Seedfolks Essay

Seedfolks

Seedfolks is a book about family. One day, a little Vietnamese girl named Kim plants some lima beans in a vacant lot in Cleveland to honor her father who was a farmer. A neighbor notices and decides to plant her own plants. Soon, more neighbors notice and do the same. Soon, the vacant lot turns into a community garden. The people of Cleveland have to avoid their differences and come together as a family to make it successful. The book Seedfolks implies that family is the true source of love because almost everybody in the book does something to express their love through the garden. The garden becomes somewhat like a family, and brings the community together.

In the beginning, we are introduced to Kim. Kim is a young

Vietnamese girl. She stands by the family altar looking at a picture of her father, and starts to cry. Her father had died before her birth, and she was never able to meet him. She turns away from the altar and takes lima beans and water out to the vacant lot. Kim’s father was a farmer in Vietnam, so she decides to plant the beans so he could see that she was her daughter. “He would watch my beans break ground and spread, and would notice with pleasure their pods growing plump.” Kim is showing her love for her father, that she never met, by growing lima beans in honor of him. This shows that even though she never met her dad, she still loves him because he is family. Though Kim’s simple expression of love for her father, she not only importance of family and starts a revolution by creating the garden. Even in a beat-up run-down city like Cleveland where tension is always running high, Kim manages to turn a disgusting vacant lot into a garden that brings the whole town together. Kim is not the only character in the book who has lost family though. Sae Young and her husband wanted kids badly, but none came. Then sadly, he died of a heart attack. Soon after that, her dry cleaning shop was robbed and her cheekbone was broken when she got kicked in the face. She isolated herself and didn’t trust anyone. She felt lonely for many years until she came across the garden. She started to feel like she had a family again and wanted to be around people, so she goes to the store and buys three funnels so it is easier for people to fill containers. “That day I see man use my funnel. Then woman. Then many people. Feel very glad inside. Feel part of garden. Almost like family.” By people using her funnels, she starts to unwind and she comes out of the shadows. The warmth of the garden family changed her life. Now Sae Young can live a normal life, since the garden accepted her.

Wendell is a very important character in Seedfolks.

He is a janitor at the local school, and lives in the same apartment building as Ana. Each time his phone rings he is instantly reminded of two tragic moments in his life. “My phone doesn’t ring much, which suits me fine. That’s how I got the news about our boy, shot dead like a dog in the street. And the word, last year about my wife’s car wreck. I can’t hear a phone and not jerk inside.” This quote is a big part of the importance of having family. Wendell’s main sign of symbolism is the pitcher. The pitcher represents the life in the garden. Wendell realizes that he can’t change a lot of things in his life, including his lost family, but he can change a patch in the lot. He realizes that it is better to do that than complain about the things he can’t change all day. Leona is another very important character in this book. When she walks past the garden, she tells herself she will plant a patch of goldenrod. Goldenrod is very important to her because it reminds her of her grandmother. She drank a cup of goldenrod tea with a nutmeg floating in it every morning, and declared that she would not need any more medicine. This shows that her main symbol is goldenrod, because Leona is trying to plant it in remembrance of her grandmother. Leona goes to the city hall to try to get the city to remove the trash so more people will be able to plant there, and she

succeeds.

In Seedfolks, it also shows how people do not appreciate their families, but later realize the importance of them.

Gonzalo and Maricela are two examples of that. Gonzalo and his family moved from Guatemala to Cleveland, which left his great-uncle, as Gonzalo says, “like a baby.” Gonzalo’s mom trusts him to babysit him, but Gonzalo is disgusted by the thought of it. Tio Juan, often wanders off and Gonzalo has to find him. One day, Gonzalo realizes he has wandered off and he rushes to find him. He finds him at a nearby vacant lot that had been turned into the community garden. He grabs his hand, but Tio Juan pulls him through the trash into the lot. Tio Juan tries to give advice to a man, but the man can not understand his poor english. That night, being the farmer he used to be, Tio Juan told Gonzalo’s mother about the garden, and the next morning they picked out a spot for him. At the end of the chapter Gonzalo acknowledges his intelligence about gardening and respects him more. “He’d changed from a baby back into a man.” This quote tells how the community garden leads Gonzalo to respect Tio Juan more. Maricela’s chapter starts off on a sour note. She shares several stereotypes and about how they are directed towards her. It leads us to the fact that she might be depressed, because she says how she wouldn’t care if she died. Being pregnant as a teen causes her to be mad at the world. She wants an abortion, a miscarriage, or to put the baby up for adoption,

but her parents are excited because they love babies. Her and two other pregnant girls from her high school joined a group for pregnant teens. The group started a spot and the garden to help them “witness the miracle of life.” Leona goes over to give Maricela flowers, and talks to her. Maricela says that Leona could tell she does not want to be pregnant. This shows that Leona might have been a young mother at one point because she relates with her. This causes Maricela starts to change. She realizes how she is a part of nature, and she started to appreciate it. “And for that minute I stopped wishing my baby would die.”

“My father called them our seedfolks, because they were the first of our family there.” By the end of the book the community garden has sprouted, and becomes a family. Many people have planted in the garden to honor lost family members. In a way, Kim is a seedfolk because she started the garden. Because Kim is honoring her father, now the garden has nice supplies, and the apartments that look on the garden charge more. Even though seedfolks is just a made up word, it has so much more meaning than just that. It means to be the first of a generation, to be an innovator.