Li-Young Lee's "Eating Together"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2022

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Li-Young Lee (李立揚, pinyin: Lǐ Lìyáng) (born August 19, 1957) is an American poet. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents.[1] His maternal great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President,[2] who attempted to make himself emperor. Lee's father, who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. In 1959 the Lee family fled Indonesia to escape widespread anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Li-Young Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, January 10th. And today I'm
0:07.4	going to read for you a poem by American poet Lee Young Lee. He's one of my favorite contemporary poets.
0:14.5	He was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese political exiles. He lived an absolutely fascinating life.
0:24.4	Look him up. He just has quite a family history of political influence in China and
0:31.1	beyond and just a fascinating family in life. He's also a prolific poet. He's written five critically acclaimed volumes of poetry
0:41.6	and won numerous awards. And today's poem is called Eating Together. And this is how it goes.
0:49.1	In the steamer is the trout seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and sesame
0:57.4	oil. We shall eat it with rice for lunch. Brothers, sister, my mother, who will taste the sweetest
1:05.1	meats of the head, holding it between her fingers deftly, the way my father did weeks ago. Then he lay down to sleep
1:14.3	like a snow-covered road winding through pines older than him without any travelers and lonely for no one.
1:27.0	There's so many things to love about this poem. It's a poem about food, it's a poem
1:33.3	about family, it's a poem about death and change and loss. But above all, I think it's a poem
1:39.5	about love, about different kinds of love and different kinds of shared experiences of love
1:45.4	within a family.
1:47.5	This poem is only 12 lines long, and yet it captures an entire gamut of human emotion and experience.
1:55.8	The language is very simple and descriptive.
1:58.9	It's simply about the vivid physicality of a shared meal,
2:03.9	which I love. And yet there's a shift in lines eight through nine. The beginning of the poem
2:11.0	is a description of a shared meal, trout in a steamer, a very simple meal with simple ingredients around a family
2:19.3	table, just the family. And the shift happens when our poet describes how his mother will
2:28.4	taste the sweetest meats of the head of the trout. And she's holding it between her fingers the way his father did
2:37.2	weeks ago. And that's when the shift takes place. It's actually a slow shift in a poem of only
	...

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