You can take the girl outta the village....
My wife was born in a tiny village in Fujian province. Really tiny. 8 houses. Up in the mountains. The joys of bucolic life are not strange to us, city dwellers, and I too enjoy planting dill up on our roof in clay pots. But my wife was adamant in her wish to grow stuff on a larger scale - the pleasures of mucking about in freshly plowed furrows and seeing the fruit of your hands heading up and wafting in the wind are quite hard not to succumb to. And here's what came out of it.
Near our housing development there are rampant subtropical jungles, in the midst of which (about 30 feet from the road) there are ruins of a house and a rectangular what-seems-to-have-been-field.
But on closer inspection it turned out that in its heyday it had been a pool (!) where villagers bred fishes. ("Closer inspection" was my wife revealing the answer to this mystery to me after I failed to crack the enigma.) You can see the likes of such pools all over the countryside here. So the earth is good and not very dry, and we could see some crabs wandering around in the tall sedge grass(?).
On day one my better half cleared the rampant grass and dug out one furrow to be later set in with a variety of Chinese greens. Fresh veggies for the table, what could be better? I was given the task to tend to the baby, and when I later joined my wife in our field, I stood there in awe, taking in the beauty of the things natural, and couldn't help reciting the eternal words, uttered by a learned sage: "A man could watch three things ad infinitum: a burning flame, the starry sky and a woman at work".
It obviously was a lot of fun, working the land, and I couldn't help noticing a change for the better that labor produced on my wife. Indeed, work refines humans, and even though I knew it all along somewhere in the dusty attic of my mind, I too now am eager to do some physical work, as it is mightily healthy and satisfying (the tests showed).
Here is the weapon of grass-destruction used by most oriental land workers. Can double as a weapon in kung-fu movies (and I neglected not this second use for the oriental machete, performing a couple of coll swishes).
It's a funny thing with the land here in China - not to generalize, but in the neighborhood if you see an unattended piece of land, you can up and husband it, growing all kinds of veggies for your table. And others know it is 'your' land, never claiming it. Hey, because it is your land! It is never yours on paper, but you till it. The rightful owner (the city, municipality, whatnot) can claim it for building a new high-rise, usually not asking the farmer, guess why? Hey, because it's their land!
I had to fight with this idea for a while but finally gave up and gave in. The happening that made me realize this state of things was an otherwise ordinary event - a neighbor was going to visit his son in a far-away land and wanted to leave 'his' piece of land to somebody. He used to grow all kinds of stuff there and spent days in the field. But he wanted to ... sell it. I was greatly puzzled as to the ethical and legal foundation of such a deed. My mind worked like this: You take a piece of land which is nobody's. Hurts nobody, everybody's happy. You work on it and grow stuff for your table. Then you leave, but you don't leave it the way you took it - you sell it to whoever wants it. Why? Because you worked on it. You 'prepared' it for the next guy. But I mean, hypothetically that next guy could have been the first to call dibs on the land. And technically it is legally nobody's land (at least in my picture of the world, but I consent it may not be so for the people around me). I mean, legally, if it is nobody's land and you start working on it, then another person can come and under the 'unfriendly but legal' claim destroy it or take the veggies, and still enjoy impunity. That would be an @$$hole move, but hey, selling the land that is not legally yours... Even though you worked on it, and as if 'prepared' it for the other guy, honestly you were not preparing it for him, you were working on it for your own good. ... But even if you were preparing the no-man's land (read: state-owned) for others to buy, what are the legal repercussions of this? Hmmm. I cannot say what I would have done, because I have not found myself in this situation 'on the sell-side', and to make a real judgment you have to at least completely understand the situation, experiences and the mind of the person you are trying to pass a judgment on, but I feel if I had a piece of land for nothing, and enjoyed working on it while I could, I would probably be grateful for the chance I had, and feel better if I just left it the way I found, - free and a 'no-man's land'. But who am I to judge, a worm, a visitor, a passenger on this chariot which spins around the Sun...
Anyhow, a good cultural note. A curiosity. But... Still, something is... off in the state of Denmark Kingdom of the Middle.
Near our housing development there are rampant subtropical jungles, in the midst of which (about 30 feet from the road) there are ruins of a house and a rectangular what-seems-to-have-been-field.
But on closer inspection it turned out that in its heyday it had been a pool (!) where villagers bred fishes. ("Closer inspection" was my wife revealing the answer to this mystery to me after I failed to crack the enigma.) You can see the likes of such pools all over the countryside here. So the earth is good and not very dry, and we could see some crabs wandering around in the tall sedge grass(?).
On day one my better half cleared the rampant grass and dug out one furrow to be later set in with a variety of Chinese greens. Fresh veggies for the table, what could be better? I was given the task to tend to the baby, and when I later joined my wife in our field, I stood there in awe, taking in the beauty of the things natural, and couldn't help reciting the eternal words, uttered by a learned sage: "A man could watch three things ad infinitum: a burning flame, the starry sky and a woman at work".
It obviously was a lot of fun, working the land, and I couldn't help noticing a change for the better that labor produced on my wife. Indeed, work refines humans, and even though I knew it all along somewhere in the dusty attic of my mind, I too now am eager to do some physical work, as it is mightily healthy and satisfying (the tests showed).
Here is the weapon of grass-destruction used by most oriental land workers. Can double as a weapon in kung-fu movies (and I neglected not this second use for the oriental machete, performing a couple of coll swishes).
It's a funny thing with the land here in China - not to generalize, but in the neighborhood if you see an unattended piece of land, you can up and husband it, growing all kinds of veggies for your table. And others know it is 'your' land, never claiming it. Hey, because it is your land! It is never yours on paper, but you till it. The rightful owner (the city, municipality, whatnot) can claim it for building a new high-rise, usually not asking the farmer, guess why? Hey, because it's their land!
I had to fight with this idea for a while but finally gave up and gave in. The happening that made me realize this state of things was an otherwise ordinary event - a neighbor was going to visit his son in a far-away land and wanted to leave 'his' piece of land to somebody. He used to grow all kinds of stuff there and spent days in the field. But he wanted to ... sell it. I was greatly puzzled as to the ethical and legal foundation of such a deed. My mind worked like this: You take a piece of land which is nobody's. Hurts nobody, everybody's happy. You work on it and grow stuff for your table. Then you leave, but you don't leave it the way you took it - you sell it to whoever wants it. Why? Because you worked on it. You 'prepared' it for the next guy. But I mean, hypothetically that next guy could have been the first to call dibs on the land. And technically it is legally nobody's land (at least in my picture of the world, but I consent it may not be so for the people around me). I mean, legally, if it is nobody's land and you start working on it, then another person can come and under the 'unfriendly but legal' claim destroy it or take the veggies, and still enjoy impunity. That would be an @$$hole move, but hey, selling the land that is not legally yours... Even though you worked on it, and as if 'prepared' it for the other guy, honestly you were not preparing it for him, you were working on it for your own good. ... But even if you were preparing the no-man's land (read: state-owned) for others to buy, what are the legal repercussions of this? Hmmm. I cannot say what I would have done, because I have not found myself in this situation 'on the sell-side', and to make a real judgment you have to at least completely understand the situation, experiences and the mind of the person you are trying to pass a judgment on, but I feel if I had a piece of land for nothing, and enjoyed working on it while I could, I would probably be grateful for the chance I had, and feel better if I just left it the way I found, - free and a 'no-man's land'. But who am I to judge, a worm, a visitor, a passenger on this chariot which spins around the Sun...
Anyhow, a good cultural note. A curiosity. But... Still, something is... off in the state of Denmark Kingdom of the Middle.