Seeking Flowers
One weekend last June, Xiao Xie called me to say that her cellphone had once again gone missing in the study room. Xiao Xie was by nature hot-tempered and absent-minded, yet the fact that she so often lost things could not really be blamed on her alone; the true fault lay in the poor security at our school. Her phone was a fashionable new thing she had bought while traveling in Europa during the May Day holiday: a straight-bar model with a pink petal pattern. Though it had cost only two hundred euros, it was a new product made with environmentally friendly technology. Inside its casing there was a seed sealed away; once the phone was worn out, if you buried it in a flowerpot, a plant would grow, while the rest of the materials would be completely broken down.
If a phone was stolen in the study room, nine times out of ten the thief was another student. I told Xiao Xie that such people generally did not dare bring stolen goods back to the dormitory. Instead, they buried them somewhere in the flowerbeds on campus. Since it was then the rainy season, if luck was with her, where red flowers bloomed would be where the phone lay hidden. A week later Xiao Xie told me that she really had found her phone. Unfortunately, the casing had already dissolved and it could no longer be used. But what was even more surprising was that beneath the tree where Xiao Xie’s phone had been buried there were more than twenty other cellphones, along with seven or eight wallets of various kinds. Xiao Xie turned all of the stolen goods over to the authorities and was praised for it.
In ancient China there were many cases of finding things by seeking out plants that could grow only in special places. Yet what I really want to ask is this: why are there always so many careless people who give thieves exactly the openings they need?
Asking Willows
At the entrance to the School of Economics and Management there stood a willow tree no thicker than a rice bowl, utterly ordinary to all appearances. Yet at some point, no one knew when, people discovered that on windless days the stems of the leaves that fell from this willow always pointed due south. It worked every time. Once word spread, everyone came to pluck a leaf and test whether it was truly so. In less than two months the tree had been stripped bare and died. I happened to know that this kind of willow was called a Yu Willow, a numinous tree planted by Yu the Great in the days when he tamed the floods, so that it might point the way.
It is a pity that this tree was born into the mortal world and did not know how to keep its gift hidden. In the end, it could only seek death by its own hand.