In the central district of Beijing, trees are everywhere. In parks, along roads and in courtyards. Many have only been planted in recent decades.
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Other trees – with wide trunks – have been around for centuries and are warm to the touch: you can form a human chain around them with a friend, running your fingers along the bark or pressing your ear to the trunk to hear the tree’s inner workings. Kissing a tree is an art. This ability is not intuitive. You have to learn it.
“Hugging trees is a way to have physical contact in life,” said Xiaoyang Wong, head of a forest therapy community in Beijing. Wong, 35 years old. She’s a former film editor who recently retrained as a forest therapist after the COVID pandemic left her feeling alone and isolated.
At first, many people feel strange about hugging a tree, she says. But in forest therapies, Wong encourages people to understand the multiple worlds of the tree, observing it closely, contemplating the ants and other insects that move between the veins of the bark.
Only after showing curiosity and talking to the tree does she encourage people to decide to touch it or even hug it. “I had a natural talent for hugging trees,” he said. However, I had only learned how to hug a tree by watching other people perform this supposedly silly act in city parks.
In Beijing, most old trees are fenced by the local government to protect them from damage; However, the newer ones can still be played and enjoyed by people.
On weekends and even late at night, I discovered people – young and old, mothers and daughters, friends and lovers – hugging trees or leaning their backs against a log, seeking relief from the stresses of daily life.
These stressors have become worse, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when loneliness and isolation have become commonplace. Additionally, as many young Chinese women question the idea of marriage, they are looking for friendships and new ways to build fulfilling lives.
Researchers say trees make young people feel “grounded” and “alive.” In interviews with more than 25 young men and women as part of my ongoing—yet unpublished—research, I found that more women than men were undergoing forest therapy, seeking both friendship with trees and other human beings.
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In these therapies, Wong adapted traditional forest bathing therapies with his own ideas to increase people’s engagement. This included a “plant role play,” in which people could take the name of their favorite tree and be called by that name all day. She encouraged us, the therapy participants, to share a gesture that we associated with the chosen plant, a gesture that described the way we imagined the tree would move.
At these sessions, Wong was joined by other women who had also given up high-pressure jobs and instead took on this part-time job caring for the city’s people, trees and plants.
During one of these group sessions, an environmentalist, Florian Mo, expressed his frustration at not being able to find and keep love in his life. He argued that a crucial problem in Chinese society was the stigmatization of the search for love among young people.
He was 28 and recovering from a breakup. But for Mo, it was only because he never learned to love when he was a teenager. If he had learned, not only would he be a better partner today, as he shared with us, but he would also be able to move past his current grief more easily.
For young people like Wong and Mo, trees have become spaces where they can explore themselves and their connections with each other. And while the story of China’s urbanization is often told through images of polluted air, water and soil, young people like Wong and Mo present an alternative narrative: China’s new generations seek to repair the urban environment by connecting with others, caring for, nurturing and even hugging trees with friends and strangers.
*Akanksha Awal is Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London.
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