In this stunning essay, Wei Tchou turns to ferns as a lens through which to better understand herself and her place in her family, amid the turmoil of her brother’s mental illness.
Names, for me, use certainty as their lure. They’re above and beneath us, a universal interface, a boulder on the earth. The safest place I find myself is in a heavy book I can flip through to find the name of anything I don’t recognize, rendered in a dead language that I know won’t change. In a world where so much truth is malleable and relative, there is a subset of that world in language where truth is fixed. Either way, ferns grow regardless of our names for them. They spiral relentlessly.
Here’s something soothing: Everything alive exists within one of three taxonomic categories called Domains, and, within that, one of five or six subdivisions under Kingdoms (depending on the zoologist you’re speaking with). All plants, including ferns, exist in the Kingdom called Plantae. No matter what language you speak, these names remain the same.
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