When Songlin Fei was a young boy in China, his parents took him to a local fortune teller to assess his balance in the five elements that many Chinese people believe make up everything in the world. Their son, they were told, had enough fire, earth, water and metal, but he lacked wood. Maybe this wasn’t a surprise. Fei’s family lived on a delta in southeast China where cropland and rice paddies stretched as far as the eye could see. Scanning his family’s property and the landscape beyond, Fei might have seen only a handful of trees.
October 13, 2020