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The hands of a rice farmer  by Situ Hui Ling
H “arvesting a grain of rice takes more than one drop of sweat,” the farmer said as she weighed out twenty jin (10 kg) of rice
for me in a transparent plastic bag.

She was referring to a popular Chinese proverb, one that I had learned as a child. She picked out a small stone from the rice, casting it on the ground before tying up the bag. As she handed me the bag of white rice, I noticed her hands. The yellowed skin and swollen fingers said much more than the Chinese proverb did.

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A farmer’s hand and a ‘city’ hand.


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Harvesting rice.
Long periods of immersion in muddy water had discolored her fingers and nails, as the sun browned her skin. The farmer said that water would not wash out the stain; she needed to use turpentine, and she would not clean the stains until after the planting season ended.

A group of friends and I had visited her farm in Du’an, Guangxi, one sweltering summer’s morning in July. My friends had come earlier in April to help plant a small plot of rice, and now it was harvest time. We had tried our hand at cutting stalks of rice while we waded knee-deep in mud, and now we were getting ready to leave after lunch.

Her family’s farm supplies organic rice to a restaurant in Nanning city owned by some of the people in the group. They had come to collect a sack of rice for the restaurant.

Earlier, as we walked back from the field to the house to wash off the mud from our hands, she told me about her daughter and son who were university-educated. Her son had just graduated recently and her daughter was still studying.

“They come back during the school holidays and help out with the farm work. They do everything, they know how to do everything,” she said.

She said that people who have been educated do not need to do labor-intensive work like farming, and can lead less toilsome lives. She wanted that for her children. Yet, I could see that she was proud that her children were also capable at farm tasks and did not look down on her work. Their actions showed their love and filial attitude towards their mother.

The yellow hands of this rice farmer may seem coarse and ugly, but if there were no such hard-working hands, we would have no rice to eat. As she grasped my arm good-naturedly in goodbye and smiled at me, I felt that her hands were noble and beautiful indeed.