The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

This section concentrates on the death of Kalia’s grandmother, Bee’s mother, and the lasting effects it has on him. Kalia notes that her father had long considered himself an orphan because his father died when Bee was young. However, after his mother’s death, Bee felt “for the first time, the reality of being an orphan.” Indeed, Bee has claimed this status for so long and, as Kalia notes, “at times so convincingly that [she] had taken for granted the love and the work [her] grandma had invested in her children” (220). This loss affects the whole family: Bee and his siblings seem to age overnight.

One thing Kalia’s words bring to the surface here is the ways Bee has often ignored or taken his mother for granted. He was so focused on what it meant to be fatherless that he often forgot that he was not really an orphan but had a mother so strong and fearless that she kept her family together despite all odds. When she dies, Bee loses his poetry. In this way, Kalia draws a parallel between Bee’s loss of his father and his loss of his mother.

Bee’s understanding of what it meant to be fatherless coalesces after he fights the friend who tries to harm the young girls they are walking home with. Although the boy’s parents have apologized, Bee knows that he must be careful, as the boy might seek revenge. This carefulness, Bee thinks, “was the way fatherless sons protected their way to manhood” (48). However, it is this very carefulness that also leads to Bee becoming a song-poet, for after this, he began listening to everything, “gathering the beauty of flowers that blossomed from people’s lips in the presence of those they loved and adored” (50). These words would form the basis of his poetry. Thus, Bee’s fatherless state brings him poetry.

Bee loses his poetry at the death of his mother. Although he still gathers words, “all the beautiful words that he had borrowed from neighbors and friends to comfort his heart disappeared […]” (220). His mother’s death silences Bee in a way that did not happen when he lost his father.

Kalia frames Bee’s mourning as a kind of depression, noting that Bee’s behavior changed in other ways as well. For example, “after Grandma’s death, [Bee] drove in circles on his way to and from work. He said he passed the right exits on the highway but took the ramps to the wrong exits” (223). He also misread traffic signals and “stopped at the sides of the roads” (223). However, Bee’s children didn’t realize how much his mother’s death affected him at first. They “were busy dealing with our own grief, and then we were busy growing up and getting older” (223). It is not until Kalia realizes that her youngest brother, Max, born after their grandmother’s death, does not know Bee as a poet that Kalia understands how long her father has been silent.

This silence intensifies when Bee loses his hearing in his left ear completely. In fact, not only can Bee no longer sing, he has trouble hearing and speaking his native language, one “dictated by tones” (235) In Hmong, a word’s meaning depends on the tone used to say it. Bee can no longer distinguish such tones well, and like many who lose their hearing as they age, the effect is isolating.

Kalia, in particular, is affected by her father’s hearing loss. As she drives him home from the ear specialist, Kalia wants to tell her father that she wishes he would sing anyway, that she will know what he means, but she is afraid she’ll draw attention to her father’s loss, she “yearned for something that couldn’t happen, was wishing for an impossible return to the man who had taught [her] to love words and value them” (236). However, Bee reminds her that they have heard the world differently for a long time, pointing once again to that theme of cultural separation that marks this half of the text.

Despite the tone of sadness and loss that permeates this section, however, Kalia sees that the loss of Bee’s poetry and his hearing does not mean an end to who Bee is as an individual. Though Bee no longer weaves words together as a song poet, he still uses them to amaze and communicate with his children, especially Max.

Bee’s mother had told him prior to her death, that when she died, Bee “should go on his knees and ask her for what he wanted most” (218). Nine months later, Max was born. Max adores his father, and Bee is able to be a better father to Max than he was to Xue. Bee spends a great deal of time telling Max “pieces of [their] history through stories” (224). Kalia ends this section with Max opening the door after she and Bee return from the ear specialist and telling Bee, “I waited all day for you to come home so you can tell me a story, Daddy” (237). By ending this section with these words, Kalia offers the reader hope and optimism, seeming to imply that, though Bee’s hearing might be damaged and his poetry might have disappeared, he can still pass on his stories.