Jeff Chu was in his second decade of holding down an enviable career as a journalist for a prestigious magazine.
The kid of Chinese immigrants, he worked on the 29th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, of “sleek steel and polished glass, shouting of progress, technology, and human capital.” He lived in Brooklyn with his husband, a successful New York City real estate agent. He had bylines for stories all over the world
He was 39 when he hit the wall. If you don’t know the term, it means when you experience sudden fatigue and loss of energy in an endurance sport, and you don’t know how you’ll finish. So you collapse.
In the context of life in general, I think it’s called an existential crisis.
Chu realized he’d been getting assignments, but none of his individual pitches had made it through the higher ups for a year. And his assigned articles were edited, or “mangled”, to what was becoming a defeating degree.
More than just being burnt out at work, though, Chu felt he was missing a level of living up to what his personal standard of truthfulness was. This was beyond just his career, beyond where he’d gotten himself in life in this manicured idea of success that was leaving him feeling empty and angsty toward what felt like a superficial life.
Chu grew up Chinese Baptist, a family denomination for generations. It certainly created problems among family when he came out and married his husband. But the religious teachings were a part of him, and they seemed to be pulling him toward a more raw and natural world. It wasn’t something he could turn his back on, even if it had, in its way, turned its back on him.
This is how Chu found himself enrolling in a religious Master’s program on a farm. Or rather, a “Farminary.” As much classroom time and standards of classroom time there was, there was an equal if not more time spent tending all aspects of a working farm.
The 318 pages of Digging into Good Soil: the Education of an Accidental Farmhand are split into the seven seasons that occur while Chu is at seminary earning his degree: fall, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter spring. The seasons are prevalent and meaningful in his memoir.
Chu works through knots in his life through his work on the Farminary. There are switchbacks in his life that are what he formerly perceived as mistakes, weaknesses and fault on his own part. He changes the narrative to see these growth spurts as parts of the ecosystem of his life. Every thing is working together to make way to growth.
“There’s the grain of the wood and there are the knots. And what might be imperfection to the woodworker is the strength of the wood,” Nate, who runs the Farminary, tells Jeff after Jeff confesses what he perceived as failure in wood-chopping triggered memories of severe bullying as a kid and sexual assault when he was a teenager.
“He was right,” Chu wrote. “A knot can from on a tree where a branch has been broken… It’s a coping mechanism: The wood becomes denser as a means of survival. A knot signals not only weakness but also strength, not only injury but also resilience.”
If you’ve ever picked up the axe again and whiffed a couple times before hitting the mark and you’ve kept trying because it’s better than giving up, congratulations, you’re still in the game, even if you aren’t nailing it. Try to just SORT OF hit the mark, because it feels right trying.
He composts. He kills a chicken. He befriends a baby goat. He attempts to grow Chinese radishes. Friendships grow, bloom and die. He creates enriching feasts. He manifests meaning.
Chu’s writing here shows we go through seasons in our lives. There are things that compound on one another to cause a winter, and that’s a time of curling in on one’s life, hunkering down, banking a reserve of emotions and often finances in whatever form they may come, recoiling from saving face and admitting the barren times are fine.
Spring will come again. You can’t force spring; it happens on its own time. But it always shows up.
On the surface level, the premise of Chu’s memoir can come across as marketable and twee—a Brooklyn journalist searching for the meaning of life and landing in a Master’s degree program on a seminary farm in Jersey where he roots around with others amidst nature, livestock and dirt, finds himself, writes a very pretty memoir described as meditative and transformative.
I had my doubts. But it didn’t take long for me to realize I was in for something very special—perhaps in the very first essay even, about the orchid. No spoilers, but he had a moment of realization that he was nurturing in the presence of fake. And Jeff engages you in his wry humor and his sharing of personal turmoil. He’s an incredible narrator.
Even this 49-year old Gen-X cynic who was raised by society to believe the world will always turn on them and to be ready for it was turnt.
I read it slowly, something I don’t usually do. I’m a horrible speed and binge reader, which is a lazy way to read. I can be a lazy gardener too, sometimes I’ll speed through weeding yanking them out at surface level but not taking the time to get into the roots.
At its deepest core, Good Soil explores the ecosystem of an immigrant-focused human experience in America. Good Soil is a book to take your time with. You pull out the themes, words, experiences and essays, to dig deep and get to the root.
Go deep and cut out the superficiality. You’ll be better off for it.
