The speaker in "I Ask My Mother to Sing" richly conveys the significance of shared cultural experience.
Unlike his parents and grandmother, the speaker has never been to China to see Peking or Kuen Ming Lake. Yet he feels the power of his family's connection to these places through his mother's and grandmother's song. The way the speaker begins the poem is significant:
She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
There is an immediate connection to ancestry, and you can almost imagine the speaker going on to say "and her grandmother joined her, and her grandmother sang through her..." The power of an oral tradition that connects them is meaningful.
The tone shifts in the third stanza:
how the waterlilies fill with rain untilthey overturn, spilling water into water,then rock back, and fill with more.
The waterlilies are a metaphor for life, explaining the ways he watches his mother and grandmother, in their life experience, expand to capture all of the pain that they can and then "overturn" but never give up. They always "rock back," strong enough to handle the next challenge. This also connects the author to the speaker in the poem, conveying the pain of his family's exile from their beloved China.
The power of oral tradition connects the speaker to China, the land of his family and ancestors. Through the song of his mother and grandmother, he is able to appreciate a land with deep and meaningful connections to his family.
The theme of the poem is cultural memory, or the transmission of culture between generations. The poet's mother and grandmother both know the song and so did his father, who would have accompanied them on his accordion if he were alive.
In the second stanza, the poet reveals that he has never been to Peking (presumably the object or origin of the song). It would be more of a matter of course for him to hear and learn these songs in context, in China, but still he loves to hear the song and see in his mind's eye the simple visual images of the waterlilies filling with water, which they eventually tip back into the pool where they are floating. Such images conjure up a vision of the country he has not seen and fix it in his mind.
Although the women are both crying, neither is too overwhelmed with emotion to continue the song. Passing on the culture is important and they communicate its importance to their son, who will have to remember the song and sing it in his turn. This is, in part, what he is doing by writing the poem.
The theme in Li-Young Lee's beautiful poem "I Ask My Mother to Sing" is nostalgia. The poem is a story about the experience of sharing in cultural memories between generations in immigrant families through song. The persona in the poem is the child of a Chinese immigrant family, but the poem touches on the fact that this persona has never "been in Peking, or the Summer Palace, nor stood on the great stone boat to watch the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake" and highlights a poignant feeling for many children who have never been to their ancestral homeland—a cultural nostalgia passed down in families through the power of oral tradition. Li-Young Lee is the child of Chinese parents born in Indonesia. Both parents were from powerful Chinese political families, and Lee's father helped to found a university in their new home in Indonesia. As anti-Chinese tensions escalated, Lee's father was jailed for a year as a political prisoner. After his release, the family fled and eventually landed in the US in 1964. This fragmented cultural identity is Lee's legacy and informs much of his poetry. When he says "but I love to hear it sung" of his mothers' (and her mothers') voices describing the unknown and yet familiar places, he speaks to a common yearning held by the children of immigrant families: the nostalgia for something they've never known in person but have been deeply influenced by in song and story.
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