Friday, June 25, 2010

Gleaning

“So she went out and began to glean in the fields behind the harvesters.” Ruth 2:3

I thought it would be a fun trip for me as a little boy to walk across the bay to the next village where people were harvesting peanuts, so I managed to talk my mother into letting me go with her to pick peanuts behind the harvesters. My mother didn’t usually do that, for we had our own peanut and rice farm and there was no need for us to pick up leftovers from other people’s fields. I suppose my mother and her neighbors had nothing to do during that particular afternoon and decided to venture out to the next village across the bay to gather some extra peanuts.

I have forgotten a lot of things about my childhood, but I can still recall vividly what happened during that afternoon. It was more a picnic or a field trip for us kids than anything else and we spent most of the time playing on the beach while my mother and her friends were trying to find some pennants buried under the sandy soil. I gather we weren’t all that welcomed by the owner and, with us being there, he made a point to tell his workers to not leave anything behind, and I had a feeling that we were being watched all the time. It probably wasn’t a particularly profitable trip, for as far as I can recall, it was the only time that my mother ever did that.

For a few seasons, my grandfather decided to grow sugarcane on our rice peddle, which provided us kids with an abundant source of sweets. It was specially exciting for us boys during harvest seasons, because grandpa gave us a job to guard the canes from being pulled out from the cow cart by kids from the village. So each one of us, with a sugar can in hand, walked behind the cart, chasing and keeping kids away from getting too close to the precious cargo.

There was nothing glorious or exciting about both jobs, come to think of it, for being a gleaner of pennants, I was looked down; and I looked down on others when I was trying to guard our sugarcane from being stolen. People in our village were just trying to scrape a simple living by doing what was necessary. Being a lad from a poor family, I wasn’t ashamed for being poor, for everyone was on the same boat and not until I went to Taipei as a teenage before I realized I was both poor and uncultured and started to learn to hide my true self and to assume a new identity.

At least it wasn’t a life and death issue for me to pick up leftover pennants from other people’s farm or to steal sugarcanes from behind loaded cow carts. We ate a lot of watering rice mixed with dried shredded sweet potatoes, which was enough to keep us alive. I developed a big tummy caused by malnutrition, but at least I survived to tell the tale. Life was more serious for Ruth and Naomi, though. It was no picnic for Ruth to glean barley behind harvesters, for her livelihood depended on it.