Rice Cutting - cắt lúa

This past weekend, we had the opportunity to go to the countryside though very close to the city-side to get a taste of how city people, or the larger society are able to get a taste of rice everyday. To put simply, we harvested rice that weekend. Gerard's little lesson-plan inserted into EAP's curriculum reminded me of the effects, especially on the policies after communist revolutions throughout history in which the bourgeois were forced to go to the rural areas and contribute to the collectivization of agriculture process. I felt we as (sub)urban dwelling students fell exactly under Gerard's lesson of getting us to appreciate the fact that we have food period. It's definitely a lot of hard work to get a bowl rice. That was what was running through my mind that day, standing in the spider-and-crab-infested mud.

While I was in that field, bare-footed and to a certain degree, bare-minded, I tried imagining a life doing work like this everyday. I tried thinking about the slaves in the so-called "New World." I tried thinking about how food today is incredibly engineered chemically to maximize profits for companies, and what kind of methods other farms and farmers use to process food. I tried thinking about where my family came from generations ago. Perhaps my family members from generations ago were not always city-dwellers. They came from a landscape and a life like this. I wondered to myself how and why has a life and scenery like this been left in the dust of modernization and development? Without this, these people, this type of work, and the struggle, or cực khổ, we would be nothing; we would have nothing. No food, no family. Nothing.

Although I was somewhat conscious of this, I could not help but to think about the latest frontiers like.. what new mail do I have today in my e-mail? or. what kind of notifications do i have today for facebook? It's amazing how much the internet today has affected people's psyches, including mine. Truly, this was the most ironic part. I can be considerably mindful, but at the same time, hypocritical. A city-mind, university-educated, yet not universally-educated.. It's easy to think one way, but it's hard to do another. There was much to think about in terms of this experience, but I think I will leave it at there.