Foodthink says Mashu Town, Qiaojia County, Yunnan Province, is the country’s second-largest summer strawberry-growing base. The area was only recently removed from the list of deeply impoverished counties. The author of this piece met a strawberry worker born in the 1990s here — unusual among the mostly middle-aged and…

  16 June 2026 marked the fifth anniversary of Evil Valley’s founding. The skies had just cleared after the rain, so I rushed up to the roof to take photos. The forecast called for continuous rain—ten days before and ten days after. The old way of putting it is that…

    In 2019, when Chen Xi first visited Qiandongnan in Guizhou, she was captivated by the paddy fields and rice of Yangdong Village. At the time, she had only just returned from the United States, where she had lived for eleven years, and was working in a Beijing office…

  Foodthink says Globally, there are 75.6 million domestic workers, 76.2% of whom are women. Just 6% enjoy comprehensive social security. In China, those who have mastered the art of cooking, cleaning and caregiving are commonly known as “ayi” or “baomu”. In major cities, they shoulder the domestic burdens of…

  My grandmother, Yang Xiuying, is seventy-four years old. Weighing under 40 kg and standing less than a metre and a half tall, she began heading into the hills each day ahead of the Qingming Festival to dig for and gather bamboo shoots. She combed through seven or eight nearby…

  This year’s bayberry scandal has thrust this highly seasonal, delicate fruit into the spotlight. Whether they’ve been soaked in preservatives, which chemicals are legal, whether they pose any health risks, or what counts as a safe threshold—I’m entirely indifferent.   It’s not that I don’t eat bayberries; it’s simply…

  Heading to the town market, I found two snack stalls within three paces.   One stall was run by a local elderly woman. She has a permanent spot in the market, sitting on a low stool by a pot of hot oil, frying and selling dengzhangao (traditional Fujian fried…

  A note from Foodthink Can an urban professional rebuild their life and career in the countryside? Chen Xi, a former consultant who grew up in Beijing and spent a decade living and working in the United States, travelled to a Dong village in Guizhou for a water quality survey.…

I. Women’s Lives Standing at sixty and looking back on my thirties, the distance feels immense, as though I am gazing into another life altogether. Back in the 1990s, during my thirties, the cultural landscape was awash with end-of-the-century prophecies and apocalyptic fiction. Whether in novels or films, the central…