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 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Track 6 Summary: “Doctors and Lawyers”
In this chapter, Kalia returns to the first-person; she no longer speaks as her father, Bee. Here, Kalia talks about growing up in the United States as a Hmong child. Her father emphasized the importance of education, especially for Kalia and her older sister, Dawb. He wanted Dawb to be a lawyer, and Kalia to be a doctor.
Kalia and Dawb listen to the stories of their uncles, who tell them about what education meant back in their village. Their Uncle Chue, for example, attended the first school in their village. Already a grown man, Chue began as a kindergarten student, absorbing everything the teacher said. The teacher told them “to memorize the Laotian script, practice writing it, practice reading it, and then to learn how to write numbers and do simple mathematics” (141). Eventually, Chue became a teacher himself, but when the Communists took over in 1975, “[a]ll teachers’ salaries were suspended” and he “lost hold of [his] pens as [he] took up a gun to protect [his] family” (143).
Similarly, their Uncle Hue reveals his encounter with education. Unlike his older brother, he was lucky to go to school as a child. In fact, he was accepted at the “American university in Vientiane, the capital of Laos” through excellent test scores. However, after the Communists took power, he was unable to finish his degree.
Neither Kalia nor Dawb are quite sure what they are meant to make of these stories. Dawb, however, decides both she and Kalia must focus on their education. What no one prepared them for was the way in which education could change them. For example, Dawb and Bee get into an argument when Dawb accuses Bee of being racist after a story about a Hmong woman who is beaten by her white boyfriend prompts Bee to state “that the woman should never have been with the man in the first place. It was dangerous to cross cultures […]” (156).
After she calls him a racist, Bee slaps Dawb, and they do not speak for months. Eventually, however, their relationship heals. Kalia and Dawb learn to suppress what they have learned and hide the “loneliness in [their] educational lives,” which “grew as a normal consequence of [their] dreams and went on beneath the surface of [their] family as [they] journeyed deeper and further into becoming doctors and lawyers” (162).
Track 7 Summary: “The Son Must Rise”
Kalia describes her younger brother, Xue. She begins with an anecdote about another Hmong boy named Xue, described by a Native American man with whom the boy stayed. The man describes Xue as respectful, wise, a boy whose “hold is gentle,” and “whose step is firm; it does not dig into the surface of the earth, it turns the ground firmer” (166). The man laments the fact that American society doesn’t value such men and wonders what “kind of world are we living in when a man’s deeds […] cannot translate into a resume or a job?” (166). Kalia thinks this could be a description of her younger brother.
Kalia is nine years older than Xue and remembers his birth well. Her father is overjoyed to finally have a son, and they have a traditional Hmong ceremony when Xue is a month old, “to call his spirit home” (169). Kalia describes Xue as a child, hunting for grasshoppers with him to feed to his rooster. However, Xue bears the burden of Bee’s hopes and dreams, and he can never measure up to them.
For example, Xue does not do as well in school as his sisters, leading Bee to reprimand him for not living up to his potential. In fact, despite Bee’s dreams for Xue and his desire for a son, Bee is very hard on Xue. When Xue is five, he loses his house key, and Bee asked him how he will protect his sisters now that their house is open to anyone; Xue sits with a bread knife by the door for hours. When the family moves to a new neighborhood, Xue becomes the victim of bullying, and he is frequently suspended for fighting. When Xue drops out of high school, Bee throws him out of the house.
Bee’s decision devastates the family, especially their brother Max, the baby of the family. Max finally calls Xue and asks him to return. At first, he seems happy. Kalia notes that “Xue’s ready laughter reminded [them] of the meals [they] shared long ago when he was just a boy” (200). However, he soon quits his job after the supervisor mistreats an elderly Hmong couple who do not speak English. Kalia recalls the words of the Native American man about the boy named Xue, wondering why no one can recognize her brother’s value, not even his own father.
Tracks 6-7 Analysis
In this section, the author moves from speaking as her father to her own voice. She provides the reader with a different perspective of Bee. By speaking as Bee in the first section, using the first person, Kalia forces the reader to empathize with Bee. We are with him as a boy, and we experience his grief over his father’s death. We are also with him as a young man and feel the love he feels for Chue. Finally, we experience with Bee his anger and disappointment at his life and America and his desire for better things for his children.
Had Kalia presented her memories of her father first, or had she used the third person to present Bee’s stories and memories, the reader would not have felt as close to Bee. By doing so, Kalia complicates the emotions the reader has for Bee after seeing him through his children’s eyes. For example, the reader might condemn Bee’s racism in Track 6, as does Dawb. However, the reader feels as if they know Bee and can see in his response his own past as being persecuted for being Hmong. In this way, the reader seems to have a better understanding of Bee than his own children do.
When Kalia describes the pressure of her father’s expectations for his children, the reader might have been tempted to side with them rather than Bee. However, since the reader knows Bee’s history and the tragedy humiliations he’s suffered to bring his children to the United States, we can understand his hopes for his children, even as we empathize with the ways Kalia and Dawb feel increasingly isolated from their father.
This isolation reflects a typical story of first-generation immigrants: the parents who sacrificed expect great things from their children, but also want them to maintain the traditions and beliefs of their homeland. The children learn the ways their parents’ culture might lack something or have values different than their new culture, such as in Bee’s racist attitudes or the ways in which their parents’ expectations are unreasonable.
For example, when the older relatives tell Kalia and Dawb of the terrible things that happened to them, they do not take from this the lessons that their parents hope they will learn, such as “how lucky [they] were to be starting school as children” (143) or “that college was not something new or impossible for [their] family” (148). Instead, the children are reminded of how hard life can be.
In addition, the children of immigrants also lack the profound humility of their parents and older relatives. Bee and Chue do not make waves or argue with anyone. They are simply grateful to be in the United States. Bee, Dawb, and especially, Xue, on the other hand, recognize the racism in the treatment they receive, and they refuse to just accept it. These differing attitudes are the price the family pays for these new lives.
This generational clash is the focus of Track 7, and the central conflict between Bee and his beloved son, Xue. Although the reader knows how much Bee wanted a son, and how much Bee wanted to be the father he had not had himself, Xue knows none of this. He only knows that he can never never measure up to the fantasy son that Bee envisions. The pressure from his father and the bullying Xue endures changes him, makes him withdraw from the world and from his own family.
Kalia and Dawb try to be a buffer between Xue and Bee. They try to explain to Bee about “institutional racism and discrimination against boys and men of color” (191), but Bee cannot understand Xue’s experiences any more than Xue can understand Bee’s experiences. Kalia here references “the culture of fear and the suicide epidemic” in the Anoka-Hennepin School District (192). A Rolling Stone report in 2012 shed light on the prevalence of bullying in the school district that Xue attended. Though this report mainly focused on the experiences of LGBT students, it also demonstrates the ways bullying in the district, like that experienced by Xue, was ignored.
Kalia also demonstrates the similarities between Xue and his father, despite their different experiences. Bee, for example, refused to allow his friend to harm the two young girls with whom they were walking home from school. Similarly, Xue refuses to allow his white supervisor to abuse the elderly Hmong couple. Bee does whatever he can to survive to protect his family, including running drugs in the refugee camps and taking jobs that put his health at risk. Xue does whatever he can to stand up for himself and others, taking repeated beatings and punishments. Neither Bee nor Xue realize how similar they are. Kalia, however, recognizes their similarities and the deep love they have for each other—a love that both are too proud to speak.
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