A Visit to Huatiancuo: Touring the Beautiful Countryside Flower Fields

Text / Jasmine

The midday light falls on the wall of the main hall at Huatiancuo, onto a black poem by Du Fu, written in a burst of feeling by the owner after roaming the four seas and meeting impermanence. The small door to the right of the main hall leads to the poetic "kitchen" - slicing a block of tofu into a nine-square grid, quickly splashing the black of soy sauce.

It is not that I love putting on a Chinese cuisine drama; taste one bite of the kind of dense texture that only pure hand-making can soak out, the mouth full of soybeans and black beans supporting each other, and who, not being a sage, could fail to be moved by that friendly heart, by the natural dorky air of good food made at no expense?

These past few days I have truly experienced life in a traditional large courtyard house, where people are tightly bound to one another; here the output of culture, the raising of children, and the passing down of wisdom all owe thanks to the owner of Huatiancuo: You Lihua.

Sister Lihua, through mountain climbing and cycling, has been on countless grand journeys across oceans and up mountains and down to the ground, worked at a TV station for several years, and taken part in many community, environmental, and natural building activities and actions, but in the end she was unwilling to keep fighting and drifting for a lifetime in the busy, chaotic city, and returned to the most sincere countryside, to once again tread the land nourished by the sweat of the farmers of old.

Another special spot is opposite the Kavalan King Car Distillery, one of the large courtyard house friendly small farmers, Yuanhe Green's farm, where Brother Cheng spent a year from designing it himself to completing it, a huge greenhouse of astonishing scale, but the abundant results cultivated inside let us understand that growing good vegetables benefits people and at the same time fulfills oneself.

After seeing off the family from Taoyuan, on the last night at Huatiancuo after bathing, Sister Lihua and I talked about how each of us stands in a world of dreams.

Sister Lihua decided at thirty that at forty she would no longer live an urban life. At first, introduced by a friend in Yilan, she went to grow pears; later, while mountain climbing, she met Brother Qingsong and began to understand rice. At the time Lihua asked him: "What do you think about me becoming a weekend farmer?" Qingsong said: "Sure! Just come and give it a try." "Later I found out that rice is not at all as simple as Qingsong said. Isn't Qingsong just very sly, ha!" So Lihua was also a fish hooked by Qingsong onto the boat of friendly farming.

Talking about the half-farming, half-X lifestyle, Lihua thinks it leans more toward self-sufficiency, and cannot enter the industrial chain like economic agriculture to change the modern social and economic structure. This made me start to think: more than ninety percent of today's farmers are elderly people about to retire, the next generation has no willingness to return to farming, and the government keeps sacrificing pure land to conglomerates. Perhaps the pressing task is how to preserve the largest possible area of land, in a friendly way. That is why Lihua says agr"iculture" - don't forget that it is also a layer of industry. And half-farming, half-X is perhaps the only final utopian world that can escape the competitive pressure that agriculture as an industry must have, self-sufficiency plus practicing one's gifts. Later we also shared the story of how "Gorilla Green Guerrilla" was first founded, and the good deeds we did.

And so we talked and laughed through the whole night, lights out, candle wick lit, shadow facing shadow making three, sharing this lamp and candlelight.