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"Hugging trees is a way of having touch in one's life," Xiaoyang Wong, the leader of a forest therapy community in Beijing, told me. Wong is a 35-year-old 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 awkward about hugging a tree, she told me. But in forest therapies, Wong encourages people to understand the tree's many worlds by observing it at close quarters, watching the ants and other insects as they weave in and out of the grain of the bark.

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Seeking relief

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In these therapies, Wong adapted the traditional forest bathing therapies with her own ideas to enhance people's engagement. These include "plant enactment" where people could take on the name of their favorite tree, and be called by this name all day. She encouraged us, the participants in the therapy, to share a gesture that we associated with our chosen plant, one that described how we imagined the tree would move.

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For young people like Wong and Mo, trees emerged as spaces to explore themselves and connections to 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: that young Chinese generations seek to repair the urban environment by connecting with others while caring, nurturing and even hugging the trees with their friends and strangers.