Grain Takes Root in My Ears
Foodthink Notes
As a child, a grain of rice fell into Zha’s ear canal. Mistaking it for a louse, she assumed it would simply jump out on its own. By the time she and her father walked from the village to the county hospital, the doctor told her the seed had already taken root and sprouted. The divide between village children and the natural world is as thin as an eardrum. In the village, people contend with the “wildly growing” forces of nature, defending the cultivated land, dwellings, and bodies they have secured for themselves. Survival operates on a physiological level. Zha translates the flexing of muscles, the life and death of cells during labour, and the visceral exertion of “heaving strain” into prose.
Foodthink has extracted several passages from three chapters: “Thanks to the Rice Paddy”, “Endless Farming Chores”, and “Many Kinds of Weather”. Whether in the city or the countryside, sustaining life remains a timeless endeavour. We are also grateful for writing, which allows us to briefly step away from this ceaseless physical struggle. We thank Shanghai Translation Publishing House for granting permission to publish this article.
I. Thanks to the Rice Paddy
After the spring showers, the village lay hazy, the rolling hills veiled in a fine mist. The air carried the scent of grass, edged with a faint, earthy tang. Mum was going out to plant the rice seedlings.
The paddy had been ploughed, the soil turned over and flooded with fresh water. Tiny aquatic leaves had already pushed through, unable to wait, while ripples played across the surface. Dragonflies occasionally dipped to skim the water, frogs croaked from the earthen bunds, and every now and then a school of tadpoles would glide past. The field was ready for the seedlings.
That year, Dad had qualified as a village schoolteacher and could only come home during the holidays. Mum disliked hiring outside help; in our village, accepting a favour meant you’d owe a return favour later. As a result, transplanting the rice often took up the whole day.
Mum set out at first light. She had to go first to a neighbour’s nursery plot to pull up the seedlings we’d left with them to grow, then carry them back to our field to begin the real work.
Around half past eight, my older sister and I built a fire and put the rice on to boil. We shaped the cooked rice into tight balls and toasted them over the coals until the crust turned crisp and golden. While the bamboo steamer (a traditional cooking vessel widely used across Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan for steaming rice) kept the rest warm, we packed up the toasted rice balls and headed down to the field to help Mum.
Transplanting was gruelling work, particularly for grown-ups who had to remain bent over for hours. Mum had to stand up every now and then to knead her aching back. I was small and didn’t mind the work, but my hands were too little to plant properly. The seedlings leaned in every direction and soon started drifting away. My sister, cross with my clumsiness, would scold me even as she followed behind, straightening each one by hand. “Leave it, little one,” Mum would say. “Go and eat your rice ball first.”
I walked back up to the bund, washed the mud from my hands, and was about to break off a piece of my rice ball when, suddenly, I noticed two leeches clinging to my calf. They were drawing my blood.
“Mum! Mum!”
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’ve got leeches on me.”
Mum dropped a handful of seedlings into the mud nearby and hurried over. “Wait here. Go and borrow some matches from Ah Du.” (Ah Du is a kinship term for a nephew, though this man was actually in his forties; our family simply outranked his in the lineage hierarchy.)
Mum came back with the matches, lit a short stick, blew it out, and used the smouldering end to gently singe the leech’s head. It writhed in panic. Mum waited for the right moment and gave a sharp tug, pulling it right off. She dealt with the second one in exactly the same way.
“Just as well they hadn’t burrowed in. Ah Mai,” she called to my sister (her childhood nickname), “you stop working too. Come and have a bite.”
The three of us sat on the earth, each breaking off a small piece of toasted rice and eating slowly. From afar came the laughter and singing of neighbours who had hired extra hands for the planting. They sang a traditional springtime song in the Yi language: “The water runs silver, the field birds return; they carry a silver ribbon, weaving it into rain above the sky…”
The rice grew in quiet silence. By the time the wild mushroom season faded and the clouds at the horizon deepened to rust, it was time to harvest.
The harvest was usually timed for a day when everyone was free, since Dad, who taught at the village primary school, and Young Fifth Uncle, who was studying in town, both had to come home to work the foot-pedal thresher. Young Fifth Uncle was only five or six years older than my sister, yet he already did all the heavy adult labour.
The threshers of that era were not only painfully slow but incredibly labour-intensive. The worst of it was how they sent rice and husks flying in every direction; the fine, needle-like bristles on the chaff would sting the skin and leave it burning and itchy.
It was on that very day, amid the threshing, that a single grain of rice flew into my ear. I didn’t notice a thing. I was too busy patrolling the field, hunting for any stray quail we’d missed and herding their whole family clear, lest they be caught by the sickles.
The grain of rice that had lodged itself in my ear canal slowly slid deeper until the pain became unbearable. Then, one day during a lesson, I suddenly felt a sharp heat in the throbbing ear, followed by a trickle of blood and fluid running down from it.
The teacher contacted my father, and he took me by the hand. We set off for a town far from home to get the ear looked at.
I had always feared doctors, assuming they were stern and frightening. On top of that, I didn’t understand all the Mandarin they spoke, which left me feeling awkward and tense. The doctor was a man in his fifties with very little hair but a full beard. Using a set of instruments, he extracted a dark, swollen grain of rice from my ear. “It’s been soaked until it’s nearly sprouting. What happened? Why bring her in only now? The eardrum looks damaged. We can’t patch it up here, and neither can the county hospital. You’ll need to take the child to Yuxi for that.” He spoke with sharp urgency, and I only caught fragments of what he said. My father, his eyes red-rimmed, nodded silently and took me to collect the prescribed medicine.
By the time we left the clinic, it was past six in the evening. The fading light of the sunset lay softly across the rice fields flanking the road. Most had already been harvested, leaving behind stumps and quail nests, their surfaces catching the reddish-orange shimmer of shallow water.
We needed to catch an inter-township bus back to the township first, and then hike down from the hills to our village. But after six, it was too late; the scheduled buses had already stopped running. Father and I had to walk along the road and hope for luck, waiting to see if a passing car would be willing to give us a lift.
In his left hand, Father carried the notebook he had bought for my elder sister along with his shoulder bag; with his right, he held mine. That day, I was wearing white wool socks with frayed edges, a pair of blue plastic sandals, and ginger-yellow knitted trousers.
After walking for about an hour, Father asked, “Can you keep going, little sister?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Does your ear hurt?”
“No.”
Father squeezed the notebook and medicine into his bag, freed up his arms, and bent down to pick me up.
“Father, I don’t need carrying. I can walk for another minute.”
“A minute? How long is a minute, then?”
“Sister said a minute is the same as an hour.”
Father chuckled and patted my back. Just then, yellow medicinal fluid began to drip from my ear. Father lifted me down and placed me on a raised earth bank by the roadside, quickly pulling at his own shirt to wipe it away.
“Does it hurt?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
He squatted in front of me, his hands resting on my knees, head bowed. Tears fell steadily onto my ginger-yellow trousers, spreading into a brownish circle. Before long, a patch on my trousers had stained dark.
“Father, please don’t cry. My ear really doesn’t hurt, I promise.”
Father did not raise his head. We stayed there until the last light faded from the rice fields and the forest behind us began to fill with the calls of birds.
We walked for a very long time that day. It was ten o’clock at night before we finally reached the village, still without a ride.
From that year on, I never went rice-harvesting again. In the years that followed, on the day everyone went to thresh the rice, I would always stay behind to spread manure or chop pig feed.
Later still, around 2003, we no longer had to deliver grain to the state grain depot. Rice on the market became remarkably cheap, and many families stopped growing it altogether. At last, the rice fields had fulfilled their purpose.
II. Many Kinds of Weather
“Tomorrow will bring rain, so we can’t spray the crops today.” She would then switch the plan to weeding, cutting back the wild grass along the field edges and clearing the irrigation ditches. “If the water can’t drain away, the soil will stay too damp, and the tobacco will get sick.”
I picked up a few basics from watching her. If dark clouds gathered beyond the distant hills, rain wasn’t guaranteed. The real clue lay overhead: if the sky directly above was clear with few clouds, the rain would likely pass us by. But if thin clouds began to gather and the light dimmed ever so slightly, the rain would come.
Fair weather was just as easy to read. The air carried the scent of a fine day; if that smell was strong, sunshine was assured for days to come. Likewise, rain had its own smell before it arrived. Catch that scent, and no matter how fierce the sun, rain was inevitable.
This method rarely failed, even in the changeable heat of midsummer.
Hail was the hardest to foresee. It gave us no time to prepare, and sometimes arrived before the rain itself. A few times, to protect the tobacco leaves from hail damage, my sister and I hurriedly threw tarps over them.The hail left us bruised and purple. The pain, coupled with the sharp cracking sounds, still gives me a chill whenever I recall it.Such frantic last-minute efforts usually saved only a fraction of the crop.
In those days, there was no agricultural insurance. If the hail wrecked the tobacco, the entire growing season was lost.Hail was our greatest fear. Fortunately, it was rare.
Wind was an essential companion. Many farming tasks relied on it. When drying strips of radish or shredding it, we needed the wind to do the drying; when threshing wheat and rapeseed, we counted on it to blow away the chaff and dust. But in the sweltering days from late summer to early autumn, the wind grew stingy: it seldom visited, and when it did, it was only a fleeting puff, not strong enough to move a single grain of chaff.
Mama learned a way to call the wind from my grandmother.
When the wind was needed, she would tighten her headscarf, place her hands on her hips, stand at the far end of the field ridge, and whistle into the open valley.
It was a melodious whistle. Mama said the tune helped the wind understand which way to go. Because the wind always came, the melody felt like magic to me, and I learned it quickly.
The next time we called for the wind, Mama and I would whistle together.
The wind was sometimes strong, sometimes weak, but it always came.
As I write this, I looked up some information, wondering what was actually happening in the world around me and Mama when we blew that tune.
“Whistling doesn’t actually ‘draw’ the wind in. It merely causes the surrounding air to move through the vibrations of the sound, creating a breeze. When you whistle, the fast-moving air from your mouth and tongue disturbs the air around you, causing small-scale air movement. This moving air drags nearby air along with it, producing a relatively weak breeze.” That’s what the internet says.
So it wasn’t magic. I felt a twinge of disappointment, but then I laughed at my computer screen and made up my mind right then and there to forget the science and firmly believe it was magic.It is one of the few shared joys I have with Mama, and I would rather keep it in my memory forever as her superpower.
Neither our sister nor I had a clue. Seeing our bewildered faces, she immediately regained her composure and declared: “Shangzhai area: thunderstorms, ten thousand millimetres.”
Sometimes her gestures were so over-the-top that my sister and I couldn’t help but laugh. Our sister pointed out that Mum looked nothing like the woman on television, but she still kept begging for another show. Mum wiped the sweat from her brow, her sagging breasts swaying beneath her baggy old clothes. Like every other woman in the village, she had never worn a bra, which only lent her a certain unselfconscious ease. When she stood at the edge of the field performing, she was a far cry from her everyday self. She looked genuinely happy, entirely unbound. The valley formed her backdrop; her hands swept through the dry wind, and even the dust she stirred up seemed to come alive.
Of course, the performance would never last long. Just as she was swept up in the joy of it, she would abruptly rein herself in, drop the smile, and turn back to her labour. Yet in those fleeting minutes when she played the weather forecaster, we all felt a distinctly palpable happiness.
III. Endless Farm Work
By the time I realised it, it was too late; I had already reached the age for fieldwork. Tending the fields was no longer a game between me and the world; it had become a livelihood.
In the dead of winter, I used to think that once the turnips were harvested, I could properly settle in for the New Year and have a rest. In truth, by the second day of the Lunar New Year, I had to make haste to turn the soil. Ploughing, harrowing—once the ground was worked, I had to trim the ridge grass, and simultaneously sow tobacco seeds and raise seedlings. I imagined I could simply sit back and wait for the seedlings to mature, but little did I know I had to prepare the planting ground as quickly and thoroughly as possible during this time: shaping the earth into beds, scattering manure to nourish it, and later reforming those beds into ridges. After the tobacco seedlings were planted came a long, meticulous period of care: laying plastic film, applying sprays, eradicating pests, stripping the film, weeding, topping… Every single step demands considerable time, and every plant must be attended to. Multiply that unit of labour by thousands, or even tens of thousands, and only then is the growing season complete.
The truly heavy work was yet to come: heading up the mountain to gather wood for curing tobacco, carrying it home on our backs, preparing the tobacco curing house, picking the leaves, neatly threading them onto curing poles, and hanging them string by string inside. We would then stand watch by the kiln day and night, tending the flames and regulating the temperature without a break. After several days of curing, the dried leaves were carefully taken down, stored string by string in the attic, then removed leaf by leaf, laid flat, graded, bundled, and kept in a cool, dry place before being collected and transported in bulk to the tobacco station.
Clearing the land after a tobacco crop was far more troublesome than after radishes; just digging out the roots took considerable effort. Plants as tall as a person had to be uprooted one by one, followed by another round of ploughing, harrowing, and breaking up the soil.
Cultivating tobacco was a major farming undertaking in rural Yunnan, so every time we finished tending the fields, the whole family would feel a profound sense of relief. That relief would not last long, though—it was time to plant the cabbages.
Back to forming ridges, digging small holes, scattering sheep manure and urea, placing each bought or home-raised cabbage seedling, firming the soil around them, and watering…
Fortunately, cabbage isn’t too fussy. It doesn’t require the meticulous care that tobacco does, provided the weather holds and the rains come on time. But if there’s no rain, you have to trek out to water it every few days.
As the cabbage grew, it was time to sow dew beans or green beans, or perhaps snow peas. The process was much the same: raising ridges, sowing seeds, and for the beans, the extra step of building trellises. That meant heading up into the hills to find suitable bamboo or wooden poles, which was quite a chore in itself.
Once this harvest was in, the land got no rest, and neither did the people. It was back to ploughing, harrowing, and breaking the soil… Planting radishes wasn’t just a matter of scattering seeds; first, the manure had to be sun-dried.
Sheep dung was best, mixed with cow and chicken manure, plus a bit of nitrogen fertiliser. Some households just used compound fertiliser straight away. After leaving it to dry for several days, it was broken up, bagged, and shouldered out to the fields.
Next, three people had to work in sync: one digging the furrows, one spreading the manure, and one sowing the radish seeds. The spacing between each seed hole had to be even, the manure measured precisely—not too much, not too little—and the radish seeds limited to three per hole. Crucially, they couldn’t touch the manure directly, or the seedlings would be scorched.
To avoid burning the seeds, some families waited until the radishes had sprouted before top-dressing. But that meant bending over to fertilise tens of thousands of seedlings one by one. It was better for the radishes, but far too labour-intensive for people.
Before the radishes matured, there was weeding, thinning, watering when it didn’t rain, and digging drainage ditches when it did. After the Mid-Autumn Festival, when the radishes had swollen, every household would carry wooden stakes out to the fields, hammer them along the ridges, and string nylon ropes between them to make drying racks. That was the signal to start slicing the radishes into strips.
Radishes pulled from the ground, often as tall as a child, had their tops and tails trimmed and were washed clean of dirt. They were loaded into bamboo baskets, carried to the foot of the drying racks, and run through a simple cross-blade device twice. Each whole radish was then hung on the nylon rope, its layers carefully separated so they wouldn’t stick together, allowing the air to dry them evenly.
Once the strips were up to dry, everyone prayed for clear skies. A single rainstorm would turn them red, or worse, mouldy and black, ruining weeks of work. Most years, the weather was watched like a hawk. Roughly a fifth of the crop would inevitably get rained on, but the rest could be carefully gathered, graded, and tied into bundles roughly the thickness of an adult man’s ankle. Only then were they ready to be packed and taken to market.
And then the land was back to the same old trio of crops. Spring arrived, and the Baima led the community in sacrifices to the earth. There would be a single day of brief celebration during the Dragon Worship Festival, and then it was time to plant tobacco again.
The farming tasks described above were merely the mainstays of my hometown, or rather, my family’s livelihood. The rest were too numerous to count off in a few words. On the whole, a farmer’s life is complex and tense, bearing little resemblance to any pastoral idyll; it’s a life of constant anxiety.
Apart from tobacco, which usually had a fixed buy-back price, farming every other crop was a gamble. Cabbage might be worth two yuan a kilogram while it was still small, only to drop to 0.15 yuan by the time it was ready to harvest. Radishes were the same: ten yuan a kilogram when you arrived at the trading market at dawn, seven by noon, perhaps twelve again the next morning, and six by the third day.
As for snow peas, green beans, dew beans… these were truly a matter of fate. If you were lucky, you’d shift the entire crop in one go; if not, it would just rot in the ground.
It wasn’t just prices that kept us on edge, but the weather too. Hail was the worst offender, followed by prolonged droughts or relentless flooding, either of which could wipe out a year’s labour and leave you with nothing.
Whether the harvest was good or bad, being a farmer was always hard work. That is why I was so terrified of spending my whole life as one.
Farmwork never seemed to end.
Except for school hours, every other moment was spent working alongside the adults. Everything was done by hand. While my mother drove the oxen ahead to harrow the field, my sister and I followed, pulling up roots, breaking up clods with hoes and pitchforks, and spotting cutworms—the dreaded pests—we’d pinch them between our fingers and crush them one by one.
Of all the chores, planting tobacco was the most gruelling. The seedlings were expensive and fragile, each one requiring careful placement and gentle firming of the soil. They didn’t store well and had to be planted within a narrow window. During planting season, we’d always head to the fields before dawn and return after dark. The sun would beat down until our heads swam and our backs burned. By late summer, my ears would always start peeling, flaking off layer by layer like a snake’s skin.
Our fingers scraped back and forth in the dry earth until calluses formed on our palms. Dirt baked into our nails, and hangnails sprouted like fuzzy blossoms around the edges.
Weeding the tobacco was just as taxing. On sweltering days, with cicadas screaming overhead, my sister and I would crouch beneath the plants, left hand steadying a leaf, right hand swiftly pulling weeds. “Ah!” my sister would suddenly cry out. I’d look up to see her clutching a snake, flinging it over the field ridge, and then bursting into tears.
My mother would comfort her for a moment, but only a moment, before my sister was back on her knees, working again.
It wasn’t just snakes. While weeding, we’d also catch frogs and skinks, by comparison, grasshoppers, snails and slugs were already considered fairly gentle visitors.
Topping the tobacco plants was equally unpleasant. Being so much shorter than the plants, we had to keep our arms raised high, and the topping chemical would run down our arms and into our clothes. By nightfall, our armpits would burn with pain.
Tobacco leaves carry a sticky residue, so after handling them, our hands would always be coated in it, turning black once exposed to the air. Our fingers were perpetually stained—not sun-tanned, but chemically blackened, looking grimy and smelling foul, as though we had never washed them. While attending the Han school, those black hands cost me many opportunities to play with my classmates. Fortunately, I was not the only student whose family grew tobacco. As soon as the school bell rang, I would rush to join the older pupils with stained fingers, grab my rice bowl and head to the canteen. We would naturally line up behind those with clean, white hands, waiting patiently until they had finished queuing before we stepped forward.
Farm labour was back-breaking, cycling through spring, summer, autumn and winter in an endless loop. Yet, despite our daily toil, our family could barely scrape by and fill our stomachs. Back then, I couldn’t help but wonder: would we really starve to death if we stopped farming? Could we not take a rest for a while? How many people in the world were like me, trailing behind our parents and toiling without pause, never allowed to stop?
The books praised farmers as great. But where was this greatness? Was ‘great’ not a complimentary term? Why did those deemed great have to endure such hardship?
Life offered no answers. I had a vague feeling that only by studying hard at the Han school could I possibly escape a lifetime of farm labour. Sadly, my grades were poor. The chores did not lessen because I was attending school; instead, the workload during the winter and summer holidays only grew heavier. One evening after a thunderstorm, I set out with a carrying basket on my back and a sickle in hand to gather pig fodder. The stones along the riverbank were terribly slick. I lost my footing and pitched forward onto them. The fodder from my basket tumbled out, plunged into the river, was swept away by the swift current, and vanished from sight within minutes.
That day, I lay alone by the riverbank and wept. My faint, hazy hopes for the future drifted away just as quickly as the pig fodder. I felt certain that I was doomed to farm for the rest of my life, just like every other farmer in the village, just like my mother, just like my grandmother—labouring until my body withered, my eyes clouded over, and my life finally ended.
Of course, for someone raised on the land, there were one or two chores I genuinely enjoyed. Foremost among them was foraging for medicinal herbs. Strictly speaking, herb gathering did not qualify as farm labour. It lacked the pressing deadlines of agriculture; there was no need to race against the clock or the weather to keep up with the rhythm of the fields. The herbs would simply remain there, waiting, regardless of whether I chose to gather them or not.
Whenever we went out herding the cattle, my sister and I would take along our small hoes and sling over the cross-body bags our mother had stitched for us from woven sacks. We’d pack two rice balls inside and make our way to the hills where the herbs grew. The cattle knew exactly where to graze, so we were free to disappear into the undergrowth and begin digging for herbs.
Foraging for wild herbs is genuinely exhausting work. You spend the whole time bent double, searching, and your lower back starts aching after just a short while. But what makes it worthwhile is that wild strawberries and raspberries invariably grow alongside the herbs. They’re wonderfully fresh and sweet. Picking the berries as you dig is a far more cheerful way to spend the day than hacking away at the soil under a blistering sun.
As a rule, by the time the cattle had filled their bellies, our shoulder bags were equally full, and it was time to head home with the herd. The herbs we brought back would be spread out to dry for a few days. Before term started again, we’d lug them over to the Han Chinese villages to sell. A whole weekend’s labour would typically fetch us two or three yuan. The woman buying them would pour our herbs into her own large woven sack, sit right on top, and tramp them down hard before handing over the cash.
……
Foraging for wild mushrooms was another decent way to earn a living.
We’d set off first light, armed with small bamboo baskets, picking out a sturdy stick for the journey before disappearing into the dense woodland. Around our family’s village, the easiest fungi to come by were king boletes, sheep’s milk mushrooms, and coral mushrooms. All three were perfectly safe to eat and made for a delicious stir-fry. They weren’t worth much money, so even if we brought them home, our parents wouldn’t bother selling them. We’d take the initiative to wash them thoroughly, secretly hoping that our father might use a bit more of his precious lard when cooking them, granting us a wonderfully fragrant feast.
As we grew older, we became far more keen on finding the kind of fungi that actually fetched a price: termite mushrooms, dry-stalk mushrooms, yellow boletes, blue-staining mushrooms, and green-cap mushrooms, the first time I learned that a single palm-sized dry-stalk mushroom fetched as much as an entire school year’s herb foraging, I was utterly floored. I couldn’t fathom why people in the cities would willingly pay such steep prices for them. Yes, dry-stalk mushrooms are wonderfully savoury, but the humble coral mushrooms don’t taste half bad either. Still, the fact that someone was willing to pay for mushrooms was a good thing. It opened a route to earning our keep. Every time we headed into the hills, I’d picture a vast carpet of dry-stalk mushrooms ahead of us, just to steel myself for hours of searching through the damp, post-rain forest. But termite mushrooms and dry-stalk mushrooms were never going to fall into a child’s lap. Compared to the dedicated foragers who threw themselves wholly into the hunt during the rainy season, we were woefully amateur. They knew exactly how to guard their “mushroom patches”, leaving absolutely no stragglers for us to find.
I remember one year when the rains were particularly generous. The perfect balance of moisture and sunlight brought out an abundance of fungi, and my sister and I managed to gather a fair few yellow boletes. We sold them for over eighty yuan. That term, when we queued up for dinner, we finally saw a bit of meat in our bowls.
I never took a shine to farm labour, yet I could never bring myself to despise it either. In a childhood marked by stark poverty, agricultural work was at least something that propped up my fragile sense of self. It made me feel I was doing something “useful”, and it gave me a glimmer of hope: “Even if I’m hopeless at my studies, at least I can earn a crust by working the land.” Thank God for that little hope. Without it, I have no idea how I would have survived those days of frustration, confusion, and anxiety when schoolwork just refused to stick.
All images in this article were provided by the author.