The Sayings of Yanying

MY FRIEND YANYING says: "Every butterfly is the spirit of a dead flower who has come back in search of itself."
Yanying is petite but also rather voluptuous and in constant danger of getting chubby. She never concerns herself with her weight, however, and likes to say rather philosophically: "A chestful is better than no chest at all." This is my awkward translation, via the Chinese saying describing a beautiful woman, "An arm full of soft jade and warm fragrance," of her original English: "Two armfuls is better than no armful."
On the birth of quintuplets in Canada, Yanying says: "One plus one equals two, but in Canada, one plus one can equal five."
Yanying describes a woman's hair: "Extremely, extremely black. The black of a blind man."
Yanying flips through a pictorial magazine at the newsstand. She looks carefully through the entire issue but doesn't buy a single paper when she's finished. The newspaper man says sarcastically, "Thanks so much!" Yanying replies, "There's no need to be so polite."
Someone said, "I wanted to wander the world and especially to see the Sahara desert. But now there's a war on." Yanying said: "Don't worry. You can still go when they're done with the war. I imagine they won't be able to blow up the Sahara completely. I'm really quite optimistic about that."
When Yanying goes shopping, she always tries to trim a little something off the full price as she's making the purchase. Once she even tried to get a
 discount when we were in a Jewish shop in Hongkew. She turned her wallet inside out and said: "You see? That's all I have. Really, it's all in here. Can you give us a twenty dollar discount? We're on our way to get a cup of tea. We came out just to go to a café. We weren't planning on doing any shopping, but when we saw what nice things you have here . . ."
The Jewish woman protested meekly: "Twenty dollars would hardly be enough for tea, anyway."
But the old proprietor of the store was moved by Yanying's childish air; maybe his first love had had skin of the same yellow brown hue, or maybe there had been a little sister who died before her time. He smiled sadly and surrendered: "All right then. I usually wouldn't let you get away with it, but since you're on your way to tea . . ." And he told her about the delicious cakes they sold at a nearby café.
Yanying says: "The moon sings out, summoning all the joy of life. A star is merely its timid echo."
There's a phrase in Chinese: "Put three stinking tanners together, and you get a Zhuge Liang." There's a similar saying in the West: "Two heads are better than one." Yanying says, "Two heads are better than one-on a pillow." She wrote this in a college essay, and the professor who graded her was a priest. Her guts are unmatched even by writers famous for being gutsy.
Yanying does actually have writerly ambitions, and she's studying Chinese quite assiduously. When she walks down the street, she will stop as soon as she sees a big shop sign or an advertising poster and begin to read the characters aloud: “‘Big something Prosperity.’ ‘Old something something.’ I know ‘Watches,’ and I know ‘Flying,’ and you say that one means ‘a bird singing.’ But what does ‘watch flying Birdsong’ mean? And what does the ca in the Chinese word for ‘café’ mean?”
Chinese characters are read from right to left. This much she knows. But modern Chinese sometimes goes from left to right. Whenever she starts to read from left to right, it's actually a text that goes from right to left. Chinese characters are mysterious and inexhaustible entities, and for this reason we await the time when this woman who is able to say such clever things—and whose surprising literary sensibility goes well beyond mere cleverness—will be able to write essays for us to read in Chinese. But we will have to wait for quite some time yet.