As for why I wrote this story, it's because as I've gotten older and traveled more, I've realized that people's living habits vary from place to place, and it's impossible to fully understand each region's economic development. People living in the same era may be leading completely different lives, and people in different places have completely different experiences. Yet no one documents this. A lot of YouTubers make their videos really polished, but the thing is, when they travel, they too fail to capture the essence

Chapter 1 Let's start by introducing our mountain village

Let me talk about my school first. My elementary school was really run-down. When I was little, its wall was only 50 cm tall and made of stone - no concrete at all. Just a stone wall enclosing the entire school. I used to climb over the wall to get into school instead of going through the main entrance. There were two temples and two old houses on campus that looked more like adobe houses from the last century, with most of the building materials being dirt. Our classrooms were made of concrete, but so were the blackboards - just a black painted surface on a concrete wall. All our desks were wooden, and I remember they were full of big holes and bumps.Now I need to talk about my teacher. Back then, one teacher taught you everything. When I was a kid, there weren't many teachers in the countryside. My teacher had a condition where his back was always bent and hunched over, kind of like a turtle. But I really respected him because I knew from a young age that his life wasn't easy and he was also an extremely kind person. Every year when the village held its temple fair, everyone would walk around the village twice, beating drums and blowing trumpets, then head all the way to our school. The village would set up a big pot to cook food for everyone in the village to eat on that day. It was kind of like our own festival. But I knew that the gods worshipped in different regions were different - some people worshipped Jesus, some elephants, some pigs, some the Jade Emperor, some Guan Yu, or some historical figures.I really liked our elementary school, and I also loved the temple fairs here - they were so lively. But when I grew up, I remember we used to secretly throw stones at the school windows when I was about 10 years old. My friends and I would pick up stones from the ground, throw them hard at the school windows, and then run away. The school would come to my house and talk to my parents about what happened. Only as I grew up did I realize that it was really wrong of us to cause trouble in a poor area like ours, since things were already tough here.There's a canal in our village called the Red Flag Canal. How would I describe it? When I play European and American games, I've never seen someone build a canal manually - I rarely see such structures. Maybe it's because you guys don't lack water here. My hometown is pretty dry, and many people died of starvation due to water shortages. So everyone worked together to build this canal, and since then we've had access to water. But there's a lot of discussion online about the background of this canal - because the people where the water source is actually don't want our city to use it for their water supply. Villagers from different places think the water belongs to them, and since we don't have much water resources in the whole area, everyone values it very much. When I was a kid, I used to play there all the time because there would be water cuts every summer when they were repairing the canal. Since it kept breaking down, it needed constant maintenance or expansion. In the summer, the water level would only reach up to my knees, so I used to run there and play. Actually, my parents and my friends' parents didn't want us to play in the canal because if the water level suddenly rose and we didn't know about it, we could drown. Fortunately, I've never died, hahaha😂