Seedfolks Essay

Seedfolks

Seedfolks is a book about family. One day, a little Vietnamese girl named Kim plants some lima beans in a vacant lot in Cleveland to honor her father who was a farmer. A neighbor notices and decides to plant her own plants. Soon, more neighbors notice and do the same. Soon, the vacant lot turns into a community garden. The people of Cleveland have to avoid their differences and come together as a family to make it successful. The book Seedfolks implies that family is the true source of love because almost everybody in the book does something to express their love through the garden. The garden becomes somewhat like a family, and brings the community together.

In the beginning, we are introduced to Kim. Kim is a young

He is a janitor at the local school, and lives in the same apartment building as Ana. Each time his phone rings he is instantly reminded of two tragic moments in his life. “My phone doesn’t ring much, which suits me fine. That’s how I got the news about our boy, shot dead like a dog in the street. And the word, last year about my wife’s car wreck. I can’t hear a phone and not jerk inside.” This quote is a big part of the importance of having family. Wendell’s main sign of symbolism is the pitcher. The pitcher represents the life in the garden. Wendell realizes that he can’t change a lot of things in his life, including his lost family, but he can change a patch in the lot. He realizes that it is better to do that than complain about the things he can’t change all day. Leona is another very important character in this book. When she walks past the garden, she tells herself she will plant a patch of goldenrod. Goldenrod is very important to her because it reminds her of her grandmother. She drank a cup of goldenrod tea with a nutmeg floating in it every morning, and declared that she would not need any more medicine. This shows that her main symbol is goldenrod, because Leona is trying to plant it in remembrance of her grandmother. Leona goes to the city hall to try to get the city to remove the trash so more people will be able to plant there, and she

Gonzalo and Maricela are two examples of that. Gonzalo and his family moved from Guatemala to Cleveland, which left his great-uncle, as Gonzalo says, “like a baby.” Gonzalo’s mom trusts him to babysit him, but Gonzalo is disgusted by the thought of it. Tio Juan, often wanders off and Gonzalo has to find him. One day, Gonzalo realizes he has wandered off and he rushes to find him. He finds him at a nearby vacant lot that had been turned into the community garden. He grabs his hand, but Tio Juan pulls him through the trash into the lot. Tio Juan tries to give advice to a man, but the man can not understand his poor english. That night, being the farmer he used to be, Tio Juan told Gonzalo’s mother about the garden, and the next morning they picked out a spot for him. At the end of the chapter Gonzalo acknowledges his intelligence about gardening and respects him more. “He’d changed from a baby back into a man.” This quote tells how the community garden leads Gonzalo to respect Tio Juan more. Maricela’s chapter starts off on a sour note. She shares several stereotypes and about how they are directed towards her. It leads us to the fact that she might be depressed, because she says how she wouldn’t care if she died. Being pregnant as a teen causes her to be mad at the world. She wants an abortion, a miscarriage, or to put the baby up for adoption,