Winged Seed
Books / Hardcover
Books › Biography & Autobiography › General
ISBN: 0671707086 / Publisher: Simon & Schuster, March 1995
A Chinese-American poet recounts a childhood of exile, his father's imprisonment, his discovery of the significance of history, and his search for identity
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This first book of prose by the celebrated Chinese-American poet Li-Young is a literary event - a luminous, wise, and magical work of memory and myth.Lee's extraordinary account follows the journey that began in the early 1950's when his parents fled China's political turmoil for Indonesia. After anti-Chinese sentiment there landed Lee's father (whose name translates to Perfect Country) in prison, the family escaped to Hong Kong, where his father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher. When the author was six, they emigrated to America, where his father eventually became the minister of an all-white Presbyterian church in a small town in western Pennsylvania.The imposing, elusive, God-like figure of his father haunts Lee's narrative, which transcends the conventions of memoir to proceed by association. The words and images that memory reconstructs reconstruct the process of memory in turn, replicating, in shimmering layer upon layer, the intricate, inexact, awful mechanisms of the human mind as it explores a past resonant with terror, and love.
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