Foraging for Asian Mothering Ingredients

Cooking, folding laundry, braiding hair, advocating for our children’s needs within an under-funded public school system, and struggling between setting boundaries and giving grace while helping our children find their own balance. All of these are acts of mothering. For mothers of color who live in a society dominated by whiteness, mothering is also the labor of intentionally and selectively passing down racialized knowledge.
I spent the first 23 years of my life in a society where my own ethnicity, Han Chinese, is dominant—and where I took for granted that my culture and experience would always be well represented. I never would have guessed that one day I would need to work deliberately to curate an identity and tradition for my child to inherit.
Today, I live on the West Coast of the United States, where Chinese-ness generally calls to mind conservatism, small business ownership, and tech professional elitism, none of which I identify with. Building our family “culture” has required a lot of appropriation and fabrication as I gathered and sourced ingredients for my personal melting pot. My family’s journey into coastal foraging is one of these attempts.


The first spring of the pandemic, I turned to social media to see how other people were making the best of this despairing period. My friend Annie posted pictures of seaweed harvesting with her Korean immigrant mom and her 3-year-old. Knee-high rain boots stepped into the ocean. Ribbons of kelp drifted in the air as hands lifted them out of shallow water.
The three generations of smiling faces in those photos showed me an overlooked transpacific cultural connectivity. I had seen broad leaf kelp and other varieties of seaweed on this side of the Pacific Ocean, but I had not realized that they were edible until that moment, even though I grew up with seaweed soups frequenting my family’s dining table on the other side of the ocean.
베던탤므缺 (haǐ daì paí gǔ tāng). Wakame/miyeok pork rib soup.
凜꽉뎔缺 (zǐ caì dàn tāng). Nori/gim egg soup.
Both of these soups are simple: two ingredients each, a pinch of salt to brighten the flavor, and a splash of alcohol to lighten the smell of blood. My parents bought the seaweed from the local market, where haǐ daì was tied into small knots and soaked in water, and zǐ caì was dried and shaped into a disc about one inch thick and eight inches across.
My family lived in the inland mountains. We did not forage from the ocean, but each spring, the women in my community would gather new growths from the forested hillsides. Jì caì (shepherd’s purse) was minced and made into pork dumplings. Jué caì (fiddlehead ferns, often found around old graves) were blanched and stir-fried with spicy peppers. Aunties picked salmon-colored xiāng chūn (the young leaves from a Chinese mahogany tree, also called beef and onion plant) and used them to make scrambled eggs colorful and fragrant. Grandmas made tea from yú xīng cǎo (literally “fish odor grass”) and savored its complicated taste of mint and fishiness. I joined them some weekends when I didn’t have extracurricular lessons. My skin, even today, remembers the breeze as I rode on the back of their bikes and scooters, the goosebumps that rose when I’d push aside tall grass and find a snake lifting its head.
For these generations of women, foraging was a response to the hunger caused by colonial war and post-colonial authoritarianism. Even though their material lives had already improved significantly, their bodies remembered the past and the need to find sustenance. Foraging follows from the traditional belief that food obtained directly and processed by our own hands is the most nutritious. Foraging is a way to relate to the land and water by eating what they offer up.
By the second spring of the pandemic, after multiple periods of quarantine, it was obvious that outdoor space was much needed for the health of my relationship with my child and for both of our emotional wellbeing. I’m bad at sports and lazy at hikes, but perhaps I could appropriate the Korean American community’s foraging tradition as a pan-Asian cultural activity?
Legal seaweed foraging season in Washington is only one month, from April 15 to May 15, and even within that window, it is allowed only during negative tides. Annie couldn’t go during the negative tides that year because of scheduling conflicts but decided to send her mom with us, so my family had the great luck of learning from the OG. Ajumma Jung had foraged various plants and animals around Puget Sound for over two decades and witnessed the price of a geoduck climb from three dollars to three hundred. She speaks limited English and is usually not talkative at Annie’s house parties, but when she educates us about foraging and farming, her words are generous and assertive.
The beach at Fort Flagler State Park is shaped like a hook. Ajumma Jung guided us towards the point of the hook. The tide had already gone down, and the rocky beach was covered with dehydrated seaweed. Ajumma Jung was at the front, speed walking with confidence over the slippery rocks. I followed, trying not to lose sight of her. My husband and Fig were still behind us. I looked back from time to time, hearing Fig exclaim with both excitement and disgust when jets of water squirted her from under the mud, seeing her pick up rocks and shells and lose herself in the many distractions until her dad told her to hurry and catch up.
I followed Ajumma Jung to the point of the beach where there was a wide area of shallow water.
“This is miyeok,” she said, pointing. “This is good, very delicious. This one with bumps, not good.” Ajumma grabbed a dark green kelp, showing us how it clung to a rock with a mass of tendrils called a holdfast. “You only get miyeok attached to rocks. The others are dead, not for eating.”
She grabbed her scissors and cut the kelp at a spot about one foot away from the rock and then made a second cut to remove the broken yellow tip of the kelp. “Yellow is because of the sun. Not good.” She grabbed the mesh bag in my hand and put the kelp leaf into my bag. “If the seaweed is too big, too chewy. Smaller is good.” She gave the mesh bag back to me and said, “Ok, you begin!” Then she walked away.
Before I could process all the information, my husband and child caught up.
“Mama, which seaweed are we picking?”
“There are at least five to six kinds of seaweed here,” my husband noted. “Do you know which kinds to collect?”
“Uh…. sort of?” Feeling uncertain, I looked around. Hundreds of middle-aged Korean and Japanese women were ankle-deep in water. Their hunched bodies were shaped almost like hooks, eyes focused, busy hands reaching, cutting, bagging. Scattered among the aunties were about ten older white men. The aunties’ partners. They stood straight up and stayed nearby, companions but not working partners.
There was almost no conversation between the aunties; they kept some distance from one another as if they had a mutual agreement on separate territories. They appeared to have been there for a while, or perhaps other aunties had come the day before. Many of the kelp left in the water had already been cut.
I moved closer to an auntie nearby, slightly invading her territory to spy on her movements for a few minutes until she noticed me and kindly offered me a demo. After that I felt more confident about this miyeok-cutting business, but I also felt anxious to get a piece of the harvest.
“Fig, bāng māma zhǎo haǐ daì (help mama look for seaweed)! Look for the long and not cut ones.” I turned to involve Fig in this foraging activity. “Nǐ ná zhe daì zi (You hold the bag). Nǐ zhǎo seaweed, māma jiǎn (You find seaweed, and mama will cut it).”
Although Fig had been a kid who said “no” to my requests more often than “yes,” she was more likely to agree when it was a group activity where her help or leadership was needed. She immediately stomped into the water, her pink rainboots splashing around. “Mama, here!” she shouted, lifting a kelp. The early spring ocean wind was strong and chilly. It blew on the kelp, making it dance, and also blew on Fig’s face, making her eyes and brows squint together.
“Mama, here! Mama, here!” Her small body darted around. Then she stopped to shout even louder, eyes opened wide and brows raised up, “Mama, come over! There are sooo many!”
As I made my way over, I saw another cluster of seaweed and reached down for them. That was the moment Fig realized her help was not sincerely needed, and this repetitive activity reached the end of her attention span. She stopped looking for miyeok.
Noticing Fig had become bored and impatient, my husband waved from a few feet away. “Fig, come over. I want to show you something.”
I bent down, eagerly harvesting these perfectly sized, brown kelps. They felt slippery but not slimy, solid but not rigid. Whoosh, snip, snip; whoosh, snip, snip…. My body converged into the aunties’ synchronized dance, the quietest and the loudest at the same time. It quickly became back-aching work, but I felt a deep sense of comfort rise from a long-lost cultural familiarity. Not for fun, but for food. Not for social recreation, but for social reproduction. We were all here collecting a nutritious ingredient for our families throughout the year; this food and this way of accessing food could not be taken away by colonial wars, economic crises, or political oppression.
This cultural familiarity is deeply reassuring for immigrant women. Even though we have been uprooted across the ocean and continue to live through uncertainty, even though much of our knowledge and skills have become irrelevant, the way we relate to and believe in the land and water helps us take root wherever we are.
Fig shouted from afar, “Mama, mama, there is a gigantic red crab!” I stood and gave her a thumbs up, then quickly bent down and returned to the rhythm of collective harvesting.
At the end of the hour, I had a heavy mesh bag of seaweed, both 海带 (haǐ daì, known in Korean as miyeok and in Japanese as wakame) and 紫菜 (zǐ caì, which is called gim in Korean and nori in Japanese). Fig had a wonderful experience tide pooling. She found tiny crabs under the rocks, cupped her hands to let small shrimp swim in the shallow pool, returned fish stuck in the intertidal zone back to the ocean, and gently touched the clam-necks that boldly protruded from the beach before their quick retreat left dimples in the mud.
Although I felt a little disappointed that she did not spend much time foraging, I appreciated that my husband, a Pacific Northwest local and former botanist, had used this place to create some nature lessons and fun for Fig. This allowed me to fully immerse my body and mind in this regenerative community act, all while the moon did us the favor of pulling the water to the other side of the earth.


Three years have now passed since that day, and seaweed harvesting has become an annual family tradition. What’s more, we’ve invited friends to join us every year. A group of three turned into a group of six, then a group of twelve. Our coastal foraging adventures expanded to include oysters, mussels, and small and big clams, all throughout the year. We’ve found that the bigger and sandier the shellfish is, the browner the foragers are. When we went to a beach that’s known for big horse clams, we were digging with another hundred or so Asians in bib overalls. When we finally had a bite of a Macoma clam, we immediately understood why historically only Native American and Asian immigrants ate them.
Fig turned seven this year. She is still the kid who says “no” more than “yes,” and still the kid who is more willing to say “yes” when it’s a group activity that needs her leadership or help. But her ability to stay motivated and to find joy through repetitive movement has grown. So has her love and skill for coastal foraging.
The day before this year’s annual seaweed harvesting trip in April, Fig was feeling sick, and we considering not going. But she was so disappointed at the prospect of missing out that she insisted that she would be fine. The next month, on a clamming trip, when we arrived at Dash Point State Park two hours before the lowest tide and saw about a hundred other Asians rushing towards the beach, Fig tugged at me: “Kuaì yi diǎn (hurry up)! Let’s run! They will take all the clams!” On other clamming trips we took this year, she would dig for clams in the muddy water alternating between hands and shovels for half an hour, take a break to adore a moon snail, and then come back for another half an hour. She insisted that we continue digging until we reached our license limit and used our homemade ruler to check the length of each clam she foraged, reluctantly putting back the ones that were smaller than 1.5 inches.
A few months ago, we went shopping at a local Asian grocery store. As we wandered through the aisles, I paused in front of a shelf stacked with bags of dried miyeok, each priced between 15 and 20 dollars. On average, the cost of foraging—after factoring in state licenses, transportation expenses, and in some cases overnight lodging—is almost the same as buying these from the store. Not to mention, the latter spares you from back-aching labor and the work of cleaning, blanching, freezing, or drying, and other prep. I felt defeated. Seaweed farming and commercialization were much more efficient than our primitive, manual collection. “Do you think we should just buy the dried seaweed here and not go foraging anymore?” I asked aloud, more to myself than to Fig.
“It’s not the same kind,” Fig responded assertively, “because it tastes different. It might be 78 percent the same, but not 100 percent the same.”
It was amusing to hear such a precise measurement, especially since Fig enjoyed foraging seaweed much more than eating it. (I’m hopeful this will change as she grows older.) Whenever I make seaweed pork rib soup, the same dish my parents made for me, she’d eagerly devour the ribs soaked in seaweed flavor but leave the seaweed itself to me.
“You know,” she continued, “when we pick seaweed, we get to play with our friends, see lots of cute crabs, and grab the seaweed right from the ocean!”
“You’re right,” I said, feeling gratified that foraging, the older generation’s response to hunger and my generation’s quest of racialized belonging, has generated new meanings of joy and connection fo her generation.
Motherhood is a journey of surprise. To fulfill the responsibility of immigrant motherhood, I ventured into foraging, which unexpectedly became a space of healing. It is also a tunnel of magic, a tunnel through which the memories of past generations of women in China have traveled across the ocean and transformed into an Asian American experience that my child will grow up with.