Bill Moyers
From The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets by Bill Moyers, copyright © 1995 by Public Affairs Television, Inc. And David Grubin Productions, Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Lee appeared in the Moyers PBS series The Power of the Word in 1988.
Moyers: How do you answer when people ask, “Where are you from?”
Lee: I say Chicago, then I tell them I was born in Indonesia, but I’m adamant about insisting that, although I was born in Indonesia, I’m Chinese. I don’t want them to think that I’m Indonesian—my people were persecuted by the Indonesians.
Moyers: Your great-grandfather was the first president of the People’s Republic of China.
Lee: Yes. He’s my mother’s grandfather and, of course, my mother’s family—the House of Yuan—fell into demise during Mao’s cultural revolution. Because my mother came from royalty and my father’s father was a gangster and an entrepreneur, my parents’ marriage was very frowned upon in China. When they got married they started traveling, and they finally fled to Indonesia, where my father had taught medicine and philosophy at Gamaliel University in Jakarta. Later on he was incarcerated by Sukarno because of his Western leanings. My father loved Western theology and Western literature. He was teaching the King James Bible there as literature, and when interest in Western culture fell out of favor he was locked up.
I was born in 1957, and he was locked up in 1958 and kept in prison for nineteen months. When he escaped we fled Indonesia and traveled throughout Indochina and Southeast Asia for several years before winding up in Hong Kong, where he became an evangelist minister and head of a hugely successful, million dollar business. But he was driven almost solely by emotion and at one point got into an argument with somebody and simply left Hong Kong. We just left it all and came to America.
Moyers: And what did he do then?
Lee: He took whatever money he had in his bank account, a couple thousand dollars, and my mother sold the jewelry off her body to get us through the first few years. We went from Seattle, where he was a greeter at the China exhibit at the Seattle World’s Fair, to Pittsburgh, where he studied theology at the seminary there. He got his degree and became a Presbyterian minister at a very small church in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania.
Moyers: What a story! From that rich, complex Oriental culture to a small American town.
Lee: Yes. I always thought there was something tragic about it, but he loved it. He loved the church and he loved the town we lived in. He loved being a pastor.
Moyers: Why did the story of his life strike you as tragic?
Lee: He was a man of huge intellectual and artistic talents. He was reading and translating the Bible and Kierkegaard, and he loved Shakespeare and opera. Then he came to a basically working-class town where, although there were many beautiful and wonderful people, I think his intellectual life almost stopped, or it wasn’t fed. But he seemed not to mind—he told me when he was very ill that he was tired of running around so much and that’s why he loved being there.
Moyers: Your journey—China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Macao, Japan, Seattle, Pittsburgh—is a story of the twentieth century, the century of refugees.
Lee: In a way, I feel as if our experience may be no more than an outward manifestation of a homelessness that people in general feel. It seems to me that anybody who thinks about our position in the universe cannot help but feel a little disconnected and homeless, so I don’t think we’re special. We refugees might simply express outwardly what all people feel inwardly.
Moyers: Do you feel yourself an exile?
Lee: In my most pessimistic moods I feel that I’m disconnected and that I’m going to be disconnected forever, that I’ll never have any place that I can call home. For example, I find it strange that when I go to visit my father’s grave I look down and there on his stone is the Chinese character for his name and, when I look up, there are all these American flags on the other graves. So I feel a little strange, but I don’t know what it is. I don’t feel nostalgic because I don’t know what to feel nostalgic for. It’s simply a feeling of disconnection and dislocation.
Moyers: What is there about exodus and exile that gives some poets a special power?
Lee: I don’t know. Exile seems both a blessing and a curse. A lot of my friends who are writers have said to me, “You’re so lucky to have this background to write from,” and I guess in a way I am lucky, but I wouldn’t wish that experience on anybody. The literature I love most is the literature of ruins and the experience of exodus. I don’t know why but, for example, the Book of Exodus is very important to me—the wandering of the children of Israel has profound resonance for me. I don’t feel as if those stories are about a primitive tribe in some distant desert. That struggle for belief and faith in the face of humiliation, annihilation, apostasy—all that seems to me really what I go through and what we all go through, finally.
Moyers: How did you become a poet?
Lee: In my household my father read to us constantly from the King James Bible, and because he had a classical Chinese education, which meant he had memorized three hundred poems from the T’ang Dynasty, he would recite those poems to us as well and we would recite them back to him. My memory was so bad I could never do very well, but I did learn to love poetry.
When I heard him read from the pulpit from Psalms and Proverbs, I would think, My God, that’s incredible! What power! then I would hear people in the congregation. I don’t know if other faiths do this, but Presbyterians have a responsive reading where the minister reads a passage and the congregation responds by reading another passage—steelworkers, schoolteachers, all of us together saying, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.” That seemed magical to me and entirely beautiful, but I never thought I could write it.
I thought poetry was some high and mighty thing of the angels and of the ancient dead in China. Later on, when I met Gerald Stern at the University of Pittsburgh, I read his poetry, and I suddenly realized that poetry could be written by living human beings. Then he became my teacher and I tried doing it myself.
Moyers: Both of you write about exodus and ruins.
Lee: Yes. When I first opened his book Lucky Life, I expected small anecdotal poems—that’s what we were taught to expect in modern poetry—but I suddenly thought I was reading something out of the Psalms or Lamentations. I walked around with Lucky Life in my pocket for two years—that book was just in tatters.
Moyers: Well, the fact is that you were the son of a New Testament preacher and you were tutored by an Old Testament prophet—Gerald Stern is a prophet in shirt sleeves—so it’s no surprise that I hear so much of the Bible in your poems.
Lee: Oh, I love the Bible. I adore it. I love it as literature—the stories, the drama, the largeness, the characters—and I love the wisdom in it.
Moyers: So many of your early poems in particular deal with your father.
Lee: He was for me a huge character. He made it obvious early on that he was the template by which all his sons and his daughter were to measure our lives. He always set himself up as a goal for us, and he wasn’t modest about it. He impressed upon us that we were supposed to speak seven languages, as he did; but I only speak two—Mandarin Chinese and English. He told us that we should be able to translate Kierkegaard and the Psalms. A few years ago I actually thought that I was going to study Hebrew and translate the Psalms before I realized that was merely another quarrel I was still having with my dead father.
Moyers: Are you able to let go of your father as a subject? Do you think you’ve written your last poem about him? Have you settled that old quarrel?
Lee: I don’t think I’ve settled that old quarrel, but I think for the good of my own writing, I have had to force myself to look beyond him, although in a way I’m being guided again by him to look at things that were important to him. I’d like to write about my own struggle with belief and disbelief, and I’d like to write my own experiences as an immigrant and refugee.
Moyers: Did you ever feel devastated by him, as some sons do by a strong father?
Lee: No! You know, that’s the one thing I have no doubt about. My mother once pointed to me and said, “You are the stone on which your father’s patience broke.” I realized that she was talking about a great deal of strength that I got from both my mother and father and that a part of him broke against me. Of course, she didn’t tell me that until he was dead, but I realized that I had a lot of strength to be able to stand up against him. I never wanted to leave home. I always knew that I would only grow stronger by struggling against him, and I was never afraid of him. I was in awe, but I never feared him.
Moyers: There’s so much tenderness that comes through in your poems about him.
Lee: He was an infinitely tender man. I remember a day—I think we were living in Hong Kong at the time—when he came rushing home, very excited, with a small, brown paper bag. He had discovered Worcestershire sauce. He had the servants move all of our living-room furniture out onto the lawn and cook a meal, then he doused everything with this sauce, and we ate out on the lawn. He was an exuberant kind of wild man, and he was infinitely tender.
The Gift
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
The iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
When he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
Moyers: I’m touched by “The Gift.” Tell me why you wrote it.
Lee: I was with my wife in a hotel and I woke up and heard her sobbing. I looked for her and she was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, sobbing and holding her hand. I noticed that her hand was bleeding, and when I looked there was a splinter under her thumbnail. My father was dead at the time, but when I bent down to remove the splinter I realized that I had learned that tenderness from my father.
Moyers: And the gift was?
Lee: I suppose it was a lesson, a gift of tenderness that he gave to me and that I was able to give to somebody else.
Moyers: You’ve written that you really discovered most about your father when you opened his Bible after his death and read his notations in the margin.
Lee: I inherited all his books, and when I opened his Bible one day and began reading it, and also reading the marginalia—all the things he had written in the margins of the book—it was like experiencing his mind at work, and I realized it was a fierce, questioning mind. When he was teaching us he always seemed so sure—he never questioned anything; everything that came out of his mouth was spit out in hard, pithy statements—and then when I opened his Bible and saw there were questions and underlinings and references to other books I realized he was struggling to come to terms with his own belief, and I really grasped another dimension of him.
I also realized that basically I didn’t know him, and that both of us were at fault. He put up a huge front, the front of a man who would not be questioned. He would always be right, he would always be sure. And I suppose that comes from his experience of imprisonment and wandering—he wanted his children to have faith in him. He didn’t want us to be afraid, so he had to keep up that front.
But by the same token, it didn’t make me ever feel I had a human being for a father. He was always right next to God. There was an hour each day when we had to be very quiet because he was praying in his study, and I remember thinking, Jeez, he’s in there convening with this being who is like no being that I know. So for an hour we had to observe this silence and tiptoe around him. That’s the way it was in our house.
Moyers: But when you opened the Bible the man you found there was less austere, less dogmatic, less cocksure?
Lee: Exactly. For example, he always talked to us about the Song of Songs as if it were a song between the Church and God. Then when I read his Bible I realized he read it very explicitly as a poem about sexuality. He would refer to other poems about sexuality and he had underlined his favorite passages and written out little love poems in the corners of the pages. Finding all that was an incredible experience. I realized he was a man who was saying one thing but who was living another life.
Early in the Morning
While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.
She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.
But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
when they untie them in the evening.
Moyers: What about your mother?
Lee: As I said earlier, my mother was the great-granddaughter of Yuan Shi-Kai, and she was classically educated, but she doesn’t speak much English. She lives with us. It was a lifelong dream for all of us to live together, so my brother and sister and my mother and my family all live in one house. I think she’s an incredibly resilient woman, though she’s become very reclusive since my father has died. She’s a beautiful woman, and there was a point when she had hair down to the back of her knees.
Moyers: Does she ever talk about what it was like to have been a member of the Royal Family of China?
Lee: Occasionally she experiences a kind of nostalgia, but I think she has the feeling that we’re in America now and that history is not going to help us. I grew up with the feeling that those stories about the House of Yuan and all the grandeur were simply stories. My father found it important to tell us stories about both families, but my mother was basically very reticent about her story. I don’t know whether she was too sad about it or whether it didn’t interest her, but even now when I ask her about what it was like growing up like that, she doesn’t like to talk about it.
Moyers: Will you ever return to China?
Lee: I wonder about China, but I have no immediate plans to return there. My mother returned and found the family graves dug up, and she was told the bones were scattered—that happened during the Cultural Revolution—so in a way I feel there’s nothing to return to. From what I understand, everything has been confiscated. They lived in a huge mansion, which has been turned into a small hospital, and certain parts of the land they owned have been turned into public parks, so I don’t have any ruins to go back to, and it seems to me important that I should have ruins. I mean, shouldn’t we? I have friends who have French, Spanish, or Italian backgrounds, and they go to Europe and I suppose they can connect. But if I go to Europe I would feel as if I’m going to look at somebody else’s ruins, and if I go to China I’d also be looking at somebody else’s ruins. I have the feeling I need to get back to Indonesia and yet, I don’t know what I would look for there either. I’m not sure what I am supposed to look for anywhere.
I’m afraid to say that often my longing for home becomes a longing for heaven—instead of casting myself backwards, I take the impulse and cast it ahead—and yet, I question my own belief constantly. You know, I don’t know if I believe in a heaven or a hell. But there’s a longing in me for heaven. Maybe my longing for home comes from a longing for heaven.
Moyers: What are your favorite books in the Bible?
Lee: I think the Book of Exodus is my favorite, but the books of poetry I most like would be The Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. On gloomy days I tell myself, I just want to write something like Ecclesiastes. And on happy days I think, I’m going to write The Song of Songs. Whoever put those two books side by side was definitely wise. We go from one extreme to another—a celebration of sexual love and then a kind of diatribe about the futility of life in general—but those are my two favorite books. If I could pinpoint what I want to do in my writing, I’d like to write something someday that would own the kind of scope and grandeur and intensity of those two books.
Moyers: When you read the Bible, what do you find out about yourself?
Lee: I identify with all the characters. For a while I was reading the Abraham and Isaac story, and I read that as my father as Abraham and me as Isaac. Then later on I read the story of Jacob and the Angel as a good metaphor for poetry, that somehow it’s the struggle between the longing for heaven and the longing to stay on earth. I discover that there’s a great longing in me to believe. I wouldn’t say I believe, but I want to believe. I want badly to believe in a God, in a palpable God. I don’t sense a palpable God, but as I’m reading the Bible, that’s what I want.
Moyers: There are a lot of “outsiders” in the Bible. Exiles, seekers, rejected and despised.
Lee: Exactly. For a while I began to really rebel against Christianity, but when I realized that it began as a slave religion and that Christ was an outsider, then it began to make more sense to me.
Moyers: It seems to me that you are struggling in the same way your father was.
Lee: If I didn’t know that he had struggled, I would always be questioning myself, asking, Why aren’t I as strong as he was?
Moyers: But what you found in the margins of his Bible were the tracks of his own doubt.
Lee: Which helps me. Doubt is OK. In a way, I guess I’m affirming God by my doubt.
Moyers: Let’s talk about the craft of writing poetry. How do you put a poem together?
Lee: For me, all the work precedes the actual writing of the poem and requires a kind of supplication, assuming a vulnerable posture, keeping open. It’s like prayer. I think one has to do a lot of struggling before one actually kneels and says the words. Then after that, of course, there’s a lot of revision; but I do a lot of reading and mental, spiritual, and emotional struggling before I actually come to the page.
When I do get to the page, it usually begins with a line that I can’t make any sense of. Then I write to find out what that line means. I hate to sound as if language doesn’t refer to something. In fact, I come to the page with certain experiences and intentions, but the poem begins to happen in a line, and I write to understand that.
Moyers: I hear you are now writing about your own children. Are they growing up thoroughly American?
Lee: I can see that they’re in a way headed for doom because they’re crazily dislocated. They’re growing up in a household where both Chinese and English are spoken. At this point, they only speak English but they understand Chinese. If they walk into a room and there’s a Chinese opera on the television, they’ll sit down and watch these crazy antics, so they’re already growing up dislocated. The older one said, “I’m Chinese, right?” I said, “Yes, you’re half Chinese.” He said, “And I’m half regular?” So there’s Chinese and regular—he’s already crazy with this stuff.
Moyers: Do you tell them stories?
Lee: Yes, I tell them stories constantly, and they love to hear stories. I used to tell them the basic stories, and then I ran out of those so I started making up stories in which the bad guy’s name is Sukarno and the good guy’s name is Yeh, which means grandfather in Chinese. Now they say, “Tell us the Sukarno stories.”
Moyers: Do you tell them the story of your own family’s fugitive travels?
Lee: Those are in fact the stories that I tell them. I make them sound more fairytale-like for them, but those stories are the only ones I know.
Moyers: Stories are crucial to the memories of exiles. They tell these stories over and over again. The stories often become scripture.
Lee: Yes. And that’s the beauty of the Bible too—it’s insistence on the importance of memory. The injunction Zakhor occurs more than one hundred times in the Bible, so that is important to me. Part of the problem refugees encounter is that as those stories are told again and again, from generation to generation, sometimes they’re changed, so each time we’re getting farther and farther away from factual reality, but I think the stories still adhere to an emotional and spiritual reality.
Moyers: What’s the spiritual reality of your own family’s journey.
Lee: Ah, God. I don’t know. I’m sad to say this, but I think we all feel dislocated and that’s why we want to live together. I think the spiritual reality of my family is dislocation, disconnectedness.
Moyers: Yet there’s a lot of joy in your poems.
Lee: I hope there is. I wouldn’t want to think that I write poems that make people sad.
Moyers: Your family will find themselves in your poems and in this new book, Rose, in particular.
Lee: Actually, I really dislike the poems in that book.
Moyers: Why?
Lee: I don’t know. I think that’s my father. There’s the answer to your question. Nothing I do is going to be good enough for him, so everything I write I hate a week later. My poet friends tell me, “I hate the poems in my first book too, but I like the poems I’m writing now.” But I hate the poems I’m working on. As I’m writing them, I’m realizing this is not Ecclesiastes, this is not The Song of Songs, and yet I realize I have a duty to finish those poems, and I know that they’re going to help me get to the next poem.
Moyers: Why do it?
Lee: Maybe I’m obsessive by nature—my father was obsessive by nature—but it’s probably really a love of a state of being. I think when a person is in deep prayer, all of that being’s attention is focused on God. When a person is in love, all of that being’s attention is focused on the beloved. I think in writing poetry, all of the being’s attention is focused on some inner voice. I don’t mean to sound mystical, but it really is a voice and all of the attention is turned toward that voice. That’s such an exhilarating state to be in that it’s addictive.
Moyers: It’s like rapture?
Lee: Yes, a kind of rapture and a joyful sorrow and a mixture of other things as well.
Moyers: So you can’t not write.
Lee: Correct. At this point in my life, I can say I can’t not write. It might change, you know?
Moyers: You’re thirty-one now. Are you suggesting you might not be a poet for the rest of your life?
Lee: Even now I don’t consider myself a poet. I get very nervous when people say, “Oh, you’re a poet.” I don’t feel like a poet. David, the Psalmist, was a poet. Milton was a poet. Li-po was a poet. I’m working hard to be a poet; that’s the way I like to think of it.
Moyers: But if you’ve published a book of acclaimed poems and you’re not sure you’re a poet yet, how will you know when you’re a poet?
Lee: I have no idea. I guess my father is going to have to materialize and tell me, “You’re OK now. I think you’re a poet now.” I simply have the sense that I’m not there yet.