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Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand - Hardcover

Chu, Jeff

 
9780593727362: Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593727363 ISBN 13: 9780593727362
Verlag: Convergent, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

In this beautifully written memoir, an accomplished journalist leaves New York City to work as an amateur farmhand at Princeton Seminary, while harvesting spiritual lessons that change his life

Jeff Chu had a seemingly successful life. As a writer at a fast-paced magazine company, he penned glossy profiles of business leaders while living with his husband in a New York City brownstone. Yet he struggled, as many of us do, with feelings of loneliness and disillusionment, all while trying to reconcile his identity as a first-generation Chinese American. Seeking a remedy, he left his job and enrolled at Princeton Seminary’s “Farminary,” a 21-acre farm where students learn to work the soil while asking the big questions of life.

As the seasons turn, Chu introduces us to a cast of characters, human and not, each with their own lesson to teach. From the cranes that visit the pond, to the worms that turn waste into fertile soil, to the Chinese long beans that get passed over in the farm’s CSA, Chu gently interrogates his relationship with the food on his plate and his own heritage, discovering what the earth is trying to teach us--if we’ll stop and listen.

In gorgeous, moving prose, Good Soil helps readers connect to the land and to each other at a time when we are drawn most to the phones in our hands. For nature lovers, foodies, and anyone who has daydreamed about a more meaningful life, this book is a tribute to friendship, acceptance, spirituality, and how love can grow from the unlikeliest of places.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeff Chu is an award-winning journalist and editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure. He is the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me? and the co-author, with the late Rachel Held Evans, of the New York Times bestseller Wholehearted Faith. A former staff writer at Time and editor at Fast Company, he has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Modern Farmer. In his weekly newsletter, “Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer," Jeff writes about spirituality, gardening, food, travel, and culture. He lives with his husband, Tristan, and their old, deaf rescue dog, Fozzie, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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Fried Rice

When I don’t know what else to make for dinner, I poke around the kitchen to see if I have the ingredients for fried rice.

First, do we have leftover rice? If I think of it early enough in the day, I can make a batch, and then let the rice dry out for three or four hours. To make fried rice with freshly cooked rice is to risk disaster in the form of a mushy, sodden mess.

Next, what do we have in the fridge? I’ve made fried rice from the leftovers of a roast chicken, bits picked off the carcass of a Thanksgiving turkey, even half of an uneaten hamburger patty. It doesn’t much matter if your mushrooms have been languishing too long, as long as they’re not moldy. A slightly shriveled bell pepper will do. Half an onion? Lovely. Droopy green onions? Fine.

It’s a magical dish, and a hopeful one. In the warmth of a well-oiled wok, old rice, yesterday’s meat, and last week’s sad vegetables can be transformed. Reinvigorated by sesame and soy, all happily married with an egg or two cracked over the top, they sing a song of resurrection.

When I was young, my grandmother made me fried rice in her battered old flat-bottomed wok.

I don’t remember ever asking for fried rice. A good Chinese child eats whatever he’s served, and a Chinese grandmother’s primary love language is food. At my grandparents’ apartment, I’d hear the sizzle of vegetables hitting hot oil and then the clack-clack-clack of metal on metal as the wok turner met the wok, and I just knew what was coming.

There are multiple ways to make fried rice. When my mom makes it, she often scrambles the egg first and then chops it up. When my grandmother made it, she’d crack the egg right over the rice, so that each grain was coated. As the egg cooked, the rice would fluff up. I love my mom, and she has always been the best cook in the family, but I preferred my grandmother’s version of fried rice.

Grandma’s fried rice developed a crispy crust on the bottom of the wok. Once these near-burnt bits—called 飯焦 (“fan jiu”)—were mixed in, the best bites had just a little crunch. 飯 (“fan”) is the Cantonese word for cooked rice. 焦 (“jiu”) can mean “scorched” or “burnt,” but it can also mean “focus.” The heat concentrates all the rice’s goodness into that crispy layer. 飯焦 is the Chinese cousin of Persian tahdig as well as the socarrat you find at the bottom of the best paella. Deeply savory and rich with umami, it tasted to me like comfort and love.

I cook fried rice the way I learned from my grandmother, but I’ve never quite been able to replicate her 飯焦. Maybe I don’t give it enough time. “Shhhh,” my grandmother would probably say. “You need to wait. Just wait.”

Long before she became my grandmother, Yim Mo Lan taught Bible at a Baptist primary school in Hong Kong. The eldest of nine children, she was the only daughter, and her father doted on her, sending her away to boarding school to be educated—an unusual thing for a working-class girl.

Nobody ever told me the full story of how she met my grandfather, a pastor and Bible college professor seven years her elder. I suspect some minor scandal: He had been married before and had two daughters, who lived in his home village in southern China. I heard something once about her being his student, but nobody ever wanted to flesh out that story.

They married in 1934 and began building a life together in Hong Kong. At the time, the border between the British-ruled territory and nationalist-governed China was porous, and my grandfather would go back and forth between Hong Kong and Canton, preaching and teaching.

Canton fell to the Japanese in 1938, Hong Kong three years later. My grandparents, their three young children, and an entourage of my grandfather’s students fled westward to Guangxi Province, where the jagged peaks that tower over deep river valleys had inspired countless painters and sheltered innumerable refugees.

I wonder sometimes if that’s when Psalm 121 became my grandmother’s favorite Bible passage. By repetition throughout my childhood, she taught it to me in Cantonese. As she recited the words, which she knew by heart, she held her worn Bible open for my benefit, her wrinkly fingers slowly chasing the characters down each column of text. Later I learned the words in English: “I lift my eyes to the hills; where does my help come from?”

On the refugee road, the students’ help came from my grandparents. I imagine them huddled together in prayer, my grandfather’s preacherly baritone rising in their midst. Maybe my grandmother made fried rice for them, too.

After the war ended, my grandparents returned to Hong Kong with their growing family. Somehow they’d managed to produce two more children while in exile, and while my grandfather shuttled back and forth between Hong Kong and Canton, my grandmother taught and mothered.

She developed a formidable reputation as a strict taskmaster. Her classroom manner was famously brusque, her tolerance for misbehavior nonexistent. Every third grader at Pui Ching Primary School took Bible from her, and they never forgot the experience. Whenever we went back to Hong Kong, I’d hear the same story: Remember that time when Teacher Yim called on ____ in class? The custom then was that, if called on to answer a question, you’d stand up next to your desk to give your reply. This girl was so petrified that she stood and peed on the spot.

The story seemed so wild to me—and confusing, too. I thought of my grandmother as gentle, her spirit as soft as her hands.

“You didn’t know your grandmother then,” relatives would say to me.

No, I didn’t. Obviously. I was born eight years after they immigrated to the United States.

“You didn’t know your grandmother then,” they would reiterate. “She dotes on you,” they’d say, as if surprised that she had softened.

I wanted to tell them how embarrassing she could be. Before leaving for Chinatown to go grocery shopping, she’d tuck a thick stack of religious tracts into her tote bag. As she chose her oranges and surveyed the greens, she’d proffer one of the pamphlets and say to whatever unsuspecting old lady was standing nearby, “Do you believe in Jesus?” She relished these encounters most when the target of her proselytizing said they believed in Buddha or in the old Chinese gods. As she unspooled a mini-sermon about their need to be saved, I’d wish for some salvation myself, mainly from this mortification.

She could be annoying, too. When I would have preferred to watch TV, she’d pull out stacks of graph paper, write a series of Chinese characters across the top row, and hand me a pen. I knew that my job was to copy and copy and copy. She hovered over my right shoulder, correcting the order in which I made the strokes, unsatisfied until it was clear to her that I was no longer copying but writing, the characters all my own.

Sometimes, I wanted to tell them, she’d take my sister and me to the McDonald’s down the street from her apartment. She’d muster the tiniest bit of English to order a “filet fishuuuu” for me and McNuggets for my sister. Then she’d show her senior card to get herself a free cup of hot coffee. Generosity and thriftiness, all wrapped up in one moment.

Sometimes, I wanted to tell them, she made me fried rice—the best fried rice I’d ever tasted. Nobody else made me fried rice like she did, always with lots of...

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Verlag
Convergent
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593727363
ISBN 13 
9780593727362
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Convergent Books
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