explantion of the poetry the song from heaven
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A Chinese woman, the descendant of immigrants who moved to the United States to build the railroad, ruminates on the desire of a boy, probably her son, to return to China. He has never seen China and is part Caucasian, which we know by his "blond hair, /the part that belongs to his father," but he stills longs for his ancestral homeland.
The speaker describes the desired China, where the boy imagines everyone will look like him, as "that blue flower ... bluer than the sea."
The speaker continues in her thoughts by weaving the current boy's desire for China together with the hope the original "boy" who came here had to return to his homeland, a wish that remained unfulfilled. The speaker contrasts the landscape of the United States, with its "pancake plains" and air thin enough to "starve" on, to the imagined beauties of China.
The narrator ponders how the ancestral desire for a homeland can emerge in a boy several generations removed from it. She wonders if this desire is genetic...