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 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Side A: “Birth of a Song Poet – Bee Yang”
Track 4 Summary: “Love Song”
In this track, Bee speaks of his love for his wife, Chue. He admits that he sang “love songs before [he] learned how to love” and this section serves as a record of his love for Chue, “the moments in which love bloomed in [his] heart” (94). Bee’s recollection of such moments outlines their history together.
Six months after their marriage, the soldiers hunting them separate them. Chue is pregnant, and Hmong communists capture she and the other women. However, Bee and Chue reunite cross into Thailand together with their first child, Dawb. Bee, Chue, and the rest of the family find shelter in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, where their second daughter, Kalia, is born. While in Thailand, Chue has a series of miscarriages, and Chue insists they must go to America. America will provide “a chance to educate and raise [their] children so they might one day find good work” (102).
After they emigrate, Bee describes the hard work and poverty they endure in the United States and the ways that hard work and poverty first separated them, then draw them closer together. They finally have a son, and Bee worries that he will not be a good father. Through all of this, Bee repeats his love for Chue.
In 2003, after the death of his mother, Bee loses his poetry, his songs. He fears that he has ruined Chue’s life, worrying “that [he] had left [her] alone for stretches of the fight, that [she] alone had been the engine for the journeys of [the] family ship, as [his] mother had been in a life without a husband to help” (109). However, nine months after his mother’s death, Chue gives birth to another son, Max, “a little boy [who] traveled into [their] life on the wings of [Bee’s] mother’s death” (110). It is only then that Bee realizes that he he’s never written a love song for Chue.
Track 5 Summary: “Cry of Machines”
This track begins with what seems like a fable, describing the lives of the Hmong who fled to the refugee camps in Thailand. It is a hard life, an animal’s life, and the narrator says the Hmong men were no longer men, but “tethered like oxen” (111) forced to watch their children and wives struggle.
In the camps, Hmong, who don’t speak English, have few jobs. Nevertheless, he and Chue take advantage of every opportunity offered, taking language classes and various job training courses. Many of the women spend their free time sewing and taking care of the children. Thai men with guns use the male refugees, Bee included, as drug runners.
When the Thai soldiers first ask Bee to transport illicit goods to various people in the camps, they assure him that they will “give [him] a cut of the profits.” If he refuses, they will “cut [him] up in front of [his] children” (115). After the soldiers leave, the children seem fine, but Bee feels “as if a bomb had just exploded and [he] was at its center” (115). He worries they are traumatized.
Bee, of course, has no choice. Hmong men in the camp are routinely killed for the smallest of slights, like hunting for mushrooms off the camp. Chue sits up waiting on the nights that Bee works for the soldiers, and Bee worries each time that he will not return home. He feels deeply ashamed of his behavior.
Once they emigrate, and Bee no longer must do illegal and immoral work, he feels just as powerless. In America, no one listens to him, his “voice is only powerful within our home” (118). He talks mainly to his children, reminding them of his hopes for them; that they will do good things and that one of them will “become an international human rights lawyer and bring justice to stories and lives like [theirs]” (119).
Bee is almost as ashamed of his work in America as he was in Thailand; he’s ashamed it will reveal that he is weaker “in America before the men in suits” than he was against guns in Thailand (119). Bee tries very hard to keep his work separate from his children.
The only bright spot of Bee’s job is the friends he has there, other Hmong refugees. During their lunch breaks, they provide support for one another, talking, laughing, reminiscing, and discussing world politics. Bee and his friends also pool their resources to buy lottery tickets, hoping to change their lives once and for all.
Tracks 4-5 Analysis
This section reveals Bee’s deepest emotions: his shame over the work he has done to survive and his love for his wife, Chue. In fact, almost every paragraph of Track 4 begins with the phrase “I loved you” followed by a brief moment or two of their lives together. In this way, Bee tells the story of their marriage, the good times alongside the bad, though never did his love for Chue falter. He documents the ways his love for her grew and changed, but never stopped or disappeared.
Bee clearly sees Chue as his soul mate, his other self, evidenced by the language he uses to describe Chue:
When we were young, it was the narrowness of your waist, the rise of your breast, the smooth strands of your long, black hair, the clean curve of your cheek, the gentle turn of your head, the feel of your small, soft hand in my own that pulled me, one day at a time, toward the possibility of us (94).
Bee’s language here is sensual but not sexual, documenting the love he feels for her romantically and intellectually.
As the Track continues, Bee uses language that indicates they have become one. For instance, when Bee describes the first time Chue miscarries, he refers to it as “your miscarriage” (97). However, later in this section, he refers to these losses as “our miscarriage” (99). For Bee, Chue’s losses and gains are his losses and gains as well; they are a unit, inseparable.
There is a shift in tone toward the end of this Track. Bee seems to think, after his mother’s death in 2003, that he has ruined Chue’s life, having taken her away from her family so that she didn’t see her own mother die. The end of this track almost sounds like a goodbye with Bee giving Chue permission to leave him. This thought is undermined by the birth of their son nine months after his mother’s death. It’s a birth that renews their love and helps to heal Bee, who had begun “to feel [he] had failed” at fatherhood (110).
Fatherhood is partly the subject of the next track, since, for Bee, who he is as a man is tightly entwined with who he is as a father. Bee is deeply ashamed of what he has done to survive. In the refugee camps, for example, Bee was essentially a drug mule, forced to deliver drugs from the Thai soldiers who ran the camps. This experience forces Bee into doing something he sees as immoral, but it also causes him to question his beliefs about life, his “belief in a man and his choices” (117).
Bee seems to think that a man is defined by the choices he makes. He fails to realize that he had no choice at all. If he had refused to do what the soldiers wanted, they would have killed him, leaving Chue and his daughters with no protection. Bee fails to see that his choice was to protect his family, not a choice to participate in an unethical activity. Bee thus feels deeply ashamed of the choices he has made, and he worries that his children will see him as a hypocrite.
This shame follows him to the United States, where he has worked in several factories. Although none of these jobs required criminal activity, they nonetheless made Bee feel ashamed. Part of this is the attitude he faced from supervisors, who seemed to reprimand Bee for not working hard enough. However, even more alarming are the health effects he suffers from working these jobs.
His most recent job involved working with carbide particles, which can result in hard-metal lung disease if the workers are not adequately protected. Bee developed a cough from inhaling these particles, and his supervisor refused to rectify the situation until his daughter wrote a letter to human resources, after which the company brought in a fan to help prevent Bee from breathing in the particles. When Kalia tries to tell Bee about the dangers of the work he does, noting “the increased rates of lung cancer for workers around the world who worked in the metal industry” (125), Bee tells her “[e]nough” (125). Bee recognizes what his daughter does not: he has no choice, just as he had no choice in the camp.
This section introduces two new and connected elements, namely, the cultural differences between Bee and Chue, raised in the traditional Hmong way in Laos, and their children, who are raised in the United States, and the exploitation of immigrant labor in the United States. Bee’s daughter cannot understand why her father won’t stand up for himself, won’t demand the safety precautions he needs. Kalia’s attitude evidences her upbringing and education in the United States, which emphasizes American values of independence and free speech.
Bee, however, recognizes his precarious position. His supervisor could easily fire him for making waves, meaning he will be unable to support the family. Kalia believes he is being taken advantage of and wants to fight, but Bee believes that “[s]ome jobs kill you with a single carefully weighted bullet, while others kill you slowly by floating the pieces and particles of metal over time” (124).
Kalia also fails to realize that Bee’s job also provides him with a support network. One of the things Bee seems to hate most about living in the United States is the way it has divided him from his community. At the factory, Bee has Hmong friends. They enjoy their lunches together, “the moment in [their] works shifts when [they] get to bring pieces of our homes to work” (122). Bee values his time with these men, which seems to remind him of life before the war.
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By Kao Kalia Yang
