Cathy Song 1983

“Lost Sister” was published in 1983 in Cathy Song’s first volume of poems, Picture Bride. Her book earned the Yale Younger Poets Award for 1983, as well as a nomination for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Poet Richard Hugo, the Yale Award judge, praised Picture Bride for its “candor and generosity,” and he specifically cited “Lost Sister” as an example of the way “Song does not shrink from the hard realities of the societal and familial traps set for women.” In this poem, neither the daughter who stays home in China, nor the sister who leaves for the United States has found freedom. By employing images of movement and stasis, and by exploring the customs of naming and foot binding, Song attends to the Chinese woman’s struggle for identity, whether at home or on “another shore.” The poem is a cameo of the struggles women in many parts of the world face in negotiating freedom and power.

Born and raised in Hawaii, Cathy Song has returned there as an adult to live and write. Thus, most of the poems in Picture Bride tell family stories that grow out of the islands’ rich soil. Some, such as “Lost Sister,” reach back and across to more distant, but no less powerful stories about Song’s Chinese and Korean ancestors. Because of this, the textures and tales of the book reach far beyond family history and beyond Hawaii. In choosing Song’s book, Richard Hugo recognized its ability to express, through Hawaii’s many cultures, the stories of anyone who has struggled to survive and adapt in a new land. Picture Bride is a polyphony of voices — Korean, Chinese, Japanese — that might otherwise be silent. In particular, “Lost Sister” tells the story of women who, like Cathy Song’s Chinese grandmother, face the paradoxes of freedom and belonging.
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