如鱼得水

They say you’re not supposed to like your work and that’s why they pay you a “compensation”, but every other autobiography begins with “I’ve dreamed of doing this since I was nine.” I envy the people who’ve found their life’s calling, and I admire those who let nothing stand in the way of pursuing it.

Still, opportunities come in different sizes. The ideal job might not have come along yet, but occasionally, at a party or by the water cooler, you might be challenged to do something, and you’re thinking to yourself, I’ve spent my whole life preparing for this.

How would you describe such a situation? There’s a chengyu for that.

亡羊补牢

The horses have bolted. Do you fix the barn door? The idiom didn’t tell us not to, but it does tell us it’s too little too late. Don’t let it happen in the first place, was the moral of the story.

The sheep have escaped. Do you fix the fence? This Chinese saying is almost identical to barn-horse one in English. Only, it takes a glass-half-full point of view: let sunk cost be sunk cost, and focus on what we can do to mitigate the loss.

不求甚解

Have you ever used CliffsNotes to get through your reading assignments? I sure have. I’ve never been big on reading as a kid, and I didn’t appreciate the art of language either. I just wanted to know what happened in the book: give me the plot, and spare me the fluff.

Oh, by the way, did you know that it’s supposed to be CliffsNotes and not CliffNotes? The book series was started by someone called Cliff and the books were originally called Cliff’s Notes. Did it matter that you didn’t know that? Probably not.

There’s a chengyu for this kind of scenarios: for when you have a superficial understanding of something, but didn’t bother learning more.

狡兔三窟

Do you back up your files? If you don’t, you should. And if you do, you should know the 3-2-1 rule: make three copies, spread across two devices, one of which located offsite. That’s a bit of an overkill, I hear you say, but if your house catches fire and you lose every computer, phone, and tablet in the house, you’d regret you didn’t keep a copy of that video of your newborn taking their first steps somewhere outside the house too. Probably won’t happen to you. Would you bet that video on it?

Three seems to be a magic number. Wikipedia lists a dozen different rules of three, there are countless three-word chants and three-letter acronyms, and it just feels satisfying to have three things in a list. Or, in this ancient Chinese story, it’s important to leave yourself three options for when things go wrong.

扑朔迷离

“Confusing” is a hard word to translate. There are a few ways to say “I’m confused”: 我糊涂了 (lit. “I am messy”), 我不明白 (lit. “I don’t understand”), or 我乱了 (lit. “I’m in disorder”). There’s no good translation for the verb “to confuse”; the closest equivalent in Chinese is 困惑, which, apart from being a rather high-register word, expresses more the idea of “I can’t figure it out” than “I don’t follow”. To say “wait, you’re confusing me”, it’s better to talk around it: 你慢点，我没听明白 (lit. “slow down, I didn’t listen-understand”).

When the plot of a story gets complicated and it’s hard to figure out who’s who and what’s what, though, there’s a chengyu for this exact scenario.

千里之行，始于足下。

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Chinese is an ancient language, and a lot of people have said a lot of things. Occasionally, someone says something brilliant, and people start repeating it. After enough repetitions, some of them become a 成语 (chéng yǔ) — roughly “fixed expressions” — and become a part of the language itself.

A chengyu is typically four characters long and taken from a longer piece of text. They usually make an astute observation about something specific. They are like idioms in English, only more concise and richer in context. With a little bit of explanation, even English speakers can enjoy their brilliance.

For good omens, let’s start with one that talks about beginnings.