How Ferns Helped An Appalachian Author Navigate Family And Her Identity

A book by a Chinese-Appalachian author explores the concept of identity and how we are shaped by the people and places around us.

Little Seed is a sort of hybrid between nature writing and memoir. Its author is Wei Tchou, whose parents migrated from China and raised her in eastern Tennessee. The book’s chapters alternate between stories of Tchou’s passage into adulthood, and eloquent descriptions of ferns and closely related plants. Inside Appalachia host Mason Adams was taken with the experience of reading Little Seed, and wanted to learn more. 

Adams: Your book, Little Seed, is amazing. It’s about many things, including identity and how people around us can shift how we think about our own identity. You get into a number of your identities in this book: Chinese, daughter, little sister. Do you identify as Appalachian?

Tchou: I definitely identify as being Appalachian. It’s such a nuanced and small identity within the identity of being Southern. I remember when I was putting this book out, it felt really important to me that it was thought of as a Southern book, and I was thought of as a Southern writer. I felt like it was important for me to be with Deep Vellum, which is a press in Texas, because I want the identification of being Southern. I think very deeply I identify with the place, and I think that there is this relevance to all of these identities I’m talking about in the book, which is this push and pull: I want to be Chinese, but I also don’t. I want to be seen as feminine or as a woman, but also there are all these deep contradictions and terrible parts about being a woman or being feminine. I think it’s the same with how I feel about being Appalachian.

Adams: Your family is from China, and your older brother was born in China, but you were not. How did your family land in eastern Tennessee, and what were your first memories of the mountains of the region?

Tchou: My family has always been in the South since they immigrated. I think that’s kind of just a luck situation. My grandfather actually came over first in the ‘40s, which is quite rare, given immigration patterns and the legalities of emigrating at the time from China. China was closed, but he came and he interned at a hospital in West Virginia, in a town called Williamson. While he was here, China wound up closing its borders, and he wound up marrying a white woman in West Virginia. He also wound up enlisting during World War II. I think some combination of these factors allowed him to claim U.S. citizenship. Apparently there was provision that if you had a relative in another country who passed away, then you could get out of China at the time. My grandfather died in this freak flying accident, so my dad was able to come over with my aunt. They kicked around West Virginia for a while. My dad was in Atlanta, working in restaurants, and then eventually was able to find his way back to being a doctor, which is what he was trained for in China. In Chinese culture, there’s a lot of ancestor worship, which means that you believe that the deceased are looking over you, and that is tied to your fate. So there was always a sense in my family that you couldn’t move too far away from your root. In our case, the root is my grandfather, who’s buried in Williamson. There was a sense that my family always made decisions to make sure that they’re always within driving distance of going to his grave to pay our respects. You asked about my childhood memories of Johnson City and West Virginia and all these mountain places I grew up in. So many of my childhood memories growing up in the mountains, [and] road trips through what really feels a jungle or it feels like deep forest. Even in Johnson City, I had these very intense sense memories of autumn, the leaves changing, the wetness in Cherokee National Forest. I remember being a little kid, and I can remember them taking us out into the woods, the teachers teaching us how to identify sassafras or tulip poplars or whatever it is. All of that education stuck with me as a child. It was really grounding to look at the natural world and be encouraged to interact with it and ask questions and be told what the names of these things are, what role they had in the culture that I grew up in.

Adams: The bit you talked about with sense memory resonates partly because my dad was a botanist at a community college, and he studied red spruce. I have these sense memories of being in the Smokies and in parts of western Virginia and West Virginia where there’s just rhododendron tunnels and ferns everywhere. So I was really compelled by your book and its descriptions of ferns and related plants. The descriptions are technical and yet poetic, and they’re also tied to this underlying story about your family. Did your interest in ferns grow directly from coming up in Appalachia?

Tchou: No. In some ways it’s part of the loss and longing of the book, is to feel like, as someone who was an adult, I got really into ferns. But the kind of wet deciduous forests, the Smokies in West Virginia and Johnson City where I grew up, that’s where you go look for ferns. That’s the entire childhood of growing up in a place like that, is where you expect to learn the differences between a Christmas fern and a bracken, whatever I’m writing about in the book. I think that that was a constant feeling that I had as I wrote the book, is I wish that I was more aware to this world of ferns when I was younger, because I would have had the opportunity. That’s also the point of the book, is that even if you are immersed in nature, like I was as a kid, inevitably, because you grew up in this place where everything’s about nature, there’s an entire ecosystem that you missed, and that everyone misses. Nobody really thinks of ferns. Even though I was taught to name a lot of plants and trees and flora in general as a child and as a teenager, I don’t know that anyone ever pointed to a fern and said, “This is what that is.” Indirectly, I think that growing up in Appalachia, that kind of deep reverence and also learning the language of the woods or that being really important to the culture, was probably part of what gave me the tools to become interested in ferns. But I was not aware that there was such a thing called a fern back then.

Adams: Little Seed is about ferns and it’s about family, but it’s also about growing up and kind of finding your own identity, and so along the way, you write about an experience that’s shared by many Appalachians and especially young people — and that’s moving away from the region. I know from personal experience that changed how I felt about where I came from. Did moving away change your conception of Appalachia and how you felt about growing up there?

Tchou: Yeah, moving away definitely, definitely changed. I think when I first left Johnson City and Asheville and my home, I had an affectation about being from this place. I went to [the University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill, so it’s a short skip east, but by the time I was in Washington, D.C., and by the time I was in New York, I was really clinging on to this identity of being Southern for so long and being Appalachian, being from Johnson City. I think it starts to feel like an accent that you’re faking. I think in the same way where growing up in the South — and I don’t know if you have this experience — but I felt extremely alienated from the culture, in a way that I was desperate to be part of it. The way that I’ve coped, or the way I’ve accepted it, is that the experience of the mountains belongs to me, the experience of nature and the natural world that clearly has formed me belongs to me. Even if I didn’t feel it for reasons of race and ethnicity and gender and all of these complicated,  marginalized reasons, I didn’t belong to the South. As I moved into places where it was easier to exist, it felt important to be able to say that I was Appalachian, because there’s no one around to say I wasn’t in the same way that when I was growing up in Johnson City, I constantly felt like I didn’t belong. There was all of this intense tension about being alive as I picked up other identities and became more competent, more mature, I think that that desire and that need really loosened its grip. I haven’t been back to Johnson City since, gosh, like high school or something. I went back to Asheville to give a talk the January before the pandemic started. I went back, and I felt an intense alienation of race in a way that I found very sad and very disappointing. I had this really intense rejection of it, where I was like, “I don’t like the way that it feels here. It’s so white. It feels so falsely progressive in so many ways.” It was a real disappointment to go back to this place that I had wanted to belong to for so long and I felt was constantly rejecting me, and then to go back and feel like an instant need to sequester myself somewhere, to not be in that culture because it didn’t feel safe to me. I’m Asian American, and not to say that my oppression isn’t real or whatever, but  I’m certainly more privileged, more fluid in the culture than I could be. And I still felt discombobulated. That’s something I consider a lot now, is that it’s not for me anymore, but I am still made of this place.
Little Seed is available now from Deep Vellum.