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Little Seed
The chapters move associatively, commenting on each other indirectly and drawing out questions of assimilation, race, class, gender, nature and the general problem of being and knowing. When the author’s brother has a psychotic break, the rigid structure of the book itself breaks apart and the protagonist adventures to the cloud forest of Oaxaca in order to truly live: to know the world by experiencing it rather than reading about it or following the direction of others. Some persistent themes throughout the book: What does it mean to be Chinese? What is love and how best to love? What really is a fern?
273 pages, Paperback
First published May 14, 2024
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692 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
April 10, 2024
At once incandescently beautiful and gut-wrenchingly powerful, Wei Tchou’s memoir about her family, identity, and fixation with ferns is the best nonfiction I have read all year. Her compelling, glassy prose is pitch perfect, and her ability to make an intensely personal story somehow universal and accessible is nothing short of a marvel. Enthusiastically recommended. Five stars!
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March 18, 2025After so much has been written about all the material-semiotic ways in which plants materialize in their relationships with human animals, it is not much use to just repeat pages and pages of mere descriptions of ferns. I was hoping it would turn out to be some kind of meta-genre commentary on botany as a scientific discipline based on classification and therefore identity, which would then reflect on the question of race among human animals, but it didn't. I'm actually quite unclear about the function of all these chapters. And there's the untapped potential of asexual reproduction in ferns. I thought it would go there, but it didn't. So in the end, I'm pretty confused about the role of ferns in general here, not just in these scientific chapters, aside from a very simple antropomorphization. Quite a mess, or maybe I wasn't in the right frame of mind (and admittedly I'm not with all the things going on in Serbia right now).
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September 13, 2024I was intensely reading this book and then gave it away like 10 pages from the ending and then one month later finally finished it, so that was sort of a weird reading experience, but I appreciated in some ways revisiting it, as it is a very layered book in terms of time and memory, scientific information and personal experience.
was left with a real sense of agony from reading, that it came out of a long process of wrestling (one could call this therapy). about a chinese American daughter of Shanghainese immigrants making sense of her rigid and violent upbringing in Tennessee and her brother’s psychotic break, told through personal memoir and a guide to ferns. The description of ferns is lush and a revolt of scientific and subjective language - I just wish there were graphs / illustrations bc honestly could not absorb the info w words alone.
really beautifully written and crafted, the pacing in particular gives the book a sense of momentum despite its wandering and plotless nature. some moments of indulgent descriptions of Oaxaca that made me wanna be like “pls get to your point of self realization” but honestly generally enjoyed the ride.
appreciated Tchou’s commitment to splitting herself open, really consciously confronting her need for narrative as a problem in the processing of writing. i was moved. Presents memoir as an act of deconstructing the stories one has told oneself and inhabits. the kinds of intellectual realizations one comes to - usually humbling - and the agony and embarrassment of ceaselessly reaching for a frame, a story, to make oneself legible / lovable, even as you acknowledge the flaws and collateral damage that come out of such a relentless pursuit.
was left with a real sense of agony from reading, that it came out of a long process of wrestling (one could call this therapy). about a chinese American daughter of Shanghainese immigrants making sense of her rigid and violent upbringing in Tennessee and her brother’s psychotic break, told through personal memoir and a guide to ferns. The description of ferns is lush and a revolt of scientific and subjective language - I just wish there were graphs / illustrations bc honestly could not absorb the info w words alone.
really beautifully written and crafted, the pacing in particular gives the book a sense of momentum despite its wandering and plotless nature. some moments of indulgent descriptions of Oaxaca that made me wanna be like “pls get to your point of self realization” but honestly generally enjoyed the ride.
appreciated Tchou’s commitment to splitting herself open, really consciously confronting her need for narrative as a problem in the processing of writing. i was moved. Presents memoir as an act of deconstructing the stories one has told oneself and inhabits. the kinds of intellectual realizations one comes to - usually humbling - and the agony and embarrassment of ceaselessly reaching for a frame, a story, to make oneself legible / lovable, even as you acknowledge the flaws and collateral damage that come out of such a relentless pursuit.
November 6, 2024
My toxic trait is that this is what I think my writing reads like when I journal about my life. This was stunning from start to finish.
December 3, 2024
“She feels proud that she has followed the death march to pedigree”.
Some cracking lines in here, and one of the few examples of a stronger second half. Her brother rampaging through the New Yorker offices was gripping.
Lost me a bit in some of the fern sections, but it didn’t really matter. Strong recommend!
Some cracking lines in here, and one of the few examples of a stronger second half. Her brother rampaging through the New Yorker offices was gripping.
Lost me a bit in some of the fern sections, but it didn’t really matter. Strong recommend!
September 3, 2024
Thought this was immensely wonderful and moving. Surprised this hasn't blown up more, but hopefully that is coming.
January 25, 2025
Couldn't put this one down. Stunning.
November 26, 2024
Wei Tchou’s tender, angry, searching, and wounded account of her childhood and transition to adulthood comes in the form of an unusual memoir: the book is half a field guide to ferns, arising from her (minor) obsession—she sought them out, learnt their taxonomy, and they came to stand for various things in and phases of her life. Little Seed (from the name she was given as a child at home) is therefore also a memoir.
Wei Tchou is first-generation Chinese American—her parents moved there from China—and here she wrestles with the complexity of being Chinese at home, while learning to move through the world as some fantasy her parents have of being American (and while also, of course, being actually American). Added to this is her natural struggle, exacerbated by her family’s culture, to follow her big brother’s example as she looks up to him and to him for protection. He is, in turn, being crushed by the burden of his family’s expectations of him—he must be a doctor as his father is—and this leads him to a psychotic break, which Little Seed witnesses. Because of culture, and the family’s tendency not to confront this difficulty head-on, as well as a failed relationship and other complicated dynamics, Little Seed has something of a breakdown herself, eventually finding her way to Mexico in an attempt to free herself from the tangles of her life.
Little Seed is verdant, melancholy, and beautiful. I did find an affinity with Little Seed: I, too, have grappled with complicated relationships, and have tended to seek solace in nature, in plants, animals, and landscapes. Her life and experiences were sufficiently removed from mine that I was able to immerse myself without too many empathetic triggers, and simply for the joy of reading. Little Seed is sometimes wry, eventually hopeful, fascinating, and very readable.
Highly recommended. Thanks to A Strange Object and to Edelweiss for access to a DRC.
Wei Tchou is first-generation Chinese American—her parents moved there from China—and here she wrestles with the complexity of being Chinese at home, while learning to move through the world as some fantasy her parents have of being American (and while also, of course, being actually American). Added to this is her natural struggle, exacerbated by her family’s culture, to follow her big brother’s example as she looks up to him and to him for protection. He is, in turn, being crushed by the burden of his family’s expectations of him—he must be a doctor as his father is—and this leads him to a psychotic break, which Little Seed witnesses. Because of culture, and the family’s tendency not to confront this difficulty head-on, as well as a failed relationship and other complicated dynamics, Little Seed has something of a breakdown herself, eventually finding her way to Mexico in an attempt to free herself from the tangles of her life.
Little Seed is verdant, melancholy, and beautiful. I did find an affinity with Little Seed: I, too, have grappled with complicated relationships, and have tended to seek solace in nature, in plants, animals, and landscapes. Her life and experiences were sufficiently removed from mine that I was able to immerse myself without too many empathetic triggers, and simply for the joy of reading. Little Seed is sometimes wry, eventually hopeful, fascinating, and very readable.
Highly recommended. Thanks to A Strange Object and to Edelweiss for access to a DRC.
November 14, 2024
If you like ferns, and you like to be sad, you should read this book.
But seriously, this was such a touching memoire about coming into one’s self after living through the troubles in a family with intergenerational pain. 4-4.5/5 from me
But seriously, this was such a touching memoire about coming into one’s self after living through the troubles in a family with intergenerational pain. 4-4.5/5 from me
March 16, 2025
Very funny that it puts diaereses on consecutive vowels (“coöperation”) only in the chapter describing working at the unnamed prestigious New York literary magazine that’s obviously the New Yörker. That’s worth a star on its own.
November 22, 2024
"The feeling of grappling for guidance from someone else, of looking for the right way to be . . . what had it ever gotten me? A family that manipulated my sense of safety in order to ease their own pain? A boyfriend who required me to drink tea from a sock and thought walnuts were poison? Worse, I was starting to see how my fixation with a correct story had led me to hurt others, how my insistence on being led along by the right person turned the world and the people around me into objectives."
Little Seed by Wei Tchou, is a coming-of-age story about a young woman from a Chinese-American family, first-generation immigrants to the U.S. Her father is a doctor, well-regarded by his colleagues, but he and his wife are status-conscious and eager to blend in, be seen not just as equals but as high-achieving Americans of good breeding and taste, goals they demand of their children, too, the older brother Kang and his little sister Wei, the narrator of this memoir. Interleaved, as it were, with her family memoir are chapters given to her interest in ferns and discussions of their traits, variations and forms, and preferred environments.
The parents scream at each other and berate their children for their imperfections, less-than-ideal scholastic achievements, errors in judgment which fail expectations—behaviors revealing to the parents a lack of love, respect, and fidelity owed them by the children. Tchou’s family, her parents’ attitudes toward each other and their children, sound stereotypically Chinese (based on my years of living in Shanghai teaching students who live on the receiving end of such attitudes), making the reading of certain passages all the more painful for that. At age 16, Wei—known as Little Seed during the early part of her life—is sent by her parents to a live-in boarding school for the daughters of wealthy families, where she learns what it is to be an exclusionary WASP.
Tchou’s analogies between ferns and her family (she does try to connect the two) seem strained at times, and I think she senses the incongruities between them when she explicitly uses a fact about ferns as a condition that provokes questions about the degree of her Chineseness vs her Americanness, not just ferns as demonstrating characteristics about her family or her individuality. She struggles to determine what it means to be Chinese, Chinese-American, an individual, and which of these she wants to be or thinks she needs to be.
An ingrained sense of family, one’s place in the family and one’s duties toward that family are the elements that keep her family together. Otherwise, they are so emotionally distant from each other, so tenuously held together, that without the expectations imposed by notions of “family,” the whole unit would fall apart. Their commitments to each other are almost entirely conditional. When the conditions are violated, the screaming starts.
Early in college, Tchou falls in love with a man she calls Spider—a Chinese ex-pat, 20 years her senior, a self-styled vegetarian Buddhist and journalist but ultimately manipulative, passive-aggressive, and controlling, a man for whom charitable deeds are themselves acts of hostility, serving to highlight to others his estimation of their moral shortcomings. Tchou drops out of college for two years to live with him while serving as his amanuensis. She finally returns home, then back to college in New York, where she lands a job as an assistant at a prestigious magazine (which sounds like The New Yorker), eager, once again, to assimilate to a new setting, still forming herself, but as she imagines herself mirrored in the eyes of others.
To find herself, her independence and resiliency, Wei needs a period of disorientation but not isolation of environment, separation but not alienation from others, an immersion in the unknown and unfamiliar that yet supports and sustains her so that her fears are transitory, and the tendrils from the known world and the known self emerge from her emotional darkness, ready to be grasped in new understanding as needed. And in such a place, with such an experience, the puzzling pieces of her interest in ferns, the dysfunctional motivations of her family, and her sense of self finally come together.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
Little Seed by Wei Tchou, is a coming-of-age story about a young woman from a Chinese-American family, first-generation immigrants to the U.S. Her father is a doctor, well-regarded by his colleagues, but he and his wife are status-conscious and eager to blend in, be seen not just as equals but as high-achieving Americans of good breeding and taste, goals they demand of their children, too, the older brother Kang and his little sister Wei, the narrator of this memoir. Interleaved, as it were, with her family memoir are chapters given to her interest in ferns and discussions of their traits, variations and forms, and preferred environments.
The parents scream at each other and berate their children for their imperfections, less-than-ideal scholastic achievements, errors in judgment which fail expectations—behaviors revealing to the parents a lack of love, respect, and fidelity owed them by the children. Tchou’s family, her parents’ attitudes toward each other and their children, sound stereotypically Chinese (based on my years of living in Shanghai teaching students who live on the receiving end of such attitudes), making the reading of certain passages all the more painful for that. At age 16, Wei—known as Little Seed during the early part of her life—is sent by her parents to a live-in boarding school for the daughters of wealthy families, where she learns what it is to be an exclusionary WASP.
Tchou’s analogies between ferns and her family (she does try to connect the two) seem strained at times, and I think she senses the incongruities between them when she explicitly uses a fact about ferns as a condition that provokes questions about the degree of her Chineseness vs her Americanness, not just ferns as demonstrating characteristics about her family or her individuality. She struggles to determine what it means to be Chinese, Chinese-American, an individual, and which of these she wants to be or thinks she needs to be.
An ingrained sense of family, one’s place in the family and one’s duties toward that family are the elements that keep her family together. Otherwise, they are so emotionally distant from each other, so tenuously held together, that without the expectations imposed by notions of “family,” the whole unit would fall apart. Their commitments to each other are almost entirely conditional. When the conditions are violated, the screaming starts.
Early in college, Tchou falls in love with a man she calls Spider—a Chinese ex-pat, 20 years her senior, a self-styled vegetarian Buddhist and journalist but ultimately manipulative, passive-aggressive, and controlling, a man for whom charitable deeds are themselves acts of hostility, serving to highlight to others his estimation of their moral shortcomings. Tchou drops out of college for two years to live with him while serving as his amanuensis. She finally returns home, then back to college in New York, where she lands a job as an assistant at a prestigious magazine (which sounds like The New Yorker), eager, once again, to assimilate to a new setting, still forming herself, but as she imagines herself mirrored in the eyes of others.
To find herself, her independence and resiliency, Wei needs a period of disorientation but not isolation of environment, separation but not alienation from others, an immersion in the unknown and unfamiliar that yet supports and sustains her so that her fears are transitory, and the tendrils from the known world and the known self emerge from her emotional darkness, ready to be grasped in new understanding as needed. And in such a place, with such an experience, the puzzling pieces of her interest in ferns, the dysfunctional motivations of her family, and her sense of self finally come together.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
December 27, 2025
Wei Tchou/ Littke Seed displays vulnerability, growth, and creativity in this concise memoir. The clash of family dynamics, magnified by mixed messages of cultural respect and assimilation, coincide with sibling rivalry, sexism, and desire for acceptance. Throw in regional stereotypes and mental illness too. How can she unite these competing themes? How can Little Seed evolve?
Ferns - a formal description including dryopteris, the impact of “fern fever” , and more - propel the narrative in sequential chapters. The pace is uneven, but this inclusion hints of Amy Tan’s birdwatching and Robin Wall Kimmerler’s Sweetgrass endeavors.
While the impact of “other” status as an immigrant is acknowledged, of more interest is the impact of aspiration and distinction ( “we’re the Kennedy’s of Chinese”). This is a family of professional status and financial privilege confronting what they perceive as unique challenges at acceptance.
As Little Seed discovers, personal growth and maturity grows from the often overlooked connections and support of others, coupled with patience and surprise. Not unlike ferns.
Ferns - a formal description including dryopteris, the impact of “fern fever” , and more - propel the narrative in sequential chapters. The pace is uneven, but this inclusion hints of Amy Tan’s birdwatching and Robin Wall Kimmerler’s Sweetgrass endeavors.
While the impact of “other” status as an immigrant is acknowledged, of more interest is the impact of aspiration and distinction ( “we’re the Kennedy’s of Chinese”). This is a family of professional status and financial privilege confronting what they perceive as unique challenges at acceptance.
As Little Seed discovers, personal growth and maturity grows from the often overlooked connections and support of others, coupled with patience and surprise. Not unlike ferns.
September 10, 2023
A book about light, crossed by dreamworlds that are ‘rigorous and prismatic,’ a gambrel roof in Austerlitz that ‘rolls over either side’ of a white barn ‘like heavy curtains,’ where a ‘string of clerestory windows’ becomes a ‘precise line of golden thumbprints in late afternoon.’ The ‘faint line of the emerging moon’ at dusk, ‘the lush violet glitter’ of the Milky Way, ferns as talons and fur and parasols and ‘tangled emerald threads’ spangled by dew that make of sunlight a ‘delicate, ever-shifting filigree.’ Fisherman set against limestone cliffs ‘striated by glittering pink, gold, and ochre bands.’ Destiny, glimpsed by a sick man, waiting ‘dense and black and limitless’ beyond a car window.
I recommend it amply.
I recommend it amply.
February 5, 2025
Little Seed is an immersive read, feeling at times very close to Tchou and, at others, very distant. This discord makes the immigrant experience feel very universal – we all grapple with many of the same questions no matter where we are from. Tchou’s writing on ferns can get bogged down a bit on names, labels, and scientific terms, but it all feels intentional – the weight of this information is Tchou’s emotional history. Yet, the connections and metaphors she draws between the ferns and herself are very clear and do not leave us guessing at what she means. For a memoir that felt very experimental, it is a beautiful read.
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February 22, 2025This reading experience was gripping but the memoir is dark, dark. It’s interesting that each section ends with a little taste of the unity and belonging that’s been yearned for and disappointed so much of the book. Genre-wise, I am completely untroubled by “a book that is half fern and half family.” I like the fern bits; I like the family bits; I don’t always get the “inarticulable question” of why they’re here together but I appreciate it all.
What does trouble me, in the most nit-picky possible way, is that the book gets called Little Seed when the whole category of fern is literally based on not making seeds. It really bugs me. Please forgive.
What does trouble me, in the most nit-picky possible way, is that the book gets called Little Seed when the whole category of fern is literally based on not making seeds. It really bugs me. Please forgive.
June 12, 2024
Stunning, beautiful, moving, and engaging. Wei Tchou has made a memoir that challenges the form: it's about family and place and botany and identity... but it's also the kind of work that gets flattened when described so it needs to be experienced.
It's well worth the jump. It's been a long time since a book has moved me quite this much that it feels like, months later, it's still rippling and echoing. I cannot recommend it enough. Her obsession with ferns seeded my obsession with ferns, and an appreciation
It's well worth the jump. It's been a long time since a book has moved me quite this much that it feels like, months later, it's still rippling and echoing. I cannot recommend it enough. Her obsession with ferns seeded my obsession with ferns, and an appreciation
December 17, 2024
At once a memoir and a scientific exploration of ferns. Early in the book we alternate between chapters following the narrator’s life and chapters talking about ferns in scientific language - as we read on the line between the chapters blur a bit. There was something I enjoyed quite a lot about reading scientific text without it being related to schoolwork, I was able to let the language just wash over me. I think Wei Tchou did something very unique and special with this book.
March 6, 2025
Wei Tchou's Little Seed is a beautifully written memoir with so many shades of meaning. I love how it combines the deeply personal with biological facts to share stark declarations about the complexity of loving a family that also constricts. The narrative is both sharply tuned and yet reminiscent of journaling, taking us into the author's psyche when she wants to let us in and leading us somewhere else as warranted. There is a reason the ferns are here too: essential, integral.
August 14, 2025
A woman‘s memoir of her growing up in Tennessee while trying to find what it means to be “Chinese” and “American,” fielding definitions given to her by her immigrant parents, an idolized older brother battling his own psychotic break, and a manipulative partner content to shape and mold her. Interspersed, are chapters on ferns, whose vivid and beautiful array of genera and species help Tchou redefine her own past and present.
January 20, 2025
“And I’m sick of my desperation to fit all of these emotions into a readable narrative so someone will understand me and make the space between us safe.” Tchou’s revelations feel like a warm hug. And when she asks, “Is it also humiliating for you to try to be alive?” I can’t help but think she’s speaking directly to me.
October 10, 2024
My favorite non-fiction genre these days is nature+memoir. This one is unique: ferns and Chinese-American raised with a challenging family situation. Lovely phrases about identity, writing, accomplishment, observing, and belonging
February 19, 2025
Perhaps this is not fair of me to say because I studied pteridology in graduate school and therefore know more than your average bear about ferns, but dang did this book desperately need a science editor. And a regular editor. Painful.
March 28, 2025
For people who love both memoir and nature writing, Tchou takes the unusual approach of combining her narrative with her exploration of ferns. The author is a master at using rich language and understanding organisms beyond your average backyard naturalist.
August 14, 2024
unexpected gem
August 16, 2024
i love an asian immigrant family memoir and this one is an exemplary depiction of the experience
August 21, 2024
The way the narrative shifted from third person to first person in Chapter 3 is so powerful
September 1, 2024
I love ferns and I love memoirs! Soo good
December 25, 2024
I really loved this book, beautiful combination of fern knowledge and poetic memoir
to-buy
March 17, 20255books.com shortlist nbcc autobiography shortlist 2025
April 30, 2025
such a unique and intriguing work.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews