In early 2020 when teaching in Hangzhou, China, I traveled to Japan and got stranded for the entire year due to the pandemic. I was lucky to be given the perfect refuge, a renovated traditional house in the quiet village of Sonobe south of Kyoto. Here I lived and worked while teaching my Chinese students at Olive Tree International Academy remotely. While waiting for flights to resume and expired documents to be updated so I could return to China, I witnessed the entire cycle of growing and harvesting rice in the fields below the mountain . I began to document the place on daily walks, first with photography and later with black ink and watercolor. During this period, I also found myself drawn to Japanese food package design and made collages with fragments of food wrappers and text of Japanese writing - Kanji (the Chinese characters), and the syllabary alphabets of Hiragana and Katakana.