The Winged Seed: A Remembrance

by Li-Young Lee

Upon its initial publication, acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee's memoir The Winged A Remembrance (1995), received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In lyrical prose, Lee's extraordinary story begins in the 1950s when his parents fled China's political turmoil for Indonesia. Along with many other Chinese members of the population, his family was persecuted under President Sukarno. Falsely accused and charged for crimes against the state, his father spent a year and a half in jail as a political prisoner, half of that time in a leper colony. While his entire family was being transported to a prison colony, they escaped and fled to Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and back to Hong Kong where his father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher. Eventually, the family sought asylum in the United States in 1962. When the author was six, they emigrated to a small town in western Pennsylvania where his father became a Presbyterian minister. This reissued edition contains a new foreword by the author and never-before-seen photos of the family from different stages of their journey. Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry that have garnered such awards as the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; the Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Genres: Poetry, Memoir, Nonfiction, Asian American, Biography, Biography Memoir, Literature

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Li-Young Lee is an American poet. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President, who attempted to make himself emperor. Lee's father, who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. His father was exiled and spent a year in an Indonesian prison camp. In 1959 the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Li-Young Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport.

Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he began to develop his love for writing. He had seen his father find his passion for ministry and as a result of his father reading to him and encouraging Lee to find his passion, Lee began to dive into the art of language. Lee’s writing has also been influenced by classic Chinese poets, Li Bo and Tu Fu. Many of Lee’s poems are filled with themes of simplicity, strength, and silence. All are strongly influenced by his family history, childhood, and individuality. He writes with simplicity and passion which creates images that take the reader deeper and also requires his audience to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. These feelings of exile and boldness to rebel take shape as they provide common themes for many of his poems.

Li-Young Lee has been an established Asian American poet who has been doing interviews for the past twenty years. Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (BOA Editions, 2006, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll), is the first edited and published collection of interviews with an Asian American poet. In this collection, Earl G. Ingersoll asks "conversational" questions to bring out Lee’s views on Asian American poetry, writing, and identity.

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it a booklength poem? Is it a memoir? It's both, the best of both worlds from Chicago based poet Li-Young Lee. You'll hear echoes of Dylan Thomas in the prose... "What is the night?" I read it several years ago, read it ever year or so. Magic.

[Greg Lehman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most bizarre books I've ever read. At times the imagery, however inventive and beautiful, became so opaque that the plot seemed to have been traded in for a stream of consciousness-style poem. I love Lee's poetry, and it was interesting to learn about his upbringing, but I can see this one polarizing readers. I was definitely a fan, though.

[Miriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated his straightforward stories very much--his family's history in China and Indonesia, his parents' further-back history, his childhood in the U.S. He touches on some deeply personal things and family skeletons and also larger swaths of history that his family was caught up in. There's a lot of absurdity and cruelty in both, although his immediate family seems to have at least something of a kind center (even with the distance between himself and his father, when that kindness is directed more toward the congregation than to him). I did not really understand much of the intermittent poetry in paragraph form. I think I understood that the whole thing is a night's thoughts--sometimes he's sleeping (even if he doesn't know it), other times he's free associating or letting his mind drift, he observes his sleeping partner, he reminisces, he looks outside because he can't sleep. I felt that he was talking only to himself in many of the more poetic sections. (Who is R? The sun? His father? Guilt? A person? No idea, no help from him to figure it out) I do not have a problem with this, free expression and all, but those sections didn't really help me understand him, his relationship to his father, or history and memory. I reread many sections and still only got an overall impression. The language is beautiful, the images are vivid, but I couldn't make them connect. Maybe that's the point? Poetry continues to elude me.

[Valerie Valentine · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than anything this was a remembrance of his father. But Lee is a poet, and this is also a memoir of his childhood in Jakarta, so it’s a poetic autobio/memoir. The poetry sings strongly in some sections, making the prose so dense that the book, although small, actually took me a long time to read. Some of the phrases are outright luminous.
Some of the stories he told about his father were really shocking, for example the beatings contrasted with his pastorliness. A reader imagines his father’s prison time through the eyes of a son, watching his mother go to bribe men at the gates. They make an extraordinary escape to the US, where the family starts over and Lee grows up struggling with language and identity.
The seed is an apt metaphor for generations. The young Lee’s sister was raped by their grandfather, describing the ache to avenge her he held all his life. The scenes of Lee caring for his father’s dying body, literally digging the shit out his ass, were humiliating and graphic. It’s tempting to stop reading, but that would be uncourageous, unlike the author.
The part where he’s talking about writing Chinese figures is pretty, describing a language that is logosyllabic, not alphabet/letters, but characters for words or parts of them. If English were more artful symbols than just letters I think we would naturally be more metaphorical - it changes the way a culture describes things.

[Kadedra]

The book I read was The Winged Seed by Li Young Lee. This book was a non fiction/biography and the theme of the book was just because you come from a new place doesn’t mean you cant adjust to a new place.
The Winged Seed was about a boy named Li Young Lee who moved from China to Chicago with his family. Lee talks about how his family was poor and how they didn’t have much food because his parents were not working. Li Young Lee had 3 siblings with him in Chicago and on stayed in China. His parents were upset about the child they had to leave behind but they were never really clear on why the child was left. While in Chicago Li Young Lee’s father was in jail and died. His life was basically shaped from his families struggles and the transition from moving to Chicago from China. One struggle he had was being poor since his family was well-off while living in China. But he grows from the mistakes of his father who also was a church pastor in China and some of the things his father would preach were things he did not agree with.
The book was a little boring at first but I began to get interested when Li Young Lee began talking about his love interest and how he would try to pursue her and also when he began talking about how his father’s death was affecting him. My favorite character from the book would have to be Li Young Lee’s mother because even when all the family had to eat was butter cookies she still sacrificed her share of cookies to feed the rest of the family. She kind of reminds me of my mom because my mom would die before me or my brother would go without something that we needed. One question I had about the book was did Li Young Lee ever find his sibling left in China and why did they leave him? The most vivid scene from the book would be when Li Young Lee was day dreaming about his father coming up from the dead and walking on the ground with his “frightening ankles”. he described his father’s journey from the grave as saddening, he thought that his was climbing alone out of the grave.
I would recommend this book to anywho who was an immigrant to America, maybe they could relate to Li Young Lee’s experiences. If you thought the book When I Was Puerto Rican then this would be a great book to read.
Overall I think this book was okay but not really a book I would read because it was boring but I can relate because people from my family were immigrants from Jamaica.

[Rishi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stream of consciousness sections really lost me. But what a life. I wish all poets would write memoirs.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Li-Young Lee is an acclaimed poet and although this is a prose memoir the language is poetic, beautifully weaving his memories back and forth in time. He builds a picture of his family, its history, its present and the fraught struggles that took them from their origins in China to their final home in Pennsylvania.
The central character is his father, known as Ba, who fled unrest in China to Indonesia. He was a popular Christian priest but was imprisoned for alleged crimes against the state by the Suharto. The entire family was going to be put in a prison camp but escaped and found shelter ultimately in Hong Kong where he became a well-regarded evangelical preacher. Once again, he and the family had to flee, ultimately gaining asylum in the USA when Lee was just six.
Lee weaves together not only his own memories of his father but those of his older siblings, mother and grandparents. He moves back in time. One memory evokes another as it does for all of us.
The image of seeds pervades the memoir. He remembers that his father always carried seeds in his right-hand suit pocket. When asked why he did so his response was one word `remembrance.’ At one time he refers to Lee as his seed. At other times he talks of seeds as symbolizing the future, giving Lee a sense of what seeds meant to his father, but no exact, definitive definition.
This is a book you have to immerse yourself in. Let Lee’s memories with their texture and depth flow over you and take you into the three-dimensional image of the family that produced this brilliant and insightful poet.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poetic memoir of poet Li-Young Lee's father who was imprisoned in Indonesia and escaped to Hong Kong and then to Pennsylvania to become a Presbyterian minister. Part thriller, part biography, part poem… through it we get to meet a man who is an admired and passionate spiritual leader and a tyrant. Fear and love fuel this tale, but mostly love. More than a tale of than factual accounting, it is more an evocation of associations and mystery, whereby it gains its strength and power. It's a tale of immigration, too, and the alienation that accompanies this process for Lee.

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Equal parts luminous and esoteric. I think what won me over, what kept me in this book until I fell for it, is just how much Lee manages to shift gears throughout these memories/mediations, changing who the you on the other side of the narrative is often, implementing register and tonal shifts deftly. This book is a reckoning with rage. But more, too.

[Mary Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poetic memoir that circles around themes of life and death, emigration and immigration, family and love. Don't expect a straightforward narrative; expect to be taken on a poetic journey into consciousness.

[Stephen Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

What indeed is The Winged Seed, the poet Li-Young Lee's strangely important and nebulous memoir published in 1995? This is an ontological question as much as a phenomenological one.

One is reminded of Lucretius's poem De Rerum Natura, whose existence as literary work and conveyance of the sometime banned ideas of Epicureanism, which gave us the earliest scientific surmise of atoms as constitutive of matter, owed its survival to its intrinsic beauty of form.‎ The Christian Church purged through dogma the philosophy of Epicureanism as it did in rhetoric and polemic Manichaeism in Augustine of Hippo's time, but their essential ideas, the atomism of Democritus and the ‎dualistic cosmology of Mani, survive today. By the same token, this memoir in particular shall survive in some purity of form if not indeed for being an ambiguous and ambivalent story of survival and refuge, and of course of much more besides.

Li-Young Lee's memoir writing is exacting of the reader's solipsism of reading in the reading's enacting the very cracking or attempt at cracking the story's seed as allegory and hard nut. Probably unconsciously taking a page from Portugal's Fernando Pessoa, specifically Pessoa's factless autobiography The Book of Disquiet, the reader will begin to recognize the fragile weft of emotions drawn through the warp of hard facts of this woven recounting and accounting of loss and of even more loss and some gain of perspective that is at once tentative and longing to erase and see again.

‎For this memoir is ab‎out loss and the traces of loss, of family, of home, of sense of self, of possession, of wealth, of health, of freedom, of dignity, of the ability and the willingness to remember. And this is very likely not a unique situation in the Chinese diaspora, not the diaspora of the China of post-Deng Xiaoping, but of the brutal decades and centuries before the 1980s when to be Chinese is to be murdered in Suharto's Indonesia.

I attended on the weekend a symposium of sorts. There, I heard it recounted by Annie Wong her quite moving account of her research into Chinese ancestor worhip and the burning of joss paper, how after all of that, there was for her efforts but silence and nothing she could know from her mother of why things are no longer done in the family. On hearing Annie's talk and what came across as palpable grief, I returned in my recollection to Li-Young Lee's writing where the contention is perhaps very similar but made articulate rather than passed over into silence. But this articulation is not at all straightforward, not even meandering. Rather it is the enigma of silence and of the left unsaid.

In Li-Young Lee's case, it was perhaps not nothing but a totality of an entirety of everything, direct experiences etched and scarred in traumas of childhood and growing up and of obstinacy of spirit and the gentle character of a Bildung that eats itself. This is exemplified in the book where he finally enquires of his mother what's been eating him so many years about the truth of how one of his brothers died‎ and was buried, he and his other siblings absent at the funeral.

This is of course not the first Chinese memoir there is. It could be argued that the Zhou and Shang dynasties, the first to establish rites and ceremonial protocols in court as templates for other courts and succeeding courts to follow and re-enact, were institutionalizing cyclical time. The circle in its perfection nods at eternity, imitates heaven, and purports an axis mundi in the order of heavenly and earthly affairs. While a memoirist in the Western literary genre would not sufficiently have this burden of cyclicality, for anyone of Chinese heritage it is an onus of being, the rites of ancestor worship a necessary telos as well as method of remembrancing sans gimmick of banal formalities such as actual story telling. Contrast this to the anecdotic raconteuring of how a life was lived, in highlight and in zigzag, or to the cumulative folkloric content of didactic and bigging up legends of still relatively oral/aural societies in non-Confucian parts of Asia.

The piety accorded to ancestors and to family especially of a certain Chinese authentic is non-Heideggerian. The anxiety of the dasein is not its futurity reaching back into its present; rather it is the day-to-day inexorably always lived in angst of ancestry of past and of immediate beyond relief or release. Into this mix add "tiger mothering" and the notion in the diaspora of the "model minority" and you soon realize how a strict fastidiousness of name and honour makes progenitors eat their young. And the young know no differently, bumping into a kind of epistemology of false consciousness of surviving piety and despite success.

Li-Young Lee in the end simply writes or writes simply of the unmentionability of a kind of tetragrammaton indulged at puerile play with an unfamiliar language of being within the unbroken vow of silence. Why is this? His YHWH is sintered in this book, the old testament palpability and severity a heavy presence, but here also nudged into a synoptic gospel of benevolence and forgiveness the memoirist works out for himself and perhaps also for us.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times, it's a beautiful work, and his play with genre conventions is nice. When he slips into the modernist ramblings -- the "This Is Me Creating Art" moments -- he loses it a little.

[Samuel Goff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Li-Young Lee's "The Winged Seed : A Remembrance" is a unique take on the form of the memoir. Lee has published a few volumes of poetry and it appears he is a poet at heart so it's no wonder his take on what mostly focuses on his family and childhood growing up in Jakarta is abundant with flowy, pretty language. Lee's writing style is so beautiful you almost forget for a minute that this slim book is not really happy memories but some pretty horrific imagery and history. The book alternates between more straight forward remembrances told in a basic memoir type style and stream of consciousness poetic ramblings. These two differing styles go in and out and you sort of feel you are riding a wave. Or enclosed in some dream like state where you wake up during the more coherent parts. In a way these stream of consciousness ramblings filled with pretty, delicate language could be a defense mechanism employed by the author. Or protection for the reader. Either way as pretty and well written as these sections are this type of style that takes up about half the book sort of makes the reader feel detached from the characters in this horrible history of Lee's. You just don't build up the emotional connection with the people who are in the author's life so you don't feel the pain as bad. It's not as striking. It feels somewhat wrong to levy criticism on a book that is so well written with such beautiful language. But in this type of setting I wish more of the book was told in more of the straight forward style.
This is mostly an account of the authors history with his father. The stark opposing nature of his father's personality. That of a suspected enemy of the state jailed in his home of Jakarta for 19 months for dubious reasons. The dual nature of this personality, he who would beat his children, yet was a beloved and adored preacher not only abroad but also here in Philadelphia where the family after much moving finally settled. It's apparent the author has love for this man though as some scenes later on in the book detail Lee gently bathing his dying father later in life. There is one scene in the book during this bathing scene that Lee pulls off well, where another writer would have exploited this type of history for drama detailing pages. Lee plays it subtle and it's left for the reader to digest.

"I noticed again the bloated feet and the missing toenails. I recalled his telling me when I was a boy how he'd lost his toenails in prison, but that was another story."

Certainly there is a horrific story behind this event. But Lee just leaves this bit of information to the reader to conjure up the imagery for themselves. It's never referred to again. The way he just puts that information out there, dangles it and leaves it, is just sort of brilliant to me.

The book is ripe and full of terrible things. The tales of his well to do but cruel and insane grandfather. The various abuses Lee and his siblings endured. His father's sad end. There is a lot of pain wrapped in these pages. His mother being gone for a good portion of their childhood waiting at the prison all day for their father. None of this is happy. There are small passages of Lee's life now that seem very happy, but these cover just a couple of pages. It's a sad and tragic story. But worth reading.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd been holding onto this for a few years; I would pick it up, consider reading it, but be so blown out of the water by the first few pages that I knew it wasn't the type of easy/just read whenever kind of memoir. The early moments really suggested the type of memoir and poetry both that would be transformative, and live in your belly for weeks.

Sadly, I don't think it lived up to its full promise; I agree with other reviewers here that it eventually feels disjointed, and the stream of consciousness just gets a little too slippery, and takes one too far away from the neatly-knitted scenes of family history. The two forms stop working well together.

A little disappointing, but it doesn't leave me with any less respect for Lee and his larger body of work.

[Joanne J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being a fan of Lee's poetry I thought I'd give his prose a try. He definitely has the heart of a poet and it is reflected in this beautifully written memoir. While a small-in-size book, you can't rush through it as it demands as much of the reader as it did of the poet writing it. Lee mixes straight forward prose with poetic reflections on his childhood, the meaning of a seed, and memories of his mother and father living in Jakarta. I felt like I wanted to immediately reread it when I finished as I'm sure I missed some of his allusions.

[Ann Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm sure this is a great book, but I'm not the reader for it. I wanted more memoir and less dream analysis. I love Lee's poetry, but I was hoping for a more straightforward autobiography. Opened at random to give an example of the language. "On the stairs, even my ear is a corpse, a dead little cartilage, and I have to hear with the close-cut stem, the green-blue nexus, barely ear; for there is the eye about it, therefore call it the seeing stem, but not a thinking reed." I'm just too impatient to get on with the story.

[Saadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was interesting. Stream of consciousness wondering all across the landscape of his memories: growing up as a child of a man arrested for religious proselytizing, running from persecution, ending up in the US as a preacher’s child, all the while weaving the imagery of a seed containing potential for so much more. Awesome imagery. However, it was hard to read and absorb. Very fine command of English.

[Charlotte Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very personal and poetic memoir. There were a lot of places where I had a hard time following, but that's most likely because I'm not exactly the target audience for this and there's just going to be references to things I don't know. It's a very sad story and the first of Lee's books that I've read. I'll have to pick up his poetry books when I'm get the chance.

[Cyber Dot · Rating 5 out of 5]

A difficult book. Can't imagine a single reading will allow you to absorb every page. Lots of stream of consciousness and mystical visions, dreams and pain. The abuse suffered by Li-Young Lee's family members is horrifying. Abuse at the hands of other family members, the state (Sukarno's Indonesia) and opportunistic bystanders.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the author's poetry, but I'm not sure the whole stream of consciousness poetic language works as well in memoir. There were parts that I was completely lost, especially when personal pronouns aren't used.

[Xindi H · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know how to make of this book, but I enjoyed how the language flowed seamlessly from realistic descriptions to surreal poetic imagination. I especially loved the images painted of the old-time Chinese noble family, grim and depressing yet beautifully so in Lee's words.

[Nimitha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Li Young's poems. This reads like prose poetry. It's amazing in some parts and incoherent in others. It's like a string of dreams and nightmares, childhood impressions and unresolved traumas passed down for generations that leaves the reader in a trance somewhere between the realm of sleep and wakefulness.!

[Dekie Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting memoir, ethereal, introspective, with beautiful, poetic (naturally!) language

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This prose in this book just does not work with the story that’s actually being told. The poetry takes away from and abstracts actual, solid events in the book. I couldn’t stand it.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts were sigh swoon worthy

The act of telling as an act of being seen.

And the language is no doubt beautiful.

[Clara WD · Rating 5 out of 5]

need to read again—break my heart bend my mind!!’

[Ella Wilford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Left me speechless in the best possible way. His insights on life are just incredible. I might have a new favorite book.

[Lisa]

much more poetry than i expected in a memoir, don't think i got most of it unfortunately but all i need is this:

O, how may I touch you across this chasm of flown things? What won’t the night overthrow, the wind unwrite? Where is the road when the road is carried? What story do we need to hear, so late in childhood?

[Ambrosia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend handed me this book after reading some of my poetry, saying that mine had reminded her of it. And I'm greatly flattered, because this is a beautiful book; although not technically poetry (in the sense that it's not written in verse), it's infused throughout with a poetic sensibility, that stream-of-consciousness imagery-laden style that so befits its subtitle of "a remembrance". The author presents a number of scenes with heartrending honesty, and although it takes a while, you start to see how they all fit together in his personal history.

For all his forthrightness in relating his childhood trauma, however, the present-time Li-Young Lee remains something of a mystery, only referenced in passing; this is likely intentional, as whether or not there's anything more to him than these experiences is a subject of some debate in the text. Still, I would have liked to see more of how the author sees himself now in relation to the often-alienated child he once was.

And then there were the parts where it outright lost me. A number of transitions especially seemed to be as much about the sounds of the words, their intertwining phonemes, as the associated meanings; these certainly made sense within transcription-of-memory context (I know there have been times when my brain catches up a particular set of sounds and rearranges them what feels endlessly), but ended up feeling a little self-indulgent on the page. I suspect they might have worked better read aloud, or if I was a little more familiar with Chinese; as it was, I mostly skimmed them in between the meatier parts. But I was still fascinated enough to keep reading through to the end, which for an unconventional work like this is possibly some of the highest praise I can bestow.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating memoir of poet Li-Young Lee, tracing his mother's roots as the granddaughter of former Chinese president Yuan Shi-kai, and his father's family's life in Beijing and Tianjin. Lee's parents relocate to Indonesia, where the father a university administrator and pastor. In 1959, the Indonesia government persecutes and kicks out its Chinese population. Li-Young's father had been imprisoned for 18 months, but found a lucky break when the family is sent from Java to Macau and is rescued at sea and taken to Hong Kong. From there the family would end up in the US, finally settling in Chicago after Lee's father completed a seminary degree in Pittsburgh. The book reads more like one of Lee's works of poetry, so it's quite deep.