In periods of chaos and crisis, it helps to focus on things that ground us and have real meaning. That looks different for everyone. For Jeff Chu, his time as a seminarian on a 21-acre farm changed his outlook, helping him unearth who he was at his core. How did nurturing a compost pile force him to understand the concepts of rediscovery and learning? He shares his journey in Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand.
Evan Kleiman: You open the book with musings on how Western thought often relies on linear storytelling while most of our life journeys are the opposite of linear. How is Chinese storytelling different?
Jeff Chu: Chinese storytelling mimics the year in that we cycle through over and over, right? Spring, summer, fall, winter, then we come back to spring again. It's not that we're exactly the same, but there's an understanding that we move through these seasons and then we have a new opportunity to begin again. As eaters, for instance, we keep coming back to foods that give us delight. There's a reason we call them comfort foods, those dishes that we seek out when we're sad or when we need a little boost to our spirits. Life is cyclical like that. We're cyclical eaters. We eat certain things in the summertime. We eat certain things in the wintertime. Chinese storytelling reflects how we live. Really, it's not about moving from A to B to C. It's A to B to C back to A and then back to B.
What was your relationship with religion and the church before joining a seminary?
I grew up in a super religious Chinese Baptist family. My grandfather was a preacher, my grandmother was a primary school Bible teacher, and that was our social network. That was really the structure that defined our lives. The complicated thing for me, personally, was when I realized I was gay, which doesn't really fit into conservative Chinese culture or Christian culture particularly well. I spent a fair amount of my early adulthood kind of wandering spiritually, not really fitting in. It took me a while to realize that my faith and my sexuality weren't at odds with each other, that I could be honest about both.
Chu manned the compost at the Farminary, working to restore the land to health. Photo courtesy of Jeff Chu.
You worked at a magazine before deciding to study in a seminary. What was your beat at the magazine where you worked?
When I started my career at Time magazine, I was a generalist. I was super lucky that I got to write about everything from movies to religion to food. Eventually, after a short stint at Conde Nast working at a business magazine, I ended up at Fast Company, another business magazine. There, my coverage area was international affairs as well as design. I think the common thread for all of it, though, was that I was always looking for stories of hope. There is so much sadness and hardship in the world, but I think that was what I was drawn to, people who were doing interesting things in the world, who were cultivating hope,
Your leaving that job was preceded by a period of time when you were questioning where you belonged and the import of your work. Can you briefly reflect on that period of questioning, that time of feeling unmoored?
I think a lot of us go through life and we find ourselves at a point where we realize, "Hey, I ended up here, and I'm not sure exactly how, but my work, the structure of my life, the rhythm of my days isn't giving me satisfaction. I'm not getting out of it the sense of mattering in the world that I want." That was really where I found myself with this kind of hole in my heart, and I was trying to figure out why life in New York City, with all the glamor that I had thought it would bring, wasn't quite enough for me.
So you get accepted to Princeton's Theological Seminary. How did you get involved with a farm?
When you go to grad school, normally you end up in classrooms. I was 39 years old, I was pretty scared, honestly, not having opened a textbook in nearly two decades, and I was flipping through the course catalog, and I saw a course listing for a class that was happening on a farm. The course listing said that one of the things you're going to do in this class is grow food. I love food. I love eating. I love cooking. I thought, "You know what? I'm going to have to take these other requirements. Maybe having one class that is a little different from the other ones could be really good for me." And that was it. I honestly didn't know what I was getting myself into.
As a farmhand, Chu tended goats as part of a class on the society and culture of ancient Israel. Photo courtesy of Jeff Chu.
This farm, called the Farminary, which is adorable, wasn't just a place to learn to grow vegetables or tend livestock. What is the underlying mission and focus of the place?
This was a farm that was supposed to grow sod. Over the years, what happens is the topsoil gets stripped away. It gets shipped off to people's green lawns. When the seminary took over the farm, the farm director, who was a Mennonite kid from Kansas originally, thought one of the things we have to do is regenerate this land. We have to find a way to make the soil good again. So everything we were growing, including the chickens, including the beans, the goal was to restore this land to health so that it could produce for generations to come.
And within that process, there were a ton of theological lessons.
Everything that we were doing was involved with the coursework. It was intertwined in the curriculum. For instance, there was a class on the society and culture of ancient Israel, and what the professor did for that class was to borrow a couple of goats, because in ancient Israel, people kept goats. So as a farmhand, I got to help take care of the goats. The students in the class all had shifts to milk and feed these goats.
Likewise, for other classes, we worked on the farm CSA. Every Thursday, folks in the community would come to pick up their vegetables and their flowers, and our job was to harvest and to weed and to sow and to keep producing so that the CSA shareholders would have vegetables in their baskets the following week. All of this was part of the class. All of this was designed to get us to think about the rhythms of life, our interdependence with creation, what it takes to sustain life, not just for humans, but for an entire ecosystem.
There was an icebreaker at the initial meeting of those who were accepted to the course you were on at the farm. You were each asked to use five words or phrases to describe the soils you came from. Can you please read the paragraph in which you describe the thinking that that sort of set you off.
"To name the soils that you come from is to acknowledge that you were not self-made because there is no such thing as a self made human. It places you in the context of an ecosystem. It confesses that you are a creature, simply someone created by forces beyond you, which is to say, reared and scarred and sanded and formed. It admits that you are not some nebula floating in the ether but that you have roots and are inescapably interdependent with the world around you."
It's so powerful and so fascinating the way that it threw you into an understanding of how much judgment you had about those around you.
Look, I'm petty. I confess I'm petty. That's a part of being human. But being at the farm, being a companion with these other folks, as we grew things together, led us to have some really great conversations. Part of our class was also having a potluck dinner every week. And when folks bring food that matters to them, you start asking questions. Why is it that you brought that casserole? What does that cake mean to you? The food carried stories and stories are invitations. It really did force me to be a little less of a jerk.
If I like the cake, I want to know more about it. That's what love looks like, right? Love makes you curious. And being in this class with 19 other people from all over the US, but also all over the world — there was a student from Korea, a student from Germany — it really humbled me. It really opened me up to not just the way we move through the world, what we bring to the potluck table, but who these people really were.
"Good Soil" documents Jeff Chu's time at seminary and the self-discovery he found there. Photo courtesy of Convergent.
At one point, Nate, the man who managed the farm, was listening, you say, to you unpack a farm metaphor. And he said to you, "What if you just tried to see this place for what it is and not what it could do for you?" What did that bring about in you?
It honestly took me a while to figure out what he was talking about because I think I've been so conditioned, as I think a lot of us have, to see the world around us in a pretty utilitarian way. "What is this going to get me? What can this place or this person do for me?" And Nate was inviting me to see the land just as land. To observe who else lives here.
It's not just humans who are using this land as a farm. There are Canada geese in the pond, there are fish in the pond. There are foxes and deer and groundhogs, bees and butterflies, all kinds of creatures that pass through this land and call it home. There are oak and maple trees. Those maple trees aren't just good for sap, if we decided to tap them. The maple trees are maple trees just by existing, right? So he was just trying to get me to notice. I think that's sometimes a hard thing for busy folks to do, to stop ourselves and our thought processes long enough just to pay attention.
I would love it if you would talk about when your mom came to visit you at the Farminary and you ended up cooking one of the chickens that you raised.
One of the things that has always brought my mom and me together, even though she's really struggled with my sexuality and I've really struggled with her theological convictions, is that we can always come to the table, we can always meet in the kitchen. I think my mom is an amazing cook, and so much of what I've learned has come from just standing by her side. Because a lot of Chinese folks, we don't have recipes. It's just about smell and taste and over the years, figuring out how things are supposed to be.
My mom always says, "Do you want me to come cook a meal?" And this time, I said, "Yes." But we decided to cook the meal together. We decided to cook one of the chickens that I had helped to raise and then slaughtered, and we cooked it in the traditional fashion of my father's Chinese tribe, which is the Hakka, which is a salt-baked chicken.
You wrap the chicken in parchment, then you encrust it all in salt. I'd never done it before, and my mom had never done it before, and it was a way of learning something together. My dad doesn't visit because he doesn't approve of my marriage but as an act of honor, I sent the drumstick home with my mom for my dad, because for Chinese folks, the drumstick is considered the choice meat on the chicken.
What is the dish that grounds you in your identity and that you make when you need to feel a sense of belonging.
No question, my comfort food is fried rice. Fried rice is the thing my grandma made for me when I was a kid. She and my grandfather lived in senior housing in Berkeley, and I would sit at the dining table as the wok turner was clacking against her old iron walk, and I could smell the sesame oil and the soy sauce, and I could just anticipate that umami and the little crispy bits, because she would let the rice crisp up on the bottom. I have never made fried rice as good as my grandma's but I do cook it in my best imitation of how she would.
A few years into our marriage, I realized that I had a piece of brisket, leftover barbecued brisket from Texas, in my fridge, and I made fried rice with it. That was a revelation. First of all, because brisket fried rice, turns out, is phenomenal, but also, I realized I had stumbled into a dish that encapsulated my marriage. My husband's from Texas, loves barbecue. I'm Chinese, and here we had a dish that represented us. Our heritage is coming together. So a few times a year, we'll take a piece of brisket that we brought back from Texas and stuck in the freezer, we'll defrost it, and I'll make brisket fried rice, which just reminds me both of my grandmother's love but also of my husband.
You talk about hearing famed author Octavia Butler speak about religion and comfort. We could all lean into what comfort is for us. Could you read what that brought up for you?
Sure. "Comfort can come in different forms for different people. For some of us, it's rooted in being right, right about the facts on the right team, on the right side of history. For many, it's an absence of some negative emotion, whether it's worry or pain, financial uncertainty or another fear. For others, for me, I think comfort comes in being reminded of possibility. Surely, there is something more than this. Surely, we will find redemption. Surely, what's broken can be made whole, and what hurts will be healed."