The Rice Cooker
A personal encounter on the way to the hostel

Article and Photos by Anna Lee

Reflections from the author's travels: working the rice paddies.

The bus rattles to a stop for a young man carrying three red buckets. We are five minutes out of Dinghu Mountain, and besides myself, there are two other women onboard. One is sleeping, the other is talking to the driver the whole time. She whines and gestures constantly, so I figure she must be the driver’s girlfriend.

The man we just picked up had been waving his brown hands frantically, but we saw his red buckets long before that. In a flurry of movement he makes three trips from the dirt road to his seat. On the last, he brings in a large rice cooker with a dented metal top. This he sits in his lap, and the rest is scattered around my feet. I see a hodgepodge of metal hangers, blankets, a fly swatter, an electric fan, and other personal items. His whole life is in three red buckets.

The man looks to be around 20, though it’s hard to tell. A broad, straight nose, full, red mouth, and very dirty shoes. It is Guangdong’s rainy season, mid-June, so everything is slathered in ugly, red, glutinous mud. My own rain boots, hidden beneath the chair, are coated in mud as well.

A considerable moment of silence passes in which the old woman shifts in her sleep, the other pauses for a long breath and I watch the bumpy countryside with ah mas (older women who work in the home) squatting in the dirt, washing eggplant underneath a rusty copper spigot.

Sichuan girls resting

After awhile, the young man turns to me and asks, “You’re not from around here are you?” I shake my head, not wanting to speak. Let the man think I am from Yunnan, or perhaps Sichuan, where the most beautiful Chinese girls are hot pepper pickers, but I am afraid to draw attention to myself by admitting I am from America. He regards me for a moment, looks down at my lap, and laughs. “You must be American!” And then I realize that a copy of Pride of Prejudice is folded over my bare knee. In a slow, careful Mandarin, I ask him what county he is from and where he is going.

“I am from Zhaoqing, a Hakka village in the mountains.” Then he pets the large rice cooker on his legs, “I am going to my new job.” Suddenly, the hen-pecked bus driver runs over a log and, with a loud rattle, the rice pot’s metal top falls to the floor and rolls underneath my seat. I bend to pick it up and, examining it, I tell him he can find a much better one than this. He hugs the thing to his thin chest. “They don’t make them like this anymore. Those plastic rub-a-dub pastel pots they sell nowadays with the flowers all over are every single one of them jia.” Fake. The man raps on the white side of the rice cooker with his finger. “Hear that? The ping ping sound? Shows how good and thick it is, a solid piece of work.”

Selling onions.

This strange conversation continues, and I learn that his father, his grandfather, and his great grandfather had all been rice farmers in the misty hills behind Dinghu Mountain. The flooding last spring ruined the paddies and bankrupted them all. As the youngest, Yuan Zi set out to find a job. His ambition is to work with rice for the rest of his life. In loving detail, he describes the steps of rice cultivation, beginning with seed planting, bending over and over to push them into the dirt. Three months later is harvest—Yuan Zi’s bare back sweating from wielding a sickle and slashing the crop by hand. He tries to tell me in the simplest of Chinese the feeling of being swallowed by the drooping yellow stems, trudging, then hacking while feeling the heat of physical strain. After some time, I can no longer understand what he is saying, but I nod anyway. Bits of words here and there tell me he does not know what to expect at the restaurant, where he is going to work as a rice cooker, in a town he’s never seen.

He rings the bell for the bus to stop on a street lined with wooden shops and old stools scattered haphazardly on the sidewalk. Men sit hunched over, faces almost buried in noodle bowls, their women spitting out chicken bones onto the road. Yuan Zi stands up and hoists the three red buckets over his shoulder. It is an odd moment. What does Chinese custom say to do in a situation like this, saying goodbye to a man I don’t even know? Yet I suddenly want to get off at this stop with him, away from the sleeper and the talker and the ride back to my hostel. In the end, I shake his hand and say, “Man man zhou,” a Chinese saying that means walk slowly, or go with care. The rice-cooker smiles at me and sings out in English, “Bye bye!”

 

Anna Lee graduated from Wofford College with a double major in English and Chinese studies in 2008. She studied abroad in Shanghai, China, with CIEE in spring 2007. Contact her at leezya@gmail.com.