at least relative to other art forms, Lim heeded his friend’s advice.
Dark Night of the Soul: The AIDS Journal and Poetry of Pei-Hsien Lim registers Lim’s states of mind, both anguished and equanimous, in the spring and summer of 1992. The last entry is dated July 11, 1992 – less than two months before his passing on September 8 of that year.[3] The diary gives voice to moments of terror, rage, and searing pain, trenchant observations about the contradictions of the AIDS service organizations of which Lim was a part, and flashes of incredible compassion and generosity. One poem, “Enough is Enough,” ironically reprises the subtitle of Track Two, the film that had made him its poster boy just a decade before, this time as a desperate plea for relief from suffering. But another entry, “A Lesson in Dying,” concludes that “living is about loving / that’s all / and dying teaches me that.”[4]
Ross Chambers, among the first scholars to analyze the AIDS diary as a form of literature, argues that even in its devastating subject matter, the AIDS diary must be understood as both a defiant refusal of the expectation of a homophobic society to go quietly and an ethical demand that the reader confront the social forces that led to the author’s death. In this way, the AIDS diary insists on a kind of survival. Indeed, even in Lim’s final days, MacLean recalled, when he was “theoretically in a coma” in the lonely, stigmatized basement AIDS ward of Vancouver’s St. Paul’s hospital, he would occasionally “sit up with something to share” with his loved ones – in his trademark way, “performing to the end.”[5] Chambers’s observation that most diaries published in the early years of HIV/AIDS were by middle-class gay white men with greater access to time, care, and publication makes Lim’s journal all the more significant.[6]
Although Dark Night of the Soul remains unpublished in its complete form, several entries began circulating during Lim’s lifetime in the newsletters of local AIDS service organizations and in LGBTQ media, and many continued to be published after his death.[7] These community publications provided a platform for Lim’s creative work, giving solace and release to the feelings of PWAs facing similar challenges. Several of Lim’s poems inspired tribute poems and letters from readers in response.[8] Lim, in turn, remained, in Choy’s words, “an example of spiritual and artistic generosity,” taking care to read and comment on others’ literary work – even in the difficult final year of his life, and even when he needed caregivers to read to him out loud.[9] In spring 1992, Choy intimated to Johnstone that Lim’s praise for an early version of his novel The Jade Peony, which would go on to be published in 1995 to considerable acclaim, left him feeling “much less discouraged about my own writing talent.”[10]
[1] James Johnstone and Martin Laba, interview with the author, April 23, 2024.
[2] “Pei Hsien Lim Poetry,” 1992-1996, Box 13, Richard Fung Fonds, The ArQuives.
[3] “Pei Hsien Lim,” West Ender, Sept. 17, 1992, 33; “Pei Hsien Lim,” Vancouver PWA Newsletter, Oct. 1992, 24-25; “Pei Hsien Lim,” Angles, Oct. 1992, 17.
[4] “Pei Hsien Lim Poetry,” 1992-1996.
[5] Gael MacLean, interview with the author, July 22, 2024.
[6] Ross Chambers, Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
[7] “A Lesson in Dying,” Vancouver PWA Newsletter, June 1992, 20; “Seeing with New Eye,” Vancouver PWA Newsletter, Oct. 1992, 25; “Tears,” Vancouver Meals Society Newsletter, Dec. 1992, 6; “In Fetal Curl…,” Vancouver PWA Newsletter, Feb. 1993, 28; “Words of Wisdom,” Vancouver PWA Newsletter, Apr. 1993, 6-7; “Pei Hsien Lim,” Xtra! West, June 3, 1994, CWR5.
[8] “For Lim: A Walk Before Breakfast,” Vancouver PWA Newsletter, Oct. 1992, 25; “Memories of Lim,” Vancouver PWA Newsletter, Jan. 1993, 11; “For Lim,” Vancouver PWA Newsletter, Apr. 1993, 7.
[9] Wayson Choy, personal correspondence with Pei-Hsien Lim, Jan. 22, 1991, courtesy of James Johnstone.
[10] Wayson Choy, personal correspondence with James Johnstone, May 20, 1992, courtesy of James Johnstone; Wayson Choy, The Jade Peony (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 1995).