Wu Xiaoyan, contestant in the selection for Jingzhou Bayberry Mountain Messenger

  Candidate profile: My name is Wu Xiaoyan, a college student. I have deep feelings for Jingzhou, which is my hometown, and Jingzhou is also famous for its high-quality bayberries. With the rise of the internet wave, letting Jingzhou bayberries reach the outside world through the "Internet Plus" model has become a new form and channel for bayberry growers to sell their fruit, fully transforming growers' existing resources into visible income through internet marketing. Agricultural e-commerce + bayberries makes the growers deep in the mountains beam with joy, and makes you, the one eating the bayberries, as sweet as the fruit.

Photo: Wu Xiaoyan

  This is Wu Xiaoyan's submission to the "Sweet China" project team. As the daughter of a Jingzhou bayberry grower, she truly tells the story of herself, her father and bayberries. The full text is as follows:

Bayberry Fragrance Drifts Deep in the Mountains

  My hometown sits in a remote mountain village in Jingzhou County, and that place is the hometown of bayberries.

  Our village is called Mudong Village, located deep in the mountains and rather remote. Being remote means being backward. Although no one wants that, apart from agricultural products like bayberries, there is nothing there. The winding concrete road, and a distance of 20 kilometers from the county seat. Walking into this village deep in the mountains, if you had not learned about it in advance, you would be surprised by how remote it is.

  The village is not large, with twenty or thirty households. The people here have always relied on bayberries as their family income, growing various varieties of bayberries in the mountains. The bayberries are all planted along the mountain, changing with the shifts in mountain terrain, adapting to local conditions. The height of the slopes, the gentleness of the gradient and the size of the hillsides determine how the bayberry trees are planted. The locals diligently cultivate bayberries with their own hands, not only as a source of family income, but also as part of life, having already become integrated into the local bayberry growers' philosophy of life.

  Far from the noise of modern civilization, the scattered village settlements are like isolated islands, hidden deep in the mountains.

  Labor in the mountains is also the whole of life for the bayberry growers here. Generations of our elders have diligently and earnestly grown bayberries for a lifetime, all through their own hand cultivation and planting, without much modern technology. They do not know artificial coloring, do not know greenhouse cultivation, do not know artificial chemical fertilizers; they simply rely on grasping the seasons and climate to grow bayberries into truly green, original-ecology fruit.

Photo: Father at work

  In my memory, as soon as spring comes in February and March, my father starts busy work up in the mountains. He says this is a good season for cultivating seedlings, and just after Start of Spring he begins loosening the soil and weeding around the bayberry saplings. My father plants the high-quality seeds carefully selected the previous year, weeding and tending them day and night, waiting for them to become saplings for grafting the next year. March and April are the pollination and fruit-setting period for bayberries, so my father goes up the mountain to cut weeds around the bayberry trees. On one hand, this serves as fertilizer for the trees; on the other hand, it helps the trees get better sunlight, and the fruit they produce tastes sweeter. In May and June, he waits for the bayberry ripening period to arrive and then picks them. After mid-July, once the bayberry ripening period has passed, we can collect the high-quality bayberry seeds that have fallen under the trees, rub off the flesh by hand, and then use them to cultivate bayberry saplings again. Repeating this process, the family planted more and more bayberry trees. After many years of cultivation, the quality of the bayberries is delightful!

  Whenever the bayberry ripening season comes, I am always woken by my father at 5 a.m., because my father is the only laborer in the family and there are not enough hands to pick the bayberries. After a quick wash-up, my father and I carry the large and small bamboo baskets he wove himself and head up the mountain. My father carefully selects and picks one good bayberry after another in the trees, while I assist him below, helping to gather the picked bayberries and pass him the bamboo baskets. After picking the fresh bayberries, my father carries them down the rugged mountain path, and only by 9 o'clock do we go down the mountain to eat breakfast.

  Because the village is deep in the mountains, transportation is inconvenient, and without help from outside resources, the bayberries here can only be transported to neighboring counties for sale. After a hurried breakfast, my father uses a bamboo shoulder pole to carry the bayberries picked in the early morning to a neighboring county dozens of kilometers away to sell. In the neighboring county, not only are there fewer people selling bayberries, there are also more people buying them. Although the price of the glossy black, large and juicy bayberries is pressed down to five or six yuan per jin, my father still cheerfully thanks every customer who comes to buy his bayberries. What my father thinks is that selling these bayberries is better than not selling them, and that if he stays too long there is a risk of urban management officers chasing people away and confiscating their goods, and the journey is long, so he has to get home before dark.

  My father is a true bayberry grower, and because of that I also feel that, apart from the New Year, the happiest time of the year is when the bayberries ripen. No matter where you walk in the village, you can smell the sweet-and-sour fragrance of bayberries. Not only can we eat the sweet-and-sour, delicious bayberries, but during the bayberry-selling period my father also brings us many surprises. Every time my father comes home after selling bayberries, we look forward to it, because in his bamboo basket there is occasionally a small bag of vegetables to improve our meals, or he brings back some small fruits for us. Sometimes, in order to bring us these things, my father even saves the money for lunch. Counting the round-trip fare, he can sell about a hundred yuan a day. Although the income is not much, my father is still happy because of such a harvest. I asked my father whether selling top-grade bayberries at five or six yuan per jin was a bit of "selling them cheap," and whether it would make people think our family's bayberries were poor. My father said: "The bayberry trees grow in the old mountains, and the bayberries are all grown carefully by our own family, so naturally the fruit will not be bad. Whether they are good or not, others will know as soon as they try them." With these plain and unadorned words, I understood. Compared with fussing over gains and losses, my father cares more about the quality of the bayberries, just as a person should be upright and sincere.

  Soon it will be the time of year when the bayberries ripen. On the hillsides the bayberry trees form forests, and on the trees the bayberries put out new fruit. Every morning, layer upon layer of cloud and mist wraps around the mountains. Seen from afar, among the deep green mountains there are touches of bayberry red, very fresh and lovely.

  Deep in the mountains, the air is full of bayberry fragrance. It is another good season of the year.

  Candidate motto: Only by walking on in a world you know nothing about can there be surprises.

     Please scan the QR code of the Huinong Sickle Association official account, follow the "Yipin Dongfang" 2016 Jingzhou Online Bayberry Festival and Feishan Cultural Tourism Festival "Help Jingzhou Bayberry Reach the Outside World Messenger" activity, and vote for candidate Wu Xiaoyan!