Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Respect One Mountain at a Time

We ended up going from mountain to mountain; we started driving through these mountain ranges and climbing up the mountains and looking for our ancestors—my mom's mother, my grandmother’s mother, and ancestors on my dad’s side. We trekked up the mountains and it was just insane, carrying these 30-pound pigs. My dad hired two people to come from the local village to help carry the pigs and all this other stuff and we all started burning incense and lighting firecrackers. The religion that we practice is called Shenism, and in Shenism this is how you worship your ancestors: you bring them roast pigs, roast ducks, and you burn money and other objects so they have stuff to use in the afterlife. We checked the mountains and burned incense and went up and down several mountains until it was afternoon. Around 5 p.m., we went back to our home village where my sisters grew up in and had a mini feast for the villagers. I could see the villagers had not had a good meal for a very long time. The food was not all that great but I could tell they found it amazing. They were just eating and talking as much as they could and trying to have a good time. They were telling me to come back because I think they were so poor. It was an eye-opening experience, seeing the way they lived. All the young people had left the village and gone to the city to make money. So, those who remained were all over 50 and all grey already. About sixty people gathered around five tables.