Tina Liu, Xiantong Experimental Primary School

One Sunday morning, I am taking a stroll in the garden downstairs, when a piece of fluffy cloud ascends from the sky and lands right in front of me. On the cloud, it is inscribed in boldface golden characters: “Welcome aboard: dreamy experience.” I jump onto the cloud, and it immediately begins to fly up. In dizziness I close my eyes, the sound of wind whistling in my ears. After a while, I feel the cloud slowing down until it comes to a standstill, and voila, I am among vast forests that you cannot imagine that exist today. I am back to ancient China.

Fearing that the wild beasts will take me for their breakfast, I run into the first cave I see. In the cave, a dozen women are busying feeding silkworms with mulberry leaves. A young woman in white comes up and introduces herself to me, “I’m Lei Zu; will you join us in the silk producing team?” I happily agree.

I follow Lei Zu and a few others into the forest to pick more mulberry leaves when a big brown bear appears in the distance. We hold our breaths and hide behind a rock. The bear, uninterested in us, climbs up a tree with huge effort; its eyes focus on a black oval lump with hexagonal holes in it. Coming up to the oval object, the bear sticks out its paw, drives away some small insects, and scoops up some thick gold liquid to put into its mouth. It repeats this movement several times and leaves the tree looking satisfied.

Making sure that the bear has disappeared from the horizon, we come up to the tree and follow the bear’s moves. “What’s this?” Lei Zu is confused. “I’ve never tasted a thing as delicious as this before.”

I, too, try the golden liquid. “This is honey,” I say. “Mom used to buy me a big bottle from supermarkets.”

“What … honey? Supermarkets?” Lei Zu is more confused.

“Never mind,” I reassure her. “Do you like the taste?”

“Of course,” she says.

“Like raising silkworms, you can raise the small insects for honey; and the gold liquid is called honey,” I explain to her.

At this moment, the cloud that has taken me back in time reappears and I jump onto it to travel back, leaving Lei Zu dumbfounded. She must have taken me to be a junior fairy. That’s how I taught our ancestors to raise bees for honey. Isn’t that magical?