Thank you Eric! How interesting that it made you think of this story. I’m going to ponder this – there’s something deeply fascinating in this short clip, and I need a little time to sort out my thoughts. It means a lot to me that you told me this!

Li Ang (p. 219 Women & Gender in Contemporay Chinese Societies)

“The young protagonist tells a florist what she is seeking. Knowing such a tree was not in the shop, the florist says she must accompany him to his own garden a distance outside of town. He is an old and very thin man…an evil dwarf…In one paragraph that is central to this story…she describes the rape that will end her virginity, half-wishing for the experience and yet dreading it at the same time. Our narrator reaches the garden, located next to an old cemetery, buys her tree and then begins the walk home. Her quest now over, she regretfully returns to her mundane reality, one she describes in the first line of her story as her “…now lost radiant youth.”