The Ten Steps to the Persimmon Tree
Trisha kingkeo
Trigger Warning: bullying and implied sexual assault
When my daughter and I first moved to America, we lived in a small two-bedroom house that I had to rent out to other Korean tenants. Despite everything, she was a bubbly and bright child. Every hair in the ponytail on the apex of her head bounced with her unceremonious eight-year-old stride, and I watched with both love and pride as she ran up to me in the garden at the tail end of our first summer in America.
“Mommy, why are you outside instead of inside?” She asked. I laughed at her bewilderment as I held her in a loose hug.
“Taehee, mommy’s gardening right now. Do you want to help me?” She tilted her head and scrunched her nose and mouth together to make a “thinking face.”
“Hmmm… No.” She giggled. “I wanna play. Can we play together?”
I turned toward my newly planted persimmon tree. It was a tree in the loosest terms of the word– a small stick only about a meter high with three even smaller, leafless branches. Not to mention, it was at a critical stage of development, needing very specific amounts of water and an incredible amount of care before it would ever be able to bear fruit.
“Uh, sorry Taehee, but I have to take care of the persimmon tree.” I squeezed my hug a little tighter as an apology.
“Why does it need taking care of?”
“Well,” I said. “Just like how mommy takes care of you because I love you, I need to take care of the tree because I love it.” I watched as her eyes fell, but she nodded her head in understanding as she backed out of my hug.
“Can we play later?”
“Yes we can!” I said, “but for now, why don’t you go draw inside?” Her laughs filled the air as she stumbled toward the house, and I rolled up my sleeves as I turned back to the tree.
It was completely different from the persimmon trees from my neighborhood in Korea. They were tall, wide trees that followed on either side of the street from my house to the school. The beautiful red-orange fruit that bore from October to January warmed my heart as it filled my stomach, even if they lined the road to my personal hell.
My mind sank back into those memories—my wrist twisted at an unnatural angle, and dark purple spots bloomed from my knees up to my—
“Mommy,” Taehee asked by the door. Her voice snapped me back to my body. “How far is the tree from the door?”
I put on a smile, intent on leaving those memories buried in Korea. “I’m not sure, Taehee. Why don’t you count how many steps it takes to get from there to here?”
“Okay!” Taking one step at a time and saying the number, she counted: “One… two… three… five… six… seven… five… nine… four– TEN! Ten steps!” She yelled as she ran to me for a hug.
“Yes, Taehee. It takes ten steps!” My smile turned more genuine as I held her in my arms, the weight of my past easing up for a little.
Despite my anxiety, I understood that my daughter needed an education in America. It was a pain to enroll her with my limited English skills, but I knew enough to get her into the school system. And as she grew older, she poured herself into learning American culture while I poured myself into taking care of the tenants and the growing persimmon tree.
“Mom, come look at the drawing I made in art class!” I looked up to see a young woman, a little shorter than myself, bathed in the dimming light of the fall afternoon. Taehee went from eight to sixteen in what I believed was the span of a day. She was growing up well on her own, but I was worried about the tree since it was only just starting to show inklings of fruit this year.
“Uh, give me a second, Taehee.” My hands were deep in a mixture of compost, but I removed my hands from the bucket and motioned for her to come over here.
“Ew, I don’t want to smell the compost though.”
“It’s just compost; the smell can’t hurt you.” I laughed, but she still shook her head and started walking away.
“Never mind, I’ll show you it later.”
“Taehee, just take the ten steps to the tree and show me.” I quoted her younger self with a smile.
She turned back to face me and rolled her eyes, but started to walk toward the tree. Taking one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten steps. She held out a paper with a bright red and orange color that was reminiscent of the persimmon of my past. A tinge of fear came, but the intense colors that gave me so much comfort back then still gave me the comfort I needed now. I admired it for a few more seconds before seeing writing that I didn’t understand at the top of the page.
“What’s this part? Is it the title?”
She nodded her head. “It says ‘The Colors of Dawn’ in English here.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said and smiled at her. “Hang it up with your others in our room.” I bent down again to shovel the compost onto the tree. “It looks almost like the persimmon fruit back in Korea.”
She gagged at the compost smell filling the immediate air.
“Mom!” she yelled as she walked away. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six steps; but still turned to stay near me. “Mom, why don’t you ever talk about Korea?”
“What do you mean?” I responded, my hand stopped in its place. “Of course I talk about Korea, Taehee.”
“Not the important things.” She countered. “Like school–”
My mind flashed to the cream colored walls of my high school. A long hallway with doors to classrooms filled with children who had triple the amount of money my parents made in a year as their weekly allowance. My assigned desk where trash was dumped on me on good days and I went home with bruises on the bad. The alley that broke off of my beloved persimmon tree path where I was beaten by my peers.
“Or like my father–” My knees gave out underneath me as my brain forced more memories to come up. A male student who bullied me, pushed me into the alley away from the persimmon trees. His hands on my body. The bruises after he was done. The bright red and orange persimmon fruit blurring through my tears as I ran home.
And then the cold police room where I had been forced to admit to being a “promiscuous woman” instead of a scared young girl. Then the conception of a child that could not be terminated. The birth and early years of living with Taehee, and constantly looking over my shoulder for him to come and take her away from me.
I shook my head, trying to focus on the ground where the roots of the tree in front of me were spreading out. I could hear Taehee’s concerned voice. I breathed in, focusing on the earthy smell of the compost.
“Mom, what’s wrong?” She asked.
“I’m fine. I need to go back to gardening, go inside” I steadied myself to a kneeling position, taking deep breaths to calm my shaking hands. My eyes traced up and down the bark of the tree, following the lines of the circular moss on the trunk.
I heard Taehee turn to leave and the slow rhythm of her feet on the grass. I force my breathing to match. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six. In and out as the crunch gets farther away. But her footsteps pause, only to resume quickly and angrily as she strides back.
“Why are you always pushing me away for this stupid tree?”
“What?” I said as my eyes shot to her face. I was met with furrowed eyebrows and eyes just barely holding back tears staring down at me. “Taehee I would never–”
“You do! You don’t talk to me about your past. All you do is put your love into this tree. You’re the only person I can rely on.” Her breathing shook and her voice broke. “But you won’t let me in.”
Her eyes flicked to the tree, and back to me before she turned to walk away; taking the ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one steps away from me and the persimmon tree.
I tried to stand up but my body was still weak from the memories. My knees fell into the compost in front of me, and it squished under my weight as I pushed myself up once more. I ran toward the house and ignored the shake in my legs.
The open doorway let the orange sunrays into the dark house, and my breathing grew heavy again. The orange– the pain and the comfort all at once. I slammed the door closed and squeezed my fists together to ground me here. Taehee needs me, focus.
I pulled myself to our shared room and peered into the cracked door. Her back was facing me and her body was hunched over, arms wrapped around herself as she cried on her bed. Her sobs were shaking her whole body, but she made little to no sound.
For some unknown reason, my breathing quieted instead of calling out to her like I knew she needed me to. My voice did not want to intrude, and my hands were unable to reach for her. I was stuck as a passive observer of my own daughter’s pain.
A pathetic excuse for a mother.
One quiet hic broke through the silence, and I almost ran to her right then. But I looked down, at my shaking knees and dirty hands, and I made the excuse that she wouldn’t want to smell the compost.
I sat with my back on the wall of the bedroom, turned away from my sobbing Taehee and both hands pushing at my heart, as I cried the same quiet tears that she was.
We were never quite the same, jokes were laughed at and meals were shared, but there was always a distance between us that we could not figure out how to close. Or maybe it was one that always existed and we were only confronted with it now. In the end, we did what we always did– Taehee focused on school and her American friends and I focused on the tree.
A year later, it finally bore fruit. It had the exact bright orange and red tones that I remembered, and I felt decades of pressure in my heart ease. All day I sat under the tree and stared up at the fruit as waves of emotion flooded into me. Unspeakable pain and fear. Pavement under my feet as I walked the path in the afternoon, the trees guiding me home and away from the school. Memories of that boy and the police officer staring me down. An itchy cast around my broken wrist.
I felt my body wanting to run, but I didn’t let it. I stared up at the tree and lived in those memories, knowing somehow that the fruit right in front of me would bring me back. I didn’t push them away, I stayed in them until my new life with Taehee broke through the old one. The orange and reds still gave me fear, but it was duller than it was before. The comfort that I derived from it shifted too. Not like a reminder of the past, but like the dawn of my future in America.
The persimmon turned bluer and darker as the sun set, and I felt myself smile. My eyes fell away from the fruit toward the house, and I saw Taehee about eight steps away from the tree staring at me.
I couldn’t read her expression, it was as if a stranger wore the face of my daughter. Before I could call out to her, she turned and walked the nine and ten steps away and into the house.
The next day, I went back to the tree. I looked at the fruit as I picked the ripest ones as a surprise for Taehee. When she came home from school today, I wanted to answer every question she asked before– about Korea and her father– and even ones that she did not yet know to ask.
After picking dozens of persimmons, I grabbed several sheets of paper and wrote down everything I could. It wasn’t finished but it was a start that I thought would close the gap and help her understand.
My hand was still furiously writing when I heard the door unlock. Taehee entered our small kitchen, her eyes flicked to me and then turned to walk to our room.
“Taehee, wait.” I said. “I have a present for you.”
She stopped walking away, but she still didn’t respond. I patted the seat next to me, then reached to my right where the persimmon fruit was cut on a plate. “It’s persimmons from the tree, and–”
“I can’t believe this.” She said, “I don’t want the fruit from the tree, and I never have!” She stormed to our room and closed the door with a punctuating slam, leaving me alone with all the persimmon and the answer to what she was looking for.
No matter how hard I tried, she never listened. She responded only in English, and too fast for me to understand. I picked out words like “mom” and “life”, but her tone told me all I needed to know– the distance that was growing between us finally became too great for her to bear. But I never stopped trying. I wrote more details during the day and joked with her when she was home at night. Even when she did not respond, I still held hope that we could become close again because she was still here with me.
On her last day of school, I woke up to nothing. No clothes, no art, no trace that my daughter ever lived in this home– just the realization that I no longer had her.
A numbness spread over my body. The happiness and the fear were gone, and only a throbbing emptiness was in its place. My worst fear had come true– my male classmate had caused Taehee to be taken from me, but it was me who drove her away.
Days blurred together yet the sun took an eternity to rise and set. And every day was spent at the persimmon tree; staring up at the leaves, branches, or fruit. When I finally felt something, it didn’t matter that the feeling was like my heart was being ripped out of my chest, I felt like I could finally breathe for the first time in years.
My hand flew to my heart, and I fell onto the ground. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, both my pain and numbness were gone. I felt free.
I sat up once again, staring at the persimmon tree that I grew and cherished, and loving it for what it grew into. The trunk is large enough that I could not wrap my arms all the way around, and there are so many leaves that I could spend a lifetime counting them all. A smile pulls at my mouth, slightly unfamiliar but good.
When I turn around, I see a young woman, unmistakably Taehee, standing by the door. She mutters soft and sad words I don’t understand, but her voice cracks on an unmistakable “mom” that reminds me of the scared child I held in my arms.
“I’m right here.” I said. I look down and see her hands clutching the papers I wrote, dozens of sheets that looked stained with tears and creased by frantic hands. “Take the ten steps to the tree, Taehee.”
I’m not sure if she heard me; but she took one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten steps to the persimmon tree and knelt down as she wept.