Essays ⁽³⁴⁹⁾

This week I tilled the vegetable plot, raked out several beds, and planted cabbage and lettuce. The chives already in the garden, once watered, began to grow rapidly. Every afternoon around three o'clock I ride my bicycle to the garden, put in half an hour…

Recently I have been working on my new website www.zhiyuanzhai.com, intending to use it to systematically organize and present my articles. I have not designed a new website for nearly ten years, and many skills have faded. I recall that around the year 2000, when…

On the day of my son's coming-of-age ceremony, I went to his school. During the three pandemic years the school was strictly managed; this was only the second time since he entered high school that we had been allowed into the school for a public…

Without my noticing, I have been writing on the official account for eight years, having composed more than two thousand original articles in all. Many have already been deleted, and others will be deleted. Because when I began writing, my thinking was immature and my…

Yesterday afternoon, after finishing work, I went to the small rented vegetable plot to fertilize the ground. The garden management gives us chicken manure twice a year, once in spring and once in autumn, each time at the standard of one 100-jin bag per 10…

A Chinese cabbage went bad before it was finished. My wife could not bear to throw it away and set it on the windowsill; within a few days, golden flower buds grew from the cabbage. These flower buds look very much like the rape flowers…

Yesterday when I video-called with my father, he told me that some young people from the village who went out to work after the Spring Festival have now come back. Because outside work is hard to find this year, and the work available pays low…

In the twinkling of an eye, my son coming-of-age ceremony has arrived. His mother urged me to complete the task the school assigned to parents, writing a few words for the child. I thought it over and over, not knowing how to begin.I myself feel…

These past days I have been busy running around because of some family affairs, and I have also seen dark sides of society that I had never seen in my life. At first I could not help but feel pessimistically that certain places in this…

Among the people around me, not many died from contracting COVID, but quite a few developed aftereffects, and I am one of them. Before infection I occasionally had episodes of tachycardia—three or five times a year, usually caused by poor rest. After the New Year…