Am I an invasive species?

I GREW UP IN A HYBRID HOUSEHOLD, where my father cultivated chives and bok choy and edible chrysanthemum, planting seeds and starts in a plot of earth he’d overturned in the middle of our North Idaho pasture. After my grandfather died, my father’s gardening intensified. At the time, I understood this as an effort to turn the abstraction of his Chinese heritage into something tangible and rooted in the earth, growing Chinese vegetables from North American dirt.

But then I went to college, and as I learned more about ecology, I started seeing threats everywhere. Within the dominant paradigm of natural resource management, invasive species are a problem. Some exotic species can outcompete natives, interbreed with them, contaminate the stock. Hybridization is one of the leading causes of biodiversity loss. In one iconic story of the