Mo Mo Mi Coarse Farming Seedling Side Profile: The Road from Farming, 2013 Issue 1

At nine in the evening, the roller shutter of A-Yi's farm machinery shop was still open, casting a lone white glow from inside out into the middle of the pitch-black rice paddies. A-Yi sat in his living room, which doubled as his factory office, beside a tea table neither large nor small, where a kettle of boiling water hissed and sent up white steam. The teapot and cups were stained with a thick layer of tea residue and looked as though they had been used for a very long time. The television screen was silent; apart from the hum of the fluorescent tube, only A-Yi's irregular breathing could be heard.

A-Yi sat staring into space, the cigarette in his right hand long since burned down to the butt, with a long column of ash stubbornly still attached. His wife and son were asleep upstairs; they really had worked hard today. His eldest son, in middle school, would skip meals for the sake of playing soccer and thought of nothing but soccer whenever he had the chance, yet today he had obediently driven the newest rice transplanter, bought on credit this season, and accompanied his mother all day, finishing the family's three or four jia of land in one go. In fact, for A-Yi, who ran a farm machinery shop, farming was just something he did on the side; after all, the tractor, rice transplanter, combine harvester and grain cart were all the family's own machines, costing only fuel, and he counted his own labor as free. His real aim was to cultivate good relations with the rice mills so that, when necessary, it would be easier to arrange short-term funds. Everyone assumed A-Yi's machinery shop made good money. After all, with the major rice mills joining forces to control purchase prices, most of the farmers' profits were swallowed up by the fees for machine cultivation, and in a bad year, when the weather went wrong, plenty of people ended up with nothing to show for their efforts. A-Yi sighed, flicked the butt from his hand, grabbed a pinch of tea leaves and tossed them into the pot, then poured in hot water.

It was true that A-Yi should have made money. When he built this big factory on ancestral land from nothing, he had bet on the coming era of large-scale mechanized farming. But while he had read the trend correctly, he had misread people's hearts. During the busy farming season he went everywhere plowing and preparing fields for others, working hard for a month, yet often ended up unable to collect his fees. Time and again, whenever he went to settle accounts, all he got was: "We'll talk after the harvest." Sometimes A-Yi cursed under his breath, "Damn it, other people's kids never die..." These days everything in life costs money; the era when people exchanged favors and labor had long passed. Just the loans on those farm machines were no small sum, his two sons needed money for school, and he still had his parents to support.

Now there was one more expense: medical bills.

The tea was ready. It was what 40-year-old A-Yi would use to take his medicine. On the outermost edge of the cluttered cabinet lay the various prescriptions his wife had sorted out for him, and at one time there were several kinds of pills whose purpose A-Yi could not understand. He only knew that if he did not take them, the pain would send him to the hospital, but if he did, he knew he would surely not sleep tonight. He had loved drinking too much in the past; those days had been a drunken mess. Before noon you could find him passed out cold by the edge of a paddy field. Alcohol had been like the source of his life, as if without its haze he would no longer be A-Yi. Now the doctor had warned him that if he touched alcohol again, he could wait to be carried into a coffin, so A-Yi had not taken a drop since. But he smoked and chewed betel nut even more heavily. He did not feel dejected or sad about it, nor any trace of unease or anxiety. He simply felt that the arrangement fate had given him was rotten luck.

"Damn."

A-Yi swallowed all the pills in one go with a big mouthful of bitter-tasting tea, then stood up, put on his jacket and went outside. He pulled down the shutter, and the world outside suddenly fell into darkness: no streetlights, no neighbors. A-Yi nimbly climbed onto the 200-horsepower tractor, started the machine whose wheels were taller than a man, and immediately stepped on the gas, roaring off. At this hour, when every household was turning off its lights and the grandparents were switching off the local drama on TV, A-Yi's tractor was clamoring loudly. He drove it into the field and, relying on the moonlight and the headlights, precisely buried the rotary blades behind the machine into the soil. At once the earth in the field began to churn as if it had come to a boil.

Just as reality came crashing down on him from all sides, waiting for A-Yi to face it, he chose to work hard at night, which seemed both a kind of courage and a kind of escape. Tonight the moon was round and bright; even without headlights you could see the earth shining silver. To the east, Dulan Mountain was like a giant boulder splitting the sky in the manner of Pangu, falling black and mute upon A-Yi's heart. A-Yi steered the tractor, drawing row after row of black straight lines back and forth across the field. From a distance it looked like watching a domino show: you expect that once all the dominoes fall, some beautiful pattern will appear, but in the end all you get is another kind of darkness.

The machine quickly finished this plot and was heading toward the farther Wuling area when A-Yi noticed that the neighboring field had already been roughly cultivated, and a shed had been set up there, filled with seedling trays. In the trays, nothing seemed to have sprouted yet.

"Damn it, this young guy really has something wrong with his head..."

A-Yi shook his head, the corner of his mouth lifting into a smile. He actually rather liked this young fellow, who had come to the countryside alone to farm with empty pockets and even had to pay for an iron ox from A-Yi in installments. In an age when everything depended on large machinery, here was a young man still willing to work slowly with a small machine, which made A-Yi feel the young man had something of his own drive from when he had started from nothing. So he always forgave the young man's inexperienced clumsiness and was willing to help him a little. But A-Yi truly scoffed at the young man's so-called natural farming. He thought the young man's head was broken, doing things that would never earn him food or clothing. Though ready-grown seedlings were available for purchase and he insisted on raising his own, he was always lecturing A-Yi at great length, and it was unclear who the person who had farmed all his life really was. He would not listen when told that rice needed pesticides and fertilizer, and he actually believed rice would grow just by wind and water. Last season, if not for that plot being good land, the young man's rice would not have been so heavy-headed, yet his harvest was only half of other people's. How could he make money that way? If A-Yi's fields did not yield seven ge (Note 1), he would lose money, so who had time to care about natural or unnatural farming methods? A-Yi had only heard that the young man's rice was all sold to Taipei, and sold at an exorbitant price and still sold out, which made him think that the people of Taipei were probably all born lucky, unlike them, whose grain could only be bought cheaply by the rice mills.

The machine kept working. Suddenly A-Yi felt a strong wave of drowsiness come over him. The rumbling low-frequency noise turned into a hypnotic tune played over and over, and the sofa seat on the machine suddenly seemed so soft and warm. His heavy eyelids blinked and blinked, like a long-used fluorescent tube flickering dimly, ready to give up at any moment. A-Yi had not been this sleepy in a long time. His forehead gradually leaned against the steering wheel, and he fell deeply asleep. That 200-horsepower giant was still running in the dawn light that was about to brighten, giving out a rumbling, wordless protest...

Note 1: Seven ge means a yield ratio; it refers to being able to harvest 700 Taiwan catty of grain per fen of land.