The Yew Tree

By Colby Fong

are based on place and heritage.

My story begins in the midst of a global pandemic. I am wandering through my grandfather’s backyard, feeling con fused and dazed as everything spins around me. The yard is colored with fall weather and gray skies that permeate deep into the walls of the world. When I am feeling existential like this, I like to wander. This time, I am wandering within the bounds of the backyard fence. This is a place that feels familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time, because years have gone by since I last wandered back here. The grass sparsely pokes through the fall mud, and the flower beds lay idle with weeds, withered and browning while laying flat out the edges of the beds. Among the crumbling rock walls is a bathtub and old cracked bamboo stakes littered about. The garden is unkept and unruly, but not in a beautiful way. It reminds me that my grandfather, the man who created this place, has been gone for nearly a decade.

I remember spending spring days here when I was just a child, sitting behind my grandmother as she poked around in the garden running along the fence. She made some smart remarks, I’m sure, and pulled the tops off of scallions so we could cook with them inside. The backyard was to truly know my grandfather? I was just 12, barely alert to the facts of adult life, when he passed away.

My foot catches on a half-unearthed piece of concrete and I nearly trip. I look back down, lost in my thoughts. What was a very quiet dry-cleaning grandfather to a boy who barely knew him? What would he think of who I was?

I suppose we could both be silent and introspective at times, but this answer felt incomplete, and still, I had more questions.

What would he think of his tree-studying grandson who, steeped in the world of academia, would seem so distant and purposeless to an immigrant whose first concern was keeping a roof and food for his family?

I thought more deeply—about what my father had told me of when he and my mother hiked the Appalachian Trail—to try to understand what my grandfather might think of me. They had decided to hike the trail after getting started in their careers, a choice that may have set them back a few years in experience and pay. My father tells me that my grandfather didn’t understand why they wanted to walk across the country with nothing but the possessions on their back. This was an experience too familiar to him to be enjoyable. Maybe he wouldn’t understand me and the work I do as a student trying to understand the natural world.

For a brief moment, I typified my own grandfather into being mostly unconcerned with the natural world. By the time I truly remembered him, he was tired and wanted to sit inside watching football.

My shoes squelch in a distinctly deep patch of mud I look up and there he is. Standing in the body of an Asian Yew Tree as if he was waiting to answer my question. I, being a student of forestry, knew his name.

So I asked, “what do you think of me, your tree-study- ing grandson? Do you understand who I am?”

And his answer was a resounding “yes.”

My grandfather planted this tree, this yew that is not native to the Northeast. It is an immigrant to this country, much like my grandfather, probably coming over the ocean on a boat to Ellis Island or some other port. He planted this tree to send his roots down into this foreign soil. To bring a little bit of home here. How different could it be? The soil was made of the same parts, the winds just as temperate and cold. The rain is no different than the rain at home nor the sun. So, the tree grew tall and beautiful.

The tree knew who I was. He knew who I was. I was the one confused.

My Grandfather steeped my father’s perspective about the world like oolong tea in my grandmother’s kettle. A water of natural connection. My father was raised in these gardens, back when they were covered in a shade of growing, golden light. Although my father did not grow gardens as beautiful as this one in my childhood. He took me up mountains and brought me down bike paths. He chose a wooded lot for our family, and as a result, I grew up to study ecology and forests, to learn the names of our plants, and to reconnect with this natural world and the beings that call it home. Everything came full circle for me to meet my grandfather again, in the form of an Asian Yew Tree.

I’m sure my grandfather knew the names of the trees and plants when he was a boy growing up in China, and in a different tongue, I was reclaiming that type of knowledge. My other focus of study is agroecology which sounds like some cultivated westernized science, but truly it was my grandfather’s garden: a piecing together of resourceful uses for things he had available to him. He would understand that part of my learning as well.

Cultivated within me is the same sense of environmental resourcefulness, something that seems to have mostly skipped my father and gone directly to me. Often, my father will say things like, “you are so odd in what you know…you are resourceful in what you make of what you were given…you have a wisdom of things that I cannot see….” Occasionally he will ask me for advice, and in his eyes, he isn’t just asking me. In me, I know he sees his own father. He is asking the man who was gone a decade ago, but a part of him born again into his own son. He aches to ask his father these questions, so he asks me, the closest thing he has.

This is cultural knowledge:

Ideas that pass through generations, ideas and trains of thought that can skip generations and reappear. It is not necessarily the details that matter, but the way you were steeped. What waters of knowledge were you steeped in?

When I think about how we will solve crises in the natural world and my part in that, I know I will dig deep into who I am and what I have been taught, because the answers for what I should do and how I should act will be found there. They will be found with the knowledge from generations past—knowledge that many others possess, in thousands of different forms—knowledge that will be pivotal to save the place we call home. With our collective knowledge, we possess the ability to rebuild our collective garden to rebuild our collective earth.

When I think about my purpose in spreading these ideas, I think about my Chinese name which is “friend to the village.” I see it as my duty to make changes for my village and to lead by example. I want to waste less and be more resourceful, I want to cultivate gardens that sustain, and I want to steward forests. Most importantly, I want to lean into my namesake, and help others find their way to help our collective garden be a more beautiful place.

It is tradition that grandparents give the cultural name in my family. I am proud that my grandparents knew me so well, for in my name they speak for us all, and they speak for me. Let us all be friends to our village and friends to our garden.

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for leaving me outside as a kid to learn about this beautiful place we call home. Thanks, Ma Ma and Ye Ye, for teaching us all so well. H