Wicked Valley’s Fifth Anniversary: Believe in Good Things, Create Good Things

On 16 June 2026, Wicked Valley marked its fifth anniversary. With fresh sunshine after rain, I rushed to the rooftop to take photos. The forecast had rain in store for the ten days before and the ten days after; the old saying calls this the “Dragon Boat rains”, and the rainy season usually ends only after the Dragon Boat Festival.

High temperatures and abundant rain have made the plants in Wicked Valley grow wildly. Every morning, when I get up early to walk round the garden, there is something new to discover; overnight, the changes are visible to the naked eye. I have been growing dragon fruit for two years. It loves heat and is heat-hardy; when people get hot, they wilt, but when dragon fruit gets hot, it flowers. One day it was still a bud; the next day when I looked again, its enormous flower had already bowed low, heavy under its own weight. Wild growth is not all good, either: if I leave the weeds alone for a few days, they declare independence and found a country, leaving no path for people to walk through.

◉ In just a few days, the dragon fruit flower has gone from first bud to full bloom. May heaven bless it with sweet fruit.

Now, at Wicked Valley, almost nothing needs to be bought except salt. In fact, even salt need not be bought. The hills around are home to salt-skin trees; in autumn, their fruit is coated with a layer of salt. If you do not mind the trouble, you can pick them, soak them in water, and make salt, but I find it too much trouble.

Over five years, I have not only created a self-sufficient one-person farm, but my health indicators have also improved steadily.

I. I.

From Construction to Refinement

Looking back on my first arrival at Wicked Valley and the earliest reclamation work, there was a period when things were changing from day to day. I came here with three years of growing experience on both sides of the strait, so I was by no means a greenhorn in agriculture; I already had a plan for a one-person farm, sufficient to envision a self-sufficient home on this wild land.

But after a year of digging ditches, raising ridges, planting trees and flowers, the first thing I did the following spring was still to call in an excavator. My growing experience in Taiwan and in Dawu, where I had previously farmed for a year, still needed to be reconciled with the realities of Wicked Valley. Frameworks such as the road layout and the irrigation channels are based on the terrain, and there was little need to change them. But once I had been through the first rainy season, I knew how shallow my understanding of “drainage” was as a person from the north. The drainage system had to be planned again and dug anew. Keeping chickens on the hillside by the road was not wrong, and the surrounding mesh was fine, but chickens have wings and can fly. Perched on the slope, they would flap their wings, clear the lower wire, and make an easy jailbreak. While the fence was raised, I had no choice but to hire the excavator again, this time to change a steep slope into a gentler one. Later, to make a “chicken-centred design” work for free-ranging chickens in a small area, I brought in an “excavator + loader + lorry” combination, and had more than a dozen loads of fertile fish-pond mud dug out. This eased the steep slope and improved the soil at the same time, and I planted in sections according to the chickens’ needs.

Over the five years there have been many similar stories. This year’s fine-tuning has centred on the water lily pond. My original plan for the water lily pond was for it to be ringed with roses in full bloom. In five years I have spent no fewer than a thousand yuan on various types of rose plants and seedlings, and the number that has survived is few enough to count on one hand.

Roses have too many pests and diseases, and I am determined not to use pesticides. Add the heavy dampness around the pond, and they are unsuitable for roses. This year I finally accepted the reality and decided not to keep replacing the dead ones; instead, I simply planted a ring of daylilies around the pond. The first plants were dug by hand from a friend’s garden and brought back on a bicycle, so one can imagine they were not many. Over a few years, those first plants have multiplied dozens of times over, and they are already a great sight at Wicked Valley. Daylilies are tough and vigorous, and they love water; planted in a ring around the pond, they will soon form a huge golden ring of flowers.

◉ The daylilies now by the roadside at my front gate were just a small cutting when I planted them.

This year, the lotus pond in the ditch has finally come to look a bit like a lotus pond. Under the lotus leaves lie three years of sunk cost. I started growing lotus in this water three years ago. All kinds of plants and lotus seeds from different places have been lost in it. Defeat after defeat, I kept trying, until last year the surviving red lotuses began to form a patch. This year, the white lotuses have finally taken hold as well.

◉ Full-blooming water lilies and daylilies on the banks. The ditch finally has something of the look of a lotus pond. It is a wild ditch: apple snails are rampant, and when it rains hard the current runs fast. It used to be a playground for my neighbour’s ducks. All of these are deadly enemies of the pointed young lotus shoots. Just keeping this patch of lotus leaves alive this year can already be called an achievement.

Then there are difficulties that cannot be overcome. Citrus is a fruit suited to the land: pomelos, honey mandarins, jelly oranges, navel oranges—more than twenty trees in all. In spring the blossoms fill the garden with fragrance. Citrus flowers are white and sweet-scented, so fragrant that the heart stirs; but then the pests arrive, and they eat the leaves until they are bare. I do not use pesticides, so I can only tough it out, waiting until the pests have fed themselves well, mated, and laid eggs in the soil to pupate, and the branches stripped bare put out new shoots.

Last year the hibiscus blossoms really shone. I had imagined that this year would also be a riot of flowers, but I was clearly thinking too much. This year the insects arrived before the buds. A kind of enormous red insect I had not seen in previous years blanketed the leaves. There was nothing for it but to tough it out. Born as plants in Wicked Valley, they cannot count on the help of pesticides; they can only follow me in practising the art of holding firm. If they hold on, they remain on this land; if they cannot, they are eliminated.

The broad, sweeping process of adjustment went on for three years, and only then did the work shift mainly to fine-tuning. In fact, by Wicked Valley’s third anniversary, a basic version of self-sufficiency had already been achieved, and the core infrastructure for the living and production areas was in place. The task ahead was to move from “construction” to “refinement”. Between the third and fourth anniversaries, the focus of refinement was the “greenhouse”. From the fourth anniversary to the present, it has been “making use of sunlight”, improving the trellis system.

All things grow by the sun. Last year I built a trellis over the path I must use to get in and out. It has proved a good idea: plants must compete for sunlight if they are to grow, while people want to hide from the sun and dread being exposed to it—exactly a win-win. Last year the pumpkins on the trellis grew well. This year I started early, and have carefully improved the trellis that was originally put up in a hurry. It is no longer the old disorderly make-do, but straight and level, and perfectly tidy. The pumpkins are at ease, I am pleased to look at them, and once again it is a win-win. Now the pumpkins have entered their season of wild growth. A month from now the vines will be all over the trellis, and the pumpkins will be heavy with fruit.

◉ The left image shows the trellis grid at the gate, taken on 16 June after the long rain had just cleared. Ten days later, it had become the right-hand image.

Wicked Valley has no big projects left now. Apart from planting and harvesting the main crops, it has entered the day-to-day cycle of routine management, such as weeding. This is something I do every day all year round, and it seems as if it can never be finished. But whatever else, every time I pull up a weed, I am actually improving things a little. To the naked eye there may be no great change, but if I do not weed, the wild grass will certainly take over everywhere, and perhaps there will be nowhere to put one’s feet. In one sense, this kind of work is a form of practice, a practice driven by “belief”—the belief that I am making myself a little better.

Over five years, bit by bit, Wicked Valley has grown softer and softer, and has come to suit me better and better, like an old cloth shirt.

No Longer a Modern Person Living in an Industrialised Food System

Since last year, the pumpkins have been in a “can’t-finish-them-all era”. This year’s new pumpkins have already made their appearance, and last year’s old ones are still around, dozens of them, big and small. I love the feeling of being a household with pumpkins; it feels abundant and luxurious. The pumpkin-eating crowd: every time they cut open a new pumpkin and try a piece, if it isn’t to their liking, they want to throw it to the chickens. This year the daylilies are the same: the endless buds hint that this flowering season will be a glut of flowers.

When I first set out to find a place where I could put a self-sufficient one-person farm into practice, of course much of it was based on ideals and a philosophy of natural living; ahead of me lay goals that attracted me. But behind me, too, were things that made me want to escape. As a modern person in everyday life, in my forties or fifties, this body had accumulated a great many problems, and the one-way street of life had already turned downhill.

Around the age of forty, I began to suffer from a deficiency of qi and blood, indigestion, poor sleep… No major problems, but one minor ailment after another. I went to hospital and took medicine, but there was no improvement, and nothing got worse either. The doctor called them “perimenopausal symptoms”; looking around at people my own age, they seemed about the same. The doctor also said that urban ailments are a common affliction of modern people, which did sound reasonable.

I was deeply afraid that this descent would get out of control, and I wanted to see whether I could for once be the master of my own life. So, at forty, the age of no perplexity, I gave up my job in a state-run public institution, and drifted in Beijing at an advanced age to do charity work. I felt that life ought to have choices of one’s own, that one should be master of oneself, and that one can choose to go upward. But when I was fifty, my immune system collapsed, and body and mind sank to rock bottom. At the time I even thought of Stephen Hawking, and I knew clearly that I did not have a will as strong as his. If I could not break free from this state in which I was not in control of my own body, I would certainly have chosen to take my own life. When I wanted to choose to go upward but my body did not cooperate, then I would stop the downward slide first.

In fact, I took a third path. After two years of farming in Taiwan, I encountered true love. Despite having no experience of rural life, I discovered that I was actually a heaven-chosen farmer. Ever since I started farming, my back has stopped aching, my stomach has stopped hurting, and falling asleep has become easy. No longer am I troubled by philosophical questions such as whether to live or die; my head is full instead of practical questions about how to live better.

At that time I also thought that perhaps a farming idiot like me could survive in the countryside because Shengou Village, Yilan—Taiwan’s first organic farming village—had conditions that were too good, with a comprehensive system of services and support made up of more than two hundred fellow farmers nearby. I wanted to challenge myself and see whether, after returning, I could find a place, start from scratch, and survive in a setting lacking local support, scratching a living from the soil with my own two hands.

I wanted to see whether, at an age when one is heading towards sixty, life could still go upward. If even someone like me can hand-build a self-sufficient home from clearing the land, then many others surely can too—even more so.

Five years ago today, I came to Wicked Valley. Five years at Wicked Valley have brought me not only a self-sufficient one-person farm but also steadily improving health indicators. It seems that lifestyle can change the physical condition of modern people.

At my health check two years ago, three indicators were marked with arrows: total cholesterol was slightly high, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) was high, and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) was low. The doctor said that as long as HDL is high and LDL is low, cholesterol is an important “building material” for the body, and a slight excess is no problem.

When I checked again recently, my total cholesterol had actually come down. The change is probably due to eating more eggs. I had always been told not to eat more than two eggs a day, and the reason given was the cholesterol in egg yolks. Lately, quite a lot of information has shown that it is fine to eat more: cholesterol is mostly made by the body itself, and eating more eggs can actually help lower cholesterol. There are even cases of people who have eaten more than 20 eggs a day for a long time. I am not that extreme. I eat five or six eggs a day from my own chickens and ducks, and if I eat fewer than four, I add protein powder. The most direct reason I eat eggs is that there are so many that it would be a waste not to eat them. By a twist of fate, this seems to have confirmed the latter.

Now I farm and keep chickens happily and with ease. I eat with relish and my body is in top form; my health-check report is “four test papers, all A+”, and my indicators are better than they were 20 years ago. Growing old does not necessarily mean the body falls apart; modern people do not have to carry a full load of modern ailments. Even within a modern lifestyle besieged on all sides, people still have choices, and they can use their choices to influence their lives.

In an age when both the food system and lifestyle have been fully industrialised and commodified, those living within it must at least first see the problem if they are to make a choice. Wicked Valley can keep its doors shut and face the open sky, setting itself apart from the elephant in the room: the modern industrialised food production, marketing and distribution system. Yet when I finally achieved self-sufficiency, I felt no relief at watching the fire from the far bank; I kept feeling that I must do something.

This year, while the various details of Wicked Valley continue to be refined, I also fulfilled another small wish: I did something I am not good at, and wrote a series of reflections on the modern food system. It points out the dangers and also provides examples and methods for avoiding them, from refined vegetable oils and refined carbohydrates, through sugar and drinks, snacks and fruit, one after another; with the addition of “food additives”, that brings the series to a close. Modern people, in the real world, can seek the good and avoid harm, and change can start in daily life, down to a single vegetable or a single meal. I have already done what I could. What readers take away from it, how they choose to change, and what effect that has on their own lives will depend on their own circumstances and opportunities.

I will retreat into Wicked Valley and live my own small life in my comfort zone. These days I am much easier on myself, and in many ways I have learned to let myself off.

◉ “Farming, daydreaming, closed to visitors”: this sign hangs at the gate of Wicked Valley.

Facing a Scoundrel with an Even Mind

Over the past year, there was one other pretty important thing: Baidu AI’s dung-slinging and rumour-mongering.

Baidu AI handed down a sentence against me: “extortion… ten years and three months’ imprisonment.” I must admit I was a bit heated at the time, because the rumour listed my background, ancestral home, charity work and personal writings right after the accusation, binding them up alongside me and parading them in public.

If a dog bites me, I cannot bite back like a dog, but I also cannot allow someone with no bottom line to act with impunity. So I hired a lawyer to take Baidu to court.

Litigating against a company with no bottom line, like Baidu, is very distressing; being pitted against a dung-slinging scoundrel brandishing a shit-stirring stick is sickening for whoever has to face it. It will soon be a year, and Baidu has admitted no fault, offered no apology, and paid no compensation—instead, it has made up new rumours and gone on smearing.

Thank goodness I am all right: my mind is calm and my emotions are stable.

I have to admit there was a period when things were quite bad: I could not eat or sleep. Although I knew I must not let a scoundrel’s tricks ruin my life, I was still dragged into the whirlpool against my will. Fortunately I have weathered it, returned to normal life, and filed a new lawsuit over Baidu’s new rumours.

This year, while dealing with the lawsuit, I have carried on the usual work—spring harvest and spring sowing. I harvested a little over five kilograms of rapeseed and a good few kilograms of wheat, and planted corn, peanuts, soybeans, black beans and all kinds of beans. In the garden now the peanuts are growing well; in another month they will be ready for harvest. The day I harvested peanuts last year I saw Baidu’s rumour. This year, besides the lawsuit, I have also tried picking up new sidelines, such as making complaints and reports to the relevant authorities and the like. Thanks to Baidu, now past sixty, I am unlocking new skills again.

Thinking back on this year’s eccentric experiences, I am reasonably satisfied with myself. Even though I have encountered such bizarre things, I still believe in good things, and still have the ability to create them.

– This is Foodthink’s 820th original article –