On the Road Home: A Three-Generation Story of My Grandfather, Father, and Me

My grandfather, who farmed for generations in Dahu, used to grow vegetables and rice that he kept his own seed for. My father may be used to buying seeds or seedlings from nursery dealers, but he was deeply impressed by watching Grandpa save seed as a child. Listening to Dad's vivid descriptions of how Grandpa selected seeds and how he stored them, this side of Grandpa I had never seen suddenly took on a clear, three-dimensional shape in my mind.

When I was little, my impression of Grandpa was of a man of few words and a loud voice. Although he was an old man all the children feared, in my fragmentary memories, I was full of curiosity about him.

I remember that when I was young I once slept with my grandparents in a tall-legged "four-legged bed." Full of curiosity, I watched from a distance as Grandpa pulled on his harsh-sounding instrument, gathered on the rice-drying ground with a few neighbor uncles - some playing suona, and others playing instruments whose names I did not know. I did not know how to appreciate it then; only later, after I started school, did I learn that this harsh-sounding instrument had a very beautiful name: erhu. The huqin should be melodious and moving, but it turned out that Grandpa was practicing, which was why the sound felt so gut-wrenchingly torn. The huqin Grandpa played was entirely homemade from materials from everyday life - truly impressive. I, who could only play the flute, was used to one hole representing one note, so I found it utterly magical that the strings of a stringed instrument had no markings yet could produce different pitches and string them together into a melody.

In March of this year, I quit my job and returned to Yilan, taking up a bewildered, ignorant farming life. Having gone through the summer rice crop, which was about to be harvested, and having completed the full course of the rice growing period, I planned to try selecting my own seed and raising my own seedlings for the second rice crop. But no matter how much material I looked up or how much experience I listened to, without doing it myself, it was hard to glimpse the inner mysteries. Dad talked up a storm about how Grandpa raised seedlings; I carefully wrote down the process step by step in my notebook and even drew diagrams to confirm whether I understood correctly. In the process there were also many Minnan terms that were not in my world of experience at all, notes with no corresponding Chinese characters; the seed-preservation and seedling-raising experiment that began at the end of July unfolded against this background.

And I, through hands-on farming experience, through the sweat pouring out in streams and the similar stuffy, musky smell of sweat, walking the road those before me had walked, came to sense the devotion and the traces of labor that my father, grandfather and ancestors gave to this land. Only then did I understand that what flows in my body is the blood of workers and farmers. The countryside is no longer a blurred background color symbolizing backwardness; rural life is precisely a posture of life in which people and nature merge.