Why is it said that this is a truly uncut jade?

At first, the piece I had in mind was simply to wander freely through the lovely scenery and unspoiled nature of the Liujia area in Hsinchu, setting aside for a moment the heavy burden of land expropriation and the confrontations and grievances we so often hear. Yet during the few days of the Summer Cultivation second-stage field survey, most of our conversations could not help but keep seeping with their heartfelt words and helplessness. We listened, we watched, we pondered... If we can, we try to convey it.

Around the Hsinchu High Speed Rail station stand clusters of "hollow concrete pillars," products of the urban plan for the Hsinchu High Speed Rail special district. Similar scenes surround nearly every High Speed Rail station across Taiwan, where small green patches overrun with weeds mingle strangely with tall residential towers. Those hollow concrete pillars are not only the spatial condition of ordinary housing; in truth, they are also "hollow" -- empty of people.

Although that batch of expropriation cases has passed and the offset land has been returned, another batch, and yet more batches, of expropriation cases have never ceased to this day. The Taiwan Economic Knowledge Flagship Park (formerly the Puyu Project) has lain crouched like a giant beast over the Zhubei area of Hsinchu for ten years (since the 89th year of the Republic of China to the present). Residents watch as roads are widened again and again, real estate agents move in one after another, expropriation and sale billboards keep "growing out" to block the familiar green before their eyes, someone ties fake bid-inflating advertisement boards to utility poles along the road every day, neighbors' land is bought up and left fallow... Over time, this distorted ecology has gradually become a new scenery that people here take for granted.

Wave after wave of rice paddies dances in the wind, and the fierce sunlight strikes the land of Puyu (locals seem to have grown used to calling Donghai, Aikou, Shixing, Xiashan and other places their "Puyu"), shining with a brilliant radiance that holds the gaze as if caught in a spotlight.

Our local guide, Tian Zhenglu, and his wife led us through the streets and alleys, from learning about the cultural history and deity worship of the Liujia area in Zhubei to experiencing the humor and fun of the fields; from the Earth God shrines everywhere, to the way even a single stone can become a spiritual anchor for them, we saw the residents' reverence and piety toward nature, and their respect and cherishing are the attitude toward life they have cultivated here over the long term; from scooping up freshwater clams one by one with bare hands in the clear irrigation channels, with fish, shrimp and aquatic plants all around our feet, we experienced firsthand a rare and extraordinary experience in today's society, and understood how precious and abundant the environmental resources here are.

What I remember most deeply is the bright smiles of the Liujia people, so certain of their homeland and unwilling to submit (to evil forces): "Look! How wonderful our place is! Why should we give them our land for expropriation?!"

Over these two or three days, we touched clams, ate champion rice, learned about rice production and marketing and the production line, came into contact with grain merchants and giant machines like beasts (threshers, dryers, cold storage, etc.), stepped into the paddy ridges to bend down and pull weeds, enjoyed unrestrained relaxation over tea and meals at the local gathering place (the Bogong Temple), interviewed expropriated households to understand their reasons for opposing expropriation, and through daily review discussions came to know our fellow survey companions even better... The list goes on and on.

This string of tightly packed activities was, to be honest, far from easy, in the hope of gaining the greatest and most understanding in a brief time and experiencing the deepest and most authentic life. Even when exhausted, it drew everyone tightly together -- residents and us, us with one another, and the fine mountains and waters of Liujia.

Countless fragments of memory interweave in my mind. Some may vanish in a flash, but one tiny image keeps coming back to me — a farmer's index finger, a bent index finger.

We know that in the lush green rice paddies, besides the rice, countless weeds are mixed in. Rice farmers who do not use herbicides rely on egrets, ducks and the like to trample or eat the weed seeds, yet they cannot eliminate the masses of tough weeds that blow in with the wind. So the more diligent farmers must rely on their stooped bodies, bending at the waist, to pull up the weeds one by one, roots and all, with their own hands. On the afternoon of the second day, we followed the farmer Tian Shouxi, stepped onto the cool wet soil, bent down to learn to identify weeds, and how to use the least laborious method to cut the weeds and pull out the roots. On roughly two to three fen of land, our group of seven pulled weeds for two hours. Although I am a child who grew up in the countryside, after long lacking farm labor, doing such mechanical motions for two hours still felt hard to bear.

Just as Tian Shouxi called out to us to watch how he pulled up the weeds, my eyes were involuntarily drawn to his index finger. This "punctum" (Note 1) left me stunned... That bent finger, which seemed designed by nature for pulling weeds, had in fact become deformed through long-term "adaptation" to weed pulling and farm work.

This sight immediately made me think of my grandpa and grandma. Their fingers were like this too. Having toiled for a lifetime and labored for a lifetime, such fingers are inlaid in their bodies and memories like badges. Even though I do not share the same bodily memory, I understood all the more deeply that behind the bent fingers lies a hidden persistence, a deepest bond that has always depended on the land and cannot leave it.

Agriculture was originally Taiwan's lifeline, producing abundant, high-quality crops year after year, yet under improper policies the farming population has continued to drain away in large numbers. For farmers, the reward for a whole year of hard work is not even enough to make a living. What are they to do? Besides being suppressed by policy, squeezed by industrial transformation, and crowded out by labor demand, the more crucial point is that young people are unwilling to keep farming -- rural villages can no longer retain young new blood. Like the butterfly effect, each problem is interlocked with the next, ultimately leading to a lost agricultural environment, a rural ecology that withers away as the population ages.

These past few days we stayed in the small container hut provided by the farmer Zhong Guangyao, with six people crammed into a two-ping space. Luckily the weather was cool, and though simple, it was quite joyful. That was a digression; coming back to the point, I wanted to discuss Zhong Guangyao's situation. His family runs the main seedling nursery in the Liujia area, that is, a (rice) seedling supply center. They supply the seedlings needed for about 300 hectares of farmland, and he can almost be called the farmer with the most power here.

In several frank talks with him, I found that although he too stands up against the unjust system, the policy oppressing the people, and the evil collusion between government and conglomerates, a farmer relatively more capable than others locally like him is nonetheless helpless before the pressure of expropriation and the predicament of having no successor to take over the farmland and family business. Even as he bravely steps forward to protect his hometown soil, he cannot conceal the mental fatigue of wanting to retire: "Farming is bitter."

Besides examining rice seedling production and the rice cultivation process, the last link in the production and marketing chain, the very final step, is also the most crucial factor determining rice farmers' livelihoods -- sales (channels).

We came into contact with a local rice farmer, the head of the Donghai Village rice production and marketing group, who is also a grain merchant, Chen Fasheng. Though elderly Chen Fasheng is deeply dissatisfied with the injustice of policy, he uses the name of the production and marketing group to apply for subsidies everywhere and buy huge machinery: multi-story threshers, rice dryers, and cold storage -- an entire post-harvest rice production line, including sales, all managed by him and his son. He claims that as long as it is grain from group members he will buy it at a "bonus" (ten yuan added per hundred jin), yet the reality is that his son keeps the accounts, and whether such an "ideal" is actually carried out is unknown.

They control the downstream rice production line. Most small farmers do not have this machinery at home and can only hand over all their wet grain to them for threshing, drying, packaging and sales. They buy wet grain at 80 percent of the weight; the discounted weight is then divided by one hundred jin, amounting to roughly 1,150 yuan per hundred jin. How many jin of rice can one jia of farmland produce? A rough estimate is about 10,000 jin. By that calculation, one jia of land might earn less than 100,000 yuan. With two rice crops a year, the final income is only about 200,000 yuan, but how many rice farmers can own one jia of arable land? What is more, they control the most crucial thing -- the "sales channels (pipelines)" that small farmers and even consumers find hard to reach directly.

The result is that an invisible hand lurks between small farmers and consumers. Small farmers who cannot afford machinery helplessly hand over their grain, and consumers with no direct channel to buy from local farmers buy "priced" grain for convenience. Rice is clearly so cheap! Why does a five-jin bag cost one or two hundred yuan?

The more we saw, the more tangled the questions in our hearts became. Too many problems also involve the interests, perceptions, moral principles, helplessness and persistence among the adults... To clarify such a vast and complex set of problems all at once is not easy, and moreover, problems often have no (standard) answers.

At this moment, I am trying to convey these questions and bring everyone together to think and discuss. What can we do? Not "for" (Note 2) helping them, but for a sustainable future, "jointly" seeking a solution, and how to contribute a bit of our own effort to keep the soil that moved us, that field, that bright and vast sky?

Summer Cultivation began in Meinong, walking the fields, getting to know the environment, finding more sense of identity in the land; Summer Cultivation came to Puyu for the second-stage field survey, entering the fields, being present on the ground, finding in the land the value it should have but which has gradually fallen into neglect. This value, our generation needs to strive to "bring back into prominence," because it has always been there, never disappeared. It has only been forgotten.

A true piece of uncut jade is ever new through the ages.

Note 1: "Punctum" comes from Roland Barthes' book "Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography" (La chambre claire). It refers to an inconspicuous tiny thing in a photograph that nevertheless draws our particular attention, even a small thing that makes one feel a prickle on the back, something that can move a person yet is hard to describe in words.

Note 2: The "for" here carries a sense of pity from above to below, but the author's intent is to make the relationship between people equal.