Essay / Essays
The Garden
How a small garden below an apartment block became a forest, a field, a mine, and an entire childhood sky.
There is a golden garden in my story. It was never large, but it held up the sky of my childhood.
A note on a small garden
My family told me from an early age that the flower bed was dirty. I never listened. It was my own country.
The garden had been there for as long as I could remember, as if it had always belonged there. Below our apartment was a courtyard enclosed by three buildings and a wall. At its center sat an oval patch of green: a few trees, four artificial rockeries, some flowers, and shrubs whose names I never learned.
Weeds changed shade with the seasons and gave the garden its dominant color. New growth displaced the old, and that quiet succession accompanied my own growing up until I left the place.
I still remember the base that my friends and I built between the rockeries and shrubs. We trimmed branches, laid newspaper over damp soil, and made simple furniture from sticks and bricks. We set a bird trap in a clearing, dug irrigation channels down a slope, moved flowers beside a small pool, and built what we believed was a perfectly concealed trap in the middle of the main “road.”
How could this have been only a flower bed? It was a forest and a field, a rain-softened town below distant mountains. This was our land, and above it was our sky.
I measured the whole territory with a child's footsteps and drew maps of it again and again. The maps marked deposits of “minerals,” fruit, and species. For a while, I felt as if I governed a world.
Yet as the maps became more precise, I grew less familiar with the garden itself. I stopped knowing when a plant had appeared or whether the rockery still held enough ore. I remember only that no bird came for the rice beneath our trap, and that I once stepped into the flawless trap myself. The scoldings for “climbing mountains,” and however many generations of ants passed through the soil, have faded.
The garden that raised those childhood dreams is still there, but it also disappeared long ago. The child who lived in it is gone; without him, his garden has fractured too. A new age of the garden belongs to someone else. How many of the old flowers could still recognize the people who once lived among them?
Surely none of them remember me now.
Originally published at Fengqing Inn. This version includes only light copy editing.