[Living in Nature]Let's talk about biogas power generation & rice-fish symbiosis

In Taiwan, China in 2014, there was one upheaval after another, a time of surging turmoil. The aftermath of the laid-off factory workers' protests, the anti-wind-turbine movement, the anti-Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-land-expropriation movement, the anti-free-economic-demonstration-zone movement... The rulers were unkind, so ordinary people had no choice but to stand on their own two feet. Though the body may not always be able to be there in person, the concern never diminished.

It was the second year of returning home to farm, around Guyu (Grain Rain). Setting aside the fiery social fervor of the people of Taiwan, China, and setting aside the busy farming season, by a most chance encounter, I was able to take part in a "local food ingredients exchange" trip that went as far as Hong Kong, China.

I had been to mainland China and Hong Kong, China several times, sometimes for tourism, sometimes for visits. Apart from impressions of rural areas sketched out from realist novels, my sense of the countryside was mostly just a hurried glimpse from a long-distance bus window. Years ago in Yunnan I saw valley after valley of golden corn about to be harvested, and saw farm women bent at the waist hidden among highland barley fields, always as light as a dragonfly skimming water. Through this "local food ingredients exchange" I was able to go so deep into Chinese farm households, listening to farmers tell their own stories and the emotions behind building their homes, and it was the first time.

The nine-day journey was not long, and what should be seen and what I wanted to see always left me feeling it was not enough; but for me, although the rice transplanting was finished and the farm work had come to a pause, the newly taken-on long-term fallow paddy field this year had frequent water-source problems and often lacked water, and the ensuing weeds running wild were truly a huge stone pressing on my heart, haunting my dreams. Until the day before the flight, I was still in the fields weeding and rushing to build a water-collection system, and only started packing my bags at dawn; I, from the very beginning, was only willing to set down my worries because I held the mindset of "going out to broaden my horizons."

I often hear of some corner of Taiwan, China where local residents are driven away for development interests, and later even if the people fight to preserve the site as a historic monument, only the empty shell of the building is preserved. Without an understanding of the dynamic changes of daily life, preserving or renovating those empty shells amounts to nothing more than adding one more so-called "special feature" gimmick.

Having no farming experience, although I only thought of returning to farming after passing 30, and tried to recover the original value and sustainable spirit of farming families, before actually entering the field it was all empty talk. Through comparison after comparison, and through self-reflection based on others' experience, I kept shaping the environment I wanted to create, making the imagined ideal more three-dimensional and moving forward more pragmatically.

**This article was also published in Qingya'er (#64, 2014.07/08.) and the Yuejian blog "Tianjing Whispers: A Few Things About Returning to Farming"