A Grain Took Root and Sprouted in My Ear Canal
Foodthink Speaks
When she was small, a grain fell into young Zha’s ear canal. She thought it was a louse that would simply hop out on its own. By the time she and her father had walked all the way from the village to the county hospital, the doctor told her the seed had already taken root and begun to sprout. The barrier between a child of the village and the living world was no thicker than that between an eardrum and a grain. In the village, people contend with all things that “grow wild”, defending the farmland, the homesteads, and the bodies they have carved out for themselves. Survival runs on mechanism; young Zha has translated into words the stretching and contracting of muscles at work, the life and death of cells, and the very image of “exerting every ounce of strength”.
Foodthink has selected several passages from three chapters: “Thank You, Rice Fields”, “The Endless Farm Work”, and “Many Kinds of Weather”. Whether in the city or the countryside, sustaining life is eternal. We are grateful, too, for writing, which lets us briefly lift ourselves out of the ceaseless physical struggle. Our thanks to Shanghai Translation Publishing House for authorising the publication of this article.
I. Thank You, Rice Fields
After the spring rains, the village lay wrapped in mist. The layered ridges disappeared beneath a fine veil of gauze, and the air carried the scent of wet meadow — a little astringent, faintly sweet. Mum was about to transplant the seedlings.
The paddy had been ploughed, the soil loosened and levelled, fresh water brought in. Some small green aquatic leaves, unable to wait, had already poked up through the surface. Light rippled across the water, dragonflies occasionally kissed the surface, and frogs croaked from behind the bunds; now and then a few tadpoles would drift past in little shoals — the paddy was ready to welcome the seedlings.
That year, Father had already passed the exam to become a community-hired teacher and could only come home during holidays. Mother also disliked hiring helpers — if you did, you would owe them a favour to repay later — so transplanting often took a whole day.
Before dawn had fully broken, Mother was already out. First she went to a neighbour’s nursery paddy to pull the consigned seedlings, then carried them on her back to our own paddy to begin the real work.
Around half past eight, my elder sister and I would light the fire and set the rice to boil, then knead the cooked rice into balls and toast them over the charcoal until the outside was crisp and golden. We would let the zèngzi (a steaming vessel widely used in regions such as Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan, mainly for steaming rice) cook more rice, pack the rice balls for Mother, and head down to the paddy to help.
Transplanting was truly exhausting — especially for adults — because you had to work bent double the whole time, so Mother would straighten up now and then to pound her lower back. I was small, so I didn’t find it tiring, but my hands were too tiny to set the seedlings firmly. They kept leaning every which way, and before long they’d float free again. My sister would scold me for being clumsy, following behind me and straightening each of my seedlings, one by one. Mother said, “Little one, stop for now and go eat a rice ball!”
So I walked back up to the bund, washed the mud off my hands, and was about to break off a small piece of rice ball. Then, all of a sudden, I noticed two leeches clinging to my calf. They were sucking my blood.
“Mum! Mum!”
“What is it?” Mother asked.
“The leeches have latched on!”
Mother thrust the handful of seedlings in her hand into the mud beside her and walked towards me. “Wait a moment — go find your adu and borrow some matches.” (Adu is a kinship term meaning “nephew”; the person in question was actually forty years old, but our family held seniority in the village.)
Mother came back with the matches, lit a stick and blew it out, then gently touched the searing end to the leech’s head. It writhed violently, and Mother seized the moment, yanking it off in one pull. She dealt with the other the same way.
“Thank goodness it hasn’t burrowed in. Amei — my sister’s pet name — you stop working too; come up and eat a rice ball.”
The three of us — Mother and her two daughters — sat on the ground, each breaking off a small piece of rice ball and eating slowly. In the distance came the laughter and singing of other families who had hired help for transplanting, singing the spring song in Yi: “The water is silver water; the paddy bird returns again; it carries up a silver ribbon, weaving rain into the sky…”
The rice grew on in silence. Once the mushroom-gathering season passed and the clouds on the horizon grew ever redder, it was time to reap.
Reaping was always scheduled for a day when everyone was free, because Father, who taught at the village complete primary school, and young Fifth Uncle, who was studying in town, both needed to come home to tread the threshing machine. Young Fifth Uncle was only five or six years older than my sister, yet every task he took on was a grown-up’s work.
The threshing machines of those days were not only terribly inefficient but also exhausting to operate. Worst of all, they sent the grain scattering in every direction — the tiny barbs on the husks would pierce your skin, leaving it stinging and maddeningly itchy.
It was on one of those threshing days that a grain flew into my ear. Yet I noticed nothing at all; I was busy patrolling the paddy, checking whether any quail had been left behind — I had to move their whole family away before the scythes could injure them by mistake.
That grain, fallen into the ear canal, slid slowly deeper, until the pain became unbearable. Then one day, halfway through a lesson, the aching ear suddenly grew hot, and a trickle of bloody fluid ran down from it.
The teacher contacted Dad. He took me by the hand and we set off for an ear specialist in a town a long way from home.
I was terrified of doctors. They always seemed so stern and fierce, and I didn’t understand all of the Han Chinese they spoke, which made me feel awkward and tense. He was a man of about fifty, with very little hair but a great deal of beard. With the help of his instruments, he extracted a single black grain of rice from my ear. “Soaked almost to sprouting — how is it you’re only bringing her now? The eardrum appears to be damaged. We can’t repair that here, and neither can the county hospital. You’ll need to take the child to Yuxi for the repair.” The doctor spoke fast and sharp; I understood only a fraction. Dad nodded, his eyes reddening, and took me to collect the medicine.
By the time we left the hospital it was past six. The last light of the evening sun fell softly on the paddies lining either side of the road. Most had already been harvested, leaving only the stubble and quail nests, glinting in the tangerine shimmer of the water.
We had to take the inter-town bus back to our commune, then walk up the mountain to the village. Past six was too late — there were no more buses heading uphill, so Dad and I could only walk along the road, hoping to flag down a private car.
Dad carried the exercise book he’d bought for big sis and his messenger bag in his left hand, and held my hand with his right. That day I was wearing white wool socks with fraying edges, a pair of blue plastic sandals, and ginger-yellow knitted trousers.
After walking for about an hour, Dad asked, “Girl, can you still walk?”
“Yes.”
“Does your ear hurt?”
“No.”
Dad squeezed the exercise book and the medicine into his bag, freed his hand, crouched down, and lifted me up.
“Dad, I don’t want carrying. I can still walk for one minute.”
“Ha! How long is one minute?”
“Big sis says one minute is the same as one hour.”
Dad laughed, patting my back as he chuckled. By then, yellow medicinal fluid was seeping from my ear. He set me down on a length of the paddy bank and hurriedly pulled at his own shirt to wipe it away.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
He crouched in front of me, both hands resting on my knees, head bowed. His tears fell drip, drip, drip onto my ginger-yellow trousers, each one spreading into a small brown circle. Before long, a patch of the trousers had gone brown.
“Dad, please don’t cry. It really doesn’t hurt, really.”
He never lifted his head, not until the last faint glow in the paddies had faded and the deep forest began to sound with the calls of “Ga-k! Ga-k!”
We walked for the longest time that day. It was ten o’clock when we finally reached the village, and no car had ever stopped for us.
From that year on, I never went to a threshing day again. Every year thereafter, I stayed home on threshing day to spread dung for drying or to chop pig fodder.
Later, around 2003, we no longer had to deliver our grain to the state grain station, and rice in the shops became so cheap that many families stopped growing it altogether. At last, the rice paddy had finished its task.
II. Many Kinds of Weather
“It’ll rain tomorrow, so we can’t spray today.” She would switch the plan to weeding instead, cutting back the wild grass along the bunds and clearing out the water channels. “If the water can’t drain away, the soil stays too wet and the tobacco will fall sick.”
I picked up a smattering of her skill. Dark clouds beyond the next few hilltops didn’t necessarily mean rain. The key was the sky directly overhead: if it was bright and sparsely clouded, the rain most likely wouldn’t reach us. But if thin wisps of cloud were gathering above and the light shifted, however slightly, then rain would come.
Clear days were easy to read too — the air carried the taste of sunshine, and if that taste was strong, the next few days were bound to be clear. In the same way, rain had its own scent in the air before it fell; once you caught it, rain was certain, no matter how fierce the sun.
This method seldom failed; even in the ever-shifting depths of midsummer, it held true.
Hail was the one thing she couldn’t sense. It gave us no time to prepare — sometimes it even arrived before the rain. A few times, to save the tobacco leaves from being beaten to shreds, my sister and I threw tarpaulins over them in a panic. The hailstones bruised our skin blue and black; the pain came with a crackling roar, and the memory still makes my heart race. Such last-minute rescues could usually salvage only a fraction of the damage.
There was no crop insurance back then — if hail wrecked the leaves, the whole season was a waste of work. Hail was the weather we feared most. Luckily it was rare.
Wind was essential. So many farm tasks depended on it: drying radish strips and shreds called for the wind to carry off the moisture; threshing wheat or rapeseed meant the wind helped sweep away the chaff and dust. But in the sultry stretch between late summer and early autumn, the wind turned stingy — it rarely came, and when it did, only for a fleeting moment, not even enough to lift a single husk.
Mum had learned the method of calling the wind from her own mother.
When she needed wind, she would tighten her headscarf, put her hands on her hips, stand at the end of a bund, and whistle into the open valley.
It was a whistle with a melody. Mum said the melody was there so the wind could understand which way to go. And because the wind always came, the melody felt like magic to me. I picked it up quickly.
The next time we needed wind, Mum and I would whistle it together.
Sometimes the wind blew strong, sometimes gentle — but it always came.
Writing this, I looked up some information, wanting to know what was actually happening in the world around us when Mum and I blew that melody together.
“Whistling doesn’t truly ‘bring’ the wind. It merely uses the vibration of sound to stir the surrounding air into motion, producing a breeze. When you whistle, the fast airflow generated by your mouth and tongue disturbs the air nearby, setting up a small-scale current. This moving air draws some of the surrounding air along with it, creating a relatively faint breeze.” That’s what the internet says.
So it wasn’t magic after all. I felt a pang of disappointment, then laughed at my computer screen and decided, right then, to forget the science and believe it was magic. It was one of the few joys Mum and I shared; I would rather keep it in my memory forever as Mum’s superpower.
Neither my sister nor I had a clue. Seeing our blank faces, she suddenly grew confident again: “Shangzhai area, thunderstorms, ten thousand millimetres.”
Sometimes her gestures were so exaggerated that my sister and I couldn’t help laughing. Big sis said she looked nothing like the forecasters on TV, but she still nagged Mum to perform again and again. Mum wiped the sweat away, her sagging chest shifting beneath the loose, old clothes. Like every other woman in the village, she had never worn a bra, and it made her look more free, more at ease. When Mum performed at the edge of the field, she was unlike any other version of herself. She looked happy, unbound, with the valley as her backdrop. Her hands swept through the dry wind, and the rising dust seemed to come alive.
Though her performance never lasted long — just as she was losing herself in the joy of it, she would suddenly force herself to stop, set her face, and go back to work — in those few brief minutes when she was the weather forecaster, we all felt a very distinct happiness.
III. The Endless Farm Work
By the time I understood that, it was already too late. I was old enough to work the fields. Tending the soil was no longer a game between me and the world — it had become a livelihood.
In the coldest stretch of the year, you’d think that once the radish strips were all shredded, you could sit back, enjoy the New Year, and rest a while. In reality, by the second day of the New Year you had to get on with turning the soil — ploughing, harrowing — and once the land was ready, you had to cut the grass along the bunds. All the while you were sowing tobacco seeds and raising seedlings. You’d think you could simply wait for the young plants to grow, but no — all through that waiting you had to get the tobacco plots ready as quickly and carefully as you could: forming raised beds, spreading manure to enrich them, and later shaping the beds into ridges. Once the seedlings were in the ground, the long, meticulous tending began — covering with plastic film, spraying, pest control, removing the film, weeding, topping … Every step took considerable time, every single plant had to be attended to, and then you multiply that unit of labour by thousands, even tens of thousands — only then was the growing season over.
What came next was even heavier work: climbing the mountain to find timber for curing the tobacco, carrying it home on your back, preparing the tobacco-curing barn, picking the tobacco leaves, threading them neatly onto the curing rods, sending them in strand by strand into the barn, tending the furnace day and night without a break — watching the flame, controlling the temperature. After several days of curing, you carefully drew out the dried leaves, stored them strand by strand in the loft, then took them down one leaf at a time, stretching each one flat, sorting by grade, bundling them, storing them in a cool, dry place, and finally delivering the whole crop to the tobacco station.
Preparing the land after tobacco was far more labour-intensive than after radishes — just digging the roots from the soil took enormous effort. Plants as tall as a person were pulled out one by one, and then came another round of ploughing, harrowing …
Growing tobacco is a significant undertaking in the Yunnan countryside, so whenever we finished with the tobacco plots, the whole family breathed a collective sigh of relief. But the relief never lasted long — the white cabbage had to go in.
Again, shaping the land into beds, digging little holes, scattering sheep dung and urea, setting in the seedlings one by one — whether bought or raised from our own nursery — firming the soil around them, watering …
Luckily, white cabbage wasn’t too finicky — it didn’t need the same meticulous tending as tobacco. That was, of course, on the assumption that heaven cooperated and the rains came in good order; without rain, you had to go and water them every other day.
While the cabbage was growing on one side, the next plot needed planting with dew herb, French beans, or mangetout — the process was pretty much the same for all of them: shaping the ridges, planting, and for the beans there was the extra step of putting up a trellis, so you had to go up the mountain to find suitable bamboo poles or wooden stakes, which was quite the chore in itself.
Once this round of harvest was over, the land had no time to rest, and neither did the people — tilling, ploughing, harrowing again … Sowing radishes wasn’t simply a matter of scattering seeds on the ground; before that, you had to dry the manure.
Sheep’s dung was best, mixed with cow dung and chicken droppings, with a little nitrogen fertiliser added — some households simply used compound fertiliser instead. After sun-drying for several days, you’d break it up, bag it, and carry it out to the field.
Then three people had to work in concert: one digging furrows, one scattering the manure, and one sowing the radish seeds. The spacing between radish pits had to be even, the manure not too generous nor too scant, no more than three seeds per pit — and the seeds must not touch the manure directly, or they would be burned.
To spare the seeds from being scorched, some families waited until the radishes had sprouted before applying a top dressing — bending low to feed thousands upon thousands of tiny seedlings one by one. Good for the radishes, but punishing for the person.
Before the radishes grew large, you had to weed and thin the seedlings; without rain you watered, with too much you dug drainage channels. After Mid-Autumn Festival, once the radishes were big enough, every household hauled up all manner of stakes, drove them into the bunds one after another, and strung nylon rope between them — and just like that, you had your drying rack. Then you could start shredding radish strips.
Radishes as tall as a child: pull them up, trim the head and tail, wash off the mud, pile them in bamboo baskets, and carry them to the foot of the drying rack. With a simple cutting tool, slice each radish twice crosswise, hang the whole thing on the nylon rope, then carefully separate the slices so they wouldn’t stick together and would dry more easily in the wind.
Once the radish strips were hung up, everyone prayed for no rain. If rain came, the radishes would turn red, or even mould and blacken, and all the work would be for nothing. Most of the time we watched the weather like hawks; roughly twenty percent of the radish strips would get rained on, while the rest could be taken down safely, slice by slice, sorted by grade, and tied into bundles — each one about as thick as a grown man’s ankle. Only then could they be packed up and sold.
And the land welcomed back the same old trio of tasks. When spring arrived, the Bima led the villagers in a sacrifice to the earth; during the Dragon Worship, people celebrated for a brief day, and then it was time to transplant tobacco again.
The farm work I’ve described covers just the main set of tasks in my home village — or rather, the ones my family focused on. There were so many other chores that no handful of words could count them one by one. In short, a farmer’s life is complex and tense, without a shred of pastoral idyll, but plenty of heart-in-throat worry.
Apart from tobacco, which generally had a set purchase price, every other crop was a gamble. When the cabbage was still small, the market might offer two yuan a kilo; by the time it was ready to harvest, it had crashed to fifteen fen a kilo. Same with radishes — hauled to the market at ten yuan a kilo in the morning, by lunchtime it was seven. Perhaps the next morning it was twelve again, and by the third day, six.
As for mangetout, French beans, dew herb … these were things that depended on fate. If fortune smiled, the whole crop sold at once; if not, it simply rotted in the field.
It wasn’t only prices that kept us anxious — the weather, too. Hail was the worst; next came days of relentless drought or endless flooding, any of which could leave you with nothing at all after a year’s work.
Good harvest or bad, being a farmer was always hard. That is why I feared, so deeply, the thought of being a farmer for life.
Farm work is never finished.
Apart from the time I spent at school, every other moment meant working in the fields alongside the adults. Every task had to be done by hand. Mum drove the ox ahead to harrow the ground, and my sister and I followed behind, picking root stubs from the soil, breaking up clods with hoes and rakes. If we spotted a cutworm, we’d pick it out between our fingers and crush it, one by one.
Of all the farm tasks, transplanting tobacco was the hardest. Seedlings were expensive and fragile — every single one had to be planted with the utmost care, the soil gently firmed around it. They didn’t keep well, and you had to beat the season. Each year when transplanting time came, we were in the fields before dawn and home only after dark. The sun was so fierce it made your head throb, your back burned raw, and by the end of summer your ears began to peel — like a snake’s, shedding layer after layer.
Our fingers scraped back and forth through the dry soil until calluses formed on the pads. The edges of our nails were perpetually black, and hangnails sprouted around them like the open blooms of velvet flowers.
Weeding the tobacco was a nerve-racking business too. In the sweltering heat, with cicadas shrieking all around, my sister and I crouched beneath the tobacco plants, left hand steadying a leaf while the right yanked out the weeds in quick, sure pulls. “Aaaah!” My sister let out a scream. I looked up and saw her clutching a snake, flinging it off over the bund, then dissolving into sobs.
Mum comforted her for a while, but only a while, and soon my sister crouched down again and went back to work.
And it wasn’t only snakes — while weeding, we also caught toads, skinks; by comparison, grasshoppers, snails, and slugs could count themselves gentle guests.
Topping tobacco was no easier. We were much shorter than the plants, so we had to keep our arms raised high the whole time, and the topping agent would trickle down our arms and soak into our clothes. By nightfall, the skin under our arms burned.
Tobacco leaves had a sticky coating, so after threading the leaves onto the curing rods, your hands would carry that gummy residue all day, and on contact with the air it turned black. Our fingers were always black — not tanned, but stained, looking foul, as though we had never washed them. While I was at the Han Chinese school, those black hands cost me many chances to play with my classmates. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only student whose family grew tobacco. As soon as school let out, I’d run off to join the black-fingered older children, and we’d take our tin mugs to the canteen. Without being told, we’d queue behind the white-fingered children, wait until they’d been served, and only then edge forward.
Farm work was exhausting — spring, summer, autumn, winter, cycling endlessly with no horizon in sight — yet all that day-in, day-out labour only let our family scrape by on the bare minimum. In those endless hours I couldn’t help thinking: were we not allowed even a little rest? How many people in this world were like me, trailing behind their parents, working and working without a moment’s respite? Was there any point in it all?
The books praise farmers as great. Where was the greatness? Wasn’t “great” a good word? Why should a great person have to live in such hardship?
Life gave me no answer. Dimly I sensed that only by studying hard at the Han Chinese school might I escape a lifetime of farm labour. But my grades were poor, and the farm work didn’t ease because I was away at school — if anything, the chores during school holidays grew heavier. One evening, after a thunderstorm, I set off with a bamboo basket on my back and a sickle in hand to gather pig fodder. The rocks along the stream were slick with rain; I slipped and pitched forward, the fodder tumbling out of my basket into the current, swept away by the rushing water, gone from sight within minutes.
That day I lay on my stomach by the riverbank and wept. The vague hope I had carried for the future was gone in an instant, swept off with the fodder. I was sure I would work the fields for the rest of my life — like every farmer in the village, like Mum, like Gran — working until my body dried up and my eyes grew clouded, right down to the day I died.
Of course, being a farmer, there were one or two tasks I genuinely enjoyed. The first was digging up medicinal herbs. Strictly speaking, foraging for herbs wasn’t farm work — it had none of the deadlines. You didn’t need to race against the weather or the clock; whether you dug or not, the herbs would always be there.
Every time we went to put the ox out to graze, my sister and I would pack a small hoe, sling over our backs a bag Mum had sewn for us from a woven sack, tuck in two rice balls, and head for the hills where the herbs grew. The ox knew its own feeding grounds; we’d disappear into the scrub and start digging.
Digging herbs was tiring work in itself — you had to stay bent double the whole time, searching, and before long your back ached. The joy lay in what grew alongside them: wild raspberries and cloudberries, sweet and vivid on the tongue. Picking berries as you dug was infinitely more pleasant than hacking at soil under a blazing sun.
By the time the ox had eaten its fill, our bags were full too, and we’d drive it home together. The herbs we gathered were dried for a few days, then carried on our backs to the Han Chinese village before school to sell. A weekend’s digging might fetch two or three yuan. The woman who collected them would tip the herbs into her own great woven sack, then plop herself down on top of them and press them flat with all her weight before she’d hand us the money.
…
Mushroom-gathering was another good task.
We set out at first light with a small bamboo basket, picking up a good walking stick along the way, and plunged into the dense forest. In the woods near our home, the easiest mushrooms to find were edible bolete, milkcap, and coral fungus — all harmless wild varieties, delicious stir-fried, and worth so little that even if we brought them home, our parents wouldn’t bother selling them. We’d wash them meticulously ourselves, then beg Dad to add a little more of the precious lard when he cooked them, so we could have a glorious, fragrant feast.
As we grew a little older, though, we hoped more for the mushrooms that fetched a price: termite mushroom, ganba fungus, yellow bolete, blue-staining bolete, green russula. The first time I learned that a single palm-sized ganba fungus was worth an entire school year’s worth of herb-digging, I was thunderstruck. I couldn’t understand why people in the city would pay so much for it. Ganba fungus was undeniably delicious, but the coral fungus that nobody wanted tasted no worse. Still, anyone willing to pay for mushrooms was a good thing — it gave us a route to earn what we needed to survive. Before every trek into the forest, I’d picture a vast carpet of ganba fungus stretching ahead, to steel myself for hours of searching through the dripping, post-rain woods. But termite mushrooms and ganba fungus were not things a child could easily come by. Compared with those who threw themselves wholly into mushroom-hunting through the rainy season, we were hopeless amateurs. They guarded their secret patches with everything they had, and there was no chance of us stumbling on a mushroom that slipped through their net.
I remember one year the rains were just right — the perfect blend of water and sunshine brought out a bumper crop. My sister and I picked a good haul of yellow bolete and sold it for over eighty yuan. That term, there was finally something meaty in our bowls at mealtime.
I never loved farm work, but neither could I bring myself to loathe it. In that utterly impoverished childhood, it was at least farm work that propped up my precarious sense of self, that made me feel I was doing something “useful,” that gave me something to hold on to — “Even if I’m no good at studying, at least I can feed myself by working the fields.” Thank goodness for that small hope — otherwise, in all those days when I couldn’t make the books make sense, when I felt defeated, lost, afraid — how would I have carried myself through alone?
All images provided by the author