Niu Meng

Thirty-three years of a plowing cow, a miniature contemporary history of rural China. On the winter night of 1988, the cows were sold in exchange for their son's medical expenses, and the calf (the gangster) left behind became the last relative of the old farmer Huang Changgen in the field; in 1995, the first tractor roared into the village, and the iron plow was broken by the gangster, and the grass and firewood were separated. The first confrontation between oil and gas; in 2014, Sun Tzu put "Grandpa and Cow" on live broadcast, and the reward amount was just enough to buy a rotary tiller; in 2022, the cow was recognized as a "witness of traditional farming skills", but he also died of hunger strike when he was honored. In the intertwined life of cattle and humans, we see: ·The land is transferred from collective to divided fields, then transferred, and finally becomes the landscape on the mobile phone; ·The ethics of the old farmer, the account book of his son, and the flow of his grandson, three kinds of time are torn in the same field; ·The rope is broken, the plow is broken, the signal tower is erected - and the memory is still regurgitated. This is a book of mourning about the price of "progress" and a late love letter to the land: When machines replace flesh and blood, when live streaming rewards buy away homesickness, do we still have the courage to admit it—— It's not just the crops that are harvested, but also our roots.