The Meaning Behind the Doughnut
Eric Liaw


In the sonnet Ode to the Doughnut, the author wrote about the wonders of the doughnut. Doughnuts may seem a trivial subject for a work of literature but, in fact, there is much to discuss about one of the world’s most recognizable pastries.
Numerous interpretations of the poem can exist and coexist. First, the poem can be read as humor. The humor arises from the way the language in which the poem is written in reflects the personality of the author or character that narrates it. The character can be seen as a childish, quirky, and affable person who has a particular weakness for doughnuts. He thus is sharing and joking about his love for doughnuts, and we laugh at the character’s character. What you get out of reading the poem is the impression that people have weaknesses or idiosyncrasies, and that unique personalities make humorous characters in literature.
The doughnut is sometimes associated with the modern American pop culture and its wealthy lifestyle and fast food. It joins French fries, burgers, potato chips, and soda in the spotlight of the rising obesity epidemic in America. Partly because of this, the reference to doughnut lovers is seen throughout American culture as the stereotypical, antiheroic average Joe. For example, the doughnut appears in police jokes, and the most well-known doughnut fan is probably Homer Simpson of The Simpsons. In this regard, the sonnet can be read from a dubious point of view, and it becomes a slightly sarcastic jest of the American lifestyle. The poem, especially the title, suggests that Americans, youth especially, pay to much homage to trivial aspects of life like entertainment, fashion, and video games and remain ignorant of aspects like geography and history, classical art, the economy, and global issues. The silliness of the poem and the character’s unabashed addiction to costly and fattening snacks brings alarm along with laughs.
The third interpretation of the poem is that the Ode to the Doughnut is what it says it is: a poem in praise of the doughnut, except here the doughnut represents the simple things we encounter in daily life. The message is that the simple life is the good life. The Irish author Oscar Wilde once wrote, “I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.” Unfortunately, we often take simple, harmless pleasures for granted. We overlook the things that are good in our lives and are not grateful for them. Instead we focus on negative things: our fears, troubles, conflicts, stress, and unsound desires. If we allow ourselves to become entangled in these corrupting thoughts and habits, then happiness is hard to find and life becomes long, complicated, and full of disappointment. The simplicity of the poem tells us to remember the simpler parts life. The purpose of the doughnut is neither to provide nourishment nor just to taste good, but to make people happy. What can be wrong with happiness? It may seem strange or childish that a sonnet is dedicated to the now mass-produced bulk of sugar-covered starch, but in reality, the poem targets precisely those who doubt the poem and is a sincere message to find solace within oneself.

There were many literary tools used in the poem that helped form the humor of the sonnet. If the humor and actual text was the bread of the poem, then the devices constituted the butter on top. Rhyme was one of the methods that helped the poem sparkle. Normally, the rather straightforward and simply structured sentences in the sonnet would be boring and slow. However, rhyme allows the silly language of the poem to flow and not bore readers.
The upbeat voice of the poem would be lost if it didn’t have rhythm and meter. If the sonnet was not written in iambic pentameter, some lines would stick out and it would not be as fun or easy to read. Although more upbeat meters exist (for example, the anapestic foot of limericks), iambic pentameter is considered “standard” because most sonnets—at least those that are mutually agreed on as classic masterpieces—are in iambic pentameter. This touch of workmanship and seriousness actually adds to the humorous and sarcastic tone by making the poem still “worthy of serious thought”. This is the effect that parody imparts—a twist is always funny. Also, in line 13, “inquire” adds a punch because it rhymes with the lines above it (lines 11 and 9).
There were some examples of alliteration, repetition, and puns. There was alliteration in the way “deliciousness” and “delightfulness” (“deli**u*ness”) share similar syllables, the same placement of the accent, and the same location with respect to their lines (lines 11, 12). The way lines 5 and 6 and lines 11 and 12 share the same structure and meaning functions as a built-in crescendo: The repetition adds rhythm and emphasis. There is a pun in the beginning on the word “sweet” that piques interest. By beginning with “My love” the reader still assumes it to be a human (even after reading the title, the reader may believe the author could be giving a donut to his love), not knowing that the opening simile is in truth a literal statement. The author quickly erodes the illusion starting on line 3 and ending on line 4-5, probably because he did not want the simile to become the focus of attention.
The choice of words added more humor and extra parodies. The switching of noun and adjective in “sugar white” (line 1) resembles older English grammar. The archaisms “O”, “thy”, and “besprinkled” are further examples (lines 9, 10, and 14). In general the word choice uses unusual words (like “torus” in line 10) to create a parodistic voice by going slightly out of their way to describe an ordinary object. This was a favorite technique of the famous British comedy group Monty Python.
The title is a joke in itself: its claim of identity as an ode is not quite accurate. Usually, odes are long, formal poems of many stanzas that tell a story or are in praise of something. Ode to a Doughnut is not an ode but a sonnet of a measly 14 lines—the title is just bluffing. Also related, a trend in modern odes, like those of Pulitzer Prize winner Pablo Neruda, is to glorify pedestrian objects to illustrate ideas. This sonnet is thus a kind of parody.
In conclusion, Ode to the Doughnut is a humorous sonnet that draws on many themes and parodies. It uses other literary devices to present itself in a humorous way, and it illustrates and explores many different themes that can be tied to doughnuts.

Sonnet

Ode to the Doughnut
Eric Liaw

My love is always sweet like sugar white,
So sweet that others gaze with envious eyes.
For my love is a quite uncommon sight,
A most sought-after and delicious prize.
Who dawned upon this wondrous recipe?
Who was the first to fry a ring of dough?
For I believe all pastry fans agree
To that great genius our thanks we owe.
O doughnut, sweet dessert of child’s desire,
May your besprinkled torus reign supreme!
Your sweet deliciousness we all admire;
Your warm delightfulness we all esteem.
I therefore must inquire if it’s alright
To mar thy perfect beauty with a bite.

Heritage Paper

Five Bushels of Rice


憫農 Pitying the Farmer
李紳 Li Shen (Tang Dynasty)

鋤禾日當午, Hoeing underneath the midday sun,
汗滴禾下土。 Sweat dripping down into the soil.
誰知盤中飧, Who realizes that this dish of rice,
粒粒皆辛苦。 Grain by grain, is all from bitter toil?

Rice was so precious in those days that few families could eat rice every meal like we do nowadays. Most often, people ate cheaper, bland yams for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Rice was eaten only a few times each year. No one would leave a single grain of rice uneaten when the opportunity came; all bowls were scraped clean. These were the times that my grandmother, or “ah-ma” in Taiwanese, grew up in.
My ah-zhou (great-grandmother) carried rice for a living. Each morning she went to the rice store where she worked as a delivery woman and loaded each 50-pound sacks of rice, bag by bag, onto the wooden cart. Every day, the handles of the cart bit into her hands as she pulled it around town. Blisters formed, popped, and calloused over to form again. It was not an easy job, but there was nothing better. Her three daughters and herself depended on the meager amounts she received for the bags of rice she had to shoulder into each household. One day of carrying rice earned four copper coins. One week of carrying rice got rice for a family of four. Two months of backbreaking labor earned five bushels of rice.
My ah-ma and her family lived in a small, dank storeroom behind the kitchen of a large manor in Tainan. They had a few pots for cooking, a futon on the floor for sleeping, and a cardboard box of clothes—two sets of clothes for each person. The kitchen they lived right behind of was not for them. It was used by the cooks of the other three families that lived in the large manor. They were my ah-ma’s family members too, her uncles and aunts, but she did not see them that often.
Actually, my ah-ma hadn’t always lived in the cockroach-ridden storeroom all her life. Her family once lived in a separate wing of the vast Chen family manor. Their troubles had started twelve years ago, in the summer when the sea grew calm and ushered the trading ships across the Taiwan Strait to Fukien, where they would fill the wooden bellies of the junks with valuable wares. Her father was the youngest son of eight in the Chen household. Scholarly, handsome, and wealthy, he was well respected in the household and by the whole community. Still today, I hear stories of how any musical instrument that his hands held always sang with the most beautiful of sounds, be it the driving rhythms of the pipa (Chinese lute), the haunting notes of the xiao (bamboo flute), or the plaintive, heartrending melodies of the erhu (the two-stringed fiddle). He owned and sailed a grand, giant ship, 300 ft. long with four towering masts. Each year, he set sail for the bustling, thriving ports of Fukien to trade— Quanzhou, Fuzhou, and Xiamen, the largest ports of the Eastern Hemisphere in their time. From each trading expedition he brought back an ample profit, enough to buy the luxuries of life so few could afford.
Then one voyage, her father’s ship never returned. No one knows why. It could have been wokou, sea pirates who sail from Japan to ambush the fat trading ships. They must have surrounded her father’s ship, taken the cargo, and held the crew captive. Sometimes they demanded ransoms from the captives’ families. Most often they just killed everyone and dumped their bodies overboard for fishermen to find days later. Day after day, month after month, my ah-ma’s family waited, until after a year, the household finally gave him up for dead. My ah-ma was four years old.
The other families of the household banished my ah-zhou and her daughters out of the household. My ah-zhou had only daughters. Her daughters would inherit absolutely nothing so neither would my ah-zhou. After all, she was a daughter-in-law who had married into their family, and was not worth the trouble to help. My ah-ma’s family kept only their personal articles: their clothes. Everything else stayed in the manor, with my ah-ma’s uncles and aunts. My ah-zhou could do nothing but cry.
Maybe her crying touched the grief of her brother-in-laws over their own lost brother. Maybe it didn’t. Either way, the other families allowed my ah-ma’s family to stay in the manor and off the streets. Since then, my ah-ma knew the grungy storeroom as her home. Because she was four when her father died and five when she moved to the storeroom, she did not remember her earliest years that clearly. She still occasionally dared to venture into the buildings across the central courtyard. When she walked by her relatives’ quarters, she moved as silently and unobtrusively as she could. She snuck into her old home as well. Sometimes, when the halls were empty and the curtains around the ornate windows blew into billowy, changing shapes, she thought she could hear faintly the high, warbling, and sorrowful sound of the erhu on the wind.

Throughout her childhood, my ah-ma wore the same tattered and old school uniform everyday to school. She possessed the required books, a pen, and nothing else. The other children would bring crayons and brushes for art class, but my ah-ma and her two sisters could only sit silently behind their desks and do nothing but watch the other kids, including her own cousins, draw their pictures.
Being a girl, no praise for studying ever fell on her. Actually, her achievements were never mentioned, but that did not deter her from striving to excel in school. No matter how much her relatives ignored her family, they all knew tacitly that she was competent. She knew it too, and that made her proud inside.
My ah-ma knew her family’s status was low. She knew she would not get most of what she wanted or needed. One of the few things she did receive in her childhood was a Chinese dictionary. How she got it is a story of hardship and determination.
Of all things my ah-ma dreamed of having when she was young, a dictionary was what she wanted the most. If she could speed up her schoolwork, she would be able to fit studying in between the housework she did everyday. But a dictionary was a far-fetched idea for a family as poor as hers. Nonetheless, she decided that this was one thing she had to try for. So one night after supper, my ah-ma gathered up her courage and approached her mother. My ah-zhou was resting on a wooden crate.
“Mom, I have something to ask.”
"What?"
"I need a dictionary."
“A dictionary? Get a dictionary for what?” My ah-zhou stood up and wiped off her hands.
“For schoolwork. It would really help.”
“You don't need a dictionary.”
“I do. I never know the words in class because I can't look them up. "
"Dictionaries cost money, you know. You don't need a dictionary to look up words. Just ask your sisters."
"But they don't know them either. We're the only ones without dictionaries. How am I supposed to do well in school without a dictionary?”
My ah-zhou looked down for a while then replied, “We don’t have money for those kinds of things. That doesn't matter now anyways. We can talk later. Don't forget to take these plates to the faucet and wash them.”
My ah-ma didn't give up. Succeeding in school was her only hope of improving her life for the future. So she kept asking.
After weeks, my ah-zhou began to get tired by my ah-ma's pleading her to get her a dictionary. She figured the only way to appease her daughter was to somehow gather enough money to buy a dictionary. The 200 dollars (Old Taiwan Dollars) needed meant six or seven weeks of extra labor. 200 dollars was a lot of money—one dictionary could buy five bushels of delicious rice for the whole family, enough for three months of meals.
In my ah-zhou’s generation, girls rarely got any education, so she didn’t place school in a high priority. But my ah-zhou saw that my ah-ma was thinking day and night about that dictionary, so she carried more rice and didn’t come home until suppertime each day to earn extra money. My ah-zhou, buried underneath the giant sack of rice she carried, must have wondered countless times what in the world she was doing. But she still set aside a coin for my ah-ma's dictionary each time she was paid.
After two months of hard work she had saved enough money to buy one dictionary. When she came home that day, my ah-ma was putting bowls on the small table in the storeroom for supper. My ah-zhou fished out the rest of the 200 dollars from the family moneybox.
“Here it is, five whole bushels of rice! Take it and go buy your dictionary!”, she shouted gruffly. Her hand flew downwards and coins skittered across the table. They landed in front of my stunned ah-ma, still holding a plate in her hand.
My ah-zhou broke the silence. “Well, what do you say?” My ah-ma didn’t answer. She broke down crying, not because of the harshness of my ah-zhou's anger nor the difficulties she faced in getting an education, but because of the sacrifices her family would take so that she could realize her dream.
The next day, as my ah-ma cradled her new dictionary home from the bookstore, she envisioned herself armed with education and forging a new path toward a better life.

When I am visiting my grandparents in Taiwan, they often recount such stories from my family’s past about the tough times they have been through. Sometimes I feel ashamed at how I take blessings I have received for granted and humbled knowing there are bigger things in life to strive for than simple pleasures. At the same time though, I am inspired by my family’s stories to become better myself, to strive to do well in school, and to achieve the goals that I aspire to achieve. My life is too good; it is nothing compared to what my predecessors went through, and I should be grateful. My grandparents have worked hard and overcome great obstacles. If I were in their place, would I be where I am today?