"Oh! You eat it raw? Is it good?" Zhou Mengdie asked in surprise.

"It's not bad, a little sweet. There are also wild fruits in the mountains, like strawberries, that are delicious—even sweeter than regular strawberries," Yi Anguo said. "The mountains also have wild persimmons, wild grapes, wild hawthorns, and wild chestnuts. When the spring thunderstorms rolled in, we could find lots of wild mushrooms and matsutake. They're incredible in noodle soup, and even better stir-fried with meat.

"Unfortunately, my family was poor when I was a child, so we couldn't afford meat. If we were lucky, we'd catch a wild rabbit or pheasant in the mountains. Sometimes, we'd even come across a wild goat. But back then, the fields and small ditches around our house were full of fish we could catch, like loaches and eels. However, the adults never liked it when we brought fish home. Do you know why?"

"Why not?" Zhou Mengdie asked, her curiosity piqued. "You said your family was too poor to buy meat. If you could catch fish, why wouldn't your parents be happy? Fish is still meat, after all!"

"Because it used up so much oil!" Yi Anguo said, unable to stop himself from laughing. "The most common fish we could catch in the streams by the fields was crucian carp. The wild ones weren't very big and were full of bones, so you had to deep-fry them in oil for them to taste good. If you boiled them, the bones were a nightmare, and they didn't taste good at all. It was easy for a kid to get one stuck in their throat. That was one reason the adults didn't like us catching fish. The other was that it was simply dangerous for kids to be playing in the water.

"When I was young, people in the village rarely bought fish. If you wanted to eat fish, you just went to the river and caught them yourself. During planting season, when the fields were being tilled, you could just walk behind the plow and pick them up. Fish were truly abundant back then. You could block off a section of a small ditch at the edge of a field, drain the water, and find it teeming with them.

"Catching them was especially easy in the summer. You could take a flashlight or a hurricane lamp, grab a pair of tongs, and head out to the paddy fields at night. It wasn't unusual to come back with a whole bucket of loaches and eels in a single evening. Hardly anyone ever caught fish to sell. Back in those days, they weren't worth much and wouldn't bring in more than a few coins. People generally just caught enough for themselves. If you caught too many to eat, you'd share them with your neighbors, uncles, and cousins.

"It wasn't just fish, either. I remember one year my family grew some watermelons and had a huge harvest. Since we couldn't possibly eat them all, we just gave them away to the other villagers, including my uncles and cousins. We never sold a single one. There was no point in trying to sell them. Watermelons weren't worth much, and they were incredibly heavy. To take them to town, you'd have to hire a hand-tractor, which meant paying for the transport and treating the driver to a meal. A single trip wouldn't hold that many melons anyway. The price per pound for watermelon was low, but the transportation costs weren't cheap! To treat the driver, you'd have to buy at least a pound of meat, and you were expected to give him a pack of cigarettes, too. By the time you added it all up, the money you made from selling the watermelons might not even cover the cost of the transport, the meal, and the cigarettes. So, taking them to town to sell was a losing proposition."

Yi Anguo was suddenly flooded with memories of his hometown and his childhood. It had been a hard life, certainly not an affluent one, but it had been happy. He remembered herding cattle in the mountains, chopping firewood, catching rabbits and pheasants, climbing trees to raid birds' nests, and stealing fruit from the neighbors' gardens. He recalled the times he'd been so busy playing that he'd lost the cattle, forcing his whole family and the other villagers to search for the animals deep into the night. He remembered the mischief that ended with his parents chasing him down for a beating.

Looking back, those memories were unforgettable. He missed that life—so unbridled, free from worries and pressure. His parents were still alive and healthy then, and life was ordinary but happy. Sometimes, happiness is incredibly simple. It doesn't need to be complicated, and it certainly doesn't require great wealth.

Unfortunately, people today are often bound by money, becoming its slaves. Their lives revolve around it, and they lose their personal freedom, trapped by their finances. To earn a living, they leave their homes and families, moving thousands of miles away. They have no time to visit their parents, nor can they often see their own spouses and children. Every trip home costs a small fortune in travel and other expenses, so many find it too impractical and return as little as possible. Aside from the New Year, they generally won't go home unless there's a major family emergency.

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