Li Young Lee
(Persimmons, Eating Alone, Eating Together, and This Room and Everything In It)
"Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity."
The poems we read by Li Young Lee (not related to Bruce Lee) were very interesting to me. I find raw truthfulness to be just as telling as mysterious poetry; someone who uses complexity rather than a simple storytelling like Lee did is equally as impressive. I think it was very obvious that the tones of his poetry were all revolved around Lee's father - whether or not it was his father in his personal life or just the father in all his poetry remains to be seen, but it was all very distressing and all about a father figure (or at least the poems we read in class had a paternal symbol mentioned in each of them). I decided to delve deeper into Lee's life to see where this distress came from. I know we mentioned that he did have father issues, but we didn't go much into detail. Taking cues from some of the other stories or artists we've read/read about, I knew that it couldn't be sheer coincidence. It turns out that I was right. After some research, what I found about Li Young Lee's life at home was really telling of the poetry and stories he writes, and it was mostly information about father figures or male figures in his lineage. Here are a few facts:- Li Young Lee's father was exiled from his home country and spent 19 months in an Indonesian prison camp in Macau.
- Lee's maternal grandfather was the first president of the Republic of China.
- Lee's father was a personal physician to Mao Tse-tung, a communist revolutionary in China.
- Lee's father read to him frequently as a child, Lee didn't begin to seriously read and write until college.
I think it's important to understand an author's background, at least to some extent, while reading their work. There's a lot of insight to be found, in my opinion. For instance, had I not looked into Lee's life, I would've never known the types of struggles he illustrated or the position he held toward the father/father figure in his poetry. Some of it is clearly longing, like in "Eating Together," where the family is missing the man of the house. Some of it is obviously remorse that he didn't take all the time he had with his father a lot more seriously, like in "Eating Alone." At first read, it would be easy to say that the father of these situations has passed on - and maybe that's a correct assumption - but in looking into his background, we see that his father was missing for some time and in a pretty bad situation. I think having a father locked away as a political prisoner and forbidden to come home is enough to give anyone 'daddy issues.'
Sherman Alexie
(At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School, Pawn Shop, Crow Testament)
"The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know."
Allow me to start with this author by saying this: I adore Sherman Alexie as a person! I didn't think much about him until after we watched the video interviews of him, but I find him to be incredibly interesting. I guess (rather ashamedly) I didn't think he was going to be very educated. I didn't much enjoy any of his poetry except for Pawn Shop, which wasn't your typical poem. I do connect to him on a cultural level in some way; I have enough Indian in me from both sides of my family to kind of grasp what he means when he speaks about the continuous struggle of an American Indian person, though I don't experience those things myself, because I've obviously had nowhere near the kind of lifestyle they have had. I just did not expect a poet to be funny. I don't know why that provides a mental blockage, but it does. Besides finding this man absolutely enthralling, one of the things I found interesting in his poetry was the incorporation of spirit animals.
I am part Choctaw and part Chickasaw Indian. What I found to be interesting is that spirit animals can be pretty much any animal out there and that it isn't just your choice. This is a very serious process in Indian tradition. For Choctaw Indians, it's especially nature-and-body oriented. The key is to sweat - go to a sweat lodge - or spend time in the wild. It's to actually get to know the animals. All animals react differently to different humans (as evidenced by probably even your friends' dogs vs. your own dogs). Whichever animal takes a special affection to you, helps you through your time in the wild, and sticks with you is your spirit animal. You will have a connection if you have opened yourself up. You can also get your elder/leader to do a quest for you, pray/meditate on the subject, or if you're born into a certain clan, that already tells you your traditional spirit animal, though you can have more than one. As Alexie said on one of the websites we encountered in class: "Everything, everything, everything has its cost. I have a spirit animal, but it's a wasp." To me, what is not-so-astonishing is that the wasp is a symbolism for the need to express ourselves more clearly. With the half-humor-half-sadness that Alexie expresses, I wouldn't mind a little clarity on his poetic genre, myself.
Jhumpa Lahiri
(Sexy)
"That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet."
To me, Jhumpa Lahiri's work represents many things: youth, culture, modernism, confusion... all states that I can relate to at this time in my life. Though I can't say I'm off having an affair with a married man, I can say that I understand what it's like to want to be wanted. Though I can't say that I understand what it's like to be all alone in a huge, brand new city right now, I can say I know what it's like to be starting out somewhere fresh without a familiar soul anywhere near. Though I don't claim to understand her choices, I do understand the main character's feelings in the short story "Sexy." I've been faced with many more international students here at UNA than I was used to being around in high school. I went to and graduated from a high school with a class of 66 white, young adults who were all mostly related to each other. I went there my whole life, but I never felt like I fit in. I had friends, but no one I could take with me to college. Coming here, I was so refreshed to meet new faces that weren't much like my own. I absolutely love the diversity; it is no wonder I was absolutely miserable in high school (haha).
I've never had a problem meeting new people (nor a problem with people of another race than me - that goes without being said). I did, however, have a lack of experience in talking with people who didn't use a clear English accent. Many, many times I have been embarrassed in conversations where I had no clue what the other person said after repeating themselves multiple times. Though I've gotten much better in my second semester, I can definitely understand the confusion that Miranda experiences in her cross-cultural relationships in this story. Though it's not language for her, it is body language, it still clearly shows the discrepancy. So I wanted to put a few things in my blog about body language and how it differs around the world!
- The 'o' symbol with your thumb and forefinger - It represents OK to most English-speaking areas. It represents 'zero' or 'worthless' in French. It represents money in Japan. In ancient Greece, it's a sexual insult (though we don't have to go too far into that...).
- A thumbs up - It means a good job or OK in America. It is generally accepted as the number 1 in European countries, as that's the widely accepted order to count in. In Greece, again, it's a pretty hefty insult.
- The Corona - Like the 'rock on' symbol, in America, it represents just that. It also represents the Longhorn, the University of Texas's mascot, dispelling evil in Buddhism and Hinduism, and the Devil or Devil's works in other cultures, such as Mediterranean.
