Guarding the Mountain, Guarding the Field: Rural Persistence in Mountain Farmland

Editor's note: This article is a partial excerpt from the book "Water Terraces: The Story of the Gongliao Mountain Village." The book documents the "Water Terrace Restoration Project" jointly promoted by the Renhe Foundation and the Forestry Bureau, working with local farmers in Gongliao to carry out ecologically friendly restoration of fallow water terraces, concretely practicing the spirit of the "Satoyama Initiative."

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Many years ago I taught at Jilin Elementary School. In those days, apart from the occasional parents who would pick up their children on the way for work convenience, most of Jilin's students still walked to school. Walking together on the mountain road to and from school, the things they played with in their hands were flowers, grasses and insects, not mobile phones or video games. The seventh-grade generation should have few such memories now!

The only one without companions to walk to and from school was A-Hao, who lived in the valley opposite. At that time there were no other children of elementary school age on that mountain road, and his older brothers and sisters had all gone away to study and live. Every day, apart from the moment he walked out the school gate when he could still trade banter with classmates across the stream, the next forty minutes were spent almost entirely in the company of mountain forest. He was Uncle Liu's youngest child. Because the home was simply too far away, after starting junior high school A-Hao was taken by his older sister to study elsewhere. With all the children living, studying and raising families away from home, for more than ten years Uncle Liu still lived in that distant valley, guarding the mountain, guarding the field.