Anushka Tay
I was walking down the road in Angkor with my grandmother and she paused to look at a red beaded necklace. It was November 2019, before the pandemic. We were there because she had wanted to see the temples at Angkor Wat, I’m not sure why, perhaps because her cousins had been a few years before and showed off their holiday pictures. We dragged Gong Gong along with us on the trip and Por Por became increasingly frustrated because he refused to climb the steps to the towers, preferring to sit at the bottom on a bench watching a group of girls dancing with bright smiles and sounding small cymbals. I don’t blame him. Still, when we entered the temple complex and passed through an open gallery, a monk was busy burning incense and Gong Gong put his hands together for a brief moment of prayer and gave the monk some money. That’s more than Por Por did.
The next day, we left Gong Gong at the hotel and walked through the town, and that’s when Por Por’s magpie eyes glinted at a rack of jewellery displayed at a shop entrance. Her hand reached out towards a necklace of red beads. ‘Those are seeds, we used to collect them from the tree when I was little and play with them. We used to play a game. We used to pretend it was money. I used to have a necklace with these seeds.’
When my grandmother talks about her childhood, she casts herself as Cinderella, forever sweeping up after her seven younger siblings, an impoverished life in a Chinese settlement in the jungle. Later I surmised that her father was tasked with destroying the rainforest, or as some might put it, extracting capital from the land. He managed a rubber plantation, although their village is now surrounded by palm.
We are indulging in middle-class tourism. She chooses a necklace, and I buy a set of hooped earrings, the red beads strung into two-inch diameter circles and threaded with dangling turquoises. Later, when we are back in London, our red beads become part of the regular rotation, at least until one of my earrings loses a hook and my grandmother moves onto other trinkets, and then the pandemic strikes, and we stop seeing each other or even leaving our homes for several years.
The necklace belongs to her and it is part of her. It rhymes with the seeds she collected as a child, from a tree in the jungle that does not belong to her. Somehow, in my mind, that tree belongs to all the children in the village, who are now all in their 70s and 80s and some have already died. The red seeds are saga (Nadhirah and Nugroho, 2025). They belong to the Malay people, who somehow don’t come into the stories of my grandmother’s childhood, although they must have been nearby at all times. My family was on their land, after all —not that they have ever seen it that way. The British got there before us, after all, as did those other Chinese who became the Peranakans, the Dutch, the Portuguese.
When my grandmother dons the necklace, the red seeds so naturally glassy as if they have been lacquered, she is a little girl scrabbling in the dust underneath the canopy for a toy, she is a young woman fleeing the humiliation of a public beating and crossing two continents to make a new life in cold, rainy, gray England, she is a minority marking her presence by styling her body (Tulloch 2016) with beautiful objects, bright objects, and red.
Saga is from Malaysia and it is in Cambodia and it is in England in my grandmother’s jewellery box, it grows in Australia, it spreads its branches in India and grows in Jamaica and Mauritius and Togo, and Venezuela (WFO: 2025).
Much Chinese jewellery is a double-metaphor of pictorial and material symbolism, like a pendant formed from a piece of jade, believed to be healing, carved into the shape of a calabash bottle gourd, which was used as a container for medicine (Tay, 2024). As I write in my mother tongue, which is English, saga is a homonym: seeds and stories. Drawing on the Icelandic, in English what we call a saga are the oldest stories, the ones that go on and on and on in many volumes, many lives, and many sessions of telling. And for me, too, saga are the red seeds that spill with abundance onto the dirt floor. These aural puns are a common feature in Chinese languages. In Hokkien, my grandmother’s language, ba means eight and jiak ba means you’ve eaten your fill, so ba is lucky number eight since being full of food means being full of money.
I’m thinking about the importance of red in Chinese culture and how colour has been used to distinguish the ethnicity of a person, a town, a time of year. Red paint on the lintels, the doors, red paper cuts flutter in the windows. Of course, originally these were plant dyes and plant paints that were brewed and then used to physically mark community spaces, objects, and bodies. And I’m thinking about this in relation to the instinctive draw towards red berries as a marker of ripeness, which speaks back again to the plants.
Plants want to grow and people want to live, and all turn towards the light. I’m writing from the perspective of my research on diasporic communities, and the experience of disconnection from inherited land through human movement that is motivated by a survival instinct. This is something that everybody is increasingly living through in these first three decades of this current century, which is set to continue as inequalities are exacerbated globally.
Engaging with living plants provides the opportunity to regrow connections to places from our recent past or familial imaginary. It’s a visceral experience, this documentation. And it’s simultaneously highly specific and totally generalisable, because in my experience different communities can relate to the forms of interaction with plants, even if the specific uses differ. In this activity of re-learning and co-feeling, botanical collections have the advantage of being a repository, a storehouse for amassing different shapes and expressions of knowledge.
Why is it valuable to have this storehouse? I feel it is important to resist nostalgia (Boym, 2007), and this can be done by scrutinising the past and aligning our present knowledge with the expression of knowledge of previous generations. In diasporic communities, the old is often swept out with the dust and broken furniture – clothes are cut up into rags and used to wipe the floor, and often nothing remains of the old country except the tales of old wives. It’s into this void that archives and collections can speak, as long as those people who have questions to ask are able to voice them. I think that what we often see in communities is that the gesture remains, in terms of cultural practices; but the nuances, the details can get lost (Tay, 2024). Or they become severed through the processes of migration, the trauma, the remaking of lives and learning of new speech. I eat rice but I do not plant rice. Re-shaping community histories becomes an urgent necessity, a form of Stuart Hall’s restoration work (Hall, 1984). Heritage is only alive as long as it is in practice.
I don’t want to think of these connections as a rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992), crawling across unseen in an underground world, spreading, popping up in unexpected places, impossible to dig out. No. We are airborne, leaning against the rail on the deck of a ship, flying in a plane, crossing continents. As a scholar of diaspora and migration I write in metaphors, dia spora, from the trees (Gilroy, 1994), scattered seeds, sycamore helicopters fluttering in the wind currents or acorns plopping down and transported by squirrels. Or apples (Pollan, 2003), eaten by birds and the pips emerging elsewhere, planting themselves, growing into an entirely new variety of apple through which the parent apple’s genetic traces are still present but whereby circumstance, weather and upbringing dictate the taste and texture of the new appley descendants. The thickness of the skin. The sweetness and sourness of the flesh.
I’m thinking about lost connections to plants, in which that relationship can be reformed through our impulses towards beauty and adornment, and re-learning which is necessary due to knowledge lost about the connections between our bodies and the natural world. Rather than tracing the origin of the species (Wall Kimmerer, 2013), I am interested in weaving a net that holds together gently all the different forms of knowledge we have about plants. Just as I am a net for the collective decisions and mistakes and accidents and twists of fate felt by my family, in Edinburgh and Essex and Lusaka and Melaka and Johor and Hokkien and Nørresundby and Pinsk.
It seems somehow both pointless and beautiful to put all of these places into my net. Nature words are being removed from children’s dictionaries in English (Macfarlane and Morris, 2017), meanwhile the collections of institutions grow ever bigger, millions, billions of records, trillions of objects to be digitised, far more than we can conceive of or ever read, into a database stored on a server and powered by fuel that also causes shifts in the weather patterns either through its own combustion or the extraction of earth elements used as building materials. The net is a metaphor, and it is the conversations that I have had, and it is thoughts in my mind and notes in my book and records in a store and words on a screen and pages in a journal, and the red seeds red beads hanging round my grandmother’s neck.
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References
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Macfarlane R, Morris J. 2017. The lost words. UK: Hamish Hamilton.
Nadhirah S, Nugroho E. 2025. Personal correspondence in Whatsapp message, 2.6.2025.
Pollan M. 2003. The botany of desire: a plant’s-eye view of the world. London: Bloomsbury.
Tay AH. 2024. The role of dress in the embodiment and articulation of Chinese diaspora identity in the UK. PhD Thesis. University of the Arts London.
Tulloch C. 2016. The birth of cool: style narratives of the African diaspora. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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WFO. 2025. Adenanthera pavonina L. Published on the Internet; http://www.worldfloraonline.org/taxon/wfo-0000173869. Accessed on: 08 Jun 2025.