Chapter 516 - 41: The Magical Soil (Part 2)
Those who have been to Xinjiang Wulukosa know that the local soil suffers from severe salinization.
When Xinjiang was liberated, teams of reclamation soldiers arrived one truckload after another.
The older generation of Uighurs still remember those young people in olive green military uniforms, who specifically chose large, flat wastelands. With the arrival of spring, they would drill wells and channel snowmelt from the Southern Tian Shan to irrigate the saline-alkali land and reduce soil alkalinity.
They then planted fields of rapeseed to improve the soil, and after summer, rows of rapeseed were harvested neat and tidy by threshing machines, and then sunflowers were planted as green manure.
The sun dried the land, and the salt in the soil, like dandruff, surfaced and was scraped away.
Only then, with various green manures, animal manures, and straw, and after an entire generation had passed, their olive green uniforms fading to grey-green or even grey,
the land truly became arable again, capable of sustaining life and continuously fruitful. The hardworking locals began planting economic crops like cotton and grapes on the improved land.
The era of such cooperation and seamless integration between ethnic groups is sadly no longer visible in today’s Ulucosa Town.
In a few fragmented cotton fields, rows of cotton plants droop, their branches pathetically holding just a few fist-sized cotton peaches, which from afar look like bewildered orphans with runny noses.
Recently, drought has plagued the area and it’s been a while since it last rained, causing great anxiety among the town’s cotton farmers, particularly the impoverished farmer Zhou Qizheng.
Reluctantly, Zhou Qizheng has to accept the label "impoverished farmer," a term that should have disappeared shortly after liberation.
Almost every afternoon, he leaves his house carrying several buckets of water, moving back and forth among the cotton fields. Cotton doesn’t require a lot of water, but it can’t survive in complete drought either; ample sunlight during summer is crucial for forming cotton peaches.
"What exactly went wrong? I’ve watered and fertilized, why can’t I grow decent cotton?" Cotton farmer Zhou Qizheng squatted in the furrow, fingers buried in his hair, mussing up his locks.
The down-and-out cotton farmer of Ulucosa Town, Zhou Qizheng, has a square face and a sturdy though not burly physique. His gait faintly reveals his past as a retired soldier.
After graduating from high school, he joined the support troops for Xinjiang with fervor. After five years of support, he married a local Uighur woman, settled down, and laid roots in Ulucosa.
Despite warnings from the last group of veteran supporters that Ulucosa was Uighur land, and that a Han retired soldier might find it hard to survive without the military presence,
Zhou Qizheng, an adept farmer, would not be dissuaded. He firmly believed in "prospering through diligence." He believed that given land, even if it were fiercely saline-alkali or sandy, he could transform it into a fertile field.
Unsuccessful stories piled up much like other Han people who left Ulucosa one after another.
His daughter Pali Dan was born, but his wife contracted a chronic disease due to carelessness during childbirth. His military pension ran out, and he couldn’t find a stable job. After much thought, he decided to farm cotton and went to the town mayor to sign a contract for three acres of land.
When Zhou Qizheng asked for those three acres, everyone in Ulucosa laughed at him. He had chosen the most barren patches of land in the entire town, entirely sandy soil suited for cotton, which a military corps expert surnamed Yu had told him before leaving. Zhou Qizheng deeply etched those words in his heart, but since contracting the cotton farm, five years had passed, and each year the quality of the cotton peaches he produced was the poorest.
During the cotton harvest season, when cotton farms throughout the town needed hired hands for picking, only his farm could be managed single-handedly.
His sensible daughter Pali Dan even secretly helped others pick cotton without his knowledge. Thinking of his daughter, who was shorter than a cotton plant, standing tiptoe under the scorching sun, Zhou Qizheng felt an intense regret.
Leaving Ulucosa to seek livelihood elsewhere had crossed Zhou Qizheng’s mind more than once, but whenever he thought about his wife Guli Azha’s illness, he hesitated.
"Daddy," the voice of his daughter Pali Dan floated from the other end of the furrow. Upon hearing her, Zhou Qizheng quickly stood up.