The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“In the warmth of spring, the wind transforms the empty parking lot by the corner Laundromat into a field of fallen petals as crab apple trees release their blooms and the hard pavement feels the soft brush of tender, ephemeral beauty. Wet rain falls into shattered concrete and the pools of black water lie still for the pink and white and red petals to swim in. The wind carries the voices of laughing children into our house as we watch the petals sway to and fro in the dark puddles across our street.” 

Kalia uses this kind of descriptive and imagery throughout the text, demonstrating constantly that her father is a poet, but also demonstrating her own poetic prowess and facility with language. Here, she creates an image of a sleepy, warm spring day.

“The words had nothing and everything to do with my being in the big arena. There was no room for refusal, for thoughts or ideas, it was all just a moment felt, emotions bubbling forth from losses the Hmong had endured. In his song, I was no longer young. I was one with a people who had lived for a long time, traveled across many lands, a people clinging to each other for a reminder, a promise, of home, that place deep inside and far beyond where the Hmong people had hidden our hearts so that we could heal. There was nothing to be embarrassed about.” 

Here, Kalia describes her reaction the first time she heard her father perform his song-poetry. Her father’s poetry doesn’t just bring her closer to her father, but closer to her heritage as a Hmong. It provides her a better understanding of the losses they have suffered, as well as their strength and courageousness in the face of their suffering.

“She started threatening my spirit if I left. She said she was going to find me, in whatever incarnation, and teach me the wrath of a mother denied her child. At another point, she started begging for my return, promising me a chicken and an egg, a spirit-calling ceremony. All I wanted to do was wrestle myself from the darkness and enter the bright world of imagination, lose the feeling that I was in a world all by myself. But that was impossible with my mother’s voice in my head, crying and calling, again and again, for my return to her.” 

“We boys took off our flip-flops and held them in our hands so we could feel our feet meet the thick mud. We watched as the imprints of small toes penetrated the once hard earth, felt the sagging give of smooth mud. We twisted our ankles first right then left to carefully pull our feet from the clinging kiss of the soaking soil. We marveled as the imprints of our feet filled with rainwater and puddles formed inside our steps.” 

Bee describes an incident from his childhood, walking home in the rain after school. Bee’s language highlights his innocence, enjoying the childish sensations of splashing in the rain and mud. This innocence is corrupted by the older boy with Bee, who uses this opportunity to try to harm the two young girls they are with. This story functions as a parable, with Bee and the young girls representing the Hmong: innocent people who want only to live their normal lives, who are corrupted and forced into violence by forces that come from without and from within.

“But it was not until I was a grown man with children of my own that I could speak of my endless yearning for a father. Day by day, I stored my loneliness and the constant missing deep inside of me. To appease the hungry heart inside, I started gathering the beauty of flowers that blossomed from people’s lips in the presence of those they loved and adored. I used to run away to repeat the words to myself whenever the yearning grew unbearable.” 

Bee’s lack of a father is a central theme throughout the text. Here, he describes the intense loneliness and vulnerability he felt growing up without a father, but also demonstrates how he transformed those emotions into beautiful poetry.

“The day my older brother told me to run.

In my flight away from our home, I heard the shotguns blast.

In my dreams, people found my brother, and they took him to the

           hospital in Sam Neua.

In my dreams, the wild dogs entered our house, and feasted on my

           brother’s fallen body.

I am sorry, dear heart, that I wish to begin again,

My tender, my wounded heart,

Begin again before the mountains and the water, before the sorrows,

 when I knew joy at my brother’s side.” 

“Under Shong’s watch and protection, my brothers and sisters and I grew up with a margin for error in a dangerous world full of death and destruction, a world rifled by war.” 

Shong becomes a father figure for Bee and his siblings, and his presence provides them comfort in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable. However, Bee loses this presence as well, and feels deeply guilty at never being able to repay Shong for his love and kindness,

“I have never thought of marriage before I met this woman; if I die tomorrow I will die happier because I lived with her today; I am intrigued by her approach to the dangers of the world we live in, a reference to the fact that Chue did not run from the bombs that rained on us. She believed you couldn’t run from death or through life.” 

Bee describes his love for Chue, as well as what attracted him to Chue, namely, her fearlessness and courageousness. These qualities continue to be apparent in this track, when Bee acknowledges how Chue spurred him to do the right thing and provide for his family, even when he thought that was impossible.

“I loved you late at night when the sound of the crickets grew fierce and unafraid, and we could hear the scurrying of mice along the floor, but your head was on my shoulder, your hand was on my heart, and the smell of your green Parrot soap wafted up to my nose and invited me to play in a garden of fresh flowers lush with rain, to swim in streams warmed by the day’s hot sun.” 

This quotation comes from the Track in which Bee declares his love for his wife, Chue, repeatedly. Each paragraph begins with “I love you” and functions as a poem on its own. The passage provides another example of the way Bee, through Kalia, uses the conventions of poetry in this memoir. The use of metaphor here conveys Bee’s passion for Chue, and how that love and passion transforms the hard realities of their existence to one of beauty and joy.

“Each woman held a needle between her thumb and a forefinger and she picked at the white fabric strewn across her lap with her needle and her thread, telling the stories of her people, drawing the animals of her past, envisioning the way life could be again – if we could return the bullets to the guns, suck out the craters from the earth, stop the bombs from falling in the sky and the planes from flying overhead, and if we could stop time and tragedy from happening to the Hmong.” 

Bee describes how the Hmong women in the refugee camp occupy themselves while they are there, and how their sewing tells the story of their people. Bee also indicates his own sense of hopelessness and helplessness, indicating that they will never be able to return to their former lives, just as one cannot “return the bullets to the guns.” The contrast between the beautiful embroidery and the imagery of war reflects the ways violence has affected the Hmong.

“I knew that what I did was the work of staying alive but I could not control its power to take from me my ease in the world, my belief in a man and his choices—the place in my heart where innocence hid.” 

“In America, my voice is only powerful within our home. The moment I exit our front door and enter the paved streets, my deep voice loses its volume and its strength. When I speak English, I become like a leaf in the wind. I cannot control the direction my words will fly in the ear of the other person.” 

Bee describes how immigrating to America has affected him. His lack of facility with English makes him feel small and powerless. Indeed, he realizes that the only power he has is in his own home with his own family. However, even there, his power lessens, as he and his family adjust to the many changes they will undergo now that they live in the United States.

“We reminisce about the past, nostalgically recalling the lives we lived in Laos. Many of us carry memories of fleeing from our homes, dodging bullets and bombs, and growing hungry and thin in the jungles. Sometimes, when things aren’t going well at home, we counsel each other on the best options for going forward. Many of the men come to me for my advice. I love many of the men I work with; they make the hours beneath the bright lights of the factory and the fall of carbide particles bearable.” 

Bee explains how his job, which he hates and is dangerous, nonetheless provides him with a much-needed support system. He is able to be around other men who have similar experiences and who have suffered similar losses. Bee and his friends counsel and support one another, and eventually, they demonstrate this solidarity by quitting en masse—a protest of the poor working conditions they have endured.

“He showed us that he cared through his stories. He fortified our hearts with words. When we were young, they were enough to distract us, to compel our questions and interest, and to spark our imaginations and fire our hearts, but we outgrew most of the characters he created, the narratives he wove, by the time we were in junior high school.” 

Kalia explains how her relationship with her father and her culture changed as she and her siblings aged. Though she realizes as an adult how magical her father’s language was, neither she nor her brothers and sisters appreciate it when they are children. They outgrow her father’s stories, which is a normal part of growing up, but one complicated by their status as immigrants. Kalia and her siblings have a much different cultural experience than Bee, and this changes their relationships with each other.

“No one had told us that education could change the way you felt about the world and the people in it, that it could give you words to use, and actions to take, not in support of those who love you but as a response to them, that education in America would make our father and mother less educated in our eyes.” 

One common problem that immigrant families of all cultures face is the ways in which their children, raised in a new culture and learning new things, often rebel or speak out against their family’s cultural practices. Here, Kalia speaks specifically about how Dawb accuses her father of racism, but it applies to other things as well, such as Xue’s refusal to accept bullying.

“Different animals from different calendar months stared down at us from the walls. Our mother had cut out the pictures from the free calendars we got from our car insurance agent. She said the pictures were art; we didn’t need expensive paintings to see that the world was full of beauty, just reminders of all the creatures who occupied it with us.” 

Chue has decorated their home with pictures from a calendar. This is one of the few places in the text where readers get glimpses of Chue, whose character is usually only understood in relationship to Bee. Here, however, Kalia shows the reader her mother’s contribution to their childhood, how it was not just her father who tried to transform their lives into something beautiful.

“Our father wanted to give Xue all the things he had missed in the high mountains of Laos: a father’s continual presence, his guidance, and his love. He believed that he would have turned out a different man, a less lonely man, a better man, if our grandfather had been around. Xue was our father’s chance to find out if this lifelong belief was true; Xue, who had already shown his resilience in making the successful journey into our lives when six others hadn’t made it.” 

Bee’s desire for a son is clear throughout the text, however, like many parents, he places his own desires and fears onto his son. The weight of Bee’s expectation of Xue are oppressive and impossible; no one could live up to them, especially in the conditions which Xue faces.

“My grandma had said that there were people who had loved her before us. She reminded us that she had a mother and a father, brothers and sisters, even a husband, my grandfather, waiting for her in the land of the ancestors. Grandma said that her leaving us would be a return to them.” 

Though this might sound odd, this is Bee’s mother’s way of trying to reassure her children and grandchildren during her final illness. She reminds them that she will not be alone, and that she is not afraid of death. This showcases Hmong cultural beliefs about the afterlife.

“My grandma had survived the war in Laos, the years of waiting in Thailand, and the poverty and racism of America; she had lived to be an old woman who died of natural causes. She became in this simple way my first American hero, a survivor and a keeper of stories.” 

Here, Kalia pays tribute to her grandmother, a true survivor who did what she needed to do to keep her family safe. Kalia refers to her as a hero, and in many ways, she is an unsung hero. Bee spends so much time mourning his father’s death that he becomes almost blind to the ways his mother filled that empty place for him and her other children.

“Slowly, our father started searching the world around him in ways we had never seen, trying to trace the song of the birds, the call of neighborhood children. He turned in circles, trying to locate the sound’s whereabouts in a surprised, scared manner. It gave him an old man’s startled appearance.” 

“I wondered if Chue was thinking about our run through the jungle those many years ago, when the threat of death pushed us forward, when we were too eager and too young to see the eventuality of aging, before we started to understand what time could do to our bodies and our bond, long before we realized that we were moving toward death, each and every day we had together.” 

“We had not run through wars, waited in captivity, only to come to this country to work in such factories and have men like him yell at us and mistreat us year in and year out because we had not been thinking about our children. We had taught them we could survive, we had taught them how to work hard; we thought we were teaching them the important lessons. Had we forgotten in our exhaustion to teach them what we were worth? What they were worth? We would bow no longer, bend our heads no more. We were thinking about our children. We were thinking about how we, their fathers and brothers, had to teach them that they were worth fighting for.” 

Here, Bee finally stands up for himself. He realizes it is not enough just to survive, and he must also insist on being treated with the dignity to which all human beings are entitled. He fully understands, for perhaps the first time, Xue’s behavior and his inability to simply accept mistreatment.

“I asked my father how he became a song poet. He told me that my grandmother was busy with many mouths to feed. When he was young, he used to go from the house of one neighbor to the next, collecting the beautiful things they had to say to each other. Alone, he whispered the words to himself for comfort. One day, the words escaped on a sigh and a song was born. I told him that this could be the beginning of a book.”