74-Year-Old Grandma Crosses 8 Hills Just to Earn 3,000 Yuan in Old-Age Savings

My grandmother, Yang Xiuying, is 74 years old, weighs under 40 kg, and stands barely 1.5 m tall. Before the Qingming Festival, she had already begun heading into the mountains each day to dig and gather bamboo shoots, traversing seven or eight small hills nearby and working without respite for over a month. Once home again, she threw herself into making dried bamboo shoots, not daring to rest for so much as a moment. She must earn a year’s worth of old-age savings from the shoots.

Heading into the Mountains

Just past six in the morning, with the sky barely lightening, Grandma skipped breakfast, pulled on her worn grey trousers and shirt, tucked her feet into her wellies, and set off to fetch Grandma Deng Lian, 70, from the same village. These two silver-haired figures—one tall, one short—headed out carrying woven polypropylene sacks and a billhook.

Our home sits at the foot of a great mountain whose ridge slices down from the northeast to the southwest. Below the main peak, ridge after ridge tumbles earthward, and bamboo groves are scattered along them in winding curves. Many of these groves do not sit on level ground at all but grow in wild clumps along valleys, stream beds, and cracks between rocks. Each spring these bamboo plants yield the mountain’s richest “fruit.” Grandma likes to say, “Qingming is chaos, Grain Rain cuts off—the moment Qingming arrives, shoots sprout wildly everywhere.” And the mountain folk’s footsteps fall into a muddle right alongside them.

When I came home for the May Day holiday, I went up the mountain twice with Grandma and Auntie.

From outside, those little hillocks look like nothing but a dense tangle of assorted trees and scrub—you could not find a path if your life depended on it. But that does not bother Grandma at all. Every entrance and exit, she knows by heart. She ducks into a fold of the hillside and feels her way down a narrow track. She even carries a whole “spring shoot” map in her head: the earliest baby shoots appear on Boluo Ridge; the bamboo grove by the small pool at Dong Village is flat and easy to pick; Bazao Mountain has shoots, but you have to wriggle through the brambles; the steep slope above the pool has fewer shoots, but they are the big ones.

There are no proper paths in the hills, and ups and downs are everywhere. Walking in behind her, barely in my twenties, I simply could not keep up with a 74-year-old. Those near-vertical slopes she grabs a branch or a vine, hauls herself up in a single stride, and her hands are quick at finding shoots and cutting them. In ten-odd minutes she has swept through an entire small grove. By the time I am still dawdling in the undergrowth, she has already crossed several more.

The hardest part is not finding the shoots but carrying them out of the valley. One person can gather a hundred to a hundred and fifty kilos of fresh shoots in a day—all of it by hand. The first time I tried it, I shouldered a single bundle and nearly buckled under the weight; I gritted my teeth and barely managed to haul it out. Grandma, despite the cuts on her fingers, carried three sacks, while Auntie carried four. All the way out we gripped the woven polypropylene sack on our shoulder with one hand and pulled ourselves along with branches in the other, inching our way down the slippery, muddy track.

Hauling shoots down the mountain is not only exhausting but dangerous—in Grandma’s words, “very easy to get hurt.” The ground is uneven and slick, you have to cling to bamboo branches and vines to climb up and drop down, and with all the weight on one side of your body it is impossible to balance. It was only on those two trips with Grandma that I truly understood what she meant. Once I lost my footing, slid, and landed on a sharp bamboo stump, tearing a long gash across my bottom. All I could do was pretend nothing had happened and keep trudging with the sack on my back, saving the wound for when we got home.

Even with all that skill and care, nicks, bruises and cuts are simply unavoidable. In 2022, Grandma went up to gather shoots and a bamboo branch pierced a hole in her right palm. She hid it from the family, dressed the wound roughly herself, and went straight back up the mountain. Last year, Grandma and Grandpa were digging large shoots on the back hill. The rain had made the track treacherous, Grandpa took a fall, and he was hospitalised with a fracture. But he hated to spend the money—he took a few cheap pills and insisted he was perfectly fine. This year, Grandma was injured again. While trimming shoots, she sliced off a small strip of flesh from her right index finger; she bound it with a scrap of cloth, carried on working, and was back on the mountain the very next day.

That day the three of us from our family filled eight woven polypropylene sacks between us. Add in Grandma Deng Lian’s haul and the car’s boot and back seats were crammed solid, with some three to four hundred kilos in total. Auntie, who had carried the most, admitted her legs ached. The next day, the three of us sat at home, rubbing each other’s limbs with muscle liniment.

That was just one day of “experiencing” for me. Grandma and Grandma Deng Lian have been at it like this for over a month. Everyone in the village says the two of them are extraordinarily keen when it comes to finding shoots—yet some of the younger uncles find wriggling through thickets to pick shoots far too gruelling and have given up altogether.

Must Find Money

In recent years, selling shoots has become Grandma’s main source of income.

In years gone by, Grandma and Grandpa still cultivated a few mu of paddy rice, peanuts, and sweet potatoes. After deducting the cost of seed, fertiliser, and labour, they could earn four or five thousand yuan a year. The year Grandpa turned eighty and Grandma seventy, the children settled on an old-age allowance for the two of them. Grandma stopped farming in earnest—just growing enough to feed themselves—and selling whatever little the garden produced over for a few hundred yuan.

But the old-age allowance was not reliable. The first two years each family contributed 6,000 yuan. Then Eldest Aunt fell gravely ill, the grandchildren married, the construction sites withheld wages… Grandma, understanding her children’s struggles, took two-thirds less, so what actually reached her hand was barely five or six thousand a year.

But expenses simply would not come down. Social obligations in the village are heavy—funeral and wedding banquets alone eat up close to ten thousand yuan a year. Mum feels the strain and often quarrels over it. Grandma and Grandpa insist on attending regardless; some of the gift money Dad had to front, and even so, two or three thousand yuan a year still came from the elders’ own pockets. Add the constant little ailments of old age: ever since the village clinic was withdrawn, every minor complaint means a trip to the town, and these scattered medical bills have added another one or two thousand a year.

Grandma had to find the money herself.

She tried growing maize, but harvesting it was too heavy for her body to bear; in the end she sold it for eight mao a jin, barely clearing a few hundred yuan. Grandpa grew frailer year by year—labour-intensive crops like rice and peanuts were beyond him now. Grain prices were low, and everything cost money: seed, fertiliser, the lot. They tried raising more chickens and ducks, but the coop was too cramped; once the flock grew large, the birds fell sick and it became impossible to manage.

Besides, “even the weather has gone against us”—a phrase Grandma has had on her lips these past few years. Rainfall has grown erratic: winters turn bone-dry, springs drown in rain. These shifts make crops ever harder to tend. She grumbles: plant peanuts, they die; plant sweet potatoes, they die; plant loofah, and even once the vines reach the trellis the whole thing withers. Last autumn she painstakingly watered the oilseed rape to keep it alive, but this past spring in Hengyang, Hunan, rain fell for nearly a month on end and every stalk rotted at the base. A great many vegetable seedlings and crops spoiled in the fields. Pest problems have grown worse too: last autumn, the moment they turned the soil, worms had already eaten more than half the sweet potatoes and peanuts. The loofahs in the garden, ripe at last, reached the point where you simply had to hang several sticky insect traps. This year, when she planted sweet potatoes, she started broadcasting insecticide into the soil during the transplanting stage.

In the end she chose shoots. Shoots are grown by heaven and earth—if they are there in the hills, you just go and gather them. No seed to buy, no fertiliser, no pesticide, no irrigation to worry about; it all comes down to whether you are willing to put in the effort. ‘Picking shoots is already a good thing,’ Grandma says. ‘No capital needed—just your own two hands.’

All told, over these four or five years Grandma has earned just under 10,000 yuan selling dried bamboo shoots—enough to make even some of the younger village uncles admire her. In 2025, dried large shoots went for 10 yuan a jin; she sold over a hundred jin, just past 1,000 yuan. Uncle Yang, a relative, sympathising with her toil, bought 30 jin at 15 yuan a jin. Dried baby shoots fetched 12 yuan a jin, bringing in over 1,700 yuan. Her total annual income from shoots came to about 3,000 yuan. In 2024, total shoot sales amounted to roughly 2,800 yuan. The year before that, 2,000 yuan.

Grandma says the increase in shoot income these past few years is really Auntie’s doing—otherwise, 40 jin of dried shoots a year would count as a good haul. Auntie comes to help for about ten days or so and lets Grandma keep every penny. Really, when you split the cost per head and factor in the fuel for the car, it is hardly a bargain.

Shrinkage

The shoots the family hauls home with such exertion still await a long, laborious process and a steep loss in weight.

As the old saying goes, “One basket of shoots, two baskets of shells.” Peeling is the first step: snap off the tender tips, tear the outer casing open, roll it away, then painstakingly pick off the pale inner skin. By the end of the day the fingers are badly swollen.

The peeled shoots go into a large pot and boil for over an hour until they turn golden and cook through. While still piping hot, they are quickly rinsed in cold water, laid one by one on racks to dry, and turned from time to time. On a sunny day two days is all it takes. On a grey day, the trouble begins: the shoots must be dried repeatedly over a wood fire. All told, turning fresh shoots into dried bamboo shoots takes several hours of work each day.

Grandma says that from 100 jin of fresh shoots, once the shells are off, about 30 jin of shoot flesh remain. Ten jin of flesh yields at most one jin of dried bamboo shoots. The baby shoots shrink even more. On May Day they gathered four to five hundred jin of fresh shoots; Grandma says the dried yield came to under 20 jin, fetching no more than a hundred or two hundred yuan. Split among three people, a whole day spent burrowing through the hills—carrying, shouldering, trimming, boiling, drying, turning, gathering—the hourly rate is simply impossible to work out.

On e-commerce platforms, dried bamboo shoots sell for an average of around 30 yuan a jin, postage included. That price is worlds away from Grandma and the other women in the village—they do not even know where the nearest courier drop-off is, let alone how to qualify for free shipping. Some in the village have connections and can sell directly to friends, relatives, or restaurants, fetching 20 yuan a jin. But those without such connections can only sell to produce buyers at a lower price.

Grandma mainly works with Boss Chen, the village’s regular produce buyer. He often drives his small three-wheeler into the village to collect foraged goods, farm produce, and medicinal herbs; they have been doing business for over a decade now. In the past two years, dried bamboo shoots have fetched between 8 and 15 yuan a jin. Once he takes them, Boss Chen trims off the tough bases and sorts by tenderness. He says that in a good market he can get around 22 yuan a jin.

Sometimes when Boss Chen offers too low a price, Grandma holds on and sells later. But her choices are growing ever fewer. In recent years, fewer buyers come to the village to collect. She once went to town herself to sell retail, but over the years many people have moved away from the town and there are fewer buyers still. Then last year the rural bus service in the village was suspended—no more scheduled coaches. Walking to town takes over an hour, and hiring a motorbike taxi costs another 12 yuan; the round trip alone is no small expense.

If no one comes to collect, the foraged goods might as well rot in their hands. In 2025, Grandma’s dried bamboo shoots were haggled down to 8 yuan a jin. Even then, the buyer was reluctant to take them. Too indignant to accept, Grandma stubbornly held out until winter, then had Auntie drive her into town to find another produce buyer.

The woman running that second shop first offered 11 yuan a jin, then flipped through the dried shoots, said the quality had suffered and they had sat too long, and dropped to 10 yuan a jin. Grandma did not dare delay any longer. That day she sold 46 jin and came home with 460 yuan. With a beaming face she took me shopping for pork and spare ribs, saying she would cook something nice. The next day she sold the remaining few dozen jin of dried shoots too—at last a weight off her mind.

Ageing

Picking shoots—a job of “low return, hard labour, and great patience”—is barely appealing to the men of the village either, yet the women embrace it willingly, each hoping to earn a little income of her own rather than wait for her husband to hand over the money.

“In the countryside, where can you find work that earns more than two thousand yuan?” Grandma Deng Lian sighed to me.

No one could help Grandma Deng Lian; she had to do everything herself, from climbing the hill to gather shoots all the way to making dried bamboo shoots. These past few years, Grandpa’s health has grown ever weaker, and Grandma no longer lets him help with household or farm chores—the bulk of it now falls on her shoulders.

But Grandma was ageing, inexorably so, and so was the entire village.

The coaches that once crammed with people on market days now sit more than half-empty. Houses in the village look ever more modern, yet door by door they have shut for good. Streetlights have been installed, but the neighbours who used to linger and chat at night are gone. In the second half of last year the village’s scheduled passenger bus was pulled from service due to heavy losses—as though, at last, drawing a quiet note for the elderly left behind in this village.

Our village group numbers just over thirty households, but now only around ten live here year-round, and only seven or eight still till the fields. A decade or so ago, heading up the hill to gather baby shoots was a lively affair—a dozen or more middle-aged and elderly women, little ones in tow, chattering away all the way. Grandma always had four or five companions on each outing, but one by one, those companions left. Neighbour Grandma Yang passed away in spring; the shoots from the last few trips we had gathered together had not yet been dried and all grew mouldy.

Today, only six or seven women in our village group still climb the hill to pull shoots. The eldest is 84-year-old Great-Grandma, though she only picks a handful when she happens to pass by; the youngest is Ah Xi, a left-behind mother in her forties. The core team is just Grandma, Grandma Deng Lian, and Ah Xi.

Fortunately, these past few years the Aunties have come home. Poor health meant they could no longer go out to work on construction sites. The daughters, back under their mother’s roof, now take some farm work off her ageing hands from time to time.

Dignity

These shoots are money—and yet more than money. For Grandma, they also mean dignity.

Grandma Yang Xiuying has always been a stubborn, proud country woman. There were nine siblings in her family; because their surname was foreign to the village, the household was wretchedly poor, and none of the girls were sent to school. She attended class for two days, knew fewer than two characters, and was called home by her grandfather—for a girl of seven or eight was still a pair of hands who could pull pig fodder and gather firewood.

In her youth she would set off before dawn, crossing ridge after ridge—over Leizu Ridge, more than 600 metres high, all the way into Hengnan County—scouring the hills for fodder, firewood, and shoots, not returning home until dusk. She told me she was one of the few girls in the village who occasionally came home with a small bundle of shoots. That modest bundle, once peeled, yielded just a jin or two of shoot flesh—still a rare treat for the family. The discarded shells, kept aside, went to feed the pigs, and everyone treasured them.

Grandpa was taken with Grandma’s grit too. In his younger days he served as the village’s work-point recorder and weigher, and he noticed that the petite Grandma always carried back the heaviest load of fodder—incredibly capable. After they married, in those first few years the household sold mainly peanuts and sweet potatoes, and it was always Grandma who haggled the prices. Dried bamboo shoots were mostly kept for the family table at festivals; the older generation all loved stir-fried salt-preserved bamboo shoots with pork, and Grandma’s were always the most popular.

It was Grandma who held the household together, in every great matter and small. In her younger days, Grandpa was conscripted to build railways and haul timber—earning a pittance, gone from home year after year—and Grandma tended their three or four mu of land alone, earning work-points and raising three children all at once. Later still, she took on the care of my brother and me. Never being able to leave home for work became a regret she carried all her life. “If only I’d had the schooling, if I’d known more than a handful of characters, I’d have built a little enterprise of my own,” she would say. “I’m no worse than anyone.”

Time shows no mercy. Through my high school years, university, and into my working life, Grandma stayed in that small mountain village. All she could do was trade familiar labour, honed by experience, for a meagre income. As the years piled up, so did the ailments—a long-standing stomach trouble, a bile duct excision, anaemia, cerebral atherosclerosis… Last year Grandma fell ill and treatment cost over three thousand yuan. Stubborn as ever, she paid a thousand or so herself, refusing to spend her children’s money.

In the mountain villages and towns caught up in development, everything is changing. The village is being left behind by the city; the old, left behind by the young. But Grandma still climbs the hill, year after year, to gather shoots.

These little dried bamboo shoots hold a lifetime of memory; they are the wisdom of hill and grove she has gathered year upon year, giving her an income and a sense of self-assurance. They are the “own thing” she can hold out before the younger generation and the relatives with pride, and she spares no effort in sending every visiting relative a gift of dried shoots and glass noodles.

Some relatives gratefully accept the foraged goods she offers, praising the quality of Grandma’s produce; others find it a bother. But she still sets a portion aside every year. These past few years she has learned to brine-soak shoots: blanching freshly gathered baby shoots in boiling water, setting them in a glass jar with a little salt water, sealing it tight for half a year or more, so that when the children and grandchildren come home for the New Year, they find pale, tender shoots waiting for them.

The Shoot Season Ends

A full shoot season lasts about 45 days, typically running from Qingming to Grain Buds in the lunar calendar; this year it fell between early April and late May.

The shoot season has two phases. The first comes before Qingming, when “big shoots” begin to push up in the Moso bamboo groves. The tips look to be barely a few centimetres, yet the body runs deep underground; the bamboo roots are tough and refuse to budge by hand—digging with a hoe is essential, a real test of both eye and muscle. A single big shoot can take nearly twenty minutes to unearth. Rain makes it worse still: a sack hauled home is more than half yellow mud, weighing a ton. As the big-shoot phase winds down, baby shoots sprout across every hill and vale. The first to appear are the velvet shoots, followed by water bamboo shoots, then rough-shell shoots. The thickness of the shoot flesh varies from type to type—rough-shell shoots, for instance, may not taste as tender, but their flesh is thicker, making them the best value to gather and sell.

Apart from days of heavy rain when she stays off the hill and days busy with fieldwork, Grandma has been in the hills for just over a month. Each outing means at least two or three hours of foraging; when she finally emerges, she’s back with bulging woven polypropylene sacks slung on her back.

My holiday ended and I returned to work. Back home, another torrential downpour swept in. Grandma said the water seemed to pour straight from the sky, but luckily the shoots were nearly all dried.

At the time, she swore to me she was done—finished for good.

But two weeks later, on the 15th and 16th of May, she was back on the hill. She left at five, came down by eight, and carried back a few dozen jin of fresh shoots, spreading them on two bamboo drying racks. She said she wanted to take advantage of the dry spell and brine some shoots for me in the jar, so I’d have something to eat when I came home.

From late March to the 16th of May, the long shoot season finally drew to a close. This year Grandma couldn’t call it a “bumper harvest.” She told me that last winter had brought little rain and quite a few bamboo stalks had died on the hill, so there really weren’t many shoots this year. The quantity gathered fell short of last year’s.

The end of shoot season does not mean the end of labour. At night, Grandma is still at work over the shoots. Under the lamplight she sorts the dried bamboo shoots, straightening each one in her hand, bundling them neatly, setting them apart by type, and keeping the very best ones aside—waiting for the New Year, when the children come home to eat them.

Outside, a sudden night rain sweeps in. The shoots left behind in the dark mountains will grow into new bamboo groves, cycle upon cycle. Next year the grove will send up fresh shoots once more, waiting for those who come to gather them.

– This is Foodthink’s 815th original article –

Unless otherwise noted, all images are provided by the author

Editor: Xiaodan

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