Five Peculiar Stories: Love Overseas

Strange tales of romantic adventure in foreign lands.

By the Nerve Editors

The Fish Pond

When I was seventeen, I ended up traveling through Southwestern China with a few friends my age. Our third stop out of Hong Kong was Yangshuo, a city in Guanxi Province that the Chinese call “The most beautiful place in world” with no discernible sense of hyperbole.

I’d been traveling with the same two friends for a couple of weeks and was getting a little stir-crazy, so decided to rent a bicycle and spend an afternoon riding around the countryside by myself. It was mind-numbingly beautiful — giant thumbs of rock shot up from the countryside around fog-covered lakes and green mountain passes. Old men punted on bamboo boats down rivers, and young women milked goats. Except for the odd DirectTV Satellite looming behind a shack, it felt like the land before time.

After a few hours, I stopped at a little family-run restaurant and went inside to have something to eat. No one was there except a young boy, the son of the owners. He was surprised to see a white kid in the middle of the countryside, even more so, one who spoke decent Chinese. It was love at first sight, at least for him. Upon my arrival, he decided immediately to stop doing his job and spend the afternoon on what felt like a strange impromptu date with me.

It started with a tour. We walked around the restaurant, around the property, and ended up at a small fish pond in a stone-tiled courtyard in front of his family’s house.

I was a vegetarian at the time, and a dumb American, and so I obviously assumed it was like a koi pond to enhance the atmosphere. It was not. With surprising dexterity, he reached into the water and snatched up a large flopping carp by the tail. In Chinese, he asked, “What do you think of this fish?” Not wanting to be rude, I said, “It looks great." So he swung it above his head and slapped it down on the flagstone, killing it and scaring the hell out of me.

When someone kills a fish for you, vegetarian or not, I think etiquette dictates you must eat it. When a boy in China kills a fish for you, cooks it, and serves it to you for free, you’re on a date.

For the rest of the afternoon, I ate fish (delicious, the beginning of the end of my vegetarianism) while he showed me calligraphy. When it started to get dark, he kissed me on the cheek. Then I hopped on my bike and was off, after perhaps the strangest afternoon of my life. — Ben Reininga, Nerve writer