Xin and the Beanstalk
Sohaila Abdulai writes:
Twelve floors below my apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Chinese immigrants cultivate crops in the neighborhood park, Corlears Hook. For months I watched them grow vegetables while I tended the flowers on my balcony. Finally, I plucked up the courage to introduce myself to Xin, Chen, Wan and Ping. I followed their gardening lives through the seasons.
My gardening friends grow bitter melon, cucumber, green beans, pumpkins, and the occasional eggplant, all for family use. They bend, they weed, they fence, they water. When they’re done, they sit on benches and gossip. As the weather warms, they are often joined by Chen, who has a flowered hat and a jolly personality.
Every day is a wonder. Every day is also a war. A war against humans, animals, weather, life, and death.
For something to live, something else must die. It is the irrefutable equation of survival. The weeds must be ruthlessly tossed aside. As a human weed myself, I feel the pain of this. The rats must be fended off, the squirrels thwarted, the birds bamboozled. The land must be claimed: is it the government’s, is it the village’s, is it the father-in-law’s, is it yours to sow and reap? And when you do, are you performing a meditative act or going into battle?
On my balcony, I chase pigeons and fret about what will happen when I go to India for six weeks. Spring continues its pre-ordained progression, a tightly composed symphony with magnolias subsiding to give way to crab-apples, while the redbuds and dogwoods wait their turn, sap silently rising. Birds start hurling crockery at each other in the trees and waking us up before dawn. And the gardeners go into battle with the creatures of the park. They know that gardening is an act of war. Tennyson was on the right track when he wrote about nature red in tooth and claw.
One day Wan is busy creating intricate nets of string to forestall pigeons. Wan is 72. She came to the US in 1999, when she was 48. Like many, she came because she already had family connections here. She has two daughters in China. In those days people were allowed to have more children and try for a son if they only had daughters. Her mother, who was here first, encouraged her to leave China. What was the point of staying there, she said, when you just have daughters and no son? So she came across the seas. She speaks no English. She likes it here, she says, and passes time on the park benches with her fellow gardeners all year round (except when it rains). They reach each other on WeChat but don’t meet in each other’s homes, and while the occasional husband (Wan’s, but never Xin’s) shows up to garden, it’s very much a women’s project, this claiming of earth for their own. The park is where they exercise, gossip, farm, and observe local goings-on, although they never talk to any non-Chinese people, except Don and now me.
Another evening, Ping arrives armed with a sack full of chopsticks. I watch in awe as she starts working on a structure to keep squirrels away from her bok choy and potato seedlings. She puts the chopsticks into the soil in parallel lines, at 45-degree angles to the earth, and quickly creates a rather beautiful structure along the entire row, with chopsticks crossing each other in an elegant gable roof. It looks like a brontosaurus skeleton.
Chopsticks for squirrels; netting for rats who apparently enjoy leaves very much; fencing for the dogs whose disgusting owners allow them to shit all over the park; and weeding, weeding, weeding, to kill all infiltrators. Yes, it’s war. And the war isn’t just against invasive flora and fauna. The constant jockeying for turf among the gardeners would make a compelling thriller, especially interesting because they fight for patches that none of them actually have a right to use.
The park is not a community garden. It is not meant for anyone except the Parks Department to plant anything. The ladies are not guerrilla gardeners. They have no political or social axe to grind. They have no point to make. They just want to plant vegetables. I asked the group once, “Whom does this land belong to?” and was met with indifferent shrugs. It’s not just that they are not sure; they don’t see the point of the question. Who cares whom the land belongs to? What does that have to do with anything? Where there’s a bare patch of land, they will plant. Simple as that.
Sohaila Abdulali is the author of several books, including What WeTalk About When We Talk About Rape. Her stories here are excerpts from her new book on women, land and belonging.
