Transplant shock and yes, uprooting is another word for heartbreak.

Some thoughts on moving house, reestablishing roots and dream shelters. CW: Family trauma.

(i) be gentle with the roots

Last two months, on a whim, my tomato plant which I’ve named Goh Chok Tom due to their gigantic height being the only trait that is worth noting, decided to have a kin from some dormant seed that have been in the soil all along. I named this new tomato sprout Goh Chok Two and before I knew it, there were signs of competition between the two of them. Tom was looking a little brown and flimsy, constantly being pushed off balance from the window-grill by Two, toppling over from a sudden overcrowding. (Though as an afterthought, it was not at all crowded and there was ample space for both). I had Tom for two years now and only changed the soil once but Tom was the sort who thrives with little interference. However, the dynamics seemed a little off and I thought to myself that it would be best for the both of them if I repotted their soil.

With but that one experience I had, I gently pulled them out from their pot and laid the two of them side by side on my kitchen floor. I did a half-half, half of the old soil and half of the new. I figured that if I was made to move house, I might want to keep some of my old furniture. I put in Two first, and gently fill up the base giving them some weight to hold them in place. Tom was a little bit harder because they are as tall as my hand and it was hard to steady them into place. All this while I kept saying, be gentle with the roots, be gentle with the roots under my breath because that was the only thing I recalled from my lazy ass speed-browsing info acquisition.

I watered the soil continuously and placed them back to where they were. In the following days, it was clear that I was unintentionally yet solely responsible for placing my tomato plants in palliative care. They were just slowly wilting, turning brown, growing soft…dying… DYING. Slowly they started to shrivel and not take to anything. Not even more water, or less water or more soil. I tried a little of everything and I stopped trying altogether. I even stopped talking to them in case they were angry with me. The dying was really dramatic. It’s like nazak¹ y’know and all I could do was wait and hope that they might pull through. It’s true what they say though about it not being broke…same thing should be applied to it not being dead.

A planter friend (we all have those friends, don’t we and yes thank you for existing, you and your naturally green fingers <3) told me that Tom and Two were just reestablishing roots as one would when they are suddenly moved from that spot they have settled themselves into for, in the case of Tom, two whole years. I imagined that being lifted out and placed back into the same city (in this case the pot) but in a completely different location, in a different house, with new set of neighbours and stray cats and sub-par supermarket produce with a new roommate that was trying to get me evicted in the first place can be very disorientating but why are you dying from all this Tom? WHY TOM?

And so, I started reading up (yes this time properly and with full attention) on this phenomena. And OMG, it has a name, a super violent one at that. So this unstoppable plant death thing that happens a lot of times for a lot of people is known as…wait for it…transplant shock. It is said, as according to Kevin: Transplant shock can last from two weeks to five years, depending on the plant or tree you’re growing. This can cause temporary stagnation of growth or flower and fruit production. The longer the transplant shock remains, the higher the chances of the plant dying.

(A most recent update is that Tom is ded but Two is thriving.)

ii: The house is a psychic state, the house is a dream shelter.

When one talks about identity especially in relation to stability of place or cultural ties, one would always mention roots. I remember that particular scene in The Professional as being the earliest memory I had of this but was probably too young to understand it. I was nine when the film came out and probably watched it when I was ten or eleven. My family was planning to move into our second home, much to my discontent. I loved my house, it was the only house I had ever known given my family moved in when I was born. “But what is wrong with our house?” I had asked my sister though I do not remember her answers.

Both my parents worked really hard towards this forever home. The best flooring and tiles and nicely matching furniture. There’s air-con in all the rooms and the best sound system. Although it would be much smaller than our first house, it will not matter much because the house will provide all the comforts we were not able to afford. Everything will be newly bought, like a fresh start, a slow and sweet reward from the daily grind, proof that hard work leads to that promised land of upward social mobility, families from our generation dreamt about.

Here’s a plot twist to that dream of that forever home: My family was there for maybe three years and then my parents got divorced.

I can’t really compare myself to Tom though after our first move. I wasn’t really thriving but I wasn’t dying either. It was for a fact that our second house was way superior. But for the life of me right now, I can only remember the cold blue marble tiles and the soft leather sofa and the custom-made cool furniture I had shared with my sister in our room with the pull-out bed and the revolving mirror shelf. Everything was blue in that house but that was all I could recall. But my first house, I remember it fondly to this day in vivid details.

We had this display cabinet that my mom kept all her trinkets, making us dust them off, these strange useless things, at the eve of every Hari Raya. There was a rocking chair and I remember that one time I toppled myself over and was trapped underneath. My parent’s living room had this paper lantern hanging light and uncomfortably warm shiny sheets which my sister and I would peel off on weekends and take long afternoon naps. I remember running up and down the hallway and there was a small little storeroom cluttered with all sorts of things and spiders in all of its dark corners. I remember playing with a big container of rice as my mother cooked, my sister and I on the kitchen cabinets licking off cake batter from the metal parts of the cake mixer.

We had two phones. One with a short wire and one with a really long wire that goes everywhere and gets tangled onto everything. Our TV was a standing one and my grandfather hacked it so that we can get Indonesian channels all the way from Batam using an antenna he bought in Johore. Outside, amongst others, there was a plant as old as I was because my father bought it when I was born. We left it, and a lot of other old stuff behind when we moved to our shiny, new house.

And our neighbourhood too, Jurong West, the end of the island almost. Sleepy new town of the nineties. Pre-internet days were long and kinda epic. We knew all our neighbours by name. There was a mini grocery under the block opposite ours. We call it ara tara because the lady who runs it would say ara, a mispronounced ada (to indicate that she has this item) and tara, a mispronounced tak ada (to indicated she didn’t). There was a small path under a gazebo that one can take to this bakery that had a revolving cake thing and kitschy birthday cakes with edible wafer roses and butter cream in neon colours. I remember just standing there on some afternoons looking at the cakes go round and round.

I could go on and on, these memories immense as though my childhood of 10 years was a big chunk of my life. As though those ten years seem to last for more. Seem to last forever in my mind. I found the only photo of my entire family in our living room of our first house recently and I could feel a longing, a pain of the slipping, irreversible. There are many photos like this one usually a small celebration at home. At the corner, in that display cabinet was our own nicely posed family portrait against this candid one, some meta-nightmarish projection of what’s about to come. My mother was the only one standing up, my father the only one smiling to the camera. It was probably his birthday. My sister in a half squat looking excitedly at the present in his hands. I looked sad here, somehow.

Fast forward a few years later, in a different house and it’s a completely different picture. My father is absent, my mother locked out of the house after a big confrontation (maybe intervention?), all three of us reaching a pinnacle of grief and abuse. My sister and I crying unconsolably in our room, frightened and angry at all that have taken place. In a desperate bid for some alternative shelter, I called my father that day to take us out of there. We couldn’t bring much with us, left a lot of things behind and that marked the start of my uprooting, house after house, different beds and rooms, that was never home and rarely shelter. Always unsafe. Motionless houses, rigid houses.

“All great, simple images reveal a psychic state. The house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy. Psychologists generally, and Francoise Minkowska in particular, together with those whom she has succeeded interesting in the subject, have studied the drawing of houses made by children, and even used them for testing. Indeed, the house-test has the advantage of welcoming spontaneity, for many children draw a house spontaneously while dreaming over their paper and pencil. To quote Anne Balif: "Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations." It will have the right shape, and nearly always there will be some indication of its inner strength. In certain drawings, quite obviously, to quote Madame Balif, "it is warm indoors, and there is a fire burning, such a big fire, in fact, that it can be seen coming out of the chimney." When the house is happy, soft smoke rises in gay rings above the roof.

If the child is unhappy, however, the house bears traces of his distress. In this connection, I recall that Francoise Minkowska organized an unusually moving exhibition of drawings by Polish and Jewish children who had suffered the cruelties of the German occupation during the last war. One child, who had been hidden in a closet every time there was an alert, continued to draw narrow, cold, closed houses long after those evil times were over. These are what Madame Minkowska calls "motionless" houses, houses that have become motionless in their rigidity.”²

iii: true roots

Over the years that followed those many houses and many surrogate mothers and fathers, borrowed families and beds (if I was lucky) that never slept long enough to form a cavity of my body, I became reckless with material possessions and grew hardy from discomforts. Leaving became easy and my needs shifted, no longer looking for longer but just long enough. Long enough for what, maybe to survive another week. Or on hard times, another day.

Tbh, to live without the stability of a home is somewhat freeing once it became familiar. I had a list of places I could crash that I rotated every few weeks once I have stopped staying with my father at 17. I was surprised how many people had taken me in, in exchange for nothing but loose gratitude. I too became a surrogate of sorts, a daughter, a sibling, a friend, a lover or something nameless but there was always intimacy blooming in those years of searching for a place in which I can root myself for good. Those who were always there without saying they were, they were people like me. Uprooted kin. In those years, it was easy until it wasn’t and when it became inhospitable, troublesome or crowded, this “for good” place seem to diminished with all the other houses I had to leave behind and fade into some impossible childish yearning. This place did not exist for me, and so I put my roots to rest inside myself.

This inside home was a secret space I filled with everything I have lost and everything I have gained from this losing, this slipping. There are no surrogates here, no temporary arrangements, no hiding or overstaying, no discomforts. No one moves out from this inside home, they move around and grow with me, running up and down the hallways, making lots of noise, sleeping wherever they wanted, dancing, playing. There is so much space that my roots grew and grew without needing much. Even in the most desiccated environments.

Mosses are typically soft plants that grow in clumps or mats. Like other plants, they produce chlorophyll and undergo photosynthesis, but they do not have true roots. They instead have multicelled, rootlike appendages called “rhizoids,” which anchor the plants and take in water and minerals. Because rhizoids are less efficient than roots, mosses generally prefer damp places with low light. When dry, they can go dormant, drawing moisture and nutrients from the green portion of the plant back in the rhizoids, which causes their leaflike structures to curl. When moist conditions return, they spring back to life, turn green and grow.³”

To be uprooted for a long period makes one accustomed to surroundings, to be aware of what is nourishing, what is necessary to thrive. I have my own dream shelter now, an outside home, messy and cluttered with all the parts of my inside home that have kept me safe for so long. In the mornings, I glimpse at my child in her bed, in her dream state and wish for her a steadiness and gentleness in forming her own roots that dance and run and play, always safe in this humble outside home we are slowly building together.

(if you wish, feel free to pass on some love. open too for thoughts and exchanges. thank you for making time to read)

1. The meaning of nazak is moribund; condition of near death; severe; in a dying death.

2. Taken from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, 1958.

3. https://www.dupageforest.org/plants-wildlife/plants/lower-plants