Flowers of a Floating Life - Treasures of Chinese Literature

Author: None
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: When I was a child, I could stare at the sun with wide eyes, see the finest details, and observe the textures of tiny objects, so I often found joy beyond the ordinary. The summer mosquitoes made a sound like thunder, and I privately imagined them as a flock of cranes dancing in the sky. With such longing in my heart, they became thousands or hundreds of cranes indeed. Looking up at them, my neck would often become stiff and aching. I also often kept mosquitoes in my mosquito net, slowly spraying smoke at them, making them fly and chirp amidst the smoke, as if watching a view of white cranes flying in the clouds. It truly felt like cranes chirping from the clouds, bringing me great joy.
In the uneven places of the earthen walls, or among the tangled flowers and grass, I often squatted, bringing my eye level to the height of the platform, and focused intently. I would treat the weeds as forests, the insects and ants as beasts, the raised earth as hills, and the hollows as valleys, and I would immerse myself in this world, feeling content and at ease. One day, I saw two insects fighting in the grass, and I was deeply engrossed in watching them when suddenly a huge creature, uprooting trees and overturning mountains, came charging—turns out to be a toad. With one flick of its tongue, the two insects were swallowed whole. I was young and lost in the moment, startled and screaming in fear. Once my senses returned, I caught the toad, whipped it dozens of times, and drove it to another courtyard. When I grew older, I reflected on the incident and realized the two insects were fighting over mating, with one refusing. As the old saying goes, "Adultery is near killing." Is this true even for insects? Out of my fondness for such play, once my testicles (in Jiangsu dialect, the male genitalia are called "") were bitten by a worm, swelling so much that I couldn’t urinate. I brought a duck, opened its mouth, and blew into it, but the maid accidentally let go, and the duck shook its head as if swallowing, scaring me into crying out loud, which became a topic of gossip. All of these were my youthful whimsies.
As I grew older, I became obsessed with flowers and loved pruning pot plants. I met Zhang Lanpo and began to master the art of pruning and nurturing branches. Later, I learned the techniques of grafting and stacking rocks with flowers. Among flowers, orchids were my favorite for their subtle fragrance and elegance, though it was rare to find orchids with petals good enough to be classified. When Lanpo was dying, he gifted me a pot of white orchids with plain centers, all with evenly rounded petals and broad hearts, thin stems, and clean petals, perfectly suited for classification. I treasured them as precious gems. While I was traveling for work, Yun was able to personally water the plants, and they grew lushly. Yet within two years, one day, they suddenly withered and died. Upon examining the roots, they were all white like jade, and new orchid buds were sprouting. At first, I couldn’t understand it, thinking I wasn’t worthy of such blessings, and sighed in despair. Later, I learned that someone had wanted to divide them but was refused, so they had poured boiling water on them to kill them. From then on, I vowed never to grow orchids again.
P38-39