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Li Young Lee was born on August 19, 1957, in the capital of Indonesia: Jakarta. He was born to Chinese parents, who relocated to Indonesia because they were political exiles. Lee's maternal great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, the first president of the Republic of China, who also tried to make himself emperor. Lee's father was the personal physician for Mao Zedong when he was in China.
After Lee's father relocated his family to Indonesia, Lee's father helped found Gamaliel University. However, when anti-Chinese sentiments emerged in Indonesia in 1959, Lee's father was arrested and kept for a year. After he was released, the family fled to Hong Kong, then Macau, then Japan, before finally ending up in the United States in 1964. Lee was seven years old at the time.
After the family settled in Pennsylvania after going through Seattle, Lee's father went to seminary and became a Presbyterian minister in a small community called Vandergrift. While his father read to him frequently as a child and encouraged him to find his passion, Lee only started to write poems seriously and become interested in language when he attended University of Pittsburgh and studied under the revered Gerald Stern.
Lee's first collection of poems was Rose(1986), and his mentor Gerald Stern wrote of Lee's "large vision, deep seriousness, and the almost heroic ideal" in his poetry, comparing him to great poets such as John Keats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Theodore Roethke. Rose won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry from New York University. Lee's second collection, The City in Which I Love You(1990) was equally as celebrated, being chosen for the Lamont Poetry Selection(now the Laughlin Award). Peggy Kaganoff of Publishers Weekly said of Lee's writing as weaving "a remarkable web of memory from the multifarious fibers of his experience" and that his images were "economical yet fluid."
Lee now lives in Chicago with his wife and two sons.

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/li-young-lee
https://poets.org/poet/li-young-lee
https://www.poemhunter.com/li-young-lee/biography/

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In the poem “The Gift” by Li Young Lee, the speaker recalls a moment when he was young and his father pulled a nail from his hand, as he himself pulls a metal splinter from his wife in present time. The speaker remembers that his father “recited a story in a low voice”(2) to distract him from the pain. The speaker also “watched [his father’s] lovely face and not the blade”(3). This tactic is synonymous to when children are told to look at their parents or just away in general when receiving a shot at the doctor’s office so they don’t notice the pain. In this moment of pain, the speaker does not focus on the fact that there is a painful splinter in his hand in his memory. Instead, he remembers the love his father showed him. Despite the fact that the speaker “can’t remember the tale”(6) his father told, he still remembers the tender love his father demonstrated through the voice that sounded like “a well of dark water”(7-8) and his hands laying “against [his] face”(11). The speaker’s father’s actions provide a physical manifestation of his love for his son and that love is the “gift” that he gives to his son.

Years later, when the speaker finds himself in the same position as his father was as he pulls a splinter from his wife, he is given the opportunity to also share this “gift” of love by showing the same tenderness to his wife. When he sees the splinter in his wife, he does not associate it as a “Little Assassin”(29) or think that “Death visited”(32). Instead, he remembers his father giving him the gift of love, and turns around to give that gift to his wife so that “she feels no pain”(22).

While acts of love are present in every culture, this poem about how actions represent love is particularly touching to me as an Asian. Especially in Western cultures, love is freely given in both actions such as hugs as well as words. However, in Eastern cultures, love is not spoken of. My own parents rarely outright say “I love you” to me. Instead, they show their love through giving me more food to eat, making sure I don’t forget a jacket when it’s cold outside, and by making sure I am the best person I can be. Through their everyday actions, I feel my parents’ love. This poem about a mundane action such as pulling out a splinter representing one’s love is emblematic for all Asians who also experience this type of love.

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In the poem “Eating Together” by Li Young Lee, the speaker eats a meal with his family. In the beginning of the poem, the speaker describes the “trout seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil”(1-3) that is sitting in the steamer. The detailed imagery of the trout lays great importance on the food. In addition, the family sits down to “eat it with rice for lunch”(4) together. In Asian culture, eating meals together is an essential part of building connections with others, especially with family members. It is a daily chance to catch up on everyone else’s day and simply be together as a united group. In addition, food is a way to communicate love to one another. For example, while Asians rarely explicitly tell each other they love each other, they communicate their love for each other by getting more food for the other person. Another Asian tradition with food is that mealtime is used to respect the elder generation. The eldest member of the family eats first and is offered the best food, which is seen in the poem as the mother eats “the sweetest meat of the head”(6). Through the act of eating a meal together, the importance of family and family connection is emphasized in the poem.

As the speaker sits down to eat lunch with his family, the way his father holds meat is referenced as his mother holds the meat of the trout “between her fingers deftly, the way [his] father did weeks ago.”(7-9). What may have at first been a random thought about the way his father hold meat becomes a reflection on how important these meals are to family. The speaker’s father has clearly passed away as it is strange for a member of the family to be absent from a meal for weeks, which is shown in the speaker’s comment that his father held his meat a particular way “weeks ago.”(9) In addition, his father “lay down to sleep”(9-10) which indicates his father being buried in the “snow-covered road”(10). In the poem, the speaker goes back to say that the “snow-covered road” his father rests in is “lonely for no one”(12), reinforcing the familial bond that exists within the family.

Throughout the poem, food plays an integral role in establishing the importance in family through the act of simply eating meals together. The love the speaker feels for each of his family members, especially his father, is developed and fostered through food.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F2SX2dePHQ

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Li-Young Lee's The Undressing Explores Life's Paradoxes

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Li-Young Lee's The Undressing Explores Life's Paradoxes

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https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/February-2018/Li-Young-Lee-The-Undressing/

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Poet Li-Young Lee articulates life's interminable uncertainties

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Poet Li-Young Lee articulates life's interminable uncertainties

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https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-li-young-lee-20180330-story.html

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People have been trying to kill me since I was born,

a man tells his son, trying to explain

the wisdom of learning a second tongue.

It’s an old story from the previous century

about my father and me.

The same old story from yesterday morning

about me and my son.

It’s called “Survival Strategies

and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.”

It’s called “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,”

called “The Child Who’d Rather Play than Study.”

Practice until you feel

the language inside you, says the man.

But what does he know about inside and outside,

my father who was spared nothing

in spite of the languages he used?

And me, confused about the flesh and the soul,

who asked once into a telephone,

Am I inside you?

You’re always inside me, a woman answered,

at peace with the body’s finitude,

at peace with the soul’s disregard

of space and time.

Am I inside you? I asked once

lying between her legs, confused

about the body and the heart.

If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not,

she answered, at peace with the body’s greed,

at peace with the heart’s bewilderment.

It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening

called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,”

called “Loss of the Homeplace

and the Defilement of the Beloved,”

called “I want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52210/immigrant-blues

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From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43012/from-blossoms

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I flushed twin doves

from my father’s unmown field.

I missed them with my rocks and sling,

but brought them to their knees

with a shout of my father’s name.

This was before rivers had names

other than names for my father.

It was even before there were numbers,

those fearsome first angels.

Well before the wind learned to speak

in the past tense,

long before it started crossing

into the future

by leaving behind all of its faces but one.

Watching my quarry tumble down the sky,

I began to long

to be born, to become

one of the heirs to the sorrows

of hunger, the rites of slaughter,

and the several names of desire and death.

The nearer I came to the place

where my game lay stunned, the more I yearned

for a new reckoning of fire and clay,

a new ratio of body and song,

just proportions of world and cry.

By the time I knelt over my spoil,

all of the light had withdrawn

to above the trees

and become an immense, bright ghost in the sky.

In the rearing shadow of the earth,

I stood up, my voice fugitive, my name vagabond,

a cursed and grieving brother

of every winged thing.

Inheritor of the sign of the violent

and the victim,

I awaited my true bride.

https://poems.com/poem/stolen-good/