China's tea growers too busy to watch Olympics

Yi Feng is a tea grower in the Chinese farming village of Fan Sheng. Two-thirds of China's 1.3 billion people live in farming villages like this, and like most of them, Yi Feng is far too busy with everyday chores to pay attention to the Olympic events going on in Beijing, to the north.

"The Olympic Games?" she asked, apparently perplexed that anyone would bring up such a subject at harvest time on these prime tea-growing slopes in coastal Zhejiang province. "With all I have to do these days, how could I pay attention to the Olympic Games?"

Carrying bags of freshly picked tea leaves down a narrow lane in Fan Shen.


—Mellow Monk

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