Best Seller
Uprooted
By Vanessa Hua
Audiobook Download
Available on Apr 13, 2027 | 9 Hours
Using a blend of nature writing, reporting, and poignant personal narrative, this debut memoir explores how interaction with the natural world—namely, foraging, both literally and metaphorically—has the power to vitalize and restore our lives, bolster resilience, and kindle joy.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, housebound with her young twins, husband, and elderly mother, Vanessa Hua escapes her dread by fleeing into the oak-studded hills east of Berkeley. In a clearing, the award-winning journalist and novelist encounters an unfamiliar plant—miner’s lettuce—the parasol‑shaped leaf of Claytonia perfoliata inviting both curiosity and fear. Here, her journey into the world of foraging begins.
With her family, Hua finds abundance in overlooked places: bay nuts scattered along the road and chanterelles erupting in a damp forest. Against a landscape marked by migration, colonialism, capitalism, and climate change, she examines who gets to feel safe outdoors, how immigration and displacement shape ideas of what is native, and how to harvest with reciprocity and respect.
Weaving together cultural and natural history, she traces her immigrant Chinese family’s journey and the daily labor of care, tending to illness, aging, and loss. Foraging renews her sense of place, kindles joy, and attunes her to the seasons of life. Deeply researched, tender, and resonant, Uprooted is a luminous meditation on resilience—how we survive, how we adapt, and how, even amid upheaval, we find our way home.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, housebound with her young twins, husband, and elderly mother, Vanessa Hua escapes her dread by fleeing into the oak-studded hills east of Berkeley. In a clearing, the award-winning journalist and novelist encounters an unfamiliar plant—miner’s lettuce—the parasol‑shaped leaf of Claytonia perfoliata inviting both curiosity and fear. Here, her journey into the world of foraging begins.
With her family, Hua finds abundance in overlooked places: bay nuts scattered along the road and chanterelles erupting in a damp forest. Against a landscape marked by migration, colonialism, capitalism, and climate change, she examines who gets to feel safe outdoors, how immigration and displacement shape ideas of what is native, and how to harvest with reciprocity and respect.
Weaving together cultural and natural history, she traces her immigrant Chinese family’s journey and the daily labor of care, tending to illness, aging, and loss. Foraging renews her sense of place, kindles joy, and attunes her to the seasons of life. Deeply researched, tender, and resonant, Uprooted is a luminous meditation on resilience—how we survive, how we adapt, and how, even amid upheaval, we find our way home.
Author
Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the novel A River of Stars and a story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities. 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, among others. She 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. She has taught most recently at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
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