The Brooklyn Rail

Humans have a long history of looking to narrative to make sense of existence. Our religious texts point us to gods and prophets, who wield storms of locusts and multiply loaves and meditate in caves and beneath fig trees. Oral histories tell us to look to the stars for answers, to remember a woman who fell to the earth and formed a continent upon the sea. These narratives are structures of human conception, but the answers may be mapped in life forms, in the biologies of organic matter. Little Seed paints the world as a lush, chaotic landscape: we are surrounded by organisms with obscure inner workings, whose nature confounds and illuminates. In this experimental memoir, Wei Tchou vacillates between the pinnules and petioles of ferns and the bounds and betrayals of humans as she unpacks the defining moments of her upbringing and her present obsessions. As Tchou attempts to make sense of her life, she looks to the patterns of life within the living.

Tchou is unflinchingly transparent in Little Seed. In the wake of her older brother’s first psychotic break, she brings her dying-no-dead fern from Brooklyn to an exclusive fern society uptown where she receives few answers when it comes to salvaging what is slipping away. This is the hinge point from which Tchou expands out, both back into her childhood, marred by toxic familial love and the desire for belonging, and forward through her own frenzied field guide of ferns. In Little Seed, Tchou is constantly uprooting the reader: from a childhood home drenched in tension and conflict, to an affluent North Carolina boarding school, a San Francisco cult, the offices of an elite literary journal, and the forests of Mexico.

Little Seed is structured as an ever-shifting timeline, in chapters alternating between a first-person exploration of ferns and those in a third-person following Little Seed (Tchou) as she grapples with the conditions of love and identity. There are moments when the pivot upends the memoir’s momentum, as when the plot breaks in the midst of an abusive relationship and diverts to the taxonomy of ferns; having to compartmentalize emotional beats has its learning curve. But the beauty of the experimental is in its wonkiness, in the bravery of the attempt of something unattempted and unexposed. Little Seed never masquerades as traditional.

A driving force of the memoir is the practice of classification. Classification is another human compulsion: to categorize and subcategorize until all is neat and tidy. This need to classify seems to be a calling and an undoing for Tchou. She throws herself into her study of ferns, comforted by the purity of her interest: “I think that liking is the greatest thing. It’s an emotion that doesn’t contain the desperation of wanting or the cost of need, the tendency to acquire it like language or culture,” she explains of her fern affinity. Tchou is called to pockets of existence that offer blank slates and level playing fields, where she does not have to adhere to expectations of the ever-shifting roles of Chinese daughter, American school girl, expressionless professional.

The classifications of flora and fauna are decisive and universal. “Let me tell you something soothing,” Tchou offers. “Everything alive exists in three categories called Domains…. All plants, including ferns, exist in the one called Plantae. No matter what language you speak, these names remain the same.” In a few meta scenes, we are brought into her research for her writing on ferns as she travels to upstate New York and Oaxaca trying to work her identification muscles. She discovers the act of identification is marred by relative perception, that even field guides cannot act as bibles when combing through the forest. Tchou must learn to distinguish on her own terms as she learns “there’s no such thing as a correct interpretation of a fern; every guide is an imprecise expression of a single perspective, a private language between a person and a plant.”

While the practice of classifying ferns provides an anchoring force to Tchou’s psyche, the memoir portions of Little Seed see her young self plagued by self-classification. Even the act of being named, of naming others, carries great weight as she contends with the implications of an imposed American name which she leaves unspoken; with the meaning of her given name, Wei Xiang, which carries a connotation of gliding flight; of the hierarchies of her familial identifier, Mei Mei (little sister), and those of her family. In these sections, she names her character, herself, Little Seed, a name we are left to classify; was this another name given to her, or is this a retrospective, self-imposed naming? Juggling so many classifications leaves Tchou constantly unsettled as she spends an adolescence in an earnest attempt to find her domain.

In Tchou’s ferns sections, one is overcome by the minutiae of detail we have been able to map of the tens of thousands of fern species that populate our planet. We must then confront how little we understand of the human brain, as Tchou excavates a childhood entrenched in a home of unclaimed and untreated mental illness. Here, Little Seed conducts ongoing studies of observation: she can assess that her family is impressive (financially stable, polite, intelligent), while simultaneously othered (as immigrants, as Asian); can document the ongoing instances of her father’s paranoia and cruelty; can track her mothers progression into a sickness of detachment. But these behavioral observations are insufficient for understanding the why of our innerworkings; Little Seed leaves us desperate for a field guide for the human mind. The book’s illuminating strength is its ability to juxtapose a deep study of plant life and a personal narrative of adjacent mental illness, and offer a whisper of revelation.

The spirit of the two sections begin to bleed into one another as the book unfolds. To the uninformed, science sounds a lot like paranoia. Distinctions of “once divided” and “twice divided” and “undivided” ferns—with names like Dryopteris filix-mas and Matteuccia struthiopteris and alliances with ant colonies and tree bark—are coded in legitimacy as descriptors of fern biology. Big Brother succumbing to mental illness could be read as the inescapable destinies written in our own biologies, of an outcome imprinted on his DNA from a father similarly afflicted by mental instability. The rise and fall of Big Brother’s potential seems mirrored by a natural cycle, an intensified case of our human arc of helplessness into bloom and then decay back into helplessness. The ferns are victim to this too, as are so many of us organisms growing and dying our small deaths here on Earth for all of time.

Ferns don’t die all at once. Their fronds reach inward, papering from tip to root. I kept the mystery plant in its pot, watching it shrivel and fold away. A fern in reverse. The end arrives in its many moments, the curling of every leaf into itself until it is a dark wisp, until it’s anything at all: a stick of incense, a crease in the binding of a book, a shadow.

Expecting all the answers to our human function by solely looking inward is perhaps where we lose the thread; Tchou’s work confronts these long-established modes of anthropological exploration. In Little Seed, we see our patterns mirrored in parts of nature that initially feel distant and unrelated. In truth, life is pulsing everywhere with pieces of something shared.