Eric Li
College Station, TX
2025, Senior, Creative Writing

The first time Grandma turned off Mom’s petunia sprinkler system, I thought it a betrayal of American values. Those pink flowers were Dad’s Mother’s Day gift that had survived three Texas droughts. I watched from my bedroom window as Grandma’s shadow fell over the flowerbed. Her calloused hands, still cracking from cold Heilongjiang (the northernmost province in China) winters even after five years in Texas, shut the water valve off with a firmness that silently said “no place for arguing.”

“Wasted land,” she muttered in Chinese, rubbing clay soil between her fingers like she was testing flour. The petunias seemed to be trembling, as if they knew their time was up.

The weekend after she renounced the petunia, Grandma opened a suitcase in our garage like a treasure chest. Inside were seed packets wrapped in a Chinese newspaper, decorated with hanging strings of dried red peppers. The infamous jar of fermented soybean paste soon made our backyard smell like a Chinese village. Next door, our neighbor’s golden retriever, Rex, barked at the strange smells over the fence.

“Baby bok choy needs more shade,” Grandma declared that first evening as she made soda-can collars around the young plants. “In Harbin (the capital city of Heilongjiang Province), we plant after the last frost, but here…” she trailed off, squinting at the Texas sunshine, which seemed intentionally antagonizing her.

I made my protest at dinner. “The H-E-B stories only five minutes away,” I said, holding up an ad on my phone. “See? Napa cabbage is only $1.99 per pound. Why waste time growing something so cheap?”

Grandma didn’t look up from chopping garlic. “Store vegetables don’t know your hands.”

In summer, our backyard had become a contested field where American lawn culture competed against Chinese agricultural pragmatism. Grandma’s innovations scaled up every week: a watering system made from my old tennis shirt sleeves and punctured Gatorade bottles; trellises from broken blinds; even a shade structure using my sister’s torn trampoline net. Every Friday morning, she walked around the neighborhood, usually bringing back with her a full cart of “plant gold,” for example, broken picture frames became garden markers, and an old ceiling fan turned into a pest deterrent.

Kids around us called it “Chinese Grandma’s Junk Garden,” but I noticed their moms started stepping to our fence with bowls full of various stuff. Our Hispanic neighbor across the street traded homemade tamales for dandelion greens she believed helped her husband’s diabetes symptoms. My Korean friend’s grandma exchanged her kimchi recipe for our Chinese chives. Most importantly, excess chives would be used to make my favorite dumplings every Sunday morning.

Then came the drought. Under the restriction of water by the city, lawns turned brown while Grandma’s garden thrived. She’d wake me at 6:30 AM to “steal water”: collecting AC condensation and shower water in buckets. Her notebook, her own little personal almanac, was filled with moon phases and diagrams showing how she arranged plants to create shade.

“You think this is just dirt?” she asked one morning as I grudgingly spread used coffee grounds around sweet potato leaves. She pressed my hand into the soil. “Earth is our roots and our history. My hands are here. Your future children’s hands will be here as well.”

Even when storm warnings were broadcast, and other kids were kept inside, Grandma pulled me outside: “Help tie down the tomatoes!” We used everything we could find: old jump ropes, Dad’s discarded ties, even torn-up bedsheets when we ran out of strings. As sirens wailed, she sang “The Commune Members Are All Sunflowers,” her voice cracking, which reminded me of the time when she’d sing me to sleep as a baby.

Streets were messed up after the storm with scattered debris and shattered branches. My neighbors’ proud southern magnolia tree fell on their SUV. Grandma’s Garden, however, stood strong: hit but unbroken. Her winter melons swayed like a victorious boxer.

Later that night, I found her weather notebook open on the patio. In her mix of Chinese and broken English, she’d written: “Harbin in 1968, the early snow killed soybeans” and “Houston in 2021- same pattern??” Next to a pressed cotton leaf handwriting picture: “WeChat said it would rain when cotton leaves curled. Should I test with Texas vegetables?”

Something changed in me then. I woke up early with Mom’s meat thermometer to check soil moisture. Grandma pretended not to notice until she saw me graphing pH levels. Without saying a word, she left a chrysanthemum tea by my calculator.

That winter, we began our big experiment, named the Texas-Heilongjiang Hybrid Project. Using a blend of Chinese seeds and local Texas plants, we attempted to grow vegetables tough enough to withstand both biting cold and scorching heat. Our backyard and garage transformed into a lab, where Grandma’s moon charts and my USDA climate printouts both served as our guides. We even turned an old fridge into a germination chamber, its shelves neatly packed with egg cartons, each holding a piece of our hopeful green future.

A February freeze in Houston nearly destroyed everything. At 2 am, Grandma’s icy hand shook me awake. “Twenty-six degrees,” she whispered, and a jolt of panic hit me. We moved quickly, scrambling in the dim phone light to wrap our precious plants in anything we could get our hands on. For instance, my little sister’s childhood blankets, wool scarves, and even Dad’s old sweatshirts. By dawn, the snow peas hung limp and broken, like snapped wires.

But then Grandma gasped. Sheltered by the house, three bok choy plants stood unharmed under their quilt armor. As we knelt, she pressed an ice chip into my palm. “Same as the 1969 Harbin famine winter.” The meltwater traced my new calluses, proof of our shared work.

I finally started to grasp what Grandma had always understood: working with the earth wasn’t just about surviving. It was building character, honoring tradition, and fulfilling a duty. Like in Confucius’s teachings, where harmony with nature and respect for one’s elders shape moral life, our garden became a reflection of those values: diligence, frugality, and reverence for the wisdom passed down through generations. Through his teachings, he also instilled in me a respect for the Earth and the importance of preserving that connection for future generations.

That spring, something amazing happened. Our hybrid greens flourished, but store-bought plants wilted. Neighbors came with notebooks to learn Grandma’s secret. Her “Dragon-Tex Long Beans” won first prize at our local Chinese church gardening contest for the elderly, growing eight feet tall with little water.

Now, when I check the garden at dawn, I sometimes hum Grandma’s work songs. We grow food, but also something much more valuable, a living language in the world. When I see my club friend taking notes on how Grandma trains bitter melon vines, or neighbors saving coffee grounds for our compost, I realize that this rustic garden has become something enlightening: a place of resilience in changing times. This garden allowed us to spread a spirit of compassion throughout the community, reminding us what it means to be human.

The land remembers what we teach it. If we listen, it tells stories of Heilongjiang winters and Texas summers, of hunger and plenty, and life exploring ways to survive. Grandma’s roots reach deep into frozen Heilongjiang winters. Mine are still finding purchase in Texas clay. But now I know they are not separate. They are braided together in the shared act of cultivation, an act that says, we were here, we endured, and we grew.

And the petunias? They only live on in a photo on Mom’s phone, which is a relic from a period when we thought beauty had to be decorative. But in this soil, beauty has changed its shape. It grows in the form of silk squash, reaching across cultures, bok choy that withstood the frost, and the quiet triumph of a grandmother who, against all odds, taught the land and her grandchild to speak her language.

 

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Texas-Heilongjiang Garden Project