Whose story about outdoors get to be told and whose doesn't?

[Glittering rhythms of afro-house, reminiscent of a meditation or ritual, plays in the background]

AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL: I grew up in some rural areas, but I also had access to big university libraries, so it’s not for lack of looking. I just simply didn’t see that and I’m a child of the 70s and 80s, so it’s definitely better now, but I always wondered, like, where are the Asian Americans who love the outdoors? I cannot be the only one.

My name is Aimee Nezhukumatathil. I'm the author of 5 books, and I am a professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

My most recent collection is a collection of nature essays called World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, and it’s a collection that is illustrated, featuring about 30 of my favorite plants and animals that helped me feel like a student of this planet again. 

JORDAN KISNER: I’m Jordan Kisner and I’m the host of Thresholds. 

NEZHUKUMATATHIL: I said before that, at heart, I’m kind of a nerd. Not kind of, I am a lot of a nerd, and the books that I grew up reading were science books and adventure books and stories of the outdoors and their observations, nature guides, you know, that kind of thing.

But when I got to the back of these books, I never saw anybody that even remotely looked like me. I was lucky to find authors like Rachel Carson or Annie Dillard -- 

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Women, but certainly I never saw any people of color. 

I don’t know if I necessarily have the answers, but I had, in the writing of this book, just a lot of questions about that as well.

KISNER:  Tell me about some of those questions.

NEZHUKUMATATHIL: The very first gut instinct one was just that question of “whose story gets to be told about the outdoors and whose doesn’t?” and all the reasons for that.  

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KISNER:  How did your dad become so knowledgeable about the landscape around Phoenix? Was it something that he took up and studied when you all moved there? Was it something that he brought with him?

NEZHUKUMATATHIL: I mean, he’s a biologist. He has degrees in biology and botany. 

He read so much, that was his entertainment.

I think I just never questioned it [laughs]. As a little girl, to me, that was just infinite wisdom of him. It’s not like he had all this free time in the world.

He worked in a NICU unit, so very, very teeny preemie, premature babies, helping them breathe. He could be called in at a moment’s notice. Birthday parties, or whatever, he would be called in.

He did not have long, luxurious summer breaks. There was no off time when it’s babies struggling to breathe. As a kid, I kind of always resented it. “Gosh, who are these babies? Don't they know it’s my birthday?”, which sounds ridiculous, of course. But he’s my dad. 

He’s an immigrant [laughs] and trying to deal with these very vibrant daughters.

[Laugh-talks] Dealing with these two elementary school girls that he didn’t really know--one wanted to be Madonna. The other one, I think, wanted to be a backup dancer in Wham! I think his peace was reading about the environment and then taking his vivacious daughters out on these hikes, out on these constellation hunting trips so that we knew the names for things. We knew the stars at such an early age. And I’ll be honest, I wasn't always thrilled about it.

[The sound of birds chirping in nature is heard in the background]

Many times I was like, “dad I want to watch MTV,” or whatever. But that is, oh, it’s just one of the biggest gifts of my life that didn’t cost any money. It was just simply going on these walks and having him. 

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Him and my mom, they have the best stories; they still have the best stories. 

It was just always an adventure. There was no sense of him being bored, and, therefore, I think one of his biggest legacies is letting his daughters not be bored.

My parents drilled it into us about like, “only boring people get bored.” 

We were sent outside. We were absolutely expected to find our own fun using sticks and stones and whatever we could find outside. “Oh, here’s a interesting Caterpillar.” “Here’s a garter snake,” or whatever. That was our entertainment, and I’m so grateful for that actually [laughs]. 

KISNER: You write so beautifully in World of Wonders about the outdoors, whether it’s a plant, or a bird, or a landscape, as a site of peace and of knowledge and of discovery and of authority. It was just striking to me that you use the word “peace”. Like it was a peaceful place. It was his peace being outside. And it reminded me of the passage in your book where you describe wishing that your front yard, when you were living in Phoenix, had a giant cactus-- I think it was a saguaro cactus-- like a neighbor’s did. I guess I’m just wondering what parts of that landscape to you really caught in your heart or in your mind. 

NEZHUKUMATATHIL: Gosh, that’s such a beautiful question too. It’s hard for me to pin down one thing from the suburban Arizona landscape because I also feel a kinship with a landscape in Kansas. 

I absolutely do have tangible, tangible memories of talking to Cardinals, for example, in the suburbs of Chicago and in Western New York-- this wasn’t in the book, but this is right around the time where it’s maple syrup season, you know, that kind of thing.

But, I would say, something that still holds true today anytime I visit Arizona, is just that pure, pure sunshine.

The culture was just so different then. I’m talking about summer and winter breaks--it was eat breakfast, go outside, swim at somebody’s house if you didn’t have a pool of your own. These are not super well-off kids. This was absolutely middle to upper, upper middle-class kids, but just so many people had pools in the suburbs. Come inside for lunch. We would wait because even the hardiest of us couldn’t be out at the blazing 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM.

We just spent these days just outside and finding new bugs or, “oh, look at the seeds of this plant,” or “check out the spider,” or just riding our bikes everywhere. And that hot, hot sunshine, and then seeing kind of the glint of cacti. That kind of dull green glint in the hot, hot sun of the cacti.

That to me is peak elementary school [laughs]. Cause there was also a danger, right? If we’re running around, “oh, don’t don’t fall. If you’re on your bikes and chasing each other around, don’t crash into the cactus.” 

So it was something both exquisite beauty to me, but also such danger. So, I think just cacti in general, there’s too many to list, but Solaro, Ocotillo, just even the cute, stumpy Barrel Bush Cactus. 

KISNER: Do you remember one of the early formative experiences of being in the outdoors that made you feel like, “oh, this is for me. This is the place where I want to be,” or “this is something I'm deeply attracted to”? 

NEZHUKUMATATHIL: I don’t know if there was one specific moment, because I have so many moments, and many of them are chronicled in the book where I just had this sense of peace or this joy.

For those people who don't know, Phoenix is in the center, it’s in a Valley. The Valley of the sun, they call it. 

But, when father was off, we would go hiking up Camelback mountain, South mountain.

That’s where I also saw him so confident, and nobody talked down to him. Nobody made fun of his Indian accent, his Malayalam accent. In fact, people were asking questions of him.

I think they would see him talking to his two young girls like, “oh, this is an ocotillo tree, there’s a chuckwalla lizard.” He knew the names of minerals and rocks and cacti. 

And if he didn’t know the name of something, this is before cell phones, he would just really try to get a good look at it. We didn’t even have sketchbooks either. Just try to get a good look at it. Then we go to the library and try to look up that plant, or that cactus, or that mineral. 

So, he was kind of an expert in this land that is not his homeland.

You know, contrasting that with observing these kind of jerk cashiers who would talk so down to him, like, “I cannot understand you. Speak English” [spoken in a broken, pejorative way], when he was speaking actual English. 

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It was very palpable. 

I didn’t have the vocabulary for it. I’m embarrassed to say that I was maybe even a little bit ashamed of my dad. Not ashamed of my dad, but just embarrassed in the situation because I could see him, this mighty, amazingly smart man. Many girls think their dad is the smartest man alive, and then to see him so belittled and talked down to in that way...

The outdoors was a place for both my mom and my dad to just kind of be on their own and confident in their own.

And nobody questioned them. Nobody asked, “what are you? What are you doing here?” They just felt so comfortable there, and, therefore, I think that comfort was transferred to my sister and I.  

I say all of this knowing full well that not everybody has that privilege. I have friends who never felt comfortable outside for various reasons.

So, I can only speak to my own experience. For me, a child of an Indian man and a Filipino woman, we didn’t have extended family here in the States. So, it was the four of us, and the outdoors was a place where nobody made us feel unwelcome. 

[Afro-house music fades out to the sounds of an owl hooting and birds chirping]