Poem "Becoming A Woman" By Hilary Tham (Personal Reviews)

Hilary Tham Goldberg, 58, a poet, painter and teacher who viewed the world from the perspective of a Chinese-Malaysian converted Jewish wife and mother in suburban America. She died in June 24 of metastatic lung cancer at her home in Arlington. 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 lived in New Jersey before moving to Arlington in 1973.



In addition to writing poetry, she did Chinese brush painting. For Mrs. Goldberg, who wrote under the name Hilary Tham, poetry -- and painting, for that matter -- grew out of the closely observed world around her, her daily life and deep relationships and her rich multiethnic heritage. In a 2001 Potomac Review essay, she wrote: "I am a writer, a woman, a blend of many cultures: Chinese-Malaysian by birth, American by love of my husband and Jewish by choice. My identity is trellised on Judeo-western principles and ideals, but my roots delve deep in Chinese lore."
Hilary Tham's "Becoming A Woman" highlight the receiving of maternal wisdom that only women who are going through it. This poem presents various portraits of the transition from childhood to adulthood. This clearly stated in stanza 3 :

“You will bleed
at a special time of the moon.”
she told me. “Use these
to preserve modesty and the secret
of your femalesness.”

Becoming a woman is a rite of passage that starts with the changes of early puberty and ends with a woman's first periods. A girl grows and changes in ways that prepare her to be able to have a baby. These changes occur in certain stages. Gender representation on female clearly take places in this poem. The poet perhaps tell the story within her own experiences on becoming a woman. In stanza 4, the poet told :

Her mother’s way she passed to me
with the few words she had received
at her initiation.

Afterall, it become necessary for a little girl going through this phase; becoming a woman, and it is someone called mother to teached her little child about becoming a woman through her own experienced and from what her late mother’s told her. Then, it becomes a woman responsible, the great responsibilities carry out from generation that men can’t do; give birth. It’s an honour for a woman to give birth and it becomes mother’s responsibilities to carry out their jobs to tell their child especially girl on becoming a woman.