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The wildly valuable life lesson I uncovered when composting
The Wildly Valuable Life Lesson I Uncovered When Composting
While shoveling food scraps in Brooklyn, a young writer has an unexpected interaction β and an epiphany
By: JingYi Li
At Vinegar Hill Community Garden, my teenage summers were spent sweating through organic matter in pursuit of suitable compost. While I shoveled through pungent, rotting detritus under the unforgiving sun, I noticed a Chinese grandmother staring at me through the gate. Pushing a cart full of bags overflowing with bottles and cans, she stopped and questioned in Taishanese, βιε₯³ (leng nui, or pretty girl), what are you doing?"
I explained that I was working with a Brooklyn-based composting initiative. For an hour, I conversed in my sub-par Taishanese. As we spoke, I recalled the humiliation I felt when my grandmother would take me to recycling centers with bags clinking with bottles. I never understood why she would willingly callous her hands for a mere five cents a can.
Bring on the “bitter labor”
Following our conversation, I realized my shame was childish. I should have been inspired. Like most immigrants from Taishan, θ¦ε·₯ (kugong, or bitter labor) was a concept far too familiar to my grandparents. They cultivated land, raised chickens, and gained an income through woodwork. In New York City, my grandmother felt incompetent, with the rows of buildings and constant traffic being a stark difference from the fields she'd known. Driven by nothing but her will to provide, my grandma sacrificed her days collecting bottles.
The humid and putrid afternoon I spent shoveling through compost was my kugong. There is a particular kind of honesty that comes from working the soil β it asks nothing of you but your effort, and it gives back only what you put in.
And while I will never understand the extent of my grandmother's kugong, my afternoon in the dirt taught me the importance of bitter labor and hard work. My grandmother didn't need to labor for five cents a can. Her children begged her to stop. But in a city that had taken away everything she used to be capable of, the bottles were proof she could still contribute. She never called it sacrifice. She just kept going, the way you keep going in a garden β not for the harvest, but because the work itself is the point, and because being needed is its own kind of nourishment.
Finding truth in food scaps
Through this composting work, I encountered people of all ages and backgrounds β diverse, unique individuals connected by nothing more than a shared willingness to get their hands dirty for something larger than themselves. Over time, environmental sustainability has been glamorized, but it is much more than reusable bags, metal straws, and #savetheturtles. It is a collective effort, built one small exchange at a time, whether that exchange is a bottle collected for five cents or a bin of scraps traded for produce.
Working the soil that summer taught me what compost really does β it isnβt waste, itβs the raw material a garden runs on: broken-down matter that rebuilds depleted soil and feeds whatever gets planted next. Nothing we shoveled that summer disappeared; it just became the ground someone else would grow plants in. A garden, like a family, is built the same way β in increments, by people who show up.
I think of my grandmother often when my hands are in the soil. Kugong was never really about the labor itself. It was about what she was growing toward β the sense that she still had something to give β and I am still learning to tend that same thing in myself.
About the writer
JingYi Li wrote this essay when participating in Girls Write Now (see below). Born in Taishan and raised in New York City, she is a graduate of Fordham University with a degree in Global Business β and still finds her way back to nature whenever she can.
Girls Write Now is a nationally award-winning nonprofit, media incubator, and multi-generational community. For nearly three decades, it has broken down the barriers of gender, age, race, and poverty to mentor, teach, and connect writers and leaders across disciplines and around the nation.