First Attempt At Doing Business (By Quan Jingye)

by Quan Jingye (translated by Denis Mair) In 1987, my wife's factory was not breaking even She was laid off for a few months This wouldn't do…she had to find a way To earn back her lost wages So she decided to bake pastries for sale After some failed attempts…she went through a friend To contact someone in Ning'an who made a living from pastries Watching him go through it once, she was able to master it Now that she knew how to bake cakes, it was time to sell them That happened to be during rice-planting season I took time on a weekend to go with my old lady We took some freshly made cakes to Dage Village Where we planned to sell them beside paddy fields In order to sell them, we had to give people a taste But as my wife watched the cake tasters licking their lips She felt embarrassed about selling them "Let's just divvy them up among the people We have ties with all of these country people" My old lady was blinking her eyes as she said this "I don't see a problem. Go right ahead." My wife flashed me a wisp of a smile Hopping like a little bird, with the cakes in her arms She handed them out door-to-door, happy as you please It seemed that neither of us was cut out For doing business…the next morning While lying under the covers she said "Well, this attempt at business has gone sour [1] This bears out the saying… We "‘raided the hen's nest but ended up breaking the eggs! '" [1] In the local dialect of Jilin Province, the Chinese word for "go sour" is HUANG-LE, which literally means "turn yellow." In his wife's colorful expression, yellowness fits amusingly with the color of eggs used in making a cake.