Jason | Sea

In July, Dahai opened a restaurant in a village near the Black Dragon River. Few people passed by that road, so most of the customers were his friends.

Although he has not been in Dali for a long time, he has made more friends than I do. He likes to be lively and loves to cook for friends. People like him not because he is good at socializing and he doesn't talk much, but because he is good at both literature and martial arts, has a wide range of hobbies, is knowledgeable, and treats people sincerely. The various life skills and interests he possesses are the only ones that are the most diverse among the people I know. Or to say, he is rich and down-to-earth, the kind of person who can take root wherever he goes.

For example, when opening a restaurant: in the early stage, I found a place, cleaned up the abandoned yard, bought grass seeds to grow the lawn, planted vegetables and spices, and transplanted a big tree; I designed the restaurant layout and decoration plan by myself; I laid out the water and electricity lines, designed the table by myself, welded the table brackets and bought the table tops. Many people have decorated yards and restaurants, and they have undertaken some of the work links. Dahai, except for hiring a few workers to help with some auxiliary work to speed up the progress, did most of it by himself, which is his accumulation of many years of life.

When most people knew him, he was already a mature man with many amazing skills. But I, by chance, knew him when he was still a young man. Over the past twenty years, our lives have been constantly intertwined, so I have seen some of his experiences and recorded them down.

Twenty years ago, in 2004, on Changle Road in Shanghai, there was an outdoor store on the street with two small storefronts called "Wildfire". In the second-floor warehouse behind the house, Xiaohua and I were moving a TV. The old-fashioned 40-inch TV was very heavy and large, and the narrow and steep stairs of the old house in Shanghai made it even more difficult to move. The two of us were considered to have some strength among ordinary people, but we were also exhausted and were in a dilemma on the stairs. At this time, a young man came in. He was not tall but strong. He said, "Let me try." He spread his arms, held the TV, and went upstairs. I was a little stunned. This young man was Dahai. This was my first impression of him, and it has always remained in my memory.

In 2004, he was 21 and I was 28. At that age, we were two generations apart. He came to Shanghai from a construction site in Beijing to make a living. He had been working as a barber for a year. He had to sell recharge cards to customers in that industry, and with his personality, he couldn't do it. He was sending his girlfriend to work and saw our store recruiting when he passed by. He came in to try and was accepted. But I only found out about this many years later when I chatted with him. Three years before we met (2001), China joined the WTO. Various new industries grew wildly and there was a shortage of people everywhere. It was good to find people, no matter where they came from. It was only in recent years that I realized the huge impact of the WTO, a big background of the times, on the lives of ordinary people.

Two years ago, I opened this outdoor goods store with a few friends from the outdoor club because of our hobbies. Everyone else had a job, but Xiaohua quit to run the store. At that time, outdoor hiking, camping, and backpacking abroad (mostly Southeast Asian countries because of economic ability) were fashionable. The Internet had just started to rise, mainly portal websites and BBS forums. Young people no longer just go to work and only know colleagues and classmates. They have begun to join stranger interest groups through forums, go to the mountains, Yunnan, Tibet, and even travel abroad together. Opening a small store after work has also become the dream of some people.

When I met Dahai, I didn't have a formal job and was idle in Shanghai, relying on the income from the store to support my life. Every day, I lived in my residence on Xiangyang South Road, or went to the store on Changle Road to help out, and on the way home, I went to the Buna Coffee House on Xinle Road to kill time. Before that, I worked as a financial manager in an advertising company, and my income was quite good. However, because I couldn't handle my relationship problems, I went on a "escape trip" of more than four months from Chengdu to Tibet, Nepal to India, and I just came back not long ago. That year, Nepal opened up free visas to China for the first time, and you can apply for it in Lhasa. A year before that (2002), China issued passports for individual self-guided travel for the first time.

In addition to the tired life state, plus the influence of what I saw during the trip, I had no intention of continuing to work after returning. I was idle without a direction. With nothing to do, I thought of opening an online store and selling the outdoor equipment in the store online. At that time, Taobao had just been established for less than a year and no one paid attention to it. eBay was still the main market. I needed a helper to work with me, and I thought of Dahai. I thought he was suitable, so I asked Xiaohua to ask him to run the online store.

To run an online store, you need to use a computer and do data statistics. Dahai didn’t use computers much before, and only played games in Internet cafes. He was not good at studying. After graduating from junior high school at the age of 17, he went to a farm in Daxing’anling in Northeast China to farm because his second sister married there. Many people I know are very smart, but they are not good at studying, such as Xiaojing, Chengchang, and Hechen. Maybe studying is just one of the skills that they happen to be not good at. However, for things that interest them, they learn quickly and are not easily constrained by the idea of ​​rules and regulations.

Dahai learned computer very quickly. He was very proficient in product development and Excel spreadsheets and became a capable assistant. Less than half a year later, he also witnessed the emergence and rise of Taobao. We gave up eBay and switched to Taobao.

Looking back, starting from my life in Shanghai, the sea gradually took the lead in my life. The experiences I had when I was younger were also very important, such as the two years I worked on the farm in Greater Khingan Range.

The farm is in the mountains of the northeast, close to the Russian border. There are some of Dahai's relatives from Anhui who have been reclaiming wasteland and farming there for decades since the early 1960s. Judging from the age, it may be caused by the famine after the Great Leap Forward. Dahai said that the land in his hometown in Anhui is barren, there is little land, and people can't get enough to eat. When everyone came to the northeast, they cut trees and reclaimed wasteland. The land was fertile and they were very active. They said that the betrothal gifts for their partners were calculated by mu (15 mu). In addition to farming, they also went to the forest to set traps and hunt in winter, planted fungus in the mountains, and cut trees. It was very cold in winter. They slept in a temporary and simple wooden house. At night, they had to light a fire in the large diesel barrel in the house to keep warm. Dahai told a story: "One night, I woke up from the cold in the middle of the night. I thought the person who was responsible for adding firewood that night was negligent, but I saw a fire in the iron barrel again. I couldn't figure it out, so I got up and saw that the person had lit a candle inside. Everyone was so angry that they beat him up."

I once drove with him from Hainan to Yichun in Northeast China in 2018, and also went to a farm in Daxing'anling, and stayed at a relative's house for a few days. The once bustling farm has few families left as mechanized farming has taken over. People only go there during the sowing and harvesting seasons, and usually live in the city.

In those years, farming didn't bring much money, so relatives in the northeast went out to work, and he followed his second brother to the northwest to dig for gold. In those days, gold mines were like coal mines. If you wanted to have a place, you had to rely on gangs, violence, and human life was worthless. The leader didn't do well and didn't make any money, so everyone dispersed. Not making any money, in order to continue to make a living, he went to Beijing to work on a construction site. In two years, he did all kinds of hard and technical work, including mud, welding, and water and electricity.

Since I started working in Shanghai, I have been looking for jobs on my own. At least the job at the outdoor store was found by Dahai himself. I also go hiking, camping, and ride a bicycle to complete the 421-kilometer Shanghai to Huangshan self-driving tour. I met young people from different outdoor clubs. He is a friend he found outside, not from our outdoor club.

In 2008, when the Wenchuan earthquake occurred, Dahai went to the disaster area at the first time to help with rescue, transportation, and haircuts for the survivors. I only found out about this afterwards, which surprised me. I am a person who cannot deeply empathize with disasters in distant places. This year, not long after he came back from Wenchuan, he asked me to meet. At that time, he was no longer working in the outdoor store, and because of very accidental factors, I went to an advertising company to do outsourced IT for two years, and we rarely contacted each other. He talked about his relationship status, which was about the dilemma between traditional love ethics and the yearning for a free life. As a person who has been trying to break free from the shackles and seek freedom, I gave encouragement to "do what you really want."

Many people will have this dilemma, and friends will have such chats, and I didn't take it seriously. About a few days later, I received a strange call saying, "Dahai left yesterday, I want to meet you to ask something." So we met at Buna Cafe, and while waiting for coffee, she said, "Dahai left, and said that after talking to Jason, he decided to leave Shanghai. I want to know what you said to him?", "...". I have forgotten my answer, but it must have been very embarrassing. Two years later, Dahai and I met again, talked about this matter, and complained that he used me as a shield, and he just smiled foolishly.

Two years later, in 2010, when I saw him again, he was already on Weizhou Island, on a piece of wasteland next to Sunrise Beach, and had built a homestay called "Qiqi's Dragon Fruit Garden". He was wearing a T-shirt, beach pants, and slippers. He had become darker and stronger, but he still swayed when he walked. He pointed out different places to me, and told me what they were like before and how they were transformed. This place was far away from the town on the island, and the electricity was sometimes available, so he set up a diesel generator, and when the homestay lost power, the generator would roar.

He opened an inn here because he left Shanghai and wandered to Weizhou Island. He met a girl from Chongqing who was also traveling there. Soon they decided to open an inn and live here together. The two rented a piece of wasteland and a dragon fruit orchard by the sea and started construction. The next year, they opened a dessert shop and a restaurant in the only town on the island. These were the first time they did it, the first time they started their own business, but they were all well-organized and solid. There were not enough people, so the eldest sister and niece came to help. In the meantime, their son was born.

At that time, I was working as an outsourced IT in an advertising company. I worked there for five years, which was the longest job I had ever worked in. Although the income was not high, I posted an ad online to hire an outsourced IT person named David. He was a freelancer with more solid skills than me and often went to work as my stand-in, so I was free and could stay in that company. I could support myself and take vacations as I pleased. There was nothing to complain about in my life. I learned to swim in the sea for the first time in Weizhou Island. Later, I could shuttle through the roaring and rolling waves, snorkel in the fluorescent sea every night, and follow the sea to buy seafood on fishing boats for the first time. I ate a lot of seafood and ate fresh and delicious red dragon fruit for the first time.

Two years later, in 2012, by chance, I started living in Dali and opened a late-night canteen. The following year, Dahai ended his life on Weizhou Island and came to Dali alone, not knowing where to go next and whether to stay in Dali. It was winter and a bit cold at that time. He helped me decorate the "happy" yard, and I learned some water and electricity installation from him, which I often used later. At that time, he might stay and we would open a store together.

About a month later, one day he said, "I still like the beach, it's too cold here," and left Dali. He went to Houhai Village in Sanya, where he opened the first foreign restaurant in Houhai Village, "Sasa's Sea". At that time, Houhai was still a natural village without business. The landlord even thought that he was young and reckless, and advised him to think carefully and not be too hasty, otherwise there would be no business at all. However, he still used the only borrowed money to start a seafood restaurant in earnest. With the rapid development of the domestic economy and the rise of tourism and surfing in Houhai, the business gradually improved, and three stores were opened in a few years. It was very prosperous, and several sisters and family members were called to help, dozens of them. At that time, although he was the youngest brother in the family, I went there several times and lived there for a month or two. It can be seen that he has become the head of this big family. In 2019, I went to Houhai Village from Shanghai to see He Chen. At that time, Dahai took him in to work and live there, and made some records. (Click "Read original text" at the end of the article to visit)

When Dahai was in Houhai, I went there twice because I followed him and took a fishing boat to the Xisha Islands. They were fishing or had other tasks. I was not very interested in fishing at sea. I just took a boat to experience the days and nights and life at sea, watching flying fish gliding on the water and a large number of dolphins chasing nearby. Mr. Yang, the ship owner who entrusted Dahai to work with the fishing boat, trusted him very much. He probably felt that Dahai was not only capable and down-to-earth, but also a reliable person.

In the past eight or nine years, he has also come to Dali one after another. After 2021, he rented a piece of land and started to build his farm from scratch, planning to take root in Dali: Houhai Village has been extremely commercialized, not suitable for normal business, and even less suitable for life. From land reclamation to building fences and walls, planting lawns, buying materials to build irrigation systems, building houses, learning to age beef, looking for the best beef ingredients, and opening "Cangshanlu Farm". During this period, he met his current girlfriend Chen Wei when he went to a paddleboarding activity with us. I have also quit the restaurant. At first, I led hikes by myself as a way to find something to do to pass the time. Later, with the rise of study tours during the new crown, I unknowingly turned outdoor travel experience into a new job, and old partners gradually joined.

In 2023, Dali implemented a vigorous "returning forests to farmland" policy under strict supervision. Like many farms, Dahai's years of hard work were in vain. The result of this policy on most farms is that flowers and grass are turned into corn fields. If the country's major policies are realistic, they can benefit most people. If they are one-size-fits-all and divorced from reality, a group of people will become victims. Both exist in the period we have experienced together.

A year later, in 2024, Dahai saw a house built by a local. It was a very unique design in Dali, with a curved staircase winding up outside the main building. He spent two or three months to complete the decoration and opened a restaurant, still named "Cangshanlu". He was always able to face changes, adapt quickly and take root quickly with resilience.

I sometimes think that it is hard to define the dishes in his restaurant. They seem to be a fusion of his life experiences, from Northeast China to Shanghai, from Weizhou Island to Chongqing, from Hainan Island to overseas travels. It is neither here nor there. He picked out some of what he saw and cooked it according to his own understanding. There is no culinary framework, nor the constraints of authenticity. He just learns and absorbs by intuition, just like his life.

Twenty years ago, when we met, Dahai was still a junior and a colleague. As we grew older, we became friends. In some ways, he was probably more mature and experienced, although in terms of personality, he seemed to have always been the same, still that young boy.