LOVE IMAGINED: a mixed race memoir
Copyright 2014 by Sherry Quan Lee. All Rights Reserved.
From the Reflections of America Series
2nd Printing - June 2015
Learn more at http://blog.sherryquanlee.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lee, Sherry Quan, 1948-
Love imagined : a mixed race memoir / by Sherry Quan Lee.
pages cm. -- (World voices)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61599-233-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61599-234-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61599-235-5 (ebook)
1. Lee, Sherry Quan, 1948- 2. Poets, American--Biography. 3. Racially mixed people--United States--Biography. I. Title.
PS3562.E3644Z46 2014
811.54--dc23
[B]
2014011837
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Distributed by Ingram Book Group (USA/CAN), Bertrams Books (UK/EU).
Praise for Love Imagined: a mixed race memoir
Love Imagined: this fascinating, delightful, important book. This imagining love, this longing for love. This poverty of No Love, this persistent racism, sexism, classism, ageism. The pain these evils cause the soul. Sherry Lee tiptoe[s] between a poverty of and a generosity of spirit, is a spirit of love that survives and infuses everything, even the doubts, fear and shame. This is an important document of a mixed-race contemporary woman, a memoir about her family lineages back to slavery, back to China, back to early Minneapolis, and about the struggle of finding herself in all of these.
Who am I? Im the great-grandchild of Black female slaves and white men. Im the great American Narrative. And shes the daughter of a man native to China. I can easily say I am Black, just as I can easily say I am Asian Rarely do I say Im white, but genetically and culturally I am that too I am each of these, yet all of these. Racism and its dangers caused my mother to pass for white. I refuse to lie, but history has made it safer for me not to. Most simply I love reading this sassy, serious woman. Sherry Quan Lee is love imagined.
Sharon Doubiago, Hard Country, The Book of Seeing with Ones Own Eyes, Love on the Streets, My Fathers Love, etc.
To borrow a word from Toni Morrison, Sherry Quan Lees beautiful and urgent book is an act of sovereignty. Transgressing through and disrupting multiple margins and in/visibilities, Quan Lees words, especially the heartbreaking repetition of the word Shame, come searing through, page after page. This book is a voice in the wilderness. Quan Lees bold, unapologetic, intimate, wise voice is an essential one.
Sun Yung Shin, author of Rough, and Savage and Skirt Full of Black.
In Love Imagined Sherry Quan Lee explores her familys mixed racial heritage and her own life with great courage and compelling honesty. She makes her deeply moving story our story as a country. She reveals her past as our past. This is an important and essential book.
David Mura, author of Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire,The Last Incantations, etc.
Love Imagined is an important book because we, as Mixed-Race people (and the people who love us!) need to hear these stories. Because we are inherently not like the people from whom we came, it is vitally important that we connect and share our stories with one another. To be understood in an effortless way. When I read Sherrys story, I recognized feelings and meanings that mirrored mine. I felt a sense of release, an exhale, and I knew I could be understood by her in a way that some of my family and friends are unable to grasp, through no fault of their own. Its the Mixed experience. Sherry Lees voice, her story, will no doubt touch and heal many who read it.
Lola Osunkoya
MA in Adlerian Counseling and Psychotherapy
Founder of Neither/Both LLC
Mixed-Race Community Building and Counseling
Joining the long history of women of color fighting to claim literary space to tell our stories, Sherry Quan Lee shares her truth with fierce courage and strength in Love Imagined. Weaving together the impact of geographic space, and a rich sense of temporal realities through her lens as a mixed-race, Chinese, Black woman, Quan Lee crafts a riveting tale of Minnesota life set within the backdrop of racial segregation, the Cold War, the sexual revolution while navigating it all through the lens of her multi-layered identities. A true demonstration of the power of an intersectional perspective, Quan Lees memoir braids together the fragments of racialized, gendered, and sexual identities. In the spirit of the foremothers and those who will continue behind, through her poetic frame; a stirring tale that asks us to think about our assumptions and recognize the social constructs that shape and confine us all.
Kandace Creel Falcn, Ph.D.
Director of Womens and Gender Studies
Minnesota State University Moorhead
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to anotherphysical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Disclaimer
Love Imagined is memoir. It is the truth of my life as I remember it; others may remember it differently, but this is my story, my identitymy life influenced by people and places and my own conscious and unconscious relationship to historical events.
Family members and others named in Love Imagined have chosen to read it or not; various individuals have given verbal permission to include stories that involve them and to use their names or not.
I have changed or used generic names as needed for privacy. Also, because I write under a last name different from any of my siblings or children or ex-husbands, privacy is respected as much as possible. Sister is often used generically to respect the identity of my three older sisters. I have only one brother.
Love Imagined is but a blip in a lifetime of skirmishes looking for love. Much has been deleted, much added, more deleted, more added. It is difficult to be succinct, to write memoir versus autobiography. Memoir is more than memory; its memory unleashed, memory named, memory diagnosed, memory organized and reorganizedand brought to healthy conclusions.
I am a poet; this is my first attempt to write book-length prose; an attempt to reveal my story in depth, leaving less to metaphor, and to the imagination. Yet, to imagine is what my story strives to do, to see beyond what was and what isnot only to witness, but to attempt to decipher.
