Contemporary Poetry

190 contemporary poetry

foreigner’s spoken English, determined by a mother tongue,

each person’s noise fell on a colouring ear, which bent the

listener’s eye and consequently the speaker’s countenance...

While some sounds were tolerated, even granting the speaker

a certain status in the instances of say French or British, other

infl ections condemned one to immediate alien.^51

Lee’s ‘Persimmons’ presents this sense of linguistic exclusion or
difference as well as interrogating a cultural legacy.^52 The poem
examines ideas of integration, the mourning of a mother language
and the importance of memorialising what survives the process of
immigration. Zhou Xiaojing comments that ‘Persimmons’ con-
ceives of the past as consisting of ‘memories, experiences, received
knowledge, established notions, and culturally and historically
constructed ethnic identity’, all of which are ‘reconstructed, ques-
tioned, challenged, and re-created’.^53 Initially, the poem recalls the
violence of the sixth-grade teacher Mrs Walker, who hits the child
for mispronunciation, for not knowing the difference between ‘per-
simmon and precision’ (p. 17 ). Lee shows how processes of cultural
translation and equally importantly mistranslation operate. The
teacher, rather than naming the fruit persimmon, refers to it as a
‘Chinese Apple’ (p. 18 ) and failing to identify it as unripe, is exposed
herself as failing in ‘precision’. Within the poem, persimmons are
associated with the child’s need to integrate, a physical sexuality
and the attempt to retain a cultural legacy through processes of
memory. These linkages in the text are asserted as exploratory
performances within the poem. A key section recreates a scene of
erotic translation as the speaker attempts to teach a lover Chinese.
Onomatopoeia guides the speaker initially, but amnesia also inter-
venes as he tries to translate the setting: ‘Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew:
I’ve forgotten / Naked: I’ve forgotten. / Ni, wo: you and me’ (p.
17 ).
Lee presents a relationship to an unfamiliar language in expe-
riential terms. The differences between words such as ‘fi ght and
fright’ and ‘wren and yarn’ (p. 17 ) are described in terms of agency,
action and family activity. ‘Fight’ is what the child does ‘when he
was frightened’, and ‘fright’ (p. 17 ) is what the child feels while
fi ghting. Equally, wrens are presented as indistinguishable from