Persimmons

The speaker of Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons” is an immigrant who struggles with being an imperfect speaker of his first language—importantly, we never even learn which dialect of Chinese this is—and English, the language of his new homeland. This struggle leads to a sense that the speaker is isolated on his own linguistic island, although the poem ends on an optimistic note, suggesting that language is only one of the ways people can communicate with one another.

The poem contrasts five characters’ idiosyncratic relationships with language. The speaker’s engagement with words dominates the poem’s narrative; we also learn about the narrow perspective of Mrs. Walker, the metaphorically rich and allusive comparisons of the speaker’s mother, the sense memories of his father, and the flirtatious interest in foreign words of his love interest Donna. Throughout the poem, the speaker marks specific words in italics—always the words that sound most foreign to him at any given moment.

The poem opens with Mrs. Walker’s rigid, academic version English. In class, she aims for semantic and analytical accuracy, which the poem reveals to be a flaw: This teacher lacks empathy, holds other cultures at a remove, and doesn’t have the imaginative capacity for lateral thinking. When the speaker, then a sixth-grader, doesn’t know “difference / between persimmon and precision” (Lines 4-5), Mrs. Walker reacts with violence and anger. She does not explain how to keep these assonant words straight, nor can she sympathize with a language learner’s challenges. Instead, she “slapped the back of my head / and made me stand in the corner” (Lines 2-3), resorting to punishment to mask her failure as an educator. The italics indicate to readers that to a new speaker of English, the words “persimmon” and “precision” have not yet formed synaptic pathways to meaning; they are so far only sounds—and the speaker’s perception of them as foreign words marks him as different just as much as Mrs. Walker’s mistreatment.

The second stanza illustrates the more nuanced understanding of language that the speaker has developed since that sixth grade experience. Unlike Mrs. Walker, who can’t imagine linking “persimmon” and “precision,” the poet knows that the point of language is exactly this kind of connection, which is often abundant with meaning. These words now take on a surfeit of associations, joined to a memory of the speaker being taught “How to choose / persimmons. This is precision” (Line 7). This fruit is finicky and requires specialized knowledge. Selecting it is a skill, as is knowing how to serve and eat it. The speaker’s instructions for handling persimmons are full of sensual description. The lines “Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted. / Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one / will be fragrant” (Lines 8-10), invokes the senses of touch (“soft”), smell (“sniff” and “fragrant”), and taste (“sweet”). Later, the speaker will delineate even further—to open the persimmon, one has to “put the knife away […] / Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat” (Lines 11-12). These qualifications for different kinds of touch enact the meaning of the word “precision.” Notably, in this stanza, none of the words are italicized—there is nothing foreign or alienating to the speaker about consuming this fruit.

The physicality of eating persimmons moves the speaker’s memory to another headily sensuous experience—a sexual encounter with Donna, which features language in a completely different way. The pair are “In the yard, dewy and shivering / with crickets” (19-20)—a description with the purposefully ambiguous modifier “dewy and shivering,” which could refer literally to the grass moving as insects hop around, or the nude, anticipating bodies of the aroused young people. Rather than diving into sex, the speaker uses his multilingualism to flirt: “I teach her Chinese” (Line 22). This line carries many resonances. It compares the speaker favorably to Mrs. Walker, the awful teacher of the first stanza—unlike her, he is using language to charm and seduce, not marginalize and punish. Another thing that makes this lesson different from Mrs. Walker’s is a curious absence of “precision”—the speaker calls his first language “Chinese,” rather than identifying the actual dialect he speaks. This, combined with his admission that he has “forgotten” many Chinese words (Line 24), explains why this stanza’s italics are non-English words. The speaker here is fully in his American identity; his Chinese suddenly limited to informal diminutives (“Crickets: chiu chiu” (Line 23)) or simple pronouns that he nevertheless spins into a romantic appeal (“Ni, wo: you and me. / I part her legs” (Lines 25-26)). The speaker’s sexy foreignness is just an illusion. Though he woos Donna with a comparison to “the moon” (Line 28), a traditional symbol of beauty in classical Chinese poetry, he does so in English.

The fourth stanza returns to Mrs. Walker’s—and the speakers’ classmates’—combative understanding of language. The speaker lists “other words / that got me into trouble” (Lines 29-30), all of which share assonant or associative qualities and all of which are again italicized to indicate their non-internalized foreignness to the young speaker. The first pair are “fight and fright” (Line 31), a suggestive combo that plays on the fight-or-flight instinct of scared animals and becomes a fitting description of the speaker’s physical altercations, presumably in school. The other pair of words are “wren and yarn” (Line 31), which not only sound similar, but also have in common a similar tactile quality: “Wrens are soft as yarn” (Line 36). This sensory link between bird and fiber stems from the fact that the speaker’s “mother made birds out of yarn” (Line 37) that he loved. This stanza’s juxtaposition of harsh playground politics with comforting home activities is a poignant window into the life of an immigrant child.

The fifth stanza acts as an ironic punch line to the story of Mrs. Walker. Trying to continue the lesson of “persimmon” and “precision,” she brings “a persimmon to class” (Line 40). The poem’s rueful joke is that Mrs. Walker is the one with the language problem, not the speaker. Rather than call the persimmon by its proper name, the teacher insists on calling it a “Chinese apple” (Line 43). The term is deeply telling. The provincial Mrs. Walker lacks the “precision” of language that she ostensibly wants to instill in her students. At the same time, the phrase “Chinese apple” is italicized, emphasizing Mrs. Walker’s reluctance to assimilate this piece of produce. Her term for it not so subtly hints at her racial bias; rather than simply naming the fruit, she wants to exoticize it, to mark it as something explicitly foreign and unpleasant, which can’t help but be read as her indictment of the poem’s similarly foreign speaker. But the speaker gets the last laugh: Mrs. Walker’s profound ignorance drives her continued failure. She could not tell if the persimmon was “ripe or sweet” (Line 44), so she selected a bad-tasting one.  Instead of “put[ting] the knife away” (Line 11), she “cut it up” (Line 41), ruining it completely with another burst of unfeeling violence. She remains a terrible teacher to the end, and her students will never know the enjoyment a persimmon can provide.

In the next brief stanza, the speaker’s mother acts as a foil to Mrs. Walker’s cold, analytic interaction with language. Sharing her love of persimmons with her son, his mother describes the taste as something otherworldly, with elements of science fiction and parental love: “every persimmon has a sun / inside, something golden, glowing, / warm as my face” (Lines 46-48). This fruit is not something to clinically dissect, steeled for an encounter with the unfamiliar, but instead something that summons associations with life-giving sunshine, hope for the future, and the soft and warm cheek of a child. Acting out his mother’s association between persimmons and sun, the speaker literally connects one to the other in the eighth stanza. Finding two unripe persimmons in his parents’ cellar—a redolent symbol of their everlasting, miraculously preserved love for him—the speaker “set both on my bedroom windowsill, / where each morning a cardinal / sang, The sun, the sun” (Lines 51-53). The italics make the birdsong into yet another form of language. The words might be foreign to the speaker, but he can interpret them correctly because he knows how persimmons link to the sun’s rays. In the next stanza, the bright visual of sunlight illuminating the hidden heart of persimmons (which are indeed vaguely translucent when really ripe) reminds the speaker of his father, who slowly lost the ability to perceive this fruit in this way when he went blind. As a gesture of love, empathy, and a reminder of the senses left to the older man, the speaker gives him these sun-ripened persimmons. He can still feel their taste and touch, even if he cannot see them: “heavy as sadness, / and sweet as love” (Lines 59-60).

In the ninth stanza, the poem shifts its time frame. We are no longer in the speaker’s distant memories; instead, we are almost in the present, “This year” (Line 61). The scene reconfigures an earlier stanza: The speaker is once again in the cellar, but this time he is “looking / for something I lost” (Lines 62-63) and does not find anything like the magically appearing persimmons; their internal sunshine has been replaced with “muddy lighting” (Line 61). Instead of the beautiful link between persimmon light and his father’s fading eyesight, now there is a communication disconnect. The speaker unthinkingly asks “how his eyes are, a stupid question” (Line 68) because it betrays a distance between the two men, a lack of empathy that the speaker immediately castigates himself for. His father answers in a language that is now foreign to the speaker—note the italics marking the response, “All gone” (Line 69). The father speaks in translated Chinese, aiming to communicate sensual and emotional truths.

But the poem ends by dissolving this linguistic rift between father and son through ekphrasis—when a written work describes a piece of visual art. Though the speaker does not find actual fruit, he stumbles onto several paintings his father made—including one of persimmons. This creates another unexpected connection, like the ones the poem made earlier between unlikely words; here, the “newspaper” earlier used to wrap real persimmons (Line 49) is transformed into the silk paper on which their image will live on forever. They are almost as full of life as the sun-bearing fruit itself: “so full they want to drop from the cloth” (Line 76). This artwork prompts the poem’s longest exchange between two people—a conversation that we see in italics, indicating that it occurred in Chinese. The speaker is no longer at a loss for the words of his first language; rather, he absorbs his father’s long description of his painting experiences in all of its sensual richness. The father’s language focuses on the physical, as the poem returns full-circle to the word connection that prompted it: “persimmons” and “precision.” The painter gives a final, definitive example of how these two concepts are connected—by the “precision in the wrist” (Line 82) necessary to execute the brushwork depicting the round fruit. The man has made the strokes so many times that he no longer needs his eyesight to recreate the image: “These I painted blind” (Line 84). Just as for the speaker’s mother, the persimmons contained the warmth of her child’s cheek, for his father, they have the same significance as the “scent of the hair of one you love” (Line 86). The poem ends with the speaker’s father recalling and giving deep weight to the gesture the speaker made earlier when he gave his father the sun-ripened persimmons. Exchanged with emotional tenderness and a deep personal bond—not with the distaste of Mrs. Walker—the fruit that “swelled, heavy as sadness, / and sweet as love” (Lines 59-60) now becomes a physical manifestation of that love, finally “ripe” (Line 88).