A Seed Doesn't Choose Where It Falls
by Grace Loh Prasad
Christa David, it was everything and then some, 2020, hand cut paper collage, 9 x 12 inches.
Courtesy of the artist.
Grace Loh Prasad / SEPT 2020 / Issue 1
Her mother planted the bathtub-sized flower bed with watermelon-red begonias, bright yellow and magenta snapdragons, and dark orange marigolds. But the flowers she treasured most of all she kept inside on the windowsill—delicate African violets, in a deep jewel-like color that reminded her of velvet.
What does a child know about growing?
If the child is raised in another country, in another language, surrounded by people who don’t look like her, she knows only what she can see.
The family lived at the end of a row of brick apartments that faced another row, with a communal grass lawn in between. The girl loved to climb the tree just opposite their front door, didn’t care that they called her a tomboy. She was allowed to walk around the neighborhood by herself—to school, to the duck pond, or to Krauszer’s to buy candy. She wore a spare key on a shoelace around her neck.
They shopped in discount stores, the kind that sell slightly imperfect socks and towels and overstock of last season’s coats and boots. On summer weekends, the family went to the Englishtown flea market, where the parents would browse the used books and furniture for hours. It was hot and dusty, but their reward was getting to eat hotdogs and Italian ice. They’d bring home fresh-squeezed apple cider in a plastic jug and the most special treat of all: a bag of mangoes.
Mangoes are cheap and ubiquitous in Taiwan, but in New Jersey in the 1970s they were a luxury—expensive, rare and delicious. It was her only sensory connection to the place she was born, a precious taste of home. None of the other neighborhood kids had ever tasted a mango. It was sunshine in your mouth. It was contraband, a secret they kept from other families.
One year, her grandmother came to visit from Taiwan. A-ma spoke the language she was in the process of forgetting, but they got along easily and watched TV and ate snacks together. A-ma knit her a cardigan from yarn the color of ripe tomatoes. The buttons were the size of quarters, and the pockets had laces tied into a bow, with pom-pons dangling from the ends.
She left after a few months, but A-ma was proof that Taiwan existed, that you could love something that loved you back, even when you could not see it.
The year before they moved away, what she remembered most was the music: the Bee Gees, Eagles, Foreigner and Queen, played on her brother’s portable record player. She knew all the words to Jukebox Hero before she was ten.
Her brother was five years older so they didn’t have much in common, but one thing they did do together was they each planted a mango seed. The seeds were large and flat, bigger than her hand, the shape of a bar of soap when it’s more than half used up. They put the seeds in big flower pots on the front porch and took turns watering them for a year. The saplings were surprisingly sturdy with dark, smooth leaves. Her brother’s grew to be about three feet tall while hers languished, several inches shorter, even though they were planted at the same time.
“It’s not fair,” she said.
When it was time to go, she abandoned the bike she’d only recently started to ride with training wheels, and the fledgling mango trees.
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In Hong Kong, their apartment was a little bigger, but instead of a grassy yard and trees, they shared a cramped stairwell and elevator with dozens of families. They lived on the sixth floor of a high-rise building. Hundreds of people shared the same address; everything was vertical.
Instead of a porch and flower bed, there was a tiled balcony with a view of the harbor and Kai Tak International Airport. Her mother cultivated a different set of plants here, more suited to the humid tropical climate. The girl did not know the names of any of them, but she has photos of her mom standing on the balcony at night holding two spiky white flowers.
“They only bloom at night, once a year!” her mom told the girl.
The girl lived there for ten years—a long time, but who’s counting? At that age, her attention was focused in only one direction: forward. She was waiting for her life to begin.
She wore the red cardigan from A-ma until she couldn’t button it anymore and her wrists poked out. One summer they went back to New Jersey for a visit. They drove by their old neighborhood, parked the car and got out to look around. The tree she used to climb was still there. It was much taller now, but when she went to climb it, she found that the branches had multiplied and thickened, and she could no longer maneuver easily in between them.
It is the first loss she remembers.
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The girl became a young woman, moved to California, went to college, got a boyfriend, got a job. Another boyfriend. Another job. They accumulated.
This was how she measured time in her twenties, by the length of her entanglements. Her aperture opened, taking in more of the world, and she defined herself by how much distance she could cover, roaming to places her parents had never been—the Côte d’Azur, the Great Barrier Reef. This felt like knowledge.
She visited her parents in Taiwan almost every year and once spent a whole summer with them at their house on Yangmingshan. The house was old and quirky, but her mom had more room for the plants she liked to cultivate. Now that the children were grown up and had moved out, her mom had more time for the things she enjoyed.
Her mom’s favorite plant was a kind of cactus whose flower bloomed only once a year, in the dark. Her mom lovingly tended to the plant, and each evening at dinnertime she gave updates, saying with growing anticipation, “It’s almost ready.” Several nights in a row her mom stayed up late, reading a book or grading her seminary students’ papers while checking her flowers to detect the slightest shift in their tightly wound buds, careful not to let any mosquitos in when she opened the front door. Then one night she noticed the buds had picked up their heads almost imperceptibly, turning away from each other to allow space for the white petals to slowly unfurl.
“Jin! Jin!” Her mom called her dad to get the camera, and pleaded with him to stay up an extra hour to wait for the flowers to reach their full glory under the moonlight.
A day later, after the flowers had wilted, they were added to a brothy soup. She remembered it tasted like a silky, perfumy onion.
The daughter never learned the name of the flower. There were a lot of things in Taiwan that she could not name, like her favorite sautéed vegetable, or the sweet amber-colored drink they were sometimes served in restaurants. She didn’t even know the proper names of any of her relatives, addressing them as Toa-ko (Number One Aunt), Si-ku (Number Four Uncle) and so on. She knew them only by their birth order, their relative status in the family tree.
Even though her parents had lived abroad for more than twenty years, when they returned to Taiwan they simply resumed their place in the family hierarchy, a structure that to her seemed as stable and immovable as a mountain. She, on the other hand, stayed in California but doubted her commitment. The longest she stayed with a boyfriend was seven years. The longest she held a job was for four years. It never occurred to her to keep plants or pets because she didn’t know how long she would stay.
Looking back, it seemed foolish that her mom had let her plant a mango tree all those years ago, when they lived in the wrong climate and knew they would never see the fruit. Why even start when they were bound to be disappointed?
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At twenty weeks, a fetus is the size of a banana.
This was how long she waited until telling her parents that she was pregnant. (The year before she’d made the mistake of telling them too soon, and then she’d lost the pregnancy. She did not want to take that chance again.)
She flew to Taiwan and told them in person, just when her baby bump was beginning to show, after she’d been through all the testing and passed all the milestones, when she could finally exhale and allow herself to be happy, to anticipate the life growing inside her.
For nine months, she counted everything in weeks. After the baby was born, she counted everything in months. Each small increment mattered, was a point scored toward viability, strength, survival.
He was six pounds at birth.
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She celebrated her forty-first birthday with her parents in Taiwan. The baby was two years old, bright-eyed and easy to amuse with toys, songs and cake. The aunties and cousins passed him around and for the first time in months she enjoyed the luxury of having her hands free.
Her older brother was supposed to join them for a brief reunion. They lived in different countries and occasionally coordinated their trips to Taiwan, but this time he canceled at the last minute. They had just finished eating cake when he called and told her the news: He had been diagnosed with liver cancer.
The tumor was the size of a mango. He started chemo right away and got an experimental treatment over the summer, but none of it helped. Nine months after that phone call, he was gone.
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Three years after her mom passed away, she learned the name of the flower. It goes by many names: Queen of the Night, night-blooming cereus, tan hua, epiphyllum. One summer day she took her son, now nine years old, to the San Francisco Epiphyllum Society's Annual Flower Show in Golden Gate Park. They browsed the tables and sighed over the prizewinning blooms displayed in mason jars filled with water. So many colors: creamy white, pale pink, hot pink, yellow and even purple.
“This was grandma’s favorite flower,” she told him.
They bought some cuttings, which would take two or three years to flower, and a small bag of soil. She decided it was worth a try. They put the paddle-shaped cuttings into small plastic pots on their deck and watered them weekly, a shared labor of love.
Occasionally she forgot. Or they went on vacation and didn’t instruct the house-sitter to water them because they worried about the cat escaping, or the house-sitter getting locked out. The leaves grew bigger and sprouted new leaves, but the time between watering grew longer and longer, until she stopped completely. Doubt took over.
She apologized to her son. She knew she would fail.
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The summer of the pandemic is the first summer the family has not traveled at all, has not even left their zip code except for one time when they drove through a desolate, empty San Francisco.
Their experience of the world consists of taking long walks through the hills where they live. They satisfy their desire for experience by observing small seasonal changes around them––a neighbor renovating their house; wild blackberries ripening on the vine; fawns losing their spots as they get braver and bigger; camelia trees in full flower and then decay.
Stuck at home with nowhere to go, it seems as though all activity has ground to a halt—until they go outside and see that nature never takes a vacation, it is always throbbing and multiplying unseen, regardless of our wishes.
How foolish to think that growth only happens when we decide we are ready for it.
After six months in isolation, her son’s hair is shaggy and his pants are too short. She offers to cut his hair but he says no; offers to buy him new clothes but he says, what’s the point? Her husband keeps referring to it as “the lost year.” It feels as though time is standing still, and yet, the boy’s feet are now the same size as hers, and she is certain that he will be as tall as her by his next birthday.
One summer morning, she woke up as usual and went upstairs to feed the cat. She hadn’t yet brushed her teeth and was not wearing her glasses. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash of pink on the corner of her deck, the deck she hadn’t even bothered to sit on all summer long.
The epiphyllum she had abandoned—hadn’t thought about in months—bloomed unexpectedly, roaring to life in a blazing shade of hot pink, demanding an audience for her brief, but hard-won glory.
Grace Loh Prasad was born in Taiwan and raised in New Jersey and Hong Kong before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Grace received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and is an alumna of VONA. Her essays have appeared in Longreads, Catapult, Jellyfish Review, Ninth Letter, Blood Orange Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, The Manifest-Station, Barren Magazine, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Grace is a member of The Writers Grotto and Seventeen Syllables, an Asian Pacific American writers collective. She is currently finishing her memoir-in-essays entitled The Translator’s Daughter.
Christa David is a visual artist, writer and researcher. Inspired by the artistic works of Romare Bearden, Wangechi Mutu, Alma Woodsey Thomas and literary works of James Baldwin, Christa fuses the mediums of painting, collage and assemblage to create and recreate stories about home, belonging, faith, and identity. Christa hold a BA and MPH (Master of Public Health) from Columbia University. Her work is in private and public collections throughout the United States including the David C. Driskell Center, and has been recently on view at Longwood Gallery at Hostos College in Bronx, NY and PRIZM Art Fair at Art Basel in Miami. Christa currently lives and works between New York City and Atlanta.