Is there anything as hot and muggy as a Midwestern summer? Summer in subtropical Taiwan, perhaps. Read my essay about connecting the dots of Taiwan’s colonial past through and get an easy recipe for my mother’s cucumber salad. That’s probably why my mother, as a new immigrant, turned to gardening—not just as a way to explore her academic field of botany, but also to connect her traditions of food with her new home.
When I was growing up, my mother always had a garden in our backyard. She immigrated to the United States as a graduate student in botany, and even though she stepped away from her career to raise my brother and me, she still had a green thumb. She would plant seeds in a clearing where our backyard blurred into the neighbor’s, and a thicket of leaves would sprout up. In the heat of the afternoon, it was my job to check and see what was ripe for the night’s dinner.
But the garden was my mother’s territory, not mine.
Read the rest at Eating Well.