Commentary

Playwright Vivian Keh planted her first persimmon tree in 2012, two years after the debut of her play Persimmons in Winter about two Korean sisters who survived World War II and the Korean War. “It was based on my mother’s experiences,” the playwright explained. “She went through some very hard times, times of starvation and war. The metaphor is that the sisters are persimmons.” She has since planted fifty different varieties of trees, but the “centerpiece of her collection” is the cluster of persimmons bearing multiple grafts from other tree lovers, a “spiritual force in her home orchard.” Under their branches she talks to loved ones in the past who suffered and died, especially “two girls...left to die” during the famine. The conversations transport her: “the original branch that all these grafts came from, it came from Asia,” she explains. “And here we are together in my backyard.” She keeps the canopies of her persimmons low so that she can keep harvesting them when she is in her eighties. “There's so much that really disgusts me about our society right now,” she says, mentioning Asian hate crime in particular. “But when I harvest these persimmons, and I put them on the cutting board and start cutting...it's such a pleasure. And I start singing! They really do make me sing. Growing fruit trees is a very simple way to stay in love with our world.”

—THE