In early August, the cotton and rice in my hometown came to ripen. Early in the morning, the neighbors were already in the fields harvesting wheat and cotton. The farmland in my hometown is not large and the population is large. Every year, after paying the grain tax, the rice produced in the fields is barely enough for each household to have enough to eat. To make a good living, they mainly rely on side jobs.

After Grandpa Xia made egg tea for everyone, he said, "Have a bowl of egg tea to fill your stomachs first, then go to the dock for breakfast."

Li Chunmei waited for the egg tea to cool down slightly before drinking it in one gulp. "Mom and Dad, aren't you coming with us to the dock for breakfast?"

"No, your uncle told your mom and me the day before yesterday that we would go help him harvest cotton today."

Xia Jianguo asked, "Do you need us to stay and help?"

“I can too,” Wang Aimin added.

Except for Xia Minmin, who remained silent, everyone was very enthusiastic about helping to pick cotton. It's common for families to help each other during the busy farming season. Xia's maternal grandparents, who weren't planting rice or cotton, were quite free, and relatives and friends often asked them for help.

Grandma Xia made the final decision, "You don't need to help. Aimin rarely comes here, so you should treat him well."

Li Zhonghua did not refute, "Alright, Mom and Dad, we're going to the county town tomorrow at noon to take the train to Chang'an. Please arrange things at home."

Grandma Xia said impatiently, "This isn't our first time traveling. You don't need to keep telling us these things. We're not seventy or eighty years old and don't know anything."

Grandma Xia ignored Li Zhonghua and folded up the bowl of egg tea she had finished drinking before walking to the backyard.

Xia's grandfather said, "You should go have breakfast quickly, it will be even hotter if you go any later. You won't be having lunch at home, will you?"

"We won't eat at home; I'll take Aimin out for river duck for lunch," Li Zhonghua said.

As the name suggests, the pier breakfast is a breakfast restaurant located on the riverside pier, about five kilometers downstream from the riverbank. The river is a tributary of the Yangtze River and has been a major waterway since ancient times. My grandfather Xia told me that during the dredging, many people dug up copper coins in the river, but now that the road has been built, the waterway is no longer usable.

Fishermen were fishing in small boats on the river, and the calls of wild ducks came from the lush reeds along the riverbank. In the height of summer, a gentle breeze caressed my face by the river, and my mood became wonderful.

Li Zhonghua pointed to the bustling shop not far away, "Aimin, the dockside breakfast restaurant. I remember when I was young, working on the ship, the breakfast I looked forward to most every time I went out to sea and returned was here."

The pier breakfast shop is divided into two areas: an outdoor area and an indoor area. In the summer, people like to sit outdoors on the drying ground to eat breakfast, where there is a breeze and the sound of flowing water.

Most of the people having breakfast knew Li Zhonghua and kept greeting him. The owner of the breakfast shop at the dock also came out to greet him when he saw that it was Li Zhonghua.

The two men shook hands and talked. "Zhonghua, it's been a long time. I heard from your junior brother that you've made a fortune in Shenzhen."

"No, I just make a little money, nothing compared to your comfortable life. I brought my family here for breakfast today. The breakfast I miss most in Shenzhen is yours!"

"Don't be shy with me today, it's on me."

"No, no, there are so many of us, how can I possibly accept this?"

"You..." The owner of the breakfast shop at the dock hadn't finished speaking when his wife coughed lightly, "You're still so polite!"

After ordering, the group sat down at two square tables pushed together on the outdoor drying ground.

Li Qing muttered under her breath, "The boss's wife is really something. She coughed and the boss took back everything he said."

While rinsing the chopsticks with tea, Sun Erni said, "It's not her fault. The boss often treats people to breakfast and then pays on credit. The boss's wife asked him to collect the money, but he never got a penny back. The couple almost got divorced over this. Later, the boss changed his ways."

Xia Minmin understood; there was still hope for this boss.

Not long after the wontons and rice noodles were served, the sugar-coated fried dough and scallion pancakes were also served. Following Li Zhonghua's instructions, everyone soaked the scallion pancakes in the soup. The scallion pancakes absorbed the soup and were soft and melted in the mouth when you took a bite.

"Brother Wang, we'll take you to see our unique hanging coffin burial site later," Li Chunmei said.

"I heard it has a history of over a thousand years," Sun Erni said.

“I also heard from others that there were burial objects in the coffin, which were supposedly taken away. I went up there with my sister when I was a child,” Li Qing said.

Xia Minmin had heard her family talk about hanging coffins since she was a child, but she had never seen them in person. Later, she learned about hanging coffin burials from a documentary, which are mostly found in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River.

Li Zhonghua was at the front, constantly tapping the bushes on both sides with a wooden stick. There were many snakes in the mountains in summer. They walked for about an hour, passing through the dense bushes and following the mountain path upwards.

Can you see it?

Li Zhonghua pointed to a cave entrance not far away, inside which was a broken coffin, and bones could be seen through the broken parts.

"I can see it."

Afterwards, Li Zhonghua led everyone to see several hanging coffins.

"This is amazing! How were these coffins placed up there?" Wang Aimin said.

“I don’t know. No one from generation to generation can explain it. It seems to have always been there,” Li Zhonghua said.

Xia Minmin recalled that those hanging coffin burials were exactly the same as those in the documentary. There were not many hanging coffins, which were probably buried by the ancestors when they migrated along the water.

In the afternoon, we went to explore a wild karst cave, which was discovered by Li Zhonghua and others when they were young. The cave is very large and contains many stalactites, but no one has developed it since then, supposedly because it is difficult and expensive to develop.

The news broadcast started at seven o'clock. The sky was still bright. Sitting on the drying ground at Grandma Xia's house, relatives and neighbors gathered around to watch TV. Grandma Xia cut up the few remaining watermelons and shared them with everyone.

Grandma Xia and Li Qing carried watermelons to everyone, saying, "Don't be shy, just eat as much as you like. We're going to Chang'an tomorrow, and it would be a waste if we didn't eat these watermelons soon."

Hearing what Grandma Xia said, even the relatives and friends who had initially declined to eat started eating the watermelon.

Wang Aimin was very interested in the hanging coffin burial he had seen that morning, and asked in broken Mandarin, "Uncles and aunts, do you know who put the hanging coffins up there?"

Grandpa Xia repeated Wang Aimin's words in the local dialect, and everyone started talking at once.

"I don't know, I heard from my ancestors that we moved here and it's been there ever since."

“Back when we were fighting, there were no roads built over the mountains, and it was very difficult to get up there. Later, the mountains were cut down and roads were built so that we could see them up close.”

"Didn't they say that guerrillas used to hide up there?"

“I know that. My dad led the guerrillas up there. He said that the bodies inside had bones, but their clothes hadn’t rotted and there were jade pendants.”

"I heard that the jade pendant was stolen a long time ago."

"Who is so despicable as to steal from the dead and not be afraid of retribution?"

"Who says there's no retribution? His whole family is wiped out."

"Really?"

“I heard it from his relatives. They said he once found a jade pendant. In our area, anyone who has a jade pendant or something like that must have been stolen from a coffin.”

Wang Aimin was completely confused and didn't understand anything. Xia Minmin relayed the information she had heard to Wang Aimin.

Some things are really hard to say; it's better to believe they exist than not to believe they don't.