Sun-Dried Rice from the Ponds of Wan'an: A Record of This Day

Photography / Lin Po-hung

Under a scorching 36 degrees, another cloudless summer day in the East Rift Valley, wisps of cirrus clouds like feathers above, the distant mountains lush and towering in green, and at the foot of the mountains a thin winding path stretches from Guanshan Township all the way to Brother Hsiao's three-fen rice paddy in Wan'an.

Since the August 8 typhoon two years ago, the water in the Wan'an irrigation ditch has carried a heavy load of silt rushing down from upstream, and even now the once-clear irrigation water is still a murky color. Beside the ditch, Brother Hsiao has fenced a small duck pen with wild ginger flowers, and the red-faced Muscovy ducks inside do not mind the murky water at all, heads down, dabbling and pecking away, utterly content.

The three-fen paddy beside Brother Hsiao's pond has been harvested. A large blue truck carries the fruit of Brother Hsiao's efforts over the past half year or more, backing into the old Hsiao family compound, where the dogs bark and circle uneasily. The truck stops, the gate opens, and golden grains pour out like a waterfall, clattering down onto a blue-and-white double-layer tarp. How delightful. The comfort on Brother Hsiao's face says it all. "Let's sun-dry the rice!" I shout excitedly inside, my spirits high.

When rice grains are freshly harvested, their moisture content is about 25%, and the standard for machine-drying rice is to dry the humidity down to about 14.6 degrees. Undried raw rice is softer when bitten, not as crisp and hard as properly dried rice. But after all, what is the difference between sun-dried rice and machine-dried rice? Brother Hsiao explains that the hot air for machine-drying rice comes from burning diesel, and if combustion in the combustion chamber is incomplete, the unburned oil fumes will inevitably enter the drying chamber and "dance" with the rice grains.

It is said that the older generation could taste, and could not get used to, that rice tainted with oil fumes. I cannot help but picture an exaggerated scene of rice grains crying for help in a two-stroke engine's combustion chamber. Perhaps, with advances in machine development, this phenomenon no longer occurs. Perhaps it is simply that our sense of taste has gone numb. My thinking is very simple: I think of the pure scent of the white cotton quilts on the balcony of my mother's old home, warmed by the sun.

The work of sun-drying rice is very laborious, a hardship best described as inseparable from it. The grain is divided into rows of pointed long ridges. Brother Hsiao uses a flat wooden rake to push the grain little by little, row by row, from the right side of the ridge to the left, and when all the grain on the right has been raked over, he turns all the grain on the left ridge back again. And so it repeats, raking once every half hour, at least four cycles a day, like a shepherd driving sheep to graze. The owner of the grain, wearing a bamboo hat, drives the grain to bathe evenly in the sunlight.

But Heaven always likes to play jokes on hard-working farmers. The clear blue sky has somehow already furrowed its brow, dark clouds twisting and churning, glaring with a ferocious look, and we beneath the sky can only resign ourselves and quickly pull the rain tarp over the yard. Brother Hsiao says that sun-dried rice, which with good weather is done in two or three days, can also be dragged out to ten days or even two weeks because of the weather. An old proverb says, "The ox slowly plows, the man slowly grinds." The farmer's life of slowly enduring, of grinding an iron rod into a needle, commands respect. Only after going through it can one truly feel the meaning of "who knows that every grain on the plate is the fruit of hard toil."

Friends, when tomorrow clears, come join us to sun. dry. rice.