NorCal farmer connects with Asian roots through growing vegetables

SEBASTOPOL, Calif. -- On a small 3-acre plot of land in West Sonoma County, Leslie Wiser is connecting her ancestral Taiwanese family food traditions to her present-day life as a mother and farmer who grew up with scant details of her heritage.

"This is the flat Taiwanese cabbage here. This is a Bok choy," she says, pointing to the leafy green vegetables popular with Asian communities around the world, spread out in seedling containers in a hoop house she built on her farm in Sebastopol.

"My trips to Taiwan were very pivotal in terms of choosing what to farm. When I started the farm in 2018, I was not certain which direction I would go to yet.

"Born to a Chinese-Taiwanese mother and father of German and Polish-Jewish descent and growing up in the Midwest, Wiser's parents had fled war and conflict and once in the U.S., like so many other immigrants, were busy working to support their family and wanting to put the past behind them.

"I had a friend say that she loves Chinese broccoli or Gai lan. I had never heard of it. And I was very intrigued and also a little ashamed that I had no idea what this vegetable was, and I'm half Chinese.

"So, after a stint in the corporate world, Wiser set off on her own journey of discovery through farming.

In 2018, she and her two young children set off for Taiwan to learn Mandarin at a preschool.

"They had a little garden, a little culinary garden. And it was really cool to see the vegetables that they were growing."

Today, Wiser's tightly-packed but extremely organized plot of land is yielding those hard-to-find vegetables she and many Asian families across the Bay Area enjoyed in their home countries, like bitter melon, Bok choy, celtuce, Sichuan peppercorn, as well as chrysanthemum tea.

"Now I feel like I've accomplished that and learned so much about myself. And now it's really just finding pleasure in the farming now and making sure that the business is viable and changing to a more sustainable direction."

Follow Leslie Wiser and her vegetable farm on Instagram @RadicalFamilyFarms.