Everything Can Be a Center: Mini Interview with Ae Hee Lee
by Gabriella Souza
The collection Asterism:Poems (Tupelo, 2024) traces the three prongs of poet Ae Hee Lee’s national lineage. Born in South Korea, raised in Peru, and now residing in the United States, Lee uses this inquiry as the backbone of her collection, which was also the 2022 winner of the Dorset Prize. She slips between lyrical and narrative and draws on snippets of languages and scenes to illustrate the scattered, displacing experience of existing between countries and cultures. The connections she draws that cross time and space center us in Lee’s experience of making home wherever she is.
Lee and I spoke over Zoom this winter, where we discussed how she began writing in English, the multi-national history of the Peruvian dish Lomo Saltado, and the “play” aspect of poetry.
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The Rumpus: So much of this collection is about how people, places, objects, even food, form our identities. I was struck by the poem, “Self-Portrait as a Mother,” particularly the line about how your mom taught you to be a foreigner.
Ae Hee Lee: That poem came to me really slowly. I didn't have that kind of understanding until much later, after living years in the United States and wondering, Where did I learn to live as a foreigner but at the same time as someone who doesn’t let the world around me exclude and fix me in an outsider position. And I realized, it must have been when watching my mother’s life in Peru as a Korean migrant. She didn’t let things get to her, and I think that attitude translated into my own life. I wanted to highlight and remember that strength in “Self-Portrait as a Mother,” but there were other things too.
In Trujillo, my hometown, we didn't really have a Korean community. My mother felt very lonely and, at the same time, scared. Everything was unfamiliar to her. She had a nervous energy to her and could also get overprotective. That was something that I also took when I came to the US, that feeling like I always had to be prepared, ready for anything, because I don't know this place.
Our identities are not really as individual or independent as we think. They're interrelated with other people's lives. Even strangers might have left deep impressions on us that we’re not wholly conscious about. So, I thought to write self-portraits, but as other people, how they are a big part of who we are.