How did hiring someone to press a pig image during Chinese New Year become a top trend?

There were only about forty people in the live stream at midnight, but now it's past seven in the morning and the number of viewers has slowly climbed to a little over a hundred. The chat isn't dense, but it's been continuous.

"How many days has An Shen been gone? Has anyone kept track?"

"I did the math. It's been 93 days since I left Xujia Village. The total distance I've covered, including hiking and hitchhiking, is about 2,300 kilometers."

"Two thousand three hundred kilometers, all on foot. He truly measured this country with his own feet."

Xu An wasn't looking at the comments; he was listening to a voice.

Ding.

A very light and crisp metallic clanging sound came from the direction of the bottom of the slope ahead. As it passed through the tea bushes, the sound was somewhat absorbed by the leaves, but the echo was still there, like a needle bouncing on a copper plate.

Then there was another sound.

Ding.

The intervals were about four or five seconds, and the rhythm was so even that it was as if someone was tapping a beat.

Xu An slowed his pace slightly, tilted his head to determine the direction of the sound, and then continued walking forward.

At the bottom of the slope is a three-way intersection. The cement pavement has cracked in several places, and the grass growing out of the cracks has been trampled down, indicating that people are still walking there. To the left of the intersection is a crooked ailanthus tree, which provides a small patch of shade, and a low table is placed in the shade.

The low table wasn't a proper table; it was made from an old door panel placed on two stacks of red bricks. The paint on the door panel was almost completely peeled off, but the wood itself wasn't cracked. It was shiny and had a patina that had been worn down by hands over many years.

There were things on the table.

bowl.

All kinds of bowls.

Enameled bowls, blue and white porcelain bowls, coarse pottery bowls, fine porcelain bowls, bowls with chipped rims, bowls with cracks, bowls broken in half and then pieced back together. Seventeen or eighteen of them, big and small, filled most of the door panel. The cracks in each bowl were inlaid with fine metal staples, which were evenly and neatly made, like another pattern growing out of the bowl's surface.

A piece of cardboard was hanging on the side of the table, with four words written on it in marker.

"Mending bowls and jars."

Xu An stood beside the table and stared for five seconds.

The sound came from less than two meters to his left. On the other side of the ailanthus tree was a low bamboo stool, and an old man was sitting on it.

The old man wasn't very tall; sitting there, he was huddled up, about the size of a stone under a tree root. His short, grayish-white hair looked uneven, as if he had clipped it himself. His skin was a dark purple, the kind of tan that comes from decades of exposure to the elements.

In front of him was a small wooden workbench with half a bowl clamped between it. The bowl was white porcelain and had been broken in the middle but had been put back together. The crack was marked with equidistant points in pencil, each point being the position of a metal staple.

The old man held a small copper hammer, barely thicker than a chopstick, in his right hand, and used a thin iron awl in his left hand to hold the end of a rivet that was only half-embedded in the bowl. He then raised the copper hammer and gently tapped the top of the rivet.

Ding.

The staples were pushed half a millimeter deeper into the bowl, fitting together perfectly.

Xu An squatted down.

The old man glanced at him from above the bowl and then looked away, his hands continuing their work.

"What are you looking at?"

"Watching you work."

"There's nothing to see, they don't do any magic tricks."

The number of viewers in the live stream was quietly increasing: 120, 150, 180. The chat was buzzing.

"Mending bowls? I've only ever seen this craft in documentaries. I never imagined anyone would still be doing it now."

"Look closely at the size of that rivet; it's smaller than half a grain of rice. How did he manage to insert it so precisely? His fingers must be incredibly steady."

"The angle of the calming squat is amazing; the footage shows the entire process of inserting the staples into the bowl."

Xu An was indeed looking at the old man's hands.

Those hands were like those of many old people he had seen along the way—large knuckles, rough skin, and black grime that couldn't be washed off under the nails. But when they moved, they were so steady that they didn't look like someone in their seventies. The force with which the copper hammer fell was always the same, as if a machine was operating it, but with an arc that a machine couldn't possibly have. Each hammer blow followed the curve of the bowl's wall.

Three minutes later, the old man hammered the last rivet into place. He took the bowl off the worktable, held it up to his eyes and turned it around in the light, squinting as he checked the depth of each rivet and whether there were any extra cracks on the surface of the bowl.

"Uncle, whose bowl is this?"

The old man placed the bowl on the door panel and pushed it into the pile that had already been repaired.

"Old Chen's wife from Wujiabazi slipped and fell while washing dishes the day before yesterday. When she came to me with the broken bowl in her arms, she cried like someone had died. It was just a bowl."

After he finished speaking, he took out another bowl from a tin box under the worktable. This bowl was much larger than the previous one and was a soup bowl. There were three cracks on the bowl that stretched from the rim to the bottom, but they were not completely broken and were still connected by a layer of porcelain.

"It's just a bowl, is it worth it?" Xu An asked.

The old man placed the soup bowl on the worktable and began drawing the nail holes with a pencil, without even looking up.

"You young man don't understand. Bowls aren't valuable in themselves, but they are valuable in the heart. A bowl that has been used for twenty or thirty years feels different to the touch than a new bowl, and the rice served in it is also different. If an old woman's bowl breaks and you buy her a new one, she won't accept it. She'll keep the old bowl. That bowl has been in her husband's hand, her son's hand, and her grandson's hand. Replacing the bowl is like replacing the hands of the whole family, and she won't accept that."

The number of viewers in the live stream exceeded 300, and the chat was filled with comments.

"This old man really knows how to speak. The bowl may not be worth much, but the sentiment behind it is. I have to screenshot this and post it on my WeChat Moments."

"Changing a bowl is like changing the hands of a whole family; God, that's a really insightful comment."

"An Shen, could you help him out? There are very few people in all of China who know this kind of skill."

Xu An did want to help, but he didn't dare to touch it carelessly. The precision required for mending bowls was too high; if the hammer was off by even half a millimeter, the bowl might break again. He did what he could, helping the old man take the tools out of the tin box one by one, while wrapping the repaired bowls on the door panel one by one in a clean old cloth and stacking them into the bamboo basket next to him.

He paused for a moment when he got to the fourth bowl.

This bowl is different from the others. The other bowls are all ordinary coarse porcelain bowls, but this bowl has a much finer porcelain. It is a blue and white porcelain bowl with very thin walls. A plum blossom is painted on the bowl. The painting is not very exquisite, but it is obviously hand-painted rather than printed. The plum blossom branch extends from the rim of the bowl to the bottom, where it forms a small circle.

There are two old cracks on the bowl, which have been repaired. The rust on the rivets blends with the blue and white porcelain on the bowl, indicating that it was repaired several years ago.

Xu An turned the bowl over and looked at the bottom.

A string of tiny numbers is engraved in the middle of the glaze on the bottom of the bowl. They are so small that they are almost invisible unless you look closely. They are six digits, separated by a small dot.

His finger hovered over the string of numbers for two seconds.

coordinate.

The format is exactly the same as the one in my father's notebook.

He didn't say anything, turned the bowl over so it was facing up, put it in the bamboo basket, and wrapped it in cloth.

"Uncle, who brought this blue-and-white porcelain bowl to be repaired?"

The old man used an iron spatula to test the depth of the crack in the soup bowl, then looked up at him, his gaze lingering on the bowl for a moment.

"I can't quite remember. It's been many years, ten or eleven. A woman brought it over. She's the kind of person who doesn't say anything. She just put the bowl down and left without saying when she was going to take it. She hasn't come to pick it up yet."

"Not going to say anything?"

"Well, he didn't say a word the whole time. He just put the bowl on the table, pointed to the crack, gestured that he wanted to fix it, left five yuan, and left. I thought it was strange at the time. This bowl was obviously not local porcelain. Why would he bring it to this remote corner to get it repaired?"

Xu An's throat moved slightly.

"Is she wearing anything on her hands?"

The old man thought for a while.

"You're putting me in a difficult position. This happened more than ten years ago. Let me think about it."

He put down the copper hammer, wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and stared at the branches of the Chinese toon tree for five or six seconds.

"It seemed like there was a red string wrapped around her wrist. I thought to myself, this woman is dressed simply, but the string on her wrist is quite bright."

The regular viewers in the live stream reacted quickly.

"Red string".

"It's that red string again, An Shen, you didn't run into it again, did you?"

"From the jelly-making lady to Granny Wu, to the herbal tea stall, and even to the old ladies at the town market, the person who always appears with the red string is the same person."

Xu An didn't read the comments. He squatted down next to the bamboo basket, pressed down the cloth on the blue and white porcelain bowl to make sure it wouldn't get damaged, then stood up and handed the water bottle to the old man from his canvas bag.

"Uncle, have some water. I'll wrap up the rest of the bowls for you."

The old man took the water bottle, unscrewed it, took a big gulp, smacked his lips twice, and handed the bottle back to him.

"You're quite capable, and you don't act rashly. Where did you learn that?"

"It was earned through walking."

The old man chuckled in agreement.

After Xu An finished wrapping up all the remaining bowls, he helped the old man organize the scattered parts on the workbench. The metal staples were sorted into three sizes and put in a cigarette box. The iron shovel and copper hammer were cleaned and put back into the tool bag. The diamond drill bit was wrapped in oilcloth and placed at the bottom of the box.

While tidying up, he noticed an old note stuck to the inside of the box lid. There was a line of writing on the note in pencil, the handwriting was neat but some parts were stained with oil and had become dark.

"He has been mending bowls for 41 years, repairing 3,200 bowls, 870 jars, and 412 basins."

Three thousand two hundred bowls.

Xu An stared at the number without saying a word.

The old man had already started working on the soup bowl, and the rhythmic clanging of his copper hammer rang out again.

"Uncle, how many villages are you visiting?"

"There used to be more, fifteen or sixteen, but now there are only seven left. We rotate through each village once a week. We spend a day in each village, take out the bowls and jars we've collected, repair them, and then leave. The next day we go to the next village."

"Has this been how you've lived for forty-one years?"

The old man's copper hammer paused for a moment, then fell again.

"My dad passed the business down to me for forty years, and I've been doing it for forty-one years without anyone taking over. My son works in renovations in Kunming. If you ask him to come back and do this, he'd laugh himself to death. He doesn't even earn enough to buy a pack of cigarettes a day."

He said this in a tone similar to saying the weather was nice today. Forty-one years were condensed into one sentence, without complaint or regret, simply stating a fact.

Once the number of viewers in the live stream exceeded 400, the sentiment in the chat began to change.