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The concept of what is or what is not a weed is not precisely defined
because it has both biological and sociological elements.
Biologically, weeds are plants having the ability to colonize, inhabit
and thrive in continually disturbed habitats, most especially in areas
that are repeatedly affected by human activity. Sociologically,
weeds are plants growing where someone wishes they would not.
This can be regarded casually as simply a plant out of place.

—From The Penguin Dictionary of Biology, 11th edition

 

One spring day after my first Northern Michigan winter, as I was still adjusting to life at the tip of the lower peninsula, Robert banged through the mudroom door after working in the yard, his jeans smeared with dirt, his hands full of weeds. 

This Midwesterner—for whom I had relocated thousands of miles from suburban Los Angeles the summer before; whom I would marry within a year; and who had listened closely to my stories of growing up the younger child of Chinese immigrants—announced that he was making dinner that night: wonton soup dumplings stuffed with ground pork and dandelion greens. 

Before I had left home and moved to Traverse City, my father had emphasized napa, not regular cabbage, as the preferred vegetable in his recipe for pork jiao xi dumplings. But just in case, he also recommended spinach as a backup. He never mentioned dandelions, and I never would have imagined them.

“They’re not just weeds,” Robert explained, rinsing his haul in the sink, sorting stems from narrow tooth-edged leaves while I looked on skeptically. “They’re greens,” he reassured me. Recalling his own childhood growing up in Flint, Michigan, with a father who worked for GM and a homemaker mother, both of them the children of Lebanese immigrants, he added, “My dad used to bring them in from the yard, and my mom would sauté the leaves for dinner.”

 

Dandelion (from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 6th edition) 

Noun. Any of various perennial plants of the genus Taraxacum of the composite family, having many-rayed yellow flower heads and deeply notched basal leaves, especially T. officinale, native to Eurasia and naturalized as a weed in North America, having edible leaves and flower heads that can be used to make wine. 

 

Ancient Chinese, Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians, as well as pilgrims who reputedly brought dandelions to America on the Mayflower, found nourishment, utility, and beauty in this flowering herbaceous plant that is cousin to daisies, asters, and chicory. But then twentieth-century modern lawn culture transformed them into interloper, invasive other. 

The summer we moved into our newly built mid-1970s tract home in Hacienda Heights, just over twenty miles east of downtown Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Valley, my parents laid down strips of St. Augustine sod in the backyard, a hardy grass they were told would keep down the weeds. I longed for a velvety green lawn like those I read about in storybooks, dotted with dandelion blooms to turn into golden chain bracelets, or to blow apart for wish-making when the blooms turned into snowy puffballs. But their immigrant homeowner pragmatism rode roughshod over my childish dreams. In the backyard of our house on Oldridge Drive, in the optimistically named Countrywood development of new-built housing where we lived, grass became coarse turf under my bare feet, and cheerful yellow dandelion flowers with their shiny green saw-toothed leaves became weeds.

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In the months before I had agreed to leave Southern California for Traverse City, I had learned how to make pork and napa cabbage jiao xi dumplings, steamed and potsticker style, from my Manchurian-born father, who had grown up eating this northern Chinese specialty. I’d insisted on cooking lessons from him, because I began to panic that I didn’t know how to make the dumplings I grew up with in my Chinese household in the Los Angeles suburbs, where most weekends of my early childhood, my father would mix the ground pork and napa cabbage filling, and the rest of us—my mother, older brother, and I—would join at the kitchen table to pleat rows and rows of jiao xi for our dinner. 

I was confident I could replicate the ingredients in my new Midwestern home, and years of practice folding and crimping dumplings would hold me in good stead. But I had never actually cooked them before, simply deferred to my father’s authority at the stove. Especially the method for making potstickers, my childhood favorite, which required first searing the dumplings in hot oil in a skillet, then pouring water on top to sizzle, before steaming them covered, and ultimately flipping the pan over onto a plate to serve, crunchy golden-brown bottoms up: This I needed to learn from my Baba.

A family recipe can be like a plant cutting or seed packet, gifted and received, taken miles away to settle into new soil, feeding a new life, providing comfort, helping one cope with a new environment. Potsticker dumplings became my father’s parting gift for his only daughter. He wouldn’t be able to keep making me potsticker dumplings when I moved to Michigan, but by God, he would teach me how to make jiao xi for myself. Because when someone leaves home, whether they want to or there’s no choice, they often seek to recreate what’s familiar, to ground themselves in a new place and life. He and I both knew that.

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After we finished eating Robert’s pork and dandelion greens wonton experiment, I called my parents, my weekly Sunday night ritual to stay in touch across three time zones.

“Chī le ma?” I asked my father, inquiring if he had eaten. “Chī le,” he responded, confirming the customary informal Chinese greeting. “Guess what, Baba,” I said eagerly to my father. “Robert made dumplings today, and he used dandelions he picked from our yard instead of cabbage!” 

I held the receiver, waiting for his response. Maybe I expected to hear his pleasure that the man who would become his future son-in-law had honored our family tradition with his own culinary translation. Or maybe I just hoped for a pat on the head, from all those miles away, commending us for our ingenuity. 

Instead, reaching back through decades to his childhood in Japanese-occupied Manchuria during World War II, my father said slowly, as the memory surfaced, “Dandelions? We ate those, too, when I was a boy. They were the first vegetable after the snow.” 

And in that moment, as his American-born daughter, I understood marrow-deep just how far my Baba had traveled—continents, countries and a lifetime ago—to put down roots in soil he has never really called his own. I had never heard his dandelion story before. But now I began to recognize that not only do roots plunge deep down into soil, they also extend far and wide.

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If dandelions are native to Eurasia, where they are said to have evolved 30 million years ago, my father’s memory of them as vegetable makes sense—just like Mediterraneans who forage wild chicory in the spring, sautéing the greens, recognizing delicious sustenance where others might just see weeds.

So once upon a time, my father was a skinny boy with a long face who considered dandelions as a welcome wild edible, native to his landscape, but then he grew up, moved far far away, and became the man who planted St. Augustine in our backyard with the sole purpose of weed control. His context and framing perspective shifted once his family fled Manchuria for Beijing, fled Beijing for Taipei, and then when he left Taipei for America as a grown man. He left home multiple times: fleeing Communists first in the 1940s; then taking a chance in 1965 (leaving wife and infant son who would follow the next year) with a graduate school visa to study education at USC (he wouldn’t register there, once he realized the cost of tuition); and finally rooting himself and his family in Southern California’s sun-baked clay loam soil, where he became a homeowner in the 1970s, first in Monterey Park, then in Hacienda Heights, wiping sweat from his forehead, his eyebrows dark slashes across the top of his long face, as he mowed our front and backyard lawns on weekends. 

Following the pipeline of the Asian immigrant diaspora that extended eastbound along the Pomona Freeway, away from Los Angeles proper, my parents were driven by their foothold in the middle class, drawn by the prospect of newer housing, bigger yards, good schools in the San Gabriel Valley, and a manageable commute for my dad back to his computer programmer job on Wilshire Boulevard back in Los Angeles. (What was “manageable” for him—a couple hours in inchworm traffic each way—is unthinkable to me now.) He traveled many miles in his lifetime, relocated multiple times, trading up housing with each move, from cramped apartments in mid-1960s downtown LA to their current suburban cul-de-sac house with a view, even higher up in the hills of Hacienda Heights than the house where I grew up. At night, he and my mother can look out their kitchen windows and see the lights of the city grid twinkling in the distance; on clear days, they can see the San Gabriel mountains from the kitchen table, while they eat their breakfast and lunch.

I remember as a grade school kid listening to the melancholy strains of “El Condor Pasa (If I Could)” on the family stereo, years after the 1970 release of the album Bridge Over Troubled Water, part of a small music collection that reflected my immigrant parents’ quiet, selective embrace of Western pop culture: Elvis’s greatest hits, Petula Clark’s Downtown, and a country gospel music compilation that included Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. My father would hum along to the soothing sounds of the Peruvian flute, saying how Simon & Garfunkel’s song reminded him of how he missed home during his first year in America, before my mom and brother had joined him in 1966, before I was born in 1969. 

A decade after his arrival, he could reflect back on that homesick year, as his American-born daughter asked him what it was like being by himself without his family. He told me about walking down Hollywood Boulevard, asking for a job in a Chinese restaurant, long workdays washing dishes, and in the evening, looking out the window of the apartment he shared with other Chinese students not far from the USC campus, thinking of home. 

But once my mom and brother arrived, he began to reorient his mental maps, no longer thinking of himself in exile, because home was no longer the place left behind. 

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In her essay “Two Ways to Belong to America,” Bharati Mukherjee writes, “The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of self-transformation.” I didn’t fully understand this distinction, given my childhood perception of my parents’ immigrant experience, until I was in my mid-twenties, teaching at a private girls prep school in Pasadena, California. I had asked a student for the recipe of a Nigerian fish stew she had brought for a school lunch potluck event celebrating African cultures. The next week, her mother showed up one afternoon at my office door, gifting me with the recipe and a batch she had made for me. After I thanked her and we chatted in the outdoor breezeway about how her daughter was doing in junior year English III, I asked naively, “Do you think of Nigeria often?” Dr. Ohikaure’s eyes flashed wide in surprise at my question for a second. “Yes,” she answered softly, her gaze drifting away across the school lawn to the cars in the street. “I think about it every single day.”

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“Is China home?” my husband asked once, during a visit to Los Angeles. My father shook his head. 

“Is America home?” My father laughed a bit, then shook his head again. 

“Where is home, then?” Robert persisted.

“Home is…” my father trailed off, searching for the right words in his second language for the past fifty years. “Home is my family.” 

These days, my parents know they are fortunate my brother lives close enough to come if the pipe under the kitchen sink is leaking or a laptop password doesn’t make sense, and they are grateful one grandson and his new wife can celebrate birthday and holiday meals with them out at the only Chinese restaurant their elderly palates tolerate post-pandemic. But whenever the national weather forecast shows a storm brewing around the Great Lakes (where we live) or a hurricane threatening the East Coast (where my older nephew lives), they fret about their daughter and other two grandchildren across the country.

Like the sturdy dandelion, my father became a transplant: once native, then migrant, ultimately immigrant. But like all parents, he can’t protect what happens to his family when they disperse, travel forth on the breeze to other places, other climes. 

 

Weed (from The Columbia Encyclopedia, 8th edition) 

[C]ommon term for any wild plant, particularly an undesired plant, growing in cultivated ground, where it competes with crop plants for soil nutrients and water. In their natural habitat, wildflowers and herbs not only provide beauty but function in many useful ways, e.g., as a source of food for insects and animals and to enrich the earth, loosen hard-packed soils, and help prevent erosion. However, when they invade cultivated areas they often interfere with the desired crop by appropriating space, sunlight, moisture, and soil nutrients. 

 

Where I live, concern about invasive species plays out in different ways. In the 2000s, it seemed every semester, my English department colleagues and I were doomed to read multiple student research reports and arguments about the dire threat posed by Asian carp to the Great Lakes, usually written by young men who grew up hunting and fishing in our local waters. Catfish were doomed; Asian carp were taking over. It’s conservation biology and wildlife management, they reason. A matter of environment and ecosystem. They signal their stewardship mindset, make their argument, even as they imagine their readers (classmates and teachers they assume are liberal tree-huggers) questioning the ethics of their hunting traditions. 

Though I recoiled my first winter back in 1999 at the sight of deer carcasses frozen stiff and stacked up against the outside wall of Deering’s Meat Market two blocks from our downtown neighborhood home, I’ve come over the past decades to respect the hunters here who take pride in supplying their family with venison for the year. My friends back in Los Angeles and San Francisco might find it strange, but I sometimes feel not kin, but adjacent—slightly akin—to the baseball-capped young men and women who drive trucks and disappear from my classes, depending on whether they hunt with bows or rifles, the first and second weekends of November for open deer season. Their absence speaks to my ambivalence about eating industrially raised, store-bought meat. 

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However, during the pandemic, as a cancer worse than the coronavirus grew in our body politic, my sense of kinship in Northern Michigan was tested. I was reminded of my racial/ethnic difference here in my rural Midwestern home, my otherness, which I’ve experienced in different ways throughout my life—sometimes overt, sometimes subtle, sometimes welling up in my own thoughts. After a contentious election, as the former president whipped up populist sentiment about COVID as the “Chy-na flu,” I anxiously watched news reports of attacks nationwide against Asians, especially elders. When I asked my parents to be careful in phone calls, they reassured me that they were fine but then asked me to text my nephew in New York City, to make sure he was safe. Because while they didn’t see themselves as potential victims of racial targeting or violence in California, they worried about their grandson riding the subway on the opposite coast.

Last year, after Trump railed about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” on Fox News and at a MAGA campaign rally, I imagined my father, newly arrived in America. How he realized that the tuition for his graduate school classes was just too much for him to keep up, if he hoped to bring his wife and son from Taiwan; how he stopped going to school and opted to work as a dishwasher instead, rendering his graduate school visa moot. In recent years, I’ve taken to telling my community college students that my father, without a green card, was an undocumented immigrant for a year in the mid-1960s before eventually becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. I want my mostly white working-class students in rural Northern Michigan to see that connection: between their English professor and a foreigner, seeking to make a new life in this country. 

Racist rhetoric inflames, as it’s meant to. It makes some people see others differently, as lesser, and makes others feel that the ground has shifted and everything’s changed. Sticks and stones, those dismissing my concerns might say. But the physical violence it incites is appalling. I worry about language wielded like sticks and stones, clubs and guns. 

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Vincent Chin, Detroit 1982. A Chinese American young man, days before he is to be married, is beaten to death with a baseball bat by two white men reputedly meting out barroom justice on someone they saw as a proxy for the Japanese companies that were outcompeting the Big Three American automakers. I never heard this story during its unfolding, when I was a kid across the country and my brother had to mow our St. Augustine backyard lawn. Cocooned in their evangelical Chinese immigrant church community, my parents stayed distant from political activism as Asians and Black allies like Jesse Jackson began to protest, first in Detroit and then nationwide, the legal system that found Chin’s killers exonerated of murder. But if my parents followed the news, they never let my brother and me know about Vincent Chin’s death. As in most matters, they kept their heads down, taught us to do the same. 

Meanwhile in Flint, Michigan, my future Lebanese American husband—then a recent college grad, the son of a UAW member—wrote a letter to his congressional representative, for whom he had previously interned in Washington, DC, criticizing his participation in a “Detroit Strikes Back” event where he swung a sledgehammer into a Toyota. The congressman was showing solidarity with American autoworkers, he no doubt thought, but my husband objected, pointing out that this action would encourage racial violence against Asians. Robert received no response from his former boss, who was, after all, just amplifying a populist rage—in his party, both parties, the nation—against what Democrat John Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress in American history, called “little yellow men.” 

In her 2023 memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet Camille Dungy writes about the ecosystem of her new home and garden rooted in Fort Collins. In an exchange with her husband Ray about how she sees the garden as metaphor in her family—and African American—history, Dungy ponders which plant they resemble the most: “Maybe my people are like dandelions, planting ourselves where the earth offers openings. Or maybe we’re more like irises—able to withstand division. Thriving and flourishing in many climates and soils.” But on a mid-June 2020 evening, her husband disagrees: “No…. We’re like dandelions. When they see us, they still try to kill us.”

The impulse to eradicate is old and persistent, given our nation’s violent history of Indigenous genocide and slavery and more recent deportations and immigration crackdowns. As with the beating death of Vincent Chin, the brutality that culminated that first pandemic summer with George Floyd’s murder by police officers on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight shows that certain kinds of bodies—Black, brown, yellow—are cut down in this country, weeded out. 

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What species are considered invasive—perpetual outsiders, with the potential to harm those native to a place? In the field of conservation biology, the terms of debate shift. Some species remain “invasive,” clearly trespassing boundaries. We can recognize pythons don’t belong in Florida’s waters, even if they are there, multiplying and lurking. And kudzu might never be welcome in the South, even if its takeover is inevitable, outcompeting native plants. But some invasives end up serving a useful purpose: non-native trees can help replenish a degraded habitat, alien plants become a food source for native butterflies. Some biologists are recognizing that certain “invasive” species over time actually fit in, contribute, adapt and assimilate. “Introduced” versus “invasive” species is how some scientists are using language to reframe our thinking and attitudes toward the beneficial ecosystem outsider. As argued in a 2020 article from the Yale School of the Environment, it’s clear as the planet warms—as flora and fauna migrate, as populations mingle—that the traditional dichotomy of “native” versus “invasive species” doesn’t work so well anymore. 

And interestingly enough, against this shifting discursive backdrop among scholars, scientists, policymakers, even Asian carp can be rebranded for the general public. As they dropped out of favor as a freshman composition subject among my students these past years, their name has undergone revisions. Federal agencies and some states have swapped “Asian” for “invasive,” due to concerns about anti-Asian prejudice, and they’re even now marketed as a dining delicacy by Illinois officials who gave them the more pleasing moniker of copi as a different way to cut their population.

So how might we reconceptualize the dandelion as something other than a pesky invasive? Asked in an Emergence Magazine podcast if she had other plants as tropes and metaphors in mind when she was writing Braiding Sweetgrass, Native botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer answered, “I’ll bet that you walked by a dandelion today…. dandelions [are] global citizens and, I think, global teachers. Our relationship to what people say [is] the humble dandelion—I say the mighty, the magnificent dandelion—is really telling about the different worldviews, about our notions of plants, and who we want to be around us and who we don’t.” 

 

Weed (from The Oxford Companion to Food, 3rd edition)

What is a weed to some people may be a prized edible to others. The point was emphasized by Patience Gray (1986) when she entitled a book on food and cookery in certain Mediterranean regions Honey from a Weed, echoing a verse by William Cowper. The dandelion is one of very many examples.

 

My husband hasn’t picked dandelion greens from our yard for us to cook and eat in years. The retired neighbor on one side uses pesticides to keep his lawn green and tidy. We get along with him, so we don’t complain, just privately rue the “children and dogs keep off lawn” signs that dot his property line and pull our Shetland sheepdog back onto the sidewalk when we walk by his house. The other neighbor, a painter who cared less about her lawn in the early years (which made the dandelions on that side of our yard worth harvesting for our dumplings), has been working on a home renovation project that’s started and stalled multiple times. So who knows what particulate matter (from housing insulation that’s been blown in as foam, ripped out as wrap) has been drifting throughout the pandemic from her house over the fence into our yard? 

Still, I have a hankering. I tell Robert that dandelions have been used throughout history for treating all manner of maladies—improving the immune system, flushing toxins from the liver, helping moderate blood pressure (of particular interest to me now, since mine is rising in my mid-fifties). I tell him their nutrition profile beats that of both spinach and kale. 

We have a running joke about the ethnic bias of foods touted by the American food and diet industry for their health benefits—foods we personally prize more for their taste and connection to our families and memories, rather than for their status as “superfood.” He’ll argue that olive oil helps him more than it does me, because he’s Lebanese, while I benefit more from tofu than he does, because I’m Chinese. (To our mutual satisfaction, we think our daughter might lay epigenetic dietary claim to both ingredients.) But we surrender our respective ancestral privileges on the common ground of dandelions, prized millennia ago in both Ancient China and the Eastern Mediterranean, now dispersed widely throughout all the continents except Antarctica. 

Even though temperatures allowed me (graciously, if I don’t think about climate change) to keep picking blackberries for my breakfast bowl into the first weeks of October last fall, our talk turned to the garden, just as the year’s backyard harvest accelerated its decline from summer peak—heirloom apples littering the ground (he planted the trees eighteen years ago to mark our daughter’s birth), potatoes dug out of their standing wire cages, the last of peak chard and arugula getting ready to bolt. When the weather finally cooled, after another summer of global extreme heat, we deflated our paddleboards for the season. Neighborhood maples and oaks flared into autumnal brilliance, then transformed again amidst rainstorms and fleeting snow flurries—their leaves strewn across lawns and sidewalks, piling up in gutters. My husband managed to plant the garlic bulbs before Halloween. 

“Maybe next year,” he mused, “we’ll plant some dandelions in one of the garden boxes.” 

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The twenty-first century invites us to reexamine dandelions again, reimagining them for our collective future. According to a study published in the journal Weed Science, researchers have tested the growth of dandelions in a carbon-level context designed to mimic what humans might expect to experience in fifty years. Their findings show that dandelions will thrive despite climate change, because they actually bulk up with more carbon. While admittedly this may sound like a nightmare (from a human allergy or conventional lawn care perspective), more dandelions will also serve as a resource within the broader ecosystem, aerating soil that’s overly compacted, becoming food for creatures whose other food sources might be compromised by climate change. Moreover, with what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls their “beautiful big taproots,” dandelions recycle minerals underground, “bringing them back up in order to share with the rest of the community,” the land and its creatures, human and nonhuman alike. 

Through their leaves, flowers, and roots, dandelions can teach us about how to adapt to climate change. In fact, engineers in a recent British study have focused on dandelion dispersal, namely how the spent flowerhead parachute disperses seeds. Traditionally—or at least when I think back to myself as a child blowing a dandelion puffball—we deny agency to the seed, imagining it scattered and borne aloft by our breath or the wind. But lead researcher Dr. Naomi Nakayama from Imperial College London reported, “Our findings reveal how the dandelion makes perhaps the most important decision in a plant’s life—to stay or go seek a better habitat.” 

 

Dandelion (from The Oxford Companion to Food, 3rd edition)

Taraxacum officinale, one of the most widespread wild plants of temperate regions worldwide. Leaves, root, and flowers are all edible. [….] T. officinale is a native of Europe and Asia. There are also native American species, but there, too, T. officinale has spread everywhere thanks to its airborne seeds. 

 

I try to imagine what my parents must have felt those years ago, when my father left Taipei: my mother waving goodbye to her husband, as he walked away across the tarmac; my father turning to wave goodbye to his wife and child, blurry behind the airport terminal window, before he boarded the airplane. I try to recall their expressions, decades later, when they said goodbye to me on the curbside at LAX, embracing me after we pulled out my bags from the car trunk, knowing that this time, I was not just going away on a trip, but leaving home. 

My father and I launched ourselves into an unknown future, each of us about thirty years old, in vastly different historical circumstances. While he moved to this country from another driven by a resolve to pursue opportunity on behalf of his family, I just moved across state lines, to see if a summer romance that started abroad (at an NEH history seminar for teachers in Nottingham, England, where Robert and I first met) could be forged into something deeper and long term back in America. Still, I like to think that my Baba and I were both dandelion-like, seeking a new habitat and place to land, far from what was familiar. 

Little did I know, just before the turn of the century—the millennium—that my own choice to move two thousand miles away from my birthplace and family would ever feel like migration. After all, I stayed within my country, my citizenship secured. Nonetheless, my first year in Northern Michigan, I felt homesick at times, neither exile nor native, but an outsider. In this, I may have felt just a tiny bit of what my parents endured throughout their lives. However, while theirs was the shock of multiple displacements—a WWII uprooting that scattered them from their birthplaces in China to other parts of Asia, eventually landing them in this country, where they have spent the past six decades building a life—my experience had a fundamentally different arc, based on my second-generation privilege. As decades passed and I chose to root myself in the Midwest, I’ve come to rethink my otherness within this region and community not as deficit or absence but instead contribution and presence. I have come to see myself as a resilient transplant—adapting, growing, grounding myself in a place that has become, for me, my home.

I have often wondered if my father’s inability to conceive of home as anything beyond his own family was, like his self-consciousness about his accented English, a matter of imposter syndrome. Despite his decades of American citizenship and bilingual fluency, he still considers himself the outsider. In his 2023 memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, community activist and documentarian Curtis Chin writes about his immigrant parents, who conveyed a different message to him, growing up in Detroit’s Chinatown, than my father did to me: 

My parents always told me that the United States was not our new home, it was our only home. This was our soil. Their reminders reinforced my love for America, not so much because of the opportunities the country had given us, but because of our contributions to this work in progress. Yes, my family succeeded because of America, but America also succeeded because of us.

Maybe I envy the confidence of Chin’s parents. Or maybe I’m coming to understand that it’s not that my father lacked imagination in calling America his home, but perhaps that imagination—the making of meaning; the telling of story; the stitching together of history—seeds itself, develops and grows, across time and space. My parents’ feat was to launch themselves from one continent and land in another. If rooting themselves into new soil (the work of survival) was their act of creativity and imagination, then extending those roots (into something that feels like belonging) is mine. 

The experience of migration differs across demographics, regions, and eras. My husband, two generations removed from his grandparents’ arrival to America from Lebanon near the start of the twentieth century, has a different story, as will our Chinese and Lebanese American daughter, born near the start of the twenty-first century, who left Northern Michigan last fall for college miles from home in another place. Across these different contexts, the impulse is familiar, the prospect always daunting. The story is one that each generation shapes and tells in its own way. 

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Two summers ago, the last time my family of three—husband, child, myself—visited my parents, they boiled jiao xi from Costco for lunch, because it was just easier that way in their late eighties, and they are pragmatic. 

Here in Northern Michigan, we haven’t gathered with our friends for a Lunar New Year celebration since pre-COVID, when I would fill, fold, crimp, and line up on baking sheets rows and rows of dumplings, as part of the multicourse dinner we’d serve to a crowd of families throughout our daughter’s childhood. Instead, to ring in the four years of the Chinese zodiac (ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon) during her high school years, we made jiao xi, steamed and pan-fried, just for ourselves.

Time passes—both slowly and not. Our daughter came home this May from her college freshman year, just as dandelions began sprouting up in our yard, in neighborhood sidewalk cracks, and along city park trails where we walk our dog. So who knows? Maybe sometime in this year of the snake, Robert and I might once again extend outwards the ritual meal that COVID whittled away into private observance: welcome back to our table a crowd of friends who are chosen family to feast on our potstickers, in communion. And now that she’s back home with us for a few months, our daughter might be open to some family cooking lessons. After all, she’ll have to figure out how to forge her own jiao xi dumpling rite, moving forward.

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In her book Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, Katherine May writes, “The pursuit of attention, ritual, or reflection does not mystically draw in anything external to me. Instead, it creates experiences that rearrange what I know to find the insights I need today.” Thus dandelions embody for me, in their quotidian nature, if not the divine, then faith in practice. Persistence and hope, in the face of bleak odds. A will to survive and imagine the future, but also a humble recognition of something shared, bigger than mere self. Whether religious or secular, the faithful must be resilient in spite of—and because of—others; must grasp that we are all of us together in this mess of a world, connected, sometimes by visible proximity, other times underground, as invisible taproots extend far and wide. 

The pandemic upended so much. And since then, the sense of community has frayed and fractured for so many. Perhaps it was an illusion all along; certainly, it was fragile. Whether violence comes from our own making (shooting, airstrike, invasion, war, genocide) or from nature itself in recoil (earthquake, hurricane, extreme heat, wildfires): when disaster happens in one place, it reverberates in another, as collateral damage and grim consequence, intended or not. If we are to survive collectively, our task is to re-see, rethink, and reimagine our surroundings and each other with curiosity instead of harm, empathy instead of denial. “In reshaping our thinking about dandelions, or other so-called weeds,” Robin Wall Kimmerer observes, “we might reshape our entire relationship with the living world.” 

Last November here at Michigan’s 45th parallel, a blizzard blasted us at month’s end. In less than a week, snow piled up. School closures shaped the run-up to winter break and December holidays; freezing temperatures ruled the month thereafter. My husband spent hours each morning clearing pathways through the snow heaped around our house. After the previous year’s mild winter, when snow didn’t stick between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, we who live at the tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula were starkly reminded of the season’s power. 

Meanwhile, wildfires blazed across Los Angeles for much of January. My family and friends were spared, safe, yet others were not. Meanwhile, a sustained ceasefire in Gaza has not materialized. So many Palestinians have been killed, so many are still dying. Earth is scorched all over. One American president left and another stepped back in. So much continues to unfurl. 

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And yet. Before my daughter left home at the start of January to go back to school—before LA’s raging fires, Trump’s inauguration, and each fresh outrage wrought by edict rather than governance—I mended some ripped seams in her favorite pair of jeans, Levi’s I wore three decades ago. Maybe, I thought, my repair might last her through her second college semester. This was the extent of my hope. That somehow, my patchwork could help keep things together.

Such is the rootedness and resilience of ordinary things. Worn-out denim, stitched up with needle and thread. A beloved recipe or story remembered and shared. Seeds saved and passed along. A FaceTime chat with a child who at some point became a young adult. A check-in phone call or text thread with family and friends near and far. The recognition of relationships newly emergent and long-standing. And dandelions that promise to bloom again come spring, growing wherever there’s a patch of land, an opening or opportunity—connecting us all, if we only care to notice. 

 

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JUDY Y. CHU, a transplant from Los Angeles, lives in Traverse City, Michigan, where she and her family are herded by their Shetland sheepdog. An English faculty member at Northwestern Michigan College since 1999, she teaches freshman composition. Her essays have been published in the Dunes Review and Prose Online.

 

Featured Image by Haci Elmas, courtesy of Unsplash.