by Tam King-fai
about his mistakes. He is, moreover, like a king in the kitchen, and the
few senior servants have all yielded to him without even realizing it,
perhaps because they all feel that his talents place him well above the
rank of servant. All you need to do is listen to the way he berates people
who have dialed the wrong number, and you will see that he was born
to be a young master.
1 [PW]TL ÅZ[ M`XTIQV _Pa 1 PI^M ITTW_ML )P .IVO W KI][M []KP
upheaval in our household, and why he is permitted to go scot-free for
doing what other servants would not dare do. Before Ah Fang came,
miscellaneous tasks such as repairing the doorbell, grounding the
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of the toilet all fell to me. These tasks have now been taken over by Ah
Fang, and I can read Plato’s Republic in peace. I no longer need to put I_IaUaJWWS]XWVJMQVO[]UUWVMLWÅ`PMWQTM#VWZLW1PI^MW
put aside my writing just when inspiration strikes to respond to a call
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bothered with matters such as these more than makes up for the losses
incurred by Ah Fang.
Ah Fang has special talents and is capable of doing any sort of
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Lin Yutang
77
menial job. When a piece of furniture is broken, he comes up with some
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making it work again. When he has nothing to do, he tells stories such as
¹
unclear who has more fun—the child telling the story or those listening.
There is one particular thing about him that I especially admire: Ever
since coming to our home, he has had his eye on my English typewriter.
In the morning when I am still in bed, he is in my study doing a two-
hour cleaning job; in fact, he is playing with my typewriter. It is probably
PM ÅZ[ aXM_ZQMZ PM PI[ M^MZ [MMV QV PQ[ TQNM IVL Q NI[KQVIM[ PQU
When he is cleaning my study, mysterious noises always come from the
room. One day, for no reason, the typewriter broke down, and I spent
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the machine, and that afternoon, when I came back from my walk, Ah
.IVO[IQLWUM¹;QZPMUIKPQVMQ[Å`MLº.ZWUPIXWQVWV1PI^M
had to recognize him as a clever and worthy compatriot.
There are many other things that we cannot do without Ah Fang.
He can curse on the phone in English, Mandarin, Shanghainese,
and Anhui and Xiamen dialects. (Any outsider has to be a genius to
learn Xiamen dialect, and people of mere normal intelligence always
keep their distance from it.) He learned somewhere to speak English
beautifully, a phenomenon so odd that it can be attributable only
to God, the dispenser of intelligence. You only have to teach him
[WUMPQVOWVKMIVLPMTMIZV[QQUUMLQIMTa0MKIV[Ia¹_IQMZUQVQº
ZIPMZ PIV ¹_IQIUMMVaWWº1 as the average college student tends to
say. I suggested he go to night school to study English and offered to
pay two-thirds of the fee, but he wouldn’t do it. Like all geniuses, he is
temperamentally ill-disposed to schools.
have his way at my home, but getting him to do anything is a different
matter altogether. For example, if you ask him to go out to buy a box
of matches, he will be gone for two hours and come back with a new
pair of cloth shoes and a grasshopper to give to the children—but
no matches. Fortunately, he has not lost his innocence and thus does
not understand the difference between work and play in this world. It
takes him three hours to clean the bedroom because he spends at least
1
original.
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78
A Garden of One’s Own
an hour feeding the bird or joking with the new maid in the kitchen.
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[MZQW][IJW]aW]Z_WZSºUa_QNM[Ia[*]_PI¼[PM][M'?M[QTTMVL
up watching him smash cups and plates, burn knives in the oven (one
of his ingenious innovations is to dry them there after they have been
washed), place the dustbin on the table, leave the broom in the clothes
closet—he does all these things just so that he can go to the garden to
catch grasshoppers for the children. I don’t have a single complete set
of teacups anymore. When the time comes for him to prepare breakfast,
PM SQKPMV Q[ ÅTTML _QP I LQV WN KTIVOQVO IVL JIVOQVO JMKI][M PM
believes that one should be speedy with one’s work. Preparing breakfast
used to be the duty of the cook, but now it has somehow become Ah
Fang’s monopoly, perhaps because he enjoys scrambling eggs, and
because the cook is a woman. Since Ah Fang looks down on women, she
has had to bend to his wishes.
Three weeks ago, we hired another maid to do the laundry, and
since then, there has been another game in the kitchen. This maid,
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only twenty-one, and you will remember that Ah Fang is eighteen. As
a result, the kitchen soon became a stage for fun and games. The work
slackened all the more, while the sounds of merriment grew louder by
the day. The time it took to clean a room jumped from two hours to
three, and Ah Fang even forgot his daily task of polishing my shoes. At
long last, I was left with no other choice but to issue a serious warning:
If he did not polish my shoes and leave them outside my bedroom by
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straight face and did not talk to him at all, determined to reassert some
discipline at home. After all, as master of the house, I had my respect
to maintain! That night, I called all the servants together and reiterated
my warning, and there was fear on everyone’s face, especially the two
maids responsible for cooking and laundry. Then I went to bed in peace,
assured that order at home had been restored.
The next morning, I woke up at six o’clock, and listened quietly to
what was happening outside my room. At six-twenty, the young laundry
maid left my shoes outside the door. This is unfair, I thought.
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PQU'º1I[SML
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IVLXWTQMTa¹
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Lin Yutang
79
¹+W]TLV¼ PM LW PI PQU[MTN ' ,QL PM I[S aW] W PMTX PQU WZ LQL
aW]ISMQ]XWVaW]Z[MTN WJZQVOPM[PWM[]X[IQZ['º
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I knew she was lying, be
cause Ah Fang’s soul was still wandering
somewhere in his dreams. But the circumspect manner in which the
young maid defended Ah Fang made me feel embarrassed, and I felt I
would rather just give in and forget about restoring order at home. Now,
no matter how topsy-turvy the kitchen becomes, I no longer have the
right to interfere.
1ÅVQ[PMLPQ[M[[Ia_WaMIZ[IOW)P.IVOTIMZPILIVINNIQZ_QPPM
new maid, and the two engaged in thievery on the outside and were
eventually sent to prison. He was released in June of this year, and I
have yet to see him.)
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80
A Garden of One’s Own
Buying Birds (1934)
I like birds and hate dogs. This is by no means due to my personal
perversity; rather, it is because I am Chinese. This inclination comes
naturally to me as to all Chinese, because all Chinese like birds.
However, if you talk to us about some people’s love for dogs, you will
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anybody could befriend the beast, hugging and patting it. Only once did
I suddenly come to appreciate this kind of feeling for dogs, and that was
when I was reading The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe. In a certain part of the story, Munthe narrates how he challenges a Frenchman to
a duel for kicking his dog. I was really moved when I came to that part.
It was really only then that I understood the sentiment, and I almost
wished that at that instant I had a hunting dog to curl up by my side.
But I was only momentarily under the mesmerizing sway of Munthe’s
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VWJTM[MVQUMV[1ÆMMQVOTaNMTNWZLWO[PI^M]ZVMLWI[PM[
The most odious time I have ever spent in my life was in the living
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dog originally bred in the St. Bernard’s Hospice in Switzerland, hence
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Even more unbearable was the interminable narrative on the part of
the hostess about the dog’s genealogy. I believe I must have seemed a
heretic on that occasion. Staring at her, I looked around in vain for an
appropriate thing to say.
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hostess said.
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the Alps. His great-grand-uncle was a prize-winner in the International
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I did not mean to be rude, but I am afraid I was.
I understand the British like dogs, but, for that matter, the British
like everything, including big tomcats. I once debated this with a British
friend.
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[IQL ¹AW] XMWXTM XZMMVL W TQSM IVQUIT[ 1¼[ I OWWL TQM JMKI][M aW]
goad these beasts into chasing down a poor fox. Why don’t you go and
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Lin Yutang
81
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is precisely that they are so sensitive. By nature, I love animals, as
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I detest those beasts that pretend to be your friend, and come up to you
and scratch you all over. I like animals that do not cross my path and
know their place. I’d rather love a donkey.... Love a dog? Sure, I suppose
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¹7PNWZOMQºUa*ZQQ[PNZQMVL[IQL¹1LQLV¼\PQVS1¼LJMIJTMW
KWV^QVKMaW]º
Later, my family circumstances became such that I ended up
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let it sleep in a nice doghouse, but I forbade it to scratch me or show
me any affection or loyalty. Truly, I would rather have died than walk it
on the street as many fashionable young women do. One time, I saw a
maid from northern Jiangsu walking with her unbound feet in a pair of
high heels. Obviously, she was a servant in some foreigner’s household.
She had a walking stick in one hand, and was pulling a little hunting
dog with the other. Now, that was a sight! I wouldn’t want to make such
a weird spectacle of myself. Let the British go and walk their dogs—the
two are fated to be together. But not with me! When I go out for a walk,
I want to be myself.
But I am here to talk about birds, especially my experience of
buying birds the day before yesterday. I have a cage of small birds at
home. I don’t know what they’re called, but they are slightly smaller
than sparrows, and the males have white spots on their scarlet chests.
Last winter, for one reason or another, several birds died, and for some
time I had been thinking of buying a few more to keep the survivors
company. The Mid-Autumn Festival fell on that day, and everybody at
home had gone out to a tea party, leaving my youngest daughter and me
at home. So, I suggested to her that we go to the city to buy birds, and
she agreed.
People living in Shanghai know what the bird market at the Temple
of the City God is like, and there’s no need for me to elaborate. With
my little girl in my arms, I walked through the streets congested with
pedestrians. The place was like heaven for animal lovers, because
there were not only birds, but also frogs, white mice, squirrels, crickets,
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82
A Garden of One’s Own
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sparrows, centipedes, iguanas, and all sorts of other strange things.
Before you make any pronouncements as to whether Chinese people
love animals or not, you would be well-advised to go take a look at the
cricket seller squatting on the ground in the middle of the road and all
the children gathering around him. I walked into a bird store run by
someone from Shandong and bought three pairs of birds. Since I had
bought the same kind of bird before, I knew the price, and was able
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dollars and ten cents.
The store was on the corner of the street, and there were about
forty such birds in a cage. After we settled on a price, the man started
to pick out three pairs for me. The commotion in the cage set off a
cloud of dust, and I stood back a little. By the time he had picked out
three birds, there was already a big crowd of people gathered in front of
the store. Idlers on the street are always like that, and there was really
nothing unusual about it. After I paid for the
birds and picked up my
small cage, I became the center of attention and the target of everyone’s
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like some sort of aristocrat, because to the Chinese masses, I was now
a proud owner of birds. Something had brought the crowd together,
some kind of natural, instinctive common joy that released our collective
wish for a harmonious world and shattered the usual wall of silence
that exists between strangers. Of course, they had every right to ask me
whatever they wanted about the birds, just as they would have had the
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win it before their very eyes.
I picked up my daughter with one hand and the birdcage with the
other, and people on the street turned around to look at us. If I were the
child’s mother, I would have felt sure that they were admiring my child.
But since I am a man, I knew that they were admiring the birds in the
cage. Are these birds that unusual? I thought to myself. No, my admirers
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of obsession.
I walked up to a snack shop. It was still early, just past noon, and
the upstairs room was empty.
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Lin Yutang
83
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shoulder asked.
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really high mountains. Hey, Zhanggui_PISQVLWN JQZL[IZMPM[M'º
Zhanggui are people who wear glasses and keep the accounts. This
one, like his fellow accountants, could read and write. Apart from
copper coins and paper money, one didn’t expect him to be interested