Immigrant Blues

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.”

Annotations:

(2) The title of the poem made me think the story would be about the sad reality of immigrating. However the story feels as if Li young lee is trying to find himself. 

(3) Li young lee is talking to himself, as well as a woman and man, over the telephone. 

(4) The key turning point is at "Practice until you feel" where the story devolves into his thoughts. 

(6) The tone becomes more serious whenever Lee uses "Its called" or "called" to begin the sentence. 

(7) Like all his poems, he uses italicized words as the character speech and normal words as the thoughts. 

(9) The ambiguous parts are hen he starts talking about the inside of himself, along with the comments from both the man and woman. Nothing very complex though for reading. 

(10) A recurring pattern is the "called" then book/story name. 

(11-12) The poem continues on with the story transforming from the fathers perspective to the sons perspective in his goal to find himself. I interpret this as the son discovering himself through past stories and their language his father told him of.