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Life begins again in spring, and as the air (and your nostrils) fill with pollen it might be a good time to learn something new about the plants with which we share the earth. To do so, Lale talks to nature writer Jessica J. Lee about how, as she's lived around the world, learning about non-native plants has given her a sense of belonging. From cherry blossoms to seaweed to tea, plants cross borders by themselves or because we move them for very different reasons.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu and this is Women Who Travel. This episode, we ask what happens when plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere? Is it any different from humans who move? When are they considered out of place? When are they allowed to belong? And are they accepted or rejected by the people who live there? Can we look at plants to better understand our own relationship with the world?
Jessica Lee: I sort of started with plants that were intimately connected to me, and I kind of just said, "Okay, what are you telling me? Are you telling me something about poetry? Are you telling me something about the history of plant breeding?" I just sort of asked questions of each plant to begin with. I gave myself that permission to play.
LA: My guest is Jessica J. Lee, who's Canadian and of Chinese and Welsh ancestry. She currently lives in Berlin, and she's an environmental historian who also teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and is a children's book author. Right now, Jessica's talking to me from her Taiwanese mother's home in Ontario. Jessica talks of how her mum constructed a koi pond in their home in suburban Canada, but Ontario winters are harsh, and so when it got cold, the fish were moved to a tank in the dining room. It was a relentless attempt to recreate a Taiwanese landscape far from home. Your mother has a koi pond in Canada where you are right now, I think you are at that house.
JL: I'm at my mother's, yes.
LA: Does she have a koi pond now, or was that left behind?
JL: She doesn't have a koi pond now because she's in an apartment, but she does have a fish and a garden still, but in most of the places she lived where she could still have a koi pond, she had one, and it was this way of connecting herself to home and a kind of past aesthetic of growing up in Taiwan and the ideal garden that she wanted to see in her life.
LA: I really love the way that you are able to use this writing about plants to talk about all these other parts of your life and the way it's all interconnected.
JL: When I was trying to title this book, I kept coming back to the idea of “dispersals” because I liked the idea of it not being an obvious plant word. I didn't want it to be called uprooted or something, even though it was a book about movement and about movements of plants.
LA: Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging, which is out this month, blends the cultural influences and writing styles that shape her.
JL: I was thinking a lot about seed dispersals, but I think ultimately if I had to come up with a more explanatory, a more expository title for the book, it might be something like: Plants and People Out of Place.
LA: Well, I love dispersals because it's really visual to me. I never really think of plants moving and they're always moving.
JL: It began from this question of, okay, how do we make sense of plants out of place? Plants we've moved, plants we've bred and taken out of their original contexts, seeds we've saved in seed banks, plants we've brought with us in migration.
LA: I haven't read a huge amount of nature writing, but it felt very different from the nature writing I have read because it was so much memoir as well as observation. I guess it's sort of on a very basic level, we can't survive without plants.
JL: Absolutely.
LA: I think plants can survive without us, but we can't survive without them, so it is sort of impossible to not talk about the personal and the self in some way.
JL: There are two parallel strands in nature writing. We see nature writing as this very masculine kind of objective trope of setting out into the landscape and telling its history without really unpacking our own positionality, and then we often see a lot of things that are more straightforwardly memoir, and as someone who's trained in history and works as a nature writer, it was important to me to find that middle road and to actually say, okay, I want to talk about the histories of these plants and these places and these natural things, but I think pretending like they don't have some personal import to me, that they don't have some entwinement with my own life didn't make sense. So many of the plants that I've chosen at least to write about are cultural products. They've been hugely shaped by our desires, our inputs, the changes we've made just by bringing them around the world and using them in different ways, breeding them in different ways.
LA: Jessica's book has 14 stories that take readers all over the world through its plants; Heather in the UK; tea in the Himalayas; or the many different kinds of seaweed in the oceans and cherry blossoms in Berlin and the widespread cultivation of soy. It's a way to talk about migration and how we ourselves move around the world.
JL: Human migrations and plant migrations, they're really entwined things, right? Most plants have moved because humans have moved. I'm the third generation of migrants in my family, and I've moved continents multiple times. I've moved all over, seemingly never staying still, and so for me, it seemed like a way of maybe unpacking my own understanding of what those migrations mean, to sort of look at them through plants and to ask questions through plants, and also, I don't know, to offer those plants a little bit more attention in their own migration stories.
LA: Jessica swam 52 lakes in Germany in 52 weeks. Along the way, she became curious about the many types of seaweed she encountered.
JL: The more I have thought about seaweed in my life, the more just in awe I am of its beauty and its power. I write in this essay about being terrified of seaweed as a child when they would touch my legs or whatever it was as I was swimming. It was deeply uncomfortable, but I also had this parallel obsession with the ocean and with the colors of being underwater. I wanted to be a marine biologist as all millennial girls do, but I was also definitely afraid of swimming and seaweed. Make it make sense. But no, I mean, the more I sort of sat down and said, okay, I want to know this plant. I want to understand its impact and its power, and so much more about it, the more that I realized, okay, we can learn so much here, whether it's the history of women in science, because seaweeds were one of the few areas that women were allowed to really excel in the sciences early on.
LA: Is that because no one else was interested in the seaweed?
JL: Well, that and seaweeds were considered polite because they didn't have these showy, sexualized flowers. They reproduced by spores, and therefore for Victorian women, that was quite acceptable. It wasn't racy, it wasn't sexy, and so seaweeds and mosses and things were the domain of women scientists early on, so we can learn a lot from that. But then also seaweeds holding this record of the past ocean and really being threatened by changes to our climate. I feel like they represent a lot. Right now, we're in this moment where we're like, oh, algae and biofuels and seaweed farming. It's the thing of the future.
LA: There are many different types of seaweed, right?
JL: Very, very, very many.
LA: How many, roughly? Ballpark?
JL: Thousands.
LA: Thousands, okay.
JL: Yeah. In the book, I focus specifically on two, but the main one I focus on is Wakame kelp, which is invasive, considered invasive in a lot of the world, but originates sort of on the coasts of Asia. But it’s also delicious. So yeah, I sort of unpack those multiple trajectories of the seaweeds. I write a little bit about my family's different encounters with seaweed as food, my mum in her Taiwanese cooking and my father being Welsh in lava bread, which is made of the same algae that we use for nori and seaweed actually, and just getting to know a little bit about the history that sort of unites food cultures and also aquaculture cultures across borders and oceans.
LA: Next up, Jessica talks a lot about how plants are interconnected with many parts of her life, like in her chapter about tea.
You grew up with two very different kinds of tea drinking rituals, your Welsh dad's tea, and I must add that my mum's Welsh, and your mother, who's Taiwanese, her jasmine tea. You said that you selected these plants based on personal connections. What do those rituals say about the two sides of you?
JL: Yeah, I mean, it was funny because when I started working on the tea section, I was slightly terrified that I was focusing too much on the cultural side and not enough on the plant itself, but I realized that was kind of an inevitability because the second I dove into the history of that plant, I basically saw my two cultures that are in my body, in my family. I saw them immediately laid out in front of me, and I saw their conflicts, and I saw the tensions that are in some ways unresolved between Britain and China in particular, and that for me was really, it was one of those essays, and it's one of those plants that forces me to think about, I think two things being true at once: what it means to belong to two cultures, what it means to belong to two cultures that have been in conflict, and how you sort of navigate that when it's like, okay, well, what is my position then as this hybrid person?
And I realize that with tea, I move between the different kinds of tea drinking cultures. I'm staying at my mum's right now, and I went to make myself a cup of proper tea, British tea the other day, and she didn't have the proper stuff, and I was like, "I don't want anything." And she was like, "Oh, no, no, I can get you something." I was like, "No, if it's not going to be the correct way, I don't want it." And then I think, okay, it's a kind of rigidity where I'm like, "I want my British tea right now a certain way, and I want my Chinese or Taiwanese tea a certain way."
LA: Oh, I can't order tea in America. Everyone gets it wrong.
JL: Oh god, I would never order tea in America. I hate to say it.
LA: No, it's true. Sorry to all listeners who may be offended by that, but really it's like pond water here. I don't know what people do to it.
JL: I think they microwave the water. Conspiracy theory. Yeah, no, it's really, it's one of those things where I think for me was really revealing in that it taught me about my cultural commitments and also taught me about the areas where those cultural commitments are in conflict and how to actually hold both of those things at once. So in a way, thinking about tea for me was this lesson in processing my mixed race identity.
LA: Well, and tea is, of all the plants you talk about, I would say sort of historically probably one of the most complicated. It's so wrapped up in colonialism and Britain is quite famous for that and the impacts that has both on the country that's the power and the country that is home to the plantations, which is often not holding that power. It feels like such an interesting tension to explore greater global issues, I guess, as well as your own identities.
JL: Yeah, I think that was exactly it, right? Being able to say, okay, the story I'm telling is the story of two particular regions in relation to tea. It's not the whole story, and I acknowledge that in the essay, but that it teaches me something about uneven power. I trace the story of this botanist Robert Fortune, who famously stole tea from China, stole tea production methods, and I write about this incident that he documents in his own travelogues of dressing up in Mandarin dress, as he puts it, arranging his hair so that he would look Chinese and could pass, and therefore enter a region that he was not supposed to enter as a Scotsman in order to steal tea.
LA: What era was this? What century?
JL: This was in the early 19th century. So yeah, just really I think setting tea and its history within that context and saying, okay, this is its history, and I know as a historian I should read this "objectively" but as a person belonging to both of those cultures, reading that history makes me deeply uncomfortable.
LA: We talk about non-native plants or invasive species in ways that are so often negative. Jessica confronts this head on: shouldn't a plant be allowed to take root, be protected regardless of where it came from? Isn't it natural for plants to disperse? And when are plants displaced? And then there's a story about Japanese cherry blossoms, which is also about the politics of a plant that adds such beauty to our landscapes and our cities.
JL: I didn't know a huge amount about cherry blossoms before I started working on them. I live in Berlin where there are cherry blossom trees planted in the sort of path of where the Berlin wall once stood, and they were gifted from Japan. Many cities have these cherry trees that are acts of diplomacy, and they were always the biggest joy. They're coming in now, actually, and it's the best part of spring. But then when you dive into that history, of course, the symbolism of that tree is incredibly complex, right? And you see at the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century in Japanese imperialism, the cherry blossom comes to represent something completely different. It has these nationalist ideas. You see cherry blossoms on the side of kamikaze planes. You see soldiers being sent off with cherry blossoms pinned to their breasts, and there is this idea of the symbolism and pressure that we put on the natural world for human ideals.
It's something I really wanted to unpack because I think we look at cherry blossoms and we think beauty and delicacy and joy, and those are really weighty things to additionally put on it. One of the stories I trace is about the planting of cherry trees across Korea and Taiwan where my mother's from under Japanese occupation, and how the planting of specific trees was intended to say, this territory is culturally a part of this empire and that the natural world is not neutral in the way it's deployed, that we use it to our ends and the legacies of those trees and what they symbolize now in the wake of that
LA: Sort of the very act of planting a tree can be settling on a land, stealing a land.
JL: Absolutely. Right? The choices we make in which trees to plant are political, explicitly.
LA: It's funny that we're having this conversation right now because it really is when the cherry blossoms are coming out, and I was having a conversation with someone a few days ago who was showing me pictures of cherry blossoms that she had taken in January, and we were talking about how it's the wrong time and cherry blossoms blooming too early feels like a really just sort of egregious example of the climate being unwell. Is that something you also noticed in a lot of your research that these migration patterns and seasonal changes are off?
JL: Yeah, absolutely, and I write about that sort of towards the end of the cherry blossom chapter, walking around my neighborhood where there are autumn and winter flowering cherries, but that also the spring ones are coming earlier and earlier. Actually, just two weeks ago, I was walking around my neighborhood and I stopped because I noticed the cherry blossoms were coming in, and I thought, are these the winter ones? And I went up and looked, and they were brand new spring buds, and they were like the full frilly spring flowers, and I thought, this is very early. But yeah, I mean, I think this is where it's understanding plants and their stories means understanding their pasts and their legacies, but also their futures and how we are deploying them to think about our futures now, whether that's understanding climate change through cherry blossom festivals, and when the cherries come in, it's a great wave of marking the sort of changing benchmark of our climate. So these plants, they're bound up in our past, but they're also really, really bound up in our futures.
LA: Next up, a detour into Jessica's Kitchen where she's been researching how to make soy sauce. Turns out there's bottles upon bottles of it fermenting in her pantry. You write of making soy sauce as a means to kind of get to know yourself or connect with yourself deeper and of your mother's mango tree. How do these plants connect us as humans, I guess on an emotional level and as acts of love?
JL: Yeah, I mean, I think for me it's partly about memory and resonance and sensation. I can read a little bit from the soy sauce chapter if you like.
LA: I would love to hear that.
JL: Okay. I've got a little bit here in which I am making soy sauce. From the apartments I've lived in over recent years, Berlin, London, Cambridge. I watch videos of Li Ziqui, the Chinese vlogger who farms her grandmother's land in rural Sichuan. I watch her dressed in traditional clothing carrying baskets into the green, harvesting soybeans in the field, freeing them from their fuzzy green pods, grinding them into a cream-colored pulp. Thinking about soy for me has become a kind of dreaming. In the past 16 years, I have moved houses more times than I can count, moved countries and continents. Now in my mid-thirties, I simply want time and space. As much as I have wanted a child or a family, I've wanted to learn to make soy sauce.
I do not know if the skill is in my bones, if my palate is sharp enough to measure the nuances of fermentation, if I'll ever be in one place long enough to begin the process and see it through, but I decide to make it anyway. I tell my husband of my secret dreams to open a soy milk shop, a breakfast stall, to open a tofu factory, a soy sauce shop. I won't, don't expect, but others have done, will do. I find boutiques tofu shops opening in the cities I love, making tempeh and natto from local pulses, artisanal soy sauce vendors and soy concept stores on the streets of cool neighborhoods I can no longer afford.
While I write, I soak beans. They swell and burst in their hours of submersion. I boil them, pulse them, strain them for milk. I've learned to make something that replicates that childhood comfort. I sip it warm, fresh from the stove. A year from now, I will strain sauce from the soy. I'll stack a cast iron pan, a pestle and mortar, a heavy board atop the fermented mash. I'll leave it overnight and through the morning the muslin lining the colander will stain a copper brown that shines beneath my kitchen's fluorescent bulb.
Everything will have the smell and feel of salt. It'll take a day at least to press the liquid through, a year and five days from when I unpacked dried beans. For so long, I've dreamt of a home where I can fill jars with soybeans just to stir them every day, week, month, until one day I could lift the lid and witness something, a scent, a flavor that my grandmother might've known well. The jars of beans my grandmother described to me are long in the distance and the past, but I have sought those sensations still. The grit of salt on bean, the softening of a pulse to pulp, a color that is far deeper than I can describe.
LA: That was so peaceful to listen to, which sounds like the process of making soy itself, that you have to wait a year.
JL: Yeah, I am not a patient person.
LA: I was about to say, are you patient? Because I would be, I don't know if, I don't think my skill set is going to be in making soy.
JL: So I think that was also part of what enticed me to make soy sauce as part of, yeah, my grandparents, my grandmother, her family had once been soy sauce manufacturers back in China, and I don't know, I think once I learned that, just the idea stuck in my head that I wanted to reclaim some of that knowledge somehow. I didn't want it to be lost knowledge, but I'm not patient, and so I would check on these jars of fermenting soybeans all the time.
I constantly was just peering into the cupboard being like, how are you doing? Are you done yet? Are you ready yet? And of course they're not. They take a really long time, but it taught me something about waiting and I think gradual change because I documented it on Instagram and I put a lot of videos just to keep a kind of diary of it, and it's great to look back on because I can see the change when I watch it back, like photo by photo or video by video, but in the moment, it felt like an absolute eternity just waiting for these beans to do their thing, and so much is out of your control.
It really is. Fermentation is kind of about letting go. You can set things up correctly, you can make sure things are clean, make sure things are well prepared to ferment, but then they do their own thing.
LA: Which is so at odds, I think with being a sort of modern day human being, we think we have control over everything and that everything should happen right away, and I mean, what a reminder that we really just, we can't control it, and we're totally out of control.
JL: Absolutely. But I mean, if you think about that and relinquishing that control and being open to, I think the joy of it, every month I would have to stir these fermenting soybeans, which meant that I got to check on them once a month, so I would open these jars to stir them and it was, I don't know, it was kind of like Christmas morning once a month being like, "Okay, how are you?"
LA: I have to ask, was this during COVID?
JL: Yes, of course it was.
LA: I was like, "Yeah, I remember some of my projects and being really excited about them at the time."
JL: Yeah, I mean, I think the idea, I had been wanting to do it for months before Covid, but it was actually only during COVID that we moved somewhere big enough that I could store huge amounts of soybeans, fermenting for as long as it would take me to actually make soy sauce.
LA: Suddenly, we had so much time on our hands.
JL: Yeah, yeah. My husband took up wood carving and bird watching, and I took up soy sauce making.
LA: I love it. What a wholesome household you became. We've talked somewhat about you moving around the world and being connected to different places in the world. What does it feel like to plant seeds and then leave them behind?
JL: I think it's one of the real sadnesses and griefs that I've held in a lot of ways because I've moved so much that I feel like I also feel a little bit like, "Okay, economically is this sensible that I keep setting up whole gardens and then moving?" But then I also think there's this huge act of hope and care and optimism and doing so right in wanting to be present for growth as it happens in the moment, and also being willing to, I think, leave that growth behind when not being able to sort of reap what I sow, in a way. Towards the end of the book, I write about having planted a garden and not being able to see it through because I'm forced to move and having to give all of those plants to a close friend of mine and how in some ways there's this kind of beautiful circularity in that she had gifted me loads of seeds as well, and I don't know. I think it just teaches me something about letting go and optimism and hope for the future.
LA: The opposite of letting go, do you think surrounding yourself with plants, even if it's temporary, is a means of keeping yourself rooted?
JL: Absolutely. Yeah. There's something about putting your hands in soil, it's automatically rooting, right? It puts you in place. It means paying attention to the seasons and the weather and your belonging and the place where you are.
LA: Lovely. This was so great. Where can listeners find you on the internet and follow along with your travels and your plants and your soy sauce making?
JL: Well, I'm on Instagram and Twitter or X or whatever it's called at Jessica J. Lee and on YouTube and TikTok under Jessica J. Lee Writes, but you can also find the book, all of my books in your local bookseller.
LA: Really wonderful—one of my favorite chats I've had in a long time, so thank you.
JL: Thank you, Lale.
LA: Being so generous with your thoughts.
JL: Thank you.
LA: Where in Wales is your dad from?
JL: Cardiff.
LA: Okay. My mom is from Brecon, so not too far.
JL: Lovely.
LA: Yeah.
JL: Yeah, really not far. My uncle lives there.
LA: Oh, mate. Oh my God. It's like the most beautiful place ever.
JL: It's lovely. Yeah.
LA: Next week, people travel for all sorts of obsessions and fascinations, but my very own sister-in-law Crisscrosses America in search of every major league baseball stadium. She shows me that it's so much more than just the sport itself. It's the food, it's the energy, it's road trips, and it's the fans themselves. Consider this episode your dose of America in the summer. See you then.
I'm Lale Arikoglu, and you can find me on Instagram @LaleHannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus, Nick Pitman and James Yost. The show's mixed by Amar Lal, Jude Kampfner from Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast Head of Global Audio. See you next week.