The Tea Table Facing the Fish Cages

In the Xincun lagoon, boat homes sit close enough to form rows, but reaching them from land requires a boat. A 2023 Hainan Daily report describes motorized transport vessels crossing the narrow waterway, their spray striking homes as people sort fish cages. The sound of an engine and the rush of water are part of the village’s ordinary geography: there is a shore-side street, then the dock, then a passage between houses where the next stop may be a family home or a neighbor’s raft. The 2026 People’s Daily feature identifies the Danjia village across Haiying, Haiyan and Haiou, three villages whose portions of water together hold this floating settlement.

When Hainan Daily entered Xing Yishi’s raft home, it found rooms arranged by small changes in level. The upper wooden room served as both living room and bedroom. One step down, a tea table faced the fish cages; Xing’s family called it their place for receiving guests and talking together. A small compartment beside it was the kitchen. Xing said he had taken over the raft from his parents and rebuilt it with sturdy timber. The frame began with straight, thick water-resistant boards forming compartments, set on foam floats and bound together with wire or heavy nylon rope. A home here was assembled not on a foundation of earth but on a floating framework strong enough to hold rooms, work and conversation.

In September 2023, Xing and his wife were raising seabream in 42 cages. Each morning they prepared feed and went from cage to cage; if a net became dirty, they pulled it out of the water to clean it. In the 2023 report, the couple had stocked fry in April and expected to harvest from December into the following May. It also records how one kind of livelihood joined another: Li Zhiming, who had grown up on a boat home, returned to his raft for years to see old friends. The village’s water is at once workplace, address and social route.

Li Xiaodan remembers that after school she could sit beneath the eaves with a fishing hook and catch enough fish for dinner. After the meal, she listened to her grandmother sing salty-water songs and learned Danjia embroidery. The 2026 People’s Daily feature follows a later effort to keep that sound audible: song inheritor Li Qiulan and her team recorded songs, staged performances and visited schools to help children sing together. Their work responds to the difficulty of passing songs on orally when written scores are hard to preserve. At the same time, residents formed an association in 2021 to collect floating rubbish and install wastewater-treatment equipment after the lagoon came under pressure. The story is not a return to an unchanged past. It is about making a home on the water more sustainable while finding ways for its songs to travel to a new generation.