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    A Study Guide for Li-Young Lee's "A Story"
    A Study Guide for Li-Young Lee's "A Story"
    A Study Guide for Li-Young Lee's "A Story"
    Ebook39 pages28 minutes

    A Study Guide for Li-Young Lee's "A Story"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Li-Young Lee's "A Story," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535817271
    A Study Guide for Li-Young Lee's "A Story"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Li-Young Lee's "A Story" - Gale

      14

      A Story

      Li-Young Lee

      1990

      Introduction

      A Story, by Li-Young Lee, is a poem of twenty-three lines depicting a man who must confront his own bafflement when he is unable to think up a story to tell his young son. The poem suggests itself as highly autobiographical in nature, as do nearly all Lee's poems, but the reader will be hard-pressed to determine whether the poet should be identified with the father or with the son. Lee's poems on his experiences with, impressions of, and feelings for his father represent a major portion of his body of work, especially within his first and second collections. This is readily understood in light of his father's outsized role in his biography: Lee was born in Indonesia to Chinese parents who had been pushed into a kind of exile because of their controversial marriage. Over several years, the father led the family through a series of locales in East Asia, at last entering the United States when Lee was six. His father eventually became a Presbyterian minister in a small town in Pennsylvania, attaining a godlike status in the eyes of his son.

      Given the difficulty Lee has had conceiving of a homeland for himself—he never lived in the China beloved by his parents and grandparents, and Indonesia, his country of birth, was never a true home for the family—it is perhaps unsurprising that he is disinclined to classify himself according to his heritage. Though many of his poems draw extensively upon his identity as Chinese American, he tends toward lyrical, universalized meditations treating themes of love, family, and home not for any one ethnicity but for all humanity. A Story is just such a broadly realized poem. It was published first in the American Voice and then in Lee's second collection, The City in Which I Love You (1990). The poem can also be found in the section on Lee in Bill Moyers's collection The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (1995) and in The American Voice: Anthology of Poetry (1998).

      Author Biography

      Li-Young Lee was born on August 19, 1957, in Jakarta, Indonesia. Lee's mother's grandfather was China's first republican president, holding office from 1912 to 1916. Lee's father was a personal physician to China's Communist leader Mao Zedong, who took power after the revolution in 1949. Despite this connection to the

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