I met Kong Suling in 2018 at a suburban ballet school. I was hustling my five-year-old, Qiutong, out of her jacket and into her pink leather shoes while, farther down the bench, Kong did the same dance with her granddaughter.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
SIGN UP
I don’t remember the precise details of our early conversations, but I remember that her eyes were animated quasars following my every word and gesture. Kong spoke only a few words of English. She was amused by my broken Mandarin. And she was delighted by our two girls. As our friendship grew, Kong asked my wife and me to call her Lao Lao—a northern China term for “Grandma.” Solid and warm with her hair cropped short, she looked the part.
Each week, Lao Lao would bring our family plastic shopping bags filled with vegetables from her garden. She had grown too many Chinese staples: eggplant, bok choy, and celtuce. Our family of four struggled to keep up with the volume of food.
Lao Lao told us that she’d learned to garden by watching YouTube. She loved her hobby so much that she planted whatever she found at the gardening store just to see if it would grow.
“Do you like this?” she’d ask, holding up bags bursting with fragrant basil. “How do you eat it? You have to teach me.”
One day, Lao Lao invited us to her community garden plot near her family’s apartment in central Beaverton, Oregon. The small lot was sandwiched between an underused community center and a drab apartment building just a block from the parochial school where I’d spent eight years dressed in a blue uniform. It was sectioned into 38 small rectangular plots arranged around a spigot. Like the rest of town, Lao Lao’s community garden was completely nondescript. It didn’t even have a name.
Time is funny in this part of the Pacific Northwest. History feels as if it’s been intentionally paved over with five- and seven-lane boulevards that snake from massive earth-toned residential developments to monolithic corporate campuses to Costco. Fossils tell us that this area was once under the sea. But at a glance, Beaverton seems to exist in a perpetual present. Even Nike, the city’s most famous company, is only about as old as I am. An occasional glacial erratic is the only sign of the great floods of the Pleistocene era. There is almost no trace of the massive oak savanna once cultivated by the Kalapuya people.
And I’ve never seen an actual live beaver in Beaverton.
Lao Lao took her small chunk of suburban glacial silt and made it bloom. A chain-link fence was all that separated Lao Lao’s garden plot from the slow parade of cars and buses on Fifth Street. But looking into all those green and growing things, I felt a sense of peace. While the rest of the community garden was a jumble of jutting sunflowers, thrusting leaves, and browning things, her plants seemed to be sitting cross-legged, breathing deep, restorative breaths. They glowed in the sun. I swear I did not see a single weed.
Perhaps reacting to my delight, Lao Lao gestured at her neighbors’ untamed plots. “They’re young people,” she said. “They’re working.”
Lao Lao was long retired and could walk the four blocks from her apartment to her garden two or three times a day to plant, weed, water, and harvest her crops.
A chemist in Lanzhou, she’d left her home and a lifetime of memories to follow her children to the States. In her new life in Beaverton, she shared a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment with her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter.
The garden plot was all hers. She set up a couple of white plastic chairs there where she could sit in the sun.
“This is my room,” she told me.
Before long, our two families were sharing dinners at each other’s places. Lao Lao, her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter visited our house for hot pot. It’s simple to prepare. If you can peel a potato and boil water, you can make hot pot.
We bought a brick of fatty, spicy, salty soup base from the supermarket; added water; brought it to a boil; and threw razor-thin slices of raw meats, fish balls, tofu, mushrooms, and fresh vegetables into a communal pot to cook. Time stretched out. We stewed together, eating and drinking for hours.
I felt a bit self-conscious about our simple culinary efforts when we traveled a mile down the road to eat at their small apartment and were treated to a genuine feast. Lao Lao served us elaborate homemade dishes made of freshly harvested ingredients, including steamed buns stuffed with chives and tofu; hand-pulled beef noodle soup full of fragrant herbs; crisp celery stir-fried with wood ear; pork dumplings with chives; tofu with shrimp and cabbage; and glass noodles stir-fried with egg, lotus root, and greens.
The two five-year-old girls twirled around the room while our toddler, Linlin, tried to keep up. We adults shared stories. Lao Lao’s daughter, Juliet, had blunt bangs, glasses, and a fierce curiosity. She loved languages and studied English literature. Lao Lao’s son-in-law, Hai, was a tall, frustrated musician still sporting a crew cut from his years in the People’s Liberation Army, for which he danced ballet. His true passion, he told us, was playing the guzheng, an ancient 21-string Chinese zither that I had heard played only in formal settings. We talked about the stress of their citizenship applications, erratic bosses, our shared impatience with finding more-meaningful work, and our daughters’ well-being. Having brought us young people together over this community-garden-to-table feast, Lao Lao faded into the background.
Hai knew a guy who could get good Chinese liquor, and one night, after several rounds of Fenjiu, he pulled his guzheng from its spot under the bed. It was over six feet long and hand-carved. He sat cross-legged on the floor with the instrument on his lap. His daughter, Nina, sat next to him, pressing into his side.
“Are you ready?” he asked us.
His right hand began to pluck notes, and his left bent the pitch. The room filled with an ancient melody, thousands of miles and thousands of years from where and when it was written.
We clapped.
“That was ‘Liú Shuǐ’—‘Flowing Water,’” he told us. “It is 2,500 years old. NASA put it on a golden record and sent it into space.”
Looking back on that moment, I can see time unfurling. A thunderous family with four young children moved into the apartment above Lao Lao’s. COVID hit. George Floyd was murdered. Sandwich boards promoting an online history exhibit appeared around town saying “This IS Kalapuyan land.” More and more people camped in the parking lot behind Lao Lao’s garden and in front of the library across the street. The city government distributed eviction notices to the community gardeners and announced plans to replace the lot with affordable housing for seniors.
Juliet and Hai bought a tract home in a newly developed area at the edge of town. They drove Lao Lao back to the old neighborhood to make one final harvest and to say goodbye to her garden friends.
The fence around the old garden is locked now. The whole lot is weeds. The community center next door serves as a temporary shelter for the growing number of people in crisis. Lao Lao’s family cut down a shady tree on their property to make way for her new garden. She still gives us all the basil we can handle. We can’t see it from Beaverton, but NASA’s Voyager space probe swims ever deeper into interstellar space carrying a 2,500-year-old melody. It reminds us of home.•
Kerry Seed has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, WashingtonPost.com, NYTimes.com, NPR and BBC. He produced several episodes about basketball in China for Sports Explains the World, a forthcoming podcast from Meadowlark Media.
