A Day in the Life
My name is Wu Mei, I am ten, and my people are named after water. We are the Shui, half a million of us, living among the green stone hills of Guizhou in southwest China, where the mountains stand up like loaves of bread and every valley holds a river.
Our village is wooden houses with dark tiled roofs, stacked up the hillside above the rice terraces. In the morning the mist sits in the valley like spilled milk, and I cross the stone bridge to school with my cousins. At school everything is in Chinese. At home everything is in Sui, our own language, which has never had books.
Except, in a way, it has one. My great-uncle is a keeper of the Shuishu, our ancient script, hundreds of strange beautiful characters that only the ritual masters can read. It is not for homework or letters. It is for the old calendars, for choosing lucky days, for the ceremonies when someone is born or married or buried. My great-uncle’s copybooks are older than my grandfather, and when he unrolls them, everyone gets quiet.
Our biggest festival is Duan, our new year, which comes around harvest time. There are horse races on the hilltops, drums, and sticky rice with fish. My grandmother ties a thread around my wrist for protection and pours a little rice wine on the ground for the ancestors. The spirits, she says, are in the water, the rocks, the old trees. We have always kept them. No one in my village has ever heard another way.
Fun Facts
- The Shui are one of China’s 56 official nationalities, with most living in Guizhou province.
- Their name, Shui, is the Chinese word for water, and their villages follow the rivers among the karst hills.
- The Shuishu script is one of the world’s few ancient writing systems still in ceremonial use.
- The Duan festival, the Shui new year, features hilltop horse racing and lasts for weeks, village by village.
- Guizhou’s landscape of steep green limestone hills is among the most distinctive on earth.
- There is no Bible in the Sui language, and believers among the Shui are very few.
How to Pray for the Shui
Pray for a Bible in the Sui language, for a people whose only sacred writing now belongs to spirits and calendars. Pray for the small number of Shui believers and for the growing church elsewhere in Guizhou to carry the good news up the river valleys. Pray for the ritual masters, the keepers of the old script, that men who have spent their lives copying sacred characters would meet the Word himself. And pray for children like Wu Mei, who have never once heard the name of Jesus in a language they understand.
How Kids Can Help
Find Guizhou province in southwest China on a map and look at photos of its green karst hills together. Pour a glass of water at dinner and remember the water people. The May 2025 Wonder Letter was written from the perspective of a Shui child, with a map, vocabulary, and activities for your family.
Scripture to Remember
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
The Shui have guarded a sacred script for centuries. Pray they meet the Word who was there before all writing.