Persimmons

“Persimmons” is a free verse poem by Chinese American author Li-Young Lee. The poem was originally part of Lee’s first collection, Roses, published in 1986. Lee’s poetry is influenced by Eastern and Western poetic traditions, such as Tang Dynasty, Romantic, and American confessional. Nevertheless, “Persimmons,” like much of Lee’s work, exists outside of the traditions and movements that influenced it, developing an independent Asian American poetic voice.

“Persimmons” navigates the space between Asian and American identities. The poem’s speaker is a Chinese immigrant who grows up an imperfect speaker of English and Chinese. “Persimmons” shares the speaker’s sense of linguistic exile, focusing on how language shapes one’s identity and one’s connection with others. “Persimmons” remains one of Lee’s most anthologized and celebrated poems.

Poet Biography

Li-Young Lee was born August 19, 1957, in Jakarta, Indonesia to an ethnically Chinese family. Lee’s maternal great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President who attempted to restore hereditary monarchy in China and name himself emperor. Lee’s father was one of Communist leader Mao Zedong’s personal physicians, and was forced to flee to Indonesia for political reasons. Lee and his family moved from Indonesia to Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, before settling in Pennsylvania in 1964, where his father became a Presbyterian minister.

Lee’s early life was spent reconciling Chinese and English influences. His father taught Lee both Chinese poetry from the Tang Dynasty (618–907) and the King James Bible. Lee’s feelings of displacement and his struggles to reconcile the Chinese and American parts of himself fuel many of his poems. Most significantly, “Persimmons” attempts to an existence between languages and cultures.

Though Lee’s father introduced him to poetry at a young age, Lee did not begin writing it until he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh. There, he studied under American poet Gerald Stern. Though much of Lee’s work is influenced by the ideas of simplicity and silence that are fundamental in Classical Chinese poetry, Lee’s focus on narrative over image and on the past over the present place him squarely in Western Romantic and confessional traditions.

Lee graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1979, and went on to graduate studies at the University of Arizona and the State University of New York College. His first collection, Rose, was published in 1986 and contains many of his most anthologized poems, including “Persimmons.” The collection won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award and has served as a touchstone for other Asian American poets. Lee has since published four collections of poetry and one memoir. He lives in Chicago with his family.

Poem Text

Lee, Li-Young. “Persimmons.” 1986. Poets.org.

Summary

“Persimmons” opens with a moment of middle grade misery: The speaker remembers when his sixth grade teacher Mrs. Walker slapped him upside the head “for not knowing the difference / between persimmon and precision” (Lines 4-5)—two words that could sound almost homophonic with a mushy pronunciation. In the second stanza, the speaker, now an adult, connects the words: “precision” is required to pick a ripe persimmon (Line 7), which need to be judged both by sight and by smell. The speaker then describes how to properly eat this fruit.

The speaker moves to a scene between himself and a woman named Donna. He and Donna “lie naked” in a yard (Line 20), clearly about to have a sexual encounter. He teaches her a few words in Chinese, picking words at random from their surroundings. Some he remembers: “Crickets: chiu chiu” (Line 23), and “Ni, wo: you and me” (Line 25). Others, such as the Chinese words for “Dew” and “Naked” (Lines 23, 24), he has forgotten.

The fourth stanza returns to the topic of the first: Words the speaker had trouble differentiating while learning English, such as “fight and fright, wren and yarn” (Line 31). Though he could not distinguish the words individually, he can now—as he did with “persimmon” and “precision”—link them in chains on meaning. Fight and fright are each other’s converse, occurring simultaneously. Thinking about wrens, makes him remember his mother’s yarn crafts that often featured small birds.

In the ruefully funny fifth stanza, the speaker recounts another moment from the sixth grade class: “Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class” (Line 40), but was too ignorant to have picked out a ripe one, and insisted on exoticizing it by calling it a “Chinese Apple” (Line 43). The speaker, knowing that this unripe fruit would not taste good refused to consume a piece when she doled out sections to the class.

The speaker’s mother told him that “every persimmon has a sun / inside” (Lines 46-47)—a metaphor the speaker later made literal when he found not yet ripe persimmons “wrapped in newspaper” in his parents’ cellar (Line 49) and put them on the windowsill to soak up the sun. He then gave these persimmons to his father, who was in the process of “going blind” (Line 55).

The ninth stanza occurs in speaker’s present year. Again, in his parents’ cellar, he looks an undefined object “I lost” (Line 63). Meanwhile, his father sits atop the “tired, wooden stairs” (Line 64), happy that his son has come to visit. During this visit, the speaker finds “three paintings by my father” (Line 73). The speaker chooses the painting depicting two persimmons and brings it to his now fully blind father, who touches it and asks which painting it is. The speaker tells his father that the painting “is persimmons” (Line 79).

In the final stanza, the speaker’s father describes making the painting. For him, persimmons are such a standard subject that he no longer needs to see to reproduce them on the silk canvas: He has “painted them hundreds of times / eyes closed” (Lines 83, 84). There is comfort in this rote ability for a blind man who can no longer paint new things—the painting the son holds was made after the father went blind because “some things never leave a person” (Line 85). The father ends the poem by comparing this lasting memory to the smell of a loved one.