Waiting for the Leaves to Open
by Huina Zheng
Ling carried a cup of warmed milk into her daughter Mei’s room. Mei was hunched over her desk, her back arched as she sat surrounded by notebooks, textbooks, reference guides and stacks of exam papers.
Mei’s curved back reminded Ling of her seventy-year old grandmother in the countryside, seen from behind as she carried buckets of water to irrigate the vegetable patch. The difference was that her grandmother, though stooped, still moved with vitality, while Mei’s back was taut and frail, stretched thin to the point of withering.
Ling set the milk on the desk. Mei glanced at her: no smile, her eyes hollow. Her daughter’s ninth-grade year had been in session for barely a month, and Ling could not understand why her daughter already looked like a sapling eaten away from the inside by worms. She could no longer remember the last time she had seen Mei smile.
Every night, Mei returned from evening study at nine-thirty, showered in a rush, then sat at her desk until one in the morning. At six, she rose again. Ling barely had a chance to speak with her. She knew the high-school entrance exam mattered and that teachers of every subject competed for the students’ time by assigning endless homework.
Ling had been through it herself; she understood its cruelty. Had she been like Mei back then? The only memory that surfaced was a photograph: she was standing with her classmates, holding a certificate for ranking in the top five in the midterms. In the picture, her face was blank.
“Is something bothering you?” Ling asked.
Mei shook her head.
“Then why do you look so drained?”
“Mom,” Mei said, “if just staying alive already feels difficult, like a burden, can a person still have vitality, a will to live?”
Ling’s heart clenched. She didn’t know how to answer. Wasn’t this a thought she herself often had? She worked hard to hide her exhaustion in front of Mei, always putting on an energetic front. Had her daughter already seen through the disguise? Ling forced a smile. “How about tomorrow morning, we go to Baiyun Mountain and feed the fish?”
Mei loved feeding fish. Tossing bits of bread into Mingzhu Lake would summon a frenzy of white, orange, red and black carp, surging and jostling for food. No matter how much pressure she was under, Mei always seemed to draw a sense of life force from watching those fish compete. But this time, Mei shook her head. “If we go out, I won’t finish my homework.”
Ling opened her mouth, then closed it without speaking. She stepped out and shut the door.
Back at her desk, she had been away from her laptop for only fifteen minutes, and dozens of unread WeChat messages had already piled up. She inhaled for four seconds, held her breath for four, then exhaled before opening the messages.
She always crawled into bed only after Mei turned off the lights, and even then, sleep rarely came. The dark circles under her eyes were no lighter than her daughter’s. She told herself not to be anxious, but her body refused to obey. The thought kept returning: What if the tutoring center shuts down?
Her anxiety was not unfounded. Mei’s anxiety came from the fact that fewer than forty percent of students pass Zhongkao, the high-school entrance exam, and are admitted to high school. Ling’s worry came from the sharp decline in enrollment at the tutoring center that she administered with a friend. She taught English, while her friend taught math.
This year, students had vanished. She realized that AI was already replacing her or soon would. If a student didn’t understand unfamiliar vocabulary in a passage, AI could explain it in detail. For fill-in-the-blank questions, all it took was inputting the sentence for AI to supply the answer. Even student essays could be graded in seconds. Math, for now, still needed teachers. But for how long? She didn’t want to think about it. The pace of the world was moving too fast for her to keep up.
When Ling had applied for college, she had chosen English, one of the most popular majors at the time, with good job prospects, high salaries and competitive admissions. She wasn’t even retired yet, and many universities had already eliminated the English major. She was forty-two. Should she look for a job? Prospective employers would certainly dismiss her résumé the moment they saw her age. She had no idea what else she could do. Become a cleaner? She wouldn’t mind, but would the income cover the mortgage? The thought alone kept her awake.
Could she blame Mei for not stopping? Hadn’t she herself worked nonstop since graduating from college, working until the day she gave birth, replying to work messages even during maternity leave? Mother and daughter were exhausted, both of them. They knew that effort alone didn’t guarantee outcomes. Still, they didn’t dare stop, terrified of becoming the one who was screened out. Even as they moved like the living dead, they feared that stopping would mean irreversible collapse.
She thought again of Mei’s question. She asked herself: Is there truly no space left to strive? All she wanted was to crawl into bed and pull the blanket over her head. Thought itself became impossible; even time felt distorted.
On her computer, WeChat avatars blinked with red dots. New messages sprouted like bamboo shoots after rain. She picked up her phone, scrolling aimlessly, as if that might allow her to escape reality’s anxiety for a moment. For distraction, she opened a shopping app. An image caught her eye. Her finger froze. Her gaze lingered on the image of delicate, emerald-green leaves.
A distant warmth surfaced, like a thin beam of light piercing her fatigue. She knew what she wanted. She placed the order.
The next afternoon, Ling opened the delivery box and pulled Mei onto the balcony. The sun was slanting westward, laying a soft gold across the floor. In the brightest corner stood a simple white ceramic pot, holding a small mimosa, its stems and leaves slender and fragile.
Ling lifted Mei’s hand and guided her fingertips toward the feather-like leaves. At the moment of touch, the tiny leaflets folded inward, one by one; even the stems lowered themselves like a shy girl covering her face with both hands.
“When I was little,” Ling said, “there was a mimosa in the empty lot beside our house.” She smiled, remembering. “I loved touching it, just to watch the leaves snap shut. I’d run off, then come back later to see if they’d opened again. I could do that all day.”
“Why didn’t you just wait beside it?” Mei asked.
“It was summer, at noon. The sun was brutal. Your grandma worried I’d get heatstroke, and she wouldn’t let me stay.”
“Wasn’t it tiring?”
“No. Waiting itself was the joy.” Ling looked at her daughter. “While I ran off, I waited for it to open again. I trusted that it would open.”
They fell silent, standing together on the balcony, watching the shy mimosa. They waited patiently, together, for this sensitive little life to be certain that the “danger” had passed and slowly, tentatively open itself again. For a calm they had not felt in a long time. In anticipation of breath.
Copyright © 2026 by Huina Zheng
