The Winged Seed
Subtitle: A Remembrance
By: Lee Li-Young.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: March 8, 1995
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 205
ISBN-13: 9780671707088
Subjects: Lee, Li-Young, 1957-; Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography
Description: This first book of prose by the celebrated Chinese-American poet Li-Young is a literary event - a luminous, wise, and magical work of memory and myth.

Lee's extraordinary account follows the journey that began in the early 1950's when his parents fled China's political turmoil for Indonesia. After anti-Chinese sentiment there landed Lee's father (whose name translates to Perfect Country) in prison, the family escaped to Hong Kong, where his father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher.

When the author was six, they emigrated to America, where his father eventually became the minister of an all-white Presbyterian church in a small town in western Pennsylvania.

The imposing, elusive, God-like figure of his father haunts Lee's narrative, which transcends the conventions of memoir to proceed by association. The words and images that memory reconstructs reconstruct the process of memory in turn, replicating, in shimmering layer upon layer, the intricate, inexact, awful mechanisms of the human mind as it explores a past resonant with terror, and love.