Reader: Hue Martell
Respondend: Paula Kunselman-Aydt
Recorder: Lisa Runnels 

(Unsettling America, p. 303)

Lee was born 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia of Chinese parents. In China, his father who was a personal physician to Mao Tse Tung helped to found Gamaliel University, a small college in Jakarta. The father was teaching English and Philosophy until he was arrested and jailed for over a year due to government anti-Chinese agitation. In 1959 the family escaped from Indonesia. After moving around for five-year through Hong Kong, Macao, and Japan, arrived in the Unites States in 1964. His father became a Presbyterian minister in a tiny Pennsylvania town. Full of rage, pity, blind, and silent at the end, he died in 1980.

Lee received numerous awards. Among them are the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poetry for his book of poetry The City in Which I Love You and his prose memoir, The Winged Seed, received the 1995 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

He lives in Chicago with his wife Donna and their two children.

2 a. Narrator or viewpoint. The narrator is 2^nd generation.

4. To become sensitized to immigrant literature’s effects on English or to the variant English styles practiced by different ethnic groups. Lee expresses his idea of displacement by saying: "I’m highly aware that I’m a guest in the language. I’m wondering if that’s not the truth for all of us, that somehow we’re all guests in language, that once we start speaking any language somehow we bow to that language at the same time we bend that language to us."

This is a spiritual poem. The poem reclaims the poet’s ethnic background allowing him to redefine what it means to be American and begin to embrace its roots.

I love this poem. It speaks to my soul. It was written in 1986 after the passing of his father. Lee’s writing is a searching for answers- to the past, to the forces that drive his work. Lee explores many issues in his poetry mainly his sense being part of a vast global Chinese Diaspora and his identity’s in a world where vast numbers of people have been uprooted from ancestral cultures but are not totally accepted in their adopted lands.

First of all, the title is interesting because not only it is a whole sentence but also it explains why the mother and daughter begin to sing. In this poem we feel the sadness, the sense of uprootedness, of loss, and the yearning for a return to some lost existence. The sadness that is part of the exile’s existence is powerfully conveyed in this poem.

The poem is characterized by its fluidity. It is a lyric poem that sounds almost like a song itself. It slips gracefully between the physical and the inner worlds through brilliant choice of words such as play and sway, rock back. Lee writes of family members, of a picnic, of ordinary experience, but through his vivid details of imagery, he is able to convey his strong emotion of his homeland to us. This is the stage five of the narrative where the poet reconnects to his homeland through memory.

The tone is sad, reflective, and emotional at the beginning. It gradually builds up with intense emotion to the end of the last two lines where both women who cannot take it anymore have begun to cry.

The use of picnickers evokes an image of happiness, of relaxation, of enjoying life among family members. It contrasts with running away which signifies trouble time. It also evokes the time where the family was on the run from Indonesia for five years until they settled in America.

In the first stanza, the poet presents some family members together, sharing their sense of loss and dislocation from their past. The grand mother joins in the mother’s song about old China, and this singing is the only way that the poet will ever come close to regaining a sense of what the China of his parents was. We perceive a happy mood from mother and daughter and we learn that the father plays accordion and he passes away.

In the second stanza, Lee said, "I’ve never been to Peking or the Summer Palace, nor stood on the great Stone Boat "; these details convey his pain of being displaced, being born in a foreign country, being a political refugee, and an immigrant. Referring to the Summer Palace, Peking, Great Stone Boat, Lee is telling us of his homeland, which is also of his happiness, and his refuge. Then the rain comes which causes the picnickers to run away. The rain is a metaphor to represent the hardship, the difficulty, and the problems that Lee’s family meet in life.

In the 3^rd stanza, he said "But I love to hear it sung; how the waterlilies fill with rain" this is figurative language comparing his family meeting problems in life like rain onto waterlilies but despite the hardship he still wants to belong to his heritage and to his roots. Lee pays particular attention to the senses: we can smell the freshness of the rain, hear the musical sound of the rain on the waterlilies leaves, hear the sound of the picnickers chattering and running away, and hear his mother and grandmother’ s voices. When the family first settled in Pennsylvania, they lived in a house with a leaky roof for a while.

An image comes to my mind when I read "how the waterlilies fill with rain until they overturn"; it is how we face challenges in life. We expand our life condition to take in more responsibilities as we grow up. It is how our life grows with each problem that we can overcome just like waterlilies; we rock back and we are ready to face new problems, new challenges.

"Spilling water into water"; this is an extraordinary imagery evoking the futility of life. It is like ashes returning to ashes. Life is eternal and our life is just a temporary stage. It is like a dot in the cycle of life. "Then rock back, and fill with more" symbolizes how we meet problems and overcome them and it repeats itself.

The family sings a song to help them remember their past. The emotion was so strong that both mother and grand mother cry; it is a memory that was lost forever. The mother and grandmother were both first generations, which made the narrator 2^nd generation.

The last two lines "Both women… her song" although both women cry at the song, neither stop their singing because those memories, as painful as they are, are all that they have from the past. In this poem, Lee expresses his love for his mother and grandmother where he finds comfort in his quest for an answer.

In conclusion, throughout the poem, a sense of resignation, of endurance, pervade for a life of an exile. Even though the rain comes and chases away the picnickers, Lee still loves to hear the song sung and watches how the waterlilies fill with rainwater. The poem illustrates in a sense a very religious side, for Lee has said: "Writing poetry is absolutely religious for me. I happen to believe that everything we do or say finally is a dialogue with the Universe, or God."

www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/poetry_family/poet_family.htm

Gale Literary Database

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Dr. White: The waterlilies spilling water like the family weeping.

Speaker 1: The waterlilies collect the water, then it tips over, but as it empties it revives itself, uprighting to collect more.

Reader: Shares a leaky roof metaphor.

Speaker 2: The women are building memories to keep the past alive. The grandmothers are the teachers of the past.

Speaker 3: Amy Tan's writing centers on women. Also noted that this piece is written by a man.

Respondent: Added that her experience with students performing "The City Which I love You" and the surprise of her students when they find out it is written by a man.

Speaker 4: Notes the image of the father and the accordion and the fact that it is a nurturing image.

Speaker 5: The waterlilies need the rain. Spilling it into the water like the information being spilled from generation to generation.

Speaker 6: There is a cycle of life and everything is passes down.

Respondent: The water and tears are almost a baptismal image.

Reader interjects analysis of the last two lines.

Speaker 7: The past endures and all of it is part of the life of the speaker in the poem.

Dr. White: There is nothing but China in this poem. China lives for them in the song.

Speaker 8: Immigration: no matter where you are you always return to the old world.

Speaker 9: Enjoyed the second line:

"Mother and daughter sing like young girls."

There is beauty in the memory. Assimilation doesn't take that away completely.