Leslie Wiser’s Sweet Tooth For Taiwanese Cabbage
Photo: Paige Green, 2019
(This interview was transcribed and edited)
Who are you, where are you really from and what do you do?
My name is Leslie Wiser. When people ask me where I’m really from, I say I’m from the Midwest. I grew up all over - Chicago, Saint Paul, Cleveland and Indianapolis. Farming is my second career. I started Radical Family Farms in Sebastopol, California, in October 2018 with our first growing season in 2019. I had been searching for farmland for around 10 years prior to actually finding it within Sonoma County. But I was looking all over the Midwest, like Indiana, Ohio, Illinois… But I didn't feel it was safe to be raising a queer, mixed race family there so I’m really thankful that I was able to settle down here with the financial help of my family, because Sonoma County is probably one of the most expensive places for farmland in the US. It’s three acres in total and I’m farming on an acre and a half.
Why farming?
I am biracial: my mother’s from Taiwan via China. She came over when she was 24 and then married my father, who’s also a German immigrant who came over when he was 10. I just wanted to use the heritage farm as another tool in my lifelong process of exploration of my identity. I’ve been able to learn so much since starting the farm. I wanted to grow the crops that my German-Polish Jewish grandmother as well as my (Chinese) aunts and uncles longed for. So I basically started with a phone call to my grandmother - what crops did you wish you had access to when you moved to the United States? I asked my aunts and uncles too, but my cousin was the one that actually gave me the whole list.
What did your aunts and uncles make of your identity project?
Well my mom has five or six siblings, and they all raised their children with the language and culture. They’re all fluent in Mandarin, grew up within Chinese communities within the United States, kept the food and the culture… But my mother was the anchor - she came here for graduate school with the mission to get married and bring everyone over. But the result was that she either willingly or unknowingly lost a lot of her language and culture and traditions. It was really only until I started the farm that I realised what a tragedy it was. I had no idea about Chinese New Year, the Mid-Autumn Festival and all those huge traditions. She just gave that all up.
So what crops would your European and Taiwanese relatives have requested?
For my Chinese-Taiwanese side, the biggest one was xiàncài (苋菜), or Chinese spinach, like a leafy amaranth. That’s the one my cousin told me that his parents tried growing in their backyard when they moved to Chicago to go to grad school. Then for my German grandmother’s side it was green sorrel. It’s easy to grow and it’s a perennial here, but I guess when she was living in Indiana and New York it was difficult for her to find. So I went through the Kitazawa Seed Company catalogue and picked out every single crop that said “From Taiwan”.
So you started farming from scratch!
I did spend one season in Alaska when I was 20. I was there from May until August but in Alaska it’s 24 hours of sun, so things grow really fast. It’s like putting a whole year of farming within Northern California within five months.
I modelled Radical Family Farms off of my experience there.
You've been running this farm for almost four years. What have you learned?
That’s such a funny question. It’s been a really good learning experience but farming is very difficult, physically, emotionally and mentally. Where I live we’ve been hit by wildfires and floods and the weather’s pretty unpredictable and takes its toll on the farming community. In 2019 we were evacuated and lost power and experienced our first crop loss due to climate change then. I've been able to convert the farm to solar power and battery backups so that if we do lose power we can continue farming. It’s so devastating when the power is cut off and you have no water and you’re just watching your crops wilt and die.
Farming is really hard. There’s this mental and emotional toll that it takes on farmers, and farm workers, and the families that are not really talked about. It’s known in the United States that there is a very high suicide rate among farmers and I can now empathise why, after my four years farming. But I’ve been able to keep it going, make it financially sustainable.
What's the ‘radical’ in Radical Family Farms about?
The name came along mainly as paying homage to my parents and my grandparents. With my parents, they were a mixed-race marriage in the early 1970s. Growing up in the Midwest, it was not very common. And so they faced a lot of discrimination that they didn’t talk about or address with us. It also pays homage to my German and Polish-Jewish grandparents, who got together after World War Two and built a life together here in America.
My queer mixed-race family mirrors the generational struggle of othering my parents and grandparents faced. I am now a solo queer parent raising two awesome kiddos while running the farm. It’s interesting how things come full circle.
Things really took off for you during the pandemic. How were people finding you? Who were they?
It was just children of immigrants or first, second generation kids who want to reconnect with their culture and heritage that have been assimilated by white American culture, either through survival or necessity or just unknowing that that was even happening at the time. The direction that the farm was going, with this reconnection mainly to my Chinese Taiwanese heritage, resonated with quite a few people. I was able to meet quite a few people that I’m still friends with today through during the early stages of the farm.
Then there was the pandemic and there were a lot of problems with supply chains at that time. We had just purchased a delivery van, so we were able to deliver our boxes of produce directly into Oakland and East Bay, San Francisco and even the peninsula which is like Silicon Valley. We partnered with restaurants who were struggling because they had shut down, and they were able to let us be a drop for them. So our customers would come in and I always encouraged them to buy dinner, patronize these restaurants because it is a very difficult time for them.
During that time many people became unemployed in the restaurant industry so a lot of people were very interested in coming up to the farm from the cities and working. We got a lot of people that could work part-time and it just built this really interesting community of people. Usually, very young Asian Americans, who, who wanted to come and learn more about farming. There was this aspect of physical safety because they were able to work outside and not be so concerned about getting Covid.
I look back on it now and it was just very hardcore and intense. I can’t even believe we survived that time. It was just like a blur.
And what about the goal you set out to achieve, to know more about where you came from?
I had no idea what any of the Chinese or Asian vegetables were until I started the farm. I remember in 2019 we were in Taiwan, and I was able to recognise all of the vegetables - I knew their Mandarin names! I just felt so empowered because before I would go to the produce markets in Taiwan and have no idea what any of the vegetables were called our how to use them.
So then I could go to the night market and order a bitter melon apple juice and say it in Mandarin. So it’s like… mission accomplished with this farm.
Awesome.
Tell me about cabbage then. What types do you grow on the farm?
You know what? I realized that on our farm, cabbage is one of our main crops. When I went to Taiwan I saw this cabbage that looked like it was sat on, so I call it the squashed Taiwan cabbage. It is so delicious and sweet - it’s the most tender cabbage. It is probably one of our longest crops that we grow, taking about 70-75 days to mature. So that’s one we grow, this signature Taiwanese flat cabbage. A friend of mine, Henry Hsu of Oramasamadumplings, loves using it in his dumplings.
And then I grow different varieties of Napa cabbage. We’re mainly a CSA farm, so I always try to include a cabbage or a big brassica, like a cauliflower, within the box. My children are of Korean descent, so I’m learning some ways to kimchi it, through cookbooks and through some of our chef friends and CSA members.
I use the Napa cabbage in lion’s head meatballs. You stir fry the cabbage then put the meatballs on top. I also use it in dumplings or cut up into soup. That's the way my mother used to use it. I can grow it year round in this area, though it does bolt a little in spring with the day length increases.
I also grow a green and a red Napa cabbage. The red one does really well at markets, just because it’s got a novelty aspect.
Then I grow a Savoy cabbage, which is one of the crops that my grandmother on my German side really wanted. I’m pretty sure she could have gotten that at any grocery store in the Midwest.
What’s your favourite way to cook cabbage?
I do it the way one of our chef friends - Chris Yang, who just opened a restaurant within San Francisco called Piglet and Company - does it. He likes to use a Savoy or Napa (but you can probably use any kind of cabbage), just cuts it in half and then just chars and grills it. He’s done a few catering events for my family reunions,and he’s come up and cooked for our farm crew. And I’m like, oh! this is so delicious and easy.
I remember Chris! I interviewed him for my project a few years ago.
Cabbage takes a lot of nutrients and nitrogen to grow and you’re supposed to rotate the crop. But since we only farm on an acre and a half it’s hard to get that proper crop rotation.
So sometimes when we grow it, the heads are not that big. But I think there are people that certainly appreciate those small cabbages besides chefs, like our single, elderly customers at the farmers market, rather than the giant three to five pound Napa cabbage, which I’m always so proud to grow.
Leslie’s Popo’s Lion’s Head Meatballs (狮子头)
Below are two recipes that Leslie uses: her cousin Gerald’s recipe based on what he recalls of their Popo’s method, and a photo of Fu Pei-mei’s recipe** that Leslie’s mom sent to her. We’d love to see you cook from either, both, or a combination of these recipes!
* Leslie doesn’t use potato or any starch and says it still holds up well.
** Both Leslie and I were unable to verify whether this is actually a Fu Pei-mei recipe ;-)
Leslie’s lion’s head meatballs (狮子头)
Leslie’s Popo’s recipe, as written down by Gerald
Fu Pei-mei’s recipe, recommended by Leslie’s mom
Who would you invite to eat your lion’s head meatballs?
I would invite my now deceased Popo (grandmother) because that was her favourite dish, and that’s what she used to cook for special occasions. But I would probably just cook it for a family dinner. I’d want my grandmother to come and critique it - she might not have good things to say, ha - but at least it’s her recipe and she will have known that it’s been passed down.
Where are you going in your farming and identity journey?
Obviously I could have done something easier than farming to learn about my identity. I don’t know. I feel like at this point in this journey, it’s less about identity exploration than it was during the first four years. And it's just about keeping the business going at this point.
Do you see it as a legacy for your children?
[Laughs] No, not really, because like every farmer no farmer wants their child to be a farmer. But I am thinking about succession in the next five years; if I could find a young motivated farmer, who’s interested in the same identity journey as when I first started, I would be interested in turning the farm over to them.
This label ‘Asian’. What does it mean to you?
I think having started the farm I’ve now got a better understanding of that label Asian and Asian-American but really, there’s so much differentiation between Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese, South East Asia, the Pacific Islands. So, no, I don't necessarily clump them into one category at all.
Even within the American Chinese community here, so many of the vegetables are called by their Cantonese name. When I first started, it was really difficult for me to understand - I would try to talk to my aunts and uncles about the vegetables that I’m growing, but call them by their Cantonese names and they would have no idea what I was talking about. Translating it into Mandarin was just that extra step.
And so now are you particular about calling them by the Mandarin Chinese name?
I’m trying to, even though it’s easier to call them by their Cantonese name because that’s what it’s more commonly referred to.
This is something I became aware of myself because I found myself defaulting to the most common anglicisation of ingredients or dish names, regardless of the region they came from. It’s a sort of laziness or non-awareness, even among Chinese speakers. Dipping in and out of dialects without really thinking, ‘which word should I be using?’
Yeh. So I feel like this farm has accomplished my initial goals and it’s also helped my kids learn about their culture and the foods they would have never known. I’d never tried bitter melon until I started the farm, and the same with winter melon! With my Korean kids, I grow a lot of perilla so even though they don’t like it per se, and they don’t like bitter melon, at least they've tried it. Whereas I had a certain level total ignorance growing up that I don't want them to have. You at least want them to have a vague memory of being tortured with bitter melon, ha!