First, find uncolonized land. If that is not available to you, soil that is mostly left untreated—preferably even abandoned—will suffice.

When you have found this place, build a living space near it. If there is an estuary or stream nearby, make sure to fasten stilts to your home.

Once you have settled in, it is important to begin immediately the preparation of soil. With a simple tool or, even better, a bare hand, rake through the muddy earth until it is loose, tamping it down every night so that it is ready for the same process in the morning. Called repeating, this ancient practice was taught to me by my own great-grandmother when I was very small.

After several weeks of repeating, you will be ready for growth. What follows are my notes for survival. I hope you can make use of them.

The Alchemy (How It Begins)

The process of germination begins in one’s head. You may start to think of what you might want to grow. This takes some time, so be patient.

Once an idea forms in your mind, you can remove its seed. Using small, generic, pharmacy tweezers and a hand mirror, pluck the fine hairs covering your ear canal. A light, gentle touch is advised. Once you have pulled several dozen hairs, you may inspect them to see if seeds have developed there. The seeds should be perfectly oval, roughly the size of a fruit fly, and glassy black in color. They should smell faintly of grass and linseed oil. If any carry fluid-filled mumpy dots, throw them away immediately—these anomalies can grow into invasive species and are harmful to the land’s ecosystem as well as your psychological health.

You may bury these seeds, with your ear hairs attached, in your selected area. I recommend the patch just by the margins of your home; somewhere half shaded where the sun might slip in for a few hours a day. If you are concerned about the temperamental climate in your area, you may plant the seeds in a low, long trough and bring it inside to sleep with you at night. After two weeks, your plant should be ready for harvesting.

Remove entirely from the roots up. When you have rinsed and cleaned out all the crevices, you may invite a few friends over and make a lavish, nourishing meal using the roots, stems, crushed leaves, and flowers, vegetables, or fruits, of your labor.

Cooking with these ingredients has been a source of great joy in my life. I used to prepare extravagant feasts for acquaintances and friends, most of whom have lost loved ones, languages, lands. At the end of these meals, we would each burn an inch of our hair as a way to give something of ours back to the mother terra. But this was before your great-grandfather was executed, before the revolution and the persecution that followed. Before we were displaced.

One springtime before the revolution, I found lavender flowers with golf-ball stigmas growing around one of my plants. I had heard that this is a very rare occurrence, but an auspicious one: with these ingredients, you can feed three times as many people. It was an especially cold spring that year; I invited twenty-seven people over, and we ate those lavender flowers in aspic. Although I don’t know where they all are now, I still think about our guests that day, how one woman sang for us as we cut into a mangosteen meringue pie and another showed us how to read our futures not in the stars, but by screwing a finger into the earth and seeing how the dirt clings to your flesh. I have not been fortunate enough to find these flowers again.

During the revolution, when I lived in the mountains, I made a lot of double-boiled soup from the harvests as it was the simplest way to feed and nourish a large number of guests. Many of the young people who stopped by my door at that time had no family left or had been turned away by their own houses, and so oftentimes this soup would be their only source of warmth. I would set up a large cauldron on a fire outside, and while the water boiled, I would make these bowls out of pulped newspaper and resin shaped over the rocks outside my house so that if more people decided to come there would always be a bowl for them.

Double-Boiled Roots Soup with White Raix

I used to make a delicious soup with white radish, but I can no longer find that ingredient. It is much easier to source Raix, which is a canned white vegetable produced in French laboratories. It does not taste or cook the same, but it is still the closest resemblance to radish I have found on the market. When boiled, it turns clear and then dissolves.

Set a time for your dinner, and then start preparing this dish precisely twelve hours in advance. Often, I have had to wake up in the middle of the night to start the pot, but it is worth it. At the end you will have a silky, balanced broth that stays hot even in the coldest of nights. My own grandmother taught me this double-pot method. This is also an excellent remedy for sleeping malaise, which is a condition that Western doctors now like to treat with opiates.

Recipe

Roots grown from your Dash of salt
harvest Water
Radish or Raix Lemon herbs (optional)
A slice of ginger

Set up a large pot or cauldron with water and place a smaller pot—empty—inside of it. The smaller pot is where the soup will be made. Start boiling the water in the large pot.

Clean the roots thoroughly but with a light touch; take care not to accidentally remove any tiny white legs. Dry on paper towels. Open a can of Raix and drain its contents into a sieve. When the water begins to boil in the pot, add the roots, Raix, a slice of ginger, and forty cups of water with a dash of salt. Cover and leave for twelve hours, uninterrupted. When you next open the pot, you should have an enormously flavorful, clear broth and no remaining traces of the roots, Raix, or ginger. It is very important to not interfere with the cooking—it should be at a full boil for the entirety of the twelve hours—and it is equally important not to reduce or extend the boil time. You may serve this with hand torn lemon herbs, which imparts a sweet, morning flavor to the soup.
 

The people who drank this soup were younger strangers and travellers, most of whom had heard about the soup kitchen by word of mouth. Once, I fed a community choir who were crossing the mountains together; another time, a well-known political journalist found some of his former students here.

People will try to pay or give back something in exchange for the food. I have always maintained that these types of transactions aren’t necessary. Once, there was a man with a three-legged dog who offered some money, but instead I handed him a large notebook and asked him to write down a recipe for me before he left.

Later when everyone had gone to sleep or continued on their journeys through the trees, I looked at what he had written.

Thank you for the soup. I hadn’t eaten anything in three days, and my dog is very ill. He is my only companion these days.

I am originally from Shuchi, so this is a dish that is popular in that region. I used to eat it all the time as a child, but I haven’t had it in years. I haven’t been back home in a long time. I hope you like it.

Shuchi Stem Stir-Fry

Recipe

Vegetable stems Black vinegar
Shuchi peppercorn Cooking wine
Safflower oil White sugar
Garlic

Clean and rinse the stems thoroughly in spring water. Using a sharpened cleaver, finely chop the long trunks into one-inch pieces. Any browning ends should be trimmed and discarded. Keep the stems in water until you need to fry them.

Heat up a wok, without oil. While that is warming, crush five handfuls of Shuchi peppercorns in a mortar and pestle. (A note to my great-granddaughter: If you do not have these tools in the future, a laser crusher will suffice, but do not use precrushed peppercorn: It has no flavor.) When the wok is hot to touch, toss in the sediment and heat until fragrant. Remove from wok.

With a few drops of safflower oil, flash fry the stems until bright. Add slices of garlic. Add a splash of black vinegar, cooking rice wine, white sugar, and the prefried Shuchi peppercorn. You can serve this immediately or let it cool and marinate in a cold place for up to 72 hours.
 

I have made this many times since the man with the dog visited, especially in the summer when the heat is intolerable and very dry. The change in weather, which has only increased over the years, has meant that fewer and fewer visitors came. Eventually, nobody came at all. It was me and your grandmother for a long time. I started keeping diaries, and I called them my mountain diaries, because later on we had to move back into a city. I read those diaries often in that very cramped, very gray apartment and remembered how the mornings used to smell, how the birds spoke to each other. There was no more land in the city, and so most of the food I made came from jarred and pickled and preserved harvests from our time in the mountains.

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From the forthcoming book Patchwork Dolls by Ysabelle Cheung. Reprinted by permission of Blair. © 2026 by Ysabelle Cheung. All rights reserved.

Patchwork Dolls can be ordered here.