Hilary Tham

• Hilary Tham Goldberg, 58, a poet, painter and teacher.


• Mrs. Goldberg was born in Klang, Malaysia, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and was educated at a convent school taught by Irish nuns.


• Her grandmother grumbled that she wasted too much time with her nose in a book, but a high school English teacher urged her to continue reading and to write poetry.


• She received a master's degree in English literature in 1969 from the University of Malaya and immigrated to the United States in 1971 after her marriage to a Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia.


• She was the author of nine books of poetry and a book of memoirs and poems, "Lane With No Name: Memoirs and Poems of a Malaysian-Chinese Girlhood" (1997).


• A book of poetry titled "Bad Names for Women" (1989) won second prize in the 1988 Virginia Poetry Prizes. Two of her books are used as Asian studies texts by the University of Pittsburgh, and her most recent, "Tin Mines and Concubines," a collection of short stories set in Malaysia, won the Washington Writers Publishing House Prize for fiction and will be published in the fall.


• She died on June 24 of metastatic lung cancer at her home in Arlington.

BECOMING A WOMAN

When I was twelve, my mother initiated me

into the mysteries of becoming a woman

with a pound of rice-paper, the unadvertised

kind made of stalks and leaves, the stubble

after the harvest.

She taught me the art of crumpling,

stretching, folding the sheafs into

a likeness of Modess-factory-rejects.

"You will bleed

at a special time of the moon."

she told me. "Use these

to preserve modesty and the secret

of your femaleness."

Her mother's way she passed to me

with the few words she has received

at her initiation.

Each full moon I cursed the tides

within my body. I abandoned

tradition's rice-paper.

I have forgiven the moon since

our children came, spores of sunrise

in their newborn hands.

ANALYSIS

• It is obvious that the main theme of this poem is the art of becoming a woman, in which it is the period whereby a girl turns to a woman through menstruation. During this time, they have to be taught on how to face the situation and how to take care of their cleanliness.
• Culture and tradition are the second theme of this poem, whereby the speaker's mother taught her on how to use the traditional rice-paper during her menstruation. However, it could be seen clearly that the speaker neglects her mother's advice by saying "I abandoned tradition's rice-paper."
• At first, the speaker seems to feel uncomfortable with the coming of her menstruation by stating "Each full moon Icursed the tides within my body." However, once she had children, she starts to realize the reason behind it. For her, the children bring happiness in her life and she is thankful for having them.