My parents' journey coming into urban and suburban abundance and the tensions gathered in me from being raised in a household that views the outdoors as unsafe but also where you can be free.
Near my home in Elk Grove, a suburban city that’s a cutout of misshapen sprawl, there lies a little creek. It’s filled with brown water in the winter and dry when the cicadas sing. When I step into it during the springtime, my back warms like it’s pressed up against sun-warmed pavement, and my shoes gently squelch their way through the mud towards small flowers with their five petals dunked into a cobalt color, and it looks like the neon sign buzzing “Blue Moon” from the corner store that sells Indian spices and CDs. During the summertime, demure shrubs that trail the edges of the creek bank burst into blackberries. I have spent joyful hours walking through the thicket, the smell of fennel floating through the air, and I come home with dark red and purple-stained hands that speak to my foraged freedom.
My parents are city people, through and through. They came from Tianjin, China, home to 10 million people— where the definition of family stretches from second-removed cousins to uncle’s best friends — to a small home in Northern CA suburbia, shrunk down to a family of four. My family as a result operated differently as a nuclear island. The grandparents, uncles and aunts are no longer there to babysit. As a parent, you’re afraid of any danger that could come your child’s way and having to communicate to police officers in broken english if your child gets lost makes you grip their arm a little tighter. Most parents in my neighborhood let their kids walk to school, and they would spend afternoons after school playing at friends’ houses. Even though my elementary school was only three blocks away from my house, my dad still drove me to and from school each day. His fear of the unknown, of its risks, were like dark swashes on the car windows, blocking my view of the outside world. My earlier years blended together into a uniform haze of school and home.
But I was still able to escape, go wild, and get dirty. I needed to do it, grabbing scraps of time to bolt out when my parents napped or bought groceries. This pull to the outdoors was instilled, unknowingly, by them. The part of me that’s moved by the green in the horizon, the color of meadow far away, and as Rebecca Solnit would call the color blue: “the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.”
When it came to snatching oranges peeking out over neighbor’s fences, or pouring banana peels into freshly dug holes in my backyard to make “compost,” or palming the grey, rough maple tree by my elementary school, or slamming knees against the asphalt from chasing squirrels, I was indefatigable. I learned how to use the tiniest amount of force to pick up an ant by its abdomen without hurting her. How to draw into my mouth the milky dregs from crushed honeysuckle flowers that trellised the schoolyard fence. I learned to paint with grass on the sharp edge of a rock, and forgot again and again the warm, shady spots I left picked clover flowers in soccer fields and patches of green surrounding tennis courts.
I have a special memory of a time when I was with my mom at the creek. She was walking down the path and I went running away but always flitted back to her like a bee to her hive. Both our bikes were lying on grass, speaking lazily about the shapes in the clouds. There was this new patch of blackberries shaded underneath a brambly bush I brought her to see, and she asks me about “sting-key”-- what does that mean? It means “chòu” I respond, well-used to my mom asking me to translate english words, especially now that I’m in third grade and read chapter books like Inkheart and The Spiderwick Chronicles. Sting-key means “smells bad, like your feet!”, I say, chortling loudly. She lightly smacks my shoulder, and I’m glad to see her smiling. “Don’t laugh so hard, doesn’t sound like a girl.”
I scrunch up my face, as I do when mom tells me dumb stuff like that. “Race me!” I shout, suddenly turning my head as I get on my bike and head towards the strip of green at the end of the path, where I’d never gone. She went “Ai yah, nooo!” but she follows me on her bike. We ride our Walmart-rusted bikes through neighborhoods, her bike too small for her 5’7”, broad-shouldered stature. We pass the middle school my brother goes to and a playground with my favorite swings and a church with a small ball steepletop, and in front of us I spot a grove of trees. Into the dense taste of sugary pines mom and I dive down, down, down, until we hit a small garden. We find ourselves at a new place, a place neither of us has ever seen before. But really it has been here for almost my whole life, closer to our house than my school, Target, even the nearest McDonald’s. But it was tucked away from us, by virtue of my family never really leaving the main roads. It’s a neatly manicured garden no bigger than a Beetle Volkswagen encircled by a green steel dome.
If the roads were like rivers, here we are now standing at a trickle, mom and me as giants clasping our hands in delight, peering into the thimble-sized rose garden in the middle of a sweet meadow. Like a moss flower drinking up dew drops, mom melds into a child. She locks elbows with me and opens the giant green gate to peer at roses, their tight buds refusing to show themselves quite yet. We would come again the next week, and the next, and the next— until the roses were brown and crispy and long past the arc of youth, and we come not for the roses anymore but to go deep, deep, deep down into the plane trees. Really, it was just a park. But God lives in these corners, too.
When people speak of protecting nature, they often refer to nature as this entity untainted or untouched by humankind, the sort of grand landscape worth saving. Yosemite over the scrap of urban greenery at the corner of 8th and M. But limited conservation eliminates the places where most people began to learn about and love the world: in their own backyards, in parks, in conversation with squirrels, birds, and bugs. In the words of naturalist Jennifer Price, “You cannot expect to preserve wilderness or endangered species unless you think about how to make the places where most people live sustainable.”
A few months ago, this past winter break I went home, back to where the night smells of cement and foggy citrus. For a whole week, Mom seemed to speak only two words: “mei you mei you mei you (I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t)” I don’t know what my mom is trying to get at when she shakes me awake one early morning, but she tells me that she wants to leave, forever, and her body is quaking while saying goodbye. I don’t know what to do, except to stay with her. So I do that. I try to take her outside. Bleary-eyed, white-faced, she plants herself on the carpet before I can open the front door. I tug on her sleeve and wordlessly, we shuffle our way down the steps and onto sidewalk. Perched up on a bare branch sings a bluejay. I look at her, but mom’s head is lowered. She confesses to me that her husband found out her terrible, lonely secret. There’s this poem written by an exiled Chinese man that ends with “低头思故” or Dī tóu sī gù xiāng. It means, “I lower my head, thinking of home.” Li Bai, after his exile, roamed the land without ever seeing family or friends again. My mom told me some time later that she was thinking of her sisters back home. Maybe she could go back home; she would feel free there. But it meant leaving a home here too.
On our walk, Mom kneels down to greet our neighborhood cat, which has a white face and dark blue eyes. Her hands brush over her fluffy stomach like she’s wiping down a whiteboard, back and forth, swiping softly but strongly. Her veins shine knobby and turquoise from the back of her hand, and I think, someday my hands will look like hers. That one day I will have her tendency to wear eyes that go blank and dark, but also the exact same pair that make people smile; and her sparse eyebrows, ones that look like she told birds to go ahead, build a nest with them, I can express enough with the lines around my eyes and mouth.
Before she tells me anything else, she shares a story. It’s about the first time she stepped foot onto American land and saw the carpet of green forest that is Golden Gate Park, she thought, bu ke si yi (unbelievable), that Earth has a place like this. She remembers being a child, hopscotching on beige rooftops and skipping jump rope on cement; trees like polka dots on sparse canvas. Dad speaks of leaving China as leaving a land of scarcity, where dinner meant meant meat scraps and rations— then coming to a land of abundance. I ask him about chao shao bao, a generous tender meat bun, and he says yes, yes, you could eat that everyday here. How this abundance comes through in natural spaces, in big plumes of fresh air. I imagine my dad wondering if this was the right decision, and my mom too, who came after him with my brother, her body only a year later swollen with me, how she must have felt to be surrounded by dark cypress and the surge of the sea but also empty arms without her sisters and her family, an island of a nuclear family. Dad said that when the family lived in SF other Chinese people spoke to him and mom in Cantonese, a language they didn’t understand, and all of them were massed into the Chinese immigrant class in the eyes of others; yet these individuals were all eastern fragments scattered from a continent larger than the U.S. Mom says through it all she’s grown to see home here in the flat tilled grounds of our suburban sprawl, the routine of waking at 5am to wire trains, the chance to see me and my brother as often as she can. She stays, and hugs me tight each time I see her. The wood lines on the frame of her bed cascade down like thin milkweed sap/brittle incense sticks/red ribbons tied to a hastily-packed suitcase/the clotted lines running down through a calendar week/the tears that track down my mama’s face. Each April, we prune raspberry bushes and put our noses in milkweed. The mush of soil giving underneath our feet feels like sinking in to a mother’s warmth.
Back when we lived in San Francisco, each morning Dad and I would pass through buffalo inside golden gate park. They’re gone now, but he says “almost every day, Nancy, I would bring you to see them.” On weekends mom would perch me in the stroller and take me through the botanical gardens with the dinosaur claws imprinted on the ground and we’d look at ducks waddling through the grass. Clearly, those first few years of my life were seeped in the luckiness of basking in crisp seaside winds and the smell of the cypress and sunny patches, all that just a part of me as the chao shao bao from China Town. I imagine my mom enjoying her walks on the weekend, tired from her workdays gluing pieces together in a factory. Each time we feel the dark shadow from tree canopies looping over our heads, I’m compelled to stick my head out the car window and holler out because of that nearby, helpless joy of using my vocal chords. My love for the outdoors started at the creek by my home, and now my parents are a part of this love. Mom wears dresses and flats when going up a trail, and Dad prefers a comfy chair to a granite rock seat. But my dad said to me when I was walking alongside him that “nothing feels as freeing as fresh air in your chest.” Someday my soul will grow as large as the trees billowing in my backyard.