Absurdity and Romance in a Desolate Land
In Part One of A Desert Oasis Internship, I tried to return to my instincts as a business journalist and explore the operational challenges of ecological farms. But in truth, during the two months I spent interning at Alxa Zhiliangtian Farm, working as a barista was my daily routine.
The coffee house at Zhiliangtian is one of the few settings on the farm where I can actually contribute. Every day I sell soft drinks and snacks, occasionally brew coffee, sit around with guests young and old having a rambling chat, tidy up the coffee house inside and out, take stock of the shelves, liaise with colleagues about restocking, and pick out new products. It is the coffee house too that, after my initial disappointment, gave me a reason to keep staying on at the farm.
I grew to love that place. At first it was because there was coffee and beer — familiar things bringing a sense of security to an unfamiliar life. Then it was because the space brought me into contact with all sorts of people — the study tour visitors, the farm volunteers, the women bustling around in the kitchen, and the field workers. They are the reason I will miss Alxa.
I. Chaperoning the Guests’ Children in the Desert
The farm’s water is pumped from over a hundred metres underground. It is hard water with a faintly salty taste — visitors from elsewhere find it unpleasant, and I did too at first. The children buy soft drinks partly to satisfy a craving and partly to slake their thirst.
This summer the farm hosted more study tour groups than last year. Each group numbers around twenty, mostly upper primary and middle school students. At first I assumed a nature education study tour was little more than a premium package holiday. But once I got to know them, I realised that a properly run nature study tour is quite different from a tour in the ordinary sense. At the very least, the parents and children on these tours respect the farm’s environmental commitments, sort their waste properly, conserve water, and do not make a fuss over the bugs in the rooms or shout at the volunteers.
I enjoy the process of selling soft drinks to children. There is an old adage in retail: “Retail is detail.” The details decide success or failure. On groups that emphasise the nature education aspect more heavily, the group leader prefers the children not to have soft drinks — experiencing the desert’s water quality is meant to be part of the programme. But I quickly learned to be canny. With every new group I check with the leader first: how many bottles of Da Yao is each child allowed per day? Usually it is just one, though after a desert hike they get to buy an extra bottle as a reward.
In the eyes of many children, I am something of a short-tempered “server”. One time a boy threw wet waste into the dry waste bin right in front of me. I stopped him. “You there — fish out what you just dropped and pop it in the food waste bin instead.” He argued back for quite a while, until one of his parents, unable to bear the sight any longer, stepped in and helped make sure he sorted it properly.
Before long I was drafted in as an assistant for a study tour. The only group I saw through from start to finish came from Wilderness Academy, a nature education organisation in Guangdong. The children ranged from seven to fifteen years old. They spent six days in Alxa, and I was in charge of logistics every day.
What struck me most was the youngest boy in the group, a seven-year-old from Guangdong with big, bright eyes. Every day at lunchtime, when we collapsed in the coffee house to doze, he would rush in to join the fun and fix me with those curious wide eyes while I made coffee. One midday, the moment I pulled out the filter paper, he piped up: “You need to wet it with hot water first.”
“What a little expert — perhaps we ought to give him a taste,” I said. I found a small cup and poured him the tiniest splash. After he’d finished, he pressed forty-five yuan into my hand and asked me to brew a pot for his mother when I got a spare moment. The following morning, when I delivered the coffee to his mother, the other mothers cast envious glances my way.
He was also the only young guest I ever served who ordered coffee for his own parent. Once he got wound up from play, he would listen to no one — but the moment things quieted down, you could see his mother pull him aside and him sitting obediently, absorbing all the grown-up lessons. I have a feeling that one day he will grow into a remarkably warm man.
During the desert hike with the group, I was provoked to fury by the elder twin. Her period had just started, which made her particularly volatile. Her grandmother, who had come along, was deeply worried about her. I brought the girl sanitary pads and told her that if she was feeling unwell she could ask the leader for a break, but she snapped at me to stay away: “I said leave me alone. Can’t you understand the English — I mean, the words on my face?”
For a split second I was furious — I am an unpaid volunteer; why should I take this kind of nonsense?! But I swallowed my anger.
That evening the study tour camped out in the desert. The twin sisters shared a two-person tent, while their grandmother was placed in our large yurt.
A howling wind swept through in the night. The grandmother, sitting opposite me, kept turning over, then sitting up and sighing. I worried she might be unwell. But she said, “Is it dangerous out there? I need to go and bring them back.” To reassure her, I promised to go out and fetch the twins.
The moment I stepped outside the yurt, the grandmother hurried after me, gripping my arm and pulling me towards the tents, muttering, “I insisted on bringing them here. If anything happens, how would I ever face their parents?” I later learned that the grandmother worked at the Wilderness Academy’s home base — a farm in an eco-community in Guangdong — and did domestic work at the leader’s house during the farming off-season. To help the twins drag their eyes away from their phones, she had spent an entire year’s wages bringing them to Alxa.
The grandmother is only a year younger than my own mother. Every time the elder twin spoke rudely to her, I wanted to give the girl a telling-off: if I had a child, I would not tolerate them treating their mother like that.
After the desert leg of the trip, the leader asked everyone to write about their feelings from the hike. When I read the elder twin’s composition, I felt a quiet wave of relief — relief that I had kept my temper and not snapped back at her cruelty.
While every other child was writing about the desert trek and the scenery of the Helan Mountains, the elder twin wrote almost exclusively about moments with her grandmother — pitching the tent together in the sand, feeling the grandmother’s worry through the gale. When they passed a dead goat on the slopes of the Helan Mountains, the grandmother made up a story on the spot, and the girl had written that into her composition too.
Children’s expressions can be so divided — one moment rejecting everyone’s kindness, the next remembering every last kindness. At the closing ceremony, three compositions were selected for prizes, and I awarded one of them to the elder twin, as a belated acknowledgment.
II. My Biggest Beer Customers – The Farm Volunteers
Once I had burned off my initial resentment, life really was quite joyful. Most of that happiness came from my fellow volunteers — we sustained one another through the chaos of farm life, giving each other the emotional fuel to keep going.
Xiao Zhu and Xiao Zhou were two young men born in the 2000s, fresh down from Beijing — the two younger lads who became my source of joy the moment I arrived. Every day they got up for an early shift to livestream, then went out to work in the fields, complaining of exhaustion and sneaking skives, yet clearly loving every minute of it.
Xiao Zhu is a full twelve years younger than me. I first clocked him at our inaugural sales meeting. In the Q&A session with the boss of the livestream e-commerce outfit, every single one of his questions hit the nail on the head — he was sharper than some of the worst journalists I have encountered. Once we grew closer, I learned he had grown up watching his mother navigate the business world.
Xiao Zhu had been sent to the farm by his mother. To get him out to build character, she had offered a sizeable allowance as an incentive. As for Xiao Zhou, he had tagged along simply because Xiao Zhu was going. What he did on the farm barely mattered — what mattered was being together with his mate.
Xiao Zhou and Xiao Zhu were always a pair. Before long they became regular helpers in the coffee house. When I was out leading a tour, they would camp inside minding the shop. Every day we would tidy the rubbish outside together, do the evening stock count, and sort through the Excel spreadsheets. Once the day’s work was done, we each slumped into a corner to play on our phones or laptops, not dragging ourselves back to bed until past midnight.
One night at twelve, as we stepped out of the coffee house, Xiao Zhu unfurled his parasol. I stared at him in bewilderment. “What is that for?” “I’m afraid the moonlight will burn you,” he said. I shot back, “It’s a new moon tonight — there is no moonlight.” And the three of us burst out laughing, stumbling off to our rooms.
They had landed smack in the middle of the farm’s leanest stretch for labour and gritted their teeth to take on the next two or three groups. During that period, I sat up with them drinking every night. Sometimes a parent passing by after an evening shower would ask worriedly, “Why are you still up?” I imagine their real thought was, “How are you going to run tomorrow’s activities when you’re still up this late?”
To such enquiries, we always cheerfully answered, “Nearly done, nearly done.”
Through all the late-night talk, I gradually pieced together the recruitment challenges farm volunteers face: people arrive out of curiosity, out of a longing for a change of scene, out of genuine interest in ecological agriculture — for all sorts of reasons — only to be thrown straight into Zhiliangtian’s busiest season, expected to shoulder tasks that neither side had properly discussed beforehand, or that they had never really wanted to do.
Peanut, for instance, was a middle-school PE teacher who had come to Zhiliangtian to learn about the farm’s operations. She owned a plot of land back home and wanted to develop it. Over the past year or two, she had been travelling during the school holidays, studying the business models and operations of different ecological farms. But once she arrived in Alxa, the daily work turned out to be the very thing she had been doing all along — teaching. After two groups, exhausted, Peanut left early.
Wheat stayed longer. When she arrived at the farm, she had just left a job at a progressive education institution and had planned simply to rest for a while. Instead, she found herself out with the study tour groups, minding the children. Frustrated, Wheat would vanish without warning, only surfacing late at night. She would invite me out for a drink, and I usually stayed out with her until we had had our fill. I can barely recall most of what we talked about now, but it always circled back to work, our respective histories, and our plans for the future.
The night before I saw Wheat off from the farm in early September, pleasantly drunk, she thanked me for the companionship and emotional support I had given her. That was when it struck me: the feeling of being needed by others had draped my farm life in a warm, rose-coloured glow.
III. The Kitchen Helpers Who Drink Coffee
On the day I left in early September, White Dew had just passed. A thick fog rolled into dry-by-nature Alxa Left Banner, creeping westward from the Helan Mountains until it swallowed the entire farm. Before getting into the car, I spotted Sister Bai in the distance herding sheep. We called out our goodbyes, and she told us to “remember to come back and visit.”
Sister Bai is from Gansu but has made a home here in Alxa over the years. In summer, on the farm, she works both in the fields and as a kitchen helper. By autumn, she becomes a shepherd again, driving sheep for a nearby pastoral household. Her home county of Minqin in Gansu is also a renowned melon-growing region, but there, people are a cheap resource — nothing like here in Alxa, Inner Mongolia, where wages can reach 200 yuan per person per day.
Sister Wang, Sister Bai’s kitchen partner, was the warmest of the workers towards me. A local woman, she could turn out a magnificent spread of northwestern home-style dishes; whenever she was at the stove, I ate so well and so full. I made sure to lay the compliments on thick every time I stepped into the kitchen.
One early-August evening, as the sun was setting, I sat outside the coffee house drinking a beer. Sister Wang walked past and said goodbye. I reflexively replied, “I won’t be around tomorrow.” She paused, then asked why. I quickly explained that I was off on a desert trek with a study tour and would only be back the day after. She let out a breath of relief. “Oh, that’s fine then — I’ll see you the day after. But you must tell me before you go! I do like you so much~!” And with that, Sister Wang drove off in her little white car.
Outside of romance, I rarely receive such open declarations of affection from adults. The evening after she left, the sunset glow was stunning — vast and tender.
Sister Wang and Sister Bai usually cook for thirty or forty people in the kitchen. Whenever Sister Wang saw the scale of work on the menu, she would treat herself and Sister Bai to two coffees. They picked up the habit because of me. One day it suddenly struck me that Labourer Coffee ought to be serving labourers, so I brewed them a pot. I had no idea that these women, drinking coffee for the very first time, would love it so much. “This stuff is brilliant — after drinking it, you can work the whole afternoon without feeling drowsy.” From then on, they became regular coffee drinkers alongside the volunteers.
Sometimes, in the kitchen, we vented about the work. Sister Wang would say with the gentle gravity of an elder: “Don’t do volunteer work like this again when you go home. Find a proper job and do it well. Don’t end up stuck in the countryside doing backbreaking field work like us. We never had the chance to study; we never had a choice.”
They offered me similar counsel time and again, sometimes even telling me not to come back after I left. But when I said my goodbye to Sister Wang just before departing, she told me: next time you come to Alxa, remember to visit me.
Wheat and I had both been on the receiving end of Sister Wang’s warnings. In those late nights drinking with Wheat, we would joke that we’d never do unpaid work like this again. But after leaving Alxa, Wheat went on to volunteer at a progressive school in Beijing. In November, she returned to the farm twice and told me Alxa was a place that stays with you.
I cannot remember which study tour’s departure it was, but a guest told Teacher Ma that Zhiliangtian felt wonderful — like a utopia. Teacher Ma waved the description away again and again.
Zhiliangtian is indeed no utopia. A utopia has no toilets to be scrubbed again and again every single day, no guests to nag over waste sorting, no steaming kitchen slaving over a communal pot of rice. A utopia certainly has none of the grinding realities of making a living.
This oasis in the desert carries countless imaginings and has been filled, person by person, with the rich texture of real human connection. Like the desert of Alxa, it may look barren, yet it holds its own stubborn vitality.
About the Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme
To date, two recruitment rounds have been completed, supporting more than forty partners across more than ten ecological farms nationwide in internships ranging from two months to a full year. The second cohort of interns is set to “graduate” at the end of 2023, and the third round of public recruitment will open in January 2024! Stay tuned to Foodthink for updates on the Ecological Agriculture Intern programme!
Editor: Xiong Yi