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For a Daughter of Immigrants, American Soil Offers Plenty to Forage
How I learned to break through the green wall
As my family tromped through the hills east of Berkeley, green with abundance, I spotted the disk of a leaf, perched on a slender stem, delicate as a lady’s parasol: miner’s lettuce?
I texted a photo to a naturalist friend to confirm my find. The excitement I felt at the confirmation might have rivaled James Marshall’s when he discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill on the American River in 1849. Eureka! Lore has it that gold rush prospectors dined on the greens, high in vitamin C, to prevent scurvy, I told my eight-year-old twin boys.
It was early April, a few weeks after the world went into retreat. I’d been foggy-headed, sleepless with worry about the coronavirus and the economy, but giving this impromptu science and history lesson fired my synapses. “Scurvy causes your gums to bleed, and your teeth to fall out,” I told my sons, a ghoulish fact that had fascinated me when I was their age. Just as intrigued, they vowed to try the greens to ward off the disease.
“They look like satellite dishes,” one said, which led to a discussion about Sputnik, the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the ill-fated cosmonaut mutt, Laika.
Back at home, I nibbled it raw, the leaf tender but a bit grassy for my taste. I stir-fried the rest with garlic and sesame oil, the sort of recipe a Chinese fortune seeker might have conjured for himself in the gold fields, or later on, while toiling on the Transcontinental Railroad.
Foraging felt like empowerment and self-sufficiency — a form of resourceful thrift familiar to me as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and a small measure of control when so much has felt out of control. I’d always wanted to try foraging, which had an aura of pioneer independence, so different than my 1980s suburban upbringing, in which my working parents called upon the convenience of every canned and frozen meal to keep us fed.
A few years ago, while conducting research for my forthcoming novel, I’d wandered through botanical gardens in Hong Kong and Beijing, snapping photos of labeled greenery in an attempt to fill in my landscapes. It was like using flash…
