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,…
This essay’s opening anecdote—in which I discover an unexpected link with my Chinese immigrant father during a phone call not long after I moved from California to Michigan—was first scribbled in a spiral notebook over twenty-five years ago, while I was at a Bard College writing/teaching workshop; planted, then left to gestate.
At the time of the initial writing, the story was about my father passing on to me a family recipe for potsticker dumplings—my flash response to a workshop prompt. But in fall 2024 (on sabbatical from the community college where I teach), when I came across the fragment again thumbing through old notebooks, I became more interested in the dandelions that figured in the story, rather than the dumplings.
I started researching definitions of dandelions—and weeds—in my college library’s databases. I pulled apart my original flash, looking for different ways to think about how these plants (considered invasives) might not just be narrative details but metaphor. My discoveries prompted me to recall different childhood memories and stories inherited from my parents; I began pulling together various fragments and expanding the piece: juxtaposing personal recollections and snippets of family history with academic context drawn from cultural history and science.
During these autumn months, while I worked on the essay during the first half of my teaching sabbatical, the privilege of time off allowed me to turn experimentation and play into practice: I learned how to see and draw in my first art class; I started to auto-belay at the local climbing gym (letting go and falling down lots); I moved between generating one project and revising another; I got over myself by sending out drafts to writer friends, submitting my work, and grasping that literary journal rejections are a given; I listened to—and was awed by—the writing of my classmates in various online workshops; I read widely across the genres of memoir, creative nonfiction, and poetry—and noted how some of those writers’ words crept into my essay: sprouting, enriching the soil of my own thinking.
And during this period of personal creativity, against the backdrop of collective anxiety (all that seemed unthinkable nationally and globally that fall, which spirals on unthinkably now), my essay—a seed planted twenty-five years ago—grew, taking off in unexpected directions.
What I didn’t know was that winter would bring me a breast cancer diagnosis, which came to dominate the rest of my sabbatical. My new year’s goal of “finishing” this essay and sending it out into the world was as much motivated by the uncertainty I was living in my own body (and the body politic), as it was by the hope that my family story—about home and migration across generations—might find hospitable ground. Over a year later, I’m doing well; back to teaching freshman composition, so not writing as much. But supported by family, friends, and community, I am still rooted—and still reaching.
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.
