Early Life and Education
Pei-Hsien Lim was born on June 12, 1953, in Kuala Lumpur to an upper-middle class Chinese family. He came of age against the historical backdrop of the end of British colonial rule in what is now called Malaysia, a federation of several former British territories on the Malay Peninsula and the island of Borneo that formed in 1963. Growing up with five sisters and three brothers, Lim preferred the company of women and girls until he hit adolescence, at which point he began noticing attractions to male servants and schoolmates.[1] Even as the film Midnight Cowboy (1969) alerted him to the fact that such desires would incur opposition, Lim had a boyfriend in high school. Although the two accommodated social pressures to date girls as well, their relationship continued for some time.[2]
As an adult, Lim spoke infrequently of his family of origin to North American friends. But he visited them in Malaysia throughout his life, and intermittently spent time with his sister, Helen, who was also in Canada.[3] Lim described being an outlier in his family: unmarried, “not interested in women sexually or romantically,” and “an artist, instead of going into computers, management, law, accounting, engineering.” This outlier status elicited ambivalence and sometimes estrangement from his family: “They think I’m crazy. But at the same time they [admire] my outrageousness.” Lim nevertheless would continue to show them consideration throughout his life, deliberating carefully on whether and how to disclose his sexual orientation (and later his HIV status), and on which aspects of his experience would or would not translate, linguistically and culturally.[4]
In 1971, Lim’s parents sent him to boarding school in Australia.[5] It is common for better-off Malaysian-Chinese families to educate their children in the West, partly as a response to a long history of social policies privileging the country’s Malay majority.[6] The young Lim’s departure for Melbourne was also informed by the events of May 13, 1969, which saw longstanding political tensions over ethnic wealth divides across Chinese, Indian, and Malay communities erupt in Kuala Lumpur; the violence claimed hundreds of mostly Chinese victims.[7]
Although Lim was no stranger to anti-Chinese sentiment in Malaysia, Lim’s time in Australia made for a rude inauguration into the peculiarities of Western homophobia and racism. Among only a small handful of Asian students at his school, Lim was routinely refused service at restaurants and ignored by department store staff who would then readily serve white customers. Seeking out gay institutions in Melbourne, Lim was alienated by the heavy drinking, routine fights, and clear power differentials he noticed in some gay relationships in local bars, which he interpreted as “self-oppressive” effects of internalizing “hostilities from the society.”[8]
In 1972, after completing high school in Melbourne and spending six months in Japan as a tourist, Lim again moved, this time to Vancouver, Canada, to attend the University of British Columbia.[9] It was at UBC that Lim first embraced gayness as a political identity, joining the university’s gay liberation organization, Gay People of UBC.[10] Then the only Asian in the group, Lim served as an informal mentor to other gay Asian students. One such student, a pre-med major and devout Catholic, worried that his sexuality and religion were incompatible. Although “not a Christian” himself, Lim referred the student to The Lord is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay, a book by Rev. Troy Perry of the Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles.[11] After five years in Vancouver, Lim himself set out for California – not for Los Angeles, but for San Francisco, with its established reputation as a “gay capital.”
[1] Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians, directed by Richard Fung (Trinity Square Video, 1984).
[2] “Lim,” May 9, 1983.
[3] James Johnstone and Martin Laba, interview with the author, Apr. 23, 2024; Gael MacLean, interview with the author, May 24, 2024; Harry Sutherland, interview with the author, June 24, 2024.
[4] Fighting Chance, directed by Richard Fung (Trinity Square Video, 1990). Although Lim struggled to translate his gay experiences from English into Chinese, more recent scholarship has examined how Chinese language has proven enabling for queer politics in Malaysia and Malaysian-Chinese diasporas, a development that no doubt would have interested Lim himself. See Ting-Fai Yu, “Queer Sinophone Malaysia: Language, Transnational Activism, and the Role of Taiwan,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 43, no. 3 (2022): 303.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Richard Fung and Tim McCaskell, interview with the author, June 3, 2024. See also, for example, Daniel P.S. Goh, “From Colonial Pluralism to Postcolonial Multiculturalism: Race, State Formation and the Question of Cultural Diversity in Malaysia and Singapore,” Sociology Compass 2, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 232.
[7] James Johnstone and Martin Laba, interview with the author, Apr. 23, 2024. See also, for example, Goh Cheng Teik, The May Thirteenth Incident and Democracy in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press), 2016.
[8] “Lim,” May 9, 1983.
[9] Ibid.
[10] “Lim,” May 9, 1983; “Racism and Gay Male Porn.”. See also “‘The People I’ve Been Missing All My Life”: The Forgotten History of the Pride Collective,” The Ubyssey, August 4, 2019; https://ubyssey.ca/features/forgotten-history-of-the-pride-collective/.
[11] “Lim,” May 9, 1983; Troy D. Perry, The Lord is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay: The Autobiography of the Rev. Troy D. Perry, as told to Charles L. Lucas (Los Angeles: Nash, 1972). Lim’s later poetry would both affirm and complicate his “non-Christian” stance.