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.
Tracks 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Side A: “Birth of a Song Poet – Bee Yang”
Track 2 Summary: “A Fatherless Boyhood”
Soon after his father’s death, war comes to the village. At first, the family is still able to work the land and harvest crops, even as their village becomes an American “military-prisoner site” (31), and soldiers force them to work. Two of Bee’s older brothers are forced to carry packs across the mountains for the military, an experience his brothers describe as “the most humiliating experience of their lives” (36).
By the time Bee is five years old, the family is unable to farm near their homes, and they decide to farm in the lowlands, which requires more intense labor than farming in the mountainous surroundings of their village. Bee falls ill with malaria, and he remembers the time as being lost in the dark. He’s unable to rest because of his mother’s incessant cries for him to “return […] to the world of the living” (37). However, as Bee begins to envision “a place of sunlight, sweet-smelling flowers, and the sound of a gurgling mountain stream” (37), his mother’s voice grows dim.
Bee’s mother refuses to give up, and eventually, Bee regains consciousness. Although Bee’s body gets stronger, he is never the same. He can’t remember things well and has trouble focusing.
Bee turns his energies to “observing nature, visiting people’s houses” and “watching people’s stories coming together” (39). Bee tells the story of catching a songbird, something usually only grown men can do. He proudly carries the bird back to the village. When the village bully accosts him and demands the bird, Bee fights him. It’s Bee’s first physical confrontation.
While walking home from school one day, Bee and his friend, who is older at 11, and two girls from the village are caught in a rainstorm. At first, they play in the rain, but something changes, and Bee’s friend tries to touch the girls inappropriately. Bee fights the boy off, and the girls run to safety. The girls’ parents thank Bee and his family, and the boy’s parents apologize, but Bee knows he must be careful around the boy, though Bee acknowledges that he “had been careful all [his] life” that this was “the way fatherless sons protected their way to manhood” (48)
Bee misses his father’s presence in his life, and he takes to listening more than he speaks, “gathering the beauty of flowers that blossomed from people’s lips in the presence of those they loved and adored” as a way of “appeas[ing] the hungry heart inside” of him (50).
When he is 12, Bee begins singing Hmong song poetry for his family and neighbors, and they are moved by his abilities. His songs bring Bee and his community assurance of better times. Despite this success, however, Bee knows that his future will “rest at the point of a gun, not a pen” (55).
Track 3 Summary: “Brothers and Sisters”
Bee has eight siblings, in addition to his cousin, Shong, whom Bee’s parents raised after the death of Shong’s father. Bee and his brothers and sisters consider Shong their oldest brother, and Shong is always grateful to Bee’s parents, not just for taking him in, but for the way they love him, and the way they keep the memory of his father alive.
Bee and his siblings want their children to know about Shong and tell many stories about him. Bee’s story recalls the way that Shong taught him kindness. One day while playing, Bee and Hue push a boulder down the mountain above the village, which crashes through the neighbor’s fence. Their brother Nhia is furious, telling them “he had no time to go to neighboring houses to fix the mistakes of ill-behaved children” (69). He orders them to fix the fence.
Bee and Hue have no idea what they are supposed to do. As they gather the pieces of bamboo broken by the boulder, Shong arrives and fixes the fence for them, telling them gently, “[l]ittle boys cannot do the work of grown men” (70). Shong was always there for Bee and his siblings, reminding the older siblings of what it was like to be a child, and reminding the younger ones of the importance of good behavior.
Shong’s guidance is particularly necessary as the American soldiers set up a prisoner-of-war camp in the village and the dangers of the war loom ever closer. Although Bee’s brothers do not enlist, many of the villagers did, as did young men from the surrounding villages. Many lives are lost. Numerous widows and orphaned children beg for food, “their bare feet bleeding from the flights they’d taken from flaming villages, falling bombs, and buried mine explosions” (72)
Nonetheless, Bee’s family is “one of the lucky ones” (73), as their family remains intact. After the Communists t over, villages that had worked with the Americans are punished: “The Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers entered the small villages and began transporting truckloads of Hmong men and boys” (73). The soldiers claim the men are to be re-educated, but really, they are to be executed. Bee’s brothers decide the family must “flee into the jungle” to avoid a similar fate (74).
In the jungle, Bee meets his future wife. He woos her by telling her a story. Chue is delighted by his story, and eventually, they marry even though their family thinks making this decision in difficult times is foolish. However, after Shong talks to Bee and realizes the depths of his love for Chue, as well as Chue’s wisdom, he “silenced the protests of [the] family,” telling Bee “there is no wrong time for love to flourish” (81)
After their wedding, during an attack on their homes in the jungle, Shong’s young son is hit by a bullet as they are fleeing the soldiers. Although the family wants Shong to keep running, he refuses, telling them his family will stay behind and he’ll catch up later. The soldiers capture Shong and his family. They torture Shong for two weeks while his wife and children watch and listen to his cries of pain. However, Shong refuses to tell them where his brothers had gone. Eventually, the soldiers give up and leave. The villagers help Shong’s wife find food and shelter, but Shong and his son are irrevocably damaged.
Bee and his family, who make it to a refugee camp in Thailand, hear the story from other refugees. They explain Shong’s condition: “Like the country, he is now a collection of open pits, broken trees, and burnt houses” (89)
Bee and his family made tapes to send to Shong, and Shong’s wife replies, but from Shong they hear only “muffled sounds” that contain “no messages of love, no words of understanding” (90). In 1987, Bee and his brothers emigrate to the United States. Although safe from the violence of “America’s Secret War in Laos” (90), they struggle to acclimate to the country and are separated, some settling in Minnesota, some in California. They still receive updates from Shong’s children, who tell them about their mother’s death, and Shong’s continued decline. His only wish is to “see his brothers and sisters again” (91).
Shong dies in 2003, and although Bee and his brothers “waited for dreams of Shong” (92), they never come. All they can do is hope “that on the other side of life there is a place where justice is not delivered in a courtroom but around the hearth of a home” (92).
Tracks 2-3 Analysis
One of the central themes of the text is of the importance of fathers. Bee loses his father when he is very young, and this experience affects his entire life. However, Bee misses his father as a person, as well as the feelings of safety and security that he lost when his father died. For Bee, a father symbolizes protection from the many dangers of the world. In fact, in traditional Hmong culture, the father is responsible for making decisions and caring for the family. Indeed, when the soldiers insist that Bee’s brothers serve as pack mules, they are able to force them into service partly because the family “didn’t have a father to protect [them] and the might of a mere woman in a war was not enough to stop the work of guns” (35). Bee’s lack of a father makes him feel constantly vulnerable and frightened.
In fact, one of the reasons that Bee is so deeply affected by what happened to Shong is that Shong is the closest thing he has to a father. Although his older brothers help care for Bee and his younger siblings, it is not the same. For example, when Bee’s elder brother returns from a trip to Long Cheng, “the provincial headquarters of the war effort” (51), he brings candy for his children, but not for his younger brothers, Bee and Hue. Bee is devastated, not because he wants the candy, but because he wants that kind of love and attention; love and attention his brothers cannot provide because they are caring for their own families.
Shong, on the other hand, does manage to show some of that love and affection to Bee and Hue, as when they break the neighbor’s fence, and he fixes it for them without berating them or punishing them. Indeed, Shong seems to serve as a peacemaker in the family, reminding Bee’s elder brothers and sisters that Bee and Hue are just children, and protecting and teaching Bee and Hue. Even as Bee gets older, Shong continues to serve in that role, quieting the protest of Bee and Chue’s families over their marriage. When Shong is captured and tortured, Bee feels guilty, though he never says this outright. For Bee, Shong was his father, and Bee feels as if they should not have left Shong behind.
Much of Bee’s sorrow and anguish over being fatherless results from what is happening in Laos at the time. Bee’s father died right before war broke out in Laos, although tension in the area had been increasing for many years. However, had there not been a war going on, Bee might not have felt so defenseless and vulnerable. Indeed, the death of Bee’s father and Bee’s increasing sense of terror serves as a metaphor for the Hmong who lacked a powerful leader, or father figure, to protect them from the interests of outsiders like the Americans and the North Vietnamese. Eventually, they are forced to flee their villages, then their homes, and ultimately, their country. Though Bee says his family is lucky their family is intact, once they leave Laos, they are separated, just as Laos itself is divided by war and chaos. Similarly, Shong serves as a metaphor for the fate awaiting the Hmong who did not flee: pain, terror, and madness.
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