Aphorisms make us lazier or smarter?

It was about 4 years ago, when Weibo (equivalent to twitter) started to heat up in China, people found that confucius is the primogenitor of Weibo.

One of his book, Lunyu (literally means selected saying) also known as The Analects of Confucius, is thought to be one of top ten most valuable books in China and has heavily influenced    the philosophy and moral values of both China and other East Asian countries such as Japan and Korea. Most importantly, Lunyu is written in the form of aphorisms. Thus it is easy to be memorized and became textbook for Chinese people for nearly 2000 years.

Another masterpiece of Tao-te-Ching, is also a collection of aphorisms, and there are only 5284 words in the whole book. No sentence is longer than 140 characters. However, it is very difficult to understand those words, and every aphorism is so profound that can be explained into a new book.

As a typical literary form, aphorisms are short and easy to be memorized and thus esay to be spread widely within the shortest time. With the development of technology, aphorisms could play a significant role in modern communication and media environment. Weibo and twitter are good case in point.

As a Chinese, there is a great benefit. Apart from the Analects of Confucius, Tao-te-Ching, there are tens of thousands of various allusions, short poems, idioms, proverbs passed down from generation to generation. As long as you have a good memory, and can remember loads of aphorisms, it would be highly convenient to state some deep and profround ideas in a conversation and impress others in a short time.

Several years ago, when I started to communicate with people from other countries, I realized this knack and mastered it quickly. Whenever we started a topic, adding one or two suitable proverds following “as a Chinese saying goes” would always harvest applause and compliments for me.

One of the advantages of using those aphorisms is to help you to make classification. As based on experiences and wisdom of former generations, once a sentence has become an aphorism, which means many people have verified and accepted it from generation to generation, and we beileve that it is true. From this aspect, these aphorisms reveal answers directly to us, and can save time in the process of thinking. When making a decision whether to adopt an aphorism, what we need to do is just to check if the background and situation is a fit for it without logical thinking and reasoning. It seems that proverbs make us smarter.

Sometimes, there would be two aphorisms oppositing to each other but both of them are reasonable, the it would totally depend on your own attitude to choose either one. For instance, we use “chu wu ni er bu ran” (literally means the lotus remain unsullied even though come out from dirty mud) to describe people who live unaffected by wordly temptation or live a chaste life in a hostile environment; we also use “jin zhu zhe chi， jin mo zhe he” (literally means one who stays near cinnabar goes red and one who stays near ink turns stained black) to illustrate the influence of other people, events, objects or environments have on people. Under such circumstance, it does not matter anything which one to use, what matters is that when we reliazed we can not think of the third possibility, we give up struggling to think, ignore the new cause-and-effect relationships and resign our brains to those proverbs.

Gradually, I have a strong feel that it is like my Chinese ancestors are communicating with others rather than myself when using those old proverbs. Maybe it is the influence of culture, and I am still proud to be the spokesman of my culture, but it is time to combine those aphorisms with our own experience, and current situation, and develop our own ideas. Anyway, standing on giants’ shoulders is better than standing on the ground.

[Chinese story-3] Why Chinese people prefer noodles rather than bread?

In addition to the four great inventions of ancient China – the compass, papermaking, movable type printing press and gunpowder, some people believe that there are also another four inventions of China – zhou (including various categories of porridge, congee, and gruel) , fen (vermicelli made from rice, bean, or sweet potato starch), Mian(noodles), fan (steamed rice).

In the docmentary of Noodles Road, it put noodles into the grand social context of culture communication between the east and the west and concludes that even though they are ordinary enough, noodles did play a crucial influence on humans’ lives, especially in China.

Throughout the weatern world, except for Italy, nearly all other countries have chosen bread – another kind of food made from wheat flour, as their traditional staple food, while Chinese people have a special preference for noodles.

What are the reasons behind these two different selections? Only because westerners and chinese people have different taste preferences?

As we known, the development of food choice is always restricted to special social conditions, and the evolution of food cooking also follows some certain path. Hence, it is necessary to go back to the remote antiquity and analyze the transitions in agricultural society to see whether it was a contigent historical circumstance.

The raw material of both noodles and bread is flour. To make flour, wheat and stone mill are two indispensable elements, but both of which are considered to originate from the middle east, where people tended to bake wheaten food into bread, or clay oven rolls over a fire or in stoves.

When ancient Chinese people started to plant wheat, pottery and bronze ware were all highly developed. As people could not grind the wheat into powder without stone mill, they had to boil or steam wheats with water in pottery cooking utensils.

The difference in the begining lead to a series of differences afterwards. Generally speaking, hunting nomads prefer to bake food, while agricultural people tend to boil food.

Firstly, pottery played a significant role in the eating habits and ways of cooking in China, and in terms of processing food, Chinese people steam and boil food pervasively. Thus, after stone mill was introduced into China, naturally people would put water into the flour and boil it. At first, noodles were made into sheet-shape, and gradually developed into long and thin strips, because it would be easy to be cooked.

Secondly, the dietary structure of chinese people is based on more vegetables and less meat and those leaves, stems, and berries are not suitable to be baked. Obviously, only a bowl of noodles are not that tasty, various vegetables are perfect match for noodles.

Thirdly, Chinese people have the habit to eat soup, which is also not suitable for bake.

Fourly, as Chinese people use chopsticks as the main table utensils from very early times, which are very convenient to eat noodles. However, only until the sixteenth century, most western countries started to use forks, before that only Italian people used forks, and this can explain why only Italian people take pasta (another kind of noodles) as their staple food. Without forks or chopsticks, it was definitely inconvenient to eat noodles. In terms of bread, as the typical representative of western food, hamburgers can be described as the varietas of bread, and usually people eat them with hands.

Throughout the world, only Chinese people adopt four different cooking types: boil (cook with water), steam (cook with gas), bake (cook with fire), fry (cook with oil). Apart from that, Chinse people aslo use other methods to cook food, including braise, stew, roast, decoct, simmer, etc. But beyond all doubt, boiling is the oldest and longest used cook mehod, which was originated from the pre-Qin period, and has lasted for nearly 3000 years. This is why wheat flour was made into noodles rather than bread. Besides, steamed bun, dumplings, steamed stuffed bun, etc, are also good case in point. 

Looking back into history, if Chinese people chose bread instead of noodles, probably hundreds of bread would appear, but there would not be 1200 various kinds of noodles in the world.

[Chinese story-2] Nuo

Her name is nuo, which means ‘commitment’.

In China, each name of ours has a special meaning and sometimes we even consider it as a sign of destiny. After I was born, my parents felt that a single child would be lonely and it would be miserable for me to play alone, so they hoped to have a baby girl to be my company.

Unexpectedly, this company has become my enemy.

Nuo was two years younger than me, but twice as smart and twice as pretty than me. People who saw us at first sight would say, “hmmm, Nuo is definitely the PhotoShop-version of her brother.” This was true. Enlarging my eyes, making my face and mouth smaller, my skin smoother and whiter, adding one dimple on the face, and putting on long hair, that would be her.

She replied, “not only me are photoshop-version of your face, everybody is.”

I was angry, “if you were not my sister, I would..”

“Mum, he wants to hit me. ” As usual, she escaped and sought protection from my mother even before I had finished speaking.

We never lookd alike . From primary to high school, she was like a shining campus star, and always invited to sing or dance in different parties. She was so popular in our school that nearly everybody knew her, and they would call me “Nuo’s brother” accordingly.

That was humiliating to me. Only after every examination, my father would talk to her seriouly, “it’s good that you are talented on singing and dancing, and we are also proud of you, but study always comes first, you should learn from your brother...”

At this time, I would laugh and pull a face to her, and of course, she would give me a black look secretly.

Everytime when relatives and friends visited us, she would act very cute and sweet, thus receiving loads of compliments. We started to vie with each other for everything, including TV remote, snacks, toys, and even toilet access.

A little sister? Just a nuisance.

Everything changed when I was in the third year of high school, Nuo was in first year.

She had grown up into a beautiful and attractive girl, and received hundreds of love letters. One day, I was busy in studying in the library, making ready for the college entrance examination, when my mobile phone rang suddenly.

It was Nuo. She was crying dowm the phone, and her voice was mixed with fear. Without any hesitation, I ran to the resturant in just 10 minutes and had a fight with those two harassers.

When we stepped out of the hospital, I was wrapped like a half-mummy. She cried in my arms for the first time, and for the first time she called me “old brother”.

On my birthday party, when I caught her kissing with one of my best friends Feng, I started to realize that Nuo was already a grown-up lady.

That night, I toasted to Feng again and again. I was deeply drunk in the end, and the next day, I was told that the whole night I repeated only one sentence to Feng for nearly 100 times, “Feng, never, never, never hurt her.”

However, after 3 months, they broke up. I held her in my arms and made a promise to myself, “I will protect her for all my life.”

From then on, I seemd to understand how to be an old brother and what are the responsibilities of a man. I found a part time job, and tried to buy everything she liked with my salary, and protect her like an old hen.

 We used to share the same womb, the same home, having the same family name. Everytime when I looked at her, I felt like I was looking at another myself, another possiblity of my life. If possible, I would give her everything I have.

In the winter of 1980, a young couple welcomed their new born son happily, and they committed to give him a little sister to play with him, but with the one-child policy, they were coerced into an abortion.

Nuo never existed in the real world.  

[Chinese story-1] Why women are not into the Soccer World Cup?

First of all, I am not even a soccer fan.

When Aaron and I walked into the pub, I realized I was the fourth “supportive girlfriend”. As Nelson Mandela said, ”sport has the power to inspire, sport has the power to unite people that little else does,” here sport did show the power to unite people – at least this soccer world cup united two Chileans, three Italians, one Irish, one Romanian, and one Chinese in this small pub.

Similar to others, as one part of the “supportive girlfriends” group, I have read “rules for women during the World Cup” of various version more than 3 times and know what would be my role clearly.

It seems that the relationship between the soccer World Cup and women has been bad for a long period. It is said that a great number of females consider world cup as their rival in love and people even coined the term "football widows" to describe those women when their men park themselves in front of the TV or are off to the stadium.

A British survey shows that the divorce rate would increase by around 20% during the World Cup time. The internet is flooded with articles like “women, please go away” , “women, prepare to lose your men”, etc. This year, things seem to be different. No matter true or pseudo fans, there are an increasing number of female fans appearing over night. For example, when my aunt talked about Messi, I could not be more shocked than hearing that China won the Wold Cup.

However, as a lazy non-fan, I would rather to stay in the first stage -  be an ignorant female, and keep asking silly questions like “who scored the goal this time?” with a bewildered expression when everybody else is yelling or shouting, or tell my man how much I appreciate this hot and sexy player and think another one’s hairstyle is funny. This time my silly level did not disappoint him, and it took Aaron nearly 5 minutes to explain the offside rule. Unfortunately, after 5 minutes, I still could not understand, then he had to google “how to explain offside rule”, and “to women” jumped out spontaneously. That’s humiliating. How does google know that rules are just not women’s thing?

Actually, one reason of the popularity of the soccer World Cup probably lies in its rules, or standardization. No matter it is a certain industry, a lifestyle, or a game, the key is to set standards, or make rules, and thus can spread it globally. Modern soccer, and ping-pong, for example, were both standardized by the Britishes in the 19^th century, and then transfered to each corner of the world with the development of industrial civilization. Why there is a huge difference between the destiny of ping-pong and soccer? Except for reasons like field limitation, teamwork and different styles of exercise, there is another reason. Even though Chinese people are very good at playing ping-pong, and too good to meet comparable opponents, Chinese people are bad at setting rules. On the contrary, British people are not only experts at making rules, but also good at encouraging others to follow the rules, and maintain the rules working smoothly.

And, probably this can explain why many females are not that into the World Cup.

Firstly, we don’t understand those rules. Why this player got a yellow card and why that team could take a penalty kick? According to our boyfriends, fathers, or husbands, referees always make wrong judgements, and only their comments are correct.

Most of all, we don’t like rules. Compared with men, women tend to set up rules or break rules rather than follow rules. If we are allowed to make rules, each of those 11 players can get a ball, and who shoot more win the game. Cause Fight? Good, it would be more fun.