Happy Dreams

by Jia Pingwa

I sold my kidney instead. I used the money to build the house, but then the girl went and married someone else.

If human life can be divided into stages, then the way I see it is that my Freshwind stage was a messy heap of straw, scattering whenever the wind blew, and the next stage for me was city life.

We must have sinned against each other in a previous existence, so that each of us owed something to the other in this life.

writing a name was like writing a charm, and saying a name aloud was like chanting a spell, it had the power to shape your destiny.

The thing I found most incredible was that I only had to wish for something and it came true.

If I saw a phoenix, then a phoenix it was, and the treetop was a cloud, a green cloud.

Their second toes were always the longest. That meant lucky in marriage.

The most prized virtue is standing on your own two feet,’

Human relationships are not about the big things, they’re about the details.

as the saying goes, a good neighbor is more useful than a distant relative.

He said I had a mole on the sole of one foot, near the heel. According to the old saying, that meant I was born to be a leader of men.

Money’s a snobby bastard. It only goes to people who already have it.”

According to Chinese medicine, your body overheats if you’re run-down.

The way big people got big was by conferring a bit of power on little people

everyone should have a bird singing inside them as well as a crow cawing.

But a white daikon turns green when it grows out of the soil, water turns to ice when it gets cold, and the environment changes people.

All the most amazing happenings in the world were hidden in money.

If wisdom meant anything, it meant thinking things through. Once you’d thought them through, little by little you applied that reasoning to your everyday life.

But there was always one whale in a shoal of fish, and one phoenix in a flock of birds,

“Change what you can change, adapt to what you can’t change, put up with what you can’t adapt to, and let go of what you can’t put up with.”

“If someone’s attractive, it’s because all their proportions are right. It’s like a house. If it’s well built, then it’s well ventilated and airy, and then the sun shines in, and of course it’s sturdy too. A house that’s just thrown together any old way is none of those things.”