Lost Sister was published in 1983 in Cathy Songs 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 womans 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 Songs Chinese and Korean ancestors. Because of this, the textures and tales of the book reach far beyond family history and beyond Hawaii. In choosing Songs book, Richard Hugo recognized its ability to express, through Hawaiis many cultures, the stories of anyone who has struggled to survive and adapt in a new land. Picture Bride is a polyphony of voicesKorean, Chinese, Japanesethat might otherwise be silent. In particular, Lost Sister tells the story of women who, like Cathy Songs Chinese grandmother, face the paradoxes of freedom and belonging.

Author Biography
Cathy Song was born on August 20, 1955, in Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii, to a Chinese-American mother and a Korean-American father. Song spent her early childhood in the small town of Wahiawa, which, like many other rural Hawaiian communities, made its livelihood raising sugar and pineapples for export. The title poem of Picture Bride speculates what the experience of immigrating to Hawaii must have been like for Songs Korean grandmother. It imagines her feelings upon first looking into the face of the stranger / who was her husband, the man who had been waiting for her, picture in hand, in the camp outside / Waialua Sugar Mill. In Easter: Wahiawa, 1959, Song connects her memory of gathering Easter eggs as a four-year-old with the image of her Korean grandfathers hard-earned find of a quail egg or two along the riverbank as a young child, eggs that would gleam from the mud / like gigantic pearls. Song began the writing life as a young student in the middle-class suburbs of Honolulu and continued at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she was mentored by poet John Unterecker. She finished her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College in 1977 and went on to earn an M.F.A. in creative writing in 1981 from Boston University. In 1987 she and her husband, Douglas Davenport, moved back to Honolulu, where they and their three children now live. Her second volume, Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, was published in 1988, and her most recent volume, School Figures, appeared in 1994. Besides winning the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award, Song has also won the Shelley Memorial Award and, in 1994, the Hawaii Award for Literature. In recent years, Song has taught creative writing for the Poets in the Schools program in Hawaii and at several universities. Since the publication of School Figures, Song has been concentrating on her own writing, supported in part by an NEA Poetry Fellowship, and has a manuscript for another volume of poetry forthcoming. She is a member of Bamboo Ridge, a group of Hawaiian poets and fiction writers. In 1991, the Bamboo Ridge Press published Sister Stew, an anthology edited by Song and Juliet Kono featuring the fiction and poetry of contemporary Hawaiian women.

Poem Text
1 In China, even the peasants named their first daughters Jade the stone that in the far fields could moisten the dry season, could make men move mountains for the healing green of the inner hills glistening like slices of winter melon. 5

And the daughters were grateful: They never left home. To move freely was a luxury stolen from them at birth. Instead, they gathered patience, learning to walk in shoes the size of teacups, without breaking the arc of their movements as dormant as the rooted willow, as redundant as the farmyard hens. But they traveled far in surviving, learning to stretch the family rice, to quiet the demons, the noisy stomachs. 2 There is a sister across the ocean, who relinquished her name, diluting jade green with the blue of the Pacific. Rising with a tide of locusts, she swarmed with others to inundate another shore. In America, There are many roads and women can stride along with men.

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But in another wilderness, the possibilities, the loneliness, can strangulate like jungle vines, The meager provisions and sentiments of once belonging fermented roots, Mah-Jong tiles and firecrackers set but a flimsy household in a forest of nightless cities. A giant snake rattles above, spewing black clouds into your kitchen. Dough-faced landlords slip in and out of your keyholes, making claims you dont understand, tapping into your communication systems of laundry lines and restaurant chains. 50 45 40

You find you need China: your one fragile identification, a jade link handcuffed to your wrist. You remember your mother who walked for centuries, footless and like her, you have left no footprints, but only because there is an ocean in between, the unremitting space of your rebellion. 60 55

Poem Summary Lines 1-4

In the first lines of part one, the speaker of the poem takes the reader immediately to the homeland of Songs maternal grandmother and introduces a Chinese naming custom that will be reflected and refracted throughout the poem. First daughters throughout China, even the peasants, are often named Jade, a precious stone recognized not only for its beauty but for its magical healing powers.

Lines 5-9
Here the speaker describes the powers of jade, using rural, natural, and agricultural images that will be contrasted in part two with menacing images of urban life. The jade stones and, by association, the young women so named are believed to bring life and healing to their homeland. Songs skillful use of color imagery can be seen here in the juxtaposition of the luminous green jade with the daughter-blessed, greening landscape of China, those inner hills / glistening like slices of winter melon. Songs musical repetition of sounds and words in the lines could moisten the dry season / could make men move mountains also implies a kind of pastoral grace and power in the lives of these daughters. The image of far fields where the stones work their magic suggests not only the vast stretches of farmland in the China of Songs ancestry, but also begins the poems melancholy play upon traveling far, whether at home or abroad. It is a theme established in earlier poems in Picture Bridein images of long walks, long bus rides, journeys into the forests of lilikoi vines, and journeys across the ocean.

Lines 10-20
The speaker next tells us the daughters were grateful, ostensibly to have such a beautiful name and to occupy such an important place in the family. Consequentially, they never left home. But there are other reasons for their stasis that cast an ironic light on such gratitude. Subtly but suddenly, the reader discovers in the next lines that the freedom to leave home was stolen from the beginning. The harsh reality Song introduces in these lines is the centuriesold custom of foot binding. From the end of the Tang dynasty in the eleventh century a.d. until as recently as the 1920s, Chinese women, initially of the upper class, were required to begin binding their feet around five years of age in order to make them tiny and feminine. Using three tightly wound yards of cloth, the binding procedure distorted the natural flexion and shape of the foot by forcibly bending the toes under the metatarsal area of the footsometimes even breaking the

As the poem says, these women had to learn to travel far in shoes the size of teacups, / without breaking . With this image, Song deftly renders a portrait of women forced to be quite delicate physically, but strong emotionally. They must be rooted like the willow tree, itself a symbol of both sadness (the weeping willow, which is native to China) and of inexhaustible life."