I often imagine what it was like to immigrate to California. The state probably felt big, dry, and daunting. My grandma said she wasn’t ready to leave her life in Hong Kong in the late 1970s when her family, including my mom, packed up for Los Angeles—preemptively avoiding Britain’s handover of Hong Kong to China. Not long after, my dad and his family immigrated from the Philippines, making the same journey, but to escape dwindling opportunities and search for jobs that could one day lead to owning a home.
What did my family leave behind in pursuit of better lives? How much do they miss? I remember how my grandparents surrounded themselves with familiar aromas, foods, and customs from their homelands that enveloped my siblings, cousins, and me as we grew up. My Chinese grandparents taught us how to kneel to Buddha, they read us folklore, and we played jungle animal chess. My Filipino grandparents took us to Sunday school and fed us a steady supply of imported dried mangoes and coconut-rice desserts, watching with full attention as we gobbled it up.
Outside the house, my grandparents learned to cultivate a sense of home with plants. One of my grandmothers planted sweet potatoes on her small balcony to harvest kamote leaves, a nutritious green that adds a pleasant bitterness to sour Filipino broths. My other grandmother started with mildly sweet small winter melons, popular in soups and stir-fries, that she grew in potting soil recommended by other Chinese nurses. Today her backyard garden bursts with dragon fruit, tomatoes, and oranges, maintained by methods she learns from YouTube videos.
Vallejo People’s Garden grows Ampalaya, or bitter melon, and Matilija poppies, native to Southern California, in the community garden. (Amir Aziz)
In the Bay Area, people like my grandparents aren’t hard to find. Immigrants make up about one in three residents in the Bay Area, or over half in many neighborhoods. And in their endeavors to create homes, they imprint themselves on the land. They plant with deep intentions to create abundance for bugs, birds, and their own families. In my reporting—an effort to learn how immigrants remake their homelands through gardening—I saw plants from all over the world that were food and medicine, each an opportunity to build families and communities. Many people planted California natives that attract wildlife, especially pollinators that flit between the homeland and native plants, encouraging both to grow. The result is an evolved sense of home—a blending of ecologies.
Like my dad, Vilma Aquino remembers the nights sleeping on bamboo mats in bamboo huts in the Philippines when she was young. She helped pump water from her family’s well and ran barefoot through sugarcane fields and coconut trees. Her mother and family grew vegetables and raised meat to sell at the market. Then it all ended abruptly at age five, when her family moved to San Francisco in 1965 in search of similar opportunities my father’s family desired. But in the city, there was no land or garden for her family to tend that might have helped feed Aquino and her six siblings. “I would be so hungry, because there was never enough food back then,” she says. “We were dirt poor.”
Decades later, with a backyard of her own in Vallejo, Aquino planted her first sugar snap peas and tomatoes, growing food for her children. After that she was eager to learn, scouring books, watching lectures and videos, and taking courses to become a master gardener. “I just evolved, and I just kept wanting to learn more, and how we can all play in the ecosystem with balance.” She also began to feel control over her health. Filipino Americans are especially susceptible to heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes compared to the average American, largely due to adopting westernized diets and lifestyles, according to a variety of studies by Virginia Commonwealth University and University of Hawai’i cancer centers. Gardening offered a different path: “When you grow your own food, and you get all that minerals and vitamins and good stuff and the fresh air, you start to become healthy too.”
Today, Aquino is in her 15th year of leading Vallejo People’s Garden in a lot next to a church with a mostly Filipino congregation less than a block from her home. She began it as a way to connect with her roots, by “being amongst other Filipinas in this urban environment and growing food that I’m familiar with,” she says. Alongside Filipina volunteers, she manages 22 beds, many filled with Filipino staples like luffa, taro, and chayote, commonly boiled in soups. Circling the beds are bay trees, whose dried leaves help develop earthiness in adobo, banana leaves to wrap around rice or meat, and guava leaves that help alleviate stomachache. She shows me a fiery costus, or the insulin plant, whose broad green leaves on branchy twigs are believed to lower blood glucose. “When you chew on it, ” she says. “It helps to manage diabetes.”
Aquino’s garden overflows with turmeric, heirloom tomatoes, and Chinese cabbage—a variety of food that reflects Vallejo’s status as among the most racially diverse cities in the Bay Area. Interspersed with the garden’s food and home remedies grow California natives like ceanothus and milkweed. A “pollinator pathway” leads through sections of native garden dedicated to pollinator habitat: seaside daisies for bats, sticky monkey flower for hummingbirds, California goldenrods for beetles, showy milkweed for butterflies, yarrows for beetles and bees, Pacific asters for flies, baby blue eyes for moths, and Oregon grapes for wasps. More than 30 native plant species, along with educational signs, line the path. “Native plants support so much more wildlife,” says Aquino. “A garden is evolutionary, just like people are.”
Roughly six miles northwest of where my mother spent her early childhood in Hong Kong, Andrew Chang grew up at the base of a mountain near a jungle. There, he was known as the boy who wrangled snakes. His remote village of about 100 households sat a mile from the bus stop, inaccessible by car. Wildlife moved fluidly between the village and jungle. Cobras and other snakes slithered down the hills to homes and yards, or sometimes, into couches. And when that happened, the villagers called upon Chang.
He would sneak up from behind and grab snakes even if they were poisonous, then give the gallbladders to his grandmother to eat, a Chinese remedy she claimed helped a person stay warm during winter months, during a time without heaters. At around 10 years old he was helping feed his family by growing a patch of green onions, bok choy, choy sum, and eggplants. He felt satisfaction in seeing a plant grow.
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Chang tended the garden until he left for the United States at 19 in 1965 (the same year Vilma Aquino moved from the Philippines) with less than $100 to his name and a strong desire to leave British rule. His attempts to get a visa included a handwritten letter to then-president Lyndon B. Johnson. He made his way through Bay Area schools studying electrical engineering and computer science, working nights and weekends at burger joints and farms. Now, he lives in Los Altos Hills surrounded by 1.7 acres of oaks, grasses, a chicken coop with pigeons, and a grove of large fruit trees. I’d describe his house as sitting in the center of the expanse, like a wooden boat in a sea of green. He lives with his environment, just as it is.
Andrew Chang with bounty, and his coveted red dates. (Amir Aziz)
Many of the grasses growing on his property are invasive and too abundant to weed. But he doesn’t mind walking through thickets or tussling with the ever-hungry fauna. “I have lots of wildlife,” he says, and it’s clear he pays close attention to their interactions. Deer and gophers are nuisances; coyotes and hawks help stave them off. Sometimes, he brings in gopher snakes or rattlesnakes he finds on the street to keep the rodents at bay. He also tries to attract different kinds of bees, he tells me while observing little ones zipping between the poppies planted along his driveway. The bees help pollinate his Chinese chives, red dates, and kumquats. As we walked through thigh-high grasses and weeds, I wondered if he had created a California version of his wild homeland.
Chang’s reason for gardening is simple. “I just like being able to plant things and be able to harvest them myself for me, for family, and for friends,” he says. He gives pomelos as gifts to promote healthy and numerous offspring during the Chinese New Year. He also teaches a Chinese cultural class and tells students about the legend of the red date (sometimes known as jujube), a tale of a future emperor’s daughter who used the dates to help a village survive a famine. And he tells of their medicinal effects. Chang began planting and eating red dates when he was diagnosed with stomach cancer 30 years ago, and he’s now cancer-free. When his students have “health issues . . . sometimes they ask me for it,” he says about the dates. “I share with them.”
Despite everything he grows, Chang doesn’t consider himself a gardener or his land a garden. “I’m kind of more like a resident steward,” he says. “I call it a jungle.”
While Chang arrived in America with a strong desire to leave Hong Kong, that was not the case for Antonia Master, from Athens, Greece. Master arrived in Martinez, California, in 2000 at age 23 with what she called “the infamous 90-day fiancée visa” and a case of homesickness. “You don’t have your smells, you don’t have your people, you don’t have the places you knew,” she recalls. Above all, “I couldn’t find the same type of oregano that had that same taste and the same aroma like I was used to.” At the time, Greek products like oregano and yogurt were scarce in grocery stores. And so she went hunting.
She didn’t have to look far. Other local Greek Orthodox churchgoers in Vallejo were exchanging seeds and seedlings from trunks of cars—varieties of eggplants, oregano, and tomatoes you wouldn’t find in your average grocery store. “Can you spare some from your garden?” she would ask. Finally she received her first oregano seedling and began joining in the trades. “We pass the oregano like it’s some type of gold,” she says.
Still, she wasn’t much of a green thumb. Athens was “a big city made out of cement,” she says; the rows of apartment buildings only allowed for small pots on balconies. “I had not grown a leaf in my life.” So her now-former mother-in-law, also from Greece and about 50 years her senior, took Master under her wing. “You’re gonna put the tomatoes there, because they’re gonna be happier there than the other side,” Master recalls her saying. “Pick the oregano when the first flower blooms, not before, not after, because this is when it has the maximum flavor, and the flavor will last for the whole year.”
Oregano in Antonia Master’s garden (left); Antonia Master holds salvia and oregano that she grows in her garden. (Amir Aziz)
Now in her backyard home garden in San Bruno, she seems to have mastered these traditions. She grows basil next to a Greek eggplant variety to fight off pests, attract pollinators, and improve the eggplant’s flavor. She grows Concord grapes alongside her fence and rolls the third and fourth fingers of each leaf into cigars to preserve in plastic water bottles for dolmas. She always makes sure to bend down and pet her basil plants, giving each little bush a shake to release aromas into the air. It’s a Greek tradition you must do, she says, because you “can’t trust anyone who doesn’t want to smell basil.”
At the front of Master’s garden is a mix of native and pollinator-friendly plants—dark indigo salvias, white-flowered achilleas, sunshine-yellow fernleaf yarrows, and lavender-speckled rosemary. And with them come the regular visits from bumblebees nesting underneath her backyard shed. The natives that bloom earlier hold the pollinators in the garden for her late-blooming Greek plants. “I think the garden is just like California. It’s a melting pot,” she says. “We all do better when we’re all together.” Her garden beds are dotted with pollinator watering stations, filled with marbles so that the bees, butterflies, and moths don’t slip and drench themselves in the small puddles. Hummingbirds take bird baths in her small fountain.
“I tried to make my garden part of what I was missing back home, and of course, it evolved,” Master says. “It’s both a California garden and Mediterranean garden.”
Unlike the other immigrant gardeners and stewards I met, José Gutierrez was born a gardener, specifically a beekeeper. Since he could walk, he worked from dawn to dusk on his family’s more-than-500-acre ranch in a valley surrounded by mountains in the small town of Matatlán in western Mexico. His family grew corn, beans, peanuts, and zucchini and raised pigs, horses, and bulls. But his father also grew orange, lemon, papaya, plum, and cherimoya trees that produced fruit thanks to the abundance of bees he captured in a collection that grew to over 100 boxes.
Gutierrez caught his first bees at just five years old, and he couldn’t wait to show his father. He wasn’t afraid, wearing just a head wrap his mother sewed from scraps of fabric and armed with only a stick, a box, and his dad’s love for the bees. Despite getting stung on his face, he was able to capture a swarm’s queen—and the rest of the bees followed. “He said, ‘Oh, you are a good beekeeper,’ and I feel good,” says Gutierrez, remembering his father’s reaction. “He gave me a chance to work with him.”
But his ranch days ended when he was 14 after tragedy struck: his mother’s death. Gutierrez and his five siblings moved to Guadalajara and he had to leave school, working to support his siblings. He was first among them to move to America, a 25-year-old with $80 in his pocket, in 1975. “I arrived on Sunday and started working on Monday,” he says. Five months later, his wife and children were able to come live with him in Hayward. It took another decade to buy a house and finally begin the garden and hives he’d been missing.
Fast-forward 35 years, and I’m standing beside a variety of medicinal herbs bulging from what looks like a single bush that sits in front of the house. It’s a common Mexican tradition, Gutierrez’s grandson Julio Contreras says, explaining that the herbs serve as the family’s first line of defense against ailments, so it needs to be accessible. In bloom are muicle, aka Mexican honeysuckle, for anemia, and cedron, lemon beebrush, for digestion. Jammed in between them are plants like estafiate, or white sagebrush, for colic, and sábila, or aloe vera, for burns. One plant, whose leaves are shaped like cow hooves, climbs his walls, aptly named pezuña de vaca or the Brazilian orchid tree, is good for people with diabetes like him, he says.
Gutierrez also grows guayabas, persimmons, chayote, lemons, and a dozen varieties of peppers surrounding the house in black plastic pots that remain unplanted in the compacted dirt. Pots and pans sticky with honey are scattered about, and as I follow the trail of bees (and flies), the buzzing grows louder. At the back of his yard, a half dozen hives in wooden boxes casually sit near the fence he shares with his neighbor, next to a row of orange trees. As they were on his father’s ranch in Mexico, the bees feel like part of his family. “They remember you,” he says. “They can see you almost two, three times a week, they recognize your face.”
José Gutierrez and his grandson, Julio Contreras, help manage a community garden in Ashland, Alameda County. (Amir Aziz)
Even the bees themselves are medicine for the family. Gutierrez’s wife, saddled with sewing machine shoulder pains, often asks him to sting her with four or five bees. The sensation is soothing: “For three or four months, she doesn’t have pain.”
Gutierrez’s bees now live well beyond his backyard. He looks after 100 hives at locations in the Bay Area from San Leandro to Hayward—it’s the buzzing engine of his family honey business at the Hayward farmers market every Saturday; some of his 17 grandkids and 13 great-grandchildren participate. A number of the hives reside at community gardens in Ashland and Cherryland, unincorporated communities in Alameda County.
The family began running one of the gardens last spring, planting rows of corn, bean, squash—three crops known throughout the Americas to grow well together. Other immigrant families have taken notice and begun helping out, admiring corn varieties they thought they would never see in California. Alongside it, purple collard greens planted by past community garden groups grow en masse, tended by the Gutierrezes for the plant’s significance to the Black community. There’s a plan to put hives between the native yarrows and achilleas at the back of the garden and the planted crops up front. The pollinators help both areas thrive.
Different people can belong to these community gardens, says Contreras, who is now a beekeeper and 4-H program coordinator for the University of California Cooperative Extension. It’s for family, immigrants, and everyone, he says, who passes by the chain-linked fence and sees land they want to help cultivate.
I have always wondered, what land do I belong to? I think it must be the land my parents belonged to and the land their parents belonged to. My nose is wide; my skin is brown-ish—I’m suited for the tropical, humid climates in Southeast Asia. But really, my body has acclimated, dried like jerky in the Los Angeles heat and San Francisco Bay winds for the past 24 years. Humidity feels foreign to me, and dryness feels normal, despite flare-ups of eczema and dandruff that seem to be telling me otherwise.
Belonging, I realized, isn’t straightforward for my grandparents either. In preparation for my grandfather’s funeral earlier this year, the funeral home managers asked my grandmother how she would like to proceed with Chinese burial traditions. “I don’t know,” she responded. She has never had to bury someone in China. “I am Chinese American,” she stated.
I never saw that. I only saw how she finds speaking in Chinese easier than English, plays mahjong at her community center, and sings Chinese opera. But in fact, she has been an American longer than I have been alive and has been in Los Angeles longer than she’s lived in Hong Kong. She has lived the American dream and grown alongside this country since the ’70s. She and my grandfather listened to the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel on their record player on repeat.
Her garden isn’t just a piece of land to produce familiar food, but a place where she makes something new and entirely hers. The tomatoes and dragon fruits are not Chinese, and neither are her compost methods from YouTube. I think the only things directly imported from China are her potting bags and watering bulbs from Temu. As she gardens to feed, grieve, and learn, the garden’s vibrancy reflects her well-being and determination to thrive despite loss. Instead of wondering what land I belong to, maybe the better question is the one my grandparents asked: What land can we create?
This piece is dedicated to my late grandfather, Daniel Ho.
