December 2023, my friend Julia invited me to a dinner hosted by Second Generation Seeds, a seed collective that she was a part of. Julia on the phone with Angie: “It's an end-of-year celebration for all the farmers that have been working on this project of growing Asian heritage seeds together. It should be really fun!” I had no idea what to expect. Angie texting Julia: “wait is there a dress code?” Julia texting back Angie: “it'll be pretty relaxed, it's hard to get farmers to dress up lol” The dinner was hosted at Sister Restaurant in Oakland, California. The food was a delicious medley of crops grown by Julia's cohort of 10 farmers. For their fellowship with Second Generation, each farmer developed a seed-breeding project for a crop that was important to their heritage. Julia's focus was gailan. She explained that since gailan is a cool-season leafy green, she wanted to explore varieties that could be more adaptable to our rapidly heating world. Not all the fellows were at the dinner, but some contributed produce. Julia introduced them to me by pointing to each of the vegetables they had grown. It was a beautiful way to meet someone, and extraordinarily special to taste a meal made of fruits and vegetables rooted in the varied histories they came from. Julia speech bubble to Angie: “Try the eggplant from my friend Christina!”
Midway through the dinner, Kristyn Leach, the founder of Second Generation Seeds, stood up to give a speech. She conceived of it as a collective of Asian American farmers growing heirloom Asian crops, one that explicitly nourishes the relationship of diasporic folks to their stories, traditions and perspectives—all through seeds. Kristyn Leach speech bubble: “Tending to Asian heritage seeds not only makes these crops accessible to others, it also helps the growers strengthen their relationships to the seeds' respective cultures.” At the time, Second Generation had five growers and 10 Seed Fellows, but their community is far larger than that: They also have a number of community offerings in the form of potlucks, cook-alongs, farm tours and information sessions. As Kristyn put it, seeds offer more than just sustenance. Kristyn speech bubble: “I'll let you get back to your dinners now.” Julia whispering speech bubble: “She's an incredible mentor.”
I left that meal deeply moved. Culture, and the food that was nestled in it, had always felt retrospective to me. My parents both come from agricultural families in the Shaanxi region of China. When I asked about their experience, my mom would often recall farming as nothing but punishing labor. But other times, my mom spoke fondly of farming. Angie’s mother speaking while cutting scallions: “Our plot of land was our saving grace. It kept us alive.” I never questioned her conflicting feelings; they seemed natural. After the Second Generation dinner, though, I asked her more about it. To my surprise, I learned that it was not. Her attitudes were about two separate periods of her farming life, cleft by a distinct political shift.
The time my mom spoke of with pain was during the period when the Land Reform Movement was in effect. In the early 1950s, the CCP seized the farmland of individual landlords. Though technically the land was being returned to the peasants to own collectively, the local government still decided what would be planted, when and where. The villagers only worked the fields in order to earn credits for food. Angie’s mother's speech bubble: “We just did what we were told. Farming was just labor, nothing more.” When Deng Xiaoping took over in 1978, he portioned out individual plots for each family. Angie’s mother's speech bubble: “Our plot was less than half an acre. We still didn't own the land. We couldn't buy land from others or sell ours.” “But now, we could make the decisions. Now we had control.” That control made everyone care much more about their farms, not only because it was now their primary source of food. My mom describes the feeling of seeing snow fall on the crops, thick layers of white covering the earth and protecting the seeds: Angie’s mother’s speech bubble: “We would say "they have an extra thick blanket this year!" They were our babies. Our bao bei.” When my mom is feeling extra tender, she calls me that, too. Her bao bei.
The control my parents were describing fell under the definition of food sovereignty that I had come to understand through La Via Campesina, an international organization of peasant farmers that advocates for the rights of farmers and sustainable agriculture. La Via Campesina defines food sovereignty as "the right of farmers to produce food and the right of consumers to be able to decide what they consume and how and by whom it is produced." This prioritizes agricultural production to feed the people and advocates for people's access to land, water and seed. Instead of depending on corporations—or governments, in the case of my parents—for food, the people consuming the food become the heart of food systems.
I spoke to Kanoa, a farmer who was in Julia's Seed Fellow cohort, about seeds and access. At Feral Heart Farm, Kanoa grows what he wants. For the Second Generation Fellow program, he breeds for longer luffa, which he thinks will sell better. Luffa, or loofah, is a summer squash that is both edible and used as a sponge. It's where the loofah sponge gets its name, though most modern loofahs are made of plastic. When I ask him what his process is for seed selection, he tells me he just picks the longest squashes to save. Kanoa’s speech bubble: “It's just like, OK — if we have a bunch of shorties, let's just not keep their seeds.” Then he does it again and again, season to season, until eventually, one generation reaps the benefits of the seeds he has patiently stewarded.
Kanoa tells me seed saving is an integral part of farming. He explained that there are designations for seeds that are sometimes marketing-based. If a seed catalog says a seed is tolerant of something, it just means that seed survived an environment with that particular factor, such as drought, disease, extreme temperatures. Kanoa used to farm on a ranch in Half Moon Bay, three miles from the coast. There, it's always cold, even in summer. When Kanoa saved seeds from tomatoes he had grown on that ranch, he called them cold-tolerant, even if he wasn't specifically selecting for that trait. Kanoa’s speech bubble: “I mean, if they weren't, they wouldn't have made it.” Despite how casually Kanoa spoke about the process, it warms me that farmers like those of Second Generation think so deeply about seasons down the line.
I'm used to our current food system that prioritizes immediate profits over long-term cultivation of healthy land, farmers and consumers. Often this priority also comes at the cost of the environment, taste and food quality. Organizations like Second Generation offer a counter-strategy to that approach as they care for a community they may never meet. Compounded over generations, the seeds can change significantly, and relatively quickly. That epigenetic memory of a single season of life is immensely powerful—all that history contained in one tiny vessel. Even if future farmers may not know the efforts of today's growers, it's a comfort to know that the seeds do. Offhandedly, Kanoa tells me: "Seeds remember the climate, the soil, things about their previous lives." When thinking of the histories they contain, it's easy to focus on the harsh conditions to which they adapt—what they can withstand, and how they are now resilient because of it. In seeds, as in humans, trauma can be easy to trace. But there is an even more important history to uncover—that of care—which often remains invisible, yet without which we would never have survived.
Kanoa is of Filipino Chinese heritage. When it comes to selecting which Asian crops to grow, he plants those that he wants to remember such as eggplant and bittermelon. Kanoa also grows corn, which, as he points out, originated in the Americas. Many crops that are considered staples in pan-Asian cuisine actually came from the Americas, such as corn, squash, sweet potatoes, peanuts and tomatoes. These crops were brought back in continental trades and woven into the culture through the food. Many European cultures have adopted these same crops so thoroughly that one could be forgiven for believing them to be native. It's hard, for instance, to imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes. Sometimes cuisine feels like shorthand for culture, which itself feels tied to a specific place. But the journey of crops across the world shows how food and culture themselves are diasporic and continuously evolving. Tomatoes were something my parents missed desperately from their childhood in China. My dad and his brother used to bike to farmers who had just plucked tomatoes fresh off the vine. When I told my dad where tomatoes originated from, I saw doubt scrawled across his face. Angie’s dad’s speech bubble: “Those were really ripe. Not like the watery ones here in America.” It didn't matter to him if tomatoes were native or not to China, only that they were native to his childhood. The larger history of tomatoes didn't eclipse his private history with them.
I visited Kanoa at his farm and noticed he had chrysanthemum drying outside in a collapsible hanging net. He said he didn't grow up with these plants, which are a popular motif in Chinese poetry, a key ingredient for herbal medicine, and a ceremonious part of Mid-Autumn Festival. There are more chrysanthemum in a nearby dehydrator. Kanoa’s speech bubble: “I didn't know my Chinese great-grandparents, but I still offer these dried flowers on their altar.” “Maybe they like this, I don't know. I hope they do.” I adore chrysanthemum tea, though I didn't drink it growing up. My mom did, however, and I wonder if that's where I get my taste for it. When I tell him this, Kanoa sends me home with a gift.
That same night, I prepare tea for my mom. When my mom takes a deep inhale, she says it's just like her childhood. La Via Campesina's manifesto talks about protecting both the past and future generations through land sovereignty. The future part made immediate sense to me, but it wasn't until sharing that pot of tea with my mom did I realize what it meant to protect the past. Since that first Second Generation dinner with Julia, I felt a renewed tenderness for my ancestors and their seasons of invisible care that allowed me to exist now. And now, my parents' agricultural backgrounds weren't remnants of a traumatic past but instead a connection from their ancestors to them and from them to me: A story we could steward together.
These days, my anxiety about the climate crisis is an inescapable screech in the back of my head, some high-pitched tinnitus. Like tinnitus, I'm aware of it, but I can't focus on it all the time or I'd be paralyzed by the internal scream. I've learned to tune it out in order to survive. My mom used to say that farming is just "xiu di qiu." Fixing the earth. It was a joke, she always clarified, like how one could say they fixed cars or fixed technology. But her joke also felt like hope. Xiu di qiu — could we? Maybe by tending to the land, stewarding the seeds of the earth — and letting them steward us — maybe, then, we could.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the July 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Seeds of Diaspora.”

Republish

Spread the word. News organizations can pick-up quality news, essays and feature stories for free.

Creative Commons License

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Angie Kang makes art in LA. She is the author and illustrator of OUR LAKE (Kokila, 2025), and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer,
Narrative and elsewhere. In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Cartoonist Studio Prize. Learn more at www.angiekang.net or on Instagram @anqiekanq.