Yan Geling: The other shore

Once I was traveling from San Francisco to Beijing on an ANA plane because the ANA ticket was the most discounted. The disadvantage is to stay at Narita Airport in Japan for four hours. On a plane from Japan to Beijing, it was more than 6 p.m. I noticed that the neighbor was a Chinese boy, twenty-four or five years old, with dark skin from ocean islanders, very thin and very strong. His appearance does not make me mistake him for being part of a Chinese tour group full of cabins.

After sitting down for more than ten minutes, he took a stack of tattered tickets from his pocket and was nailed together by staples.

He asked me how the plane from Beijing to Changsha should change.

I asked him, who owns all this ticket?

He was alone.

Why are there so many tickets?

Because from the island where he fished to Japan, he had to switch planes several times.

I took a closer look at the tickets that had been rubbed to the point of being rubbed, and I could probably see his tortuous voyage: the first stop was Somowa, the second stop was Hawaii, the third stop was Okinawa, the fourth stop was Nagoya, and the fifth stop was Narita.

I wondered why an air trip was cut into bars and sections.

He smiled and said, "Because this is the cheapest ticket." The boss didn't know how to make it up, and there were two that he didn't pay for. ”

His smile touched me, it was the laugh of a country boy. A country boy who is accustomed to eating one kind of bitterness, and sees eating another new kind of suffering as a country boy who sees the world, his eyes are almost completely closed when he laughs, and his mouth is grinning very widely, and it can be imagined that no matter how bitter he is, he will not lose his smile, and he will not be naughty.

I told him not to worry, I would show him the way when I got to Beijing, and it would certainly be much easier than the first five airports where the language was not spoken.

After a few minutes of chatting, I learned that there was such a small group of compatriots who were exported from abroad to some deserted islands in the Pacific Ocean as fishermen.

I asked him if he could tell me how much money he made each month.

He didn't know that in the West it was not allowed to inquire about other people's income, so he cheerfully told me that he was two hundred dollars a month, but he had to pay for his own meals. He also told me that these fishing and hunting companies are Taiwanese, and that the Taiwanese bosses spend very little money to export them in batches. But their salaries, no matter how small, were nine hundred dollars, and after a drawdown from the middle layers of labor export agencies, they were only two hundred dollars in the hands of each laborer.

I asked him if the labor intensity was very high.

He just told me plainly that I would drift for many days as soon as I went to sea. Then he told me that fishing is day and night, that I can't sleep to death at any time, and that I have to start a net as soon as I talk about it. Good weather is nothing, when the storm comes, you can't eat or sleep. Once, at night, the wind and rain were so strong that the waves almost overturned the boat, and when the wind and waves stopped, it was dawn, and I counted the people on the boat and found that there were two less.

"Where did it go?" I asked stupidly.

"Let the waves wash into the sea." He was still bland, only slightly lowered.

The two men buried in the ocean were his countrymen, who had been recruited with him, signed forms together, and were companions who had made a three-year contract. The last thing he could let go of was that when the boat was about to tip over, he heard the cries of his middle-aged companion. There was a deafening sound on all sides, and he suspected that he had heard wrongly, so he did not go to save him. Later, he thought back again and again, thinking that it was Uncle Mi's cry for help—he called the man who was more than ten years older than him and who was his elder everywhere.

That's three years.

Based on his account, I envisioned a Chinese fishing village at the end of the world, listening to Chinese music, watching Chinese DVDs, and above the village, chinese cooking smoke was wafting, and that alone was enough for them to be bitter and happy.

As for the days outside of fishing, how do you live?

He smiled haughtily and said that he would splurge on it occasionally.

How to splurge?

Go to the small restaurant and drink a beer.

This is his profligacy.

Chinese the small restaurant opened?

Of course!

I listened to his story and felt that the oppression of fellow citizens was the darkest part of the story. Risking your life, leaving your hometown to go fishing, nine hundred dollars is already pitifully small, and you have to be exploited layer by layer? Those who are willing to take offenses against their compatriots are proud to preach that their labor is not worth much, time is not worth it, and life is not worth anything, and they will say generously at every turn: "Some people in China are people!" ”

Before the plane landed, I asked him if the money he had bought for his life would come in handy in his new life when he returned home.

He answered me almost smugly: The money is enough to buy a small agricultural machine. In the future, he only needs to rent agricultural machinery, so he can barely make a living, and he does not need to work in the fields all year round like other village neighbors.

Agricultural machinery is old, broken?

Then you can find a way to go abroad to fish.

Aren't you afraid of being swept away by the waves?

unafraid!

At the Beijing airport, I took him to the transfer point and said goodbye to him. By all accounts, he took a boat from that island to Somowa and all the way to Beijing, for four or five days on the road, without sleeping, but he was in great spirits. After three years in the bitter sea, the sense of luck that he finally landed on the shore lit up in his eyes.

My compatriots, with just a little bit, can make him happy and make him feel that he is luckier than others. As a survivor, he seems to have carried the luck of the uncle who did not survive. Yet my fellow citizens of all generations often do not get even the little bit that makes them feel lucky.