How to Live Safely in a Disheartening World: Asian American #PlantMoms in the Post-Pandemic Digital Age

"This, then, is my choice: I can allow the events of my life to happen to me. Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own. I can live in my own present, risk failure, be assured of failure."¹

It all "began as a curiosity."² At the beginning of 2022, recovering from COVID-19 alone in Long Island, I germinated the seeds of store-bought raspberry oranges. The hybrid felt intimate, almost allegorical.³ Ever since I moved to the US from South Korea, the grocery store had become a site of quiet confusion, where fruits no longer tasted the way I knew. The more I searched for familiar flavors, the more estranged I felt. The unfamiliar textures did not merely signal that I was in a foreign country but reminded me that I was the one foreign to this land.⁴ In the midst of the pandemic, this dislocation became less geographic than physiological, and it brought into focus a larger concern in Asian American intellectual work, in which ways of knowing emerge alongside the material and affective demands placed on Asian bodies.⁵

A month and a half later, I pressed the sprouted seeds into a shallow dish of soil. That same day, Christina Yuna Lee was murdered in her apartment in Chinatown, New York. She was a firstborn daughter — like me — of first-generation Korean immigrants. The news did not register as distant tragedy but as intimate proximity, collapsing the space between her life and mine. Only weeks earlier, Michelle Alyssa Go had been pushed to death in the New York subway. The 2021 spa shootings in Atlanta had already exposed the lethal convergence of racism and misogyny directed at Asian women.⁶ Decades before, in 1982, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a Korean American poet and artist, was raped and murdered in Soho. Her poetic work, Dictee, carrying "a haunted prophetic aura," continues to resonate with unsettling clarity.⁷ These deaths, dispersed across time and geography, accumulate into a pattern that renders survival precarious, reconstituting erasure and fetishization as material forces enacted through bodily violence and physical threat.⁸ While reckoning with the link between "intelligibility and the documentation of violence" against Asian women, I felt the precarity as contiguous with my own, intensified by the conditions of social distancing and isolation that rendered vulnerability newly collective: I was them, they were us.⁹ To inhabit the post-pandemic era as a woman of color is to live within this accumulation — to recognize that violence is not episodic but ambient, structuring the conditions under which ordinary acts of the everyday unfold.

What, then, does it mean to live as a woman of color in such a moment, when time feels suspended, when land feels estranged, when bodies are distant, and when violence circulates as an atmospheric condition of everyday life? With flowers dedicated to the dead, signifying collective mourning and voice, "what happens when our blood falls to the soil and seeps in?"¹⁰ What becomes of land for racialized and gendered bodies when access to it is suspended? If land records violence, if it holds the residue of history, then what does it mean to cultivate it under such conditions?¹¹ In the weeks that followed, tending to the seedlings and sharing the process on social media became a deliberate practice of care and a way of reasserting and grounding my presence.

During the pandemic, the #plantmom aesthetic circulated widely on social media as global lockdowns confined people indoors and reoriented daily life around domestic space, and it transformed everyday acts of houseplant cultivation into a recognizable form of Asian American mass culture. Although the aesthetic itself does not overtly signal engagement with any cultural values or representations traditionally registered as "Asian," many Asian American plant moms drew attention to the complexity and urgency of inhabiting Asian Americanness in the contemporary moment. Not by foregrounding "Asianness" as an explicit marker of identity but by cultivating an aesthetic practice, they subtly remodeled visibility, inhabitation, and collectivity. Under conditions of restricted physical contact, the aesthetic offered an alternative mode of connection grounded in mediated forms of touch and intimacy. While social media reproduced and circulated countless representations of anti-Asian violence and hate crimes, #plantmom also enabled Asian Americans to redirect narratives of violation toward practices of making, caring, and sustaining. Through algorithmically mediated networks, these private acts of care are transformed into a participatory digital community. Hashtags help plant moms locate others within this emergent Asian American collective, while following and tagging one another fosters visualized connections and a collective cultural voice across geographic and generational boundaries, much like plants themselves traverse national borders and cultivate new forms of belonging across different environments.

The #plantmom aesthetic harks back to a longer history of Asian American relationships to land and agriculture, one shaped by exclusion, dispossession, and racial capitalism. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Alien Land Laws restricting land ownership and leasing, Asian Americans were systemically positioned as a threat whose claims to land were denied and displaced. The incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens during World War II further devastated agricultural communities, resulting in the loss of farms and severing generations of cultivation practices.¹² Yet, Asian American relationships to land cannot be understood solely through exclusion. They are also entangled with Indigenous dispossession and the uneven historical positions produced by empire and settler colonialism.¹³ The #plantmom aesthetic responds to such tensions by relocating cultivation from territorial ownership to domestic and digital practices. If cultivation historically functioned as a colonial technology that justified the domestication and possession of land, the potted plant offers a different ecological relation. They retain agriculture's language of cultivation while relinquishing its dependence on territorial possession. Through social media, plant moms simultaneously produce and circulate these practices, collapsing distinctions between producer and consumer of Asian American culture.

Asian American communities have sought resilience and forms of communities through gardening.¹⁴ As Suji Kwock Kim writes in "The Korean Community Garden in Queens":

... How do they live without wanting to live
forever? May I, and their gardeners in the old world,
who kill for warring dreams and warring heavens,
who stop at nothing, see life and paradise as one.¹⁵

Her poem captures the tension between survival and futurity, labor and refuge, and loss and regeneration — tensions that have long shaped diasporic relationships to cultivation and land. The #plantmom aesthetic emerges from this longer historical and affective terrain but rearticulates it in a distinctly contemporary form.

Rather than unfolding on farms, gardens, or community plots, the #plantmom aesthetic takes shape within "unnatural" environments not traditionally associated with agricultural production or profit. Indoor houseplant cultivation in urban apartments, often constrained by limited light, climate, soil, and space, necessitates specialized knowledge and acquires political resonance through intentional acts of care. Rather than representing nature as an external landscape, this practice first brings the outside in, relocating nature into the realm of culture by reconfiguring land into soil-in-a-pot — a portable, precarious, and mediated ecology. Then, by documenting and sharing these practices on social media, it projects the domestic outward again, circulating intimate acts of cultivation across global digital networks. In doing so, this practice reimagines Asian America as inseparable from intimate, relational entanglements with the environment, transforming private acts of cultivation into reproducible cultural forms that participate in the making of Asian American mass culture in digital space.

Plant moms are not limited to women; the aesthetic opens space for diverse identities to participate in and invest in practices of care and creativity without reducing motherhood to biology or a fixed identity category. Referring to plants as "plant babies," the anthropomorphizing cultivates intimacy rather than mastery or extraction. Instead of taming nature for aesthetic pleasure, this practice extends kinship, imagining alternative and intergenerational lineages. As Alice Walker reflects in "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," generations of Black women have nurtured and inherited life and beauty under constraint: "And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read."¹⁶ Planting, then, is not merely a decorative act; it is a practice through which care, knowledge, and relational meaning are cultivated and transmitted.

The aesthetic also foregrounds care as corporeal, requiring physical labor — watering, replanting, rotating pots for even sunlight, and monitoring pests — as well as intellectual labor to sustain the "plant babies." In doing so, it redirects traditional notions of aesthetics toward an aesthetic of labor. For Asian American women, such labor often entails continuously navigating the intersections of race, gender, and cultural expectation while asserting control over self-presentation. Online spaces often intensify these dynamics, as Asian femme bodies are commodified, surveilled, and consumed. Yet the #plantmom aesthetic reconfigures visibility through an intentional focus on plant bodies, whether or not the plant mom herself appears in the frame. When the human subject is absent, the account holder's presence is still made legible through profile images, captions, and other self-representational markers that situate the plants within Asian diasporic life. When the plant mom appears, her body becomes part of a domestic ecology in which human and vegetal life are mutually constituted. For example, in a time-lapse video, a NYC-based plant mom Vionna (@felinejungle) documents the process of watering her plants. The video begins by centering the plants themselves, with her intermittent presence appearing as she tends to them. Her body remains mostly at the edge of the frame or turned away from the camera. The video renders her presence partial yet unmistakable on her own terms, foregrounding the labor over the spectacle of the body.

The #plantmom aesthetic becomes "an aesthetic force, and its navigation creates aesthetic methods . . . shaping everyday and artistic interactions."¹⁷ As Christina Sharpe reminds us, "even as we experienced, recognized, and lived subjection, we did not simply or only live in subjection and as the subjected."¹⁸ The #plantmom aesthetic gestures toward a quieter mode of activism. In Generosity as Method, Myung Mi Kim complicates the "model of change by opposition," which risks reinforcing the very boundaries it seeks to contest.¹⁹ By rendering labor intimate yet publicly legible, corporeal yet reflective, aestheticized labor becomes a way of living otherwise within the circuits of Asian American mass culture. Aesthetic form does not merely represent history but transforms how it is apprehended, creating space for recognition and reorientation. Digital mediation renders the #plantmom aesthetic widely accessible and transferable. Yet neither plants nor knowledge grow on their own. Propagation offers a model for understanding this process within mass culture. A propagated plant emerges from a parent body, carrying traces of the original while developing its own growth. Likewise, knowledge builds upon prior work while generating new forms, relationships, and possibilities, materializing citation and indexing practices as a form of intellectual propagation. In both cases, growth depends on sustained labor, care, and cultivation, emerging through intentional practice rather than spontaneously, and spreading through collective participation rather than singular authorship.

In tending, transplanting, and propagating plants, documenting and disseminating the process online, and collectively reflecting on the immediacy of racial and gendered violence, Asian American plant moms enact a form of care that is intimate, political, and methodological. In my own turn to planting during the pandemic, what began as an individual domestic practice quickly expanded into a shared cultural form, circulating across digital and material spaces. The #plantmom aesthetic is not a retreat to an idyllic pastoral. Instead, it becomes a mode of living with uncertainty, a mode of knowing that emerges through sustained attention and care, demonstrating how quotidian labor can become a site of knowledge and resilience. As How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe reminds us, safety is not secured by avoiding danger but by choice to assemble meaning within alternative emotional, spatial, and temporal landscapes.²⁰ Within Asian American mass culture, plant babies offer one such landscape. Their "precariousness, violability, and at the same time . . . astonishing tenacity . . . [and] capacity for survival" are an essential mode and outlet of Asian American mass cultural experience.²¹ Plant babies "[hold] some concrete space, a physical one as well as a temporal one . . . like a thought, a sentence, a book . . . a placeholder," serving as a persistent reminder that "spring always comes, if not now, later," not as a distant promise but as enduring insistence.²²

Circulating through feeds, hashtags, and visual economies of relatability, the #plantmom aesthetic turns cultivation into a recognizable mass cultural idiom. Soil, body, and digital space converge here, and in that convergence, care becomes shareable, legible, and reproducible across human and nonhuman networks. What appears as lifestyle content carries other weights beyond representing "the real" Asian America. In the consumption of Asian diaspora and its cultural capital, where belonging is so often policed through narratives of origin and blood, an emphasis on horticulture unsettles the fiction of stable cultural, racial, national, or biological "roots."²³ Cultivation — both material and digitally mediated — thus offers a lens through which to reckon with embodiment and mass culture itself, crystallizing the moment when Asian America is reconfigured through the everyday practices by which we nurture, witness, and endure. Amid insurgent violence and isolation, tending plants means tending proximity. The #plantmom aesthetic does not simply represent Asian America; it turns former consumers into participants, collectively making one among many.

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Nayoung Yang (@yanngna) is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stony Brook University, with a certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her in-progress dissertation explores how Asian American women writers use food as a literary form to intervene dominant narratives of consumption while reimagining global Asian networks. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Literature.

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References

1. Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel (Knopf, 2010), 212. ↩︎
2. Many thanks to Timothy K. August and Leland Tabares for their editorial guidance. See Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021), 1. ↩︎
3. Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Duke University Press, 2019), 104-110. ↩︎
4. Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1991): 773-797. ↩︎
5. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press, 2000); David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2019); Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020); Summer Kim Lee, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (Duke University Press, 2025), 15-21. ↩︎
6. Rising Against Asian Hate: One Day in March, directed by Titi Yu (PBS, 2022). https://www.pbs.org/video/rising-against-asian-hate-one-day-in-march-hx833d/. ↩︎
7. Hong, Minor Feelings, 155. ↩︎
8. Slaying the Dragon, directed by Deborah Gee (Asian Women United of California, 1988); Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America (Temple University Press, 1997); Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Duke University Press, 2007). ↩︎
9. Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Traffic in Asian Women (Duke University Press, 2020); Kandice Chuh, "The Promise of Hate," Amerasia Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2024): 325-339. https://doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2025.2594967. ↩︎
10. McKittrick, Dear Science, 4. ↩︎
11. Mary Kuhn, The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (New York University Press, 2023); Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021). ↩︎
12. Sarah D. Wald, "Agriculture and Asian American Literature," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2019), 764. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.882. ↩︎
13. Candace Fujikane, "Introduction: Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai'I," Whose Vision? Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai'I, eds. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura, special issue of Amerasia Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2000): xv-xxii; Byrd, xxxviii-xxxix; Iko Day, "Settler Colonialism in Asian North American Representation," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩︎
14. Sayaka Akayama, et al., "Exploration of the Value of Japanese-Style Gardens in Incarceration Camps during World War II: The Case of the Amache, Colorado, U.S.," International Journal of Heritage Studies, Vol. 30, No. 9 (2024): 1068-87. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2024.2369549. ↩︎
15. Suji Kwock Kim, "The Korean Community Garden in Queens." Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 72. ↩︎
16. Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens." In Search of Our Mother's Gardens (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 240. ↩︎
17. Timothy K. August, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America (Temple University Press, 2021), 9. ↩︎
18. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 4. ↩︎
19. Myung Mi Kim, interview by Yedda Morrison, Generosity as Method: An Interview with Myung Mi Kim (Electronic Poetry Center, December 1997). ↩︎
20. Yu, How to Live Safely, 2010. ↩︎
21. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013), 19. ↩︎
22. Yiyun Li, "What Gardening Offered After a Son's Death: Deep in Mourning, I Thought, What If Spring Never Returns?" The New Yorker (October 23, 2023). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/onward-and-upward-in-the-department-of-not-moping. ↩︎
23. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indiana University Press, 1993); Ien Ang, "Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm," boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 25, No. 3 (1998): 223-242. ↩︎