The audience filled the Overbrook Auditorium at Muskegon Community College, exceeding seating. About ten students filled the floor at bottom of the stage, making Li-Young the first poet to read at MCC with the makings for a mosh pit. The students and visitors enjoyed his poems and his answers to questions greatly, even whooping and yelping, as if Li-Young were a rock star.
One woman asked a question trying to locate Lee in one of the artistic traditons, such as voticism, nihilism or dadism. She had engaged the use of these terms during her study for a Master of Fine Arts. Lee answered back he belonged to a movement called chow meinism. He explained he hadn't found decent chow mein since his childhood in Jakarta. No one knew how to burn the noodles correctly any more. So he implored his audience for assistance towards finding a proper chow mein. The audience loved the joke, but Li-Young exclaimed, as if apologizing, that he suffered insomnia and hadn't slept for 38 hours. By my calculation, he hadn't slept since Sunday morning, October 24th, when he rose from what sleep he had enjoyed at 5:00 AM.
Li-Young hadn't expected an overflowing house of twenty-somethings. He confessed he had anticipated an audience of ten and felt sure he could read from his work-in-progress. Maybe he didn't know that the English Language Center at Muskegon Community College had grown in strength since his previous visit, with instructors exhorting and escorting their charges to the auditorium. He expressed gratitude for a warm welcoming audience, and recalled when he first had started reading in the United States, when the US had engaged an Asian country in war and many Americans could not tell differences between Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese or Cambodians. Feeling assured of a sophisticated audience, he began to read from the new work, to much approval.
His published work exerted a magnetism he couldn't resist. When his first poem reminded him of a second from his published work, he switched gears. Regarding all the young men and women sitting as if at story hour, he pulled out a poem called "The Children's Hour". At question and answers, a woman asked about his poem that relates his father pulling a dangerous metal splinter from his palm at age seven. Li-Young apologized for he had not brought the collection, Rose, that contained it. Rose had been published in 1986. What luck, the woman who had asked the question held up her copy of Rose, and one of the English teachers present carried it up to stage for Li-Young to read. Li-Young's work often focuses on theme of father and son. His father had served as the personal physician of Mao Zedong until a falling out forced Li-Young's family to flee to Jakarta, Indonesia, where Li-Young was born. Indeed, the poem requested from Rose described his physician father extracting a splinter from his seven year old hand. In question and answer, we learned more about the poet's father, who could translate from Classical Chinese and a number of languages, play beautiful music upon many instruments.
No Father Dearest by a long stretch, once Li-Young's father tore down the house in a fit of anger. The father drove the poet to learn English, as he drove his son to discipline in all matters. Seated upon a chair and a thick English dictionary, the poet's father listened as his student and son recited from the King James Bible. Success the father rewarded with shards from a hand-smashed butterscotch candy. Errors he punished with inquiries into his son's preparations for English tutorial. Li-Young discussed his insomnia, nights spent awake remembering the past, a past that included exile from China and flight from Indonesia to the United States in the early Sixties. Perhaps sleep feels undisciplined to Li-Young, who learned an absolute discipline at his...
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