A Year in Reading: Jianan Qian

My spiritual crisis this year was not triggered by the pandemic but by the trees in St. Louis. Almost every day at noon, I took a walk to see the trees in my neighborhood: branches reaching into the sky and leaves shimmering in the sun. I marveled at their majesty and wanted to know what they had to say to me. To figure that out, I downloaded a  plant-identification app on my phone and paid extra attention when I came across trees in literary works. But the more I read, the more confused I became. The app fed me the knowledge about their names in Latin, flowering period, the uses