Seeds of autumn

Farmers harvest gorgon fruits from a pond in Suzhou. XU JUNQIAN/CHINA DAILY

By 9 o'clock every morning, 55-year-old Hu Xiuxia has been sitting on a small stool and peeling off white seeds from a pomegranate-like plant for almost three hours.

The plant in Hu's hands is called gorgon fruit or nut, or "rice from chicken head" among locals, because the fruit looks like chicken head. The aquatic plant has been grown and enjoyed in Suzhou for centuries, a land that is believed by many Chinese to be flowing with milk and honey, or paved with fish and rice in Chinese slang.

Hu works near a dim green tea shop at the entrance of the biggest and oldest wet market in Suzhou, Jiangsu province. Behind her, the muddy pink shucks are piled waist-high. But in front of her, the starchy white seeds are pearl-sized and surprisingly skimpy－just enough to blanket the bottom of a salad bowl. It takes 10 kilograms of the fruits to produce 1 kilo of seeds.

From late August to mid-October every year, when the plant's seeds become edible, hundreds of middle-aged and more elderly women gather at the entrance of local wet markets and put on a pop-up show, stripping the fruit down to the delicately flavored seeds.

Men wouldn't have the patience for the job, the women say, but an experienced woman can peel 2 to 3 kilograms of seeds every day, despite wearing iron fingertip protectors that preserve their fingernails as they work.