Remembering a Friend We All Loved

A Singular Person, Singular Writing ▼

I have known Guan Qi for over ten years now, but our first proper working encounter was in 2016, when I went on a business trip of more than ten days with a large group. In the crowd, he was very low-key — not much of a talker; you might say he barely registered. The only thing I noticed was that he was taking careful notes the whole time, and his English was excellent across the board: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. I bumped into him at various conferences afterwards, and the impression was much the same. I mistakenly assumed he was a serious person who was also a bit dull.

It was only as we gradually got to know each other that I saw the real Guan Qi. The moment that truly broke the ice and built our trust was probably when we discovered we both loved food fiercely and both despised people who said one thing and meant another — when it came to roasting each other, we each had our own brand of sharp tongue. One year, before Mid-Autumn Festival, we were both on assignment in Nanning and agreed to spend the holiday together. He led us around the city hunting for food, and I can still picture him walking ahead, hailing a taxi.

In recent years, whenever we happened to be in the same city, we would make a point of meeting up for a meal — not just to discover new dishes, but to pick up all kinds of interesting knowledge and laughs. On business trips I would also ask him for food guides, and he would fire off a stack of links. Not all of them were reliable, but judging by the speed at which he unleashed those links, it was clearly the fruit of a deep well of accumulated knowledge.

His wide-ranging erudition (not only on serious academic topics but also all sorts of obscure and well-known facts), his humour, and his impeccable taste in everything made us great friends in both work and life. But there are two things I admire about him most of all.

In his work, he has constantly been pushing the boundaries of seed network work. He proactively reached out to botanic gardens, artists, self-publishers, podcasters, restaurants, and all kinds of groups that had never been within the sightlines of NGO work, drawing them into the work of farmers conserving old seeds, and carrying the concept of the “farmer seed system” into new communities, opening up a whole range of new paths. When we met in Beijing before Chinese New Year, he quietly announced a new initiative that had already been underway — it was genuinely exciting and something to look forward to.

As a fellow practitioner, I know only too well how draining it is to sustain a cross-sector informal network like this, both mentally and emotionally, and his care and support for his partners always went far beyond the work itself. That is the second thing I admire about him most: he was never stingy with his time or his emotional energy, always there to support and be present for the people he believed in, whether in a professional or personal capacity. That also made his network of information extraordinarily wide and accurate — we even joked that he was the “Farmer Gossip Centre.” But he was fiercely respectful of his friends; for all his sharp tongue, he never once said a word that diminished them.

In our industry, the first is a rare ability; in wider society, the second is an even rarer quality of character.

Over the past month, reading and hearing the stories everyone has shared about Guan Qi, I feel he truly lived his life like a seed — the kind with public value.

I have read a lot of the tribute pieces people have written about Guan Qi, and many of them are set from 2020 onwards. I suddenly found myself wondering: to what extent does the Teacher Guan Qi I know line up with these vivid, recent memories?

Not long after Foodthink was established in 2017, we published a piece on plant breeding written by Guan Qi. He was one of the very first group of authors to write for us. I still remember the excitement I felt when I was editing his manuscript: the line of argument was crystal clear, the structure was open and confident, the information so dense it felt like it might explode — it read like a professional article but still respected its ordinary reader, with none of the impenetrable, exclusionary feel of academic writing; it had a clear point of view without any ego. That is a moment of pure joy reserved for a “veteran editor” who has stumbled on a great piece.

Out of curiosity, I quietly looked into Guan Qi’s background and learned that he had thrown himself into rural reconstruction at a very early stage, and that he was a postgraduate student of economics at Renmin University. At the time, I thought — rather snobishly — that here was a young person outside the system who seemed to have a bright future ahead, and he had plunged straight into the mud and a rural cause with limited rewards. Was that not a bit of a waste? Looking back, that was probably the moment I first became infected by Guan Qi’s idealism.

In 2018 I attended an event run by the Farmer Seed Network and saw Guan Qi in person for the first time at a workshop. He was busy organising the workshop the entire time, but stayed very much in the background, leaving all the spotlight and high moments for the farmers he was working with. The Guan Qi of that period, whether online or in person, struck me as someone who did more than he said — a person with real substance but who tended to be quiet.

Life’s paths always cross and then diverge. Later, after I left Foodthink, our working interactions largely ceased. On the rare occasions I needed to ask him something for a piece I was writing, given my impression of Guan Qi as a “silent” type, I would approach him with great care and politeness. Sometimes I needed ongoing guidance, but he was darting around the country so much that finding time was hard — I had to put in real effort to “catch” him and “squeeze” out his precious advice and opinions. Although Guan Qi is younger than me, in my eyes he has always been, quite literally, “Teacher Guan Qi.”

In 2023 I was on assignment in Indonesia, attending an event hosted by my then employer, where I happened to run into “Third World Network” (TWN), a Malaysian organisation working on seed conservation. I had since gone back to my old line of work in public health, and the overlap between the different fields is usually minimal, so running into them in that context gave me a peculiar feeling of “breaking out of my own bubble.” In the small talk after the event, I learned that they were also old friends of the domestic Farmer Seed Network, and immediately dropped the names of Teacher Song Yiqing and Guan Qi — which, of course, got a response. The first thing I did was message Guan Qi on WeChat, and it seems to have opened the floodgates — I received a stream of messages flowing in. He sent me all sorts of TWN institutional profiles, information pages, and project briefs, and while he was at it, gave me a rundown of their collaboration network in China. I asked if he would like me to bring back some of the little institutional booklets from the venue. Guan Qi replied: “I already have everything you sent me.”

Oh, and just like that, Guan Qi no longer seemed to be the somewhat silent person of before.

After that came 2024. That year I quit my job — a middle-aged person who had run off to Hangzhou to frolic with younger friends — and I ran into Guan Qi again, who at the time was based in Suzhou for work. Completely out of any work context, I could now half-teasingly call him “Boss Guan.” Those few days, “Boss Guan” was in full command, introducing us to all manner of Jiangnan specialities. Listening as I went along, I realised his favourite foods still carried a northern soul — more precisely, the soul of his home province, Shandong: all kinds of stuffed dough dishes, generous slabs of meat, noodles, and rich, savoury sauces. This also gave me a side lesson: so-called Jiangnan water-town recipes, it turns out, still carry a great deal of the northern palate imprinted by migration, displacement, and the southward shift of the political centre. He was also full of enthusiasm for craft beer, particularly lager, and led us on a night out sweeping through craft bars in a Hangzhou that still had a nightlife, eating skewers and Wenzhou fish balls on the street. I was stunned — so Guan Qi was such a “sophisticated boy” (in a friend’s words)! Little did I know these scenes would become my last memories of Teacher Guan Qi.

In the process of sifting through fragments of memory, I became aware of how Guan Qi’s image had shifted in my mind. And indeed, it had: from the Teacher Guan Qi who used to be quiet but earnest, impossibly busy, and nearly impossible to catch, to the later “Boss Guan” who could talk endlessly about work and whose life was refined and varied in every way — I think Guan Qi had genuinely entered a new phase, opened up a new frontier, and was preparing to make his mark in the visible future. Little did any of us expect that at this very moment he would be “called away” by fate. He is frozen in a moment of vibrant energy. The regret is left for those of us still here, and for the entire field of seed conservation. I can only imagine — if even someone like me, who barely knew him deeply, has so much left to say, then his parents, his old friends of many years, his colleagues, the closer companions in his life — how many words must be stuck in their throats, unwritten, how unbearable the grief.

This piece is my tribute to Guan Qi. I hope that from wherever you are now, you are still watching over us. The next time I go off to Jiangnan, I will carry these last memories and images with me.

I first met Guan Qi on 1 August 2019, at a team-building meeting co-hosted by Foodthink and the Farmer Seed Network. He was still wearing glasses then. I had a cold that day and did not sit at the table; I asked to sit on a sofa in the corner and listen in. I had been with the team for a year by then, but I still felt like I had stumbled into the food-and-farming world by accident — riddled with self-doubt and low on confidence. Later, once we became friends, Guan Qi would often say to me: “You’ve got to value yourself.”

We did get to know each other slowly. In 2020 a magazine wanted to reprint the two-part series “New Paths for Seed Conservation” that Guan Qi had published on Foodthink; I handled the liaison, and that is how I ended up with a one-on-one WeChat conversation with him. Publishing during the pandemic was full of twists and turns; the project timeline stretched, and so did our conversations. In December 2021, the Farmer Seed Network organised a training workshop at a farm on the outskirts of Chengdu. A farming partner asked me how to write a project proposal, and Guan Qi happened to walk by. I threw the question at him offhandedly, but he actually stopped and taught us how to structure a project brief. Later I left my full-time position at Foodthink to do my own fieldwork in the Qiandongnan region, and I used the project-proposal structure he had taught me to apply for funding. Whenever I was stuck in the field, he would answer every question I had and pick up every call I made. If there was some mystery or gossip to unpick, he would raise an eyebrow, fill in a little biography and backstory, chuckle at how things had changed since then — but never pass judgment on who was right or wrong.

In April 2022 he had moved to Suzhou to live. In the early days of building the Eastern Network, he set up a small group called the “Jiangnan Reading Group.” The first book we read together was A Fierce General Returns Home. It was a chaotic spring — in truth, we only managed one online reading session, and most of the time we were talking about food and life. Everyone’s movements were restricted, pinned to different places, but the relationships grew closer. Today, A Fierce General Returns Home is still unfinished. The singular person has returned to Shandong and been laid to earth. The food-and-farming world and the seed-conservation work have lost a fierce general.

In recent years, Guan Qi’s work and life focus shifted to the eastern region, and the Eastern Network did indeed grow ever tighter and more vibrant under his support. Beyond the public organising and rallying that came with his professional role, there was the indispensable private matchmaking and running about, the generous hosting of gatherings, the eager acceptance of invitations. The Eastern Network, as he wished, slowly grew into a decentralised, multi-node community, and I, as a loose individual, was welcomed in. His sudden departure has left an enormous void in that network, but his character and his warmth are sending new threads growing out of the rupture. Many people and stories that had never intertwined before have been drawn close together because of him. Beyond the east, Guan Qi had many other networks. The grief resonates through all of them, because this was a singular person, and the mourning is that much more real and precious. Because of Guan Qi, no one is alone.

As a partner, he accepted me. As a friend, he caught me countless times. Over these years, he has witnessed and taken part in my growth. But it seems I never once properly thanked him.

I met Teacher Guan five years ago. I was working on an article about farmers conserving old seeds. The year before, the General Office of the State Council had issued an opinion calling for the strengthening of the protection and utilisation of agricultural genetic resources. Everyone knows how important seeds are. It is not just a question of national food security — seeds are the very bedrock of human agricultural civilisation. But what is the best way to conserve them? While reporting this piece, the split between two approaches left a deep impression on me. One route held that “conservation is the government’s job (building seed gene banks), and seed R&D is the job of the corporate sector (hybridisation, genetically modified technologies, and the like).” The other encouraged farmers to conserve old seeds, achieving in-situ living conservation. On the surface they seemed complementary, a win-win. In reality, the tension between them was beyond words.

At the time, the Central Government had just approved the Seed Industry Revitalisation Action Plan, emphasising the need to achieve self-reliance and control over seed sources. I asked a leading expert whether this meant spring was finally coming for old-seed conservation. He laughed heartily, somewhat taken aback by what he called my naivety, and said it was a signal to support the industry — to call it spring for old seeds would be reading far too much into it.

Another key interviewee was Teacher Guan, a representative of the old-seed side. Editor J helped me get in touch with him. Teacher Guan answered my endless questions about old seeds — the questions of a complete novice, as I was — with great kindness. Looking back, those shallow questions must have been a waste of his time. Throughout our entire exchange, Teacher Guan did not spare a single unnecessary word, and there was no “ha ha,” no “sure thing,” no emoji or any other social lubricant. It was as if talking to me was something he had no choice but to do, yet still had to see through. And yet he answered every question and sent me study materials. When I mentioned wanting to interview some farming partners, he helped make the introductions too. Sometimes he would not reply for a day or two. Editor J said, helplessly: ‘That is just how Guan Qi is.’

When I joined Foodthink, I saw another side of Guan Qi — the two were almost unrecognisably different people. From colleagues close to him, I heard all sorts of stories about Teacher Guan: the class study-committee member, the hometown treasure — and through them I could feel his passion for agricultural issues and his care for farming partners. We did not treat Teacher Guan as an outsider, either; we put him to work without a second thought. But I never got the chance to collaborate with him directly, and so we maintained a politely distant professional relationship for a long time. That was until one day, after he had visited the Xiangtangshan Grottoes, he spotted me, his small eyes suddenly alight, and teased: ‘The food in Handan is absolutely dreadful!’

Only in that moment did I touch his real warmth and feel I had finally found the door into a friendship with Teacher Guan — after knowing him for years. I never imagined it would be the last time I saw him.

Even now, as I write these words, I still feel a sense of unreality — Teacher Guan is truly gone. Life goes on, days pass in their usual blur, and there are moments when I forget the fact of his absence. Or rather, my sense of the world still lingers in the time when he was here. When a detail in my memory grows fuzzy and I want to check his WeChat messages to confirm it, I hold myself back in the end. I am not ready to confirm any further that no one will be on the other end of that conversation. So I can only rely on the impressions in my head and set the memories down as they are. As for whether certain details are accurate, I do wish Teacher Guan could point out the errors one more time.

The phrase that made the deepest impression on me from Teacher Guan was about someone I had never met at all. It came up like this: we were soaking in the hot springs in Mille, and he asked me about my days doing food delivery. I told him honestly. He said it reminded him of a friend who had always cared about workers’ rights — a Tsinghua graduate — whom he had bumped into in Beijing a few years earlier, only to find him working as a security guard. Teacher Guan said: ‘When I was leaving, I told him to take care, because I was a little worried about how he was doing.’ His tone carried a hint of humour, but I was still warmed by what he said, because it revealed an empathy that made you want to trust him. He was worried about an idealist — or, more precisely, about people squeezed between their ideals and the grind of everyday life. I think, for anyone in this era, that is a rare form of understanding and kindness. Hearing him say that, I sank a little deeper into the warm water and just let the heat soak in.

And he himself was an idealist — just the more optimistic, easygoing kind. He once mentioned that when he was younger he had gone “undercover” at a cola-bottle factory, investigating workers’ labour conditions, only to quit before long. With his eyes squinting, he said: ‘It was not really anything else — it was mainly that the more I worked, the more efficient I became. I also spoke English, and the boss wanted to promote me to team leader. I thought to myself, there is no way I can keep doing this.’ That day, Teacher Guan talked for a long time in the tea room about his earlier years, and I was laughing the entire time. When we left, it was raining hard, and we said our goodbyes in a great hurry.

I saw him again only two or three months later. He had come to Beijing once more, and I thought to myself that someone who flies around as much as Teacher Guan would have plenty of chances to meet up. That time I gave him a copy of Cultural Studies 1988 — not just to return the favour for the birthday present he had given me the year before (a book on agrarian capitalism), but also because he always remembered that I liked the British New Left and cultural studies. I am not the sort of person who actively pushes things I enjoy onto others, for fear of being a nuisance, unless I already have enough trust. Teacher Guan always gave me a sense of closeness, so without a shred of hesitation I gave him that copy of Cultural Studies 1988, still full of my marginal notes. That was the last time we met.

In Lijiang — the old stone city, Youmi Village, and Lugu Lake — I accompanied Teacher Guan for a stretch of the road of old-seed conservation, and that was only a tiny fragment of the road of his life. His life was so vast. He had walked so many roads. He was the kind of person who cared about big things, and yet he always managed to hold all those specific people and specific moments in his heart. I am very fortunate to be one of them. Losing you makes me deeply sad. I feel that if I had more time to learn from you, my wonderful teacher and friend, my life would be better — but I will carry this regret and press on in the direction of becoming better.

We always called him ‘Teacher Guan.’ In truth, he neither surnamed Guan nor was a teacher. The reason we called him that was that he knew so much, and was the kind of person who could ‘catch anything you threw at him.’ Whether it was academia, the entertainment industry, or anything genuinely related to seeds and agriculture — as long as you asked, he could send you a link, an article, or a paper. He never launched into an unsolicited lecture, but the moment you asked, he would answer with real attention.

Teacher Guan was calm and also very sociable — I had never met anyone so steady. Once you got to know him, you realised he was a real ‘treasure.’ Not only was his professional knowledge encyclopaedic, but he also knew his way around food — how to eat well, what was worth eating. Everyone loved being around him, whether for work or for life. I remember that after meetings, just by following him, you could always find a great restaurant in no time.

To me, he was also humble, generous, and full of a big-hearted warmth. When I first came to Foodthink, I knew nothing about agriculture or seeds. Every time I asked him a question, he was patient — never once irritated, never making you feel like, ‘How can you not even know this?’ Looking back, those questions were actually quite naive. But it was precisely his patience, his kindness, and his inclusiveness that made me feel that in this field, newcomers were welcomed, that there was space to learn and adapt, and then gradually find your way in.

Teacher Guan cared about smallholder farmers and about preserving old seeds, but he rarely put those words on his lips. It showed more naturally in the work he did.

He understood policy as well as local development. He went to ethnic-minority villages and to rural areas all over the place, telling farmers about the importance of old seeds and teaching them to save their own seed for replanting. At the same time, he was broadening public and consumer awareness of old seeds and promoting a social vision of seed diversity. At public events in different towns, at markets in various cities, he would always recommend the old varieties grown by farmers in partner communities, and he would bring along Foodthink’s promotional brochures.

Teacher Guan’s work connected the land with academia and with policy, while steadily expanding the market for old varieties in the community. His practice showed me how independent organisations can do their work, live out their principles, and make a real difference in society. He kept both feet on the ground and solved real problems — and I think that is precisely the reason such organisations exist.

It also helped me gradually understand that a great deal of work has to be done one small step at a time. Each step may be tiny, but it is also an important one.

Now we have lost Teacher Guan — a seed expert, an outstanding practitioner — and, for me personally, a good friend to eat, drink, and have fun with.

Teacher Guan, we will miss you forever!

There are probably very few people in this world better suited to being a friend than Guan Qi. The sad thing is that I had barely started a friendship with Teacher Guan before it was already over.

Every one of my encounters with Teacher Guan involved alcohol. Guan Qi’s connoisseurship of beer was something none of us had failed to witness. His material life was simple — he could do a two-week trip with just a light backpack — but over the years he must have made a considerable contribution to the craft-beer industry through his spending. Outside a hotel in Aohan Banner, a few of us grabbed an eager, fists-grinding late-night meal and nearly lifted the table off its legs. Yet around Guan Qi there seemed to be a kind of protective field. He bought two four-litre cans of craft beer from the little kiosk at the entrance, then at the barbecue stall ordered chicken gizzards, gluten, lamb skewers, and roasted mantou. Whether there were three people at the table or twenty-three, Guan Qi always kept the same unruffled composure, drinking his beer at a perfectly even pace, like a precisely calibrated beer processor. Every so often a juicy piece of gossip would slip out, for everyone to savour and chew over.

Besides alcohol and coffee, reading critical theory was Teacher Guan’s other form of refuelling. The more a person knows, the less they tend to say. As soon as I drink too much I start blathering through my shallow academic knowledge, and I cringe at myself. Guan Qi was nothing like that. Although he had read a great deal, he never opened with ‘I think that…’ — it was always ‘I’d recommend… to you.’ How rare that is! No wonder everyone loves Guan Qi, because he is always genuinely trying to help others. I often pull rank and ask Teacher Guan for help, and I don’t know how to repay him, but I used to tell myself there would always be a chance to return the favour, so there was no need to worry. I never imagined I would be unable to.

I have always called myself a materialist, but Guan Qi’s passing has made me believe in the existence of another world. I hope he has gone to a better place.

Although I only met Teacher Guan twice, I still want to write a few words.

Both times, it was because of a meal.

The first meal was also my first with Foodthink — a Wenzhou street-food stall. I can vaguely remember that during dinner Teacher Guan performed a drinking-table special move, keeping rhythm with his elbows, or some other kind of body art. A remarkable person, indeed.

Later, when we added each other on WeChat, his first message was: ‘I thought you hadn’t split the bill yet…’

Look closely: this is a clean-cut middle-aged man who uses Jennie stickers.

◉ Guan Qi has a whole collection of utterly unexpected stickers, and people have turned his expressions into all manner of memes.

The second meal — the last — was in Bangkok.

At the time, Teacher Guan had been “cultivating” up in the mountains, and this rare holiday brought him down to the lowlands. I spotted him from far away at the metro station, and he really did have the air of a ‘master descending from the mountain.’

We picked up some beer at the nearby 7-11, found a little shop, and kept it simple — a bowl of pork porridge.

The beer was probably average. To go with it, we added a packet of pork skin, though the pork skin was not particularly tasty either.

But no matter how lavish the spread, all we could add was a packet of pork skin.

The core of this retreat was ‘seeing yourself.’ As it happened, the seat he was in was right next to a big mirror — a turn of the head and there you were, any time. At the time I thought that was really convenient — why go up a mountain to practice when a turn of the head is also practice. Looking back now, maybe wherever he sat was the place of practice.

I invited him to go to King Power the next day to watch the handsome men. He looked put out and put on the expression of an old man on the metro staring at his phone. But the way he looked genuinely reluctant, and the fact of how good a person he was, made me really think, for a split second, that he would actually go with me.

After the meal we walked back towards the hotel. The streets of Bangkok were very clean. I don’t really remember what we talked about. It might have been that it was going to rain the next day, or which shopping mall to hit for a one-stop souvenir run, or maybe a scathing critique of how Thai people really overdo the whole ‘selling queerness’ thing…

After all, it was just an ordinary day. There would be many more meals like this with him still to come.

All I remember is that the temperature was just right, the meal was satisfying, and I had just met a wonderfully interesting person. Looking back now, it was a rare moment of easy, unhurried comfort — and getting to know Teacher Guan was a fortunate thing.

That ease, too, was the feeling he gave me.

Free and easy, like the wind.

When will you come again?