A Grain of Rice Took Root and Sprouted in My Ear Canal
A Note from Foodthink
When she was little, a grain of rice fell into Little Zha’s ear canal. She thought it was a louse and that it would jump out on its own. By the time she and her father had walked from the village to the county hospital, the doctor told her the seed had already taken root and sprouted. The barrier between a village child and the natural world is as thin as the eardrum from a grain of rice. In the village, people contend with the untamed growth of all things, protecting the cultivated fields, dwellings, and bodies they have staked out. Survival is mechanical; Little Zha renders the contraction and extension of muscles during labour, the life and death of cells, the image of straining with every ounce of effort, into words.
Foodthink has selected a few excerpts, drawn from the chapters “Thank You, Rice Paddy,” “Farming That Never Ends,” and “Many Kinds of Weather.” Whether in the city or the countryside, sustaining life is eternal. And thank writing, too, for letting us step back, however briefly, from the endless physical struggle. Thanks to Shanghai Translation Publishing House for granting permission to publish this article.
I. Thank You, Rice Paddy
After the spring rain, the village is wrapped in mist; the layered mountain ridges are shrouded in a thin veil, and the air carries the scent of grassland, with a faintly astringent fragrance. Māma is going to transplant the seedlings.
The paddy has been ploughed, the soil loosened and turned, fresh water let in. Some small aquatic green leaves have already pushed through, impatient to see the light; shimmering ripples catch the surface, a dragonfly dips its tail at random, and frogs croak from the paddy banks. Every now and then a little cluster of tadpoles drifts past in a procession—the paddy is ready to welcome its seedlings.
That year, Baba had just passed the exam to become a private teacher and could only come home on holidays. Māma didn’t like hiring help, either—if she did, she would have to return the favour later—so transplanting seedlings often took the entire day.
At first light in the morning, Māma was already on her way. She went first to a neighbour’s nursery field to pull up the seedlings they had been growing for us, then carried them over on her back to the paddy, where the real work began.
At about eight thirty, my sister and I lit a fire and put rice on to cook. Then we shaped the cooked rice into balls and toasted them over the charcoal until the outside was crisp and golden. With the zhēngzǐ (a steaming vessel widely used in Guizhou, Sichuan, Yunnan, and other regions, mainly for steaming rice) keeping the rice warm, we packed up the rice balls for Māma and headed to the paddy to help.
Transplanting seedlings is truly exhausting work, especially for adults, because you have to stay bent over the whole time. Māma kept having to stand up now and then to rub her aching back. I was very small, so the bending didn’t tire me, but my hands were too little to hold the seedlings steady. They leaned this way and that, and before long some of them floated loose in the water. My sister scolded me for being clumsy while following behind, straightening my seedlings one by one. “Enough, little one,” Māma called. “Stop for now and go have your rice balls!”
So I walked back to the paddy bank, washed the mud from my hands, and was about to break off a small piece of rice ball when, suddenly, I saw two leeches clinging to my lower leg. They were sucking my blood.
“Māma! Māma!”
“What is it?” Māma asked.
“Leeches have latched on.”
Māma stuck the handful of seedlings in her hand into the mud nearby and came toward me. “Wait here. Go find your Ādū and borrow some matches.” (Ādū is a kinship term meaning “nephew”; the man in question is in fact forty, but our family’s generational ranking is high enough that he still counts as a nephew to us.)
Māma came back with the matches, lit a thin stick, and blew it out. She held the hot, smouldering end gently against the leech’s head. I watched it writhe violently. Māma waited for the right moment and pulled it off in a single tug. She did the same with the other one.
“Good—it didn’t burrow in. Āmǎi,” she called to my sister (her childhood nickname), “stop too. Come up and have your rice balls.”
The mother and two daughters sat down on the ground, each breaking off a small piece of rice ball and eating slowly. In the distance came the laughter and singing of another family that had hired hands for the transplanting. They sang a spring song in Yi: “The water is silver water, the paddy bird has come again; it picks up a silver ribbon and flies up to weave rain in the sky…”
The rice grew quietly. When the mushroom-picking season was over and the clouds on the horizon grew redder and redder, it was time to cut the rice.
Harvesting was always scheduled for a day when the whole family could be there, because Baba, who taught at the village complete primary school, and Fifth Uncle, who was studying in town, both needed to come home to work the thresher. Fifth Uncle was only five or six years older than my sister, but by then he did entirely adult work.
The threshers of that era were not only slow but also extremely strenuous. The worst of it was that they sent chaff and husks flying in every direction—the fine needles on the rice husks splattered against your skin and left you stinging and itching.
It was on that very day of threshing that a grain of rice flew into my ear. But I didn’t notice at all. I was busy patrolling the paddy, checking for any stray quails so the whole family could relocate before the sickle caught them by mistake.
The grain that had slipped into my ear canal simply continued to slide downward, slowly, until the pain became unbearable—until one day, in the middle of a lesson, I felt the aching ear suddenly grow hot and a stream of bloody water run down from it.
The teacher contacted Baba. He took my hand, and we went to a town far from home to have my ear looked at.
I was afraid of doctors. They always seemed so stern and fierce, and I didn’t fully understand Mandarin, so I could help feeling embarrassed and nervous. It was a male doctor of about fifty, with very little hair but a thick beard. With the help of his instruments, he drew a black grain of rice from my ear. “It’s been soaking so long it’s nearly sprouted. How on earth did it take this long to bring her in? The eardrum looks damaged—we can’t repair it here, and they can’t in the county seat either. You’ll need to take the child to Yuxi for that.” The doctor spoke fast and harshly; I caught only a fraction of what he said. Baba nodded, his eyes red, and took me to collect the medicine.
By the time we left the hospital, it was past six in the afternoon. The last light of the setting sun fell softly over the paddies on either side of the road. Most had already been cut, leaving only rice stubble and quail nests, all mirroring the shimmering red-orange water.
We had to catch the inter-town bus back to the township first, then walk down from the hills to the village. It was past six—too late. The scheduled buses had stopped running in that direction, so Baba and I walked along the road, hoping against hope that a private car might be willing to give us a lift.
In his left hand, Baba carried a notebook he’d bought for my sister along with his shoulder bag; his right hand held mine. That day I was wearing a pair of white knitted socks with frayed toes and a pair of blue plastic sandals, with ginger-yellow knitted trousers.
After we had walked for about an hour, Baba asked, “Can you still walk, little one?”
“I can.”
“Does your ear hurt?”
“No.”
Baba squeezed the notebook and the medicine into his bag, freed his hands, bent down, and lifted me up.
“Baba, I don’t want to be carried. I can still walk for one more minute.”
“Ha! And how long is one minute?”
“Sister says one minute is a whole hour.”
Baba laughed, patting my back between chuckles. Just then, the yellow medicine began to seep out of my ear. He lifted me up and set me on a stretch of the roadside embankment, then hurriedly used his own shirt to wipe the wetness away.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
He crouched in front of me, both hands on my knees, head bowed. Tears fell, drop by drop, onto my ginger-yellow trousers, spreading into small brown rings. Before long, a patch of the fabric had darkened.
“Baba, please don’t cry. It really doesn’t hurt, I promise.”
Baba never lifted his head, not until the last light over the paddy had faded and the croak-croak of birds began to drift up from the deep woods.
We walked for a very, very long time that day. It was ten at night before we reached the village, and we had not gotten a single lift.
From that year on, I never went to thresh rice again. Every year after, on the day of threshing, I stayed home to dry manure in the sun or chop pig fodder.
Later still—around 2003, I think—we no longer had to deliver grain to the grain station, and rice in the market became so cheap that many families stopped growing it altogether. The rice paddy had finally done its job.
II. Many Kinds of Weather
“It’s going to rain tomorrow, so we can’t spray today.” And so she would switch the plan to weeding—cutting the wild grass along the paddy banks, clearing the water channels. “If the water can’t drain, the ground gets too wet, and the tobacco will fall sick.”
I picked up a few scraps of this knowledge from watching her. Black clouds gathering beyond a few ridges don’t necessarily mean rain will reach us. The key is what’s directly overhead. If the sky above your own head is clear and bright, with only a scattering of clouds, the rain will most likely pass you by. But if thin clouds are starting to thicken overhead and the light shifts, even slightly, then the rain is coming.
A clear day is easy to read too—the air carries a particular scent. If that scent is strong, you can bet the sun will hold for several days. And rain, too, has its own smell before it arrives. Once you catch that scent, no matter how fierce the sun, the rain is bound to come.
This method rarely fails. Even in the mercurial heat of midsummer, it still holds true.
What’s hard to sense is hail. Hail gives you no warning, no chance to prepare. Sometimes it even arrives before the rain. A few times, to shield the tobacco leaves from hail, my sister and I frantically threw tarps over the rows. The hail bruised our arms and backs, the pain mixed with the thunderous crackle of ice striking everything, and even now, remembering it, my stomach tightens. But these last-minute rescues could only save a tiny fraction of the loss.
Back then there was no agricultural insurance. If hail smashed the leaves, the whole growing season was lost for nothing. Hail was the weather we feared most. Fortunately, it didn’t come often.
Wind is an essential thing. So much of the farming depends on it. Drying radish strips and shreds requires wind to blow them dry; winnowing wheat and rapeseed needs wind to blow away the chaff and husks. But in the sweltering stretch between late summer and early autumn, the wind grows stingy: it rarely shows up, and when it does, it’s only for an instant—barely enough to nudge a single grain of chaff off the ground.
Māma learned a way of calling the wind from her own mother.
When they needed wind, she would tie her headscarf tight, plant her hands on her hips, stand at the far end of a paddy bank, and whistle out into the empty valley.
It was a melodic whistle. Māma said the melody was so the wind could tell which way to go. And because the wind always came, the melody felt like magic to me. I learned it quickly.
The next time we called the wind, my sister and I would whistle it together with Māma.
The wind was sometimes strong, sometimes faint, but it always came.
Writing this, I looked things up, wondering what was actually happening in the world around us when Māma and I blew that melody together.
“Whistling doesn’t truly ‘call’ the wind. Whistling simply sets the surrounding air in motion through sound vibrations, producing a breeze. When you whistle, the high-speed airflow from your mouth and tongue disturbs the air around you, creating a small-scale current. That moving air drags nearby air along with it, producing a rather feeble wind.” That’s what the internet says.
So it wasn’t magic after all. I felt a little deflated, and then I laughed at my computer screen and decided, right then, to forget the science and insist it was magic. It was one of the few joys Māma and I shared, and I’d rather keep it filed away in my memory as her superpower.
My sister and I had no idea. Seeing our blank faces, Māma’s confidence surged right back: “Shàngzhài district, thunderstorms, ten thousand millimetres.”
Sometimes her gestures were so over the top that we couldn’t help laughing. My sister said she looked absolutely nothing like the forecaster on television, but she still kept pestering Māma to perform. Māma wiped her brow, her sagging chest swaying beneath the loose, threadbare old shirt. Like every woman in the village, she had never worn a bra, which made her look all the more unselfconscious and at ease. Standing at the field’s edge giving her show, Māma was unlike herself in every other moment. She looked genuinely happy, unbound; the valley was her backdrop, her hand sweeping through the dry wind, and even the dust she kicked up seemed to come alive.
Her performances never lasted long, because the moment she got fully caught up in the joy of it, she would force herself to stop—set a stern face and go back to work. But in those few short minutes as our weather forecaster, we all felt a very clear happiness.
III. Farming That Never Ends
By the time I truly understood that, it was already too late—I had grown into the age when you farm. Tending the fields was no longer a game between me and the world; it had become a livelihood.
Every year, when the weather was at its coldest, I’d think that once the radish strips were out, we could finally rest for New Year. In reality, by the second day of the lunar new year we had to get straight back to turning the soil. Turning, ploughing, harrowing—once the ground was ready, it was on to cutting the bank grass, sowing tobacco seed, raising seedlings. You’d think you could simply sit and wait for the seedlings to grow, but no: during that waiting period you had to get the planting ground properly prepared as quickly as you could—piling up ridges, scattering manure to let it work in, and a while later, shaping the ridges into furrows. Once the seedlings were in, it was a long, meticulous stretch of management: covering with plastic film, spraying, killing pests, stripping the film off, weeding, topping… Every single step took a good deal of time, every plant had to be attended to, and then you multiplied that unit of labour by thousands, even tens of thousands, before the growing cycle was finally through.
The work that followed was heavier still: trekking up the mountain for timber for the tobacco curing barn, carrying it all the way home, tending the tobacco curing barn, picking the leaves, weaving them neatly onto curing poles, hanging them in the barn one strand after another, then watching the fire day and night without a moment’s rest, stoking the flames, holding the temperature steady. After several days of curing, you carefully pulled the dried leaves out, stored them strand by strand in the attic, took them down one by one, stretched each leaf flat, sorted them by grade, bundled them up, and kept them somewhere cool and dry. Only then were they ready to be hauled off to the tobacco purchase station.
Preparing the land after tobacco was far more trouble than after radish. Just pulling the roots out of the ground was a major effort in itself. Plants as tall as a person, each one yanked out by hand—then another round of turning, ploughing, and harrowing.
In rural Yunnan, growing tobacco counts as one of the more important farm tasks, so once the land was finally tended, the whole family would feel a collective sigh of relief. But the relief lasted only a short while before it was time to get the white cabbage in.
More ridging, more digging of small holes, a scatter of sheep manure and urea, then setting in the white cabbage seedlings—bought or home-raised, one by one—earthing them up, watering…
Fortunately, white cabbage isn’t too fussy and doesn’t need the same devoted tending as tobacco. But that’s only on the assumption the weather plays along; without rain, you have to water every other day or so.
While the white cabbage is growing on one side, it’s time to get the dew herb or French beans in on the other—or snow peas, for that matter. The steps are much the same: ridging, planting. Legumes need one extra step, though—building the support trellises—so you have to go up the mountain to find suitable bamboo or wooden poles, which is trouble enough in itself.
Once this round of harvest is over, the land gets no real rest, and neither do we. It’s ploughing, harrowing, dragging the harrow all over again… Growing radish isn’t as simple as scattering the seed. Before that, you have to dry the manure.
Sheep manure is best, mixed with cow dung and chicken dung, with a little nitrogen fertiliser added. Some families just use compound fertiliser straight. After a few days out in the sun, you break it up, bag it, and carry it to the field.
Then you need three people working in tandem: one digs the trench, one scatters the manure, one sows the radish seed. The spacing between each radish hole has to be even; the manure neither too much nor too little; the seed no more than three per hole, and it must not touch the manure directly—or it will be smothered.
To avoid smothering the seed, some families wait until the radishes have come up before top-dressing. Tens of thousands of radish seedlings, each one fed by hand while bent double. Good for the radish, but exhausting for the person doing it.
Before the radishes are full-grown, you weed, thin, water if it doesn’t rain, and dig drainage channels if it rains too much. After Mid-Autumn, the radishes are big enough. Every family carries out stakes of all kinds and nails them in a row along the paddy bank, strings nylon cord between them—that’s the drying rack. And then you can start slicing the radish strips.
Radishes as tall as a child—once pulled, you trim the top and tail, wash off the dirt, load them into bamboo baskets and carry them to the foot of the drying rack. With a simple device, you make two crossed cuts, hang the whole radish on the nylon cord, then carefully separate the strips one by one so they don’t stick together, making them easier to dry in the wind.
Once the strips are hung out, everyone prays it won’t rain. If it does, the radish turns red or even moulds and blackens, and all the work is wasted. Most of the time, everyone keeps a close eye on the weather. Roughly two tenths of the strips will get rained on; the rest come off cleanly, sorted by grade and tied into bundles about the thickness of a man’s ankle. Only then can they finally be packed for sale.
The land gets its usual three again. Spring arrives, and the Bèimǎ leads everyone in the land offering. People celebrate briefly during the Dragon Rite, and then it’s time to plant tobacco once more.
The farming I’ve described is only what’s done at my home—our family’s main tasks, that is. The rest is simply too much to list one by one in a few words. On the whole, a farmer’s life is complex and tense. There’s nothing pastoral or idyllic about it. If anything, it keeps you on edge.
Apart from tobacco, which generally has a fixed purchase price, everything else is a gamble. White cabbage might go for two yuan a kilogram when it’s still small, and by the time it’s ready to pick, the price has dropped to fifteen cents a kilo. Radish is the same: hauled to the market in the morning at ten yuan a kilo, seven by midday; maybe twelve again the next morning, six the day after.
As for snow peas, French beans, dew herb… these are things that depend on luck. In a good season, they all sell at once; in a bad one, they just rot in the field.
What keeps us tense isn’t just the price but the weather. Hail is the worst; next comes days of drought or days of flooding, either of which can wipe out a whole year’s effort.
Good harvest or bad, being a farmer is always hard, and that’s why I was so, so afraid of being a farmer for my whole life.
Farming never ends.
Except when I was at school, all my other time was spent doing farm work alongside the adults. Everything had to be done by hand. Māma drove the ox ahead, dragging the harrow over the ground, and my sister and I followed behind, picking up roots and stems from the soil, using hoes and rakes to break up the clods. When we spotted a cutworm, we’d pluck it out one by one with our fingers and crush it.
Of all the farm work, planting tobacco is the hardest. The seedlings are expensive and fragile; each one has to be set in with the greatest care, then the soil pressed gently around it. The seedlings don’t store well, and the season won’t wait, so once tobacco-planting time comes, you’re in the field before dawn and home after dark. The sun is fierce, swelling your head with heat, your back burning. And every late summer, your ears start to shed skin, like a snake shedding, layer after layer.
Our fingers dig back and forth in the dry soil. The pads grow a layer of callus, the nails are black all year round, and the cuticles sprout like open velveteen flowers curling around the nail.
Weeding the tobacco is exhausting in another way. In the peak heat, the cicadas are screaming, and my sister and I crouch beneath the plants, left hand steadying a tobacco leaf, right hand quickly yanking out the weeds. “Ah!” my sister shouts. I look up and see her holding a snake in her fist, flinging it off the bank, then wailing.
Māma comforted her for a moment—but only a moment—then my sister crouched down again and kept working.
Not just snakes—we’ve also caught toads and skinks, and compared to those, grasshoppers, snails, and slugs are rather mild visitors.
Topping the tobacco is no comfort either. We’re a lot shorter than the plants, so we have to keep our arms raised the whole time, and the topping fluid runs down your arm into your shirt. By nightfall, your armpits are on fire.
Tobacco leaves have a sticky coating, so after bundling the leaves, that residue clings to your hands. Once it meets air, it turns black. Our fingers are always black—not tanned, but stained. They look foul, as if we’d never washed our hands. During those years at the Han school, my black hands cost me a lot of chances to play with my classmates. Fortunately I wasn’t the only tobacco-planting kid in the family. As soon as school let out, I’d run off to join the older kids with black fingers, grab my lunch jar and head to the canteen. We’d line up behind the white-fingered kids on our own, wait for them to finish, then step up.
Farm work is so tiring. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, round and round, as if it will never end. And through all that day after day of labour, our family barely scrapes by. Back then I couldn’t stop thinking: would we starve if we didn’t farm? Couldn’t we just rest for a while? How many people in the world are like me, following my parents from one task to the next, never stopping?
The books praise farmers as great. Great in what way? Isn’t “great” a good word? Why do great people have to live so hard?
Life didn’t give me an answer, but I had a vague sense that only by studying properly at the Han school could I hope to escape a lifetime of farm work. Alas, my grades weren’t good, and the farm work didn’t shrink because I was at school. The summer and winter holidays brought more and more. One evening after a thunderstorm, I was carrying my back basket and a sickle to gather pig fodder. The stones along the riverbank were too slick, and I went down in a heap. The pig fodder spilled out of the basket, fell into the river, and the swift current took it. A few minutes later it was gone.
That day, I lay face-down on the riverbank and cried. My vague hopes for the future drifted away with the pig fodder in an instant. I felt I would farm for the rest of my life, like every farmer in the village, like Māma, like my grandmother—working until my body dried up and my eyes went cloudy, all the way to death.
Of course, even as a farmer, there were one or two tasks I actually enjoyed. The first was digging herbs. Strictly speaking, digging herbs doesn’t count as farm work. It doesn’t have the same urgency—you don’t have to race against time and weather to keep up. Dig or don’t dig, the herbs will be there.
Whenever we went out to graze the ox, my sister and I would take a small hoe and slung Māma’s crossbody bag—made from a woven sack—over our shoulders, packed with two rice balls, and head up the mountain where the herbs grew. The ox knew for itself where the grass was; we ducked into the scrub and started digging.
Digging herbs is tiring in itself. You’re bent double the whole time, searching, and before long your back aches. The joy is that wild raspberries and Yunnan berries always grow alongside the herbs, sweet and bright-tasting. Picking berries while you dig herbs is far more pleasant than digging in the blazing sun.
As a rule, by the time the ox has had its fill, our crossbody bags are full too, and it’s just about time to drive the ox home. The herbs we dig are dried for a few days, then carried on our backs to the Han village before school to sell. A weekend’s work might net us two or three yuan. The woman who buys the herbs dumps ours into her own big woven sack, sits down hard on it to compress it, and only then does she pay us.
……
Picking mushrooms is another good task.
You set off at first light with a small bamboo basket, pick a handy stick on the way, and push into the deep woods. The easiest to find in the woods near our village are porcini, sheep-milk mushroom, and coral mushroom. All of these are non-toxic and delicious stir-fried, and they’re not worth much money—even if we bring them home, our parents won’t sell them. We’d wash the mushrooms ourselves and hope that when Baba stir-fried them, he’d add a little more of his precious lard, so we could have a proper, fragrant meal.
Once I was a bit older, I looked forward more to finding the ones that fetch money—termite mushroom, dry-bark mushroom, yellow bolete, blue-staining mushroom, green-cap mushroom. When I first learned that a single palm-sized dry-bark mushroom was worth a whole school year’s worth of my herb-digging, I was stunned. I couldn’t understand why people in the city were willing to pay so much for it. Yes, dry-bark mushroom is exquisite, but even the worthless coral mushroom doesn’t taste that much worse. But it’s always good that someone’s willing to pay for mushrooms. It gives us a way to earn what we need to survive. Every time I’m about to push into the mountains, a field of dry-bark mushrooms appears in my mind first, to keep me searching for hours in the forest after rain. But termite mushrooms and dry-bark mushrooms aren’t so easy for a child to find. Compared to people who devote themselves entirely to mushroom-picking during the rainy season, we were far too amateur. They’d do everything they could to protect their “mushroom nests,” and there was no way we’d stumble on one they’d missed.
In my memory, there was one year when the rain was particularly good. The right mix of moisture and sun meant mushrooms came in abundance. My sister and I picked quite a lot of yellow boletes and sold them for over eighty yuan. That term, when we got our canteen meals, there was finally some meat in the bowl.
I never liked farm work, but I couldn’t hate it either. At the very least, in my impoverished childhood, farm work propped up my wavering sense of self, made me feel I was doing something “useful,” and gave me something to look forward to—”Even if I can’t do well at school, at least I can fill my stomach with farm work.” Thank God for that one glimmer of hope. Otherwise, how would I have gotten through those days of feeling defeated, lost, and anxious because I couldn’t keep up with my studies?
All images in this article are provided by the author.