Ever since, the moment has been particularly instructive for him in his understanding of faith: "I look back a lot on that terror of being up that high, suspended between heaven and earth, and I think that’s what my relationship with God has been.

Kristina Marie Darling, in Rattle, observed how Lee's writing on identity was necessarily bifurcated by him being both an immigrant from China and Indonesia to the United States.

Darling wrote:"Lee’s newest work examines the many contradictions inherent in the immigrant experience, depicting them in spare, lyrical narratives throughout.

Often juxtaposing thoughtful observations on identity and family with Western attempts to commercialize and quantify, Lee’s poems convey the difficulty of negotiating one’s heritage with American cultural values, proving at once philosophical and grounded in everyday life.

In sum, "Lee does not merely peer at the edge of the unknown; he enters it, as though it were a familiar room in a childhood home, and returns to report.