When first thinking of an unused rice paddy, I had romanticised backbreaking work, a round straw hat, whilst getting very wet and muddy, in the process of sweating profusely all day. But this fantasy, should not be considered strictly fantasy, for an Englishman attempting to do what his wife tells him in a non-paid working period. Trying to get a hat that fits an oversize Caucasian head is near impossible in China, seven XL heads are in short supply in Asia, for some unknown reason, so a tiny Panama hat would have to do. I had bought some super cheap rain boots for emergencies, as I fully expected to be either working back in a school or teaching online, buying the boots only to rescue my wife if she got into trouble as she chased her peasant dream. The only trouble that emerged was a lack of school to return to after the summer break. I had a tiny Panama Hat and enormous cheap wellingtons with my wife’s eyes telling me I must always be working. The fields beckoned me to find the romantic ideal.
Allotments in China are not much like their British counterparts, as nobody really knows who owns the land. Some people will set up an area for rent, without being truly able to rent it, whilst other neighbours will just say, ‘it’s ok, have that field there, the one that nobody wants’, which is very attractive to the number one family priority of saving money, whilst ignoring the reasons why nobody wanted the land in the first place.
I had not been in on the land deal, as obviously I had been expecting to be back in a school or something, so was far from prepared to be a tropical gardener. As the jobs said, ‘no’, and my boots arrived my wife’s eye situation looked more and more like a demand for help. There is nothing more galling for a wife than a belief that the husband is doing nothing, especially when she decided to take two of these allotments, one paid for, and one given, and was drowning in tropical grass. My boots arrived and the following morning I was off to help my wife by following orders, very strict orders.
The Chinese have a phrase to define the age of my wife, which loosely translates as, crazy middle-aged woman, whilst many British would say the same, it seems a little nicer to say perimenopausal without HRT, as HRT is few and far between in China, and most Chinese women would rather cut their husbands balls off than have HRT, as its very expensive, and, at best, difficult to get. My new orders would be delivered by somebody in the grip of a hormonal roller-coaster of forgotten things thirty seconds after remembering them, and being furious about everything along the way, which was obviously going to make for an interesting building project infused by rage…much of it my own. However, that is the readers job, to find their own images and judgements on what their great irritants are when it comes to building things with others, as the writing is always better done alone, under one’s own orders. The outside world must be done with others.
‘You carry logs too field’, was my first order, my first command, my first knowing what I was in for over the coming weeks. We had cycled down not too far from our flat. Too me it looked like a set of rice paddies stretching across to the self-built, but illegal, housing in the distance, which is where the local people had built their lives. Roughly one kilometre of continuous rice paddies accessed from a little entrance off the road on our side. This was the paid for land, charging five hundred RMB per year, which I suspect my wife had paid for without telling the landlord what she was about to do, and him expecting her to just return the field to growing rice. However, she had zero intention of growing rice and was seemingly planning on cornering the market on growing and making anything she felt like on any given day. The thing I hadn’t envisioned as I locked my bike and began walking down to a broken bridge, was that there would be another woman roughly my wife’s age making a mess of a perfectly good rice paddy. Numerous baby geese were doing their unbeautiful strange bird thing and waddling towards me as I jumped the broken bridge. Some chicks are far from beautiful, and it would have taken a mother’s love to see the beauty in these friendly things. They flapped their tiny wings as they came gaggling out from what looked like a large pile of rubbish and clutter. Lean too shelters made from all the detritus of the local area hid the rusting cages inside. Not the kind of thing that is seen in the UK, unless of course, you happen to be renting your home from one of the countless dubious landlords that thrive in this uncaring age. This was her rubbish, and this rubbish did its job, by giving some ugly chicks shelter from the countless creatures that would eat them in a second of easy access. That was the beauty of the rural Chinese, they really couldn’t give that much of dam on how things looked, especially if there were money to be saved in not giving a dam. Against the incline, before the broken bridge, were several far more well-established areas with ponds where organised older people were rearing all manner of poultry/geese/ducks, which looked well-kept and constable like. These were the top of the allotment social food chain and had animals that looked both healthy and well fed, with what is considered an acceptable beauty. My wife, as always, wanted to be different, and my first job was to carry thirty logs of wood to her field. How on earth she had managed to even get them there in the first place was beyond me, with only a little black trolly tied behind her bicycle, and the strength of a tiny Asian woman, she had managed it, with a little help from grandma, who happens to live with us. But carry them the thirty metres to her field I must.
Being six-foot-three and hundred-and-ten kilograms brings up several problems on the tight squishy paths of a rice paddy network. I was already sinking without the added weight of twenty-to-fifty-kilogram logs. At nearly sixty years old I was being given a job that would make a twenty-year-old wince. This was not the nonsense work I had done in arts galleries years before whilst under the spell of famous delusional narcissistic people, my first rice paddy job was fraught with all sorts of danger, but not the danger of listening to a very egotistical shower of shit, more a loving shower of dangerous shit, which is of course a better form of shit, yet shit neither-the-less. Very gingerly I hoisted the first heavy log onto my shoulder, as picking the heaviest one first would doubtless leave me some energy for later, or that was the hope anyway. Sinking ten centimetres on every stride I made my way to my wife’s field, having to jump the last two meters over an overflow stream, before entering her domain.
‘Drop there, you don’t have to cross the stream’. She cared, as the sweat started to pour down my face. It was already another, ‘the sun is trying to kill me’, thought bubble day in the tropics, even at seven in the morning it’s pushing one-hundred-Fahrenheit during July. Super-hot and sweaty without the load. She had pointed to my side of the drainage ditch. Littered with the gathering rubbish to make a chicken house of some unknown design. My thinking was to jump across in that moment and make a nice clean pile, as it would make it easier to move them in the future, and utilise the space available. Knowing that my wife has a penchant for leaving anything everywhere, I jumped across the drainage stream and threw it into a corner of her field, breaking an unwritten Chinese rule in the process. You must do exactly what you are told! There is no leeway in the Chinese management system for insubordination, and zero questioning of orders is expected, you are the empty vessel to do a job by following orders. After listening to the countless derogatory curses about having placed the first log in that corner and trying to explain through my own growing rage for fifteen minutes as to why I was doing what I was doing, I returned time and time again to collect my logs and put them into the corner I had decided was the best place. Planning for one possible future and enacting another in a perpetual present is my wife’s seeming unspoken methodology. For me, this method was completely and utterly bewildering, much like my thinking on what was going on in the wider world as it disintegrated into a morally bankrupt perpetual present artificial bubble, I could not make sense of it in the grip of steaming hot thoughts. By the time I had carried all the logs to her field, there was not a single part of my body not covered in sweat, indeed the sweat was sweating. I cursed my cheap boots, I cursed my stupidity for not having found another teaching job full of fake positivity, I cursed my wife, and I cursed the countless dragonflies that swarmed around me eating the numerous mosquitoes as they bade for my blood. But at least in that molten thinking I had clear thought once again, and it wasn’t the stupefied thought of education and its infinite theories of how education works, it was actual creatively useful thinking in a general sense, the ultimate insult to educational thinking. I stood under the small tree in my wife’s field and looked towards my pile of dead logs with a certain pride. I had rebelled by putting them there, I could still carry stuff, and I could dig a small trench with merely my feet over the course of an hour carrying dead wood to a field. Dead things have their use’s when their usefulness to themselves is long forgotten. Pride in the physical work is more pronounced when done under the rebellion of authority…it makes the whole thing taste better. Could I now rebel enough to call myself, they/them, and join the mind-forged-maniacal cult of modern education, could I fuck, I had enjoyed carrying the dead wood.
One noticeable thing that caught my eye when I could find focus again from the dripping sweat was the little grape like pink sweets hanging off everything. Tiny little bubbles of pink beauty that must be some wonderous creature. My teacher education had enforced the absolute respect and equal rights for anything vaguely pink – it was no longer the colour of little girls, but the colour of the oppressed, the colour, along with a few other colours of the rainbow that defined the subtle artifice of being a victim. Thus, the mediocre weak had conquered the world and there were no longer any little girls – just, they and them. Small wonder I had failed in some modules of my teacher education by using critical thinking to show what utter nonsense I was being taught with their own research. Never challenge imaginary oppressed victims with anything but a gun. However, looking at these little pink grape vines I pondered how they must taste, being so attractive to the naïve eye. Thankfully, technology has evolved, whilst civilization might well be dying, and iPhone photo can tell you exactly what you’re looking at.
Apple Snails, not that dissimilar to our modern academics, were laying these beautifully enticing pink grapes. Toxic, invasive, without predators. Should I find all the parents and organise a meeting after doing a thoroughly flawed data analysis that indicates their child has potential growth of one percent, or should a kill as many as possible, parents and children alike. Having not gone over to the frighteningly mediocre educational elite of elite and become only able to stab a passive aggressive nothingness, I decided the spade and boot would be the best way of killing all these snail kids and adults. I apologised as I crushed visible adults with the spade and stamped underfoot the countless tiny pink bubble they had left everywhere. The species really shouldn’t have been here anyway and was destroying everything native in the process of eating food and herbs I could possibly live off. Certain things were never meant to mix, and these things were not meant to be here anyway, so easing my anger by killing snails was very useful indeed. Yet, methinks this war may be ongoing.
