A Lone Boat Fishing for Fortune and Glory

Rookie angler Jiang Xiaoyu starts out by poking into a “water monster” catfish’s den in the creek at the village entrance. He goes on to fish the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, where a hundred-jin black carp drags him into a wild tumble in the raging current. He scales the Tianshan Mountains to hunt rainbow trout in icy pools, ventures into the Shennongjia wilderness in search of ghost fish, and gets his palms sliced open by sea bream on the rocks of the Bohai Sea. A giant wave even hurls him into the deep ocean, where he spends three hours in a tug-of-war with a Pacific sailfish. He battles bluefin tuna through a Norwegian blizzard, and in an Antarctic ice cave, a Patagonian toothfish yanks him into a collision with an emperor penguin! From an aggrieved boy whose fishing spot is stolen by the village bully Er Gou, Jiang Xiaoyu becomes a fishing fanatic who drinks and battles in the deep sea with Japan’s “GT Immortal” and matches wits with poachers on the frozen ocean. In the end, he returns to the little creek back home, carrying the hollow title of the world’s top angler, only to discover that the greatest fishing ground of all is no more than a jar of bloodworms from his old friend Earthworm Li, the teasing laughter of the girl who fishes with lures, and the arc of a cast into the water, not for a giant catch, but for the love that started it all.