Un-belonging

I Ask My Mother to Sing

BY LI-YOUNG LEE

She begins, and my grandmother joins her.

Mother and daughter sing like young girls.

If my father were alive, he would play

his accordion and sway like a boat.

I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,

nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch

the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers

running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;

how the waterlilies fill with rain until

they overturn, spilling water into water,

then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry.

But neither stops her song.

I read this poem while sitting in my balcony in the warm winter sun on a Saturday morning, sipping a milky-sweet coffee. And what happened to the women at the end of the poem happened to me. My eyes filled with tears but I didn’t stop reading. The love and the loss seeps from Lee’s words and you resonate with the sense of longing and displacement in a way you would when you have lost something you loved deeply – a place, a time or a person. Or maybe all three.

The love is transmitted through the act of singing; as you notice that Lee who has never seen the places sung of, can still describe them with the beauty and detail that can only come from really seeing. And one really sees only things one loves – be it a flower or a painting or a science experiment. In this case, I imagine Lee visualising the scenes his mother and grandmother sing of and then placing each word on the page gently-“how the waterlilies fill with rain until / they overturn, spilling water into water, / then rock back, and fill with more.”

It is a simple sight, and yet it captures the essence of cycle of existence – filling with water, which sustains us, but being overturned by the weight of the very same thing that sustains us, and then springing back to reach out to it again. How wonderfully silly the waterlily and by extension each of us are. That we keep yearning for the very things that keep testing our endurance and will one day most likely drown us. Perhaps it was that realization, that we are helpless in the face of our natures, that brought tears -tears of contentment and acceptance that one cannot change what we choose to be hurt by. Just as we cannot change what we choose to love.