Walking a dirt path through a rice paddy, we are obviously foreigners with our shorts, T-shirts, and cameras. Middle-aged women pass us carrying rice straw hung in big bundles from bamboo poles slung across their shoulders. Children are working as well, helping their parents with the thresher that separates the grains from the stalks.
When all the planting, cutting, picking, and drying are done, the villagers make only a few dollars for a hundred-pound sack of grain.
Back home, all of us in the group spend most of our days in classrooms or offices. Harvesting rice is real work. Were it not for the chance opportunity for our ancestors to leave China, many of us could have well been laboring in those rice paddies instead of watching from our comfortable perch, knowing we have plane tickets back to the United States.
"I complain when I have to pay $30 to play golf," says Roland Ng, a Silicon Valley engineer. "Compared to what kind of life these people have, that's stupid."
Threshing