Life in the Countryside: From Guilt to Peace of Mind | Grandma Kouzi

I. A thousand theories pale before a single deed

He had volunteered without a penny’s pay, braving the biting cold to haul his own gear up to the Northeast. I figured he deserved a proper breakfast. The market offered a bounty of cheap, hearty fare: steamed buns, fried rice cakes, tea eggs, soy milk, dough sticks, and millet porridge. Gao Tian, however, was sorting through plastic bags and disposable utensils, tallying up the damage: “This single meal has generated twelve pieces of plastic waste.”

I had long followed how environmental shifts impact the planet and human survival, paying attention to desertification, sandstorms, penguin habitats, and even more niche issues like the ecological toll of the Jinsha River hydropower projects—I’d even shot a documentary on it, so I considered myself fairly environmentally conscious. But that morning, I felt profoundly ashamed, apologetic, and embarrassed—not to Gao Tian, but to the world, to the Earth itself.

In theory, we all know we should care for the environment. Yet living requires food and clothing; basic survival demands we take from the world. Modern life is deeply socialised and commercialised. The greater the distance between our needs and their source, and the longer the supply chain, the heavier the toll on nature. I am grateful to Gao Tian for jolting me awake that cold morning. It was then that “eco-friendliness” ceased to be an abstract ideal. From that point on, I resolved to shun single-use cutlery and plastic bags, making it a habit to carry my own water bottle, utensils, and reusable bags wherever I went.

In 2009, in Xiangfan, Hubei, Yun Jianli, founder of “Green Han River”, passionately outlined the dangers of phosphorus-containing detergents and offered a practical alternative: swapping liquid hand wash, washing powder, and laundry liquid for traditional soap and soap powder. I put this into practice straight away. Later, I stopped using shower gel and shampoo altogether. It not only lessened the environmental burden but also eased the load on my body; my hair stayed fresh and flake-free, and I saved money in the process.

In 2018, deep within the Lishan region of Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, I visited the mountain-view toilet used by A-Bao (Li Baolian, who became a fruit farmer in the mountains in 1999 and is widely regarded as Taiwan’s first ecological farmer), but found no toilet paper. Asking how she managed without it, she cupped her hands to gather some water and asked, “Toilet paper—how sanitary is it, really?” Since then, I have abandoned toilet paper.

Wherever three walk together, there is always a teacher among them. I am deeply grateful to all of them.

II. The Inherent Guilt of Being Human

Organic agriculture had a relatively early start in Taiwan. At the time, just 1% of the country’s cultivated land was devoted to organic grains (according to online sources, China’s organic agricultural production area accounted for 0.8% of total agricultural land in 2022, with grains making up 47.5% of that, or 0.36%). In Shengou, however, the figure was well over half, with more than two hundred organic farmers working the land.

The village features shared spaces such as the Farmers’ Canteen, Meihong Kitchen, and Xiaojian Shucai, where one could source some of the finest produce on the island. Many of the farmers embraced a ‘half-farmer, half-other’ way of life. For some, the ‘other’ was urban employment or remote work; for most, it involved food and farming-related crafts or small-scale processing. Virtually everything was grown or made by hand, earning the village a reputation across Taiwan for exceptional quality at fair prices. Barter was commonplace among the villagers. As a rice grower, the village’s unofficial brewer, and a food workshop instructor, my fermented drinks and homemade dishes were in high demand. Trading them for other essentials made it effortless to live a high-quality life within a remarkably low carbon footprint.

Those two years in Shengou were, by any measure, a life of luxury. Had it not been for the drainage pipes running into the rice paddies, those rich and vibrant days would have been nothing short of unblemished.

While rural Taiwan enjoys municipal-grade water and electricity supplies, it lacks a formalised urban sewage network. Wastewater from neighbouring houses simply converged and flowed into local streams, and plots of land situated near these discharge points naturally commanded lower rents.

The farmhouse I rented sat a short distance from the main village lane, part of a small cluster scattered across the fields, with domestic greywater draining directly into the paddies. I didn’t notice the issue at first, until a fellow farmer showed me what was actually flowing through the irrigation channels.

Born and raised in the city, I had grown up entirely insulated by modern piped infrastructure; I had never seen untreated wastewater, nor known where the water from my washing machine or kitchen sink went, or what damage it might cause. That day, the truth was laid bare before me: the water emerging from my drainpipe ran a distinctly different colour to the clean irrigation water, and the rice seedlings near the discharge point were undeniably paler and more stunted.

I was vegetarian, and at that point I rarely used oil for cooking, so kitchen runoff should have been light. I strictly avoided single-use cutlery, reused plastic packaging wherever possible, and never used phosphorus-based detergents. Even among Shengou’s community of organic farmers, few adhered to such rigorous standards. And yet, despite all this, my household wastewater was still harming the paddies.

I felt profoundly, deeply ashamed. This was not merely an apology owed to my fellow farmers; it was an admission that, simply by being human, I had let the land down.

III. Reconfiguring My Relationship with the World

Birds eat insects, insects eat grass. When birds die, they fall to the ground to be consumed by insects, decompose in the soil to nourish the grass. Birds also eat earthworms from the soil, which in turn aerate the earth and fertilise the grass with their waste… All are part of the ecosystem; animals and plants alike are links in the cycle. But not humans. Grass feeds sheep, and sheep manure nourishes the grass. Wolves eat sheep and other grazing animals, and when they die, their bodies return to the soil. But again, humans are the exception. We consume everything, dominate the world, and take without limit. We have not only driven countless animals to extinction, but have also devoured the land itself.

The cities we build grow ever larger; steel and concrete entomb all living things. Urban sprawl consumes the land that nurtures life, creating what in Hong Kong is known as the “concrete jungle”. Wherever the footprint of human activity extends, the vitality of the land steadily recedes.

I planned my home in Woren Valley with a sense of guilt for being human, striving to minimise harm to the land. I followed a principle of “no hardening unless absolutely necessary”. By hardening, I don’t just mean concrete; I also mean the compaction of soil caused by human footfall. Concrete is used only when it is truly indispensable. In Woren Valley No. 1, the house is raised on a pig manure net, with concrete used only for the support piles. In the later Woren Valley No. 2, just ten square metres of hardened ground accommodates all daily living needs.

The drainage ditch at the farmhouse in Yilan left me with a lasting sense of unease. In Woren Valley, household wastewater flows through Plantain Bed No. 1 and Plantain Bed No. 2 into a water lily pond before being diverted to the vegetable garden as irrigation water. A neighbour once gave me a bucket of red carp fry. I was deeply anxious, afraid I might harm the fish. Several years on, the fish are thriving in the water lily pond, and there are even new fry.

The plantain acts as the first line of defence in purifying the wastewater. It grows lush and vigorous, and I should be able to harvest bananas this year. After passing through two stages of filtration, the mulberry trees and wild ginger along the edge of the water lily pond are thriving. I am grateful to these living things: fed with household wastewater, they return to me with lush canopies and exquisite blooms.

The pig manure net is, without a doubt, a stroke of genius in rural architecture. This is where I prepare the harvest from the fields; it serves as the main working area in Woren Valley. It has caught well over a hundred kilos of peanut shells, more than fifty kilos of various bean pods, along with countless vegetable leaves, fruit stones, walnut husks, and so on. I never have to sweep the floor—it is truly a godsend for anyone who dislikes cleaning.

IV. The “Weed Character” of the Back Garden

The climates of Fujian and Taiwan are closely aligned—warm and rain-rich, making them a paradise for weeds. Weeds are a market gardener’s nightmare, the sort that literally steal the life from your crops. Xingyan divides the weeds in his plots into aggressive and non-aggressive types. Aggressive weeds are characteristically tall and robust; their height allows them to hog sunlight, while their robustness lets them monopolise nutrients. Among these, those that spread via nodes or underground runners are the most ruthless, leaving crops with absolutely no fighting chance. To tackle aggressive weeds, they must be pulled before they flower and set seed. They should then be placed in a designated area, covered to block out light, and left to compost. This fermentation process eradicates pathogens and weed seeds, transforming the biomass into high-quality seed-raising compost with an optimal carbon-to-nitrogen ratio.

After two years of practice, the vegetable plot of just over a hundred square metres stood in stark contrast to the surrounding land. The crops were lush and robust, free from aggressive weeds, with almost no bare soil visible. Close to the ground, a carpet of short, shallow-rooted grasses covered the earth. These grasses neither competed for sunlight nor drained the soil of nutrients, yet they reduced soil erosion, lowered evaporation, and enriched the ground with humus, thereby “establishing a sound initial weed composition.”

I had long been deeply pessimistic about the relationship between humans and the land, seeing only how people extract from and degrade it. Yet Chen Xingyan’s vegetable plot demonstrated that a mutually beneficial relationship is indeed possible: while we draw sustenance from the earth, we can also give back to it and nourish it.

In many ways, Evildoer Valley is an expanded version of Xingyan’s approach, and I pay him tribute through my own endeavours.

Land left entirely to run wild is essentially overdrawing its soil fertility. At Evildoer Valley, the weeds grew taller than a person. Once we cleared them with an excavator, we found the soil to be poor and severely compacted. Preparing the ground for planting was impossible; not only was the earth packed hard, but it was tightly interlaced with tough grass roots, forcing us to call the excavator back to dig three feet deep. The grass is incredibly tenacious, and leaving even a small fragment of root in the soil is enough for it to sprout and regenerate endlessly. We hired more than a dozen local women to break up the clay clods and pull the roots out by hand. They worked for a week, and the extracted roots piled up like a mound. Running the tally, between machinery and labour, clearing the grass roots alone cost well over ten thousand yuan.

And that wasn’t even the end of it. My war with the cogon grass lasted three years. I assembled a full arsenal of specialised digging tools. The moment I spotted an infestation, I would go into a frenzy, launching an all-out campaign: ripping them out by the roots, baking them under the scorching sun, and torturing them until death. Now, if I wanted to take a photo for reference, I’d struggle to even find a specimen.

After more than four years of life-and-death struggle with the noxious weeds, the ground cover in Woren Valley has transformed dramatically. The more I tread in an area, the better it looks. The prime spots are around the pigsty and the front and back of the house. The hillside across the stream behind the house used to be barely visited. Although the main newly planted timber species there are chestnuts, camellia oleifera, and Furong plums, their saplings couldn’t hold their ground initially, and the wild grasses went rampant. With the new waterside pavilion built this year, this overgrown path became my private domain. How could I let vicious weeds sprawl undisturbed right at my door? Active weeding happens after every thorough soaking, while the soil is still soft enough to pull them out by the roots. Passive weeding comes once the grasses flower: no matter the circumstances, I can’t afford to slack off. Even if the ground is too hard to dig, I’ll at least swing a sickle to lop off the heads. But they can’t just be tossed aside—immature seeds will still sprout again with the spring breeze. They must be dumped in the river to ensure they never come back.

Tall noxious grass is virtually non-existent now; the dominant plants are blanket flowers and roselle. The blanket flowers are bursting with vitality and will surely carpet the path by next year. Roselle is not only beautiful and edible, but its fleshy leaves and sturdy stems make excellent amendments for neutralising soil acidity. With humans, blanket flowers, and roselle forming a formidable alliance, the complete suppression of noxious weeds is just around the corner. My private domain will soon become a golden floral carpet dotted with roselle.

In the wild, animals mark their territory and assert dominance through their waste, defining the space they need to survive. How much land does it take to sustain one person? I’ve put it to the test: a modest plot of land is more than enough to live entirely self-sufficiently, with plenty left over to send to my son. I’ve secured a healthy lifestyle for myself, incidentally improving the quality of life for the local birds. My food forest yields harvests while fixing nitrogen, retaining topsoil, and enriching the earth—achieving multiple benefits at once.

Four years on, while surveying my own territory, I was startled to discover that the area showing the most dramatic soil improvement was, ironically, a “zone covered in excreta”.

I wrote about this years ago: The urine-diverting dry toilet at Evil Valley: returning human waste to the fields as fertiliser. After several upgrades, the dry toilet at Evil Valley has transformed into a garden sanctuary framed by lilies, red spider lilies, and distant pumpkin blooms. It has become a cornerstone of my secluded, self-directed daily routine. At regular intervals, I dilute the collected urine to water the vegetables, while the solid waste is composted, buried in pits, and left to slowly break down. The compost bins are too heavy to move far, so the composting zones are roughly ten metres away. Even if they were closer, they wouldn’t actually smell; the aversion is purely psychological. The plants around the composting zones show visibly superior growth, making me truly understand why old-school farmers always said, “Don’t let your rich water flow into someone else’s fields.”

Pulling invasive weeds is my daily chore, but the area I can thoroughly cover without missing a spot is a ten-metre radius around the house. Back and forth, I pluck them as I see them. It happens to be my vegetable and fruit zone, and coincidentally, that same “excreta-covered zone.” I can’t help but laugh: I have finally become part of the land. As a fruit harvester at the top of the food forest pyramid, I am a life nurtured by the soil, yet simultaneously an animal belonging to it. Experience proves that human activity does not inherently harm the environment. Human life can coexist, flourish, and mutually sustain the surrounding web of life.

The land nurtures life, and I enrich the land. I can finally live in peaceful harmony with the earth, conscience clear.

I give it care and beauty, and it returns nourishing food. My land and I are bound together, inseparable at every turn.

 

Foodthink Author

Kouzi

A dedicated long-distance walker and farmer, village distiller. Full-time food lover, part-time farmer, and amateur writer.