“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
– Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008), a Japanese farmer, microbiologist and philosopher best known for pioneering natural farming, sometimes called ‘do-nothing farming’.
1960–1970: A boy in a banyan tree, and a lifetime of questions
I USED to climb trees the way other children chased kites. The banyan was my favourite: tall, wide, steady, with branches that seemed to hold up the sky. I would haul myself up and sit near the top, legs hooked around a thick limb and look out over the wetland below.
From up there, the paddy fields looked like a living thing. Ripples ran through the stalks when the wind passed, as if a green-gold sea was breathing. On a good day, the whole view felt endless – row after row of paddy, the water shining in thin strips, the horizon blurred by heat and distance.
I was a farm boy for a while, and then a school boy, learning to read and write my way towards another life. A farm boy ought to get used to the sight, you would think. But I never did. It never became ordinary. It never stopped pulling at me.
And I kept asking myself: what did this scene mean to the people who worked it? What did it mean to bend your back for months and months so that this soft, waving field could exist? Was it just work? Was it pride? Was it fear – fear of a bad season, fear of hunger, fear of starting again?
The family plot: A centre of everything
Below my perch was my family’s plot, not large, but ours. From above, it blended into the surrounding fields, yet to my family it was not just “a plot”. It was the centre of everything. It was food. It was school fees. It was the difference between being calm and being anxious. It was the answer to the basic question that sat behind all other questions: Will we eat?
My father worked those fields with a kind of patience I only understood much later. His hands were always marked – by mud, by water, by the rough edges of tools.
The lines on his face looked deeper in the sun. He did not rush. Each plant mattered. Each patch mattered. He moved through the field as if it were a duty and a craft at the same time.
To him, it wasn’t only labour. It was an inheritance. A trust handed down, season after season. He carried it as if other people’s lives rested on it – because they did. His own family depended on him, and in our village, dependence spread quietly outward. One household leaned on another. Everyone watched the sky for signs.
My mother was usually out of sight from my tree, but not out of mind. I knew where she would be: at home, cooking, cleaning, keeping order, making sure the younger ones were fed, washed, safe. That was the pattern. My father was in the fields. My mother was running the house. The work was different, but the weight of it was not.
Community and the quiet weight of dependence
And then there were the neighbours – the larger community of people who lived by the same crop and the same uncertainty.
One figure stands out in my memory: my grand-uncle, already old then, his face mapped with years of sun and struggle. He would stand in his field with a quiet pride, not the loud kind, but the kind that says, I am still here. I have not been beaten.
Working alongside him was my grand-aunt, equally tough, equally steady. She did not speak much about hardship, but you could see it in how she moved – as if she had learned long ago that complaining did not change the weather, did not soften the mud, did not make the harvest come faster.
For them, the paddy fields were not romantic. They were surviving. Yet they were also hopeful. If you planted, if you weeded, if you watched for pests, if you prayed for the right rain and not too much of it, you might be rewarded. Might. That word sat in every farmer’s throat, even when nobody said it.
The hard beauty of farming
I am not dressing up paddy farming as something glamorous. It is hard. Bone-numbing hard. I learned that early, when I helped my parents and, at times, helped our neighbours too. My feet sank. My back ached. My skin burned. The same movements repeated until my mind went blank and my body just kept going.
And still, there was beauty.
Not the sort you find in a postcard, but the sort that comes with simplicity: the open air, the honest tiredness at the end of the day, the sense that life had a shape you could recognise. No traffic. No queues. No shiny distractions.
Just the field, the home, the village, and the seasons turning like a wheel.
But even then, the questions would not leave me alone.
If the land gave so much, why did it also keep people on the edge? If the whole village could be surrounded by food, why did one bad year make everyone look thinner? If the work was endless, why did the reward feel uncertain? And why did grown men speak about the weather with the seriousness of a court case?
Because nature decided. That was the truth no one could negotiate with. Too much rain and the field drowned. Too little and the crop failed. Pests came like thieves. Disease spread without warning. A farmer could do everything “right” and still lose.
From farm boy to city dweller
So, the fields became a kind of bargain with the unknown. They were stability, yes – a routine, a structure – but they were also a reminder that stability could be taken away. The “fields of plenty” only stayed plentiful when everything aligned. And when it did not?
From the top of the banyan, I could see abundance. From the ground, you could feel how fragile it was.
When I climbed down, hands dusty and legs scratched, I often felt grateful. Not in a dramatic way. Just a quiet awareness that we had something precious around us: the ability to feed ourselves, to keep going, to be part of a community that knew how to survive.
Those fields gave the body food, but they also did something else. They taught endurance. They showed what it meant to commit to a task whose outcome you could not fully control. They showed how humans keep working anyway.
And in my boyish certainty, I assumed it would always be that way. I assumed the fields would keep flourishing. I assumed my family and our neighbours would do what they had always done, and the village would hold together for generations.
But life does not stay put, does it?
The fields I knew are long gone, or at least no longer what they were. They have been replaced by other crops, crops that promise better income. That is what people say, and it makes sense – who would not choose a better return after years of scraping by? Yet the change leaves me with more questions than answers.
Because I became something else: a city dweller. I left that old way of life behind, and with it I left the daily knowledge of how food appears in a household. In the city, food comes wrapped, labelled, priced. It comes with air-conditioning and background music. It comes in neat stacks under bright lights, as if it were always meant to be there.
Fragile abundance: Questions in a world of convenience
Nowadays, when I see rice in colourful plastic bags in supermarkets, I find myself staring at it longer than I need to. I wonder who grew it. I wonder where it was grown. I wonder what the field looked like, whether the farmer’s feet sank into mud the way ours did, whether the harvest was a relief or just another worry about next season.
And then the bigger question arrives, quietly but firmly: what if the rice stops coming?
In the old days, we had our own. Even when times were hard, there was a direct line between effort and food. Not a guaranteed line, but a visible one. You could see the crop, touch the stalks, count the sacks, and measure what would last.
Now the line is hidden. Now it runs through lorries, supply chains, ports, warehouses, and decisions made far away by people we will never meet. The shelves look solid, but are they? How long would they stay full if something broke – a flood, a conflict, a fuel shortage, a disease, a sudden policy change?
And if the shelves did go empty, what would cash in hand mean then?
Sometimes, even with money, you cannot buy what you need. There is nothing to buy. In those moments, money becomes a strange thing – paper, numbers, a promise that no longer works. If food does not appear despite your ability to pay for it, then what is money worth? What is a city worth?
Then what?
That is the question that follows me now – the city man carrying a farm boy’s memories.
A farm boy’s memories in a city man’s world
I can still picture the banyan tree. I can still feel the branch under my legs. I can still see the paddy fields rolling out like waves.
But I cannot look at a supermarket bag of rice without wondering: How did we get from there to here? And more importantly: How secure is “here”, really?
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at www.hayhenlin@gmail.com
