Mountain Life in Naxi Stone City (Part Two): Those Who Tend the Land
Editor’s Note
— Farmers’ Seed Network
I. Their Fields and Their Homes
Besides running the family guesthouse, Xiuqin also serves as the village doctor. Her home doubles as the village medical room, and people drop in from time to time for medicine or an injection. She was, at one time, the last midwife in the village. Xiuqin did not go to school as a child; at seventeen she went to Lijiang to study medicine at a vocational secondary school. She says she deeply regretted not having studied earlier and found it very hard to learn her letters. Her mother had wanted the children to be educated, so her older siblings had all gone to school, but Xiuqin herself had not wanted to—she felt it was too difficult. The teachers beat and scolded them all day long, and even used a prickly stinging nettle to hit them; after being struck, the pain would last a whole day and night. What stayed with her most was something the teacher once said: “By the year 2000, when the Four Modernisations are complete, if you lot don’t study hard, the cars from outside will come driving in and you’ll just be stuck here carrying manure, stepping aside to let the cars pass.” Yet little did she imagine that more than two decades after the teacher spoke of the year 2000 and the Four Modernisations, the villagers were still carrying basketfuls of manure to the fields on their backs. The cars have indeed arrived, but they can only reach a car park at the very top of the village, while goods and produce still come in and out on people’s backs and by the backs of horses.
Xiuqin began learning midwifery around 1987 and served as the village midwife until 2005, delivering roughly three or four hundred babies over that time. While she was training at the township health centre, the doctors had trainees like her practise delivering babies during labour inductions. In those days, family planning was strictly enforced, and women who had gone over the permitted number of births—many of them eight or nine months pregnant—would be brought in for a forced induction. Inductions were frequent at the township health centre; on any given day there would be one or two. Xiuqin once told me about a woman who had been brought in for an induction: the doctors were still busy, and while she was waiting, her waters broke. She wanted to keep the baby, so she said nothing to the doctors, bore the agonising pain in silence, and in the evening crept out on her own into the fields, where she delivered the child by herself. In the old days, when Xiuqin was delivering babies, all the village women gave birth at home, because the road had not yet reached the village. Once the road was built, people began to leave for town, and for childbirth they started going to the hospital—yet even now, a delivery without medical insurance coverage can cost around ten thousand yuan, placing a considerable burden on village families.
Xiuqin is exceptionally gentle-natured and never loses her temper, yet she seems to lack a certain self-confidence. The words she repeats most often are: “I can’t do a single thing,” “I’m the most useless person here,” “I’m the worst dancer of them all,” and “They’re all so brilliant and so capable.” And all the while she says these things, she quietly takes on every household chore in the home: up at dawn, fussing in the kitchen—three meals a day, feeding the pigs and chickens three times a day, washing up, cleaning, working the vegetable plot, then back home to sort the vegetables. In her view, cooking and housework don’t count as proper work; only going out to the fields is real work. In Naxi tradition, men do not enter the kitchen. As in most other ethnic-group villages, men are expected to earn money outside or to attend to the big affairs—for instance, women cannot take part in the heaven-worship ceremony or the rain-praying ceremony. The men rarely trouble themselves with the heavy, endless round of domestic labour, yet the women, too, carry heavy baskets along steep mountain paths. Perhaps the women of the village, Xiuqin among them, have not yet fully realised how vital the domestic work they shoulder truly is. It is precisely because of all the cooking, washing up, sorting of vegetables, and the myriad small labours they perform that field and table are genuinely joined together. It is their daily, uncelebrated work that sustains the life in the soil and the quiet, ordinary rhythm of family life.
I saw many admirable qualities in the other women I got to know in the village. Zhang Xiuyun is known as the “Maize Mother”: she grows more than a dozen heirloom maize varieties on her land and has developed several waxy maize varieties of her own through hybridisation techniques. Xiuyun now serves as the manager of Lishi Hotel in Stone City, and while running a hotel she also tends several mu of farmland at home, yet she always wears a bright, carefree smile and insists that working the fields is no hardship but a pleasure. Her parents’ home is in Hailong Village, another village further downstream on the Jinsha River, still a three-hour drive from Stone City. She told me that in the old days, before the road was built, she carried her newborn firstborn son on her back all the way back to her parents’ home—a two-day walk. Women who married far from home, like Xiuyun, have always carried seeds with them on their journeys to and from their parents’ homes. In the vegetable plot at her parents’ place grows her own hybrid waxy maize, “Xiuyun No. 1”. And in her family’s wheat field grows Shandong wheat, brought back by her aunt’s daughter who married into Shandong. This past May, Xiuyun visited the Potato Park in Peru with the support of Farmers’ Seed Network, where she admired traditional maize and potato varieties of every shape and size. However, when traditional local varieties travel across half the earth to a new environment, they may not adapt to the local soil and climate. So when Xiuyun carries out her seed trials, she carefully inspects and selects the best seeds before sowing, making sure every grain is full of vitality. Seeds, indeed, flow with people’s footsteps.
When I came to Stone City, I also brought a few packets of heirloom tomato, lettuce, and basil seeds, which counted as non-native varieties in Stone City. For the past few years I had tried growing them on my little balcony at home; this time I planted them in the mountain fields here. The tomatoes grew especially vigorous under Stone City’s abundant sunshine, and after more than three months of raising seedlings, transplanting, staking, and fertilising, I finally ate tomatoes with a rich, full flavour. Sweet basil, originally from Europe, was an unfamiliar taste for this land and its people, yet it was well received—Xiuqin often added a few leaves of basil to her cooking, enriching the flavours at the table. These “new varieties” will save seed in Xiuqin’s vegetable plot, and perhaps will go on growing on these mountain slopes even after I have left.
II. Secretary Mu and His Nostalgia
Secretary Mu’s story begins in 1993, when he was just nineteen. By a fortunate turn of events, he found himself drawn into the tourism industry, leading hiking tours for foreign visitors through the village. The route wound from Stone City over Taizi Pass, traversing the soaring mountains high above the Jinsha River all the way to Lugu Lake. Even in those early days, foreign adventurers were already drawn to this far-flung, little-known corner of the world. Perhaps it was Joseph Rock who, as early as the 1930s, had revealed to the West a mysterious and beautiful ancient Naxi kingdom; the foreign trekking enthusiasts had set foot here long before Chinese tourists ever did. As the local hiking guide, Secretary Mu picked up English early on, so he could chat easily with visitors who had travelled all this way. It was after he started working as a guide and running a family guesthouse that tourism in Stone City began to grow, step by step, carried along by foreign hikers. After the year 2000, Secretary Mu became the village head of Stone City, and was later elected secretary of Baoshan Administrative Village. He has his own clear vision for developing rural cultural tourism. He knew full well what damage a rush of large-scale investment would wreak on the village’s way of life and its ecology. He was always thinking: it has to be small, it has to be slow, if it is to last.
He was just as sincere in the way he carried himself, even though he always liked a joke. Secretary Mu would often say, “My little temple is too small to accommodate all of you who’ve come from the big cities.” I understood this was because he had already seen so many people pass through Stone City, coming and going. Whether short-stay tourists, students and scholars coming to conduct research, or interns and volunteers like myself who came for a spell through a charitable organisation—every year, some newcomers found their way here for all sorts of reasons. Throughout the whole of July, I accompanied Secretary Mu as he hosted several visiting groups. Some arrived with certain expectations or preconceptions about this place, and perhaps felt let down by the gap between what they had imagined and what they found. Today, the countryside has become “the field” for studies across disciplines, for the arts, and for the cultural-tourism industry; yet for the people who have always lived here, this “field” is simply their home. Whatever change outsiders may bring, they always pass through and leave. But Secretary Mu was also keenly aware of the dangers facing the village’s future. Like many other villages deep in the mountains, the young people who had left to study or find work no longer came home to toil in the fields; the youngest farming labourers left in the village were all over fifty. Amid the urban-rural divide that has marked this generation, the farming wisdom unique to this place can scarcely be passed on any longer.
When I first arrived in Stone City and went for walks with Secretary Mu along the mountain paths, he would casually pluck various wild plants growing by the roadside and tell me about their uses and their medicinal properties. Even then, he mentioned that compiling and recording these plants had long been a wish of his. So I began paying closer attention to the plants in the mountains and along the field edges, learning their Naxi names and their many uses alongside the villagers. In the end, we decided to work together to collect and catalogue Stone City’s local wild plants, setting a target of fifty species commonly encountered and used in daily life, and the result was printed as a small guide. Secretary Mu felt that even if nobody were left to till the fields, these wild plants would go on growing in the mountain slopes to which they were already well adapted. And I thought: to know these plants is to come to know a way of life and of work that belongs to this place alone. When I grew confident enough to grab a handful of “hua zhan” (Jiye Suanmo) leaves from the roadside, rub them between my fingers, and press them onto a mosquito bite, I felt as though I had forged a deeper bond with this place.
For Secretary Mu, the changes the village has seen over the past thirty years have been immense. The road came through, electricity reached the homes, and the household gained a fridge, a washing machine, and a rice cooker—modern appliances that had arrived. Yet with them vanished all sorts of ways of living from his childhood, and these losses became a nostalgia that always tugged at his heart. Secretary Mu writes well and often dashes off an essay of a thousand characters, telling a story from his memory—recollections of a lunch eaten in the fields, or of the prickly pears of Stone City, or of the stone-throwing games he played as a boy. He even wrote an essay for me, titled “Sowing and Integration”. Secretary Mu and I made a pact: once he had written twenty pieces, I would make them into a small book for him. I have always loved the process of making a book—whether it is a short guide to Stone City’s wild plants or a volume of Secretary Mu’s nostalgia. A book you can hold in your hands is, in itself, a vessel of friendship.
III. Afterword
What are the views on the cosmos, nature, and life held by Stone City’s villagers?
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Editors: Guan Qi, Mei Ying