The night out there in the sea isn't as quiet as it is on land as many from the village are out fighting for their livelihood. These are small boats that sail out in the near by water to fish for squids in the middle of the night. They use lures and rods, not nets, and catch more than a hundred squids on a regular night.
How do I know this?
“One, two, three, four, five.... he says he will be the fifth light from the right..."
A middle school kid sat by the shore as I took photos of the stars, watching his father at work out in the ocean and awaits for his return. His father is the only kin his got.
It was a night of the stars but the sky wasn't in the best condition. I stopped shooting and got out a blanket and laid on the ground to just gaze at the stars. The kid, who was playing with hermit crabs followed suit and laid down while using his flip flops as his pillow. And the two of us who don't know each other and barely saw each other's face in the dark chatted for the next two hours.
So I will address him as Zhuang as that's his last name. Zhuang is a middle school boy who goes to the school in town. He used to live in another town called Tai-Yuan located in the mountains as opposed to being a coastal town like this one. Zhuang then told me that he used to hike into the mountains, up to 1.5 hours in, by himself to gather wild vegetables and hunt for meat.
"A kid wanders into the mountain by himself and hunts?"
I couldn't quite believe him, so I asked leading questions for him to complete his story. Zhuang then told me which plants are edible, how to set up traps for small animals, how to hunt snakes and how he once dragged a 200kg wild boar that he killed with a trap, by himself, back to his home from the mountain. His story seems to be quite complete and sounded like it's told by a first person point of view. I have absolutely no right to doubt him being someone who knows absolutely nothing about the nature.
Then a meteor shoots by and I gasped at its beauty. He did as well. Then I asked him if he knew what stars are. He doesn't. So I explained that stars are all Suns like the one that we have, but they are very very far away and therefore very small, and judging by how small they seem and how many there are, it shows how small we are on earth.
May be that knowledge blew his mind away, but his description of his survival skills and knowledge about his world is something that I will never be able to match. I am blown away by him.
"Why not just buy food from the market?" I asked.
"It's too expensive!" He said.
That's what he kept saying every time I asked about using money in exchange for food because it's more convenient and sounds like a hack a lot less trouble to me. However after hearing about how he and his father lives on wild resources, it taught me something that I would otherwise have never thought about. Money isn't the only measure in value. We've lived in the urban for so long that we all depend on money to exchange for resources. Without money, it's crippling. To these folks who don't make much money, we can probably say they are poor. However they really aren't poor. They don't make much money because there isn't many jobs here, therefore money is something that is hard to make, and therefore anything that requires money will be expensive to them. But not hunted meat and picked wild vegetables. The labor and time and risk involved in harvesting from the nature, to them, is more affordable than to make money. To them, they are wealthy not because of how much dollars they have, but their strength, knowledge and skills that they survive on. I always think that the man with the most money with the least skill will be the most worthless person on earth should the entire economy go under. I am absolutely impressed by these simple yet sophisticated folks. If there are human survivors after an apocalypse, they deserve every right to be them.
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