Minions vs. Smallfolk
Awakening of Insects 惊蛰
Things I’ve done since quitting my job last month:
Eaten at Atoboy, Banh Anh Em (that salted duck egg scallop!), Frijoleros, Mam, Sailor, Bonnie’s, Auntie Liu’s Kitchen, Hakata TonTon (mine is better), and the lone American location of Grandma’s Home (a great PDR1 for CNY)
Signed up for NYBG courses Basic Plant ID, Spring Mushrooms, and Spring Foraging Walk
Signed up for this Using the Whole Animal workshop with Theresa from Alone Season 8 at Marble House Project
Signed up for NAMA’s burn morel foray in British Columbia, which then evolved into a whole roadtrip involving Vancouver Island and black bears
Gotten some lavish gifts for loved ones - winter Perigords for a friend feeling down, an Inis Meain2 cashmere sweater for my brother just because I found a deal, Kaluga caviar for one friend’s milestone birthday, Hermes nail polish for another’s (because the ridiculousness is the point)
Which is to say, I have simply been fending off the instinct to hunker down and bite my nails by saying FIWB.3
I know this is a short-term strategy, but it’s an important one. For ten years I have looked at daytime classes at NYBG and cool hunting (animals and mushrooms) workshops and thought “wouldn’t it be nice to have the time” so I cannot immediately replace that thought with “wouldn’t it be nice to have the money” because that would mean I’m the problem.
And the restaurants, the gifts? One last flurry of largesse while I can. Last year, my two longtime restaurant anchors4 both closed and I’m still mourning. You have to support the places you love the same way you have to tell people you love them - before it’s too late. Also, I’m a Virgo; gifts are my love language.
At the moment, I am also still drawing a paycheck. A hilarious quirk of the corporate world is that usually, once you hit a certain title, you have to give a long notice. I love this. You want to pay me for 90 days of lame-duck employment? Sure thing, I am happy to “work” on my “transition.”
I think everyone will be happy to see the back of me when my 90 days are up. I’ve been such a pill since quitting. I think my ability to perform/codeswitch/give a single fuck simply vanished overnight. One pillar of my worldview is that there are only four productive (read: societally beneficial) jobs: grower, builder, teacher, and healer. These jobs can be defined generously (you know what’s real), but the farther you get from one of these jobs, the more you feel nagging ennui, self-alienation, whatever you want to call it. Hungry ghost syndrome lurks.
I’ve been far from societally useful for a long time. I’m a good employee in the sense that I’m reasonable and competent and not a psychopath, but I’m becoming an ever worse employee (and boss) because when I know my job doesn’t matter, I can’t really feel shame or performance anxiety or “imposter syndrome” (lol), and I can’t be bothered to make anyone else feel that way either.
And if you can’t feel those things, you can’t be scolded. It’s ridiculous, right? To be an adult scolded by another adult? Over “KPIs”? To be made to feel like a kid who hasn’t completed her homework? And yet people habitually do this to each other in work environments. In one of my first jobs, at Victoria’s Secret, I was constantly scolded by the managers for not measuring enough boobs or selling enough credit cards. These days, I’m still getting scolded for the corporation not making enough money, the only difference is the metrics are a bit more opaque (but not more sophisticated) than boobs and credit cards. I think that adults consenting to other adults making them feel like children is what makes capitalism run.
I’m just not scoldable anymore.
It has a lot to do with foraging, actually. When I first started foraging, it felt like a party trick, being able to walk down the street and pluck something and say “taste this.” Then, once I started really working with the ingredients, foraging felt like a culinary secret weapon. Then, when I started learning the plants’ stories, it felt like meeting kin.
Now, I realize that somewhere along the way, the plants taught me to be ungovernable, quite without my consent. I think what happened is that I’ve just seen mugwort and knotweed and honeysuckle and all the rest too many times. Seen them resist labels and fences and designs and poisons and management plans and strategies, year after year, completely oblivious to our frantic human plotting. There is such relief in witnessing the small but inexorable win against the mighty but futile. Mugwort does not care that you think it’s a noxious weed; it does not have big feelings about called invasive. It is unscoldable.
My foraging practice developed against the backdrop of the pandemic, Gaza genocide, climate disasters, end stage American immolation, etc etc. I’ve long struggled to describe my political bearings. I didn’t vote in the 2024 presidential election, but I did spend that summer rewatching Game of Thrones, and I kept telling everyone I was not having a Brat Summer, I was having a Smallfolk Summer. Game of Thrones, upon rewatch, revealed itself to be an incredibly optimistic and libbed out climate parable. I mean, these ancient clans who murder each other incessantly actually manage to band together and defeat climate change! Your real world faves could never!
I was having a Smallfolk Summer because in Game of Thrones, the smallfolk understand that the only value elites have is entertainment value. Smallfolk live in gleeful nihilism, happy to throw cabbages when fancy carriages pass but otherwise unconcerned with the Game. In the real world, smallfolk once understood that the ruling elite should have their nipples cut off and thrown in a bog if they failed to govern adequately. Smallfolk once understood that the mandate to rule comes from them providing, not from scolding us into voting better.
If The Man wants to make children, or minions, of us, don’t be a minion, be smallfolk. Things grow without permission all the time; noncompliance can be a way of life. Grow the cabbages on someone else’s land and then throw them at the landlord.
Because how can anyone live these days without defining her own moral code? When law, religion, and what our parents taught us are all quite useless, what choice do we have? Defining a moral code is foundational to leaving childhood and becoming a full-fledged adult, is it not? It is each person’s birthright and each person’s responsibility, is it not? Foraging hastened and sharpened this process for me, because from day one, it was always a constant negotiation of what’s right vs. what’s legal.
Maybe all of this sounds like I’m advocating disempowerment, but it’s just a different understanding of power. Next time you have some bro in your face asking “well what do you think the solution is, then?” to some Big Issue, you can simply refuse to be put on the spot. You can say, “it’s not my job to figure that out, I’m smallfolk.” I think our shit would be less fucked up if we all just recognized that we are not supposed to try to be independent political strategists/game theorists/thinktanks. THAT is what is disempowering. It is OK to simply demand the right to exist and it is OK to simply not comply with the conditions that threaten your right to exist.
Why am I even talking about 2024? I attended an event two weeks ago that finally crystalized all these long-bubbling thoughts into words. A huge puzzle piece snapping into place. It was a discussion of Lu Xun’s work by professors Zhang Xudong and Adam Tooze. Tooze drew parallels from Lu Xun’s chaotic and violent era (1920s, China crumbling) to our own (2020s, America crumbling), and characterized his darkest, most famous pieces as cries into the abyss. Zhang described Lu Xun as a humanist who cared deeply about his country and his countrymen and just wanted straightforward things - nice lives - for everyone.
In other words, Lu Xun, the most important Chinese author of the modern era, was smallfolk. Zhang said that nihilism and its overcoming was the most central question for Lu Xun, and that the closest he ever came to expressing an answer - the closest he came to putting down his moral code - was in his book of prose poetry.
The name of that book? Wild Grass. He admired wild grass for its ability to grow fast, die fast, and come back. He saw it as a metaphor for the Chinese people.
The last line from “Hope,” the key poem in Wild Grass:
绝望之为虚妄，正与希望相同
“Despair, like hope, is but vanity.”
春游/FIELD TRIPS BY FIELD NOTES
A Spring Foraging and Cooking Workshop Series
Mugwort: April 4th and 5th, Staten Island. In collaboration with Dani Mercury. This one is free thanks to grant funding from Culture Push; full details and signup to be announced very soon.
Toon: April 25th and 26th, Bronx. Looking for a collaborator, get at me if you are a gardener or horticulturalist.
Bamboo: May 23rd and 24th, New Jersey. Looking for a collaborator, especially other Asian cooks. Might you have something to share about bamboo?
Rose: June 13th and 14th, Brooklyn. Are there any sericulturists reading this? Birders? Cocktail artists? Bakers?
Phragmites: June 20th and 21st, Queens. The 21st is solstice so we’re going to party!
Saturdays we will forage, Sundays we will preserve and cook. Workshops will range from $30-$50 per session. Discounts will be available for those wishing to attend both sessions in a weekend. One scholarship slot also available per session for someone willing to assist and take photos. Exact foraging locations will be provided after signup and carpool is available from North Brooklyn.
MORE TO COME.
Private dining room. Apparently this is not a widely known acronym?
The best mens’ sweaters on the planet, bar none
Fuck It We Ball
Corkbuzz and M Wells
as someone who also just left her job, you literally put all my feelings into words. big fan of your workshop attendance and extremely eager to attend some of yours. curious for the builder/grower/teacher/healer where you see artist?