There is a special“restaurant” on the top of the 10th floor of an old residential building in Daming Community, Chaoyang Sub-district, Beibei District, Chongqing Municipality. The owner of the restaurant is an old couple over 80 years old, and the diners are all kinds of birds. Surrounded by flowers and plants, filled with songs of birds and scent of flowers in four seasons, it just like a hanging garden“Bird Restaurant”.

Hundreds of birds visit the restaurant every day. When it’s time for meal, they will arrive on time, flapping wings and eating happily. These diners are very well-behaved. Because the dining table is limited, when a group of birds have their meal, the rest will wait in line on the nearby branches, group by group, taking food one after another, which is very spectacular.

Li Yarong and Jiang Wenzhen are over 80 years old. Li Yarong, a native of Hejiang, Sichuan, was assigned to a machine tool factory in Chongqing to engage in technical work in 1968 and moved to Beibei with the factory in 1970. Jiang Wenzhen, a native of Jiangbei, Chongqing, came to Beibei with her husband and worked as a teacher in a primary school. From then on, the couple took root in Beibei.

In 1990, the couple moved into the building where they currently live in. They liked planting flowers and raising grass, so they chose the top floor specially to create a hanging garden of about 160 square meters on the roof platform. The“Bird Restaurant” is just located in this hanging garden.

The“Bird Restaurant” has a unique originality. It is glued by an old beverage bottle and two metal plates. The upper plate is used to shelter from wind and rain, and the lower plate is used to hold food. The bottom of the“dining table” is supported by a pole about 3 meters long, suspending in the air. Li Yarong said this would prevent rats from coming to the“Bird Restaurant” to steal food and cats from harming the birds while they were feeding.

The main food for the couple to feed birds is rice, which is fed once in the morning and once in the afternoon, with more than one catty a day. The couple used more than 10 catties of rice every month, and birds need more food than them every month, but the couple enjoy it.

Feeding records, which only they can read, are scrawled on the abandoned door panels and kitchen tiles. The couple joked that this was the account book of the“Bird Restaurant”. This special account book not only records the restaurant’s day-to-day accounts, but also reminds the couple of the time to buy rice. They said that in the past, when they were only concerned about their own meals, they didn’t worry about too much when they were about to use up their rice in hand, because they could go out for meals. But after feeding these birds, it’s different. Whenever they saw that there’s almost no rice in hand, they were more anxious than they were going to starve.

Flowers, birds, insects and fish are the hobbies of the couple. As they get older, their memory deteriorates. So, in addition to their usual bookkeeping for the“Bird Restaurant”, they also record the time of changing the water in the fish tank on the surface of the tank and other forgetful things in a place at home where they can easily find them.

“They accompany us to grow old together, and we thank them very much,” the couple said. The relationship between the couple and birds is not simply feeding and being fed, but a relationship of interdependence. They felt that having these birds in their lives is a kind of comfort, a kind of company and a kind of sustenance, and the life has also become vibrant and colorful. (Translated by Zhang Ying, Fathom Language Limited)

Editor:Jiang Yiwei