Bending to the Fields: Why Did I Fall in Love with “Repetitive Labour”?
I. More Than Just an Onlooker
At that time, everywhere I looked in my daily life, I was surrounded by nature. Yet when I passed through the fields, most of the time I could only be an onlooker—someone who simply thought they looked beautiful.
For the local farmers, growing crops is a means of livelihood. But how do they work with the land and nature to make it part of their own lives? Of this wisdom of survival, what has been lost from then until now, and what remains? That is a world of experience I could not enter as a bystander—beyond the reach of words, existing only in the daily labour.
But I did not want to be forever an onlooker. I wanted to take part in agriculture myself and see what kind of world it was. So this spring, I signed up for Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme and came to Xiqing Farm in Changziying Town, Daxing, Beijing.
Looking back over all the work I have done in the fields these three months, I think it amounts to coming to know the land through actual labour. To an outsider, this work might seem repetitive and tedious, yet without it, one could never truly feel the close bond between oneself and the soil, the weeds, the insects, the crops and other natural foods.
II. Weeds Are More Than Just Weeds
On a routine walk around the fields, I noticed that in the corn plot, the soil along the edge of one row had turned pale and dry, while the soil next to it remained moist. The whitened patch had no weeds shading it, but near the damp ground stood redroot amaranth up to knee-height, its oval leaves unfolding in overlapping tiers, sheltering a small cool patch beneath.
Sow-thistle and lyreleaf rockcress are also common weeds in the fields. In late March, I first saw aphids clustering thickly on the stems of the sow-thistle; a month later, in the same clump of sow-thistle, I was delighted to discover that seven-spot ladybird larvae had begun to hatch. The aphids’ preference for sow-thistle and lyreleaf rockcress lessens their incursion into the crops, while their predator, the seven-spot ladybird, has also found here a hospitable home.
As I recall, it rained only three times in Beijing in May. Weeding in the parched sweet potato field, I found that goosegrass had curled its leaves over vast stretches, pressing flat to the ground; a casual tug would lift a whole clump. As members of Poaceae, they need a great deal of water and struggle to put down roots without it. When rain came at the end of the month, the very next day weeding the same spot, even the young shoots of goosegrass were no longer easy to pull up—in just one day, they had already sent their roots deep and strong. It turns out that information about the land and the weather is written in the bodies of the little grasses.
III. Dealing with Bugs
On March nights, slugs gorge to their hearts’ content in the pak choi beds. There is no need to hunt for them deliberately—part aside two or three leaves and you can scoop up a whole cluster. They emerge in the cool, damp evenings, greedily devouring the endosperm inside corn seeds. Fail to catch them in time, and before long the nursery trays will be left with nothing but thin, empty seed coats.
In April mole crickets are frequent visitors, feasting on the tender roots and stems of young seedlings. Night after night, tomato plants fall victim, toppling one by one. There is little to be done, however, against a mole cricket that works its way underground. By sheer luck and chance, we can sometimes demolish their subterranean burrows while watering the beds, catching them as they surface in the current.
Ants have been tirelessly busy since the turn of spring. They are busy building homes after every rain clears; busy meeting rival colonies in open war over territory; busy herding aphid eggs, climbing up and down sweet pepper plants to find the best spots to settle them. The ants protect the aphids from their predator, the seven-spot ladybird; in return, the sweet honeydew that aphids excrete after sipping the crops’ sap is the ants’ favourite fare.
In May, Small Whites enter their hatching period, producing large numbers of cabbage white caterpillars on the leaves of Brassicaceae crops such as cauliflower and cabbage. They devour the leaves, leaving bright-green droppings. To be precise, they eat only the soft, juicy mesophyll; the leaf veins, tough with fibre, are too hard to bite through and survive as the only untouched part of the leaf. The larvae are translucent yellow-green. As they grow, their colour deepens, blending ever more closely with the leaf—they even mimic the translucent white, waxy bloom on the cuticle of brassica leaves. The little creatures know the way of survival.
More often than not, you will not actually see them in person: an earthworm leaves a small mound of oval castings; a bee rests on a leaf, leaving a golden trail; a mole cricket tunnels through the shallow soil, leaving a winding line of crumbled earth on the surface; a leaf miner scrawls undeciphered script across a leaf… Merely tracing where they have lingered is fascinating in itself.
IV. The Living Wisdom of Crops
After pinching off the axillary buds of several sturdy tomato seedlings, I planted them as cuttings in the soil, giving them a handful of water each morning and waiting for them to take root. For the first few days, the cuttings lay slumped askew on the ground, their leaves gradually withering, listless, looking for all the world as though their days were numbered. A few days later, the upper halves of the leaves had curled and dried, yet the lower portions of the very same leaves began to push up fresh emerald green—each one narrating a story where death and new life intersect.
One sweet pepper seedling, stunted in stature and yellowing at the leaves, was the first to flower. Its growing conditions were considerably harsher than those of the other seedlings that had yet to bloom—situated at the edge of the polytunnel, exposed to intense light, with soil that lost moisture rapidly; frequent drought was the key reason for its poor growth. The plant had long since recognised this, and so it chose to divert the nutrients that would otherwise have fuelled stem and leaf growth into reproductive growth, allocating its limited resources to flower and set seed ahead of the others.
The flavour of strawberries varies greatly across the seasons: in winter, sweet strawberries store sugars to ward off the bitter cold; come summer, that tartness is their deliberate choice for antioxidant defence in the high heat. Clever birds and insects are drawn only to fully ripe strawberries, becoming the plant’s seed dispersers. A ripe strawberry chooses the right moment to “speak”—it releases a sweet, delectable fragrance to announce to the world: you may come and eat me now!
V. Witnessing Food’s Past and Present Lives
In large part, it was also because Wang Xin, the farm steward, had practised ecological planting rooted in “rebuilding biodiversity in the surrounding area” from the very beginning, giving me the conditions to grow close to my food and accompany it as it matured.
In an ordinary market, fruit and vegetables present only two states—ripe or not yet ripe—and the secrets of their past and present lives seem as legendary as the Stone Monkey’s. How could I have imagined that one day I would see the whole cucumber family, tiny to tall, lined up in a row along the vine; a baby watermelon no bigger than a jujube, swaddled in a ring of soft down; green, unripe tomatoes with slender calyxes stretching powerfully toward the sky, their taut skins gleaming with fine hairs in the sunlight; corn stalks sending out aerial roots like little footprints, driving deep into the earth to draw up nourishment and feed the organs above; the tips of young cobs pushing out tender pink female ears, swaying in the breeze…
In an interview, the writer Yoshii Shinobu recalled her time living on a farm: “It was exhausting there, but I truly felt I was living earnestly—the sense of life and death being bound up with my very self was something extraordinary.”
It was only after having the chance to witness crops complete the full arc of their life cycle that I came to understand her words completely.
Three months seemed like an age, yet at the same time no more than a single breath. I can still recall the day of sowing—how the tiny seeds left my palm and, in every invisible moment that followed, grew on quietly:
The seed sinks into the earth; a force gestating in darkness pushes it upward until the surface cracks and loosens. The stem, a closed cotyledon still wearing its seed coat, and a small clod of soil break through together.
With luck, they keep growing—stem taller, leaves more luxuriant—passing from vegetative growth into reproductive growth. They flower, complete pollination by many different means, set small fruit, the fruit swells, and one day you find the branch laden with full, ripe produce.
Throughout this process, my heart swayed between elation and sorrow, but what I felt most was a deep tenderness—tenderness that, so long as I was willing to draw close, I could always glimpse the transcendent power nestled within their tenacious lives.
VI. The “Joy” of Repetitive Labour
Now, looking back over these months—turning the soil, pulling weeds, raising seedlings, watering, catching insects—I replay in my mind the images of swinging a sickle through last year’s corn stalks, dragging a leveling harrow across bumpy ground, and spreading fertiliser with a spade across freshly turned earth… I realise that the long, repetitive labour itself is more precious than any harvest. In each day’s work, I feel my body and my heart, in certain fleeting moments, joined to the land—honest, concrete, and focused. In those moments I taste a kind of transcendent stillness and joy.
Such moments are very rare. Most of the time it is tedium, exhaustion and disarray that surround me, a thought that rises again and again—”I don’t want to do this anymore, forget it”—and yet it is precisely because of those uncomfortable feelings that I can hold on with such clarity to the arrival of every peaceful, joyful moment. I know that moment existed. I know, and I hope, that it will find me again around some corner of life.
I would like to close with a line from “Exhortation to Diligence” in the Huainanzi, a line that mirrors how I have gradually come to see my own role in agriculture over these past months:
“Grain crops sprout in spring; it is through human toil added to them that the five grains reach their full growth.”
Crops in nature follow the rhythm of heaven and earth to grow. The farmer, as a collaborator, draws out their vitality through sowing, feeding and tilling, so that the five grains may grow freely, and people are granted a harvest in turn. When we hold the natural world in sufficient reverence and respect, there is no exploitation in that relationship, no conquest—the earth simply offers its bounty of its own accord.
Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme
Four recruitment rounds have now been completed, supporting more than eighty partners across over ten ecological farms nationwide in placements ranging from three months to one year.
Editor: Zheng Yuyang