Writers from China's diaspora
When people ask poet Li-Young Lee where he's from, his first answer is Chicago. At times, he might add that he was born in Indonesia. 'But I insist that, although I was born in Indonesia, I'm Chinese. I don't want people to think I'm Indonesian - my people were persecuted by the Indonesians.'
Lee's origins are complicated. Indonesia is where his father, Lee Kuo Yuan, a former physician to Mao Zedong, fled during the anti-rightist campaign with Lee's mother, a great grand-daughter of the notorious warlord Yuan Shikai, who replaced Sun Yat-sen as president of the infant Chinese Republic.
In Indonesia, the elder Lee helped found Gamaliel University, but had to flee again in 1959 to escape anti-Chinese persecution. The Lee family lived in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan before settling in a small Pennsylvania town.
Since the publication of his first book of poems, Rose, in 1986, the 47-year-old writer has become among the most acclaimed US contemporary poets. Not surprisingly, given his family's history, themes of exile, loss and dislocation figure largely in his work.
'Exile seems both a blessing and a curse,' Lee says in a soft, almost meditative voice. 'A lot of my friends who are writers have said to me, 'You're so lucky to have this background to write from'. And I guess in a way I am lucky, but I wouldn't wish that experience on anybody.
'The literature I love the most is the literature of ruins and the experience of exodus.'