The Local Consumed

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THE LOCAL CONSUMED: RECREATING NATIVE-PLACE ON CHINA'S HILLTOP HERB FARM BY REBECCA CATHERINE CHRISTOFORO A Thesis Submitted to the Division of Humanities New College of Florida in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Bachelor of Arts Under the Sponsorship of Dr. Jing Zhang Sarasota, FL January 2012 i

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Acknowledgments Jing Zhang, friend and professor, for helping me find my voice. I couldn't have made it through these many years without her wisdom, patience, and good humor. Professor Kuo and Professor Zhuang, for taking me into their home and encouraging me on my journey. Xiao Yan, Feng Gui, Shi Li Yan, Xiao Bao, Da Duo, and Yan Ji, for being my teachers, students, translators, and first true friends in China. My family, for their tolerance and love always. ii

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Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Table of Contents iii List of Figures iv Abstract v Preface 1 Introduction 3 Chapter 1 Green Dreams: Food Anxiety and Rural Tourism in China 6 The Hilltop Herb Farm 13 Chapter 2 The Edible Local: Ritual Consumption and Communitas 20 Communitas and the Touristed Landscape 22 The Living Utopia 23 Eco-locating 31 Chapter 3 Educating for New China: Occupying Rural Feixi 39 Behind the Scenes 40 Conclusion 52 References Cited 55 iii

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List of Figures Figure 1 Summer Campers 27 Figure 2 Fishing Pond in the Commune 28 Figure 3 It's Always Spring in the Commune 29 iv

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THE LOCAL CONSUMED: RECREATING NATIVE-PLACE ON CHINA'S HILLTOP HERB FARM Rebecca Catherine Christoforo New College of Florida, 2012 Abstract In China today, the ease of movement through sociogeographic space has led to an estranged relationship between individuals and their ancestral homelands, and thus a sense of alienation for many urban Chinese. In part to amend this problem, millions of domestic urban tourists seek rural recreation every year. This thesis, using one eco-agritourism venue in Anhui as a case study, examines the changing conditions of 'native-place' as it becomes a commodity, and asks: what are the authentic qualities of the 'local' in a globalizing China? Dr. Jing Zhang Division of Humanities v

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Preface When I arrived in China in August 2011, I was enrolled as a language exchange student with the Confucius institute at Nankai University. At this time, I had already studied abroad twice in China, both times with established American programs. Upon arriving as Nankai however, I had a change of heart and decided to suspend my scholarship until spring semester, traveling south from Tianjin to Kunming. With my limited language skills and finances I decided that my best option for lodging and food was invariably a work exchange, which is how I became involved with the WWOOFChina network. WWOOFing refers to the monetary-free exchange of work for room, board, and education on an organic farm. It was as a WWOOFer that I was first acquainted with the Kuo family from Taiwan, who own and operate an eco-agritourism business in rural Anhui. The longer I WWOOFed the stronger I felt about the strengths of WWOOFing in comparison with my experiences in more standard study abroad programs. It is for this reason that I developed the website WWOOFChina Guide (www. wwoofchina.moonfruit. com) as a way of helping other students and travelers WWOOFChina. The website gives an overview of the Hilltop as one instance of organic agriculture in China, as well as telling my personal story and tips for other WWOOFers. I have also created a forum for those who have questions or want to relate their own experiences. As a way of reaching potential WWOOFers, I have also submitted this site 1

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm as a resource to the WWOOFChina network. Please see the site itself for more information. Because WWOOFing presents a language student with an immersion experience, my Chinese skills improved dramatically while in Anhui. It was as a result of this improvement that I was capable of communicating with fluency among the guests, owners and students living on the Hilltop. It became evident to me that the movement I was witnessing, and the individuals involved, could be of some interest to Americans who receive most of their information on China from the western media. Although my studies in anthropology have been limited, I have chosen to write this thesis presenting an image of Chinese tourism and environmentalism at a time when many western news sources are focusing on food scandal and pollution. As much of my research on the farm itself was done using the methods of participatory observation, I have also included several primary and secondary sources from Chinese and American media. As you will see, I have remained critical of practices in this movement, but I feel these criticisms are both welcome and encouraged by Professor Kuo and his family in their quest for educational growth and environmental stewardship. 2

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Introduction Facilitated by the technological prowess of the 21 st century, movement in sociogeographic space has become increasingly normal world wide. For a variety of reasons, employment and recreation not the least among them, individuals from all walks of life find themselves with the impulse and opportunity to relocate and inhabit unfamiliar landscapes. We are living, undoubtedly, in an 'Age of Migration' (Castles and Miller). In China, the post-Mao era has seen millions of Chinese flock to major cities to reap the benefits of industrial society, and a simultaneous swelling of the Chinese upper and middle classes. These phenomena have facilitated a drastic change in the way individuals relate to and understand the concept of 'native-place' (J iaxiang ), or hometown. As sociologist Dean MacCannell has argued in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class it is the urban and suburban middle classes in society who are particularly estranged from the ideal experiences of community often feeling that "their lives are overly artificial and meaningless" (Graburn, 33). As Urry, in the Tourist Gaze addresses, these classes may romantically assume an authentic and meaningful 'belonging' lurks just around the corner in the 'simple life'; a life of agriculture for example, or of traditional arts and crafts ( 42 ). Thus it is no surprise that rural, heritage, and nature tourism are becoming ideal opportunities to "get away from it all" for wealthy tourists in China. Erik Cohen suggests that these are 'existential' tourists; neither fully centered or estranged from their physical homes, but rather centered in an 'other' home (77), a home away from 3

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm home, or a nostalgic home of the past. For tourism venues the plight of the existential tourist begets profit, as the manufacturing of 'authentic' communities and the commodification of existing locales may serve those who are in fact searching for the exact opposite. In October 2010, I had the opportunity to do a case study on an eco-agritourism business in Anhui province. The 'Hilltop Herb Farm', an organic leisure farm and restaurant in rural Feixi, offers domestic guests an Arcadian experience through the consumption of local products and participation in farm activities. In this thesis, I used participant observation to conduct a case-study of this farm with regards to emerging conceptions of the 'local' within the context of globalization 1 paying particular attention to the commodities and rituals that have come to represent the experience of native-place. Chapter One is primarily concerned with the origins of eco-agritourism as a venue in China, and the socioeconomic conditions leading to its popularity as a place for leisure and recreation. These conditions include, but are not limited to, the rural-urban migration, industrialization of agriculture, food production and regulation scandals, and a return to the values of collectivization. I then introduce the Hilltop and its owners. Chapter Two will begin a two-part examination of the mechanism with which guests on the Hilltop relate to and become a part of the Hilltop community. In this chapter I will argue that the nostalgic aesthetics and consumption patterns on the Hilltop maneuver guests from a liminal state into one of communitas, wherein they leave behind their city-selves and become temporary inhabitants of the local landscape. 1 Here understood as the "accelerated inter-connectedness of far-flung people, places, and things" (Kaul, 187) 4

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Because this cycle is static, I will argue in the Third Chapter that the Hilltop as it stands promotes the commodification of a 'museumified' landscape, a process that both subjugates and and supports economically the local community of Feixi. To transcend the problem of inequality, the owners of the Hilltop plan to create a more integrated and permanent community. In this expansion they hope not only to repopulate and alleviate poverty in Feixi, but to do so in manner that coincides with their dreams for a 'New China', a society largely built around a mode of 'sustainable development' within traditional Confucian thought. Although the state of the New China is unclear, it is apparent that the Kuos are successfully establishing a novel setting for the more traditional social structures associated with 'native-place', thereby exemplifying a new way of accessing and organizing the local. Through this, urbanites affected by the homogenizing forces of western ideological expansion can belong to a community built on a traditionally Chinese values. This thesis asks: how do individuals access and participate in the modern conception of the 'local', and what are some qualities of this interaction? Are they 'authentic' in the traditional sense? Hopefully, exploring these questions may serve to illuminate slightly what it means to be Chinese in today's world. 5

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Chapter 1 Green Dreams: Food Anxiety and Rural Tourism in China Ecotourism is perhaps the most dynamic and widespread of all the alternative tourism 1 trends. Although there is no widely accepted definition, the term itself is generally attributed to anthropologist Ceballos-Lascurain, who in the early 1980s defined it as "tourism that consists of traveling to relatively undisturbed and or uncontaminated natural areas with the specific objective of studying, admiring, and enjoying the scenery and its wild plants and animals, as well as any existing cultural manifestations (both past and present) found in the area" (Jafari, 165). Today, it is perhaps more generally characterized as a type of leisure recreation in which elements of the 'natural world' are highlighted and marketed to tourists who wish to enjoy themselves in a environmentally responsible capacity. This definition, as any ecotourist knows, is broad out of necessity. There is no international standard for ecotourism ethics, and the goals of environmental or cultural preservation of the host site can be approached with a liberal degree of conservationism. 1 In the West, tourism in its infancy was overwhelmingly regarded in the academic community as an ideal activity; characterized by positive economic development, promotion of cross-cultural understanding, and incentives for cultural preservation. This was the age of unbridled 'mass tourism' characterized by the four S's: 'sun, sand, sea, and sex' (Jafari, 191). By the 1970s however, the damaging consequences of this growth had become clear as the host sites suffered severe environmental degradation, cultural commodification, and the domination of corporate interests over local economies. It was at this time that businesses operating within the 'alternative tourism paradigm', emphasizing the philosophy of 'careful growth' and conservation, first became popular (Weaver, 4). 6

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm In many cases, ecotourism is said to promote a model of 'sustainable development', an idea with as many interpretations as there are ecotourism sites. In David Weaver's text Ecotourism sustainable development is defined as "development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (316). Often, sustainable development invokes a 'low-impact' model associated with the agricultural methods of pre-industrial societies. The Hilltop epitomizes a similar variety of ecotourism which I will call ecoagritourism In its most traditional sense, agritourism is the 'provision of touristic opportunities on working farms' (Jafari, 14) as method of supplementing rural incomes. In China, agritourism began in the 1980s as a cheap lodging option for travelers. It was not a promoted industry until the late 1990s, when it began to grow in popularity under the the title 'Fun With Rural Families' ( Nongjiale ) as a form of cultural exchange (Ryan and Gu, 269). Now it is one of the most popular forms of tourism in China, with numbers of both domestic and international tourists reaching their all-time highs. As the Xinhua news agency reports:"according to the statistics from China's National Tourism Administration, 70 percent of urban tourists choose rural tourist destinations during China's three 'golden-week' peak travel seasons in May, October and Spring Festival or China's Lunar New Year. Over 60 million tourists flock to rural tourist spots every such week". Understandably, with the vast potential for steady market growth many agritourism farms (including the Hilltop) are now owned and operated by entrepreneurs, and "the income obtained... consists of a large, even exclusive, part of the farm income" (Snzajder et all, 3). 7

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Such high tourist traffic in rural and wild areas of course creates problems of sustainability, both environmental and cultural, and Chinese anthropologists have subsequently developed two theories on 'operationalizing rurality' (Ryan, 269) in agritourism. The first promotes an emphasis on differences between the rural and urban as filtered by the tourist gaze, and attempts to build an experience including the tourist in this perceived authenticity. Depending on the products of the specific farm this authenticity can mean many things, as guests in an agritourism venue have a series of demands 1 which are as variable as the farm's ability to provide them. The second developmental philosophy is based around community needs, for example: using rural tourism as a method to sustainably alleviate poverty while actively retaining cultural norms and values (Ryan, 269). In both cases however, agritourism is undeniably promoted, 'rurality' undeniably 'operationalized', prompting the question: what are some qualities of urban life that are causing Chinese tourists to insatiably seek agritourism destinations on their time-off? Tourism is the manifestation of a need for a change, a desire to satisfy something the physical home cannot (Graburn, 33). Thus the phenomenon of rural tourism may find its roots in its temporal counterpart and material opposite: the rapid urbanization of Chinese society and the growing middle class. As I mentioned in the introduction, MacCannell's argument that the urban middle classes are particularly alienated (contrary to Marx's argument) has become a backbone of tourism study. For many pre-industrial Chinese the spiritual center and the physical center were, in the Confucian sense, the 1 Some agritourism ventures exhibit the native peoples dressed in traditional clothing, performing traditional music, or making (and selling) traditional crafts and food. These acts were once justified as a way of promoting cultural longevity, but it is now understood that the commodification of these activities can lead to a variety of inequities and a great potential for cultural erosion in the host site. 8

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm same. The traditional significance of native-place (Jiaxiang and the worship of one's ancestors was a localizing force, tying individuals to specific geographies. Today however, modern Chinese are establishing new physical homes, which for many reasons, do not satisfy entirely "the idea of home, as a place of security, refuge, comfort, family and simple shelter" (Lew and Wong, 1), leaving behind a noticeable 'lack'. This lack manifests itself in the act of tourism. As Erik Cohen explains, ...There are many people-and their number is increasing in a growingly mobile world-who, for a variety of practical reasons, will not be able or willing to move permanently to their 'elective' center, but will live in two worlds: a world of their everyday life, where they follow their practical pursuits, but for them which is devoid of deeper meaning, and an 'elective center'...a traditional center to which he, his forebears, or his people have been attached to in the past, but became alienated from. In this case, the desire for a visit to this center derives from a desire to find one's spiritual roots. This visit takes on the quality of a home-coming to a spiritual home (78). Although the ancestral homeland is real, geographically specific place for most Chinese, the rapid development of the modern age has seen many changes in these areas so they may no longer be an appealing center. One visitor on the Hilltop commented on this, People today, having lived in the city for a long time, yearn for the countryside. But the countryside is polluted with pesticide and chemical residue, due to knowledge, farming methods and management problems. Many ponds are black, and the air is full of floating plastic bags (He). 9

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm As will be shown, the Hilltop has been designed to evoke a nostalgic image of the hometown, or jiaxiang, thus allowing existential tourists to 'elect' it as a traditional center Although the alienating conditions of urban life are many, I would like to briefly touch on the relationship between urban Chinese and food, as the explosion of food scandals related to mass produced foods (often subjected to dangerous amounts of pesticides and fertilizers), has caused significant anxiety within Chinese cities in recent years. Pork in particular, long a staple of the Chinese diet, has become a notoriously dicey choice. Even up until the early 1980s, pigs were almost exclusively raised and slaughtered by smallholder farmers or households. According to Mindi Schneider's article Feeding China's Pigs: Implications for the Environment, China's Smallholder Farmers, and Food Security, pork has been the most consumed and produced meat world-wide for the past thirty years, largely due to its popularity in China. As a method of maintaining food security, the Chinese government has privileged agricultural practices through which low-priced pork remains abundant. The subsequent factoryfarms are now numbering over 60,000, and with the increasing liberalizing of China's economy, it is understandably difficult for smallhold farmers to compete. As a result, pork production has become one of the first largely industrialized agri-businesses in China. While there are certainly benefits to the wide availability of this meat, the costs of production are piling high. Schneider explains: The consequences of these changes in pig production and pig feeding have wide-ranging impacts. In terms of environmental degradation, agriculture in generaland livestock farming in particularare the most important sources of pollution in China...Industrial pig feeding also 10

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm carries with it a wide range of public health concerns. China is becoming increasingly infamous as a site of food safety scandals, most of which stem for feed additives such as hormones and growth regulators ending up in meat and livestock products (3). Even at the time of this writing in December 2011, exposŽs regarding tai nted pork are dominating the Chinese media, and a government survey recently estimated that over 80% of Chinese are extremely concerned about food safety (Want China Times). The importance of this anxiety cannot be overstated, as pork is no mere commodity, but a cultural symbol closely related to the manner in which families or communities understand themselves. The availability of pork, long signifying relative food security or celebration, also represents a way of characterizing events in national history and the passage of time within individual families. Even the Chinese character for 'home' ( ji ) is composed of the character radical for 'pig' underneath the character radical for 'roof' referring to the ancient practice of keeping the family hogs underneath the house. The phenomenon of poisoned pork does not simply represent a change in the values surrounding food in modern China, but rather a continuing need that cannot currently be met by industrial agriculture. It is for this reason that the Hilltop has a steady market for the hogs and chickens raised on their property, and strong support of the organic message they promote. In fact, organics are becoming a nationwide food movement, with an emphasis on 'clean' and 'hygienic' production. These foods are expensive; in cities they are found predominantly in large department stores. Unfortunately however, there remains a suspicion among consumers regarding the authenticity of the products. As Professor Kuo revealed to me, 11

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm The Hilltop is not certified organic, because the certification process is corrupt. You must pay an official a large amount of money to be certified, and they may never even examine your farm (personal interview). In addition to the public doubt surrounding legitimacy, it seems there is a system by which most of the truly organic foods are grown on farms unavailable to the public, and channeled directly to party officials and other elites (Demick). Disgusted Chinese food activist Gao Zhiyong expressed his dissatisfaction with this system by commenting that "'the officials don't really care what the common people eat because they and their family are getting a special supply of food" (qtd. in Demick) and his frustration is undoubtedly echoed by many urbanites who feel they have lost control over their choices. For those who have the time and money to take this dilemma into their own hands however, collectivized agricultural is again becoming popular in China in the form of farm co-ops 1 In the past few years, at least three dozen farm co-ops have popped up around China, mostly in proximity to large, metropolitan cities. Members of a farm cooperative buy 'shares' in the farm, and either work the land themselves, or are provided with a weekly box of produce, whatever might be in season. The principle is based around shared costs, and has been fairly popular in America and Europe for several years. In an article on How Community Supported Agriculture Sprouted in China on National Public Radio, the author asks "It's a little hard to tell, walking through Little Donkey Farm in a village northwest of Beijing, whether this is just a charming but ineffectual protest against the tide of Chinese history, or a sign that the tide may be shifting" ( NPR ). Here, I 1 While the Hilltop does not currently have a co-op, the Kuos plan to open one in the next year. These plans will explored further in the final chapter of this thesis. 12

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm believe the 'tide of Chinese history' he is referring to is the industrialization of Chinese agriculture, in which 'every recent trend' points toward increased use of mono-cropping and chemical pesticide/fertilizer, both of which are avoided by those practicing organic, sustainable agriculture. What he ignores, however, is the long history of chemical-free, smallholder farms that once characterized all of rural China. Again, perhaps the ultimate draw for an agritourist or co-op member is in the implied promise of a healthy community. As 'Little Donkey Farm' co-op member Fang Danmin claimed, the farm isn't just the land, or the food. We can know each other and create new ideas. We make friends here" (qtd.in NPR). Thus, for tourists seeking reversals in the conditions of their everyday life, a venue supporting the hands-on approach to organic agriculture and cuisine becomes also a place for reestablishing community values now associated implicitly with 'rurality'. Before I show in the following chapter how the Hilltop guests experience these values, I will briefly introduce the the case study. The Hilltop Herb Farm 1 Topwits Herb Farm, affectionately known as 'the Hilltop' or Xiao Tuan Shan' ( ) sits on top of a small rise that was quarried out on one side many years ago. When the Kuo family decided to purchase the land, they ignored warnings from the locals that 'nothing would ever grow' and put down a layer of topsoil and seeds. Now, several years later, the old quarry basin is covered in wildflowers, native grasses and several manmade fish ponds. Two covered platforms serve as tea-pagodas, and behind squats a large brick pizza oven. Magpies or 'happiness birds' live in roomy birdhouses lining the quarry 1 Please see the website ( www.wwoofchina.moonfruit.com ) for photographs. 13

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm wall, and surrounded by a sprinkling of newly planted trees is the building containing the restaurant and, upstairs, the classroom. There is a brick stairway leading up to the top of the hill from the restaurant entrance, and at the crest sits the hotel. A white, boxy structure with a maze-like feel; massive windows and balconies facing out to the cultivated hillside below. Look out these windows in the fall, spring or summer and you will see fields of herbs, some planted orderly in rows, and some growing freely along the borders of the property. The farm as it is now is quite simple, but at the bottom of the hill is the newest, largest, and as yet unfinished building on the property. This building will hold another restaurant (including fourteen rooms for private dining), a wedding venue and a lecture hall. The architect's style is dramatically modern, using both linear and organic shapes, high ceilings, and large open courtyards. Like the hotel, this building will use an inordinate amount of glass to bring the outside in. At first look, the hotel and restaurant appear almost too contemporary against the surrounding area. The landscape in this part of Anhui is damp and muted in the early fall, and the stark white lines stand out painfully. The contrast is appropriate, however, to the relationship that the Hilltop has with the local community. Farmers in this area are notoriously poor, and have been so for decades. The Hilltop, although in its infancy still, is a blossoming and successful business. The proprietors of the Hilltop have worn many hats over their careers. Professor Kuo and his wife Professor Zhuang are academics, politicians, and activitists, and Professor Kuo was once an elected member of the Taiwanese cabinet. As self-admitted Chinese history buffs, the Kuos are happy to answer any of the frequent questions from a 14

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm guest or a staff member with a relevant story about Confucius or another Chinese sage. Because of their fascination with story-telling and personal narratives they are particularly conscious of their familial history and the history of the region, which are intertwined. Professor Kuo's father is a native of Feixi, having fled to Taiwan at the end of the war in 1949 By returning to his ancestral homeland to work in agriculture, Professor Kuo has joined a long line of Chinese academics who escaped the 'world's net' to pursue a simple life on the family farm. The following poem is one famous example of this. It was written by the disgruntled Jin dynasty official Tao Yuanming (365-427), depicting his return to agriculture after abandoning a wealthy urban life. Tao would later become one of the most celebrated nature poets in China. This is an except from the beginning of the poem, Coming Home: I've come home! And bid farewell to the society of men. Since the world and myself cannot agree, What more have I to strive after? Joy will be found in the hearty talks with my kin, Or delight in music and books that lighten my mind. When the farmer's tell me of the arrival of spring, There will be enough to do in the western fields... ( qtd.in Kwong, 29) Professor Kuo is well aware of his own vast historical legacy, and it has become a vital part of the manner in which the farm is marketed. By allying himself with famous teachers and sages from Chinese history like Tao Yuanming, Professor Kuo has developed around himself a benign cult of personality. This can be evidenced by the way he is approached by the media, many instances of which portray the farm itself as an idea secondary to a biography of the man. The comments in this blog illustrate this: 15

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Many of us have a dream in our hearts to change society, transform life, but we are often able to do no more than culivate ourselves. But Professor Kuo, with his romantic character and the spirit of a sage endevors to improve the world while perfecting his own moral character (He). Although Kuo has no personal experience in Feixi, and although his accent and lifestyle are completely foreign to the region, he is still 'coming home'. At the back of one of the basil fields he has even built a small shrine to his ancestors. Like Tao, he associates the countryside with a place of ideological freedom. Unlike Tao however, he does not wish to leave the entire fabric of the urban world behind, but rather to drag a corner of it with him by attracting others alienated by urban life out to the Hilltop. In doing so, he has begun a 'teaching' project to spread a philosophy of sustainable development and traditional Confucian values. Had Tao Yuanming been a guest on the Hilltop, he could perhaps have found his ideal rural life drinking herbal teas, discussing poetry with his fellow guests, and enjoying the fresh meals and air. While I was living there, the guests (those who paid admission) were all city-dwellers from nearby Hefei, with a sprinkling of outliers that included the local officials from Feixi and friends of the Kuo family from Taiwan. Of the city-dwellers from Hefei, many were extended families, but most were members of larger, non-familial groups. There were at least four 'typical' groups, which included young parents with children between the ages of 1-15, seniors aged between 60-80, young professionals in their 'work groups' aged 20-35, and cyclists (predominately male, 16

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm varied ages) who would bike from Hefei city and back. Of these, the most common demographic were parents and young children. As you can see, these groups are essentially stratified by age, rather than by family. Even the parents and children together would rarely be accompanied by an elderly parent. When the guests arrived in their buses, cars and bicycles, they would first buy tickets at the top of the hill to gain access to the entirety of the grounds. Most guests would then take a tour up to the highest point to see the herb fields, and at times, groups would even walk all the way down the other side of the hill to the new building, often through muddy conditions. Despite the rough terrain, guests on the farm often had a formality to their dress. Women in high heels and skirts, and men in long pants and dress shoes. After visiting the fields, almost all have a meal in the restaurant or tea pagodas. The menu offers a variety of dishes, including some specialties from Feixi, from Taiwan, and a number of western foods like pizza and baked potatoes with cheese. Popular with the children are the 'activities', where (for a fee between 10-20 yuan) a staff member will teach the participants how to do a craft. These include origami, leaf and fish ink prints, cookie-baking and ceramics painting. Although guests can stay on the farm overnight, the Hilltop was mostly a one-day experience. During my stay, there were only a few nights where guests stayed in the hotel. The Kuo's herb fields cover many acres of property, but at the time of this writing the majority of their profits were coming from tickets sales, the restaurant and souvenirs. They grow few organic vegetables, focusing instead on herb varieties lesser known in China like chamomile, stevia, basil, thyme, and rosemary, which are dried and used to make a variety of products. They sell herbal teas, handmade lavender sachets, herb17

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm scented pillows, and herb-flavored cookies. Also available for sale are potted herbs, and live baby rabbits (for pets). Although the Kuos have an extensive knowledge of the use of medicinal herbs, their actual farming experience is relatively limited. The agricultural component of the Hilltop is effectively run by a cousin of the Kuos, who I knew as Brother Gu. Brother Gu and his wife together managed the staff and menial laborers, natives of Feixi all, most of whom lived in the valley below the Hilltop. According the Professor Kuo, all the farm hands, kitchen staff, construction workers and waitresses on staff were distantly related to him in some way. Although I often worked closely with the locals, my closest companions on the Hilltop were a group of hooky-playing college students and the Kuo sons. Between their English and my Chinese, we were able to communicate fluently, and it was through them that I became acquainted with all aspects of the Hilltop. The six students, all from Shannxi agricultural university, first arrived on the Hilltop as a part of a club promoting rural volunteerism. They were only supposed to stay a few weeks, and then return to school. Instead, they were so taken with the farm and with the message that the Kuos promote that they had decided to stay through their first semester, skipping their classes. One of the students, Xiao Yan, once told me that she had never felt inspired the way she felt on the farm, and that while her parents and boyfriend were expecting her to join the family furniture business, she had no desire to return there. The students worked closest to the Professor and his wife, and were given many jobs to complete. Often, we would have brainstorming sessions to come up with new projects, delegating the work among the seven of us. Professor Kuo treated them as his 18

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm apprentices, and once told me his plans to give each of them a large portion of land. Together the Kuo family and the students had devised and implemented a number of 'sustainability projects' on the Hilltops grounds. These included a grey-water filtration system, compost toilets, and a 'cooling' pool on the roof of the Hilltop hotel. Conclusion: The students and the Kuos both tell a story of 'coming home' to Feixi that is a template for the Hilltop guests who find themselves decentered, unable to entirely inhabit their physical homes in the city, and I have briefly touched on the food safety problems that I believe characterize a part of this alienation. Although these individuals and families may not have the inclination or ability to move to the countryside, the rural landscape nevertheless embodies a traditional understanding of native-place. The Hilltop is exceptional in that, unlike other agritourism destinations, the Kuos are themselves 'coming home' in a physical sense as well. For the guests, the Kuos are proof that a reuniting with one's native-place is possible, even in the modern age. 19

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Chapter 2 The Edible Local: Ritual Consumption and Communitas "If a pilgrim is half a tourist, then a tourist is half a pilgrim" -Victor and Edith Turner Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture In creating the Hilltop Herb Farm, the Kuo family is attempting to occupy rural Feixi as a method of protest against what they believe to be damaging trends in globalization affecting social, agricultural, and educational conditions in China. By opening their farm to tourists, they are inviting others to repopulate the region and explore a way of life that contrasts dramatically with life in a Chinese city. Using Nelson Graburn's adaptation of Victor Turner's theory of liminality and communitas in secular tourism as a framework, this chapter will show how the Kuo's nostalgic marketing aesthetic induces a ritualistic process whereby the guests on the Hilltop are seduced into the local landscape, and into a state of communality with the other guests. This process arguably occurs in two distinct parts, which are then followed by the guest's return to the city. First is the tour of the Hilltop farmland and grounds : as they walk the wide brick paths, guests are treated to a bright simulacrum, a constructed aesthetic evoking the fertile serenity of a rural utopia. Beginning with a comparison of the the Peach Blossom Spring the defining piece by writer Tao Yuanming, I show how the design and initial experience of the Hilltop is reminiscent of this historical image. For 20

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm a visual counterpart, I will then show propaganda posters promoting agricultural co-ops and the reeducation of urban youth (from the 1970s), and photographs of the Hilltop side by side. The aesthetics of these posters are particularly familiar to the many guests who grew up amidst collectivized agriculture. By embodying this mythic landscape, the Hilltop evokes from the guests a complex nostalgia. This nostalgia blooms, in part, from the unavoidable juxtaposition of the guest's lives in the city against the relaxed atmosphere of the farm. The farm is, however, naked and estranged on two accounts. First, the environment is depicted as edible but is not yet available for true consumption. Second, because the farmhands on the Hilltop work out of sight (or not at all) on busy days, the great herb fields are silent, empty, and somewhat surreal. Through this tension between recognition, nostalgia, and surreality the guests are maneuvered into a liminal space, estranged from both their city life and the rural landscape. It is during the meal that the farm is transformed into a participatory space. The act of eating 'local food', essentially consuming the landscape, and engaging in series of rural rituals and activities transforms the farm from a utopic simulacrum into an environment with strong local flavor. In the consumer imagination, this process affirms the Hilltop's authenticity as a native-place, tying it strongly to rurality, thereby ushering the guests into a state of communitas. In stark contrast with their city-selves, guests begin to embody the community necessary to 'fill in' the Hilltop and to complete the utopic image. Previous distinctions in class, age, and origination are discarded as the guests enjoy together the activities prepared for them by the Hilltop staff. At the end of the day however, this must be interrupted as the guests travel back to the city, leaving the Hilltop to be repopulated the next morning (if the skies are blue). 21

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Communitas and the Touristed Landscape: According to Nelson Graburn's Secular Ritual: A General Theory of Tourism, tourism experiences are often meaningful because of the ways in which they contrast with the mundane activities of daily life. These experiences become, in the mind of the tourist, a dynamic method of marking the passage of time, much like religious rites of passage (27). With slight simplification, Graburn uses Victor Turner's theory of liminality and communitas to examine these processes. Turner's work, which builds upon French Folklorist Arnold Van Gennep's analysis on rites of passage notes key points in these ritual transitions from the profane to the sacred, specifically the state in which participants are neither "in nor out" of any social role (Graburn, 31) but are instead positioned over a metaphorical threshold. It is in this liminal state that individuals are stripped of their previous identities and begin a process of 'leveling', wherein normal social constructs and roles (age, sex, occupation etc.) lose their significance. Once in this state, participants are free to experience "a special feeling of excitement and close bonding" (Graburn, 31), otherwise known as communitas As the following pages will show, it is while in this same state that tourists most fluidly reposition their relationship with the locality and with each other, and thus 'tourist' or dynamically inhabit the local landscape. In Cartier and Lew's Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes, the authors touch on the liquidity of all those in a tourism setting: Touristed landscapes are about complexity of different people doing different things, locals and visitors, sojourners 22

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm and residents, locals becoming visitors, sojourners becoming residents, residents 'being tourist' travelers denying being tourists: resident part-time tourists, tourists working hard to fit in as if locals...In the touristed landscape people occupy simultaneous or sequential if sometimes conflicted positions of orientation toward landscape experience and place consumption (3) To illustrate this dynamism, and to continue in the pattern established in the first chapter, I will focus largely on the creation and consumption of food. The Living Utopia Although it would be false to assume that every tourist's experience on the Hilltop is not an extremely personal one, there is a pattern in the way the farm is introduced to new visitors, and thus a structure within which we can explore the guest's transformative experience. Almost invariably, the first activity for every guest on the Hilltop is a tour of the grounds. The bus loads of elderly, groups of parents and children, armies of company picnic-goers are all indiscriminately led up the hill and around the manicured landscape by Professor Kuo or one of the students. During these tours the fields and work buildings are glaringly empty of local inhabitants or workers, as staff who would otherwise be caring for the plants are too busy serving and preparing food for the guests. T he Hilltop has been purposefully designed in the image of a 'rural utopia', and is presented to the guests in such a way that this association is unavoidable. An exploration of this idea would be impossible without the blueprint for this mythic space, a lost world found in Tao Yuanming's story, The Peach Blossom Spring ( Taohua Yuanji ) This story is the "foundation text of the Chinese utopian tradition: it has 23

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm been imitated many times and is still very much a part of contemporary cultural memory" (Foukemma, 6). I have included here the opening portion: There lived in Wu-ling a certain fisherman. One day, as he followed the course of a stream, he became unconscious of the distance he had traveled. All at once he came upon a grove of blossoming peach trees which lined either bank for hundreds of paces. No tree of any other kind stood amongst them, but there were fragrant flowers, delicate and lovely to the eye, and the air was filled with drifting peach bloom. The fisherman, marveling, passed on to discover where the grove would end. It ended at a spring; and then there came a hill. In the side of the hill was a small opening which seemed to promise a gleam of light. The fisherman left his boat and entered the opening. It was almost too cramped at first to afford him passage; but when he had taken a few dozen steps he emerged into the open light of day. He faced a spread of level land. Imposing buildings stood among rich fields and pleasant ponds all set with mulberry and willow. Linking paths led everywhere, and the fowls and dogs of one farm could be heard from the next. People were coming and going and working in the fields. Both the men and the women dressed in exactly the same manner as people outside; white-haired elders and tufted children alike were cheerful and contented (qtd.in Birch and Keen, 167). Fascinatingly, the fisherman's journey parallels the guest's initial experience on the Hilltop perfectly. As the fisherman patiently rows his boat toward an enigmatic opening in the mountainside, so must the Hilltop guests travel a round-a-bout route, from which they can see nothing of the colorful herb fields. They are then directed into a depression in the hill, through which a single set of stairs leads out. Guided by Professor Kuo in a white tunic, or by young and well-spoken volunteers dressed in matching shirts of pale lavender or yellow (not entirely unlike the gentle encouragement of fragrant peach blossoms), the guests are invited to climb to the crest of the hill. Like the fisherman must be crowded by the walls of the tunnel before he can catch a glimpse of 24

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm the bounty beyond, so are the guests imposed upon by the startling image of the Hilltop hotel, perched impenetrably at the highest point on the property. Stark white and cubic, with no doors visible from the staircase, the modern silhouette is remarkably fortresslike. Empty, it guards the fields and buildings with gusto. Once past this building however, the guests, like the brave fisherman, are treated to a panorama of fertility, a terraced rainbow of a farm, smelling sweetly of herbs and berries. Beside the paths, small springs trickle down the hillside. The guide explains that this water is in fact the greywater from the hotel, and will be filtered as it makes its way down the slope to the fish ponds below. Seen from the far side, the hotel is all windows and balconies, facing out into the landscape like a low hanging cloud. Beautiful 'wishing' trees are decorated with red cards containing prayers and the unspoken desires of previous guests, mimicking the aesthetics in many Buddhist temples. It is the picture of sustainability, as the young guides explain to the guests, and there is little waste or need for the products of the outside world. As blogger Mr. He wrote after his nitial visit to the farm: ... On the Hilltop, you can walk where ever you please. The mountain is planted with dozens of rare herbs, fruit trees...Along the gentle slope are brick steps, passing through a garden, and arriving at a strange building. Standing at the window, a brisk wind comes by...Through the transparent glass doors, you get an ample sense of the room's tasteful design and comfortable layout. As soon as you open the door, the various herbs on the mountaintop avail your nostrils with their sweet scent, it's another kind of pleasure. 25

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Here, you can be content and happy, and experience how man is one with nature (He). Other well-known utopic societies found in literature, including the island of Penglai from the classic text Shan Hai Jing (Fokemma, 92), depict similar scenes of a landscape exclusively inhabited by immortals ; where wine cups never drained, rice bowls never emptied, and healing fruits tumbled from trees of jade. The hyper-saturation of wealth in these stories carries with it a dark counterpart. The often harsh reality of famine in China breathes life into myth where food is bountiful, and the Hilltop's organic abundance is a similar foil for a new variety of food anxieties concerned with quality rather than quantity. It is quite possible that the rural utopia emerges as a dominant social theme during the most abject periods of famine, and today, urban Chinese are experiencing a famine of an unprecedented variety. Instead of a caloric deficiency, many are lacking in safe and nourishing foods. The Hilltop's aesthetic and presentation thus stimulates guests to nostalgically recall these famous mythic landscapes in which food is healing and wholesome. For a visual example of the purposeful evocation of the nostalgic rural utopia through aesthetics, one must go no further than the interior of the Hilltop restaurant, where images displayed on the walls show a troop of happy Hilltop summer campers fishing in the local ponds or working in the herb fields, the large brims of their new straw hats covering soft pale cheeks 1 1 For more images, please see the accompanying website www.wwoofchina.moonfruit.com 26

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Figure 1 Summer Campers (Photo by Kuo Yanji) 2009 The images are obviously, even without caption, of urban children having a 'rural experience' ; powerful because they are reminiscent of the educated urban youth who were relocated to the countryside for 'reeducation' after 1968 in China. As a good number of the guests on the Hilltop grew up between the late 1950s and early 80s, they would have experienced this movement of young people 'up to the mountains and down to the villages' Shangshan xiaxiang firsthand. This makes the absorption of the images associated with this event a distinctly nostalgic experience for many guests. To better understand the ideological similarity, see this poster from the early 1970s titled Fishing Pond in the Commune' 27

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Figure 2 Fishing Pond in the Commune, circa. 1970 In the poster, the massive school of fish seems wholeheartedly delighted to swim into a wide net. Meanwhile the young people on either side of the frame turn towards each other, about to complete the circle, symbolizing their strengths within the whole. The lack of ambiguity in purpose, differentiation between the sexes and distinct facial features coagulates the individuals as they work towards a communal goal. Like the summer campers in the previous photograph these are amorphous young people empowered by their roles within a community. Similarly, if the following poster titled It is always Spring in the Commune weren't from the 1970s, it could be depicting the story of the Hilltop as it is advertized on 28

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm TV, blogs, and in newspapers. A charismatic patriarch, much like Professor Kuo, stands pink cheeked within a healthy circle of youngsters (his students), cheerfully regarding the abundance of winter crops. Figure 3 It's Always Spring in the Commune circa. 1970 While none of the 'People's Communes' experienced levels of success remotely similar to those depicted in propaganda posters, images like these represent an idea that remains familiar for many Chinese. For the guests on the Hilltop, the existence or nonexistence of a bucolic rural as depicted in stories and images is irrelevant. It is only necessary for the myth of the rural utopia to exhibit a strong enough character in collective memory to create a "contrast with the events, moods, and dispositions of [the] present circumstances" (Davis, 12). T he particular brand of nostalgia experienced by Hilltop guests is termed 'historical nostalgia' by Fred Davis, author of the definitive text 29

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Yearning for Yesterday In other words, an experience characterized by a nostalgic feeling towards an event that did not actually occur in one's personal life, but rather occurred in history or in the social imagination. The prolific nature of these propaganda posters (Evans, 1), and the regularity with which most Hilltop guests would have been exposed to such images in their lifetime, is strong evidence of their significance. By offering an attractive and nostalgic alternative to the guest's lives in the cities, and the reality of many polluted rural environments, the Kuos make an offer that cannot be refused. The guests begin to step out of the husks of their city-selves. This transition becomes apparent in subtle actions; when impeccably-dressed individuals get their shoes muddy trying to leap over a puddle for example, or parents hunt in the tall grasses for crickets to present to their children, or young men roll up their starched shirts to splash each other with water from the ponds. Already, these guests have broken barriers of conduct and normalcy to engage in ludic behavior. This begins a series of pre-meal activities, and thus the process of ritual consumption. After the tour of the Hilltop grounds, the guests relax for a short time before dinner. Some might sit close around outdoor tables to sample handmade mulberry wine and herbal teas. Often, these teas are shared across tables with new friends. If there is a large group of children, they will make and decorate rosemary cookies to be baked and eaten for dessert. One of the more popular pre-meal rituals is the catching and slaughtering of a chicken. Understandably, the availability of mass-produced meat products has made the slaughtering process unnecessary for most urban Chinese. As a nostalgic and quintessentially rural food experience then, catching a chicken is a perfect pick-your30

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm own' style experience for the Hilltop to offer its guests. For agritourism businesses all over the world in fact, 'pick-your-own' (whether its 'pick-your-own' fruit or 'pick-yourown' meat) is an essential component in engaging the imagination of the consumer and authenticating the farm experience (George and Rilla, 8). By taking control over a part of the meal process (chosing and handling your chicken, your strawberries), the guests are working in conjunction with the farm, getting their hands dirty. These subtle but poignant acts mark the beginning of the meal, an act that makes a community out of the guests, tying them to each other and to the local landscape. Eco-locating: Inducing Communitas Through 'Eating Local' In a nostalgic essay describing the sweets of his hometown, Selling Candy (Mai Tang ), noted anthropologist and folklorist Zhou Zuoren argues for the exploration of a locality through its native cuisine: In observing the peculiarities of a locality, its foods are very important. Not only its everyday staple foods, but also the tidbits and sweets are very interesting. It is a pity that few people have given these things their attention. The literati, native to the district, consider these things too trivial to talk about. Outsiders give only slight attention to foods, but instead write of men and women... Actually the affairs of men and women are more or less the same and not worth that much effort. On the other hand the various foodstuffs are full of 'flavor' and could be talked about much more (qtd.in Daruvala, 80) Historically, the local landscape, being the vehicle for virtually all sustenance to what was once a largely static populace, nurtured and defined each rural community in China. The temperature, weather, soil type, topography, precipitation etc. of a region and the native foods (spices, game, wild vegetables) and cooking techniques that arise from 31

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm these geographical idiosyncrasies make up what is known as a region's fengtu ( ). This term, which literally means 'wind-soil', acquired this meaning from the chengyu fengtu renqing ( ) referring to the environs of a locality and the temperament of those who live there. Within this idea lies an implied reference to the commodities produced and consumed agriculturally in the region. Just as some believe the only true champagne wine grapes must be grown in the soil of Champagne France, and are thus imbued with a 'terroir' specific to that geography, each region of China has a variety of specialty foods valued for their unique origins. Only recently however have these foods become mass produced and available across the country, often regardless of season. Xinzhang pears for example, widely acknowledged to be the most delectable of all Chinese pear varieties, are now marketed nation-wide. For those living in large cities it is quite common to ingest several regional delicacies each day. So it is that many urban diners hoping to consume food with regional authenticity are attracted to local-dish restaurants or agritourism businesses like the Hilltop, and the Hilltop in turn uses this perceived authenticity as method of inviting the guests to consume the rural landscape. The Kuos also promote local food products in an alternative, but cohesive way: through the environmental movement known as locavorism T he term 'locavore' is used to describe a person who strives to eat sustainably harvested and/or organic food grown within a limited distance of their home 1 Those 1 'Locavores' first popped up in the United States in 2005 as a part of an experiment in sustainability, when a small group of foodies in San Fransisco pledged to eat a '100-Mile Diet' for a month, consuming only products grown or raised within one hundred miles of their homes. As almost all foods in a conventional grocery store do not fall under this category, the 100-milers had to personally source, grow, or gather everything they ate. This experiment spawned a number of hard-core practitioners and a corresponding lay-consumer movement, (understandably bosom32

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm promoting the movement assert that doing so uses smaller quantities of fossil fuels, while additional benefits include a purportedly healthier diet, the direct support of small businesses and farms, and delicious 'in-season' foods 2 The Hilltop restaurant belongs to a long lineage 'local-dish' establishments that have been providing culinary tourists with family-style rural cuisine across China since the early 1990s. Although local-dish restaurants exist in a plethora of manifestations, representing a variety of different historical themes and food values (whether gourmet, rustic or even a fusion of the two), the common denominator invariably narrows down to marketing the region's fengtu ( Swislocki, 6 ). In David Wank's article Local Dish Restaurants in Shanxi Province he argues that the modern perception of fengtu is no longer related to the actual origin (or food miles) of a product, but to its representational origin. The new restaurants that have emerged in the local dish boom...are distinguished by strategically converting the "local" into a commodity. The key is not whether something is actually local in the sense of readily available and inexpensive but rather its representation as "local." In fact, reliance on local ingredients in preparing local dishes is not very profitable and the new local dish restaurants add non-local ingredients to increase the price of dishes. The menus of the new local dish restaurants contain many fusion dishes, as well as dishes from other regional buddies with the 'organics' movement), through which the American farmer's market has been revitalized. Even large-scale food chains like Walmart made a commitment: buying over $400 million dollars worth of local produce in 2008. 2 Along with many international trends in environmentalism, locavorism is becoming popular among the upwardly mobile in China. Beijing, for example, just recently had their first 'organic and local' farmer's market in the fall of 2011. Even the literature and film movement that has characterized locavorism in America is spreading to China. It wasn't until I was WWOOFing on the Hilltop, for instance, that I first saw Food Inc, the blockbuster documentary touted as must-see for any environmentalist. This film comments dramatically on destructive qualities of factory-farming in the United States, claiming that the meat and corn industries in particular are environmentally harmful and abusive toward both humans and animals. Professor Kuo saw this film as a grave omen for China. 33

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm cuisines. Also, the new local dish restaurants feature dishes made from coarse grains and starvation foods, which is unprecedented in high-end restaurants in China (3-4) Here we see an interesting juxtaposition. To represent a food as local is to control and design the environment in which the food is consumed. In other words, there has been a role reversal in the consumer's perception of the relationship between food and locality. At one time, the characteristics of a region (and the consumer's place within that region) were accessed through the consumption of the regional food. Today, these foods have been mass produced and subsequently stripped of their local flavor, becoming instead food-like props within a manufactured environment. With this in mind, how then food is understood and consumed as 'native' on the Hilltop, despite the overwhelming variety? The Taiwanese and American dishes are 'recipes from home' for the Kuos, both of whom spent their college days in the United States 1 and their childhood in Taipai. To assert their common origins with these dishes, the Kuos 'dress them up', preparing them in an idiosyncratic or 'homestyle' way. Make-your-own-pizza, for example, is one of the most popular food activities one Hilltop. While the pizza tastes and is composed of all the same ingredients that many of the chain pizza parlors in China might use, the Kuos have built a massive brick-oven in which to bake them. In this way, the Kuo assert their methods as traditional, and thus more authentic, than the urban equivalent. Professor Kuo also often claimed that many western foods like ice-cream, spaghetti, and even pizza were originally Chinese dishes brought by Marco Polo to the west and reinterpreted. For dishes composed of local ingredients or spiced with fresh herbs, the process is slightly different. Often these foods are prepared in fusion dishes, embracing trendy 1 Almost the entire Kuo family are American citizens, including Professor Kuo's father and mother. 34

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Taiwanese 'flavors' (Wei-er ). A white-fish, for example, prepared in soy sauce and ginger, reminds the diner of traditional Anhui braising, but uses less oil and an usual garnish. "When we first hired the [local] cook", Professor Kuo mentioned to me once, "he cooked very heavy, oily, food. We had to teach him to cook the way we wanted" (personal interview). Like many local-dish restaurants, the Hilltop also offers a small selection of dishes utilizing 'starvation foods', subtly making palatable to the middle-class what was once a cuisine of the poor 1 An interesting example of this is the Taiwanese brown rice that the Kuos have chosen to serve. In the bowl, the rice is course looking, reminiscent of home-milled peasant varieties. In the mouth, the rice is nutty and flavorful, a gourmet, organic variety found nowhere else on the mainland. The Kuos have also developed a number of recipes themselves, including recipes for cookies, breads, wine, tea, and herb-flavored jellys. These products are found only on the Hill, and are some of the most popular commodities sold in the restaurant. These items are available for take-out or gifts, so guests can bring home with them a piece of the culinary experience. 1 David Wank expressed surprise at finding sorghum (a grain historically stigmatized and rejected except for those suffering great poverty) served in a gourmet local-dish restaurant. However, using expensive ingredients and complex cooking styles, the flavor of these foods is often transformed. By improving the taste, texture and general palatablity, these restaurants prepare the foods, not as they once were, but as they are favorably recalled by nostalgic guests who may not have consumed these foods since their childhood. Lu Xun, the iconic Chinese modernist writer, comments on these elusive flavors in the preface to Zhao Hua Xi Shi: There was a time when the vegetables and fruits I ate as a child in my old home kept coming into my mind: caltrops, horsebeans, waterbamboo shoots, muskmelons. So succulent, so delicious, were they all, like a magic potion they bewitched me into long for my old home. Later, after along absence, I tasted them again and found them nothing special. It was only in memory that they kept their old flavor. Perhaps they will continue to cheat me for the rest of my life, making my thoughts turn continually to the past (qtd.in Daruvala, 78). 35

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm From these examples, we can get a subtle hint of the special 'flavor' of the Hilltop cuisine, which is certainly unusual and individualistic. Not only are these foods promoted as authentically representing the 'fengtu' of the local landscape, they are also considered 'native' to the Kuo family, and to the Hilltop itself. Just as in the myth of Persephone consuming the pomegranate seeds, the act of consumption effectively bonds together host and guest. By consuming these unfamiliar foods, the Hilltop guests reach a pinnacle of their separation from their city-selves. In doing so, they are free to relate fluidly and playfully with their fellow diners, and the staff on the Hilltop. This is made all the more poignant by the way the Hilltop foods are consumed, which is largely in a communal setting. The dining atmosphere is notably unrestricted. One can eat in almost any location on the grounds, indoors and outdoors, that has enough chairs and tables. During the meal, the identifiable groups in which guests had arrived largely disappear, and people would begin lining up with their pans to make their own pizza as they might in a dining hall. In the tea pagoda, tables were often rearranged to accommodate new groups, and the restless children of leisurely dining parents would run together in packs, returning every now and then for a bite of rice or fish. In the restaurant, crowed tables would be made heavy with food, a banquet compared to the meals of everyday. Often, large amounts of liquor and cigarettes were consumed as an indulgent treat in the festive atmosphere. The chaos eas profoundly reminiscent of the 'olden days', when the extended family of many generations lived under one roof, and one could always trust that the children were being cared for. Through all this, Professor Kuo wandered, the picture of a 36

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm benevolent patriarch, stopping indiscriminately at various tables to speak with diners about their food choices or to tell a story. After the meal, diners would play games or listen to music. Crafts would be taken out for the children, and many (particularly the elderly) would watch and digest or perhaps join in the games. On several occasions, someone brought with them a guitar, obliging with popular sing-a-longs to groups of thirty or more people. As the day turned darker, so began the beginning of the 'come-down' after the 'high' (Graburn, 31). Those who had biked out to the farm would take their final photographs. Small children would begin to get fussy, ready for their naps. A bus of elderly would start the drive back into the city. As a last event before the guests leave, they were invited to sign their names on the white restaurant wall in permanent marker, or to write down a 'wish' or prayer to be hung on a tree at the crest of the hill. These are acts reminding the guests of their permanent place in the Hilltop community, and marking their completed rite of passage. Conclusion: Thus, a guest's day on the Hilltop Herb Farm is complete. By promoting the farm as an reconstruction of the nostalgic rural utopia, and through the ritualistic consumption of unusual and 'native' foods, the guests temporarily inhabit, or 'tourist', the Hilltop community. In this process, they disassociate with their day-to-day selves, persisting in a liminal state where otherwise dividing barriers like status, age, and sex, are abandoned. In its place, a sense of belonging, or communitas, arises, which in turn authenticates the Hilltop in its position within the local landscape. 37

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Despite the apparent potency of this ritual passage described above, the guests remain only for a day, and as it stands, there is only a day's worth of experiences for them to consume. By this I mean, were a guest to repeatedly return to the Hilltop, they would be treated to almost the exact same cycle of activities. Thus, there is a front and a back side to the Hilltop community. For those 'behind the scenes', the guest experience is largely a matter of performance and service, thus calling into question all points of authenticity. This critique, and the Kuo's response to it, will be explored in greater depth in the following chapter. 38

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Chapter 3 Educating for A New China: Occupying Rural Feixi For the Hilltop staff, ushering the guests through the process described in the previous chapter is a weekly routine. In order for it to be efficient and lucrative, a number of polished, reproducible performances/activities have been created. In other words, the guest experience on the Hilltop (and thus the farm itself) is museumified for the ease of consumption. It is frozen in time for the perhaps ironic purpose of depicting an authentic, inviting rural landscape. In tourism anthropology, this process is often analyzed as a complicated but dominant characteristic in rural and heritage tourism in particular. A major point of this critique is to question the credibility of the final product, balance the true costs to the local environment and people, and critically realize the potential for cultural erosion. The Kuos are exerting extreme pressure on Feixi to change in a variety of ways; social, political, and cultural. However, this pressure is coupled with the reality of migration in rural China. Many of those still residing in the region do so because they have a reliable source of income from their jobs on the Hilltop. In fact, the Kuos originally began purchasing all the excess property because they were asked (being the local elite) by impoverished locals who needed to vacate their homes and move to the city for work. 39

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm As this chapter will show, the Kuos are not content to persist in their current pattern, as they have themselves realized the damaging potential inherent to a purely touristic endeavor. Interestingly, rather than downsize they have chosen to move in the opposite direction, effectively taking over a large portion of the surrounding landscape. In the next several years, the Kuos will have created a school, an organic agricultural cooperative, a wedding venue, a massive 14-room restaurant and a lecture hall. They will hold film showings, conferences, adult education classes, art shows, and holiday celebrations. The Hilltop will become a place of residence for many children and summer-campers. Scholars, students, and volunteers like myself, will visit from all over the world. In this way, the Kuos intend to spread their philosophy of sustainable development and Confucian thought to begin a 'New China'. In this movement, the Kuos are embracing an increasingly liberal conception of an individual's relationship with his native-place. The act of repopulating Feixi is building a community from the bottom up, based largely on ideology rather than blood. Although individuals may not physically reside there, the Hilltop is becoming a notational local, as well as an abstracted residence of a unique interpretation of secular Confucian thought. Behind the Scenes While the cycle described in the previous chapter may hold deep significance for the guest participants, it is quite a different experience for those living on the farm. Satisfying the whims of hundreds of unfamiliar tourists is no simple matter, and it 40

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm requires serious planning and preparation by all the Hilltop staff, particularly the college students, who do the majority of interacting with the guests. Because the Hilltop does not have wholesale buyers for their herbal products, and because the farm produces few foodstuffs that could offset costs, financial stability is completely dependent upon the ticket and commodity sales. As the Kuos are currently expanding and building on the property, it is of the utmost importance that the Hilltop remains profitable. Thus, the college students are in charge of reliably producing both an environment of consumption, and the subsequent commodities to be sold. Understandably, much of this 'environment of consumption' coincides with the successful movement of the guests into a state of communitas. The more the guests felt at home in the Hilltop landscape, the more likely they were to purchase large meals, gifts for themselves and their families, and souvenirs commemorating their trip. For this reason, many guests would simultaneously eat their meal (which I have discussed as the peak of the guest's experience of communitas) and shop, getting up between courses to browse. In addition to this, the products themselves are considered more valuable to those guests who feel particularly moved by the philosophy of the Hilltop, or by guests who witnessed or participated in the production of a commodity for themselves. I once witnessed a group of tourists purchase an entire oven-full of cookies while they were still baking, for example, after having watched their preparation. Also evidence of the value of participation: the price of a personal pizza on the Hilltop, which is almost half again what a pizza of the same size would cost at an urban Chinese pizza chain like Pizzahut. Like make-your-own-pizza, most other popular commodities were not products, but rather activities. These activities were carefully planned by the college students for 41

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm weeks in advance, and repeatedly offered to guests a various points during their stay. For groups of children, these activities were almost requisite, as they promoted a creative educational component extremely valuable to parents. While I was living on the Hilltop, the weekend activities made available were ink prints using leaves and live fish, origami, cookie-baking, and ceramic painting. Each of these activities cost between 15 and 40 yuan per child. As the children often played in large groups, it was probable that one parent's investment in the activity would have a domino effect, often leading to over twenty children participating at one time. While these activities might seem excitingly novel, traditional, or rural to the guests, the Hilltop staff were simply reproducing a prescribed set of activities and experiences on a regular basis. By making a performance of their actions, complete with costume (Professor Kuo's traditional tunic; the college student's matching yellow and lavender shirts), and script ( beginning with a scripted tour of the herb fields) the Hilltop experience is essentially frozen in time for the ease of consumption in a phenomenon known as museumification. In many instances of tourism, (rural, heritage, and nature tourism in particular), the 'taming' of traditional practices in a touristed culture or landscape into a performative act is quite common. Through this, it is possible to transform any environment or community into a kind of living museum by making the happenings in that environment obedient to the demands of a tourist public. As Paulette Dellios argues in The Museumification of the Village: Cultural Subversion in the 21 st Century In the interpretive medium of museumification, everything is a potential 'artefact'-entire villages, or abstractions such as 'ethnicity' and 'nation', or human beings. Yet, reality cannot 42

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm be represented: museumification distorts inverts and subverts meanings (1) In fact, in many cases, activities perceived as the most authentic and thus the most valued by visiting guests, are also the most scripted. In the case of the Hilltop, the guests are encouraged to think of the farm has a functioning example of a agriculturally sustainable community, subscribing to set of rules promoted by the Kuos as a part of their environmental philosophies. By making the farm a living museum however, it is unable to realistically meet the standards of these marketed philosophies. The promotion of organic and local foods is a perfect example of this. In order for the Hilltop to remain organic, beautiful, and manageable, the Kuos have forgone tricky vegetables and fruits to plant herbs, which have natural pesticide properties, and berries. Thus despite the number of cultivated acres, the Hilltop produces almost no food As the Kuos feed (by estimate) more than a hundred guests a week in their little restaurant, none of the main dishes are composed entirely of locally or organically grown ingredients, but rather more affordable and available foods purchased inside the city proper, ironically the same foods that the guests may be fleeing from. The museumification of the Hilltop also has the effect of presenting the individuals who live and work there as consumable objects under the tourist gaze. As the only American volunteer, I experienced this phenomenon firsthand. To many guests, I was not just Hilltop staff, but a caricature available for group photos and as an intriguing subject of 'otherness'. The Kuos, as Taiwan natives, presented themselves and were thus approached in a similar manner. Perhaps because of their own 'othering' by the Hilltop guests, the Kuos are aware of the pervasive danger that the process of museumification can have on the individuals 43

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm subjected to the tourist gaze. However, their knowledge of this phenomenon has not made it any less of a reality for Feixi communities. Many tourism anthropologists have "noted the ways in which tourism reproduces inequities of power and wealth between those who do the touring and those who get toured" (Garland and Gordan, 251), and already the villages in Feixi have begun to transform in the wake of the Hilltop's arrival in a way that represents this disparity. Logistically, the Hilltop 'floats' above the rural communities it surrounds, which is a fitting metaphor for the relationship between Feixi residents and the Hilltop guests and owners. Because the price of admission and participation is so high, the only Feixi residents who visit the Hilltop recreationally are officials in the local communist party, who use the restaurant to host late-night banquets on the government's dime. The consumption of the Hilltop products has become a symbol of notable prestige in Feixi. As these products are marketed and priced for wealthy urbanites, even the more affluent Feixi residents may find them unaffordable, thus restructuring perceptions of status and commodity values in the region. Actually, most locals are limited to entering the Hilltop community in positions of service or construction and the Kuo family employs dozens of men and women who at one time were subsistence farmers. Now, whether serving wealthy guests in the restaurant or working to preserve the decorative herb fields, the Feixi natives are positioned at the bottom rung of the Hilltop staff, taking direction from even the college students. In fact, the Kuos make it a point to give jobs that require prolonged contact with the guests (and particularly with children) to the students, indirectly favoring them as more presentable, or well-spoken. These jobs include acting as a tour guide, teaching 44

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm craft projects, and facilitating any games or quiz-like activities. The menial or physically difficult positions, like sanitation and the feeding of the livestock, were invariably left for the local employees. The origins of these hierarchies are unclear, and it is possible that the Kuos are simply forced to concede to the expectations and demands of the guests. It is also possible that the guests are more responsive to a guide or teacher that they understand to be college-educated, whether or not this individual has agricultural experience. Much of the analysis of the tensions with the local residents is complicated by the reality of migration in Feixi. For most of this thesis, I have been dealing with the effects of urbanization on the upper middle class. In Feixi, we see the other side of this coin. Much of the region is abandoned, due to the migrating of the locals into industrialized areas. Often, Professor Kuo would lead us on hikes through the hills, cutting through the dusty fields of abandoned farms and exploring the husks of old homes. I remember one home still held the previous occupant's tattered belongingsa red parasol, a fringed shawl, a large four poster bed covered in cobwebs. It was eery to see these old things, unmoved. In another instance of museumification, this empty home will become a destination point for a bike tour that the Kuos are creating. The Kuos use the relative emptiness of Feixi to justify in part their occup ation. They are the 'return-migrants', bringing people and jobs back into the region. Undeniably, the Hilltop has become the most reliable source of income in the area, and most who still live in the valley are supported in some manner by a position on the farm. Recognizing and acknowledging the potentially damaging effects on the Feixi residents has done little to slow down the Kuo's development of the Hilltop. In fact, the 45

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Kuos have decided that the best solution to this problem is to continue expanding outward into the landscape, transforming the farm from a tourism venue into a multifaceted community center and educational complex. This way, they argue, they will be able to offer a variety of amenities to the locals (like schools and employment), while preventing unnecessary or unwanted migration. The Kuos believe these amenities, and the presence of the Hilltop itself, is essential to the continued existence of the Feixi community. By 2013, a building currently in construction on the far side of the herb fields will be complete. Again, this complex will house a wedding venue, a 14-room restaurant, a western food cafeteria, an art gallery, and a lecture hall. The Kuos also have plans to construct a large boarding school on the property, and are working to rebuild the local public schools as well. These buildings will morph the Hilltop from a (deceptively utopic) farm-museum into a place of residential and ideological permanence. Students and volunteers will reside on the property, lecturers will fly in from all over the world to give talks on agriculture, art, and music, marriage celebrations will be hosted. The Kuos are also intent on creating an organic food cooperative that blankets the entire region. In an email I received from the Professor, he explained I am gathering people to make some contribution to rent a piece of land. We plant rice and vegetables on the land without using pesticide and herbicide. They pay 2000 RMB for 1 acre of land a year and get all the grains. This will not make a lot of money for us, but it will change the way people look at their own land... The program is similar to one in Taiwan. I hope in this way we can arouse the concern of the way they consume foods and treating their homeland (personal email). 46

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Thus, the urban visitors would actually own portions of Feixi, to be farmed and cared for by locals. To Professor Kuo, this is an excellent avenue for 'skills exchange', an important piece of their Confucian educational philosophy. However, this is again an instance of cultural subversion. For the Kuos it seems Feixi is not only materially vacant but spiritually vacant, without many of the qualities epitomizing what could be called 'Chineseness'. 1 This attitude necessitates their messianic relationship with the local economy, and pointedly absolves them of many of the critiques of cultural erosion. In the same email, Professor Kuo expressed his desire to transform the area from the ground up, The talk about taking over some neighboring decaying primary schools is under way. We have to change the way of education altogether to really change the village (personal email). The Kuo's desire to 'change the village' is not limited just to rural peoples, but to the entirely of modern Chinese society. Describing his theory on Chinese history, Professor Kuo told me once after dinner, Now, China is not a true China. There have been three true Chinas in history, each with great teachers. A new China is coming, I hope to be a teacher for the new China" (personal interview) For Kuo, China is a notational concept without a cohesive history or geographic and temporal continuance. Instead, it is largely a sociocultural construct, materializing out of the social climate and an adherence to a set of values largely based on the teachings of Confucius and the pioneers of secular neo-Confucian thought. When asked about his educational philosophy during a television interview, Kuo expanded: 1 Here I am referencing Lew and Wong's Existential Tourism and the Homeland: The Overseas Chinese Experience in which 'Chineseness' is used to understand the degree of removal with which individuals relate to their ancestral homelands and cultural traditions, asking of the modern age: "Just how long does the existential relationship to an ancestral place last?" (13) 47

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm We can learn from the Confucian school, when he spoke of heaven, earth, and man as the three elements. As humans, we have to be able to nurture the natural world. Only then can we become one of the three elements, only then can we stand beside heaven and earth, if we don't reach this level, you are not substantial enough to be called an elemental man (television interview) 1 The three elements or realms (San cai ) mentioned here are in reference to an ancient relationship in Chinese metaphysics, central to the classic Book of Changes ( Yi jing ). Like the mythic Pangu, man has his feet on the ground and his head in the sky; a connective, interrelated realm of the universe. Under Heaven, man has an essential nature, a role to play (Ikhara, 23). As Kuo explains, Confucianism furthers this idea into an impetus for an individual's virtue, and in this case necessitates a 'nurturing of the natural world'. Kuo's personal adherence to Confucianism comes at a time of a wide-spread Confucian thought revival across the Chinese mainland. Although it has been argued that Chinese-style Marxism was inherently filtered through Confucian tradition, Mao-era China saw a drastic subverting of these traditions as apart of the elimination of nonsocialist thought 2 Today however, the Confucian ethos is being re-asserted. Confucian self-help books, college courses, and after-school programs are increasingly popular, and 1 At one time, a primer called the Three Character Classic describing the 'three elements' (san-cai was the staple of a child's beginning education at home, but it was discarded after the communist revolution in 1949. In Taiwan however, this classic is still widely known and taught to young children, and Professor Kuo probably learned this classic as a young boy. 2 Professor Kuo's father fled China at this time, which brings up an interesting speculation on the Professor's timing. Could his desire to return to the liberalizing mainland be a kind of Confucian missionizing? 48

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm values like filial-piety and self-cultivation continue to persist in both business and personal life (Bell, 10-11) 1 On the Hilltop, the Confucian ethos is evoked also in environmentalism, where the dialogue of sustainability (often associated with western environmental thought) is configured with an emphasis on Confucian modes of conduct and the relationship between mankind, heaven and earth. The association of Confucian ethics and environmentalism moves both ways on the Hilltop, environmentalism recontextualizing the need for Confucian theory, and Confucianism indicating the potential of sustainability. It is this same association which prompted J. Baird Callicott to speculate in his essay on 'Traditional East Asian Deep Ecology' 2 : If Confucius had lived in our time of environmental crisis, he would have pointed out that the dynamic web of relationshipsas an intersection or node of which each of us isincludes our relationship with plants, animals, soils, and waters as well as other human beings. The environment is thus an extension of the self; and the self, the individual person, is, complementarily, the focus of the environment in a particular space-time nexus...The Confucian self is...a unique center in a network of internal social and natural relationships. The social and natural environment is the wider 'self'(82-83). Indeed, it is as if Professor Kuo were attempting to voice the concerns of the sage himself. His narrative of home-coming highlights also the traditional significance of the ancestral homeland as native-place, once the keystone of a ritual relationship with one's local landscape and people. Although Feixi will not be the authentic jiaxiang of the 1 To corroborate this claim, Daniel Bell in China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society quips "even criminals seem to take heed of the value of filial piety: the crime rate spikes just before the Chinese New Year, when filial sons and daughters are supposed to bring gifts to their parents" (11). 2 Deep ecology being a core philosophy of environmental ethics and sustainable development emphasizing the interdependence of all natural systems, with humans as only one component. 49

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm guests, the Hilltop represents a kind of elective replacement, a vessel for traditional modes of thinking. Conclusion: The New Local Thus, in this model for approaching Chinese values on locality during a time of globalization, ritual observance of a specific landscape has been abstracted into the values of interconnectivity and reciprocity, and brought back down again to inhabit a bucolic landscape. In other words, in their attempt to create a 'new China', the Kuos are also privileging a new local, constructed from a national understanding of the local in the social imagination As the Kuos continue to expand their property, and people begin to visit the Hilltop with more regularity or permanence, the Hilltop will acquire an even greater gravity as a place of personal as well as cultural memory. The new local is a place for a playful exploration of Chinese values in a global context, including what it means to be a 'community' or family. When lining up to make pizza for example, what would commonly be considered an 'outward gaze' is turned inward through participation (it is called 'make-your-own' for a reason), subverting a food product that has come to symbolize the homogenization of global cultures and the spread of western values and reinsert it into an experience of Chinese traditionalism. I have mentioned many times that the Hilltop is a site of protest and activism. While it may not seem this way in the strictest definition, this localizing is a way of encouraging Chinese to regard their homeland and traditions in a positive sense at a time of western cultural dominance. Professor Kuo, playing the teacher-sage and insisting 50

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that pizza actually originated in China, provokes individuals (including myself) to continuously question these narratives of western supremacy. 51

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Conclusion As I have shown, t he Kuos have created the Hilltop Herb Farm as a method of protesting what they consider to be damaging trends in modern China, many of which are associated with globalization. For millions of urban Chinese, rural tourism is appealing for just the same reasons, often relating to a sense of lack' regarding valued aspects of healthy rural communities particularly safe and nourishing food. While on the Hilltop these tourists are encouraged to understand the farm and farm products as authentic expressions of the local landscape of the Kuos, or of traditional thought and history. In doing so, they are molded into a temporary community through a complex combination of nostalgic and/or participatory activities, including the consumption of local food. The Hilltop in this sense proves problematic for a variety of reasons, as the very functioning of the farm depends on the cyclic manifestation of the products and activities mentioned above, necessitating a museumification process in which processes on the farm are forcibly recreated. Because of this, the farm is incapable of adhering to the promoted ideals of sustainable development. Also questionable are the apparent inequities between the local Feixi residents and urban guests or educated Hilltop staff The Kuos are approaching these problems by expanding their business, and creating a more permanent habitation of the Feixi landscape. As they explained to me, this alleviates the above issues in two ways. First, by providing an economic boom in the area, the Hilltop is slowing the migration of Feixi residents into the city. Second, as 52

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Feixi is a village in social crisis, the Kuos are providing a much needed pressure to 'change the village'. For the Kuos, the imperative is relevant for all of China, and they have developed an environmentalism based primarily on the Confucian ethos of relationships. Through this, the Kuos have created a praxis for what I will call a new local. In other words, the Hilltop provides increasingly mobile Chinese with an landscape in which they can access and engage with traditional values of native-place. Although doing so is primarily enacted through rituals of consumption, this process encourages Hilltop guests to approach these products as reflections on what makes up their own 'Chineseness'. Thus, for them, the local and global are intertwined and often indistinguishable from one another. The translation of values or experiences into modes of consumption invariably calls into question the authentic quality of those values, and indeed, the Hilltop's variety of ecotourism is often quite damaging to the Feixi landscape. The problem with this critique however, as Garland and Gordon claim, "is the enigma of authenticity in the age of poseur" (261). In other words, tourism venues will invariably engage with the touristed landscape in a manner that alters what had been before. There is no one 'authentic' manifestation of ecotourism in that a wholly conservational technique cannot exist. As the Hilltop seems to exemplify, it is the search for true environmental stewardship that we can perhaps find the most value. By creating a variety of learning environments based on the philosophy of 'the self' as a dynamic point within a vast web of natural phenomena, the Kuos will continue to encourage this search for years to come. 53

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm By way of conclusion, I would also like to mention my continuing work on this project. My greatest limitation in writing this thesis was the lack of input from the natives in Feixi. Because I was unable to understand their dialect of mandarin, and as I was hesitant for obvious reasons to use Professor Kuo or Professor Zhuang as a translator, their voices are not heard. I find this extremely problematic, as it reinforces their position in the community within the wider readership. After graduating, I plan to return to the Hilltop as a teacher, as I have been offered a permanent position on the Hilltop helping to build a greenhouse classroom for the education of local children. While there, I will continue to learn Chinese and include in this project the local Feixi community, to be updated on my website www.wwoofchina.moonfruit.com 54

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm References Cited: Bell, Daniel. China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008. Print. Birch, Cyril, and Donald Keene. Anthology of Chinese Literature, New York: Grove, 1965. rint. Callicott, J. Baird. Earth's Insights: A Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback Berkeley: University of California, 1997. Print. Cartier, Carolyn L., and Alan A. Lew. Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Ceballos-Lascur‡in, HŽctor. Tourism, Ecotourism, and Protected Areas: The State of Naturebased Tourism around the World and Guidelines for Its Development Gland: IUCN, 1996. Print. Cohen, Erik. A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences. Aix-en-Provence: Centre Des Hautes ƒtudes Touristiques, 1984. Print. Daruvala, Susan. Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000. Print. Dellios, Paulette. "The Museumification of the Village: Cultural Subversion in the 21st Century." Culture Mandala: The Bulletin of the Center of East-West Culture and Econmic Studies 5.1 (2002). Print. Demick, Barbara. "In China, What You Eat Tells Who You Are." Los Angeles Times 16 Sept. 2011. Print. Duara, Prasenjit. Local Worlds: The Poetics and Politics of the Native Place in Modern China Taipei: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1998. Print. Evans, Harriet, and Stephanie Donald. Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Print. Fokkema, D. W. Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011. Print. 55

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm Nianyong H. & Zhuge, R. (2001). Ecotourism in China's Nature Reserves: Opportunities and Challenges. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 9 (3), 228-242. "Over 80% of Chinese People Worried Over Food Safety: Survey." Want China Times 09 Jan. 2012. Web. 14 Jan. 2012. "Rural Tourism Helps Poverty Alleviation in China." XInhua News Agency 6 Sept. 2006. http :// www china org cn / english /2006/ Sep /180309. htm Ryan, Chris, and Huimin Gu. Tourism in China New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Schneider, Mindi. "Feeding China's Pigs: Implications for the Environment, China's Smallholder Farms, and Food Security." Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (2011). Print. Smith, Valene L. Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1989. Print. Studley, J. (1999). Ecotourism in China: Endogenous paradigms for SW China's indigenous minority peoples. Swislocki, Mark. Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009. Print. Sznajder, Micha Lucyna Przezb—rska, and Frank Scrimgeour. Agritourism Wallingford, UK: CABI, 2009. Print Tao, Qian, and Gladys Yang. Tao Yuanming: Selected Poems Beijing: Chinese Literature, 1993. Print. Turner, Victor W., and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia UP, 1978. Print. Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure Chicago: Aldine Pub., 1969. Print. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze London: Sage Publications, 2002. Print. Weaver, David B. Ecotourism Milton: John Wiley & Sons, 2001. Print. Weaver, David B. Ecotourism in the Less Developed World Oxon: CAB International, 1998. Print. 57

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The Local Consumed: Recreating Native-place on China's Hilltop Herb Farm West, Paige, and James G. Carrier. 2004. Getting Away From It All? Ecotourism and Authenticity (with commentary and reply). Current Anthropology 45 (4):483-498 Wilk, Richard. Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System Lanham, MD: Altamira, 2006. Print. Zhang, Mei. China's Poor Regions: Rural-urban Migration, Poverty, Economic Reform, and Urbanization London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Print. 58