Wan'an on the Chihshang Plain welcomes a bumper harvest year, with fine scenes across the fields

Text and photos / Lin Po-hung

Along Taiwan Provincial Highway 197, the road that strings together Jinyuan, Wan'an and Fuxing, there have lately been many more grain trucks and flatbed trailers carrying harvesters, leaving clumps of gray mud stuck to their wheels on the asphalt. Every grain truck looks heavily loaded, and every harvester looks hurried.

The old man who had just finished his farm work after a full breakfast lives right beside the road. Facing the whole expanse of yellow checkerboard fields across the road, facing the towering Central Mountain Range in the distance, he always sits as usual on his Wild Wolf motorcycle parked in front of his house, smoking a cigarette, sitting quietly, exchanging a glance and a nod with each person who hurries past.

I was curious what he was looking at, so I took a stool and sat down beside him. I watched quietly, and he too sat quietly on his Wild Wolf.

In the distance several cultivators could be seen going back and forth in circles, moving fast, mercilessly devouring each golden sheaf of rice. I once heard people say that in the past, three fen of field could keep eight or even nine people busy cutting for a whole day; now, a machine needs only one hour to shave the whole field bald, leaving behind row after row of evenly cut rice stubble and chopped lengths of rice straw spread across the entire field.

A large truck carrying grain flashed past on the road ahead, golden and pointed like a pyramid. The old man was still silent, and I really could not hold back from asking him what he was looking at.

In Taiwanese he said loudly and powerfully: "Haven't you noticed the sky looks different from before? Everyone is afraid the weather will turn bad, so they're all rushing to bring in the harvest. This year, No. 139 has very little poor grain. Look at so-and-so's truck, 15,000 jin piled up full, at least 11 ge! (One ge means harvesting an average of 100 jin of grain per fen of land.)" Drawing on his cigarette, he went on, blowing out white smoke: "Everyone's rushing to deliver their rice, and the rice mill is backed up with traffic now."

In just those two short sentences, besides admiring how the old man could know everything about Wan'an Village just by sitting on his Wild Wolf, I also sighed at how farmers worry all the time. A poor harvest goes without saying, but even with a bumper harvest, they still have to worry about the weather, worry about the timing of the harvest, worry about this and that, until they see the golden-orange grain poured into the truck and are sure the rice mill has time to dry it for them. Only then can they sit in front of their own door and, like the old man, leisurely smoke a cigarette.