On the East China Sea a Japanese fisherman pulled in his nets. It was typhoon season, and the sky had grown dark with warning. As he turned his boat towards home, something caught his eye. There was an object shining in his net. He knelt to pick up the chain—it held an oyster shell pendant with the inscription kai. He turned his boat back towards the open ocean, and the coming storm.

He searched through the wind and driving rain for an hour until he found what he was looking for: a pearl diver, clinging to a broken piece of hull. The Japanese fisherman pulled the Chinese pearl diver into his boat.

“How did you know to look for me?”

“I have seen you diving these reefs.” The fisherman held up the necklace. “Yours?”

The pearl diver nodded. “Kai,” he said. “It means ocean.”

“It is the same in my language,” the fisherman said.

“You risked your life to save mine.”

“If it had been my own son, I could not have done less. We are all one family on the ocean.”

The pearl diver’s granddaughter wears the necklace diving now, and the fisherman’s son takes his father’s boat out every day, as his father did. Every year or so both families get together in the open ocean, to tell the story.