Winged Seed

A personal account by the celebrated Chinese-American poet offers a magical work of memory and myth that recounts a childhood of exile, his father's imprisonment, his discovery of the significance of history, and his search for identity. 25,000 first printing. Tour.

In this lyrical memoir, Chinese-American poet Li-Young (Rose: The City in Which I Love You) recalls scenes of his childhood and youth in a kaleidoscope of dreams and nightmares with a factual recitation of events. He moves back and forth among prerevolutionary China, when his forbears were rich and privileged; the China of Mao Zedong, when his father was Mao's physician; Indonesia, where he and his family fled in the early 1950s after the father's release from the leper colony where he had been imprisoned for suspected disloyalty; and thence to Hong Kong and the U.S., where his father became a Presbyterian minister. Through the illogic and distortion of his dreams, Li-Young leads readers into the emotional landscape of his childhood, while objective events become clear in the narrative. In this evocative tale, politics plays a lesser role than family history and love in a world that was sad, frightening and hard for a child to understand. For the reader, however, Li-Young's portraits of the times are vividly illuminating.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An autobiography at once intimate and sweeping, this work traces the path followed by poet Lee (Rose, BOA Editions, dist. by Consortium, 1986, and The City in Which I Love You, BOA Editions, dist. by Consortium, 1990) and his family. Born into a prominent Chinese family in residence in Jakarta, Lee was shaped by his scholarly father's imprisonment under the virulently anti-Chinese Sukarno; the family odyssey began when they escaped from Indonesia. His father eventually became a preacher in Hong Kong, with his final calling in a church in rust-belt Pennsylvania. Lee interweaves remembrances of incidents from his childhood with dreams, myths, his father's sermons (dimly remembered), and mundane recollections, such as the seeds in his father's coat pocket or the coconut oil in his Indonesian nanny's hair. To the son, the powerful father figure embodied cruelty, Christian kindness, inspiration, deprivation, devotion, and penetrating insight. In this lyrical yet stark rendering of a family of modern China, we see the inner development of the author from his childhood in the 1950s to the present and his adaptation to new world and new perceptions of reality. For general collections.?D.E. Perushek, Univ. of Tennessee Libs., Knoxville
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.