Li-Young_Lee's_Furious_Versions_

A Struggle through Life with the Specter of Someone Else’s Memories The poem “Furious Versions” by Li-Young Lee, takes the reader on a trip through the mind of a loving son reminiscing. This son is haunted by his father’s divided life, the distantly foreign life of his father’s youth and the lovingly familiar life his father started living in the son’s early childhood. Throughout this essay, I will show the facts that lead me to conclude that this poem’s central theme is of a son haunted by the circumstances of his father’s life. The first verse leads precipitously into the son’s poignant predicament. “These days I waken in the used light / of someone’s spent life…” (Lee 13). As he awakens in the morning, the son is reminded and grapples with, the weighty heaviness of his thoughts. He contemplates the possible scenarios in his mind. Will he find himself living his own life, in America, his life of freedom' Or will he be lost in the memories of his father’s long ago life, the escape to America by boat with family in tow, the interrogation by soldiers whose pistol butts are stained with blood' In verse two, the son is walking through the nighttime darkened house where his mother lives, moving to the unlatched backdoor being slammed by wind. Spurred on by the black darkness, his mind transports him to a place where his father is hidden in a closet, soldiers sweeping the streets looking for him, soldiers asking his father “What color suit, Professor, Magar-Speed 2 would you like / to be buried in' Brown or blue'” (18). This scene is yet another example of the father’s history that has come to frequent the son’s conscious thought. As the poem continues, there are many references to the son’s thoughts of his father’s life of turmoil before settling in America. In one verse, the father and son are walking in little Chinatown in Chicago and they come upon a couple of men that the father has known twenty years ago in the old country. While the men innocuously float folded paper boats in the current of a street gutter river, the son’s thoughts immediately turn to his dark memories of his father’s life stories: Here was the sadness of ten thousand miles, of an abandoned house in Nan Jing, where my father helped a blind man wash his wife’s newly dead body, then bury it, while bombs fell, and trees raised charred arms and burned (23) In verse six, the son realizes that instead of being haunted by it, his father’s story needs to be told to keep the memory of his father alive for all time, but the son also perceives that his father’s story needn’t be told from the perspective of the cruelty the son is preoccupied with. Lee decides I’ll not widow the world. I’ll tell my human tale, tell it against Magar-Speed 3 the current of that vaster, that inhuman telling. (27) Instead he will tell his father’s story simply, from his birth on an island in a foreign land, to life in America, married and raising two sons with respect: “And always he stood erect to praise or grieve, and knelt to live a while at the level of his son’s eyes” (28). The poem “Furious Versions” starts with solemn contemplation. A man awakening and wondering: will he live in his life that day, where birds sing outside his window and the echo of someone hammering makes its way into his bedroom as he reflects on his mission to clean the church on this snowy morning' Or will he be paralyzed and trapped within his own mind by his debilitating and distorted memories of his father’s life in China before coming to this safe haven known as America, land of the free' His father being confronted by soldiers threatening to kill him, the chance meeting of two acquaintances from his father’s early adulthood on a street in Chicago, the son’s vague memories of a long voyage at sea and of a house that he has never been to, and the stark realization that the son needs to tell his father’s story to the world; these are all instances that prove that the poem’s hero, the son, is indeed haunted by the circumstances of his father’s life.