Planting a Letter in the Sand

Prologue

That letter bumped along the sand ridges for more than four months before it finally reached Jingkouzi.

In April 2001, the postman Leizi’s motorcycle wheezed on the sandy road harder than any man. The kraft-paper envelope had worn fuzzy at the edges. It had ridden a plane, then a train, then a bus, and for the last six kilometers of sand, Leizi himself had walked it, step by step, sinking into the soft hollows. A strip of colorful stamps—printed with an eagle—filled the upper right corner. At the bottom of the envelope sprawled a line of cursive that the villagers later described as ants crossing a river in single file. Only the line of Chinese characters in the middle stood square and upright, each stroke careful, like a schoolchild tracing copybook letters:

Jingkouzi, Uxin Banner, Inner Mongolia, China. To the attention of Teacher Su, for Bai Shuihua.

By the time Leizi delivered the letter, half the village was crowded outside Bai Shuihua’s wicker gate. Jingkouzi was a strange place—a name with “well” in it, and no water on the ground; now even a woman whose name held water had received a letter from a foreign country.

“Shuihua, you’ve got relatives out there?”

“No.”

“Then who wrote this?”

Bai Shuihua was thirty-five. In her whole life she had made two long journeys: once at nineteen, when she married into this place, and once two years ago, when she went to the banner seat for treatment. She took the letter, turned it over and over, looking at the line of Chinese, then at the trail of ants. Suddenly she thought of someone. She thought of a wind. She said:

“Oh. The tree-planting one.”

The letter sat on the windowsill for three days; no one dared open it. On the weekend, Teacher Su from the primary school in the neighboring village rode his bicycle over and opened it. The letter came from a town in America called Maple Creek. The writer’s name was Robert Green.

To make sense of this letter, you have to go back to the spring of the year before.

I

At the end of April 2000, the winds of the Mu Us desert had not yet softened.

Robert Green, fifty-two, was a middle-school teacher from Maple Creek, Vermont. The year before, through a teacher-exchange program between the two countries, he had taught English in Hohhot for a year. Before the May Day holiday, he set out with a map to see the Salawusu River. Books said that seventy thousand years ago, the people of the Ordos had built fires on its banks. He had taught for half his life and always wanted to know what an old river looked like.

The long-distance bus dropped him at the edge of the sand; beyond that, no vehicle could go. He walked in with his pack on his back. By afternoon, the sky suddenly turned yellow. The wind rose up from every direction at once—the sand didn’t blow, it poured. Bending into the gale, following telephone poles half-buried in the dunes, he walked until dusk, when he saw a figure standing on a sand ridge.

A woman, head wrapped in a green kerchief, an armload of thin seedlings held against her chest, standing in the wind—looking as though she might be torn up and carried off at any moment, yet never quite torn loose. Behind her, on the slope, rows of just-sprouted seedlings stood in the sand, and from a distance they looked like someone had written words across the earth in very light strokes.

When Green climbed the ridge, the wind shredded his words. He gestured with his hands, pointed at the bundle of seedlings. The woman glanced at him, pulled two seedlings from the bundle, pressed them into his hands, and pointed at the sand at their feet: dig, plant, tamp down. It turned out that the motion for planting a tree is the same everywhere in the world.

He copied her. The first seedling went in crooked. The second, crooked. The woman said nothing, followed behind him, and straightened each one, her palm cupping the roots, pressing once. The sand was cool. The backs of her hands were cracked all over, like a dried riverbed.

Full dark came, and the wind hadn’t stopped. The woman called it a day, pointed into the deep hollows of the dunes, then at him: come.

Her home was dug into a hollow in the sand—half a cave dwelling, its door pieced together from two old planks. Green didn’t know that nineteen years earlier this woman had been carried into this sea of sand on a mule cart, her dowry nothing but wind. On her wedding night the wind had howled till dawn; the next morning she pushed open the mud-brick door and saw, in every direction, neat as a ruled page, nothing but sand. The nearest neighbor lived twenty kilometers away. She cried through an entire spring—until one year she saw a wild sand willow blooming on the ridge, watered by no one, alive on its own. She squatted in front of that willow for a long while, then stood up, went inside, and came back with a shovel.

From that year on she began planting trees. The first year she put four hundred seedlings in the ground; the ones that survived could be counted on one hand. She gave every surviving tree a name. Youliang laughed at her; she ignored him. Trees are like people, she said—you call to them, and they know it in their hearts.

That night, by the light of half a candle, two people who shared no language somehow taught each other the most important lesson of their lives. The woman grabbed a handful of sand, spread it open, tilted her hand: the sand ran out between her fingers. She made a motion of eating, pointed out the door, pointed east: the sand eats the earth, it eats its way east. Then she pointed at a little pot of sand willow on the windowsill, then at the dark ridge beyond, and nodded hard.

Green understood. He pointed at himself, then at the seedlings, and mimed: can planting trees fill your belly? The woman laughed, shook her head, then nodded, and finally pointed at her own heart.

That was a gesture Green would remember for the rest of his life.

The next day he had to leave. She packed him fried flour and a jug of water and walked him all the way up the ridge. When Green looked back, she had already bent down to the slope again, the green kerchief nodding in the wind like a tree that could walk.

Before parting, he made a motion: hands cupped into a bowl, then pointed at the little seedlings. When they’re as thick as this, I’ll come back to see them.

The woman looked at his hands, then at her seedlings, and nodded. She thought a moment, then shook her head, and mimed: trees grow slowly—what about you, when you’re old?

Green smiled, and mimed himself walking—slowly, one step at a time.

They both laughed. The wind was laughing; the sand ridge was laughing too.

II

That September, Green went home. Maple Creek had one street, one middle school, and a stand of maple trees older than the town itself. When he was a boy, his father drilled taps into the trunks every spring, and he could still hear, to this day, the sound of maple syrup dripping into iron buckets.

Back home, the first thing he did was write to sixty people.

The letter said: I met a woman in the desert of Inner Mongolia, in China. She married into a sand hollow at nineteen; for twenty kilometers around there was not another neighbor, and the wind could shove half a roof off in a night. She has been planting trees for fifteen years. She says she’d rather die of exhaustion planting them than be bullied to death by the sand. Her seedlings cost a few cents apiece, and those cents are scraped out of egg money. I’ve taught school for twenty-eight years. I have no money. But I want to try.

Thirty-seven replies came. Some sent checks; some sent apologies and promises for next month. The children in his class hauled their piggy banks up to the teacher’s desk and rattled the coins out like a small rain. Old Hank at the barbershop put a sign in the window: this month, haircuts double price—the extra goes in the jar. A little girl named Amy laid out, one by one in an envelope, the four quarters the tooth fairy had left her. The church basement held a bake sale whose main offering was maple syrup from every household’s evaporator. Green himself took out the money set aside for a new overcoat; the old wool coat kept him warm one more winter.

By December the money was gathered: five thousand dollars, one hundred thirty-seven names copied out, stroke by stroke, in a student’s exercise book. The money went through the exchange association’s channels. Then he wrote the letter—the one that traveled four months.

Shuihua: The money is on its way. Five thousand dollars—not a fortune. I’ve taught school for thirty years; that’s the size of my estate. It is the goodwill of one hundred thirty-seven people. I’ve copied out the list. If you want to know who gave every cent, ask Teacher Su to read it to you. As for what the money becomes—I don’t understand trees. You do. Plant them where you say. One more thing I must write here: when your trees are as thick as a bowl’s rim, I will come back to see them. I keep my word. People in my town keep their word—teachers above all. Your friend, Green

When Teacher Su translated the letter into Chinese, he got stuck on one sentence. “She’d rather die of exhaustion planting trees than be bullied to death by the sand”—rendered literally, it came out stiff and unnatural. He turned it over for three days, and finally wrote in pencil in the margin of his draft: This is a woman who would plant on her dying breath; let the sand bully her all it likes—she refuses to admit defeat. Later Green wrote back that he had taped that line to his classroom wall, and once it was up, he never took it down.

The money arrived the following spring. With people from the banner seat escorting, three full truckloads of seedlings came back from the nursery station: sand willow, yangchai shrub willow, desert elm, Simon poplar. Shuihua led Youliang and their son Shuanzhu in planting for a whole month.

On the day they reached the East Ridge, she straightened up suddenly and told Shuanzhu to fetch Teacher Su. “Write to that man,” she said. “Write just this: the money stopped being money when it got here. It became seedlings. And one seedling can spread across a whole slope. Just you wait.”

III

Shuihua’s reply was dictated—Teacher Su held the pen.

The letter was short, more or less: Received. Seedlings bought. Planted on East Ridge. They lived. More lived than died. All well at home. You be well too.

There was no signature at the end—there was a drawing: a tree, trunk straight, its crown circled three times. Teacher Su asked what the three circles were. She said: one circle is spring, one is summer, one is autumn—to tell that man the tree grows in every season of the year.

In the lower right corner of the drawing were three more characters, wobbly strokes, some deep, some faint:

Bai Shuihua.

She had written them herself. Green never knew that to make her name look presentable she had practiced in the stove ashes for half the winter, her fingers black as if dipped in ink. Youliang laughed: who’s going to read it? He can’t read Chinese. She wiped her fingers on her apron:

“He wrote to me across an ocean. I can’t have him thinking we’re people who’ve gotten used to being bullied by sand.”

From then on, two letters a year. One in spring, reporting how many were planted; one in autumn, reporting how many had lived.

The letters held more words every year. She wrote: the sea buckthorn has gone red, terribly sour; I’ll dry some and send it—taste our autumn. She wrote: wild rabbits have come to the front ridge, foxes to the back, sandgrouse in flocks—once upon a time not even birds passed over this place. She wrote: Shuanzhu tested into university, studying desertification control. He says he’s coming back to keep planting.

In Green’s letters, the maples of Maple Creek turned red again and again. He once sent a small packet of maple seeds; the next spring, not one came up. Shuihua stewed over it all summer, and only in autumn dared write: The maples didn’t live. I failed them. Green replied:

Don’t say you failed them. When I was a boy, my father’s first row of maples didn’t live either. He planted again the next year. The first lesson a tree teaches is next year.

She also sent a pair of insoles, a tree embroidered into the stitches. Green couldn’t bear to use them; he pressed them under the glass of his writing desk. The year Teacher Su retired, the translating passed to his daughter Su Xiaoman—she taught English at the middle school in the banner seat, came back to the village during winter and summer breaks, translated letters on one side, and on the other taught Shuihua’s granddaughter, Miaomiao, her words.

“Green—Gre-en. Green, the color,” Miaomiao recited.

Shuihua, listening nearby, suddenly slapped her thigh. “So that’s it! His name had a forest planted in it all along!”

IV

The letters did not come easily every year.

In 2011 came the great drought. The well ran dry, and of the three thousand–odd newly planted seedlings, the summer sun killed the better part. That year’s letter was the shortest in more than twenty years—three lines in all:

Heaven hasn’t shed one tear this year. Three thousand dead. I’m not afraid of the work. I’m afraid of the sky. For the first time, I’m afraid.

Green’s reply came in two weeks, as if he knew she was waiting. It told of one tree: Behind my childhood house stands a maple that was struck by lightning when I was ten; half of it was sheared away, and everyone said it was dead. My father would not dig it up. The next spring, buds broke from the bark on its remaining half. It stands there still. Every child in our family, growing up, has raided bird nests in that lightning scar.

At the end he wrote: Trees are more patient than people. When you are anxious, you must learn from trees. Slow. Slow. Slow.

In autumn, a well-drilling crew came into the sand hollow, and pipes ran water all the way to the ridge top. In her next letter Shuihua wrote: The well has come. Water is on the ridge. I’m not afraid anymore. You were right—the first lesson of a tree is next year.

In the winter of 2015, Green’s letter was two months late. In it he said that his wife, Martha, had died. He wrote it plainly: The classroom is half empty. This term I teach only half the lessons.

When Xiaoman translated this far, Shuihua said nothing for a long while. The water boiled on the stove, and she didn’t go to lift it. At last she said: “Add a line.”

Xiaoman waited, pen raised.

“Just write: An old tree is like that too—half its leaves yellow, the other half still green. When the wind comes, the green half shelters the yellow half.”

Later Green told Xiaoman he’d read that letter for a month before he dared reply. The reply was one sentence: Thank you. Wait for the next next-year. I’m coming.

The next next-year bred yet another next next-year. His wife had been ill seven or eight years, and it used up their savings; then came trouble with his own heart. None of this did he write. He only wrote, over and over, in his letters: next year. And Shuihua answered, over and over: No hurry. Trees can wait. The thing a tree does best in this life is wait.

Later still, a letter took eight months on the road, arriving with the envelope wrinkled by rain, as if it had been weeping. In those years the post was slow across both shores of the ocean, so the two of them saved up what they wanted to say and folded it into the next letter.

Twenty-six years. Fifty-three letters. At the end of every one of hers: trees can wait. At the end of every one of his: I keep my word. Leizi himself had turned from Leizi-on-a-motorcycle into his son Little Lei in a box truck, and the GPS simply announced: Green Forest—you have arrived.

V

In December 2025, Green’s letter arrived. Xiaoman read it to Shuihua over the phone, slowly:

I am seventy-eight. The doctors examined me head to toe and said that apart from being old, there is nothing wrong with me—I’m fit for a very long flight. I taught school my whole life, and I always told my students: when you’ve given your word, you go, no matter how far. Now it’s my turn to hand in that assignment. Next August, I’m coming. If the trees truly are as thick as a bowl’s rim by then, please save me a shovel.

When Shuihua heard it, she had Xiaoman write down her reply, word by word:

Come. The trees have waited twenty-six years without ever rushing you—what are you afraid of? The shovel will be waiting. A new one.

That winter she did three things.

The first: she made Miaomiao her teacher and learned to write. Miaomiao guided her hand, character by character, in a grid exercise book. She wrote slowly, tracing each character a dozen times, pressing so hard she poked several holes through the paper.

The second: she raised a Mongolian pine seedling in a flowerpot on the windowsill. She said, in case he arrived at the wrong season for planting, one would be ready for him—the way you set out a bowl of water for a guest before he even reaches your door.

The third: she sorted all fifty-three letters by year and tied them with red string. When they were tied, she thought a moment, untied them, took out the earliest letter, and pressed it under her pillow.

VI

In August 2026, the paved road ran all the way into the sand hollow, green rising in waves on either side, as if someone had set the sea down on the land. Xiaoman drove steadily; in the back seat, the old man kept his palm flat against the window glass, and kept it there a long time.

The Salawusu River still flowed. On the sand ridge by the river, a green kerchief faced the wind.

Bai Shuihua stood on the ridge, sixty years old now, her back still straight. Before Green had fully steadied himself stepping out of the car, she came forward, seized his right hand, opened it, and looked at his palm.

“Your calluses are gone,” she said.

Xiaoman translated. The old man paused, then remembered: the blisters from that year. “I remember,” he said. “It hurt for half a month.”

“It was worth it.” Shuihua pressed his hand back into his own keeping. “Half a month of pain for fifty thousand trees. You came out ahead.”

On East Ridge, the earliest trees could no longer be told apart. Sand willow had rooted and spread, the shrub willows had seeded on the wind; slope after slope rolled green over the ridges and into the hollows, joining the aerially seeded tracts and the fenced enclosures into one unbroken mass. Five thousand dollars and twenty-six years had become more than fifty thousand trees, and she claimed no credit: “I’ve only got one pair of hands. A forest has a temper of its own—you give it a start, and it runs on its own.” At the ridge top stood a stone stele carved with three characters: Green Forest.

The first time she had truly heard that name, she’d slapped her thigh: “So that’s it—a forest was planted in his name all along. All we did was water it awake for him.”

The planting spot had been chosen long ago, right beside the stele. She wouldn’t let Green touch the shovel: “Your job is to hold things straight.” He held each seedling upright; she packed the earth, one stamp of the foot, then another, tamping it solid. Twenty-six years ago it had been him, clumsy-handed, while she straightened his seedlings one by one; now it was the other way around. When the soil closed over the roots, both their hands drew back at the same moment, and they both laughed.

The seedling was the Mongolian pine from the flowerpot. When it was planted, Green drew a small paper packet from his pocket and opened it: a pinch of winged maple seeds.

“This time,” he said, “we’ll start them in a pot.”

Shuihua took it and weighed it in her hand. “Fine. First a home in the pot, then the ground. You’ve waited twenty-six years for me—can’t you wait for one flowerpot?”

The wind came through from the forest, and fifty thousand trees sounded all at once—like a distant sea, or like many people softly applauding.

“Your Chinese—you only ever learned one word,” Shuihua said. “I remember it.”

The old man looked at the little pine and slowly brought out the one sound he had kept unchanged for twenty-six years:

“Shù.”

Then, from inside her jacket, Shuihua drew out an envelope. No stamps, no address. She handed it to him face to face: “This one doesn’t need four months.”

Inside the envelope was a single sheet, the characters large and crooked, stroke by careful stroke, like seedlings just set in the ground:

Mr. Green: Your trees have lived. The sand has pulled back, the trees have grown, and I am well. I wrote these characters myself. It took me three months. Read slowly. —Bai Shuihua

At first Green didn’t ask Xiaoman to read it. He held the letter up to the sun. He couldn’t read these characters, but he could read the effort in them. Xiaoman read it aloud softly, and when she came to “Your trees have lived,” the old man took off his hat.

From the pocket next to his heart he drew out two things of his own. One was the list—one hundred thirty-seven names, copied in the winter of 2000—with a small line added at the end, which Xiaoman read out for Shuihua: Today, beneath every name, something green is growing. The other was a photograph: the children of Maple Creek Middle School holding a long banner, which Xiaoman translated: Thank you, Grandma Shuihua, for the sea buckthorn—from the children of Maple Creek.

Last of all, Shuihua returned to him the letter that had lain under her pillow for twenty-five years. The glue on the flap had long since yellowed and gone brittle.

“What you wrote, you keep,” she said. “So you can’t welch.”

The old man laughed heartily—and then, laughing, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

Epilogue

That evening, the two of them sat side by side on the ridge and watched the sun sink into the forest. Miaomiao carried a little bucket and watered the newly planted pine, and when she finished, she did as her grandmother had done: cupped her palm around the roots and pressed.

Later, Little Lei’s truck often passed in front of Green Forest. He liked to tell people what he’d seen on the ridge that day: a foreign old man, a Chinese old woman, and between them a small tree just planted, their two shadows meeting upon the seedling. When the wind blew, it was as if someone were gently sliding a letter into the great mailbox of the earth.

Still later, someone asked Shuihua what the three characters on the stele meant—what all those slopes of trees were, really.

Shuihua didn’t even pause. “A letter.”

One hundred thirty-seven people—a coin from one, a bottle of syrup from another—put together a promise; a woman answered it for twenty-six years, seedling by seedling, writing her reply across the sand ridges. This letter crossed an ocean, then crossed twenty-six years.

Today, it was delivered.

This story is adapted from true events. All names are pseudonyms.