Western images of China are usually exotic ones: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, or else negative, like overpopulated cities, polluted air and water, tainted exports and a totalitarian government.

The real China of ordinary people may be much harder to uncover. We may get better glimpses of it during the August Olympics, if we objectively look and if the government lets us.

I was treated to some unique views of it during a two-month residence in the fall as a professor at Shanghai Normal University, unique in that students are excellent informers about ordinary life and unique in that I focused some of my teaching on environmental issues in American studies.

A very big environmental and social problem in China is the movement of millions from farms to the cities. Reputedly, 330 million of China's 1.3 billion people have uprooted themselves and look for work and security in the cities — that's the total population of the U.S. on the move. Shanghai, with 18 million, already bursts at its seams with crowds — polite and smiling, but admittedly overstressed.

What's wrong with the farms?

This prompts the question of what's wrong with the farms. Government policy provides some answers — poor healthcare, housing and schools, lack of electric power, backward agricultural practices and deteriorating productivity. It sounds like our own South before the Tennessee Valley Authority and the modern hydroelectric energy — a big reason the environmentally damaging Three Gorges Dam has its defenders.

I wanted to see a farm, although I was assured it was not a pleasant experience. I worried about being an outside intruder upon China's rural poor. Still, I asked. Finally, I was told to be ready on a Sunday morning for a day at a farm in the Nan Hui District, only an hour south of Shanghai. Some Chinese colleagues and I would be able to tour the farm, talk to the farmer (through a translator) and eat a country meal.

We soon arrived at Fang Xin Yuan farm, which produces kiwis, dates, peaches, etc., on hundreds of acres.

This, it seemed, was no impoverished backcountry failure, but a thriving enterprise that packaged and shipped fruit in containers large and small. This successful venture in sustainable agriculture is also a place for locals and tourists alike to come for crafts, entertainment, edification and meditation. I didn't find the notorious Chinese farm I wanted, but this was a special alternative worthy of a careful look.

It began with an introduction to the farmer, Lu Xiulong. He was a pleasant man in mid 30s. He and his wife met us by the warehouse next to the dining hall. We stopped to examine the large kiwis, larger than ours or ones from New Zealand. We were told kiwis originated in China. Who knew?

Handy gifts for hosts

Here's where some foresight paid off. I had brought old Ventura County fruit box labels as gifts for my Chinese hosts and, when I heard we were going to a farm, I brought one along. My translator, "Jerry," had no trouble communicating that the label I offered as a gift was for shipping lemons, since the "Sespe Brand" label from the 1930s showed the fruit wrapped in paper in front of an orchard in the Ventura County hills.

The Chinese, like us, no longer used detached labels, printing scant information on the sides of shipping boxes. This heirloom label from Ventura County signaled an earlier, more aesthetic era in our own farming history, and this modern Chinese grower, with a fine aesthetic sense himself, seemed indeed to appreciate it.

We began the self-guided tour. (I had no official watchers, though we often had a friend or translator along.)

A wide canal for irrigation and other uses was up the paved path. A sign nearby pointed out the direction of the lobster fishing area, also a floating barge for card playing and chess and a calligraphy area. Was an irrigation channel more utilized for practical and recreational purposes?

Two workers were fertilizing the kiwi trees with shovels of dried manure. The trees still held pendulous fruit. Three others pruned peach trees and left the branches on the ground for rough mulch, I presume. There were hand-carts, bicycle wagons and clay cisterns at many intersections of the rows, and a frequent random row of vegetables along a lane — cucumber, purple beans, a patch of cotton, oranges, which they call tangerines, and other miscellaneous veggies. Crop diversity edged the orchard areas. I noticed no engine-powered machines on this large plot of hand-raised food.

Black swans eat damaging plants

What about chemical controls? Water hyacinths from South Africa invade China's waterways with beautiful, but damaging, plants and flowers. Many on this farm were invaded. What's an orchardist to do?

He encloses the affected water areas with nets and installs beautiful black swans to eat invasive plants, which they eagerly do. They stay in the enclosed area because there is food there. One of the swan's legs is tied back to prevent flight. This may seem cruel, but the swans seem very much at home and a sign at the entrance touts their presence. Here's an environmental cleanup agent that gets top billing. If they had a label, perhaps it would be the Black Swan Brand.

The irregular layout of some trees suggested other practical and aesthetic interests, a fantasy forest with a garden canopy of fruit. Flowering plants filled the spaces between trees in off-season. Sustainable agriculture was the ordinary way to farm before machines and chemicals and intensive single-crop growing made it not so. This modern place uses the best old-fashioned methods.

The day ended with a country meal. In a separate room, the 10 academics in our company feasted on an 18-dish meal of some of the best food I had in China. Where most ceremonial meals were a gustatory challenge, with a bit too many eyes staring back and strange flavors from bitter to bland to bizarre, this country meal had unfamiliar items to be sure, but the tastes were all pleasant: pork thighs, shrimp, river prawns, pond-raised fish, fried sardines, lamb, free-range chicken, corn and taro, bamboo, stuffed cucumbers, unknown greens, pickles, lotus with rice stuffing, then soup, rice and watermelon dessert. My university hosts gifted each one of us with a box of kiwis and dates, which kept the farm lingering many days in flavorful memory.

Perhaps the Sespe Brand label will keep the memory of Ventura County's orchard history alive in southeast China.

— Robert Louis Chianese is a professor of English at California State University, Northridge, a 20-resident of Ventura, and a Fulbright Senior Specialist in American Studies.