1985, Lijia Village, Hongqi Commune, Qingliu County, Xia Nation.
Chen Dazhuang is the village’s universally acknowledged loafer. His favorite thing to do is lie in the vegetable patch and say weird things to the vegetables. Then one day, he howled at a crooked-neck cucumber: “Ah~ Mm~ Oh~ Yeah~” The cucumber exploded. Juice splattered all over his face, and a yellow slip of paper rolled out of its flesh. It read: “Sound Effects: S-rank. Congratulations on binding the ‘All Things Voice-Over System.’”
From then on, his farming career went completely off the rails:
He gave the chili peppers a “spicy sobbing voice.” They got so hot they started smoking, and one sniff was enough to make a supply-and-marketing cooperative clerk faint from crying.
He conducted a choir of cabbages. At midnight, they went “hee hee hee,” and the whole village thought it was haunted.
He sang “March of the Athletes” to a pumpkin. It rolled five miles and smashed into the township chief’s desk.
He improvised a little audience interaction with radishes. At a provincial cultural showcase, an audience member called, “Hello, radish!” and the radish nodded on the spot.
Other people farm with hoes. He farms with his voice.
From the village’s laughingstock to a county celebrity, from a test subject at the provincial agricultural research institute to the publication of a textbook, from having a red cloth mistaken for an “agricultural ritual” to a Braille textbook being sent to a remote mountain village in the southwest: a blind old farmer measured a radish’s width with his hands and asked someone to pass on a message: “I can’t see what the vegetables look like, but I can feel their shadows growing.”
