Asian American Poetry: Timothy Yu & Li-Young Lee
Group Analysis Activity
Directions: With your team, read and annotate your selected poem, analyzing the poet’s main
ideas, as well as elements of supporting craft and technique. Then, construct one or two formal
thesis statements, which you will delineate to the class while you walk them through your expert
analysis.
Chinese Silence No. 22
Timothy Yu, 2016
The Italians are making their pasta,
the French are making things French,
and the Chinese cultivate their silence.
They cultivate silence
in every Chinatown on the persimmon of earth— 5
mute below the towers of Toronto,
silently sweeping the streets of Singapore
clear of noisy self-expression.
The Americans are in their sport utility vehicles,
the Canadians are behaving reasonably, 10
but the Chinese remain silent
maybe with a cup of tea or an opium pipe
and maybe a finger puzzle or water torture is involved.
Or maybe the Chinese are playing the Chinese
game of ping-pong, 15
the pock-pock of the ball against their tight-lipped mouths
as their chefs dice scallions and bean curd.
The Chinese are silent
because it is their job for which
I pay them what they got for building the railroads. 20
Which silence it is hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite
out of the 100 different kinds—
the Silence of the Well-Adjusted Minority,
the Girlish Silence of Reluctant Acquiescence, 25
the Silence that by No Means Should Be Mistaken for Bitterness.
By now, it should go without saying
that what Crocodile Dundee is to the Australian
and Mel Gibson is to the Scot,
so is silence to the Chinese. 30
Just think—
before I invented the 100 Chinese silences,
the Chinese would have had to stay indoors
and gabble about civil war and revolution
or go outside and build a really loud wall. 35
And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall of thousands of miles
that is visible from the moon.
I mean a noisy wall of language
that dwarfs my medieval battlements 40
and paves the Pacific to lap
California’s shores with its brick-hard words.
Thesis #1:
Thesis #2:
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Immigrant Blues
Li-Young Lee, 2008
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. 5
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,” 10
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 15
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, 20
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 25
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 30
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.”
Thesis #1:
Thesis #2:
