Here's another story in our Kids in Ancient China series. This is Part 1
Finally Being a Sailor: Zheng He
Part 1
Oh, hello there! What brings you to this ship? Oh, you want to learn about Zhenghe? You’re asking me if I know him? Well, just because I’m a sailor that has worked on ships many times before, doesn’t mean that I personally know Zhenghe. Let me tell you what I know about him, and a little about myself.
I guess first off I should tell you my name. I am Xu Bing. I’m now almost thirty years old and have been a sailor just about fifteen years. I was a young lad like yourself when I first stepped on a big ship like this. Ok, it wasn’t a huge ship like this. My first time onto ship was actually a fishing boat. I live in Yunnan and there’s a big lake where we go fishing. Yunnan? What is Yunnan? It’s a place- a province. It’s in the Southwestern part of China. Actually Zhenghe is from this part of the country as well, but we’ll get to his story in a little bit.
Growing up, I didn’t live close to water. Once a year we would take a big trip and walk for four days up a few mountains to see my distant relatives for a holiday. This was always my favorite time of the year because having such a big trip is always exciting for kids. My distant family lived close to a lake where sometimes I would see a small boat. My family wouldn’t let me go on the boat as a kid because they said it was too dangerous. I was fascinated with the water and being able to go on top of it on a boat. Although some of my cousins who lived by the lake knew how to swim, I didn’t learn. I wish I did, because it’s always very great to learn to swim.
When I was fifteen my dad told me that I should start a job. I asked if I could go on a big boat to work there. After all, I heard that some people had jobs where they worked on big boats. I had never seen a big boat, a ship, before, but I really wanted to see and work on one! He said maybe I could work on a small fishing boat for a few years and see if I liked that first. That’s what I did. I had to move back to where my distant relatives lived to do it because that’s where they knew some fishermen who would let me work with them.
After a few months, some people came through the village talking about a guy named Zhenghe, who was called Ma He at the time. He was going through a few villages in our part of the country (Yunnan) looking for people who would work on a big boat with him. When I heard this, I got so excited! I left my fishing job and my relatives to go to the place where everyone was supposed to go who wanted to work on the ship. When I got there, I was surprised because we weren’t by the ship at all! There was no water and no boat! How were we going to work on a boat when there wasn’t one?
It turned out that Zhenghe wanted all of his men to have two weeks of training to make sure they were strong before they went on the ship. If you couldn’t make it through these two weeks, then you weren’t allowed to work on the ship. Zhenghe led part of the training. I remember seeing him for the first time. He was very tall and strong. His teeth were really white and his cheeks were very high. His nose was small but his eyes looked like they had lots of stories to tell. His voice was loud, which made me think, “Does he always talk like this?” There were about two hundred of us training for those two weeks, broken up in small groups of ten.
