“I Live in the Gap”: Mestiza Consciousness and the Reconfiguration of Presence and Absence in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands

Abstract This article argues that Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s memoir, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands , theorizes subjectivity through “the gap,” a borderland space defined by loss as much as by gain. Hybridity is approached not as a resolved or coherent condition but as an unstable and incomplete framework shaped by contradiction and ongoing negotiation. Engaging with Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza consciousness alongside a recontextualized understanding of presence and absence as lived and relational processes, the analysis shows that Lim’s project is not one of synthesis but of sustained reworking of essentialist notions of homeland and self. The absence of maternal, linguistic, and national origins functions as a structuring condition that compels a continuous negotiation of identity. Situating Lim’s work within late twentieth-century discourses of hybridity and borderlands identity, the article demonstrates both their historical specificity and their continued relevance for contemporary configurations of migration and transnational subjectivity. Lim thus reconceptualizes the gap not as a void, but as a generative site of transnational becoming.