Six Records of a Floating Life (Chapter one: Wedded Bliss 11)

    Then on our way back, we visited the Koyuan Garden, in which we saw a profusion of flowers of all colors. Wang was very childish, she would now and then pick a flower for no reason, and Yun scolded her, "What do you pick so many flowers for, since you are not going to put them in a vase or in your hair?" "Oh! What's the harm? These flowers don't feel anything."

    "All right." I said. "You will be punished for his one day by marrying a pock-marked bearded fellow for your husband to avenge the flowers." Wang looked at me in anger, threw the flowers to the ground and kicked them into the pond. "Why do you all bully me?" she said. However, Yun made it up with her, and she was finally pacified.

    Yun was at first very quiet and loved to hear me talk, but I gradually taught her the art of conversation as one leads a cricket with a blade of grass. She then gradually learnt the art of conversation. For instance, at meals, she always mixed her rice with tea, and loved to eat stale picked bean-curd, called “stinking bean-curd” in Soochow. Another thing she liked to eat was a kind of small pickled cucumber. I hated both of these things, and said to her in fun one day, "The dog, which has no stomach, eats human refuse because it doesn't know that refuse stinks, while the beetle rolls in dunghills and is changed into a cicada because it wants to fly up to heaven. Now are you a dog or a beetle?" To this Yun replied, "One eats beancurd because it is so cheap and it goes with dry rice as well as with congee. I am used to this from childhood. Now I am married into your home, like a beetle that has been transformed into a cicada, but I am still eating it because one should not forget old friends. As for pickled cucumber, I tasted it for the first time in your home."

    “Oh, then, my home is a dog's kennel, isn't it?" Yun was embarrassed and tried to explain it away by saying, "Of course there is refuse in every home; the only difference is whether one eats it or not. You yourself eat garlic, for instance, and I have tried to eat it with you. I won't compel you to eat stinking bean-curd, but cucumber is really very nice, if you hold your breath while eating. You will see when you have tasted it yourself. It is like Wuyien, an ugly but virtuous woman of old." 

"Are you going to make me a dog?" I asked.

“Well,I have been a dog for a long time, why don't you try to be one?"

    So she picked a piece of cucumber with her chopsticks and stuck it into my mouth. I held my breath and ate it and found it indeed delicious. Then I ate it in the usual way and found it to have a marvellous flavour. And from that time on, I loved the cucumber also. Yun also prepared pickled bean-curd mixed with sesame seed oil and sugar, which I found also to be a delicacy. We then mixed pickled cucumber with pickled bean-curd and called the mixture “the double-flavoured gravy." I said I could not understand why I disliked it at first and began to love it so now. "If you are in love with a thing, you will forget its ugliness,”said Yun.