Dear Reader,
Today’s guest author, Vanessa Hua, is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of three titles: A River of Stars, the story collection Deceit and Other Possibilities and her new novel Forbidden City.
A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. Vanessa has filed stories from China, Burma, South Korea, and elsewhere, and her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Most recently she taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Vanessa lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
Vanessa would love to hear from you. Connect with her: @vanessa_hua
An Easy Sweetness
After becoming a forager at the start of the pandemic, I'd pinpointed in my neighborhood where to find plums, blackberries, loquats, bay nuts, butternuts, acorns, and more while taking endless walks with my family in the San Francisco Bay Area.
But late last fall, on an afternoon stroll, I spied something new. Or something that had been there all along, but hadn't noticed until now: by the fence of the local pool, bushes had sprouted small oblong fruits with a dull green skin. The leaves were dark green on top, and silvery on the underside.
Foraging has become more than a hobby that helped get me through the last two and half years; it's a way of seeing, of being present, that makes me feel more at home, at home. Just as knowing what's happening in the lives of my neighbors fosters cordial and warm relations--"How is your son doing in college?"--so too with the plants and trees around me, whose names, background, and seasonality I now consider.
Preliminary identification with the help of iNaturalist suggested it might be pineapple guava, or feijoa, a fruit native to southern Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and parts of Argentina, and introduced to California around 1900. Widespread commercial cultivation never quite caught on in the United States, where pineapple guava serve mostly as ornamental shrubs.
Based on a photo I shared online, friends all but confirmed my find, but I wouldn't know for certain until I cut it open and it inside, and I'd have to bide my time until they ripened on the tree, after Halloween and early November. And so, I waited with the eagerness I might once have reserved for the opening of a hot new restaurant.
I returned to the bushes, gave them a light shake and collected the fruits that tumbled to the ground; they'd grown to the size of hen's eggs. Other creatures had beaten me to the first ones, gnawing through the rinds.
Slicing the pineapple guava in half, I scooped out the juicy, tender flesh with a sweet-tart taste that reminded me of kiwi. Like Starburst candy, but not cloying or artificial. Delicious fresh, it was even better when I incorporated them into a delectable curd.
The pineapple guava's easy sweetness--in such quantity!--so late in the year was such a delight. In late spring and early summer, I'm looking forward to its flowers with its spiky bright red stamens, a harbinger of the bounty later this year.
-- Vanessa HuaConnect with Vanessa @vanessa_hua
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
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* This month's Penguin Classics book is People from Bloomington by Budi Darma. I have a copy of the book to share with a lucky reader, so start reading and enter for your chance to win.
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