Field notes in transit
Presenting my Chinese Farm Chronicles fieldwork live in New York City and Washington DC.
In April this year, I spent three weeks based in Qitian, a region in rural northeastern Sichuan, documenting the work, lives and memories of elderly smallholder farmers in a local cooperative called Qitianren (旗田人). Two months later I travelled to the US to visit my mum, who recently moved there, and ended up taking my photographs and stories from Qitian on a little storytelling tour.
This post, a bit different from my usual Long Reads, is a recap of the three offline Chinese Farm Chronicles events I organised this summer in New York City and Washington DC:
…interspersed with some general musings on storytelling, connection, community, my journey so far – and journey ahead.
Enjoy,
薇薇
P.S. Writing this from a plane halfway across the Pacific, en route back to China, so this is a wrap on the US tour for now. But if you are in (or can get to) Shanghai for the weekend September 6th & 7th... Save the dates :-)
NYC 6.15 From the Soil: Stories and Flavors of a Chinese Village | Chinese Farm Chronicles x Off-Menu Magazine x 81 Eats
I arrived in NYC at the start of June with only one event in my calendar, which already felt pretty ambitious for a first-ever trip to the city. From the Soil, in the works already since April, was a three-way collaboration between Chinese Farm Chronicles, the NYC- and Barcelona-based independent food & drink magazine Off-Menu, and Eric Wang of the NYC-based supperclub 81 Eats.
And like so many great stories these days, it had all started with a cold DM…
Sophie and I ended up staying in touch throughout April and my fieldwork in Qitian, catching up now and then to workshop the best format to share it in. A digital feature? A zine? A book?
And then the trip to the US came up, so I threw out this idea I’d had of maybe doing something… in-person… in New York City. Off-Menu had never hosted an in-person event before, but Sophie was immediately on board, as were NYC-based editors Crystal and Sara. Soon we had also roped in our mutual freelance cook friend-slash-internet-friend Eric (which also started with a cold DM) (and a girl on a tractor!), and suddenly, we had a whole team.
Three weeks and many cross-multiple-timezone video calls later, we were finally ready to announce what we had been quietly working on. Tickets for From the Soil went live on May 28th, and all 50 of them sold out in less than 48 hours.
And I had genuinely nearly shed a tear when Off-Menu's graphic designer Timothy Lê shared the first draft of this poster, because if you too find yourself admiring the background collages thinking, wow, they look so... handmade? That's because they are:
Fast forward another two weeks, to June 15, and the whole team is gathered in the heart of Manhattan Chinatown, watching the fifty of you trickle in, one by one…
We pour you some tea, brewed with sun-dried and aged orange peels, chenpi, straight from the world’s oldest orange trees in Qitian.
Then From the Soil begins – with a conversation between Sophie and me about my Chinese Farm Chronicles journey, about Off-Menu, and our shared interest in the behind-the-scenes stories of food that had brought us together.
And then in the first-ever public showing of my fieldnotes and photographs from Qitian, I got to bring you with me into the homes, fields, and lives of the farmers of the Qitianren cooperative – and also into conversation about some of the questions that had lingered with me since leaving the village. Questions of tradition, change, progress, and nostalgia; of what, in times of change, we hold on to and what we let go of. In Qitian, in rural China, and beyond.
I had chosen to deliver the presentation in a format that kind of mimicked how you’d flip through a photo album with a friend—structured yet slightly meandering, with the occasional digression—which I think created exactly the intimacy and immersion I had hoped for. I, at least, completely forgot that I was in a room with fifty strangers in New York City, halfway across the world from Qitian.
Also if you take photos and have never projected your work onto a big screen before, you should try it sometime. It’s pretty awesome.
The conversation carried on as we made our way to the floor, mingling over bites that Eric and his on-the-day helpers Chloe and Lingsha had been quietly assembling in the back.
I honestly still can’t believe that I’m getting to work alongside all these ridiculously talented people. Nearly shed a tear once again when this plate landed in my hand – not only the by far prettiest afternoon snack I have ever had, but also, the flavours! Textures! A gentle journey from crispy to silky to sticky, savoury to sweet… through three bites, each of which Eric had carefully crafted to showcase the sesame seeds, red beans, honey, aged orange peels (chenpi), roasted rapeseed oil (caiziyou), and preserved mustard greens (suancai) that had travelled with me all the way from Qitianren soil.
Feels the next morning:
So so grateful for everyone who in some way were a part of this afternoon that I’ll genuinely remember for life. I had known for some time already how special of a community is emerging around this project, but seeing it all come together in a physical space for the first time that day was truly something else.
For those who weren’t able to join, here are some highlights – brought to you, once again, by the endlessly talented Timothy Lê:
(Or for those with shorter attention spans, Eric’s reel is also a pretty awesome recap).
NYC 6.26 Plot Lines: Stories of Farming and Manufacturing in Contemporary China | Chinese Farm Chronicles x Through the Factory Window x Welcome to Chinatown
And now, surely, may the holiday begin?? Or...?
As exciting as it had been to see From the Soil come together, the month leading up to it had admittedly been a total whirlwind – of trying to plan, sort photos, and get coherent thoughts into writing, all while on the move from Sichuan to Shanghai, to Fuzhou, Kinmen, Taipei, Taitung, Guangzhou, and now, finally, NYC. I thought that once it was over, I’d want nothing more than to just… chill out.
But a week and a half later, still brimming with momentum and inspiration from From the Soil, I found myself back in front of another fifty of you. And this time, alongside one of my favourite Substackers and now also good friend,
.
Kenza is a fellow China-focused writer, researcher, and photographer (currently living in NYC), who writes Through the Factory Window based on the year he spent living and working in an aluminium factory in rural Henan. We first crossed paths a year ago in China, during a brief window when our fieldwork journeys overlapped.
Long-form, English-language, human-centred stories from contemporary China is a pretty niche genre at all, let alone from its rural interior, so Kenza and I immediately connected over Chinese Farm Chronicles, Through the Factory Window, and their shared endeavour to make sense of contemporary China from these peripheries. Or rather, sites generally thought of and framed as peripheral, yet which to us felt central to understanding the country and its development.
And given the cyclical nature of rural-to-urban labour migration in China, we knew that there must be many more points of connection to be uncovered between our chosen sites. Catching up in NYC a year later, we decided to sit down and properly articulate some of these – for instance, how the people we’d spent our time with separately, farmers and migrant workers, were actually largely the same group of people, just at different stages of life. And how the factory, through the movement, labour, and remittances of these individuals, feeds and sustains the farm, and vice versa. Really, we realised, we were telling the same story.
Then we also started playing around with our photo archives, and discovered that even just the visual resonances were pretty striking too:
We agreed that someday, we really should put our work side-by-side in some kind of Through the Factory Window x Chinese Farm Chronicles co-production. We hadn’t quite dared to commit, though, to making anything happen within the week and a half I had left in NYC…
…until another DM trickled in. This time from the team at Welcome to Chinatown, a community project with a physical gathering space on Bowery Street. Suddenly, we had the perfect venue, an awesome MC, and even sponsorships for drinks and dim sum. It was happening.
On June 22nd, tickets went live for Plot Lines: Stories of Farming and Manufacturing in Contemporary China. Once again, all 50 of them sold out within two days.
With just four days to go, my initial plan had frankly been to just deliver the same presentation again. But conversations with Kenza in those four days ended up prompting me to look at my material from Qitian through a new lens.
Specifically, to think about the work of these farmers in the context of a broader push that’s been underway in China for some time now—and which I've written about before—to modernise agriculture by encouraging smallholder farmers to contract their land to large-scale industrial operators, and, in effect, turn farm work into something more like factory work. And to unpack why this feels wrong and unsettling.
We delivered Plot Lines in two parts: Part 1: The Farm and Part 2: The Factory. At the start of my presentation, I asked the audience to hold a few questions in mind throughout the two presentations:
Is there something about the production of food that fundamentally is and should be different from the production of say, aluminium?
Is the purpose and goal of farm work just to optimise agricultural production? To churn out the highest possible quantity of food at the cheapest possible price in shortest possible time?
Or is there maybe something else that’s worth holding on to?
And I posed these questions with the disclaimer that I don’t actually have any conclusive answers to them. Plot Lines was not just the first time that Kenza and I directly juxtaposed our work for an audience; it was also the first time that we were hearing each other's presentations in full. It was an evening of discovery for us as much as it was for you.
But on reflection, I think this is precisely why delivering these stories in person has felt so refreshing. Offline storytelling feels forgiving and holds space for sharing things still in progress in a way that, at least for me, writing doesn’t always do. I have an ungodly number of drafts for this Substack that I keep putting off sharing because I think the ideas are not polished, conclusive, or complete enough. Meanwhile, during the Q&A part of Plot Lines, I think both Kenza and I—prompted by your questions, by the new connections that had surfaced throughout the evening—found ourselves sharing ideas that we had never ever articulated before, and it felt not just okay but exciting.
Which should be a reminder to us all that you don't need polished or finished work to share something. That actually, you really can just gather a room of fifty people and be like, hey, here's an idea we got a few days ago, let's explore it together.
A few days later, Kenza and I realise that we’ll both be in DC the coming weekend, so we joke about continuing the tour. Like a book tour, but without books. It’s already Monday night when we decide that, actually, why don’t we just book a free room in a public library, put an Eventbrite link up, and see what happens.
On Thursday that same week, we are delivering Plot Lines 2.0 to another twenty of you:
(And once you realise that it really is this easy, you’ll just keep going. This week, Kenza is taking the factory part of Plot Lines to London! Tickets for ‘Through The Factory Window’ on July 17 here. Go go go!).
Some closing thoughts…
When I first started my Chinese Farm Chronicles account on Instagram a year and a half ago, I could never have imagined that my long-winded musings from rural China would find a space in this attention economy.
But somehow, there are now 1,652 of you following these long musings on Instagram, plus an additional 577 subscribed to these even longer ones here on Substack. Not a huge following by any measure, but what I do think is pretty impressive is how many of you, like literally hundreds, I have been able to link up with in person. Mostly this month in NYC and DC, but also throughout the year – in Shanghai, Beijing, Sichuan, Fuzhou, Taipei, London. Our community may be small in the grand scheme of things, but somehow it feels like wherever I go these days, I am never more than a DM away from it.
And I call it a community because that’s what I hope and genuinely believe that Chinese Farm Chronicles is becoming – a space and platform for you to connect not just with me and the stories that I share, but also with one another. I think my favourite part of these offline gatherings has been the hour or so after the talks when everyone has moved to the floor, and everywhere I turn, new connections are forming. It fills me with so much joy to overhear snippets of conversations – about farming, food, and China, but also—actually especially—when they’ve drifted far and wide beyond.
Because while brought together by some shared tangential interest we all seem to have in Chinese farms, I think what really holds together what we’ve got here is a kind of broader, deeper curiosity and care. About people and the lives they lead, systems they navigate, aspirations they pursue—even in villages and factories thousands of miles away. And amid the disconnect and alienation that plagues so much of our modern existence, this feels like something extremely precious and worth cultivating.
I’m working on some more things towards this end which I can’t wait to share soon.
In the meantime, just remember to mark Shanghai September 6th & 7th in your calendars, get your tickets for Kenza’s talk in London, and go DM some strangers.
Love,
薇薇
ABOUT QITIANREN (旗田人)
Qitianren (旗田人) is a farmers' cooperative of over 190 smallholder eco-farmers based in and around Hongqi Village in Nanbu, Sichuan, founded in 2019 by my now good friend Mingpei He, “Mantou”. After over a year of exploring various forms of farms and agribusinesses in rural China, I am yet to find another organisation in which nature, farmers, and consumers alike are treated with such dignity and respect.
All proceeds from ticket sales for From the Soil have gone directly to the Qitianren members, to whom I am forever indebted for all they have taught and shared with me. Below are some of them whose photos and stories featured in my From the Soil and Plot Lines presentations:
Qitianren has featured previously on this Substack in ‘Hugging the World's Oldest Orange tree’ and ‘Good Eggs, Bad Eggs’. I also have an extensive archive of Instagram stories from on-the-ground: Qitian #1 from my first visit in November 2024, and Qitian #2 and Qitian #3 from my April 2025 visit.
an honor to have shared this memory with you vivi ♥️ here’s to more and more collabs in the future !!
You're incredible! This is awesome, 很期待你之後的更多分享!