Read Online The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
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should have been here last week; that hillside was white with mushroom.” He pointed out the window to a clipped lawn where matsutake would never grow. Without the dance of matsutake forests, memory loses focus.
Hiro takes me to a valley where commercial pickers were not so careful with the landscape. Hiro is one of the most generous people I know, and he loves to work across racial and cultural categories. Yet after some hours, tired, he fell back into discouraged repetition: “This was a good place before the Cambodians ruined it. This was a good place before the Cambodians ruined it.” Cambodians is his shorthand for Southeast Asian pickers. And no American should be shocked by the clash of racial profiling through which we stereotype each other. Without wagging a finger at either Hiro or the Cambodians, let me turn to the performance I learned from two Mien pickers. My point is not to show classificatory contrast but to sweep you into another dance.
For Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi, matsutake picking is both a livelihood and a vacation. Every matsutake season since the mid-1990s, they have made their way with their husbands from Redding, California, to the central Cascades; on weekends their children and grandchildren sometimesjoin them. When the season is over, Moei Lin’s husband stacks crates at Wal-Mart; Fam Tsoi’s husband drives a school bus. In a good year, matsutake picking is a better living than either of these alternatives. Still, they look forward to the season for multiple reasons, including the exercise and the fresh air. The women, in particular, feel released from the confinement of the cities. The neighborly shelters of their Mien encampment are the nearest they have come, in the United States, to a village in upland Laos. Mien mushroom camps are full of the bustle of village life.
There are also reasons to forget, as Fam Tsoi reminds me when I ask about memories of home. Because many Hmong pickers have told me that hiking the Oregon forests reminds them of Laos, I wonder about Mien. “Yes, of course,” she says. “But if you just think about the mushroom, you can forget.” Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi came to the United States with the tragedies of the U.S. war in Indochina. After spending years in Thailand, they were accepted as refugees and moved to the mild weather and agricultural wealth of central California. They had no English and no urban job experience. They grew their own foods, and their husbands forged traditional tools. When they heard that money could be made picking mushrooms in the forest, they joined the autumn harvest.
For them, pioneering new landscapes is an old skill, once necessary to migratory shifting cultivation. It is a useful skill for commercial mushroom picking, which, unlike heritage picking, requires covering a lot of ground. Unlike heritage pickers, for whom a half-bucket of mushrooms is a good day’s haul, commercial pickers know that a half-bucket won’t pay for gas. Commercial pickers can’t afford to just check a few remembered spots. To make a living, they pick for longer days and in wider ranges and more diverse ecosystems.
Unlike refugees from cities, Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi do not fear the forest and rarely get lost. Their group feels so comfortable that there is no need to stay close together. When I pick with them, the men go off on their own, quicker trajectories, while the women forge their own way, returning to meet the men much later. “Men run off chasing big bumps,” explains Fam Tsoi, “while women scratch the ground.”
I scratch the ground with Fam Tsoi and Moei Lin. Everywhere we pick, other pickers have been before us. But rather than cursing their messy digs, we explore them. Moei Lin leans over and touches her stick to the area where soil has been disturbed. No heave is in evidencebecause the surface has already been broken. But sometimes there is a mushroom! We follow the tracks of earlier harvesters, touching their remains. Because matsutake,
Hiro takes me to a valley where commercial pickers were not so careful with the landscape. Hiro is one of the most generous people I know, and he loves to work across racial and cultural categories. Yet after some hours, tired, he fell back into discouraged repetition: “This was a good place before the Cambodians ruined it. This was a good place before the Cambodians ruined it.” Cambodians is his shorthand for Southeast Asian pickers. And no American should be shocked by the clash of racial profiling through which we stereotype each other. Without wagging a finger at either Hiro or the Cambodians, let me turn to the performance I learned from two Mien pickers. My point is not to show classificatory contrast but to sweep you into another dance.
For Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi, matsutake picking is both a livelihood and a vacation. Every matsutake season since the mid-1990s, they have made their way with their husbands from Redding, California, to the central Cascades; on weekends their children and grandchildren sometimesjoin them. When the season is over, Moei Lin’s husband stacks crates at Wal-Mart; Fam Tsoi’s husband drives a school bus. In a good year, matsutake picking is a better living than either of these alternatives. Still, they look forward to the season for multiple reasons, including the exercise and the fresh air. The women, in particular, feel released from the confinement of the cities. The neighborly shelters of their Mien encampment are the nearest they have come, in the United States, to a village in upland Laos. Mien mushroom camps are full of the bustle of village life.
There are also reasons to forget, as Fam Tsoi reminds me when I ask about memories of home. Because many Hmong pickers have told me that hiking the Oregon forests reminds them of Laos, I wonder about Mien. “Yes, of course,” she says. “But if you just think about the mushroom, you can forget.” Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi came to the United States with the tragedies of the U.S. war in Indochina. After spending years in Thailand, they were accepted as refugees and moved to the mild weather and agricultural wealth of central California. They had no English and no urban job experience. They grew their own foods, and their husbands forged traditional tools. When they heard that money could be made picking mushrooms in the forest, they joined the autumn harvest.
For them, pioneering new landscapes is an old skill, once necessary to migratory shifting cultivation. It is a useful skill for commercial mushroom picking, which, unlike heritage picking, requires covering a lot of ground. Unlike heritage pickers, for whom a half-bucket of mushrooms is a good day’s haul, commercial pickers know that a half-bucket won’t pay for gas. Commercial pickers can’t afford to just check a few remembered spots. To make a living, they pick for longer days and in wider ranges and more diverse ecosystems.
Unlike refugees from cities, Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi do not fear the forest and rarely get lost. Their group feels so comfortable that there is no need to stay close together. When I pick with them, the men go off on their own, quicker trajectories, while the women forge their own way, returning to meet the men much later. “Men run off chasing big bumps,” explains Fam Tsoi, “while women scratch the ground.”
I scratch the ground with Fam Tsoi and Moei Lin. Everywhere we pick, other pickers have been before us. But rather than cursing their messy digs, we explore them. Moei Lin leans over and touches her stick to the area where soil has been disturbed. No heave is in evidencebecause the surface has already been broken. But sometimes there is a mushroom! We follow the tracks of earlier harvesters, touching their remains. Because matsutake,
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