Across the babbling stone brook from Grandma Zhang’s cabbage patch, four grown men were engaged in a life-or-death wrestling match with the earth.
Farmer Chen, a barrel-chested mortal man with sun-darkened skin and broad shoulders, stood in the center of his mounded sweet potato furrow. He had dug a trench three feet deep around a single plant. His face was flushed red with hard effort as sweat poured into his collar. Clinging to the braided hemp rope looped around the base of the vine were his three sons, their boots slipping in the soft, dark loam as they pulled with all their might.
“One, two, HEAVE!” Farmer Chen shouted, his neck cords straining against his rough hemp tunic.
“M-Father, it’s not budging!” his eldest son wheezed, his knuckles white around the rope. “It feels like we hooked the roots of a thousand-year-old hardwood tree! The shovel handle cracked clean off when I tried to lever it from beneath!”
Beside the trench, a sturdy brown plow mule was tied to the other end of the harness. The beast dug its hooves into the furrow, braying loudly in protest as the rope stretched taut as an iron wire without yielding so much as an inch.
