Farmers live on the mountains, and fishermen live on the seas. Ma Xiqing, 55, lives in Jiaozhou, a coastal city in east China's Shandong Province. He started fishing at sea since he was 16. In the early 80s, he set out at one o'clock in the morning and returned at three in the afternoon. The wage was eight yuan per day. "It was good pay. A normal worker could only earn four to five yuan at that time."

Eating seafood everyday seemed to be a good life. But Ma recalls, "Fishing needs heavy labour. We had to jump on the boats carrying over 35 kg of fish and sold them on the pier. When you worked so hard, you wanted to eat something oily. But seafood couldn't let you grow fat."

Then Ma switched from fishing to selling fish. "We took seafood from the pier and sold them on the markets," he recalled. The pier was about 12.5 kilometers from Ma's home. He carried sea products with his bicycle and the business went well. "But there was nowhere to preserve the food. If the products were not sold on the same day, I either dried them or salted them. If those wouldn't work, I had to toss them away."

As logistic chains developed, seafood can be sold to places faraway. "They can be transported by air with dry ice. They can reach everywhere in the country within three hours. And the fish is still jumping even after 48 hours." In 2016, with the help of his daughter, Ma established an online shop. He never anticipated that he would become a popular live streaming host.

Nobody knew about Ma's online shop at the start, and he could hardly sell anything. His daughter encouraged him to stream his produce online and attract customers, showing them that everything in the shop is freshly from the sea. As there were no signals in the sea, Ma learnt to film videos, while his daughters uploaded them at the pier. The number of fans steadily grew.

"Now they know I sell good stuff. But they don't know how to cook them," says Ma. Then he began to stream at night to teach people how to cook seafood. "I teach them how to eat mantis shrimps, how to hold crabs and how to fry snakehead fish…Then I forecast what I'll cook in the next streaming, and people would come all at once."

When he is streaming, he is satisfied to see the audience posting mouth-watering emojis. The business went great too. "I can sell over 50 kg of seafood within two or three hours. I just sit at home and everything is sold out."

As he grows older, Ma now seldom goes out to sea. But he still feels a strong emotion towards the life as a fisherman. "The scenery brings back my memories about how I ended up working on the boats and how I traveled around this area…I still miss the sense of fulfillment when I harvest the full fishing net." 

The good thing is, after a lifetime's hard work, his son entered university, and his daughters helped him started a company. The family even bought an apartment in Hainan for vacations. He is very satisfied with his current life.