Pulling Onions in Baoli Village, Pingtung, Wearing Marine Corps Camouflage to Harvest in the Fields

A series of old photographs from the 1960s flash before my eyes, precious images left behind by the American Presbyterian missionary Barry Schuttler. A female farmer carries a wooden rake used for turning rice on her right shoulder; after finishing work in the fields, the whole farming family gathers at the edge of the field to eat snacks; in days without running water, mothers and grandmothers carry clothes to the river to wash them while the children play nearby; two grown men catch fish and shrimp in the river; an old man with half-white short hair smiles as he leads a boar to sow seeds; a mother holds a little girl in one arm while holding relief shirts and pants distributed by the Americans in the other, and so on.

I have a kind of worry about how I view the farming people of earlier times, and this worry stems from the fact that my own life has grown distant from theirs, distant from the land, so that I cannot look with a generous eye at the human warmth and life of the older generation of farming families. The longest time I ever spent working in the fields was about 20 days, wearing Marine Corps camouflage in Baoli Village, Checheng Township, Pingtung County, helping local farmers harvest onions. It was a mission, but the meaning of taking part in farm work went far beyond that.

Reading the poems written beside the photographs by Yang Du, Wu Sheng, Zhan Che, and Chen Tian, the time and space of the photos come vividly to life, stirring up nostalgia within my memories. On a day of farm work back then, besides regular meals,9 a.m. and 3 p.m. were snack times; in the morning it was usually hot soup noodles, and in the afternoon two pieces of bread and a bottle of a drink. Five meals a day was the basic amount of food

The scene before my eyes touches past memories, and I think of the song written by Shen Hsin-ling, "Grassroots Days," humming softly while doing farm work: "The sun blazes fiercely, who is willing to come do this work? Through wind and rain, who is willing to go out to earn a living?..."