Going Home to Farm, Creating a Self-Determined Life: One-Pot Nun’s Little Table
This is the fourth instalment of “One-Pot Nun’s Little Table”. It will explore Xia Lili’s culinary experiments, farmer Hu Xuemei’s farming experiments, and a teacher’s experiments in nature-based arts education. Within circumstances that left them passive, these women have been building a life of kindness, new kinds of connection, and self-fulfilment around natural, farm-grown food. How exactly do they think, and how do they act?
I. Unboxing a Vegetable Blind Box: A Little “Shock”
Perhaps because my door and radio are always open, or perhaps because households that live next to the Yulin market yet still shop for produce online are genuinely rare, the delivery courier assigned to this area got to know me after just one or two trips. He has learned to bring the vegetables before nine in the morning, every Monday, because he knows that once nine o’clock strikes, I will have started my fixed writing routine and often miss the phone call.
Hu Xuemei’s vegetable box is rather like a blind box: the varieties she sends are up to her random selection. For a cook like me, who has long been committed to keeping everything under tight control, that is somewhat of a challenge. Still, I am confident that everyday home cooking is all within my grasp, and I want to seize this “passive” opportunity to draw out my own potential. So every unboxing is filled with excitement and anticipation — a bit like a student who believes they have mastered every topic and is just waiting for the teacher to hand out the test paper, brimming with a blind confidence: whatever she sends, I can make it taste good.
Garlic shoots — just the thing to pair with a slab of cured pork in a classic twice-cooked wok dish.
Rapeseed shoots — half goes into an egg-drop soup; the rest is blanched and laid beneath the dumplings in the bowl, turning it into the most popular “veggie-heavy noodle bowl”.
Moso bamboo shoots — peeled, cut with a rolling cut, and dropped into the stew pot alongside a chunk of Chuxiong ham left over from New Year and some fresh spare ribs. It makes for a modified version of yan du xian, the traditional braised soup of cured ham and bamboo shoots.
Ice plant — a little unusual, but how hard could it be? Wash it, drain it, mix up a bowl of dipping sauce or a hot-and-sour dressing, toss it all together, and there you have a Chinese-style salad.
Garlic scapes — far too precious to waste. Such a tiny bunch that stir-frying it alone with shredded meat would look more like a meat-and-sauce dish. So I hatched a plan: popped to the market for Chaozhou hand-beaten beef meatballs and a pack of Little Zhao’s rustic village pork sausages, added oyster mushrooms and chanterelles, and simmered a big medley, tossing in cut sections of garlic scapes just before taking the pot off the heat.
And yet, even for someone like me who eats whatever arrives and improvises as things come, these past few months have not been without a few scratches at my scalp. One time, I opened Hu Xuemei’s vegetable box and there, tucked inside, was an enormous kohlrabi. I froze on the spot — goodness gracious! It had been at least thirty years since I had last eaten kohlrabi.
II. Rewriting My Kohlrabi Memories
The last time I ate kohlrabi, my mother, my brother and I were still living in one damp, sunless room in the old family quarters of the Qingcheng Paper Factory.
Our father had passed away only recently, Mother’s new job had not yet been settled, and the meagre pay of a family worker barely stretched to the end of the month. By spring, kohlrabi was a daily staple.
Kohlrabi has a thick skin and keeps well, so the stall-holders would sell it by the heap. When the market wound down and they started to “dǎ duì” — dumping the leftovers by the pile at rock-bottom prices — she would buy a great mound at a time, every time.
Even more dreadful than kohlrabi at every single meal was kohlrabi at every single meal made exactly the same way. So ingrained was that bland, repetitive taste that when I later read in a book that kohlrabi is also called “wú jīng” (turnip), I simply could not connect the jīng — the exquisite essence — of the old saying “qù wú cún jīng” (to weed out the coarse and keep the finest) with those kohlrabi slices my mother used to stir-fry.
“Jīng” means the finest part of anything, but the moment I think of those stir-fried kohlrabi slices, the only thing I recall is a revolting smell of rotten turnip flooding up my nostrils, as though even my stomach were convulsing.
Ugh — that truly is a past one would rather not look back on.
Alas! A person who has not touched kohlrabi in thirty years opens the vegetable “blind box” she paid a small fortune to subscribe to and finds — after all this time (or rather, after all this deliberate avoidance) — a kohlrabi staring back at her. It felt like taking a boomerang square in the chest. But what else could I do?
Over the long, solitary stretch of my adult life, I gradually acquired one particular knack: a willingness to accept everything that fate sends, whether as a plain sign or a subtle hint. Whatever turns up, I face it first, then sort it out.
Well, I have a kohlrabi in my kitchen now, so I shall treat it as an opportunity — a chance to rewrite the memory I carry of this stubborn little vegetable.
I picked out the big kohlrabi, washed it, crouched quietly by the kitchen bin and peeled it, then cut it into fine julienne and tossed it with salt. I stir-fried seasoned shredded pork until it was dry and golden, added the squeezed-dry kohlrabi just before turning off the heat, and — with a creative flourish — finely sliced the garlic shoots that had arrived in the same parcel to use as a garnish, lending the dish a fresh fragrance and a splash of green.
It was so crisp! So delicious! In that instant, I rediscovered this round little fellow.
The second time Hu Xuemei’s kohlrabi turned up in a delivery, I actually felt a flicker of delight and excitement. I lifted my knife and sliced it cleanly in two. Half I cut into thin shavings, dressed with a pinch of salt and a splash of sesame oil, added minced garlic, and made a cool, simple salad. The other half I cut into chunks, boiled in plain water with just the faintest whisper of salt. Both were unexpectedly, wonderfully good.
And with that, I gave my wholehearted blessing to whoever first named kohlrabi “wú jīng” — the turnip. For it truly is the jīng of the old saying “qù wú cún jīng” — the exquisite part worth keeping. This was the finest harvest of my kohlrabi season this year.
III. The Proactive Hu Xuemei
Once Grain Buds arrives, the spring harvest begins, and vegetable supplies finally emerge from the lean gap between one season and the next. After Grain in Ear, the range only grows richer by the week: cucumbers, luffa, courgettes, Er Jing Tiao chillies, spiral chillies, aubergines, sweetcorn, tomatoes, water spinach, red amaranth …
Scroll through her Moments posts and you see her field’s vegetables and fruit looking so plump and glistening you half expect them to burst off the screen. Every single one seems to be crying: “Come and see how beautifully Hu Xuemei has grown us!” As her customer, I could not help but look forward in secret to receiving my own favourites.
“Grow the land well” and “manage the land well” — these are the two fundamental operational demands that Community Supported Agriculture places on its farmer partners.
Compared with managing the land well, growing the land well is rather the easier of the two. Our farmers have years of experience in the fields, and with the growth of online networks and agricultural social organisations, they have encountered the new thinking around ecological civilisation, glimpsed fresh directions in society, and found more and more opportunities to learn agronomic knowledge and swap growing techniques. Learning as they go, practising as they go, the soil improves, the ecosystem matures, and the quality of the crops rises in step.
“Managing the land well,” though, brings a whole new set of challenges. How does a farmer interact and communicate with consumers online? Every day, from dawn to dusk, our farmers are busy tending their “treasures” in the soil — finding the time for any sort of “online marketing” is almost out of the question.
On this front, Hu Xuemei is more than keeping pace. She is industrious and regularly posts updates on Moments to keep her customers informed about what is happening on the farm. She is also wise enough to seek help: she knows full well that one person cannot handle the selling alone, so she partnered with Tian’an Life and now sells through their distribution network. And she is wholeheartedly invested in community development, taking an active part in Chengdu’s life markets and other street-level promotional events, meeting her customers face to face and, in the process, winning new ones.
Whatever grows in the field, that is what she sends; whatever she sends, that is what I cook; whatever I cook, that is what my meal companions eat. Is that life not a little too passive?
The farm does not take orders, so this cook is “passive”; but creating freely in the kitchen once the ingredients arrive — that is this cook’s “activeness”.
The cook does not take orders from her meal companions, which makes them the passive party; but choosing to go along with whatever is served, to eat and learn and deepen their understanding of food — that is their active choice.
Faced with the broader external landscape shaped by nature, politics and the economy, farmers often have little choice but to accept and adapt. And yet, learning and applying ecological farming techniques, forgoing chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, making one’s own compost and improving the soil according to local conditions, diversifying crops and tending them with meticulous care, building wide connections with society, and being responsible to oneself, to others and to the environment — these are active choices a farmer can make.
So, for Hu Xuemei: was setting out on the road of ecological farming a matter of passivity, or of active choice?
IV. Turning Cultivated Land into a Garden of Self-Determined Life
Another time, Tian’an Life and I co-hosted a session of the “I Want to Know My Food” reading group. That month we read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and she had taken the metro from Pi County for over an hour to attend. During the sharing circle, she spoke to everyone with great sincerity about why she cared about soil and food, why she had taken up ecological farming: because she believed it was good not only for her own body and family, but also for her customers’ bodies and families.
That humble, plain-spoken conviction is what sustains her devoted toil in Pidu District — coaxing a small plot of land to yield a rich and diverse harvest with meticulous care. I admire it, and I am genuinely impressed.
Over time, as I met Hu Xuemei more often, I noticed that her upbringing closely mirrored that of the older female cousins back in my own hometown: born into a rural family and a girl to boot, Hu Xuemei left school after junior secondary and, still a child herself, went out to work with relatives or fellow villagers. When she reached marriageable age, she settled down with a suitable match, and from then on her life centred entirely on running the household and raising the children. Never once did she stop giving and toiling.
That life carried on until her child entered senior high school.
That year, the River Research Association selected Linshi Village to build a “Resource-Saving Closed-Loop Western Sichuan Rural Eco-Home” system. Chatty, cheerful, and suddenly with a little free time on her hands, she joined several neighbours in signing up for the water-protection team and became a volunteer on the source-protection work.
In the course of that work, Hu Xuemei followed the teachers and learned what ecological farming meant. Encouraged by them at the River Research Association, she turned her own farmland into an experimental plot for ecological cultivation — learning to make compost, to brew enzyme preparations, to master every production skill that needed mastering …
By the time the shape of Hu Xuemei’s family farm was gradually coming into focus, the “I Want to Know My Food” reading group had found its way to her doorstep.
I remember that session was devoted to Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods. The central experience Louv wanted to share was that “professionals in every walk of life can weave their work into helping more people reconnect with nature.” What matters, really, is action.
At that gathering, an art teacher who had added me on WeChat long ago turned up with her child. As luck would have it, her parents’ home was just down the road, and she, too, was keen to help her children build a connection with the land. During the sharing circle, I suggested that she bring her strengths as an art educator to bear and collaborate with Hu Xuemei on farming-based arts-education activities — meeting her own needs while helping other families who felt the same pull.
“Louv, as a journalist, writes books — that is his action. I, as a researcher and educator, run diverse practices and research in nature education — that is my action. Hu Xuemei, as a land steward and food producer, cultivates and manages her land according to her own understanding of sustainable development — that is her action.” After the sharing ended, I put a question to the art teacher: “As an art teacher, if you believe the growing distance between people and nature is a problem, if you want your own child not to suffer from ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’, then what is your action?”
That conversation struck a chord deep inside the art teacher and set her thinking about her child’s growth. She wasted no time testing the waters. Before long she had recruited a handful of families who, like her, wanted to spend weekends getting their children outdoors and into the soil, and together with Hu Xuemei they ran a farming programme that lasted a full year.
The children came every weekend to the land at Hu Xuemei’s farm as “Field Children” — the name the art teacher had chosen for her organisation, a nod of homage to Last Child in the Woods. Hu Xuemei taught them seed raising, tilling the soil, applying fertiliser, and harvesting. After a year of sustained observation and honest labour, the parents’ feedback was glowing, and the art teacher felt that nature education which married the arts with the soil had enormous potential. She rented an old courtyard compound just around the corner from Hu Xuemei’s, and the two families formally became business partners — and weekend neighbours.
On top of running the regular weekend nature-education activities, Hu Xuemei actively teamed up with several other nature-education organisations. Groups would frequently bring their students to her family farm for site visits and hands-on experiences, and because of this she hired her own relatives to come and help in the kitchen whenever the workload peaked.
Hu Xuemei “walking on several legs at once” attracted yet more partners drawn to her farming life and brought in a steadier stream of income from beyond the farm. It was further proof that she truly did “manage the land well,” and with good reason she became a Green Sprout Partner funded by the Guangdong Green Sprout Foundation.
As her connections with the outside world grew, Hu Xuemei expanded her home, adding a multi-purpose classroom and a youth hostel with en-suite bathrooms so she could welcome visiting partners and host institutional camp programmes.
The richer her life became, the higher her standing within the household rose. Her husband, Brother Li, quietly shifted roles and made peace with his place, saying his greatest contribution was “handling the odd jobs in the field and the farm’s logistics.”
Last winter, a group of ecological farmers from the northwestern provinces came to Chengdu on a tour of eco-farms. I went along to guide them and recommended Hu Xuemei’s place, eager to show them how a family working the smallest possible unit with the least possible labour could still run an ecological farm. Everyone who walked the grounds shook their heads in amazement: it simply was not done easily!
For the group photo, she stood beneath the freshly painted farm sign, her face glowing with pride. And that same day, after dinner at Hu Xuemei’s, we gathered around the fire, chatting. When I heard that her son, on receiving his very first paycheque, had immediately bought his mum a massage chair, I nearly wept with joy: Our Sister Xuemei — at long last, the hard years have paid off.
Coming Next
Editor: Xu Youyou