The Absurdity and Romance of a Desolate Land
In the first part of ‘Notes on an Internship in a Desert Oasis’, I tried to lean into my professional instincts as a business journalist to explore the operational struggles of an ecological farm. But in truth, during my two months interning at the Zhiliangtian Farm in Alashan, my daily life mostly consisted of being a barista.
The coffee house at Zhiliangtian was one of the few places where I felt I could truly contribute to the farm. My days were spent selling fizzy drinks and snacks, occasionally making coffee, having long natters with guests of all ages, cleaning the indoor and outdoor areas, and periodically taking stock and coordinating with colleagues to replenish or select new products. It was because of the coffee house that, after an initial wave of disappointment, I found a justification for staying at the farm.
I loved that place. At first, it was because of the coffee and beer—familiar things that brought a sense of security to an unfamiliar life. Later, it was because the space allowed me to meet all sorts of people: guests on nature study trips, farm volunteers, the sisters bustling in the kitchen, and the field workers. They became my reason for longing for Alashan.
1. Coming to the Desert to ‘Walk’ Other People’s Kids
The farm’s water is pumped from over 100 metres underground. It’s hard water with a slightly salty taste; outsiders aren’t used to it, and neither was I at first. The children came for the fizzy drinks both to satisfy a craving and to quench their thirst.
This summer, the farm hosted more nature study groups than last year. Each group had about twenty people, mostly upper primary and lower secondary school students. At first, I thought these nature education trips were just fancy tour groups, but after some time, I realised that proper nature study groups are quite different from tourism. For starters, the parents and children in these groups respected the farm’s various environmental agreements: they sorted their rubbish, saved water, and didn’t make a fuss about the insects in the rooms or shout orders at the volunteers.
I enjoyed the process of selling fizzy drinks to the children. There’s a saying in the trade: “Retail is detail.” The little things determine success or failure. Some of the groups that placed a heavier emphasis on the nature education aspect had teachers who didn’t want the children drinking soda. They felt that experiencing the taste of the desert water was part of the learning process. However, I soon became savvy; whenever a new group arrived, I would first check with the leader to see how many bottles of Dayao soda the children were limited to each day. Most of the time, they were allowed one bottle a day, though they could buy an extra one as a reward after returning from a desert hike.
In the eyes of many of the children, I must have been a rather grumpy “waiter”. Once, a boy threw wet waste into the dry rubbish bin right in front of me. I stopped him: “You there, pick up what you just threw in and put it in the food waste bin.” He argued with me for a good while, until a parent, unable to watch any longer, helped urge him to sort his rubbish correctly.
I was soon drafted as a teaching assistant for the study groups. The only group I participated in from start to finish was from a nature education institution in Guangdong called “Wilderness School”. The group consisted of children aged 7 to 15. They stayed in Alashan for six days, and I was responsible for the logistics every day.
What lingers most in my mind is a 7-year-old boy from Guangdong, the youngest of the group, with big, bright eyes. Every day at noon, while we were lounging in the coffee house for a break, he would run in to join the commotion, blinking those curious wide eyes as he watched me brew coffee. One day, just as I took out the filter paper, he spoke up: “You have to rinse it with hot water first.”
“The lad knows his stuff; why not let him have a taste?” I found a small teacup and poured him a tiny amount. After drinking it, he gave me 45 yuan and asked me to find time to make a pot for his mother too. One morning, when I delivered the coffee to his mother, the other mothers looked on with envy.
This boy was the only little guest I ever hosted who ordered coffee for his parent. Although he became reckless and wouldn’t listen to anyone when he got excited, whenever he calmed down, I would see him being pulled aside by his mother, listening obediently to the lessons adults give. I suspect that when he grows up, he’ll be a very warm-hearted young man.
While leading the group on a desert hike, I was at one point provoked by the elder sister’s rudeness. She had suddenly started her period, which left her exceptionally irritable. The grandmother accompanying them was very worried about her. I brought the sister some sanitary pads and told her that if she felt unwell, she could ask the leader for leave, but she snapped at me to stay away: “I told you to leave me alone, can’t you understand words?”
For a moment, I was furious—as an unpaid volunteer, why should I have to put up with this?!
But I swallowed my anger.
That night, the study group camped in the desert. The twin sisters stayed in a two-person tent, while their grandmother was placed in our large yurt.
A gale blew through during the night. The grandmother, sitting opposite me, kept tossing and turning or sitting up with a sigh; I worried she was feeling unwell. Instead, she said, “Will it be dangerous outside? I need to go and bring them back.” To put her mind at ease, I agreed to go out and call the twins back.
As soon as I stepped out of the yurt, the grandmother followed, pulling me along as we hurried toward the tent area, muttering, “I’m the one who brought them here; if something happens, I won’t be able to answer to their parents.” I later learned that the grandmother worked at the Wilderness School’s headquarters—a farm in an ecological community in Guangdong—and did housekeeping for the lead teachers during the farm’s off-season. To get the twins to tear their eyes away from their phones, the grandmother had spent an entire year’s income to bring them to Alashan.
This grandmother was only a year younger than my own mother. Whenever the elder sister treated her poorly, I felt a strong urge to give her a piece of my mind: if I had a child, I would never allow them to treat my mother that way.
After the desert trip ended, the leader asked everyone to write about their feelings during the hike. After reading the elder sister’s essay, I felt a strange sense of relief: relief that I had controlled my emotions and hadn’t retaliated against her harsh words.
While the other children recorded the desert trekking and the scenery of the Helan Mountains, the sister wrote only of the small moments with her grandmother: pitching a tent together in the desert, and sensing her grandmother’s worry on that windy night. She also wrote about the improvised stories about goats that her grandmother made up when they passed dead goats on the Helan Mountains.
It turned out that a child’s expression can be so fragmented—rejecting everyone’s kindness on one hand, while remembering all of it on the other. At the closing ceremony, three winning essays were to be chosen; I gave one of the prizes to the elder sister, as a belated form of validation.
2. The Beer Big-Spenders: The Farm Volunteers
After letting go of my initial restlessness, my life actually became quite happy. Most of the joy came from my fellow volunteers; we provided each other with emotional support amidst the chaos of farm life.
Xiao Zhu and Xiao Zhou are two Gen Z lads from Beijing, and they became my source of happiness shortly after I arrived. Every day, they start early for live-streaming and follow the others to work in the fields, complaining about the exhaustion and slacking off, yet simultaneously loving every minute of it.
Xiao Zhu is exactly one zodiac cycle younger than me; I remember him from our first sales meeting. During the Q&A with the e-commerce boss, every one of his questions was spot on; he was more reliable than the worst journalists I’ve encountered. Once we became closer, I found out he had seen plenty of the business world while accompanying his mother.
Xiao Zhu was introduced to the farm by his mother. To encourage her son to toughen up and gain some experience, she offered a large sum of pocket money as an incentive. As for Xiao Zhou, he only came because Xiao Zhu was coming. To him, what he did didn’t matter; being with his mate was what mattered.
Xiao Zhou and Xiao Zhu were inseparable on the farm and soon became helpers at the coffee house. When I went out with the tour groups, they would hunker down inside to mind the shop, cleaning up the rubbish outside the coffee house with me every day, taking stock at night, and tidying Excel spreadsheets. After finishing the day’s work, we would each slump in a corner on our phones or laptops, not returning to our rooms until midnight.
One night at midnight, as we left the coffee house, Xiao Zhu opened his parasol. I asked in confusion, “What’s this for?” Xiao Zhu replied, “I’m afraid the moonlight is too strong and will burn you.” I replied, “It’s a new moon tonight; there is no moonlight.” Having said that, the three of us laughed out loud as we walked back to our rooms.
They arrived during the farm’s leanest period for labour and, gritting their teeth, took over the management of the final two or three groups. During that time, I joined them for drinks every night. Occasionally, parents who had just showered would pass by us and ask with concern, “Why aren’t you asleep yet?” I imagined they were judging us, thinking, “Still awake at this hour? How are they going to lead the activities tomorrow?”
To such inquiries, we always replied with a perfectly content, “Almost, almost.”
Through our long chats, I began to understand the issues with recruiting volunteers for the farm: many come out of curiosity, a desire for a place to rest, or an interest in ecological agriculture—various motives, in short—only to arrive during Zhi Liang Tian’s busiest season. They find themselves tasked with work that was either poorly communicated before their arrival or work they had no real desire to do.
Take Huasheng, for example. She is a secondary school PE teacher who came to Zhi Liang Tian to understand how the farm is run. She has a piece of land back in her hometown that she wants to develop. For the past year or two, she has spent her winter and summer breaks travelling to different places to study the business models and operations of various ecological farms. Yet, upon arriving in Alashan, she found herself doing the same old job of being a teacher every day. After leading two groups, an exhausted Huasheng left early.
Maizi stayed longer. She had just finished a job at an innovative education institution when she arrived, hoping for a period of rest, only to find she was expected to lead groups of children. Dissatisfied, Maizi would often vanish suddenly, only resurfacing late at night. She would invite me for drinks, and I would usually stay until we were both thoroughly pleased before returning. I can’t recall most of our conversations now, but they revolved around our states of work, our respective experiences, and our career plans.
On the night of early September, the day before I saw Maizi off, she thanked me in a drunken haze for the companionship and emotional support I had provided. It was only then that I suddenly realised that the feeling of being needed by others had cast a beautiful, romanticised filter over my life at the farm.
3. The Coffee-Drinking Kitchen Assistant
On the day I left in early September, just after the White Dew solar term, a heavy fog—rare for the usually arid Alashan Left Banner—rolled in, blanketing the entire farm as it swept west from the Helan Mountains. Before boarding the car, I spotted Sister Bai herding sheep in the distance. As we bid her farewell, she told us to “remember to come back” in the future.
Sister Bai is from Gansu and has made her home in Alashan over the years. In the summer, she is both a field worker and a kitchen assistant at the farm. Come autumn, she becomes a shepherd, herding sheep for nearby pastoralists. Her hometown, Minqin in Gansu, is also a famous producer of honey melons, but there, labour is a cheap resource. It is not like Alashan in Inner Mongolia, where she can earn a daily wage of 200 yuan.
Sister Bai’s partner in the kitchen, Sister Wang, was the warmest of all the workers towards me. A local, Sister Wang makes superb Northwest Chinese cuisine; whenever she cooked, I ate heartily and with great relish. Every time I entered the kitchen, I was especially sweet to her.
One sunset in early August, as I sat outside the coffee hut drinking beer, Sister Wang passed by and said goodbye. I instinctively replied, “I won’t be here tomorrow.” She paused, puzzled, and asked why. I immediately explained that I was going into the desert with a group the next day and wouldn’t be back until the day after. She breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good, then I’ll see you the day after tomorrow. You must tell me when you’re actually leaving—I really like you!” With that, Sister Wang drove home in her white sedan.
Outside of romantic relationships, I rarely receive such direct expressions of affection from adults. The evening after Sister Wang left, the sunset glow was beautiful and gentle.
Sister Wang and Sister Bai usually cook for thirty or forty people in the kitchen. Whenever Sister Wang saw the workload on the menu, she would always order two coffees from me. This habit was something I started. One day, I suddenly felt that “Worker’s Coffee” couldn’t exist without the workers, so I brewed a pot for them. To my surprise, the sisters, who were tasting coffee for the first time, loved it. “This stuff is powerful; I’m not even sleepy while working in the afternoon.” Thus, they became regulars for coffee, alongside the volunteers.
Sometimes, we would vent about work in the kitchen. Sister Wang would always tell me earnestly not to do something as foolish as volunteering ever again, advising me to go back and find a proper job rather than ending up like them, stuck in the countryside doing hard labour in the fields: “We didn’t get an education; we had no choice.”
They often gave me similar warnings, sometimes even telling me not to come back after I left. Yet, as my departure drew near and I said goodbye to Sister Wang, she urged me to remember to visit her the next time I came to Alashan.
Both Maizi and I were recipients of Sister Wang’s advice. Sometimes, while drinking with Maizi late at night, we would joke that we’d never do this kind of free labour again. But after leaving Alashan, Maizi went to volunteer at an innovative school in Beijing. In November, she returned to the farm twice, telling me that Alashan is a place that leaves one longing to return.
I don’t remember which study group it was, but a guest once told Teacher Ma that Zhi Liang Tian was wonderful, like a utopia. Teacher Ma repeatedly rejected that description.
Zhi Liang Tian is indeed not a utopia. In a utopia, there are no toilets to be mopped repeatedly, no constant reminders for guests to sort their waste, and no communal meals cooked in a sweltering kitchen. Nor would there be the practical struggles of survival.
This desert oasis carries countless imaginings, but it is also filled with the rich, authentic relationships of real people. Much like the Alashan desert, it may seem barren, but it possesses a vitality all its own.
About the Ecological Farming Internship Programme
To date, two recruitment cycles have been completed, supporting over 40 partners in entering more than 10 ecological farms across the country for internships lasting from two months to a year. The second cohort of interns will “graduate” at the end of 2023, and open recruitment for the third cohort will begin in January 2024! We welcome your continued interest in Foodthink’s “Ecological Farming Intern” project!
Editor: Xiong Yi