Shen Yannan has been listening to leaves since she was a child.
In the summer when I was seven years old, in the afternoon in Xi'an, my mother was knitting beside me, and the orange ball of thread slowly became smaller. She lay on the windowsill and listened to the sound of the sycamore leaves being blown by the wind. Swish, swish, swish. It was her earliest memory of the world—not what happened, but the texture of light, sound, and smell.
As she grew up, she learned to cut rubber and cut large things into small pieces for digestion. In junior high school, she stood up and admitted a fault that was not hers, and in college she kept her bottom line of not cheating. She treats life as an account and remembers every transaction clearly. She spent four years turning that story into a specimen. The sycamore leaves, the books on Orange Island, the wind in Xi'an in the early morning, those unclear words - she put them in a glass cover and placed them on the top shelf of the bookshelf. Not an exhibition. I don't want them scattered all over the place anymore.
The girl who listened to the leaves heard from the age of seven to twenty-four. She heard the sycamore tree, the privet tree, and the ginkgo tree. She heard someone singing "If I Have Time" and heard herself saying "I will definitely do it". What she heard now was the sound of ginkgo leaves being blown by the wind in the spring evening.
It doesn't matter whether the oranges are ripe or not. Her branches already have their own leaves.
Intention: Confirm yourself in an uncertain relationship