45 pages • 1 hour read
Kao Kalia YangThe Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Fatherhood and Fatherlessness
Though the text is meant as a memoir, a portrait of Bee Yang as an artist, what emerges is a portrait of Bee as a father. Bee grapples with the importance of fatherhood throughout the text and considers the loss of his father one of the great tragedies of his life, second only to the war that drove him out of his homeland.
For Bee, a father means both protection and love. He recounts, for example, his deep jealousy of the ways his older brothers treated their own children. When he was a young boy, his older brother visited the city and returned with treats for his children. He did not, however, bring any treats for Bee or Bee’s younger brother, Hue. Bee is devastated, not because he necessarily wanted candy, but because he wanted someone to love him enough to want to treat him to something.
In addition to lacking a father’s love, Bee also feels vulnerable without a father. He believes, for example, that his elder brothers are forced into service for the American soldiers because they had no father to argue for them, and he claims that fatherless sons must be constantly careful and wary of danger.
Much of Bee’s sense of loss is intertwined with the war, and his fatherlessness is not only literal but metaphorical; for Bee, Laos is also his father, one that is taken from him by the war. Not only does Laos not protect him, it turns on him, and after the Communists take control, Bee and his family are forced to flee the country.
Bee’s focus on his loss leads him to consider himself an orphan, even though his mother lives until 2003, well after they had all emigrated to the United States. Kalia notes that his father’s declarations that he was an orphan even prior to the death of his mother were “articulated […] so convincingly that [she] had taken for granted the love and work [her] grandma had invested in her children […]” (220).
Bee’s focus on his missing father almost cancels out all the ways in which his mother took on that role, which is perhaps why that Bee gains the ability to create poetry after the death of his father, but loses that ability after the death of his mother.
Survival Versus Living
Survival is one of the main themes of the text, not just what it takes but also what it means to survive. Repeatedly, Bee and his family recount the many things they must do to simply to go on living, and each new step forces them further away from their homes. First, they must move their farmland to the lowlands away from the villages. Then, they must flee into the jungle to avoid reprisals from the Communists. Finally, they are forced to emigrate to America.
Bee also considers survival on an individual level. In the refugee camp, for example, Thai men forced Bee to become a drug runner. He literally has no choice; the soldiers tell him he can do these tasks and get “a cut of the profits” or he can refuse and “they could cut [him] up in front of [his] children” (115). Nonetheless, Bee feels ashamed of this behavior, and he dreads his children knowing what he had to do to stay alive.
Bee is deeply affected by his experiences in the refugee camps, and this blinds him to other possibilities. When Xue is repeatedly punished for fighting, for example, Bee is angry with Xue. He doesn’t understand that they are no longer in the camp, and Xue does not have to do whatever the authorities say just to survive. Indeed, Bee does not realize until almost the end of the story that merely surviving is not living. Once he realizes that all his sacrifices mean nothing if things do not change, he takes on some of Xue’s anger and quits his job, refusing to allow himself to continue to be mistreated.
Identity
Kalia begins the story by declaring that her “father would never describe himself as a poet” and provides a series of descriptors that Bee would use: “a fatherless boy,” “a refugee waiting in the dust,” and “a machinist” (1), as well as a husband and a father. This serves to indicate one of the primary themes of the book: how people decide who they are. It explores what comprises identity.
In Western culture, people most often identify themselves by their primary occupation: sales clerk, student, plumber, teacher. However, Kalia seems to ask, what does that tell us about the person? Indeed, we often associate certain characteristics with certain occupations, and it is through this association that we believe we understand who a person is and what they are like.
Kalia challenges that belief, insisting that the description does not work for her father. She uses language and narrative structure to reinforce this theme. For example, Kalia writes as if she were her father in the first half of the book, using the first person. First-person narrative is intimate and allows the reader to become a part of the narrator’s inner life. Using this narrative means the reader cannot identify Bee as just a son, just a husband, or just a father. The reader cannot pin down Bee’s identity at all. This uncertainty is one of the effects of the narrative and makes the claim that no one can be only one thing or another, that there are aspects of multiple identities in everyone.
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By Kao Kalia Yang
