Free The Diary of Ma Yan by Ma Yan

he’s so dry. His son has come to ask my father if we could cut their wheat for them. My father goes to see them. On his return, I ask him whether we’ve accepted the job. “Yes,” he says.
    The whole family goes off to the fields to harvest Ma Zhanchuan’s wheat. While we’re working, my mother stands tall and says to us, “When we’ve cut the wheat, I’ll give you each ten yuan. You can eat whatever you want at the market.”
    I literally jump for joy, then I suddenly notice a comrade who passed the entrance exam for the school in Tongxin. My heart sinks down to my knees. I can’t take my eyes off the girl. Nor can I see straight. It seems to me the hills and the sky are moving. Mother looks at me and asks what’s wrong.
    â€œNothing,” I tell her. “Nothing.”
    I bend down again. What earthly right do I have to buy good things at the market? I haven’t even managed to get into a good senior school. I should be ashamed. I shall have to work really hard not to fail next time and disappoint my parents.

    The entire family works in the fields.

HARVESTING
    Children take part in all the farming work when they’re not at school. They help harvest grains, feed the animals, and fetch water from the wells. The Ma family, like most of the poor peasants in the region, depends on human labor, sometimes with the help of a donkey or a small ox. Harvesting is done with a scythe. Only the “rich” have tractors, which cost about six thousand yuan.
    Some families supplement their income by harvesting fa cai , a hairy grass that grows wild on the steppes of northwest China. In addition to representing this grass, the two characters used to write fa cai can also mean “to make one’s fortune.” “Get rich” is a greeting the Chinese use at the lunar New Year. In the 1990s, this pun lead to fa cai ’s popularity as garnish for soups and salads in China’s cities. Though fa cai has no nutritional value, the demand for—and price of—the grass soared.
    Peasants travel hundreds of miles to perform the backbreaking work of harvesting the dry black grass, which is a little like algae but as fine as hair. The amount of money they make for this exhausting labor is tiny by the standards of urban China. But it is crucial to families whose annual incomes never exceed a few hundred yuan.
    Picking fa cai was, however, outlawed by the government in2000 for environmental reasons. Hundreds of miles of Inner Mongolia have been turned into desert by the pulling up of fa cai , and this is thought to contribute to violent sandstorms that hit Beijing each spring and travel as far as Korea and Japan.
    The prohibition on harvesting fa cai threatens to plunge the poorest peasants—who have no other means of subsistence—into total misery. Neither the threat of being stopped by the police nor the possibility of being attacked by angry Mongolian herdsmen, furious at the plight of their disappearing pastures, has halted the harvest.
    As one peasant explained, “Even if we are frightened, we have no choice. We have nothing to eat.” For them, fa cai doesn’t mean getting rich, it simply means survival.

    A tractor carrying exhausted peasants who have been picking fa cai
    Sunday, July 1
Fine weather
    This afternoon at four o’clock, after our rest, Mother started to prepare dinner. I helped her to make the fire. After we’d eaten, the whole family went back to the fields to cut more wheat. A little while later, my mother was tying the wheat into bales when she suddenly sat down and got very pale. She moaned softly and said her stomach pains had begun again.
    There she is, sitting in the wheat, but we carry on mowing with our sickles.
    Tears and the perspiration of pain run down my mother’s face. Her eyes are red. Her hands are arched over her stomach. My father tells her to go home. No, she’ll wait for us, she says. I