From Blossoms

The publication of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers in 1974 and Elaine Kim’s Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Context in 1982 saw an increased interest in Asian American voices in American literature. In its meditation on the ways in which lost origins define our experience, “From Blossoms” indirectly speaks to Lee’s own background as a lifelong exile from his ancestral mainland China. Just as the peaches “carry within [themselves] an orchard” (Line 12), as a kind of living testimony to a vanished history, the poem imagines the immigrant experience of diaspora, or living geographically removed from one’s culture of origin, as representative of the broader human experience of being shaped and defined by the passage of time. Individuals displaced from their places of origin must similarly carry their homelands within themselves in the form of memories.