A Study Guide for Li Young Lee's "The Gift"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Li Young Lee's "The Gift," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535836777

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11

The Gift

Li-Young Lee

1986

Introduction

The Gift is an early poem by Chinese American poet Li-Young Lee. It is characteristic of Lee's style: understated in its use of free verse and common, almost simple language, it plumbs the depths of human emotion by taking a careful look at a small moment in the poet's life. The poem recounts a time when Lee was a boy and had a metal sliver in his palm. His father, to distract him from the pain of having it removed, told him a story. His father's demeanor inspired somuch love in the boy that years later, when removing a sliver from his wife's hand, he finds himself striving be as gentle as he remembers his father having been.

Lee frequently writes about relationships with his family, and particularly his father, who suffered political persecution in Communist China before escaping with his family while Lee was still a child. His father was the most common subject in Rose, the 1986 collection in which The Gift was published. Since its publication, Lee has published several more poetry collections and won numerous awards. He is considered one of the most talented, powerful American writers of the early twenty-first century, as well as being one of the foremost Asian American poets of his generation.

Author Biography

Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, on August 19, 1957. He is descended from Yuan Shikai, China's first republican president, on his mother's side, while on his father's side his ancestors were businessmen and criminals. His father was a doctor who worked for a while as the personal physician to Mao Zedong in China. In Jakarta, his father helped found Gamaliel University. Soon after Lee was born, his father was arrested for