Distant Sunflower Fields

'The earth’s most powerful force is not its quake, but rather its ability to be home for myriad creatures to grow'

In this collection of dispatches from China's far northwestern province of Xinjiang, Li Juan recalls helping her mother to grow sunflowers from the barren earth. Li Juan's skill as a writer captures the extraordinary everyday in this sensitive and lively record of both the fragility of life, and the joys and dignity of family bonds.

An iron-willed mother, an ageing grandmother, a pair of mismatched dogs and 90 mu of less-than-ideal farmland: these are Li Juan’s companions on the steppes of the Gobi Desert.

Writing out of a yurt under Xinjiang’s endless horizons, she documents her family’s quest to extract a bounty of sunflowers amid the harsh beauty and barren expanses of China’s northwest frontier. Success must be eked out in the face of life’s unnegotiable realities: sandstorms, locusts and death.

While this small tribe is held at the mercy of these headwinds, they discover the cheer and dignity hidden in each other. But will their ceaseless labours deliver blooming fields of green and yellow? Or will their dreams prove as distant as they are fragile?