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No Rubber Boots needed at Harvest Time
by Mo Rui Qiu
It was fun to amble down the same dirt path to my friend’s village and feel it was a familiar place. Planting rice
seedlings in July was the beginning of this adventure! Over three months later, on October 16, 2007, we were invited to come back to help harvest.

This time we were greeted by my friend’s mother like an old friend! By now, I had a slightly wider Zhuang vocabulary and could communicate a bit more with her mother, who is monolingual in Zhuang. In her honor, I had specially learned how to ask, “How is your health?”

My Zhuang friend took us past the exact field where we had planted earlier. Sure enough, those seedlings had produced a harvest! Instead of fluorescent green fields of rice seedlings, we now saw yellow tassels of ripe

Harvesting Rice
Golden waves of ripe rice are ready for harvest!

Jingxi, Guangxi
White Rice
Edible white rice pours out from this machine.

Jingxi, Guangxi
grain, supported by dried brown stalks. I now realized that when ripe, not only wheat, but rice too, creates golden waves. My Zhuang friend showed us how to distinguish glutinous rice (糯米) from regular rice（大米）.

When I asked about wearing boots to harvest the grain, she assured me that the fields were now dried up. Wearing tennis shoes would be just fine. Apparently no rubber boots were needed at harvest time! We gathered rounded knives (small sickles), our hats, and bottles of water. She showed us how to grab a stalk of rice near the bottom and slice it off with the sickle. I steadily cut down stalks of rice and turned around to place them in rows to dry. Initially, I could only hold up to three stalks at a time before setting them in the piles. I awkwardly sawed the knife back and forth across the stalks…but later realized that a swift, more forceful swing would topple the stalk more quickly. Then, I could collect five or six stalks before turning to set them down.

Tiny clumps of pink and white balls were scattered throughout the field. They looked almost like opaque, dry tapioca balls. Instead, I learned that those pink and white balls were actually snail eggs!

Harvesting the rice was much harder work than planting seedlings! After a while, my body felt sore. In a neighboring field, I saw other farmers using a foot-pumped cylindrical device to knock the grain off the top of the stalks. Once the grain was off the stalks, they spread it out on canvas to dry. Later, they would winnow the chaff away and pour the grain through a machine that removes the husks. Out pours white rice! It truly is amazing to see rice go from seedlings, to ripe stalks, to the edible rice that I buy in the market. I now appreciate every grain of rice more than I could have ever imagined.