Ending Note: Will We Remember When We Wake Up From this Dream Together?

I want to be honest about how this project began, because the beginning is embarrassing in a way I have come to value.

I was introduced to mugwort in New York by a white forager. She pointed it out on a walk through Prospect Park — here, she said, smell this — and I did, and I recognized it instantly, from childhood, from my grandmother's kitchen, from a whole world I had left behind. And yet I had never sought it out. I knew the plant by name and scent and use, had grown up beside it, and it had taken a stranger in a new country to make me look.

That is what immigration does, at least to me: it made me lonely in a particular way, and loneliness taught me to pay attention. I began to notice the margins — the strips between the sidewalk and the fence, the unmaintained edges of parks, the rubble-lots where things grew without permission. I began to recognize plants I had walked past blindly for years. And I found, again and again, the same plants I had known in China: mugwort, of course, but also plantain, and thistles, and dandelions, and all the others that the colonial machine had scattered across the world and then tried to eradicate and failed.

There is a particular satisfaction in that failure. Seeds may lie dormant, but they sprout. They do not observe human-made borders or calculate who is wanted and who is not. Their persistence feels, to me, like an argument — not a gentle one, not a resigned one, but a defiant one. The colonial machine's violence cannot be buried because it is legible in the landscape, growing through concrete, taking root in disturbed ground. The plants are witnesses that cannot be deposed.

I find comfort in this. When the weight of being an immigrant becomes too heavy — and it does become heavy, regularly, in ways that are hard to explain to people who have not felt it — I think about mugwort. About the fact that it crossed an ocean it did not choose to cross, was declared a pest in a country it had no reason to want, and grows abundantly anyway. About the fact that I can find it in every borough of this city, which is to say I can find something that knows me wherever I go.

This project is, among other things, a record of learning to be grateful for that. And an argument that this gratitude — for plant kinship, for the memory stored in volatile oils and root systems, for the stubborn life of things that were never meant to survive — is not a private sentiment but a political one. The archive we are building at Migration Mapping must be wide enough to hold it.