A young boy finds himself alone in a ship in a terrible storm. All the other passengers and crew are dead. Suddenly he sees a bright yellow ball of fire on the mast...

This is a short story in Simplified Chinese, pinyin and English, excerpted from the short story collection "Learn to Read Chinese, Book 1" by Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang. It's based on stories told by Norman Hinsdale Pitman in "A Chinese Wonder Book" originally published in 1918.

Folk tales are immensely popular in China. Passed down orally over the centuries from grandparents and parents to children, they serve as an unwritten handbook for living in society. Nearly all Chinese folk tales are about simple people who find themselves in difficult situations. These people are often helped (and occasionally hindered) by talking animals, as well as by powerful gods, wizards and other supernatural beings who actively participate in events here on earth. Within every Chinese folk tale is an underlying moral message derived from one of the three major schools of spiritual thought – Daoism (also called Taoism), Confucianism, and Buddhism.

Pitman's versions of these stories are wonderfully written, but they were written over a century ago. He wrote them in English for English-speaking readers, and this unrestricted vocabulary is not quite what we're looking for in a graded reader such as this. So we have taken the liberty of retelling this story to use just 358 different Chinese words, most of which are in the standard 1200-word HSK4 vocabulary .