Not many people know about the small community of North Americans living in Tsau-Chee, a province in southeast China. This is globalization’s great plus point, the fact that you can have a Tex-Mex in China and a bamboo soup in a town in Texas. About two dozen families have created a simple, carefree environment for themselves, but also based on great wealth. Basically, they’re executives from American companies who, in their day, came and worked in the region. Now that conditions are sufficiently favorable, due to the intriguing mysteries of the free market and its contract relations, they’ve been given early retirement, all of them on full salaries. Free of the moral pressures of North American society, and on the other hand in a position to enjoy everything an artificial North American society has to offer, theirs is a happy lot. The eyes of southeastern China are trained on these several hundred square feet. It’s the kind of life desired by any self-respecting Chinese on the path to modernity. But the main thing, the most well-known thing about this little America, is that a nucleus of surfers, the best surfers in all of the Yellow Sea, have joined together there. Initially this nucleus was made up of the children of the North Americans, but now multitudes of Chinese have been drawn in, too, with the peculiarity that it isn’t the younger surfers who can really ride, but the elder statesmen of the region. Their grandchildren aren’t a patch on them. The explanation lies in a dangerous local tradition, one that only the older members of society are allowed to take part in: kwai muk collecting. The kwai muk is a citrus fruit that grows on a tree of the same name, and it is gathered by means of a tightrope walk along ropes slung from treetop to treetop—at times 80 feet off the ground. The day these grandmothers and grandfathers stepped into neoprene suits and onto surfboards, they swept all before them.