The Peach Tree

We once had a peach tree.

It stood on our rooftop for four years, lush and full every season, like a silent witness to our lives. But it is gone now. I have often told myself to write something for it, yet I never managed to pick up my pen. Maybe it’s guilt. Guilt for not paying enough attention while it was still alive, guilt that all I can do now is feel regret afterward, unable to save it when it truly mattered.

 

Recently the weather has begun to cool, and the wind carries a sharp chill. Sitting on the rooftop, watching the light shift across the sky, I suddenly noticed the place where the peach tree once stood. It has been empty for a long time.

 

Poor thing. It never even had the chance to bloom before my grandfather cut it down. No one believed it deserved to live for its leaves rather than for its fruit.

 

Years ago, we decided to expand our little rooftop garden and start planting fruit trees. After considering the weight the roof could bear, the sunlight, and our family’s fruit preferences, we chose three saplings: papaya, loquat, and peach. All three started off well, their young leaves a healthy, glossy green. The papaya tree bloomed and bore fruit in its very first year, and the loquat began producing small, sweet fruits in the third. Only the peach tree—year after year—grew more leaves, thickened its trunk, stretched toward the sun, and yet never opened a single flower.

 

The first year, my grandfather said nothing. He knew perennial fruit trees needed patience.

The second year, he glanced left at the fruit-laden papaya, then right at the bare loquat and peach, and frowned.

By the third year, he could no longer hold back and cut off a major branch from both the loquat and the peach, hoping to “stimulate” them.

And in the fourth year, the loquat rewarded his efforts with branches full of golden fruit. But the peach tree, which had stood beside it for three long years, was pulled out entirely. Without a single flower to show, it was declared “useless”, and removed from the garden.

 

The peach was not the only thing we failed at growing, yet for some reason, it stayed with me the most. Perhaps because it made me question, for the first time, what “failure” really means.

 

That question goes back to a story I read in seventh grade—Jia Pingwa’s A Little Peach Tree.

 

I remember it vividly. In that story, the little peach tree was also overlooked, dismissed for not bearing fruit. But its fate was different. The narrator—presumably the author’s younger self—believed in it simply because he had planted it himself. He cared for it, trusted it, and waited. And in the end, the little tree answered his faith: under scornful voices and heavy rain, it finally bloomed. The story ended with these lines:

 

“My heart felt slightly comforted. Ah, little peach tree! How can I thank you?… My dear, your flowers will bloom beautifully, and you will bear a peach. I once called you the spirit of my dreams, didn’t I?”

 

Our teacher explained that the little peach tree was a symbol of the author himself—his overlooked childhood, his stubborn resilience, his dreams.

 

Only now do I fully understand: that little peach tree had a kind of storybook halo. It lived under a watchful, affectionate gaze. It suffered, and someone praised its strength. It delayed its flowering, and someone willingly waited. Its value was no longer tied to fruit—it had risen into a symbol, a projection of the narrator’s hopes.

 

But our rooftop peach tree? It was simply itself, an ordinary peach tree in a southern city, with no myth attached, no chosen destiny. To those who planted it, its meaning was direct and practical: to blossom and bear fruit. If not, then it had no use. And without use, it had no right to keep growing.

Its lush leaves, its years of quiet effort—within a system obsessed with efficiency—became not virtues but unforgivable flaws.

 

What exactly am I mourning?

The loss of a single life?

Or the many ordinary beings—plants, people, everything—that are judged by utility and dismissed when they fall short of expectations?

I’m not sure.

 

Back then, I only thought my grandfather understood agriculture well, that he simply wanted to avoid wasting resources. Looking back now, I still understand his pragmatism—but I also feel a sadness I couldn’t name at the time.

 

Much later, insidently, I learned that peach trees, being temperate plants, require a period of cold to trigger flower development. In a place like Shenzhen, warm nearly all year, it may never receive that awakening signal. Or perhaps the truth is simpler: peach trees often take two to four years to bloom. Maybe it really was just one year away.

 

This knowledge came too late. Like a small needle, it pricked my heart and left behind a lingering ache.

 

If I could go back to that day, I might have stopped my grandfather before his blade fell:

​

“Let it stand for one more year.”

I know this is wishful thinking. And even if I had spoken up, it might not have changed anything.

 

Between ideals and reality, between intrinsic value and practical benefit, my tiny bit of compassion feels painfully weak. Perhaps all I can do is translate those invisible, quiet “inner values” into a language that others might understand—something like: One more year, and it might actually bear fruit. Then all these four years won’t have been wasted.

 

If our interests constantly collide with the inner worth of other beings, then at the very least, within the limits of what we can do, we can try to reinterpret that worth in terms people can accept.

Maybe that is the only thing someone studying ecological philosophy can genuinely do—to use realism as a vessel to carry a small whisper for those lives:

“Give them a little more time.”

 

The wind blows again, carrying the distant noise of the city.

​

I glance once more at the empty corner where the peach tree once stood, then head downstairs.

Behind me, in that patch of emptiness, it feels as if countless unbloomed buds are still calling out, silently, into the air.