I didn’t learn of this historical context until much later, but what I did know was that during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao declared war on bourgeois culture and banned excess, including flowers, my mom grew chili peppers on her balcony in Beijing as a way to add color to her town. Because chili peppers were regarded as functional, they were allowed. To me, this snapshot of peppers in China was deeply intertwined with tenacity and resistance. Historically intertwined with fertility and luck, preventative of physical maladies and combative of depression, and a symbol of resistance, the chili pepper has left a fiery mark on our culture, and that is…