The Modern Person Who Craves Nature in the City and Air Conditioning on the Land

After graduating with my bachelor’s degree in 2025, I did not rush into a stable job. Instead, I wandered circuitously, exploring what I imagined a good life to be. As the years went by, I — who had grown up between cramped apartment blocks and raw concrete — began to realise that nature could soothe me, hold me. Entering nature meant relief. The instant I left it, a weight settled over me: the anxiety that saturates human society would flood my body all at once.

Of all the trades, agriculture is relatively close to nature. So I signed up for Foodthink’s 2026 ecological agriculture internship programme and came to Baicaoyuan in Guigang, Guangxi, in early March this year.

Peach Blossom Spring: Does It Exist?

Within the boundaries of Baicaoyuan, a small ecological Peach Blossom Spring has taken shape: kitchen scraps and faeces are turned into compost; plastic waste is hauled to the town for disposal; all washing and care products are ecological, so when you wash, the suds just run unabashedly with the water downhill, following the slope of the bricks and stones into the earth, feeding the soil runoff; no pesticides or chemical fertilisers are used on the crops or fruit trees — they are left to grow “wildly”.

But just a few metres from the edge of Baicaoyuan’s Wogan mandarin trees lies another orchard, another world.

◉ Signboard at the neighbouring orchard.

Plump, golden fruit hangs heavy on the branches. At the edge of the trees, barely a blade of grass takes root — just a bare, barren expanse of yellow. On Baicaoyuan’s fruit trees, by contrast, a few false fruits linger; weeds crowd the trunks, some growing right up to the root zone, their stems coiling and winding between the branches. This is the sharpest visual difference I have noticed here between conventional farming and ecological farming. More subtle still is the difference in taste. A Wogan mandarin from conventional farming leaves a sweetness that lodges in the throat, sticky and cloying, unable to sink into the body. A Wogan mandarin from Baicaoyuan is clear and sweet, permeating the body without a trace. Such a difference calls for slow savouring, for tasting and re-tasting, for feeling with the whole body.

◉ Fruit boxes at the neighbouring orchard.

On another small hillside not far from Baicaoyuan, every tree and every blade of grass has been pulled up by the roots, eradicated to the last. The result is the same bare, barren yellow. In April, the land was planted with fruit trees; drip-irrigation pipes crisscross the ground in every direction, and plastic waste buried in the soil has been laid bare.

One morning, we set about clearing a plot Sister Yan Ping had newly leased, and the first thing we did was pick up rubbish. The waste in the soil was mainly plastic film, plastic bags, plastic bottles, pesticide and fertiliser bags, and woven polypropylene sacks. Some of the rubbish was buried so deep that you could not sense where it ended. Some was such a tangle that it resisted both cutting and untangling — it would crumble apart as you pulled, sending white fragments flying from the break. Picking up rubbish is a thing that saddens me. The plastic waste in farmland can never be fully cleared; I joke that I am Sisyphus, the rubbish-picker.

◉ Sister Yan Ping at work. Photo: Chen Yujun

Sisyphus and the Slowness of Agriculture

At the start of farm work, I often felt like Sisyphus. In the beginning, farming seemed repetitive, tedious, slow, and endless.

Hoeing at Baicaoyuan was my first time holding a hoe. I did not know how to grip it or how to carry it on the shoulder. All I could do was silently watch Sister Yan Ping or Xiaona’s movements, study them, then awkwardly pick up the hoe, awkwardly strike the ground, feeling awkward all over. Under my clumsy motions the hoe went every which way, and it was hard to cut a deep furrow. Before long, my body was already weary, and a faint sense of frustration began to rise in me.

Agriculture is, by its nature, a slow thing. My slowness at farm work was because I had not yet truly mastered the technique; the seasoned farmers, on the other hand, could set a seedling in the ground in a few seconds. Their “speed” is, in fact, built on a long accumulation of “slowness”.

But between one kind of slowness and another, there is a difference.

There is a kind of slowness that is low-quality slowness. When a person is not present, not fully engaged in what they are doing, everything turns diffuse and tedious. Time is stretched out, but nothing settles, and nothing enters the work itself. This slowness is, in essence, a kind of drifting and depletion. And then there is another kind of slowness that is good slowness. Pacing, thinking slowly, letting thoughts unfold gradually; doing a task at an unhurried pace, body and attention both fully present. This slowness is a time with density. So the question is not whether things are fast or slow, but whether a person has truly entered time itself.

Later, as my body gradually developed a good working relationship with the tools, I began to feel an occasional lightness — lifting the hoe gently, then letting it fall under its own weight, the soil would give way with a small hollow; a gentle pull toward the body, and a little furrow would appear. A small sense of accomplishment would follow.

◉ A well-worn old hoe.

But the land has other challenges in store. Sometimes the hoe strikes a stone in the soil. If it is a small stone, you can angle the hoe slightly to pry it out. If it is a large one, you either back off, acknowledging the difficulty, or step back a little, dig away the soil clinging to it to expose the stone, then lift it out by hand.

Brute force is useless against stones. It is, in many ways, the same with other things.

After a period of adjustment, working in the land again, I always felt time stretching out, and occasionally a calm state of flow would arise. Attention resting on the land is not constantly fractured, and the work takes on a quality of mental ease.

At Baicaoyuan, I carried water on a bamboo carrying pole for the first time. The rounded crown of the bamboo rested on my right shoulder, the hooks at either end cradling a half-full bucket on each side. Standing in the middle, I squatted down, my left hand steadying the front, my right hand hooking the back, then rose slowly, slowly. A faint ache in my right shoulder, then I shuffled my feet forward, one careful step at a time.

It is physical work, but when I realised that my body was not frail and powerless — that it could still carry water — I felt a subtle satisfaction and a trust in my body.

Baicaoyuan’s only mechanical tool is a brush cutter. To use it, you rest one end on your shoulder, lift the blade end to a certain height, and walk forward slowly.

The brush cutter is heavy for me and produces a tremendous roar. It is often Sister Yan Ping who uses it to clear the path. W hile it is running, I need to put in earplugs or stay away from it to reduce the noise.

◉ Sister Yan Ping discovers an ant nest while cutting grass.

I have even come to feel that a mechanical tool like the brush cutter is more physically demanding than a traditional one. It must remain perfectly still against the body; the only thing in motion is its blade — and this puts enormous strain on the shoulders. After a few days of continuous use, Sister Yan Ping’s shoulder ached badly. I held the handlebars of the three-wheeled motorbike for her, and we rode into town together to see a doctor.

But when using a traditional tool like a hoe, the body and the tool form one interlinked whole. Force passes continuously between body, tool, and earth, each driving the others in rhythm. The body moves with the cadence of the tool; the tool, guided by the person, works more effectively with the soil. Once you learn to farm without strain, your body is less likely to feel weary or aching — you may even feel light and at ease.

Submission to Nature

At Baicaoyuan, I experienced a life entirely different from any I had known before. When life is this close to nature and the earth, the body must submit — it submits to beggarticks that plaster themselves across shoe tops, socks, and trouser hems; to the welts bugs leave on my arms after biting; to sudden downpours lashing in with howling wind; to long stretches of drought; to the weight of a carrying pole bearing water; to rugged, treacherous hill paths; to wild grasses surging across every hillside; to mice scurrying along the roof beams day after day, to cockroaches darting through the rice bin; to the colonies of mould that set food fermenting and turning musty — though I will not submit to the plastic mulch film buried in the soil or the rubbish heaped beside the graves.

◉ Beggarticks.

Looking back now, what stays with me most is that sudden day of violent rain. This is what I wrote about the storm that afternoon:

“After the thunder and lightning, the sky changed in an instant — darkening, greying — the sound of rain and wind blended into one, and the plants bent and skewed in every direction. I hurried to bring in the clothes hanging from a forked branch outside. The rain blown through the window was fine and chaotic; the wooden floor showed patch after patch of water stain, and a dampness crept onto my skin, tinged with a faint coolness that spread.”

“A few aunts working at the neighbouring farm sheltered at the doorway and broke into mountain songs. Sister Yan Ping warmly ushered them in. She set out the little wooden stools, and we sat down in rows. The rain grew heavier, and our movements grew frantic — hastily gathering the mulberries and Job’s tears stalks drying under the eaves, drawing up the bamboo curtain, moving deeper inside, huddling by the fire. The wind drove the flames lopsided to one side, and we scrambled out of the way. The small space was filled with people in no time. Mountain songs, conversation, and the sound of wind and rain — all at once. My hearing gradually had nowhere to rest; my ears, my auditory nerves, my whole brain were on the verge of breaking down. I raised my camera and tried to record it all, and it seemed to work. Through the lens I watched the people, the plants, the wind and rain, the fire, and slowly I calmed down.”

◉ The aunts sheltering from the rain.

◉ By the fire inside on a storm day.

Later, another downpour struck in the dead of night, just as sudden. The sound of rain flooded the entire ear pressed against my pillow in an instant, and I jolted awake, unable to sleep again. I made my way down the wooden staircase and found the floor already wet; the odds and ends on the table were damp too. I hurried to gather them into the smaller, drier room.

After going through times like these, a person rediscovers a sense of awe toward nature.

Here, I also came to feel something of a producer’s role. Food was gathered, cultivated, or bartered with farming friends; all three meals a day were made by me, sometimes starting from the very act of lighting the fire. Travel was limited to wherever the electric tricycle could reach — collecting a parcel in town, say, or tending another plot in the nearby city of Yulin. Food, clothing, shelter, transport — everything contracted back to a small scale.

In a remote, impoverished place, a person takes on the work of production, whether by choice or by necessity. In the city, a person’s time is carved up by work, and they often end up, passively, as mere consumers.

◉ A corner of Baicaoyuan.

The Day I Left

After a month of living and working on the farm, I decided to leave because I could not stand the heat.

The day I left, Sister Yan Ping drove me to the high-speed rail station on her three-wheeled motorbike. The afternoon was muggy, the sun blinding. As the speed picked up, a breeze began to rise, scattering some of the heat. Halfway through the journey, I swapped seats with Sister Yan Ping and took the handlebars. Light reflecting off the road poured straight into my eyes; I squinted, staring fixedly ahead. The experience of driver and passenger is entirely different.

I remember the first time I rode this three-wheeler — it was Xiaona and I taking turns practising. Starting from the doorway of the wooden cabin, a narrow ramp lay ahead, a bamboo frame set alongside. Further down, the slope widened slightly. A left turn, then a short stretch, and you reached the flat ground in the village. The slope was bumpy; I was trembling, suppressing my fear, keeping my speed under control, driving forward slowly, slowly. When I reached the stretch of slope connecting to the flat ground, the vehicle suddenly jolted violently, and I did my best to steady myself. Trusting myself, and trusting the stability of this three-wheeler, I finally made it smoothly onto the flat ground.

◉ On the right is Xiaona, examining a bean paste that has been fermenting for several days with Sister Yan Ping.

It was Xiaona’s turn to take over. I stood to the side, watching her suddenly accelerate in a flash. Before I could react, the vehicle shot off in a blur. Just as it was about to turn onto a side path, Sister Yan Ping and I hurried after it. After rounding into the fork, she still had not managed her speed. In an instant, the vehicle had slammed into a tree by the roadside. Xiaona probably had not dealt with the fear inside her, and that tension made her movements frantic, which is how the accident happened. It seems slow has its own merits after all.

◉ The three-wheeler at Baicaoyuan. Photo by: Chen Yujun

But driving on the flat road to the high-speed rail station was well within my comfort zone. As long as there was no oncoming traffic, I eased up to top speed. When a vehicle came, I slowed down in advance, yielding whenever I could. Still, I am someone who cannot stand the heat. For the last stretch, Sister Yan Ping took over the handlebars, and I dozed off at her side.

By April, Guangxi had already become a steamer. In those last few days at Baicaoyuan, the heat sealed over my head like a lid. I felt my mind muddled, my body sluggish and heavy — it was truly unbearable, like a kind of brain fog brought on by the heat. It was not like the emptiness in the head during physical labour; it was more like a lump of hot paste churning in the brain. I think my brain and nervous system genuinely need the right conditions to function.

Afterword

The Modern Person Who Craves the Land

By the time I set down these words, I had already returned to the cramped, claustrophobic spaces of the city. The difference between nature and the city hits me all at once — at Baicaoyuan, there was no separation between person and nature, but in the city, one must go to parks, to man-made things, to find nature that has been carefully tended. The city is a vast top-down system; one’s time is surrendered to it, and, being so far removed from primary nature and the site of production, one gradually loses sensitivity to weather and the rhythms of nature.

But during my time on the farm, I often felt lost, too. It seemed to me that beyond the hours of work, there was only cooking, eating, and sleeping. I no longer had time for reading, writing, or study — I could only snip at the margins, straining and hungering to absorb whatever text I could. Sometimes I was afraid I was wasting my time.

◉ A corner of the desk.

Farm work is a continuous, repetitive cycle, and it gives you a certain immediate feedback — plant one seed, then the next. But crops need time to grow, and this silent, wordless growth is unfamiliar to me. I often wonder how farmers endure the months, even years, of a plant’s growing cycle.

I cannot find feedback in a crop’s growth, or any shift in emotion. For me, it does not constitute “meaning.”

I did not take the ecological farm as my final resting place; it is a possible part of the life I envision. During my time on the farm, I was still handling other work concurrently. Sister Yan Ping would say, “Don’t try to do two things at once.” I cannot yet hold fast to one place the way Sister Yan Ping does. I, too, want to give my whole heart to one thing, but where I am now, I must extend different feelers to better reach the life I want. I cannot yet hold fast to one place the way Sister Yan Ping does.

Looking back now on my time at Baicaoyuan, I think it allowed me to truly, freshly, and both bodily and spiritually taste what it is to live and labour in nature, and to more deeply recognise the preciousness of food and how hard-won it is. At the same time, I have come to realise that I am still a modern person, not a person of nature — I cannot do without air conditioning and the city; I cannot truly live like a farmer. But in my own way, I will explore a good way of living in the cracks between city and countryside, tradition and modernity, consumption and production.