Life Is Just One Leap of Abandon – but the Rice Paddies Caught Me? | Food Talk Vol.70

In 2019, Chen Xi visited Qiandongnan, Guizhou, for the first time and was struck by the paddy fields and rice of Yangdong Village. She had just returned from eleven years in America, working a desk job in Beijing that had nothing to do with farming. Seven years later, she had built a timber house in this Dong village, settled into a life of growing and selling rice, and a library she had built for the village children was undergoing its first renovation.

Chen Xi has almost terrifying powers of execution. With no design training, she drew up plans herself and built her dream timber house among the mountains. Worried about village children spending too much time on short videos, she used the proceeds from selling 5,000 jin of purple rice to build the village’s first library. A senior told her, “Ecological agriculture in the primary sector simply won’t work,” but she didn’t believe it. “If it can move me, why shouldn’t it move others?” Today, Zhaoxi She is largely self-sufficient.

Of course Chen Xi is brave. But bravery alone isn’t enough – you also need patience, and that is something the land taught her.

In Guizhou, rice is grown for just one season a year: sowing in spring, flowering in summer, threshing in autumn, and water storage in winter. Agriculture demands time, so she decided to give herself time.

The first three years barely covered expenses. She spent them in the fields running experiments with heirloom rice varieties from Liping County and the surrounding area. The first year’s harvest was only a few dozen jin, sold at thirty yuan a jin, which came to just two thousand yuan.

No matter – she thought of it as paying tuition. Find a new plot, plant more next time.

Now they cultivate nine varieties of rice reliably, with a yield of over three hundred jin per mu.

After seven years, for Chen Xi and Zhaoxi She, their summer has only just begun.

There is a Dong proverb – Angl xeenp weex xuh nyenc weex egs (“the land is host, and we are but guests”) – humans are not the centre of this landscape, just passing guests who happen to stay here. “When the ecology is well balanced, you don’t need a great deal of human intervention. You just check in and look after things.”

Chen Xi says she has always been this way. “For a while my online status read, ‘Living forever on the mountain’s edge’ – as if I could leap off at any moment.” Since you’re here anyway, why not take the plunge?

Welcome to the first episode of the “She and the Land” series. Perhaps Chen Xi’s choices and outlook can offer you a little inspiration.

(This conversation was recorded in April this year. The timber house in the mountains was being renovated, and Chen Xi had returned to Beijing for an event during the International Year of Women Farmers. At the time, she was desperate to race back to the mountains: “If I don’t get back soon, the bamboo shoots will go old!”)

P.S.: The “Zhao” in Zhaoxi She is a local Dong generational naming character

01:35 From Beijing to Qiandongnan: a crash course in dismantling a family farm

04:00 First impressions of Yangdong Village: the very first look at you was sheer magic

06:20 The moment she went all-in on village life: two spring bamboo shoots posted by a former contractor, now husband

08:53 What does it cost to build a timber house in the village?

10:00 Can you build a house without studying architecture? The master ink-line builder, hidden in quiet famelessness

18:20 What do you do when it rains? Thunder that sounds like the end of the world, power cuts and leaking roofs – the price of living far from it all

22:00 Want to build a library for the village’s left-behind children? First, let’s sell 5,000 jin of purple rice!

27:47 Running Zhaoxi She: its operations and growing model – “When the ecology is well balanced, you don’t need a great deal of human intervention.”

30:49 Locals start planting hybrid rice too – chemical fertiliser reaches deep into the mountains

32:00 “The land is host, and we are but guests” – Dong people, Han Chinese, foreigners: all are guests on this land

32:33 International Women’s Day the Dong way: “Want to pass through? Leave a toll!”

34:36 The Dong view of festivals: celebrating life itself – of course every festival deserves to be celebrated! “When you come to my home, that’s a festival.”

36:00 The classic East Asian family question: You quit your Beijing job, married into the mountains of Guizhou to farm – what do your parents think?

38:00 A senior told her ecological agriculture growing rice simply can’t make money. “If this can move me, why shouldn’t it move others?”

41:50 Who says the varieties we grow are old? These varieties are wonderful!

44:58 The world is my oyster – crack it open with courage and sheer force of will

46:00 The greatest challenge in farming is time: plant for a year, harvest two thousand – wouldn’t anyone feel the weight of it?

48:33 Farming means making wishes to nature: in summer pray for sunshine, in autumn hope for no rain

51:14 “I can keep on my Odyssey – I don’t want that endpoint to find me”

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