International Women's Day Keynote: In the Shadow of Pothos

For six weeks in my freshman and sophomore summers, I immersed myself in the world of textile workers—from fast fashion factories they work at, to shadowed urban villages they live in. I realized that what the mainstream narrative of exploitation coined as “privileged” consumers and “underprivileged” workers are, at their core, humans, rich with life, pain, hopes, struggles, dreams, subjectivity—in a single word, agency—beyond our labels.

Pothos

noun  /ˈpoʊ.θɑːs/

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A heat-, drought-, and shade-resistant evergreen plant with thick, heart-shaped leaves. The plant is easily propagated and rarely, if ever, flowers.

Shenzhen’s urban villages are nothing short of a labyrinth. It’s hard to walk here without feeling like a rodent randomly chosen by behind-the-scenes researchers to walk through a maze—Theseus’s maze without Ariadne’s thread. Each turn of the alleyway opens an empty page in an unread book, each corner a twisted, anticlimactic plot. There is a kind of cruel poetry in the air here—the way the buildings crowd in on themselves like supplicants praying for sunlight, as if they are all trying to reach a space that actually spells: Error 404 Page Not Found. Sunlight itself, when summer heat emboldens it to intrude, rarely finds its ray through the entwined fabrics of concrete, ceramics, and rusting steel, its photons split into feeble shards, overshadowed by the geometry of survival. Our universe is a piece of cloth glued together by the friction of too many plots, too many characters, too much tension residing in each of its domestic interstices. I walked behind Ms. Chen, each step flipping through another page of these unraveling paths, her silhouette a sharp comma in the syntax of shadows.

The stairwell to her apartment was thick with the black smell of damp laundry and fried garlic—expired perfume to the walls tattooed with the fingerprints of time itself. Six flights up, her door opened into the body paragraphs: her apartment. Seven square meters, stacked with the archaeology of displacement: a bunk bed fossilized in a corner under quilts, walls sweated mildew, time congealed into the scent of damp plywood. A big white plastic tub, upturned like the hull of a steamship in an undersized lake, anchored the room. Around it, two red caravels formed a council of inverted vessels. Above them, a pot of pothos perched on the windowsill, its tendrils spilling over the sill like green ink bleeding into gray margins, trying to rewrite the room in photosynthesis. Ms. Chen rescued it from a factory dormitory after the machines and workers migrated south to Huizhou, leaving behind skeletons of rust and this lone green fugitive.

In the shadow of her pothos…I came to know her over the course of several weeks. She was born in a decade when starvation was as familiar as the sun, shining from a sky taut with hunger over the collective fields where soil yielded more stones than grain. At eleven, she left school so her brother could stay, a compromise no younger than the story of Isaac and Abraham, though no angel stayed the knife. By sixteen, she was a thread in Shenzhen’s textile loom, stitching her life into forgetful garments destined to become mannequins’ second skin. Decades later, the factory migrated inland, a giant hermit crab retreating from rising rents, leaving her stranded on the shore of obsolescence. No severance. No pension. Just a pot of pothos in the shadowed corner of her new life. The daughter, worker, ghost on the assembly line, turned fifty seven. She works three jobs, her labor a Sisyphusian calculus: each paycheck a boulder rolled uphill, each month a cliff—“Enough to buy rice and send money home. Not enough to stop.”

Pothos, how peculiar. Its leaves, green and glossy, lived under a window too small for genuine sunlight. Yet it survived. Thrived—not because of light or water, but in its refusal to die. This, it seemed, was the root of Ms. Chen’s story. Resilience grows out of stubbornness—a refusal to the world’s erasure, a most radical act of hope. Ms. Chen’s pothos mastered hope, its leaves hoarding photos like stolen coins. The plant did not know it was a metaphor. Nor does it know that 550 million people in this country subsist on wages thinner than rice paper, or that its owner’s pension had evaporated into the bureaucratic ether, a phantom limb she still reached to scratch. It simply climbed.

Guilt is a peculiar solvent. It dissolves the membrane between Us and Them, leaving the soul porous. I, a tropical dracaena reared in hothouse privilege—my leaves broad, my roots deep in the loam of generational nurture—was struck by, haunted by, the story of the pothos. Yet Ms. Chen’s stories were not tragedies penned in minor keys; they were ballads of growth. She laughed as she recounted outsmarting foremen who dismissed her as “expired goods,” her voice the sound of a creek finding fissures in granite. Her resilience was not a scar but a sepal, the green armor that wraps a bud before it dares to bloom.

We speak of inequality as a duel between light and dark, a ledger of haves and have-nots. We paint the picture of the callous dracaena hoarding the sun with its fat body, the pothos gasping below for the rumor of light. But this is a fable flattened by the moral shorthand. In a world where inequality runs as deep as the roots of the most ancient tree, both plants are hostages to the same soil, their fates dictated by the tilt of the earth, the whims of clouds, the gardener’s “invisible hand.” Ms. Chen’s hands, when she pours hot water, are a map of her life: calluses like mountain ranges, veins like rivers damned by time. She speaks of her village’s soil, now fallow, and her son, a delivery driver navigating Shenzhen’s algorithms. “He works harder than I did,” she says, pride and sorrow braided into one breath. The factory’s pothos, she tells me, outlived three owners. “It’s still there, probably. Growing through the cracks.”

In the kingdom of shadows, resilience is a quiet rebellion. The urban village breathes its own ecology—noodle stalls exhaling steam, children’s laughter ricocheting off walls, the hum of generators powering a thousand dreams. Ms. Chen’s neighbors are maids, security guards, street vendors—a chorus of voices rarely harmonized in the ballads of GDP. China’s income reports scroll like stock tickers: 550 million earning less than 1,000 yuan a month, numbers that flatten lives into footnotes. Yet here, in this labyrinth, humanity persists in the interstices: a grandmother sharing sweet potatoes, a cobbler humming Cantonese opera, the pothos on the windowsill.

Guilt, I’ve learned, is a poor compass. It fixates on the dracaena’s privilege—the accident of sunlight—while ignoring the roots we share. Ms. Chen does not want my guilt; she wants her pension, her son’s health, a room without mold. Our struggle is not between plant and plant, but against the gardener who withholds water. Here, perhaps, is the crux of the matter: the natural equality that exists between all living things. In the most basic sense, every plant is a seed. Every human being is a person with a soul capable of growth, capable of reaching toward something greater than themselves. Ms. Chen’s struggle was not a matter of her failure—it was a matter of the world failing to recognize her inherent right to grow, to flourish, to live with dignity. And yet, in the eyes of society, she was relegated to the status of victim—her existence framed by the oppressions she faced.

In the mainstream narrative of inequality, the story of the privileged and the oppressed is framed as a fight—workers against consumers, the exploited against the exploiters. The simple act of consuming fast fashion becomes synonymous with exploitation, while workers like Ms. Chen are reduced to mere symbols of suffering. It’s a narrative that divides, that overlooks the essential truth that, whether dracaena or pothos, we are all seeds deserving of the same conditions for growth. We are all entitled to the same sunshine.

I spent weeks in the world of textile workers, listening to their stories, living their lives. And in the end, I realized that the difference between me, the dracaena, and Ms. Chen, the pothos, is not a matter of inherent worth, but of conditions. She, too, could have been a dracaena if she had been given the same conditions. I, too, might have been a pothos had I been born in her place. What separates us is not our worth, not our humanity, but the systems that constrain us, the sunlight that is withheld from some while showered on others. The true fight is not between dracaena and pothos—it is against the forces that prevent us all from growing toward the light.

In that small room of Ms. Chen’s, I understood: survival is not success. Growth is. And it is only when we all have the conditions we need to grow that we can begin to speak of true success, true equality. We are all, in the end, just plants, reaching for the light. Just like how both rodents and researchers are mammals.

As Black feminists Brittan and Maynard wrote in their 1984 book, Sexism, Racism, and Oppression, “domination always involves the objectification of the dominated; all forms of oppression imply the devaluation of the subjectivity of the oppressed.” Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde contended that “guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.” Being feminist means moving beyond objectification and beyond guilt, beyond our self-indulgent, simplistic, arrogant tendency to label some as oppressed and others as oppressors. Because from the migrant workers who lead their lives, the forgotten vines that grow up and tall, the sunlight that fractures but still persists, we learn that everyone is capable of exerting their agency as humans. It is for this humanity that we care, we unite, we strive. For a more equitable and freer world. Ms. Chen’s pothos now climb my bookshelf, its tendrils groping for a story yet unwritten. Sometimes, at dusk, I imagine it whispering to the dracaena in a language older than soil: “We are kins, not rivals. The same sap rises in us both.”

And so we rise.

Pothos

noun  /ˈpoʊ.θɑːs/

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A plant that grows.