What is the purpose of a book? This is a complex question, for books have no purpose that is analogous to that of a plow or a needle. Books do many things, and also nothing at all in a practical sense - except perhaps to weight down papers and keep them from flying away. Books may serve one purpose for the writer and another for the reader - or rather one purpose for the writer and another purpose for each of the different readers who come to the text. So when we ask if a book is successful we are asking a complicated and nuanced question and one. One can know if a plow is a good plow if it breaks open the ground allowing seeds to be pressed into the soft, warm earth. But a book? How does one know if a book has achieved its purpose?
This question is especially to answer for The Winged Seed, a book that is a novel/an autobiography/a poem written by Chinese American poet Li-Young Lee. The book recounts the story of Lee's family, who fled from the oppression of Mainland Chine in the 1950s to meet more oppression in Indonesia, where Lee's father was imprisoned by Sukarno's government. After Lee's father is freed, the family travels to Japan via Southeast Asia, before moving to Pennsylvania, where his father only somewhat incongruously becomes a minister. Lee mixes genres and voices and narrative strategies freely throughout the book. In the end this choice to dabble in so many different ways of telling a story proves to be the undoing of the work. For if there is any single function that a book should have, it would be to tell a story. And somewhere between the beginning and end of this book we lose hold of the story that Lee seems to wish us to hear.
This is not to say that the book is entirely unsuccessful: Some elements of it do work well, including the fact that this story is told in some measure as an epic story, a form of storytelling that is probably as old as humanity itself and that crosses cultural as well as historical bou...