Li Ang - The Lost Garden

A sense of relief and relaxation overtook her as she felt the shedding of a heavy load, but quickly a different kind of fear grabbed hold of her.

Is Lin Xigeng gone or is he still waiting beyond the fence?

When they were seeing each other often, she naturally paid a lot of attention to what she wore, hoping to leave him with a different impression each time with new clothes.

She missed and wished to recall what she was wearing when they first met, but never could. She was, however, able to recall what she was wearing the time he asked her out for a walk and they crowded into the small neighborhood watch booth.

Rain is a common feature of Taipei spring evenings. Now in late spring, an occasional rain produced a slight chill that slowly warmed up. Her new thin silk dress was like gossamer, the fabric cold to the touch, as if washed by water, when it first touched her skin.

But in that small booth, with its rain-soaked, stifling air, the dress was soft and warm because they were sitting shoulder to shoulder. When he reached out and took her in his arms, she leaned against his shoulder. The large warm hand on her back seemed to go straight through the thin silk fabric, as if the light dress had dissolved under their body heat.

It was a white dress in silk that gave off a delicate luster, but looked like flickering light on a cold day.

Lotus Garden underwent a major renovation when she was about to graduate from elementary school, two years after she’d written “I was born in the last year of the Sino-Japanese War.”

By then Father had pretty much recovered his health. A hundred-year-old plane tree by the garden, with too many crisscrossing limbs overladen with branches and leaves, crushed the fish-scale tiles on a corner of Lotus Pavilion’s eaves. After most of the branches were trimmed, a plan for a major renovation emerged.

The branches were trimmed in the middle of winter. Given central Taiwan’s typical, subtropical weather, the plane tree was not deciduous, though its leaves were visibly sparser than in midsummer. Taiwan’s plane tree leaves are smaller than the palm-sized leaves on French counterparts; they curl up on the edges in the cold of winter, reducing their size and altering their shape.

“The common name for the Taiwan plane tree is citong . Our ancestors planted them originally because on the Mainland the plane trees shed their leave; they needed sunlight on cold winter days and the plane trees did not block out the sun after the leaves had fallen. The leaves grow back in the summer to provide shade from the heat.”

Father explained all this to her as he held her tiny hand in his. They were watching Luohan, whose former profession had been turning roosters into capons, as he directed workers in trimming branches.

“But the Taiwanese coral trees don’t lose their leaves. So it would be pointless and ineffective to merely copy the Mainland practice of planting a tree by a building, wouldn’t it?”

She nodded quietly.

“So should we take it down and replace it with an indigenous Taiwanese tree?” Father sounded vague and uncertain. “But it’s more than a hundred years old and was planted by our ancestors. It’s as old as Lotus Garden. I simply can’t bring myself to do it.”

Twenty years later, it was springtime when Zhu Yinghong decided to renovate Lotus Garden. The plane tree that had escaped the ax remained strong, even displaying a blanket of tiny red flowers. She had finally learned that it had a lovely name, Indian coral tree, or coral citong , which was why her father had called it citong . During the several years of renovation, she followed her father’s habit of calling it that.

Unlike the citong , which underwent only a trimming, the pine and beech trees by Authenticity Studio were uprooted one by one.

Ignoring objections from the elders in the clan, Father went ahead with his plan. He disagreed with their practice of imitating Mainland garden architecture, including planting similar trees; the saplings they had taken so much trouble to find on the Mainland would not necessarily thrive in Taiwan.

“Why plant trees that won’t do well in the local climate? It’s better to grow indigenous trees and flowers,” Father continued in Taiwanese. “Your children may be born in the year of the dog or the pig, but they’re still your own flesh and blood.”

Pines from the frigid zones baked in the harsh sun of central Taiwan for nearly half the year and lost the resilience of evergreens in the snow, where deciduous trees wither till the spring. They manage only to put forth anemic needles on shapeless branches. The pines were dug up and replaced by star fruit trees.

The star fruit trees came in mature forms, though many leafy branches were trimmed for the transplanting process. When spring arrived, tender, green, delicate leaves sprouted with impressive vitality. With the autumn wind came blankets of red flowers, so tiny they weren’t particularly attractive by themselves, but the concentration of many shades of red presented an eye-catching yet sorrowful beauty, especially when blown off to the ground by strong winds. The ground was covered with small flowers, like blood-red tears.

With the arrival of winter, the flowers disappeared, as if they’d shed their last drops of blood, and were replaced by small star fruit hanging on the trees like tiny green stars. Yinghong had asked Mudan to pick some for her to play with, but each time was met with a stern refusal. Mudan said that they would grow to be delicious fruit and what she wanted was wasteful. But soon afterward, the starlike fruit began to fall, until not a single one was left. This time Mudan explained that the newly transplanted trees needed time to recover from the uprooting and branch trimming before they could properly nourish the fruit.

By the time she got around to renovating Lotus Garden, the star fruit trees near Authenticity Studio had all died. She wasn’t sure what to do now, plant pines like her ancestors or grow star fruit trees like her father. Pines would be the obvious choice if she wanted to return the garden to its original design, but Father’s plan seemed more practical and feasible. In the end, she opted for the latter, as the out-of-climate pines were frail and emaciated, in contrast to the star fruit trees, with their splendid and sorrowfully pretty red flowers, that left an indelible image in her mind.

She did exactly what her father had done by planting mature trees. One fall afternoon a few years later, when the renovation was near completion, she sat on her father’s favorite Jiaping white stone terrace at Flowing Pillow Pavilion. A casual glance drew her attention to the red dots on the water in front of her. She scooped some up and saw that they were star fruit flowers, but there were no star-fruit trees nearby. So she followed the floating flowers, tracing them past several pavilions, terraces, and towers along the way, until she reached the small man-made waterfall, where she was surprised to find mature star fruit trees by Authenticity Studio. Their thick branches and dense leaves reached into the water, which was how the petals fell into the stream, past the artificial hills and winding paths and the pavilions and terraces, before appearing in every corner of Lotus Garden, with its crisscrossing waterways.

Tears blurred her vision.

I have spent most of my life in Lotus Garden, but only recently, when I learned how to observe small things, did I find myself captivated by the many wondrous sights and minute occurrences in the garden. Our world is filled with endless surprises and mysteries; nothing is possible and everything is possible.