Chapter Sixty-One: Doggy, Fool, Madman, Dunce, Old Woman [Part 2]

More often than not, the smarter a person is, the more worries they have.

The ease of attaining happiness also seems to be inversely proportional to IQ.

Just a simple video-recording session filled Li Wowo with boundless wonder.

When she saw herself inside the digital video camera, her jaw dropped in utter astonishment.

"Wowo! Big Brother, Wowo is inside! Wowo is in there!"

Her dancing and jumping were filled with pure innocence and joy.

Her happiness infected Huo Qitai and Li Yangyang, causing both of them to burst into cheerful laughter.

"Woof, woof..."

Ah Huang, however, let out a couple of disdainful barks.

Inside the house, the grandmother leaned on her walking stick, walking somewhat unsteadily as she came out. With a kind and loving smile on her wrinkled face, she said:

"Children, come on in and have some bitter-chestnut cakes!"

Li Wowo was the first to leap up, clapping her hands and cheering, "Bitter-chestnut cakes! Bitter-chestnut cakes! Wowo loves them the most."

"Qitai, come inside and have a taste! For the past two years in Shenzhen, Grandma has been constantly yearning for this exact flavor. The moment we got back, she went up the mountain to pick bitter chestnuts. Today’s batch is the very first pot. Just smelling the aroma makes me feel like I’ve returned to my childhood."

Li Yangyang offered a sweet smile, speaking as she hurried into the kitchen to help her grandmother dish out the freshly cooked bitter-chestnut cakes from the pot.

Meanwhile, Huo Qitai held the digital video camera, following behind them the entire way to record the scene.

These bitter-chestnut cakes could be said to be a unique specialty snack of Jian'an City, made from naturally wild bitter-chestnut trees growing high in the mountains.

Bitter-chestnut tree was the local name; its botanical name was *Castanopsis sclerophylla*, also known as the wishing tree.

In the dead of winter, the kernels of these bitter chestnuts were ground into a paste, heated and blended into a soft, block-like gel, and then refined through twenty-eight intricate processing steps.

The yield of bitter-chestnut cakes was small, and the processing was extremely difficult, making it a completely pollution-free natural food.

Li Wowo stood on the least ceremony, picking up the first bowl of steaming-hot bitter-chestnut cakes. Unfazed by the heat, she immediately began to devour them in big, hearty bites.

Huo Qitai also accepted a bowl from Li Yangyang’s hands. During the exchange, his fingers gently brushed against the back of her soft, smooth hand. Both of them felt as if they had been struck by an electric shock, pulling their hands away the instant they touched.

"Making bitter-chestnut cakes is terribly troublesome. My mom hasn't made them in years."

Huo Qitai took a spoonful of the piping-hot treat, and the flavor was delightfully savory and delicious.

Even though his tongue was scalded, he couldn't help swallowing spoonful after spoonful.

Bitter-chestnut cakes contained starch, lecithin, and other trace elements essential to the human body.

They possessed various health benefits, including effectively lowering cholesterol, aiding in weight loss, keeping the skin clean and delicate, delaying aging, clearing heat and detoxifying, reducing blood lipids and blood pressure, resolving stagnation and eliminating blood stasis, and preventing malaria and diarrhea.

Before his rebirth, Huo Qitai had watched several food documentaries whose crews had traveled specifically to Jian'an City to gather material.

Upon seeing the introduction of these nutritional values and health benefits regarding bitter-chestnut cakes, Huo Qitai had gained a wealth of knowledge, never expecting that a rural snack he had eaten since childhood would have such remarkable properties.

"Delicious! Yangyang, look, since making bitter-chestnut cakes is so troublesome, you can use the camera to record it, especially those twenty-eight steps."

Right as he was eating the bitter-chestnut cake, Huo Qitai began to explain in detail how to shoot videos about these intangible cultural heritage handicrafts and local delicacies.

From conceptualization, gathering material, to camera movement and beyond.

Li Wowo listened in a trance from the side, supporting her chin with her small hand, her expression entirely serious.

Grandma, meanwhile, had been looking at them all along with a beaming smile, nodding continuously as she said, "That's right! If you film it this way, when future generations want to eat it, they'll know how to make it. Otherwise, once old bones like us are gone, the coming generations won't even be able to eat it if they want to!"

"Exactly! Grandma, if you have any other hidden skills at the bottom of the trunk, pass them all on to Yangyang. All of these can be filmed. In the future, audiences all over the world will be able to see them, and they'll marvel at the vastness and abundance of our country and the ingenuity of its various master craftsmen..."

The kitchen was filled with rising steam, and Ah Huang the dog lay flat against the doorstep.

Huo Qitai spoke eloquently and fluently, while Li Wowo, Li Yangyang, and Grandma all listened intently—listening to him talk about how to film, listening to him talk about how magnificent these crafts were, and listening to him talk about how countless people in the future would fall in love with them and their lifestyle...

Everything felt almost like a dream. Even Li Yangyang herself found it hard to believe: would foreigners living in developed countries really find the rural life and crafts they filmed so wonderful, and feel a heartfelt yearning and envy toward it?

"Let's go! Wowo, Yangyang, the sun is setting. Let's go shoot the sunset together. Ever since I was a child, I've felt that the valley here is at its most beautiful during sunset.

"The setting sun is like blood, and a streak of blood-red flows through the stream coming down from that mountain over there, contrasting against the verdant mountain hollow—it's truly more beautiful than any painting."

Huo Qitai led them out once more to film the setting sun, the valley, the stream, the nimble squirrels leaping through the trees, and the various small birds soaring across the forest canopy.

For several days in a row, disregarding the gazes of the villagers, Huo Qitai brought Li Wowo and Li Yangyang along to run around and film everywhere.

As soon as they finished shooting, he would take out his newly purchased laptop and teach them simple video editing.

Consequently, the gossip within the village spread far and wide!

Especially every time Huo Qitai carried a pile of photography equipment, swaggering proudly through the village with Li Yangyang and Li Wowo in tow and passing right in front of the village sundry store, they inevitably became the subjects of much pointing and whispering.

"Didn't that little Tai from the Huo family get accepted into Peking University? How is he hanging out with these two fools and lunatics?"

"Surely his tens of thousands of yuan in scholarship money wasn't spent on buying these gadgets for them to record things with, right? What a blockhead!"

"Such a wasteful good-for-nothing! Yesterday I heard my daughter say that Sony video camera in the madwoman's hand costs over thirty thousand yuan, and just one lens alone costs several thousand."

"Oh! No wonder a few matchmakers went to propose marriage to Li Yangyang a few days ago and got rejected. So she's latched onto the high branches of the Huo family, is she? I could tell she was a little vixen ever since she was a kid, born to seduce men."

"Just not learning anything decent! A beam goes crooked at the top because the foundation isn't straight. Doesn't that old hag of the Li family spend all day stealing other people's land to farm?

"Li Yangyang was raised single-handedly by her; could she possibly learn anything good? I reckon her reputation in Shenzhen must have gone completely to ruin, which is why she had no choice but to come back. Otherwise, with how much money there is to be made in Shenzhen, only a fool would be willing to come back and farm in the mud!"

"Precisely! Look at the rubbish they film all day long. My daughter said it looks like they're going to upload it to the internet to publish. What kind of flowers can possibly bloom out of this rustic countryside? Is anyone even going to watch it? Such a waste of so much money..."

...

The horizons of rural folks were only this short, yet their tongues could wrap around the village three times over.

In their eyes, Li Wowo was a lunatic who had been crazy since childhood; Li Yangyang was a fool who returned to the countryside instead of making money in the city; and Huo Qitai was a bookworm whose brains were fried, easily duped and seduced into coughing up so much money.

Add in Ah Huang the dog and Grandma the old crone.

In a mountain village in northern Fujian as ordinary as this one, located right in the high mountain ranges, absolutely no one could have imagined that the video footage composed and filmed by such a dog, fools, lunatic, blockhead, and old crone

would one day sweep across the globe, shine brilliantly on overseas video-sharing websites, and become a utopia and earthly paradise yearned for in the hearts of countless "foreign lords."