Sowing Seeds for a Bountiful Harvest

Agricultural researcher Lin Wanxing opened her eyes to find herself a widow in Shiwa Village in the twenty-third year of the Guangxu reign. Her husband had died young, her son Xiaoshitou was feverish with hunger, and torrential rain had swept away all but the ruined rice stalks in her three mu of poor farmland. This was a poor village where even the wild vegetables were nearly gone, and the shadow of starvation weighed on everyone.

But she didn’t panic, even with blisters ground into her palms. The rice seeds she had cultivated in the laboratory, the irrigation and drainage knowledge she had committed to memory, the principles of hybrid breeding... These were what she could rely on.

“Dig drainage ditches!” She led the villagers through the mud, digging channels and teaching them to mix straw with mud to reinforce the field banks. She cut up potatoes, a crop no one had ever grown there, and buried them in the soil, then sowed fast-growing buckwheat. Some doubted her; others waited and watched. But when round potatoes tumbled out of the earth and buckwheat ears bent the branches, a light finally returned to their numb eyes.

She repaired irrigation channels to bring in mountain spring water, taught everyone to make compost and enrich the fields, and improved the rice varieties to raise yields. She turned surplus grain into vermicelli and wine, then led the villagers to town to find buyers. From three mu of experimental plots to broad stretches of dependable farmland, from chewing tree bark to full granaries, from earthen huts to two-story homes, the village chimneys of Shiwa gradually began to send up the aromas of rice, pancakes, and the sweet promise of better days.

This wasn’t one person’s comeback. It was a pair of hands and a caring heart wiping the word “hunger” from the land, while hope, like the rice ears, took root along the field banks.