Our first day in Yangshuo was cool and overcast. We read it as an invitation to bike around and photograph the picturesque countryside. Biking is the best way to avoid the tour buses and to go deeper into the soft silence of the hills and encounter villages that you might miss if you sneezed as you breezed by. So we biked and took photographs, and by the time we were cut off by the Li River we were painted with mud and starving. A persistent, almost desperate woman implored us to let her ferry us across the river on her bamboo raft for a dollar fifty (US) per person. Once on the other side, she insisted we follow her to a dusty private home in a village. Home cooking, she said. Wary of scams, I tried to steer my companions to a proper restaurant. But they’re going to kill a chicken for us, one of them said pointing to a beautiful maple hen being tied at the feet. And that settled the matter.

Now many Americans might think killing a chicken for dinner is a brutal act. But I bet you a good portion of them probably eat at KFC, which probably ships its chickens to processing plants in such miserable conditions that half of them suffer broken limbs, if not necks, by the time they arrive after a lifetime of hormone injections and suffocating cages. Our dinner, in contrast, was allowed to wander and stretch its wings as it ate off the land; the relatively thin breasts and lean thighs sufficient proof that it was raised without hormones; other chickens walking about sufficient proof that it was raised humanely. The woman who ran the household and single-handedly prepared our meal took a strong hold of the chicken, cut its neck with a swift stroke, and held it neck down to drain the blood which would later be used to prepare a soup. Little goes to waste on a small farm.

The woman asked us to cross the small dirt path to a small disheveled patch of foliage and pick whatever vegetables we wanted her to prepare. If there is a better way to get three city-dwellers non-plussed, I haven’t encountered it. Amused by our helplessness, she came and picked a bundle of vegetables that looked unfamiliar to us except for some red-green beans and a type of gourd. She chopped vegetables and meats over a single weathered cutting board and started a wood fire for the one wok in which she would prepare six dishes. And as she cooked, she fed us various stories, among others, about how she raises her chickens and her son whom she hopes will leave for school because life is difficult in the village. The chickens will have to stay, of course: there are travelers to feed.

We sat down on small wooden chairs to eat on an old table. It seemed appropriate in this setting, here in the yard of an unadorned farm house, off a dirt road that leads you into a row of dusty houses. The first course was the chicken, chopped into small pieces with bones and all, stir-fried together with its liver and feet, some garlic and chilis. It sends a pleasant shudder to think that what you’re about to eat was clucking next to you just thirty minutes ago. Then came a sublime dish of eggs with tomato – the finest rendition that any of us had ever had. Then came some sort of squash cooked with fermented soy beans, then the red-green beans with minced pork and ginger, followed by a soup that used the chicken blood and the gourd, and finally some sauteed leafy vegetable I had never seen before. It was a feast by any standard.

There’s a lot of talk these days about farm-to-table dining. Usually it’s among affluent foodies who have romantic visions of quaint farm houses and rustic meals. Here in Yangshuo I stumbled by chance upon just such a quaint farm house and ate a rustic meal, except it was a farm-to-table experience without the fantasy and theater. No candlelights, no scented washcloths or a polite bilingual waitstaff. This was a woman for whom laboring over the land is a way of life forced on her by circumstance. She toils to earn a living on a trickle of tourists (some days there are none), her crops subject to weather and her customers subject to the health of tourism, neither factors over which she has any control. It’s little wonder the children leave agrarian villages as soon as they can. My own romanticized vision of the country life came undone in our host’s dirt yard. Thus my gratitude to this woman is two-fold, for I ate well and learned much during what will stand as one of my most memorable meals.

To see more photos of Yangshu read my previous post, Yangshuo in black and white.
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