2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

Madhuparna Mitra, “Lahiri’s Mrs. Sen’s,” Explicator, 64 (Spring 2006): 185–189.
Brief but helpful close reading of the details in “Mrs. Sen’s” that speak to the
character’s struggles with her new life as a Bengali American.

Laura Anh Williams, “Foodways and Subjectivities in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter
of Maladies,” MELUS, 32 (Winter 2007): 69–79.
Traces the importance of food and food preparation in “A Temporary Matter,”
“Mrs. Sen’s,” and “This Blessed House,” illustrating the ways in which choices
about food and food preparation represent assertions of identity and subjectivity.

Bonnie Zare, “Evolving Masculinities in Recent Stories by South Asian Ameri-
can Women,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 42 (September 2007):
99–111.
Argues that Lahiri and Meera Nair differ from other contemporary South Asian
American women writers in depicting male protagonists and in showing those
characters working through “internalized colonialist, consumerist and patriarchal
norms”; discusses “Interpreter of Maladies” and “This Blessed House.”

—Kathryn West

h

Li-Young Lee, Rose

(Brockport, N.Y.: BOA Editions, 1986)

In his foreword to Li-Young Lee’s first book of poetry, Rose, the renowned poet
Gerald Stern writes, “What characterizes Lee’s poetry is a certain humility, a
kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understand-
ing.” This humility and desire for understanding may result from Lee’s turbulent
childhood. Lee was born to Chinese parents in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1957. His
mother was from a wealthy landowning family whose property was seized during
the communist takeover. His father had been personal physician to Mao Tse-tung
and later was imprisoned and tortured under Sukarno in Indonesia. In 1959 the
family fled Indonesia; from 1959 to 1964 they moved from place to place, living
in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan until finally settling in the United States. From
this peripatetic and unstable childhood Lee emerged with a contemplative view
of human life and poetry. In an interview published shortly after the release of
Rose (1986) he said, “I have to say that I’m concerned just as much with ideas and
with making sense of my world as I am with language. [Writing poetry] isn’t mere
play for me” (Ingersoll). This earnestness pervades Lee’s work, making his poems
as much philosophical meditations as literature.
Lee studied poetry with Stern at the University of Pittsburgh from 1978 to
1979 and later attended the University of Arizona and the State University of
New York at Brockport. During this period Stern noticed in him a propensity
toward “the deep seriousness” one observes in spiritual poets such as John Keats
and Rainer Maria Rilke. Rather than writing in a particular tradition, Lee was