Why does a small green oasis appear in the rice field?

Text / Zhang Shuning

A vast setting sun hangs on a large tree in the west, dyeing red the clouds that happen to drift slowly across this patch of sky. In the distance, a farmer burning rice straw becomes a slowly moving black dot on the skyline; following the wind, the flame in the farmer's hand quickly sets the entire stretch of paddy field to the east ablaze with red.

Waves of black smoke spread through the air with the wind, and my drifting thoughts, carried by this same wind, return to the fertile land of Jianan that it once gently brushed a hundred years ago. The wind tells me that this place was once like this: all things shared everything in harmony, the land fed everyone but belonged to no one, and here the tiniest bacterium in the soil was as important as the largest black bear.

The wind asks me to listen carefully amid the sounds of forest and stream, to the interwoven harmony of every kind of insect chirp and birdsong. And this music woven from all living things is something I cannot hear, a hundred years later, on that plain where nothing but paddy fields stretches as far as the eye can see. I immerse myself quietly in it, watching the sunlight filter softly through the forest; here, towering trees have never been felled, vines grow freely, and it becomes home to thousands upon thousands of species.

In Along's fields, bare soil is never seen, and insect chirps and birdsong are never lacking here; in this place, the tiniest bacterium in the soil is as important as the towering camphor tree.