The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

Kao Kalia Yang’s The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father was published in 2016; this guide refers to the Kindle edition of the text. The book won the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Chautauqua Prize. The Song Poet presents the story of Kalia’s father, Bee Yang, as an artist and a song poet.

Song poetry is a traditional form of Hmong art. The Hmong are an ethnic group, indigenous to China, who fled to what is now Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam to escape persecution and oppression by the Chinese. Kalia’s family is from Laos. When Laos fell to the Communists in 1975, the Hmong faced reprisals for assisting the United States. Kalia’s family spent time in a refugee camp in Thailand before emigrating to Minnesota in the early 1980s. In The Song Poet, Bee’s experiences as a child in Laos, as a young man fleeing the Communists, as a father in the refugee camps, and as an immigrant in America, comprise the majority of the text.

The text begins with an explanation of the Hmong term kwv txhiaj, “songs [that] can be duets: the voices of fathers and daughters coming together, different verses within the same song, stanzas in the same poem." Kalia arranges this story as a musical album: there are two sides or sections of the story, and both use first-person narration. Bee narrates side one, and Kalia narrates side two. The album ends with a duet that alternates between Bee and Kalia. Instead of chapters, the text has tracks.

This structure reinforces Kalia’s goal to allow the reader to see her father as a musician and a poet. However, Kalia also provides a fuller picture of her father and engages with a variety of themes, including survival, fatherhood, and questions of identity and memory.

Plot Summary

The Song Poet tells the story of Bee Yang, Kalia’s father, and his life as an artist. Bee never wrote down his songs, and only a few have been recorded.

In Kalia’s rendering, Bee traces his path as an artist in the first section, beginning with his childhood. As a toddler, Bee is greatly affected by the death of his father, and he traces much of his personal troubles and worries to this point in his life. At age five, Bee’s family is forced to farm away from their village, and Bee contracts malaria. After this illness, he is different and is unable to learn as quickly as before.

This change quiets Bee, and in that quiet, he hears things he had never noticed before: the sounds of the earth, the animals, and the words of the people in his village and in his family. He collects their words, using them to form his poetry, a poetry born out of his yearning for the unconditional and attentive love he believes would have if his father were alive.

Kalia shapes this first section by having Bee recall memories and stories that could have been part of his poetry. Thus, Bee recalls capturing a songbird, for instance, as well as the first time he got into a fight with another boy, and his affection for his cousin, Shong, who was the only member of the family unable to escape the Communist soldiers after Laos fell. Like a poem, these stories weave in and out of the text, loosely following the trajectory of Bee’s life, from child to teenager, from teenager to husband and father, and finally as an immigrant to the United States.

In the second half of the story, Kalia describes the ways her father continued to suffer as an immigrant, the racism and humiliation he faced, and how his personal demons affected their family overall.

However, Kalia’s portrait of her father is always sympathetic, even when he behaves in a way that seems uncaring or cruel, as in his treatment of Kalia’s little brother, Xue. Bee’s experiences as a fatherless child place a terrible burden on Xue, and Xue suffers as much from his father’s expectations as Bee suffered from missing his father.

The text ends with a duet, part of it in Bee’s voice and part in Kalia’s voice. Bee narrates his attempts to return to Laos, and Kalia narrates the aftermath. Kalia’s memoir ends with Bee losing his job after refusing to work in unsafe conditions, having to sell the family home and move to a smaller one. Bee’s children rally around him, and that though he may not create song poetry anymore, he is still an artist, and most importantly, a father.