Chokers encrusted with rubies. Strands of bright emeralds. Delicate headpieces framed by opalescent pearls. These are just some of the golden treasures belonging to her mother that Farah Khalid long admired — and knew she would one day inherit.

That day, however, came far too soon. Khalid’s mother unexpectedly became ill and split her collection between Khalid and her older sister, Lubna, before dying in 2013. Then, in 2021, Khalid inherited the rest of her mother’s items when Lubna died at 47.

Khalid wanted to honor her family members by wearing their jewelry, but she typically preferred silver. She decided to take some of the smaller trinkets to Lahore, Pakistan, and remake them into a chain with her mother’s and sister’s names translated into Urdu. The necklace was washed to tone down the yellow hues, so she could wear it more frequently.

“Having their names on me out of something that they used to wear — it just felt really important to be close to them in that way,” said Khalid, 48, a film director who lives in Brooklyn.

Passing down gold is a common practice among many Asian families. The precious metal isn’t just a superfluous adornment; it’s seen as a liquid asset: something that can be traded, act as collateral or melted down and sold. In pop culture, gold has even become something of its own character: Consider the mangalsutra, a traditional Indian necklace representing marriage, in the Netflix hit TV show, “Never Have I Ever,” and the 2025 rom-com “Picture This,” in which Simone Ashley plays a financially struggling photographer who must marry in order to access her family’s heirloom jewelry.

For many Asian American women like Khalid, coming into these accessories from their mothers or grandmothers prompt questions about how to bring the past into the present. Many women simply stow away these delicate heirlooms in safe deposit boxes of their own. Others save the jewelry for special occasions like their weddings. Some have even reshaped them into more contemporary, wearable pieces. Here are four other women and the stories their gold jewelry tell.

‘Tiny Little Piece of History’

Alicia Penn, 42, Charleston, S.C.

Growing up in Baltimore, Alicia Penn and her siblings would make routine stops at a jewelry store with their mother after visiting the temple. Her mother would spend an hour haggling with the owners, family friends who were also Cambodian, to buy gold accessories that she had no intention of keeping. Instead she would wear a piece until a friend showed interest in buying it, then resell it for a profit.

Penn never gave a second thought to what her mother did. “She explained it as a way to invest and enjoy buying stuff,” Penn said. “I thought it was an interesting way to think about investing, as opposed to traditional stocks and bonds.”

What Penn didn’t know then was that the Khmer Rouge, which was responsible for the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians, had abolished Cambodia’s currency, making gold even more valuable. Penn’s parents left the country before the most brutal years, 1975 to 1979, but her maternal grandmother wasn’t as lucky.

She eventually made it to the United States in 1980 and helped raise Penn and her siblings until she died when Penn was still a child. Penn learned the story of how her grandmother escaped in 2022 during a visit to her mother’s bank locker, where she was invited to select a piece of jewelry: a tiny flat piece of gold in the shape of a mermaid.

“I’d never seen anything like it before,” Penn said.

The jewelry was one of two remaining charms of a gold belt that once belonged to her grandmother. She had sold and bartered pieces of the belt, made up of charms linked together, to escape the genocidal killing fields and flee to Thailand on foot.

Penn wears the charm on a heavy gold chain with a malleable hook enclosure. “It’s this tiny little piece of history that you can’t replicate,” Penn said. “Nobody makes things like this anymore.”

‘I Want to Wear It’

Nigar Iqbal Flores, 39, Clovis, Calif.

Marrying a man outside her Pakistani heritage has complicated the issue of who might inherit Nigar Iqbal Flores’s familial gold, compounded even further by the couple having three boys. “One issue that I have to think through is: Are my kids going to marry a Desi girl who would appreciate this jewelry?” Flores said. “Or are they going to marry a Desi girl who does not appreciate it?”

Her children are still young, but the questions do offer an opportunity for a new tradition, already a familiar concept in her family.

When Flores’s parents got married in Karachi, her paternal family insisted that her mother not work. She defied them, becoming a professor of home economics, and spent her first paycheck on an emerald set, including a necklace, earrings, a tikka (headpiece) and a ring.

“When I was a little kid, I remember being like, What a weird set because circles are not a traditional shape,” Flores said. The reason, her mother said, was that she had designed them herself.

Her mother gave Flores the set the day after her own wedding in 2012. Now Flores is on the lookout to wear her mother’s emerald jewelry to as many formal occasions as she can. “​​I only buy green shalwar kameez now,” she said, referring to the traditional outfit of loose trousers and a long shirt. “Because I want to wear it.”

Something Reimagined

Robin Kasner, 41, Chicago

Robin Kasner remembers her 16th birthday being a bit of an ordeal. She was given a jade bangle that was measured so closely to her wrist that she needed the help of her popo (maternal grandmother), her mother, some oil and a plastic bag to slip it on. “I never took it off for 20 years,” Kasner said. “Until it shattered.”

A spontaneous visit to a batting cage led to it splitting it into four pieces. Kasner called her mother in tears, who didn’t mirror her panic. She said that in Chinese culture, when jade breaks, it’s a form of protection, and she advised Kasner to keep the pieces. But Kasner was determined to find a way to salvage it for posterity.

She came across Spur, a jeweler based in New York that reimagines heirlooms as everyday pieces. The broken bangle was remade into something else entirely: a smooth, curved jade pendant attached to a 22-karat gold chain. “I love that the broken piece was made into a new piece, and that it’s something that I can hopefully pass along to my future daughter,” Kasner said.

An ‘Acceptance of the Relationship’

Lisa Kumar, 51, Franklin, Mich.

As a child, Lisa Kumar didn’t love the yellow gold she associated with Indian jewelry. But as her mother, now 83, began bequeathing more and more pieces to her, she finally came around. For Kumar, the jewelry offers a reminder of having been hard-won.

Kumar’s father came as a student in the 1960s to the United States from Mumbai. He soon met her mother, who is white and American, and they fell in love and got married — a decision that his parents weren’t pleased about. The couple made a trip to India shortly after their nuptials to meet the family, and, when it was time to leave, Kumar’s mother decided to stay behind for almost two months to travel around southern India with her new in-laws. “That was a really pivotal moment in her relationship with them because they didn’t think that she could hack it,” Kumar said. “And she did.”

Over the following years, Kumar’s grandmother gave her daughter-in-law jewelry: heavier pieces but also simple things she could wear, like half a set of gold bangles. “My grandmother giving all of this over to her was a sign of acceptance of the relationship, acceptance of my mother,” Kumar said.

Now Kumar tries to wear the accessories whenever she can and plans to pass them on to her own daughter, who is 20 and mostly wears silver. “I’m hopeful that as she ages,” Kumar said, “she’ll come around to it the way that I have.”

This story is part of a series on how Asian Americans are shaping American popular culture. The series is funded through a grant from The Asian American Foundation. Funders have no control over the selection and focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of this series.

Nine days earlier, Gayle King had been pilloried online as a Marie Antoinette like figure for asking critics of her 11-minute spaceflight “have you been?” and suggesting they can’t have a conversation about it until they have. But on Thursday evening, she walked the red carpet at the Time 100 Gala, her head held high and her green dress shimmering.

“I can’t complain,” Ms. King said at 7:30 p.m., standing on the 16th floor of the building that was previously known as the Time Warner Center, but is now called the Deutsche Bank Center. “My life is wonderful.”

To her left was one of the night’s honorees, David Muir, an ABC News anchor whose bosses recently paid President Trump $15 million to settle a defamation suit he filed against the company.

To her right was the designer Georgina Chapman, whose ex-husband Harvey Weinstein was back on trial this week over sexual assault allegations. Ms. Chapman was attending the gala with her current boyfriend, the actor Adrien Brody, who was being honored at the event.

Ms. King turned to another celebrity on the line and moved toward her. “Hi Scarlett,” she said, speaking to the actress Scarlett Johansson, who was also on the Time 100 list.

For much of the 20th century, Time was published weekly by Time Inc. Now, the magazine is owned by the tech billionaire Marc Benioff and is published biweekly. In the company’s answer to events like the Met Gala, the Time 100 has become a petting zoo where contemporary artists get honored alongside champion athletes and take selfies together.

The artist Mickalene Thomas had never met the gymnast Simone Biles before Thursday night, but she wasn’t shy about pulling out her phone for a selfie. “She’s legendary. Why not?”

Just as attendees were being ushered toward the dining area, the actors Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who are currently in the middle of a legal battle with the film director and actor Justin Baldoni, walked in.

Ms. Lively has accused Mr. Baldoni of misconduct on the set of the film “It Ends With Us.” Mr. Baldoni has denied the accusations and sued Ms. Lively, her publicist Leslie Sloane, and The New York Times, which published a story about their feud, for defamation.

Was there something in the air on Thursday? A scent being delivered to attract people connected in various ways to recent controversies?

“Who knows,” said Ali Zelenko, the former chief spokeswoman for NBC News, who was attending with her new boss, Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. “But it makes for good copy.”

“This is a complicated moment,” said Sam Jacobs, the editor in chief of Time. “The Time 100 reflects that.”

The tiered dining room had a large stage on the lowest level. Behind it, glass windows showed off Central Park. Waiters served a kale and dandelion Caesar salad. Cameramen darted across the room, grabbing shots of the audience for a Time 100 special that will air on ABC in May.

Here was Demi Moore on the ground level at a table with her manager, Jason Weinberg, and Ms. Johannson. There at the next table over was Ms. Biles along with Serena Williams and the actor Adam Scott. Above them were Mr. Brody and Ms. Chapman.

The program began with a short speech by Jessica Sibley, Time’s chief executive, who briefly talked about the vital role independent journalism plays in a functioning Democracy and then moved onto the longer business of thanking the evening’s numerous corporate sponsors.

Shortly after the British singer Myles Smith performed his hit song, “Stargazing,” Mr. Muir took control of the microphone to introduce another Time 100 recipient, Angeline Murimirwa, an activist from Zimbabwe who has spent decades creating educational opportunities for girls in Africa.

She was one of several speakers over the course of the evening, including Noa Argamani, an Israeli activist who was held captive by Hamas for 245 days.

To serve as comic relief, the magazine selected the rapper Snoop Dogg as the host of the program, though his appearances were somewhat sporadic.

“Man, I’m so proud of Simone Biles. Ain’t y’all?” he said at one point. “Me and Simone, we have a lot in common. She’s an expert at the balance beam vault and the uneven bars and I’m really good at high jumping. I’m also good at high sitting, high rapping, and as you’ll see for the next two hours, high hosting.” (He also suggested onstage that the only reason he was given a slot in this year’s Time 100 was because the magazine needed a famous emcee.)

Around 9:30 p.m., a grilled branzino was served as the evening’s main dish.

Ms. Biles called over a waiter to order a pair of margaritas for herself and Ms. Williams.

After that came a speech from Ms. Lively.

“I have so much to say about the last two years of my life, but tonight is not the forum,” she said, seemingly in reference to her experience with Mr. Baldoni.

Then, she spoke for several minutes about the pain women endure and the way they ultimately “break” the hearts of their daughters when they, “let them in the secret that we kept from them as they pranced around in princess dresses: that they are not and likely will never be safe. At work. At home. In a parking lot. In a medical office. Online. In any space they inhabit. Physically, emotionally, professionally.”

“But why does that torch have to be something we carry in private?” she asked. “How can we not all agree on that basic human right?”

In the speech, Ms. Lively also thanked her mother, Elaine Lively, for helping her acquire her voice, as well as her “sweet husband,” Mr. Reynolds, whom she described as one of the men “who are kind and good when no one is watching.”

The event ended around 11 p.m. with a performance by the singer Ed Sheeran.

He also addressed Mr. Reynolds, albeit in less reverential terms.

Mr. Sheeran has a minority stake in Ipswich Town F.C., a soccer club located in Suffolk, England. Mr. Reynolds co-owns the Welsh soccer club Wrexham A.F.C.

Mr. Sheeran said his club would mess up Wrexham, using a more colorful term than that, before launching into a rendition of his signature hit, “Shape of You.”