A Modern Person Craving Nature in the City, Air Conditioning on the Land

After graduating with my undergraduate degree in 2025, I did not rush to find a stable job. Instead, I wandered in circles, searching for what I believed a good life ought to be. As the years passed, I—raised between cramped buildings and concrete—began to realise that nature could comfort me and hold me. Entering nature meant release; the moment I stepped out of it, a weight settled on me. The anxiety that pervades human society would flood into my body all at once.

Of all the fields, agriculture comes closest to nature. So I signed up for Foodthink’s 2026 Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme and arrived at Baicaoyuan in Guigang, Guangxi, in early March of this year.

Does Peach Blossom Spring exist?

Within the bounds of Baicaoyuan, a small ecological Peach Blossom Spring has taken shape: kitchen waste and faeces are used as composting material; plastic waste is taken to town to be disposed of; all toiletries are eco-friendly products, and when washing, one simply lets the water run down unapologetically, following the slope of the brickwork into the ground, seeping into the soil through runoff; no pesticides or chemical fertilisers are used on the crops or fruit trees—they are left to grow ‘wild’.

But at the edge of Baicaoyuan’s Wogan trees, just a few metres away, lies another orchard—another world.

◉A sign in the neighbouring orchard.

Golden fruit hangs heavy along the branches, the ground at the edge of the trees almost bare — a stark expanse of yellow. In the Hundred Grass Garden, by contrast, a few false fruits are left on the trees, weeds encircling them, some growing right up to the root systems, their stems winding between the branches. This is the most obvious visual difference I have felt here between conventional and ecological growing. Subtler still is the difference in taste. The wogan grown conventionally has a sweetness that lingers in the throat, sticky and cloying, unable to penetrate deeper into the body. The wogan from the Hundred Grass Garden, by contrast, are clean and sweet, seeping through without a trace. A difference like this has to be savoured slowly, felt with the whole body.

◉Fruit crates in the neighbouring orchard.

On another small hillside not far from Baicaoyuan, every tree, every blade of grass had been uprooted and obliterated. In the end, the same stark expanse of bare yellow. In April, fruit trees were planted on this land, drip irrigation pipes sprawled across the surface in every direction, and the plastic waste in the soil was laid bare.

One morning, we were clearing a plot of land that Sister Yan Ping had just rented, and the first thing we did was pick up rubbish. The rubbish in the soil consisted mainly of plastic film, plastic bags, plastic bottles, pesticide and fertiliser sacks, and woven plastic bags. Some of it had been buried so deep that you could not tell where it ended. Some of it was so inextricably tangled that the more you pulled, the more it crumbled apart—countless white fragments scattering from the tear. Picking up rubbish is a melancholy thing for me. The plastic waste in farmland can never be fully cleared; I jestingly call myself the Sisyphus of rubbish-picking.

◉Sister Yan Ping at work. Photo: Chen Yujun

Sisyphus and the Slowness of Farming

When I first took up farm work, I often felt like Sisyphus. At the outset, I found it repetitive, boring, slow, and endless.

Hoeing the ground at Baicaoyuan was the first time I had ever held a hoe. I did not know how to grip it or how to carry it, so I could only quietly watch Yanping or Xiaona at work, studying their movements, then clumsily pick up the hoe myself and clumsily work the soil, feeling awkward from head to toe. My awkward motions sent the hoe lurching in every direction, making it hard to dig a proper furrow. Before long, my body was already aching, and a faint sense of frustration began to well up inside me.

Farming is inherently a slow affair. The reason I am so slow at farm work is that I have not yet truly mastered the techniques; those skilled farmers, by contrast, can set a seedling in the ground in seconds. Their speed is, in fact, built on a long accumulation of slowness.

But one slowness is not the same as another.

Some slowness is of poor quality. When a person is not present, not truly engaged in what they are doing, everything becomes scattered and listless. Time is stretched out, yet nothing settles, and one has not entered the thing itself. This kind of slowness is, at its core, drift and depletion. Another kind of slowness is a good one. Pacing, for instance, or thinking slowly, letting thoughts unfold at their own pace; working with an unhurried rhythm, body and attention both present. This kind of slowness is time with weight. So the question is not about speed or slowness, but whether a person has truly entered time itself.

Later, as my body gradually developed a good working relationship with the tools, I would occasionally feel a certain ease — lifting the hoe lightly, then letting it fall by its own weight, the soil would give way to a small depression; drawing it back towards me, and a little pit would form. A small sense of accomplishment would follow.

◉A worn-out hoe.

But the land has other challenges in store. Sometimes the hoe strikes a stone in the soil. If it is small, a slight shift of the angle will scoop it out. If it is large, you either concede the point, or step back a little, dig away the soil clinging to it until the stone is exposed, then move it out by hand.

Brute force is of no use against stones. Nor is it against anything else.

Once I had adjusted, working the land made time feel as though it stretched, and at times a calm flow would arise. Attention in the land isn’t constantly fragmented, so the work achieves a kind of mental repose.

In Baicaoyuan, I carried water on a shoulder pole for the first time. The rounded surface of the bamboo pole pressed into my right shoulder; the hooks at either end held small half-buckets of water. I crouched in the middle, left hand guarding the front, right hand holding the back, and slowly, slowly rose. A slight ache in my right shoulder, then I shifted my feet and moved forward, one careful step at a time.

It was a physical task, but when I realized my body was not frail and powerless—that it could still carry water on a pole—I felt a subtle satisfaction and a trust in my body.

The only powered implement in Baicaoyuan was a mower. To use it, you had to rest one end on your shoulder and raise the blade end to a certain height, then walk forward slowly.

The mower is heavy for me and makes an enormous racket. It is usually Sister Yan Ping who uses it to clear a path. W hen the mower is running, I need to wear earplugs or keep my distance to reduce the noise.

◉Sister Yan Ping discovers an ant nest while mowing.

I even find that mechanical farm tools like the mower are more physically demanding than traditional ones. The mower has to sit still on the body, completely motionless; the only thing in motion is the blade — and this places enormous strain on the shoulders. After several consecutive days of using the mower, Sister Yan Ping’s shoulder began to ache. I held the handlebars of the three-wheeler for her as we rode to town to see the doctor.

When using a traditional tool such as a hoe, the body and the tool become a single, interlinked whole. Force passes continuously between body, tool, and earth, binding them together. The body moves in the rhythm of the tool, and the tool, under the body’s guidance, cooperates more effectively with the soil. Once you learn to farm without straining, the body is less likely to ache or tire — you may even feel light and at ease.

Submit to Nature

I experienced a quality of life at Baicaoyuan entirely unlike anything I had known before. When life is so close to nature and the earth, the body must submit—submit to the claspweed that clings to your shoes, socks and trouser hems, submit to the welts left on your arms by insect bites, submit to sudden storms lashing in with a fierce wind, submit to prolonged drought, submit to the weight of the carrying pole strained with water, submit to the rough, treacherous inclines, submit to the wild grasses blanketing the hillsides, submit to the rats that scurry along the roof beams each day and the cockroaches that dart through the rice jar, submit to the colonies of mould and bacteria that make food ferment and spoil—though I would not submit to the plastic mulch in the soil or the rubbish piled beside the graveyards.

◉Claspweed.

Looking back, what left the deepest impression on me was the day of that sudden downpour. This is what I wrote about the storm that afternoon:

After the thunder and lightning, the sky changed in an instant — darkening, then going grey. The sounds of rain and wind blended together, and the plants bent in every direction. I hurriedly gathered the clothes hanging from the branches outside and brought them in. The rain driven through the doorway was fine and chaotic; the wooden floor showed patch after patch of water, dampness crept onto my skin, and a faint coolness began to spread.

Several women working at the neighbouring farm sheltered from the rain at the doorway, and they started singing hill songs. Yanping warmly called them inside. We set out the small wooden stools and sat down, row after row. The rain grew heavier, and people’s movements grew frantic — quickly gathering the mulberries and Job’s tears stalks drying under the eaves, pulling up the bamboo blind, moving deeper inside to the fire. The wind knocked the flames over to one side, and people quickly dodged away. The small space filled with people in an instant. Singing hill songs, chatting, the sound of wind and rain — all at once. I was gradually losing my grip on the sound; my whole ear, my auditory nerves, my brain were on the verge of collapse. I raised my camera and tried to record it all, and it seemed to work. I watched through the lens — people, plants, wind and rain, the fire — and slowly I calmed down.

◉Aunties sheltering from the rain.

◉A stormy day, warming by the fire indoors.

Later, another downpour struck in the dead of night, just as sudden. The sound of rain crept into my whole ear, pressed flat against the pillow, and I was jolted awake at once, unable to sleep again. I went down the wooden ladder to find the floorboards already soaked and the odds and ends on the table dampened. I hurriedly gathered them up and moved them to the relatively dry little room.

Having gone through such times, one rediscovers a sense of awe before nature.

I have also experienced a role here that is close to that of a producer.Food is gathered, cultivated, or exchanged with fellow farmers; all three meals a day are prepared by myself, sometimes starting from lighting a fire. Travel is limited to places within reach of the electric tricycle — going to the town to collect parcels, or to the nearby city of Yulin to tend another plot.Food, clothing, shelter, and transport return to a smaller scale.

In the sticks, people take on the work of production, willy-nilly or by choice. In the city, a person’s time is carved up by work, and one often finds oneself a passive consumer.

◉A corner of Baicaoyuan.

The Day I Left

After a month of living and working on the farm, I decided to leave — the heat had become unbearable.

On the day I left, Sister Yan Ping took me to the high-speed rail station on her three-wheeler. The afternoon was stifling, the sun blinding. As we picked up speed, a breeze rose and swept away some of the heat. Halfway there, Sister Yan Ping and I swapped seats — my turn to take the wheel. Light reflected off the road and shot straight into my eyes. I squinted and fixed my gaze ahead. The experience is entirely different as a driver than as a passenger.

I remember the first time I rode this three-wheeler — I was taking turns practising with Xiaona. We set off from the wooden cabin’s doorway. A narrow slope lay ahead, flanked by a bamboo frame. Further down, it widened slightly. A left turn, a short stretch, and we’d reached the flat ground in the village. The slope was bumpy. I was trembling, holding back the fear, keeping the speed in check, moving forward — slowly, slowly. When we reached the stretch of slope that led onto the flat ground, the vehicle suddenly jolted violently. I did my best to steady myself. Trusting myself, and trusting the three-wheeler’s stability, I finally made it through onto the level ground.

◉ On the right, Xiaona and Sister Yanping are observing a bean paste that has been fermenting for several days.

It was Xiaona’s turn to take over. I stood to one side, watching her suddenly surge forward. Before I could even process what was happening, the vehicle had shot off down the road. Just as it was about to bear into the lane, Sister Yanping and I scrambled after it. Once she’d turned into the fork, she still hadn’t managed to keep the speed under control. In an instant, the vehicle had slammed into a tree by the roadside. I suppose Xiaona hadn’t quite managed to get a handle on her fear, and that tension only made her movements more frantic, which is what led to the accident. So it seems that going slow really does have its benefits after all.

◉The tricycle at Baicaoyuan. Photo by Chen Yujun

Driving on the flat road to the high-speed rail station, however, brought me squarely into my comfort zone. As long as there was no oncoming traffic, I would ease up to my top speed. When a vehicle came the other way, I would slow down early and pull over wherever I could. Then again, I am no fan of the heat. On the last stretch of the road, Sister Yan Ping took over at the wheel, and I dozed off beside her.

By April, Guangxi had already become a steamer. In my final days at Baicaoyuan, the heat seemed to paste itself over my mind. I felt my awareness grow muddled, my body sluggish and heavy — it was truly hard to bear, like a kind of brain fog triggered by the heat. It was not the emptiness one feels during hard labour, but more like a hot, sticky paste sloshing around in the brain. I suppose my brain and nervous system genuinely need the right conditions to function.

Postscript

Modern People Who Long for the Land

By the time I put these words to paper, I had already returned to the crowded, claustrophobic space of the city. The difference between nature and the city hit me all at once — at Baicaoyuan, there was no barrier between people and the natural world; in the city, one has to go to parks, to man-made settings, to find nature that has been meticulously maintained. The city is a vast, top-down system to which people surrender their time, and because they are so far removed from primary nature and the actual sites of production, they gradually lose their sensitivity to the weather and to the rhythms of the natural world.

Even so, during my time on the farm, I often felt adrift. I found that beyond the hours spent working, there was only cooking, eating, and sleep — no room left for reading, writing, or learning. All I could do was seize every small gap, absorbing what little text I could with a fierce, hungry urgency. I sometimes feared, too, that I was simply wasting my time.

◉A corner of the desk.

Farm work is a continuous, repetitive cycle that gives you a certain immediacy — plant one seed, then the next. But crop growth takes time, and I found this silent, wordless growing unfamiliar. I often wondered how farmers could bear to endure a growing season that stretched across months, or even years.

I cannot find any feedback or emotional movement in the growth of the crops. For me, it does not amount to ‘meaning’.

I have not made the ecological farm my ultimate home; it is one possible part of the life I aspire to. During my time on the farm, I was still juggling other work alongside it. Sister Yanping said, “Don’t try to do two things at once.” I cannot yet remain as rooted in one place as Sister Yanping. I too wish to devote myself wholly to a single endeavour, but at this stage, I must stretch out feelers in different directions to better reach the life I want. I cannot yet remain as rooted in one place as Sister Yanping.

Looking back now on my time at Baicaoyuan, I think it allowed me to experience—honestly, afresh, and in both body and spirit—what it is to live and labour within nature, and it deepened my appreciation of how precious food is and how hard-won. I also came to realize that I remain a person of the modern world, not a person of nature. I cannot do without air conditioning or the city, nor can I truly live as a farmer lives. But I will, in my own way, explore a good way of living in the spaces between city and countryside, tradition and modernity, consumption and production.