Sister and brother trouble stars

Author: Wu Meizhen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: My brother and I are twins. My mom said when we were born, my weight was four jin, just short of one liang, while my brother was only two jin and nine liang, plus one liang more. I was very curious about what kind of scale they used to weigh the little ones. My mom said she fainted from the pain and didn’t notice. My brother suspected it was a fruit-selling pan scale, where they wrapped the child in a cloth (or sometimes didn’t wrap at all, just weighed the net weight) and placed them on the scale pan. The left hand gripped the scale head, and the right hand adjusted the calibration star. The nurse, with her lovely orchid-like fingers, lightly opened her lips and said, "Three jin and nine liang; three jin. Oh, you don’t look much alike, ‘three jin and nine’ is much prettier than ‘three jin.’" The latter part was added by me following my brother. My mom was mixing dumpling filling and laughed heartily at our discussion: "You think of yourselves as apples or pears." My brother sighed after hearing this: "If all fruit sellers were as charming as the nurse, I wouldn’t eat anything but fruit every day." "Shhh, boys grow up to be wolves!" I protested angrily. My brother shook his head like an artist: "Fruits can not only be eaten but also serve as great works of art. Selling fruits should also be about a certain level of taste. Nowadays, everyone treats fruits like pork, piling them up in heaps. The fruit sellers are all fierce-looking, and even those eating fruits always look at the fruit in their hands as if they were enemies."