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John Steven Pramesa (August 28, 1925 – September 9, 1996) was an American professional baseball player, a catcher in the Major Leagues from – for the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds. A native of Barton, Ohio, he threw and batted right-handed, stood tall and weighed .
Pramesa spent the full seasons of and as the Reds' second-string catcher, playing behind Homer "Dixie" Howell. In 1950, his best MLB season, Pramesa batted .307 in 74 games played and 228 at bats, with a career-high 30 runs batted in.
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1925 births
1996 deaths
Major League Baseball catchers
Chicago Cubs players
Cincinnati Reds players
Anderson A's players
Bristol Twins players
Des Moines Bruins players
Jacksonville Tars players
Jersey City Giants players
Los Angeles Angels (minor league) players
Manchester Giants players
Springfield Cubs players
Syracuse Chiefs players
Toronto Maple Leafs (International League) players
Trenton Giants players
Baseball players from Ohio
Baseball players from West Virginia
People from Belmont County, Ohio | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 4,001 |
1
Twelve years ago, a man named Bodine checked into a Las Vegas motel under the name Thomas Hudson with a young girl who was of no relation to him. She was a pretty little thing, perhaps eight or nine years of age, dressed plainly in a simple cotton dress embroidered with tiny red strawberries around the waist. To glance casually upon the pair, one would assume they were father and daughter. But on closer inspection, anyone with a knack for detail would see that the man was no one's father. Tall, gaunt, haunted—looking at him was like staring infinity in the face. With his black, hopeless eyes recessed into deep pockets and an air of chronic fatigue surrounding him like a cloud of Midwestern dust, this man was no one's father.
"What's wrong?" the girl said. "Why did we stop?"
Bodine's grip tightened on the Bronco's steering wheel. The sodium lights from the motel fell against the Bronco's windshield. A light rain had begun to fall.
"We're getting a room here," he said, his voice low. "We're staying here for the night."
The girl leaned toward the dashboard to peer out the windshield. She wasn't wearing her seat belt. "Looks dirty," she said, sizing up the motel.
It was one of a million nameless joints he'd passed on the drive from the mountains of Colorado and across the equally anonymous desert highways. There was nothing distinguishable about it. After a while, on the road, everything started to look the same.
"We call this comfortable digs," he said.
"What's that mean?"
"Means we stay here tonight." He shut the car down and popped open the door. Paused. "You wait here," he said, an afterthought.
"Can I play the radio?"
He didn't think there was any harm leaving the keys in the ignition. Unless she'd been lying, judging by her simple questions about what the pedals on the floor were for and why he had to turn a key in order to start the "growling", as she called it, he didn't think she knew how to start the vehicle let alone drive away in it. Bodine turned the switch over until the door chimes sounded. The girl, whose name Bodine did not know, smiled and switched on the radio. One tiny white hand ran through the dials until she located an oldies station while Bodine watched.
"How come you need to turn the key to play the radio?" she asked now.
"Because it runs off the car's battery. I need to turn it on to use the battery."
"Cars have batteries?" She sounded almost incredulous.
"Yes."
"Is that how they drive?"
"They drive on gasoline."
"Like from the last time we stopped," she said. "How you put it into the gas tank, like you said."
"Yes." He suddenly felt like an imbecile. What the hell was he doing talking to her like this, anyway?
"Are you going to shoot somebody?" the girl asked before he could step out of the Bronco. The statement caused him to freeze, caused the fingers of his left hand to tighten on the doorhandle.
"Why would you say something like that?"
"Because you have a gun in your pants."
His throat was lined with sandpaper. "How do you know that?"
The girl didn't answer.
"How do you know that?" he repeated, one foot out on the blacktop, his fingers still strangling the doorhandle.
The girl just smiled and stared straight ahead out the windshield. She swung her legs to the rhythm of the music, her face radiating a sickly glow beneath the wash of sodium lights. "I like this song," she said after a bit.
The motel lobby was rundown, filthy, and haunted by cigarette smoke. A flickering black-and-white television was mounted to the wall on brackets behind the night counter.
"One room," Bodine said at the counter. "One night."
"Just you?" said the grizzled cowboy behind the counter. No stranger to midnight characters of peculiar design, the cowboy did not give Bodine a second glance. And that was just fine by Bodine.
"Just me," Bodine said.
"Name?"
"Thomas Hudson," said Bodine.
"Credit card?"
"Cash," he told the cowboy, who did not raise an eyebrow.
The room was tomblike. Peeling alabaster walls and an oatmeal-colored carpet, the single bed, wide as a coffin, was dressed in a fleur-de-lis spread, heavily starched. The bathroom reeked of mildew, and the shower curtain was curled at one end of the shower into a filthy plastic sleeve. In the tub, a bristling brown spider did pushups by the drain.
"It smells bad in here," said the girl, wrinkling her nose. "Gross." She stood clutching the empty cardboard cylinder that had moments ago contained a milkshake.
"Go turn down the bed," he told her, carrying his nylon duffel bag into the bathroom. He set it beside the sink and unzipped it. Inside: fresh sneakers and a change of clothes. Brand spanking new. The sneakers were too bright and the clothes still had the tags hanging from them.
The girl did not move. She watched him through the open bathroom doorway. When he turned and saw her staring at him, he nearly jumped out of his skin.
"Thought I told you to go turn down the bed," he said, his voice quiet and level. Nearly monotone.
The girl shrugged and stepped away. A moment later, he heard the mattress springs creak.
A skeleton stared back at him from the mirror. _Jesus Christ, is that me? Is that really me?_ He grimaced, inspecting the way his purplish gums had begun to recede from his teeth, the teeth themselves discolored and patchy with calcium deposits.
Bodine peered out into the room. The girl had turned down one corner of the bed and was now sitting on the edge, staring directly at him. She'd set her empty cup down on the nightstand.
"Did you want another milkshake?" he asked. His voice shook. _Stop it,_ he thought. _Stop it, stop it, stop it._
"Why did you tell the man at the counter your name was Thomas Hudson?"
Sweat stung his eyes. "There's a soda machine down the hall. Do you want a Coke?"
"Your name's not Thomas Hudson," she said, swinging her legs.
"I don't like playing these games."
"What games?"
"These games where you ask all these questions and expect me to answer."
The girl shrugged her small shoulders. "Your name's Frank Bodine," she said.
Bodine swallowed a hard lump of spit. Seconds ticked by. His own heartbeat was like a drum in his ears. "How do you know my name?" he said finally. He'd never told her.
Again, the girl shrugged.
"Yes," he said after a moment, blinking the sweat from his eyes. "Yes, my name's Bodine. Frank Bodine." Sour, shaky exhalation. "You think you're ready to tell me your name yet?"
The girl shook her head. Grinned.
"Why not?"
"I told you," she said simply. "I don't have a name."
"Yes you do. Everyone's got a name."
"Nope. Not me."
"Sure you do. You just don't want to tell it."
"You're silly," said the girl.
"What about your parents? Didn't they give you a name?"
"I don't have any parents."
"You don't have a mom or a dad?"
"No."
"Everyone does."
"No, silly." She giggled.
Withdrawing back into the bathroom, Bodine toed the bathroom door shut. He lifted his pullover up, which stank of perspiration. The butt of the 9mm protruded from his waistband.
_Can you do this?_ a voice spoke up toward the back of his head. It was the same voice that had followed him all the way from Durango. _Are you really sure you can do this?_
He plucked the 9mm from his waistband, set it down beside the duffel bag, and turned the water on in the sink. Just the hot water. He waited as the entire bathroom steamed up before shutting the water off. With one hand he carved an arc through the condensation on the mirror before him. Dead eyes stared back.
_Can you do this?_
Bodine removed his pullover and tossed it on the floor. Took a deep breath. A chill accosted him, pimpling his flesh with goose bumps. Grabbing the handgun, he eased open the bathroom door and stepped out into the room.
The girl hadn't moved. She grinned at him as he took a single step toward the bed. His nostrils flared with each inhalation of breath. He stood unmoving, no more than ten feet from her, peripherally aware that the digital clock on the nightstand counted through several minutes while he simply stood there.
"You're skinny," she said after a while. "Your chest has red marks on it." She said, "I can see your ribs." As if this was funny, she giggled. "Your bellybutton looks funny." Legs still swinging.
"Tell me who you are," he breathed. Leveled the gun at her. His hand shook. His whole fucking arm shook. "Tell me."
"Your hair," she said, wrinkling up her nose as if she suddenly smelled something awful—the room itself, perhaps. "It's too long. Like a girl's."
He lowered his arm. The 9mm suddenly weighed fifty pounds. Without a word, he turned and retreated back into the bathroom. He felt cold, clammy, made of vulcanized rubber. The soles of his work boots creaked with each step.
In the bathroom, he set the gun down in the sink basin, which was still streaked with water. Staring up at his reflection, he thought the girl was right—that somewhere along the way, his hair _had_ gotten too long. Like a girl's.
Wearily, Bodine grinned at himself. Skeleton-faced, too-big teeth protruding from retreating purple gums...
_Can you—_
Grinned.
Next morning, a Puerto Rican housekeeper would discover Bodine's body in the bathtub, a dried spray of blood on the tiled shower stall behind his head. Bodine's hand, still limply holding the 9mm, was nestled into the thatch of black pubic hair between his legs.
The woman's screams would bring the grizzled cowboy who would in turn alert the local sheriff. Suicide, the sheriff would say, and the grizzled cowboy would nod while he chewed on an unlit cigar stub no longer than a grown man's thumb and greenish in color, and would recall nothing special about the man from the night before. There were all breeds of stranger who passed through his place, after all—all species of outlaw and lummox and daft buffoon—and who could remember one from the other?
"Name's Hudson," the cowboy would tell the sheriff, handing over the log from last night where the man had signed in. The sheriff, a grizzled old cowboy in his own right, took the log without so much as a grunt while fishing out a pack of menthols from his nylon coat with the faux fur at the collar.
There was no sign of the little girl. But, of course, no one had seen her come in with the man and therefore never knew to look for her.
Anyway, that was twelve years ago, and in a whole other part of the country.
2
After seven days of futility—
"So fucking cold my goddamn lighter's giving up the ghost," Charlie Mears said, chasing the tip of his cigarette with a tarnished Zippo. His cold, gray eyes leveled out over the vast nothingness of charcoal waters and icy strata from over the bow of the trawler. The air was cold and sharp, only vaguely scented by the trawler's diesel exhaust. Each inhalation burned his nostrils.
Beside him, hugging himself in his bright orange slicker with the hood up, "Dynamo" Joe Darling offered nothing but a grunt.
"What's your vibe on _el capitán_?" Charlie said, exhaling smoke out over the bow. The trawler was at a crawl now yet the wind still stung his chapped face.
"Think he's got a good eye for snailfish, is what I think," muttered Joe. Charlie could tell he was shivering in his orange slicker without looking at his face.
"The rest of the guys are getting restless too," Charlie said, though it didn't need to be said. He was a big, broad-shouldered guy, square-jawed with a salt-and-pepper beard tinged with copper strands. Creases splayed from the corners of his black eyes: years spent wincing through the glare of the sun off the water. "Look at that," he added, nodding toward the bleed-over pastels beyond the horizon as the sun dipped into the Bering Sea. "Something, eh?"
"I got bills to pay," Joe went on, unimpressed. "I got two mortgages, Charlie."
The crew hadn't seen a single blue since disembarking from Saint Paul Island one week ago. The captain was Mike Fenty, fairly new to the red circuit, though he'd carved out a name for himself going after walleye and sablefish. Crabs, however, were a different story. While he wouldn't say so to anyone on board, it was Charlie's distinct impression that _el capitán_ was in over his head.
"You think you'd get used to seeing the sun go down out here," Charlie said. "But I never do. It's fine in the daytime, but at night, it's like God and the rest of the world forgets about you. Left behind, like some kid in a grocery store."
"Got three kids at home, Charlie, countin' on me." There was no shaking Dynamo Joe. Anyway, he was right.
"Christ," Charlie grunted, flipping his half-smoked cigarette over the bow. "We'll give him two more days before suggesting we reassign coordinates."
"There's nothing out here," Joe said. "There's us and God and nothing else."
"Not God, either. He's somewhere else at the moment. Too damn cold for him."
"The blues are laughin' at us."
"Two more days," Charlie repeated, hugging himself now as night fell over frozen Arctic wastes.
3
But it wouldn't take two days: early the next morning, while the sky was still black and the stars as bright as fireworks, the crew of the _Borealis_ struck gold. What they called space-spiders. Moon-bugs.
During the night, Captain Fenty had wound the trawler through a section of black water alongside the Kula Plate, the wind so harsh and unforgiving the sea spray kicked up by the trawler would freeze in under a second. The giant steel pots were lowered by the great hydraulic arm, which seemingly grunted in protest, and a breakfast of warm oatmeal and watery coffee was served belowdecks. Each of them still half-asleep, they ate their oatmeal and sipped their coffee like zombies, undedicated to their roles, their broad and heavy bodies swaddled in long johns and flannel underwear. Pulling on their gear after breakfast, the sun still brightening some other part of the world, they climbed topside and sent the arm to work again, this time hoisting the pots, which were giant steel cages that weighed 800 pounds each. The first pot ascended from the black waters alive with bristling, clattering crabs, scores of them, nearly to the top of the cage. There sounded a united cheer from the deck. The pot was hoisted over the side and onto the deck where Billy McEwan and a young greenhorn named Sammy Walper each grabbed one side to stabilize it.
"Jesus Lord!" Joe shouted, clapping his rubberized gloves together. "Jesus in a propeller hat!"
Charlie shot a glance at the pilothouse windows, which were beaded with ice and grimy with diesel sludge. He raised one hand to Fenty, and Fenty raised one in return.
"They're reds! All of 'em!" shouted McEwan. "A pretty fucking penny better'n blues!"
Charlie and another deckhand, Bryan Falmouth, bent and grabbed the handles of the tank lid that was impressed into the trawler's deck. Each of them grasping a wrought-iron ring, Charlie said, "Ready?"
Falmouth nodded. "Do it."
"One...two...three!"
The lid was hoisted on angry, squealing joints.
"Ha, ha!" Joe was still stomping and clapping on the deck.
The pot was opened and the crabs were dumped across the deck. Immediately, the sound of the bone-thick, segmented legs chattering along the planking was like a wave of applause, their enormous, grotesque bodies clambering over one another, abbreviated pincers raised and snapping, biting at the freezing air and, more often, at one another.
They set to work sizing the crabs and examining their sexes, mostly by sight—a quick glance of appraisal, no more than a second and a half long—though occasionally one would have to be lifted and examined and judged before tossing it either into the under-deck holding tank or over the trawler's side back into the sea.
"This ugly bastard's a new pair o' bowling shoes," Joe shouted, holding one of the giant reds with two hands. He was grinning from ear to ear—Joe, not the crab. Bending down and planting a kiss on the top of the creature's carapace, Joe flung it down into the tank and quickly scooped up another. "And this 'ere one's a flat-screen TV!" To the crab, which was raising and lowering its legs with a mechanical, hydraulic quality, Joe muttered, "How you gonna like that, you ugly son of a bitch?"
Sammy Walper, the greenhorn, laughed and kicked one of the crabs down into the hatch soccer-style.
Most were keepers; they threw back very few. And once they'd finished, Captain Fenty brought the trawler around to another buoy and they repeated the process over again. This went on until lunchtime.
Nearing dusk, they reran the circuit and dumped the traps overboard, scattering a trail of neon buoys in the ship's wake. Having worked up monstrous appetites, the rest of the crew descended belowdecks to the galley quarter where Walper the greenhorn would be coerced into whipping up fried eggs and ham while everyone got drunk on Dynamo Joe's vodka. Blood-caked lips, splitting and chapped, with eyes like black pools...everyone stinking of codfish guts and dense with perspiration...
Charlie did not join them right away. He remained topside, his joints and muscles aching pleasantly, digging out a pack of menthols from within his overcoat.
"Whatcha smokin'?" Mike Fenty said, coming up behind him. He was a distinguished-looking guy, particularly for out here in this ungodly void—of good height and symmetrically featured, his close-cropped hair silvered at the temples. His eyes were lucid and a shade of blue that recalled Caribbean waters. Had that George Clooney appeal with the ladies back in Anchorage.
"Hey, Mike."
"Here," Mike said, extending him a cigar as black as demitasse. "Try this. Helps you settle down."
"Thanks."
Mike produced a second cigar for himself and together they bit off the tips and spat them into the water. The trawler was idling down a chasm of banded gray sea, bookended on either side by thin crusts of ice. Off to the north, the silhouette of an iceberg loomed like the spinal column of some giant prehistoric skeleton. Even in the oncoming darkness, Charlie could make out the black specks of seal pups nesting along the rookeries.
Mike lit Charlie's cigar for him and Charlie pulled on it a number of times, working up good passage. It was strong like coffee and tasted good. Charlie exhaled a jet of cigar smoke into the air. "Nice," he said.
Mike leaned over the ship's rail. His lucid eyes watched the sun sink down beyond the backbone ridge of the iceberg. "Listen, Charlie," he said. "I want to thank you."
"For what?"
"I'm not an idiot and I'm not deaf. I know there's been talk all week. Was starting to prep myself for mutiny."
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Nothing ridiculous about it." Mike squeezed one of Charlie's shoulders. "You're a good friend, man. I appreciate you keeping the wolves at bay, giving me a chance." Mike turned and stared at the glow of the lamps coming through the pilothouse windows. His face partially masked in shadows and outlined in the glow of the sunset, he said, "They're all good guys, all of 'em. I'm glad today was a good day. We needed a good day." Mike plucked the cigar from his mouth and examined the glowing ember at its tip. "Anyway, I wanted to thank you for sticking up for me with the guys."
"Forget about it," Charlie said, looking back over the darkened waters. "We been friends for a while, ain't we? Was nothing."
A comfortable silence settled between them. After a while, Mike said, "You hear anything from Gabe? From Johanna?"
Charlie closed his eyes. "Been a long time."
"You ever call that lawyer? The guy from Fairbanks?"
"Three times."
"And?"
"And there's nothing I can do. No court's gonna make her bring him back to Alaska and I sure as shit ain't gonna get full custody."
"Where are they now? Do you even know?"
He didn't know, not for sure. The last conversation he'd had with Johanna, she and Gabriel were somewhere outside Omaha, holed up in some flea-infested roadside motel, Johanna angry and yelling at him until she finally started crying. In the background, he had heard Gabriel crying too, and calling for him. _Daddy-Daddy-Daddy—_ He could still hear it, echoing out over the ether. In his hand, he could still feel the telephone receiver, pushing hard against his ear as Johanna's yelling came through all too clear. All of this: flashes of memory going off like mind grenades, the images so vivid they singed the filaments of his brain.
But he couldn't say all of that to Mike Fenty. Instead, he kept his eyes focused on the mottled neon hues of the setting sun spilling over the ice floe and trickling down into the black sea. To Mike he said, "She's got no family to stay with, Mike. Nobody I could contact. She and Gabe could be anywhere." The _Borealis_ canted to one side as sheets of ice broke apart beneath its bow, the sound like glass being crushed beneath heavy boots. In the distance, covered now in deepening darkness, the seal pups barked at the moon. "This is my last trip out, Mike. Just wanted you to know that."
"Jesus, Charlie, what are you talking about?"
"I can't keep doin' this."
"You're just talkin' foolish."
"Been thinkin' about tryin' to find 'em. Go out lookin' for 'em."
"But you said it yourself, Charlie—they could be anywhere in the country. How you gonna find them? Ain't got a chance in hell."
"Better chance than bein' out here."
"And even if you did find them, it won't change nothing. She still won't let you see him."
"She might. If I took a job nearby, something that kept me grounded without disappearing on the water for weeks or months at a time..."
"Bah," Mike groaned, turning away and looking out over the port side. "That's just happy talk. You know it."
"Still gotta try."
"And what the hell will you do for a job, anyway? Teach goddamn physics at Harvard? This shit out here—" Mike Fenty opened his arms as if to embrace the world. "This shit is all you know, Charlie. She was wrong to want you to change and you'd be wrong changing."
He sucked hard at the cigar and said through a mouthful of smoke, "Nothing wrong about goin' after my son, Mike. Nothing wrong with that at all."
Finally, Mike Fenty sighed. He relit his cigar and, after a few moments of silence between the two of them, said, "Yeah, I guess there ain't a damn thing in this world wrong with that."
They remained topside for several minutes more, burning the life from their cigars at equal speed, until Mike Fenty clapped Charlie and on the back and told him he was freezing his ass off and wanted to get some supper before Walper the greenhorn hit the sack.
"Don't stay out here too late, Charlie."
But Charlie hardly heard him. Blindly, without taking his eyes off the passing island of ice, he groped for Mike's coat, catching the captain around the forearm and tugging him back toward the rail.
"Charlie—"
"Jesus Christ," Charlie whispered. The cigar fell from his lips and silently dropped into the sea. "Holy mother of God..."
"Charlie, _what—"_
He jabbed a gloved finger at the ice floe. The trawler had sidled up alongside it in the encroaching night, so close Charlie could see the individual fissures in the ice, the moonlight casting a palette of shadows along the bluish ridge. They'd passed the seal rookeries some time ago, leaving their ghostly barking far off in the distance now. Still, there was movement out on the ice, movement—
"What the hell are you—" Mike began, peering through the darkness. The sun had fully set and there was nothing more to go on than the moonlight refracting off the snow.
"You see it?" Charlie said, his voice not rising above a whisper. "Holy fuck, man, you _see_ it?"
"Can't be..."
"Holy—"
_"Can't—"_
A figure, most definitely human, darted along the nearest ridge of the iceberg. Legs pumping, arms like pistons, the black shape ran along the cusp of the snowy ridge until it climbed to the top, briefly silhouetting itself against the three-quarter moon. A second later the figure descended down the opposite side, vanishing from view. The trawler was close enough and the moonlight bright enough for Charlie to identify with little doubt actual _footprints_ in the snow.
"Jesus Christ, Charlie, did you _see_ that?" Mike's voice was no louder than a croak. He was leaning over the ship's rail, gaping up at the ridge where the mysterious figure, only seconds ago, had been standing.
"It was a woman," Charlie said. "Did you see?"
"Charlie—"
Snapping from his daze, Charlie grabbed two fistfuls of Mike Fenty's coat and pried him away from the rail. "Get up behind the wheel and spin this boat around. She went down around the other side of the ridge."
Mike's eyes were as wide as hubcaps. "Christ, Charlie..." A crooked half-grin broke across his face. "How do you suppose...?"
"Go!" he barked, shoving Mike across the deck. Mike staggered for a couple of feet until he regained authority of his legs and began running for the pilothouse.
Charlie rushed to the port side of the trawler and nearly became entangled in a coil of line left haphazardly unspoiled on the decking. He kicked the line off his boot and peered over the side of the ship, his heart beating heavy in his chest now. In the pilothouse, Mike Fenty had taken the wheel and was already bringing the _Borealis_ around the side of the iceberg. As the ship navigated around a tongue of ice and dipped back close to the iceberg, Charlie was immediately overwhelmed by the enormity of the floe. From this side, beneath the bleeding moonlight, he could see the entire length of the iceberg. It nearly glowed with phosphoresce, the sloping ridges frozen into icefalls that bled directly into the sea. The ocean opened up—a blanket of tar whose surface glittered with jewels—and the _Borealis_ chugged around the perimeter of the floe.
Charlie looked down. The port side of the trawler was cutting through a crust of ice. Any closer to the ice floe would put the boat at risk. He glanced up at the pilothouse, a triptych of paneled glass illuminated from within by smeary, tallow light. Mike's slender silhouette was clearly visible through the glass. Charlie held up one hand and Mike prodded the air horn— _maaaawh—_ in acknowledgement.
The rest of the crew began filing out onto the deck. Joe hurried over to Charlie, still clinging to a half-eaten ham sandwich. "What in the name of holy hell are you two doin' out here?"
The trawler passed beneath the lee of a great conical of ice. The moon was wiped out, dousing the ship into darkness greater than a thousand midnights.
"There's someone out here," Charlie said. For whatever reason, he was still whispering. "There's someone out on the ice."
"What?" Joe cawed, incredulous. He perched himself along the rail and peered through the darkness at the looming iceberg. "Are you insane? And we're too close to this thing." Joe turned around and started waving his arms at the pilothouse. "Asshole's gonna pull a _Titanic!"_
"We're fine, we're fine," Charlie said, his breath coming in excited gasps now. He was staring through the dark, his eyes cutting through the undulating depths of the mountain of ice. The shadows appeared to be alive. If he looked at any particular place for too long, the landscape appeared to shift. He blinked and pressed the heels of his rubber gloves into his eye sockets.
Billy McEwan materialized beside Charlie. One of McEwan's large white hands closed around Charlie's left wrist. "The hell's going on, Charlie?"
"I saw someone on the ice. A woman."
"We can't be cutting this close to the ice, man. You know that." McEwan still had his wrist.
"Mike knows what he's doing." He yanked his wrist free and locked McEwan in a heavy stare. Billy McEwan stared back, his too-white face framed in a black, rubberized hood, the loose threads of his knitted cap spiraling down over his forehead. McEwan had spent a good chunk of his career as a pilot with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service out of Alaska until he got caught doing overflights for poachers in his private Cessna. As a deckhand, McEwan was a strong and silent worker...but Charlie always got the feeling that the man resented his current lot in life and thought of the rest of the crew as no better than a mob of uneducated roughnecks.
McEwan's eyes pulled away, cutting out across the flank of ice. Charlie let his gaze linger just a bit longer, nothing more than a childish exercise in superiority of course, until he watched McEwan's eyes widen and his lips purse. A waft of cloudy vapor rose from between McEwan's lips and vaporized in the freezing air. Charlie swung back around and stared over the ice just as McEwan mumbled something unintelligible under his breath.
The figure reappeared down the opposite side of the ridge—just a black blur among a density of deep shadows.
"There's someone out there," Billy McEwan breathed.
"There!" Charlie yelled, waving again at Mike inside the pilothouse. He began pointing vigorously at the ridge. "There! There!"
The rest of the crew, including Dynamo Joe Darling, turned and stared at him as if he'd lost his mind.
Just then the trawler cleared the shadow of the icy spire and the three-quarter moon reappeared in the sky. Moonlight washed down the frozen slopes of the iceberg and spilled down to the frozen shores. The figure was illuminated coming down the ridge—white, glistening skin, athletic build, undeniably female. Smallish breasts capped in dark areolas were quite visible, as was the narrow thatch of dark pubic hair nestled between the V of her thighs.
"She's fucking _naked,"_ McEwan uttered. The incredulity of his statement would have been a cause for good laughter had the situation not been so absurd.
The young woman—for Charlie already decided she was somewhere in her early twenties—whipped her head around at the sight of the boat just as Mike turned on the floodlights. The entire wall of ice lit up like a dance floor, the mysterious young woman suddenly at center stage. She had long, dark hair, wet and plastered down against her shoulders, her skin glowing in a freezing sheen of icy water. Eyes large and black, she stared directly at the trawler's floodlights without wincing, frozen as if in spectacle without movement, her narrow little breasts quivering, her mouth opened in a partial snarl through which the vague gleam of teeth glowed.
Joe, Bryan Falmouth and Sammy Walper dashed to the portside in unison, causing the 200-foot trawler to list to one side. All of them speechless, the only sound that could be heard above the chugging of the trawler's diesel engine was a commingling of raspy, exhausted breathing.
The young woman turned away from the floodlights, her hair whipping in a single frozen fantail from one shoulder to the other, and stared down the length of the ice floe. Then she turned back and stared at the men. By inches, the trawler crept closer to the edge of the ice floe. A second later, Mike cut the engine, and the ship, following a heavy growl, went silent.
The girl collapsed into the snow, seemingly unconscious.
"Jesus," Joe gasped.
Charlie spun around and grabbed the coil of line that he'd nearly tripped over moments ago. He found the end and slipped it around his waist, tying a halfway decent lasso. Kicking out the length of line to relieve the tension, he was about to make sure the other end was firmly fastened to the hydraulic arm when Joe grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.
"The hell you doing, Charlie?"
"Going out there."
Joe blinked twice, shaking his head. "You've lost your mind or something?"
"Not unless I'm the only guy who sees a naked girl lying facedown on the ice."
"How—"
"Listen up," he said, stepping away from Joe and addressing the rest of the crew. Mike was already hurrying down the pilothouse steps, pulling his coat tighter around his waist. "I'm gonna go down there and grab her. Bryan and Sammy, you guys lower me out over the ice with the hydro arm then pull me back up when I give you the okay."
Bryan and Sammy just stared at him, equally dumbstruck.
"Whoa, whoa," McEwan said, raising both hands. "Calm down, hero. We ain't sending a man overboard tied to a goddamn piece of cable—"
"Is there a better idea?" Charlie returned.
"We've got grappling hooks down below," McEwan said. "Ain't nobody's life on the line. We yank her up and over with the hooks the way they used to yank people off stage in the old vaudeville days."
"Sure," Joe countered, "and we stab her full of holes in the process. Nice thinking."
"Neither one of you assholes is the captain," McEwan said, suddenly leveling his gaze on Mike Fenty. "What say you, Cap?"
Mike glanced over the side and down at the broken white form crumpled in the snow. Her skin had started to crystallize and turn blue. "Much as I don't like it," he said, "we'll send Charlie down. Dynamo's right—those grapping hooks'll turn her into a spaghetti strainer."
Charlie tightened the knot at his waist. "All right, then. Clock's ticking."
4
In hardly no time at all, the hydraulic arm began to whir. Joe and Mike, positioned on either side of Charlie, steadied him as he stepped one foot up onto the narrow railing. As the hydraulic arm positioned itself at the proper angle, it began to raise Charlie up off the railing. Mike's fingers trailed down the length of Charlie's left leg while Joe took a step back, feeding the cable out over the side of the boat.
"Keep steady," Mike called up to him. "Try not to swing."
Thankfully, there was very little wind. Still, Charlie could feel the cold air seeping into every open pocket; he tried to hug himself against the chill, his teeth already beginning to rattle in his skull, as the hydro arm rotated out over the water. He looked down and saw his mirrored self in the glassy surface of the night waters. The hydro arm began to hiss as it extended itself out over the water and toward the floating island of ice. He could smell the gears burning. It seemed to go impossibly slow.
On deck, Mike raced back up to the control booth and manually swiveled the spotlight toward Charlie, catching him suspended in midair like a yoyo having run out of string. Slowly Charlie rotated in the beam of light, shielding his eyes with one gloved hand as he wheeled around to face the spotlight.
The arm jerked to a stop, causing Charlie to swing gently from side to side: a hypnotist's watch on a chain. "What happened?" he yelled. His eyes, which had been trained on the slight, pale form of the young woman sprawled on the ice, turned now to Sammy and Bryan back on deck. "The hell's going on?"
"It's fully extended!" Bryan called back, his hands cupped around his mouth.
Charlie looked down. The ice below was thin and gray, sloping gradually up toward the snowcapped mounds of ice that made up the first ridge of the massive floe. The boat, he knew, would be unable to get any closer.
He called back to Bryan, "Lower the arm!"
Bryan was clearly shaking his head. "No way! Ice is too thin! You'll go right through!"
"It'll hold!" he shouted back. Glancing down a second time, however, he had serious doubts...
"Bullshit!" Bryan returned. "We'll try to get closer!"
"Impossible," he called back. Mike was outside on the deck now, shaking his head as well. "Just lower me down." Charlie added, "Slowly."
Bryan and Sammy exchanged a look. A second later, the gears above Charlie's head once again started to whir. He felt himself slowly descending, keeping his eyes locked on his all-weather boots. Water dripped from his boots and struck the ice below as frozen pellets. In his head, he was already doing the math: he was a two hundred twenty-nine– pound man with approximately forty pounds of gear on; below, the tongue of ice was maybe four inches thick...if he was lucky. He could have taken one of the grappling hooks, prodded the ice to test its strength, but he didn't want to make his fear a reality as the ice broke apart under the weight of the hook. He would just go ahead and do it the same way he'd done everything else in his thirty-nine years, including his relationship with Johanna all those years ago: he'd simply close his eyes and take a single step toward the abyss.
In fact, he realized his eyes were closed as he felt the world come up to meet the soles of his boots. He opened his eyes just as the hydraulic arm wheezed to a stop. He was standing perilously on the narrow peninsula of ice, conscious of the distribution of his weight equally between both feet. Above his head, the cable slid from the runner and spooled down around his feet. Back on the boat, Joe continued feeding slack.
Holding his breath, he took one step up the incline. Solid. He took another step—and a distant breaking sound echoed back to his ears, hardly perceptible yet as loud as the rumbling of a cement truck at the same time, causing him to freeze. He sucked cold air through his teeth. There was a hairline fissure in the ice running directly beneath his boot.
He looked away, focusing straight ahead. Backlit by the trawler's floodlights, Charlie's shadow, projected onto the iceberg, loomed enormous. Arms outstretched for balance, he crossed the finger of ice quickly then mounted the incline, dropping down on all fours to scurry up the slope. Behind him, he heard the cracking ice peel away from the floe. He turned to see chunks of gray ice float away on the inky waters.
"Perfect," he grunted.
Still on all fours, he spied the young woman's frail figure fallen slumped, face first, in the snow. Maybe ten, twelve feet away. Mesmerized momentarily, he stared at one narrow buttock, the flesh so white it was almost translucent, before Joe's urgent cries sent him scrambling toward her.
Sitting up on his knees, he touched one of her shoulders and rolled her on her back. Her head lolled, as if filled with ball bearings. Charlie gasped. Her eyes were still open, milky and cataract blind. Her thin lips had purpled and split in the cold; blood from open sores had frozen in spidery calligraphy down her chin. She wasn't breathing.
"Come on, hon." He managed to hoist the girl up in his arms while standing simultaneously. She was as light as an empty husk, her arms and legs already beginning to stiffen. He shouted out to the _Borealis,_ and Bryan Falmouth gave him a thumbs-up. A second later, the mechanical hoist reeled the extra cable up into the hydraulic arm, pulled the rope taut. Charlie hugged the girl against him, squeezing his own eyes shut. The rope around his waist tightened and pulled up. The cable was set at an angle, causing him to swing violently the moment his boots lifted off the ground. Keeping his eyes shut, holding tight to the girl's rigid body, he felt his stomach lurch with the swinging of the rope. On deck, a couple of the guys cried out and someone told Bryan to steady the rope, steady the rope, steady the fucking rope.
The arm retracted and swiveled over the deck, dangling Charlie and the girl like two fish caught on a line. Overzealous, Sammy Walper struck the release too early and sent Charlie and the girl crashing to a sopping wet heap on the floor of the deck.
The girl's stiff body sprang from Charlie's arms and rolled like a mannequin away from him. Scrambling backward on his hands and feet, Charlie slammed his back against Joe's legs. Joe reached down and tweaked his ear, clapped him on one cheek.
"She's not breathing," Charlie said, struggling for breath himself. "I don't know CPR."
McEwan dropped to one knee over the girl. He reached down to roll her over on her back but jerked away the moment his fingers touched her bare flesh, as if shocked by a current of electricity.
"What? What?" Joe yelled.
"She's freezing," said McEwan.
"And not breathing," Charlie said again, struggling to his feet. Joe helped him, slinging one arm around his shoulder. "Does anyone know CP-fucking-R?"
Surprisingly, Sammy Walper came bounding off the crank rig and hurried over to the girl. Without a word, the kid shouldered McEwan out of the way. He peeled off his gloves and placed one hand atop the other, braiding his fingers together, and proceeded to pump stiff-armed down on the girl's chest.
"Go to it, kid," McEwan muttered, standing and sliding out of Sammy's way.
Mike scurried down the pilothouse steps, breathing just as heavy as Charlie. Briefly, their eyes locked across the bow. Mike nodded once. Charlie wordlessly returned the gesture.
McEwan pulled back his hood and grabbed his knit cap off his head. Eyes locked on Sammy Walper and the girl, he raked thick fingers through his corkscrew hair. "Jesus, Sammy, she breathing?"
Sammy didn't answer. When he dropped his face down toward hers, pressing his lips against hers, Charlie turned away. He was thinking of how her lips had ballooned up and split at the creases...the way the blood had dried on her chin...
Bryan sloughed off the crank platform and staggered over to Charlie and Joe. He seemed unable to look away from the spectacle. In a small voice he said, "How the hell did she get out here?" When no one answered he said, "And what happened to her clothes?"
Mike bent down beside Sammy, who was back to administering chest compressions. "You're doing real good, kid. Real fucking impressive. Come on, Sammy. Come on, Sam—"
Sammy cried out, high-pitched as a schoolgirl. Startled, Mike staggered backward a few steps, his arms splayed, his knees wobbly. With unmatched agility, Sammy Walper popped to his feet and practically moonwalked back across the deck.
The girl's eyes were open. Stiffly she turned her head to one side, appraising the crew one by one. When those cold, black eyes fell on Charlie, he felt something tighten in the center of his gut.
She sat up. Color was already beginning to filter through her veins. Clumps of ice slid down her wet hair and splashed to the deck in muddy pools.
Mike clapped his hands. "Come on, guys! Let's get her downstairs, warm her up!" He grabbed Sammy's sleeve and dragged him back down toward the girl. "Help me get her on her feet, Sammy."
Sammy jerked his sleeve free and pulled his arm up to his chest, as if injured. In a small voice he said, "I ain't touchin' her."
McEwan rolled into place. He slipped two hands beneath the girl's armpits and, after a quick one-two-three count, lifted her off the deck. Upright, her body was as pale as moon glow, slender yet muscular, fragile as glass. Mike rushed to assist McEwan, each of them grabbing one of the girl's arms. They proceeded to lead her to the hatch. At one point the girl turned and looked over her shoulder. Charlie thought she was looking directly at him.
5
Charlie gathered dry towels from the pantry while Joe boiled water on the petrol stove in the galley. There were only a few towels, which Charlie stacked under one arm. There were warm, clean clothes on his bunk—fresh socks, sweats, a hoodie—so he jogged down the narrow corridor that led to the tiny compartment he shared with Joe and Sammy.
Sammy was in the room, sitting on the edge of his own bunk. His presence startled Charlie, who paused briefly before setting the towels down on Joe's bunk.
"Nice work out there, kiddo."
Sammy nodded.
Charlie grabbed a laundry bag and stuffed it with two pairs of clean socks, a pair of LSU sweatpants and a sweatshirt with a drawstring hood. He balled the towels up too, and squeezed them into the bag.
Before leaving, he turned back to Sammy. "You okay?"
The kid sat on the edge of his cot, a runnel of snot leaking from one nostril, his legs bouncing up and down like pistons. He had his hands folded together between his knees. At the sound of Charlie's voice, the greenhorn lowered his head and refused to look Charlie in the eye.
"Sammy," he said.
"Who," the kid began. He swallowed what appeared to be a hard lump of spit then continued. "Who do you think she is?"
"I have no idea. What's the matter with you?"
"You picked her up." Sammy turned to him. His eyes were haunted, frightened. "You feel anything funny?"
"Like what?"
Sammy opened his mouth as if to speak but no words came out. Instead, he merely shook his head and turned his face away. His legs, those twin engines, were going a mile a minute now.
Charlie left, hurrying back down the corridor toward the captain's quarters. Mike's cabin door was cracked halfway, allowed Charlie to see movement on the other side. He knocked once then eased the door open.
The girl sat on Mike's cot, the towel around her shoulders already soaking wet and dripping water onto the floor. She looked up at him as he entered. Her face was expressionless. Curls of dark hair hung down over her face.
Mike was digging through an old footlocker, presumably for more towels or warm clothes, while McEwan leaned against one wall, his big arms folded across his chest.
"Here," Charlie said, tossing the laundry sack at McEwan. "Clean clothes and towels."
Mike stood with a groan and intercepted the sack from McEwan. Undoing the drawstring, Mike emptied the contents beside the girl on the cot. Taking one of the towels, he unfolded it and draped it down over the girl's head.
"You speak English, honey?" McEwan said.
The girl was busy watching Mike; she didn't look in McEwan's direction.
_"¿Habla ingles?"_ McEwan grunted. He thumbed his nose then, with a kiss-my-ass grin, looked at Charlie. "You win the prize for best catch of the day, Mears."
He was about to say something when the cabin door swung in and slammed against his back. Joe's head poked through the opened, wincing. "Shit, Charlie, sorry about that." He was holding a steaming mug of tea wrapped in a dishtowel with both hands.
Mike bent down to eye level with the girl. "What's your name, honey?"
Her dark, oil-spot eyes flitted from Mike to McEwan...then Joe, Charlie, and back to Mike.
"Can you talk?" Mike tried again. "Can you tell us your name?"
She looked away again, only this time at the fresh clothes spread out on the cot.
"She wants to get dressed," Joe said, setting the mug of tea down on Mike's footlocker. "Why don't we step out for a couple seconds, give her some privacy?"
Mike sighed. He clapped both hands on his workpants then stood with his trademark grunt. "You're right, Dynamo." He nodded toward the door. "Everybody out."
They gathered in the galley where Bryan was already pouring shots of vodka. He passed them out as the others filed into the room and slid around the table. Holding one extra shot, Bryan frowned and said, "Where's the kid?"
"In his room," Charlie said.
Bryan leaned out into the corridor and shouted, "Hey, Walper, get your CPR-pumpin' hands in here!" Claiming his own seat in the booth around the table, Bryan knocked back both his and Sammy's vodka and grimaced. "You see that kid out there? His first time out and he's saving people's lives and shit."
"Let's not jump to conclusions," Joe said.
Pouring himself another shot, Bryan said, "Conclusions about what?"
"About what constitutes being a person."
Everyone looked at Joe. McEwan said, "The hell you talkin' about?"
"Did you see her in there?" Joe was running one finger around the rim of his own shot glass. "It's fucking January and we're how many nautical miles off the coast of fucking Alaska? And she's out runnin' around naked as a jaybird. Fellas, she ain't even _shivering_ in there. Not to mention the fact that she's simply fucking _alive_ to begin with..."
"So what is she?" McEwan said. "Let's hear your theory, Einstein."
Joe cracked an awkward grin. His eyes looked aloof, delirious. "Fuck should I know? She could be a mermaid, a ghost, a fucking vampire. I don't know. All I know is there's no rational explanation for what she's—"
Mike held up one finger. He turned to Bryan. "Flip on and see if you can get Saint Paul on the radio. Find out if there's been any distress calls from ships within the past twenty-four."
Bryan saluted and jumped out of the booth. His heavy footfalls were heard tromping the steps up to the pilothouse.
They drank their shots and Mike passed around the bottle for refills.
Charlie rubbed two thick fingers across his furrowed brow. "You think she was on a ship that went down?"
Mike shrugged. "It's possible."
"Fuck," McEwan countered. "We would have heard the distress call come over the line too."
"Hell," Mike said, "for all we know, she could have fallen off a goddamn cruise ship. I'm just covering all the bases."
"Do you think—" Charlie began then cut himself off. When Mike prompted him to continue he said, "Do you think there could be more people out there?"
There was silence around the table as this notion sank in.
"Nothing we can do about it now," Mike said. He sounded dejected, worn out, beaten. "Unless we hear something specific from Saint Paul dispatch, I ain't risking running this boat into a 'berg searching for people who ain't there." He rubbed his weary face with his big hands. "We'll decide when to head back tomorrow morning when—"
"Whoa," McEwan said, holding up one hand. "Head back? What the hell, Mike?"
"What's wrong?"
McEwan coughed up a strangled little chortle. "You're kidding, right?" He leaned closer toward Mike across the tabletop. Charlie could smell the dried perspiration on his skin, mingling with the odor of the codfish used for baiting the pots. "You were out there today, weren't you? We keep this up for the rest of the week we're liable to pull fifty thousand pounds before the next snowfall." He shook his burly head. "No. No fucking way, Mike. We killed a whole week out here, catching nothing but runny noses _at your direction_ and we've got the chance to make up for lost time. We hit the motherload today, man. Think about it."
"But what about the girl?" Charlie offered before Mike could come to his own defense.
McEwan rolled one massive shoulder. "What about her? Keep her nice and warm, give her a few paperback Westerns to read, and we drop her off on Sheriff Lapatu's doorstep the second we get back."
"And what if she freaks out?" Mike said. "What if she has a goddamn seizure or a heart attack or fucking _dies_ out here, Billy?"
"If she didn't die up there on the fucking deck twenty minutes ago, then I think she's out of the woods. I get your concern, Mike. This is your boat and everything on it—every person—is your responsibility. I get that. But I ain't gonna let you cash in for no goddamn reason."
Charlie opened his mouth to speak but Joe cut him off, quick to the punch.
"He's got a point," Joe said, though unable to meet Charlie's eyes. As if he owed some explanation, he added, "Got mouths to feed, Charlie. Sorry, Mike."
Bryan came bounding back down the pilothouse stairs and into the galley, a grim look on his face.
Mike turned to him. "Well?"
"Well, you're not gonna believe it but the fucking radio's down." He tossed both hands up in mock surrender. "So's the GPS."
Mike sat forward. _"What?"_
"It's juiced," said Bryan. "I mean, it's getting power. It's just not turning on. I rebooted the whole console but it ain't working."
"Christ." Mike sank back in his seat. "I'd say we check the generators but if the board's getting power...I mean, the fucking lights come on and everything?"
"Lights, meters, gauges, you name it. No GPS screen and no radio signal. Power light comes on but I can't locate a channel."
Mike rubbed at his face and stared at the shot of vodka that stood before him on the table. Disgusted, he slid the shot over to McEwan. Through his fingers, Mike said, "Let's drop console power for the night. We'll reboot in the morning and deal with it then. It's been a long day. Any other suggestions?"
There was a resounding grunt of approval from the others.
"All right," Mike said, standing up. "I'll go down and double-check the generators. Last thing I want is all the power to cut out. Lose heat. I think—"
The girl appeared in the doorway. She was swimming in an oversized sweatshirt and baggy sweatpants, her tiny feet bound in two pairs of socks. Though still damp, her long dark hair had begun to dry in silken, raven-colored waves around her face.
The men stared at her, speechless.
"Do you have any food?" she said, startling them all.
No one moved.
"I'm hungry," she said, and this time Bryan snapped into action, climbing over the booth and pulling open cupboards.
The girl eased herself down into Bryan's seat while everyone else slid over to make room for her in the booth. Mike put his hands on his hips and looked like he wanted to laugh.
"You can talk, huh?" Mike said. "How come you wouldn't talk to us before?"
"I didn't know what to say," said the girl.
"What's your name?" Mike asked.
"I don't have one."
"Did you fall off a ship?" Charlie asked from across the table. "Did a ship go down out here or something?"
"I don't think so," she said. She seemed unconcerned. Bryan placed a bowl of cornflakes in front of her, which she proceeded to eat with her fingers. "This is good," she told him, holding up individual flakes to examine them up close before eating them. "These taste good."
"Honey," Mike went on, "how the hell did you get out here?"
"Wait." She set both palms down on the tabletop, on either side of the cereal bowl. Across the table from her, the guys recoiled without thinking about it. "There was one more of you."
"The kid's in his room," McEwan said before anyone else could answer. "Sweetheart, what the fuck you doin' running around naked out here in the middle of the devil's icebox? How long you been out here before we came along?"
"I don't remember," she said. "I don't know how long."
"And you don't remember how you got out here?"
She seemed to consider this. Finally, as a coy little smile spread across her face, she said, "I don't. I don't remember."
They watched her devour several bowls of cereal and even warmed her with a shot of vodka before the totality of the day's exhaustion began to weigh heavy on them all. They slipped out of the galley one at a time, until only Charlie, Mike Fenty, and the mysterious girl remained. The trawler bobbing like a cork on the troubled, icy waters of the Imarpik, the cupboard doors creaked open and banged shut while the remaining few inches of Popov seesawed in the bottle. Between Charlie and Mike the silence was pregnant with speculation. Frequently, sitting across from each other at the Formica table, the two men would exchange similar glances, each attempting to prompt the other into speaking.
Whether he crumbled under the weight of Charlie's unflinching glare or merely surrendered to his rank as captain, Mike sighed and finally said, "Look, darling, it's late. You're eating like a truck driver who just drove in from the moon but it's late. Charlie Mears and I, we're hitting the sack. You're welcome to my bunk for the night. There's an extra cot next to Falmouth. Won't be an issue long as he cranks down the snore machine for the—"
The girl stood abruptly. "Good night," she said, and marched out of the galley.
Mike turned and stared at Charlie. They broke into laughter together, the girlish giggling subsiding only after Mike stood, yawning. "Fuck it," the captain growled. "Maybe Billy's right. No sense cutting this thing short."
Charlie shook his head. "It's late, Mike. Go to bed."
Later, in his own room, Charlie couldn't find sleep. He stared at the darkened overhead while on his back, his big hands laced behind his head and one ankle crossed over the other. Joe was snoring soundly. Outside, he could hear the waves lapping against the sides of the trawler.
"You awake, Charlie?" It was Sammy Walper's voice, disembodied in the dark.
"I guess. What is it?"
"She make you feel..." Sammy paused, possibly choosing his words with heed. "Make you feel funny, Charlie?"
"Nearly gave me a heart attack earlier when I saw her running along that 'berg. That's about it."
"She doesn't exist." His voice was small and growing smaller. "Like... I mean, she's not supposed to exist. And maybe she doesn't. Not like you or me, I mean."
"Sammy, what are you yappin' about?"
"She doesn't know who she is," Sammy said.
"Probably amnesia. She'll remember in the morning," Charlie assured him.
"No." Sammy Walper sounded adamant. "No, that's not it..."
It was only when Joe spoke up did Charlie realize his snoring had stopped. "Truth is," Joe muttered, his voice still groggy with sleep, "she didn't say she couldn't _remember_ her name. She said she ain't _got_ one."
"Well shit," whispered Sammy Walper. The greenhorn's heartbeat was nearly audible in the claustrophobic little room.
"Guys," Charlie said, rolling over. "Let me get some sleep. I need to dream about my kid for a few hours before sunup, okay? Everything," he promised them, "will be fine in the morning."
6
In the morning, Sammy Walper was gone. It was impossible, of course—there was no place to go—but the truth of the matter could not be refuted. The kid was gone, vanished, disappeared. After thirty minutes of scrambling about the _Borealis_ like frantic rats through a gasoline-smelling maze, the crew regrouped in the galley, confusions rising, to formulate a more ceremonial approach to the search.
"We'll split into teams," Mike said. "Charlie and Joe, you guys check the engine room, the generators, every single poorly lit crevice on this ship." Mike handed Charlie a flashlight then instructed Bryan and McEwan to systematically check every room as well as all the compartments and hatches abovedeck. "We'll tear the boat apart if we have to."
"What're you gonna do?" McEwan said.
"I'll be in the pilothouse, trying to restore power to our radio and GPS," Mike said. "We good on this?"
"We're good," Charlie advised.
"Good as ever," said Bryan.
As they began filing out of the room—
"Hey." Mike pulled Charlie to one side, leaning close to his ear. "Do me a favor and peek in on our guest before you head down, will you?"
"Sure."
She was still in Mike's room where she'd spent the night. Charlie knocked on the door, but when she didn't respond, he opened the door slightly. Poked his head inside. The lights were off in the windowless room. The girl sat stock-still on the edge of the cot, her bare feet on the floor, her hands folded in her lap, illuminated by the vertical sliver of electric hallway light coming in through the half-open cabin door.
"Jesus, I'm sorry," Charlie blurted, quickly looking away.
She was completed naked, the curls of her raven-colored hair just long enough to cover the swells of her smallish breasts.
"Oh. Hello, Charlie." Her voice was childlike, simplistic somehow. "You're awake early. It's still dark."
"We're always awake early."
"How are you?
"I'm...I'm okay." He grinned in spite of his embarrassment—or, more likely, because of it—and held up two casual fingers over his eyes. Still, he could see her peripherally. "You didn't happen to see Sammy this morning, did you?"
"The young boy who saved me last night?"
"Yeah, that's the one."
"No, sir." She actually shook her head from side to side, like a stage actor being overly dramatic. "No."
"Sit tight," he told her and quickly departed, a flush of red having blossomed at each cheek.
Down belowdecks, they wandered through an ink-black labyrinth of industrial pipes and steam valves, of rattling compressors and twitching radium needles arcing across grime-caked dials. Charlie played the flashlight's beam along the ductwork, breaking light into cobwebbed corners and back behind narrow crevices. Behind him, Joe's boots shushed along the planking. The constant hum of the generators resonated in Charlie's back teeth and, at the end of the tapered black walkway, bending down where the pipes came in too close to his head, the vibrations caused an enormous spider's web to quiver like the plucked string of an upright bass. In these temperatures, the web's occupant was no longer in attendance, having either vacated by virtue of arachnid intuition just prior to the trawler's departure from Saint Paul Island or simply disintegrated in the subzero temperatures into filaments of frozen bug dust.
"Sammy ain't down here." Joe's voice, punctuated by the chattering of molars, echoed off the pipes. "Ain't nothing down here, Charlie."
"Sammy?" Charlie called, his own voice booming in the cramped space. "Kid, you down here?"
"Why's it so cold?"
"Dunno."
"Charlie, man, you don't find this strange? First it's this chick running naked on a 'berg, next thing we know the kid's gone missing."
"You sayin' there's some connection?"
"I'm sayin' it's pretty fucked up, _amigo_. That's what I'm saying."
Something cold and wet fell in Charlie's face. He directed the flashlight toward the overhead which was only about a foot from his face, and saw icicles forming along the ductwork.
Joe saw it too. Muttered, "That ain't good."
The flashlight flickered then winked off. Charlie groaned. He cracked it several times against the heel of one hand but the light did not come back on.
"Let's beat it topside," Joe said, already retreating into the darkness through the maze of pipes.
Topside, the rest of the crew was in a panic. Bryan and McEwan were unsuccessful locating any sign of Sammy Walper and Mike was still fiddling with the power grid in the control room with no success. The sun had just started to peek up over the horizon, the sea like liquid mercury, and the pots would soon need to be collected.
Charlie rapped knuckles on the control room door three times before Mike, looking haggard and frustrated, opened it.
"No dice," Charlie informed him. "I've got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, Mike, that the kid might've gone overboard."
"Don't say that. Anyway, how in the world...?"
"Beats me. He was pretty shaken up last night. Maybe...I don't know...maybe he went topside for a smoke and fell the fuck over the side."
"That's pretty goddamn queer."
"Whole thing's queer," said Charlie. "What're we gonna do about the pots?"
Mike rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead and looked instantly exhausted. "Guess we pull 'em. We're here, ain't we? Fuck."
"Then what?"
"You mean do we head back to Saint Paul? I don't see no other alternatives, do you? Kid's gone, for Christ's sake. We gotta report it or something. Tell the police."
"You been in to check on our guest this morning?" Charlie asked.
"Briefly. Talk about queer, she was just sittin' on the cot buck-ass naked."
"You get a name from her yet?"
"No. And talkin' to her's kinda funny. Leaves me feeling...strange, I guess. Like talking into a tornado—words get all jumbled and lost."
He didn't have to ask what Mike meant. "How's the power situation coming?"
"No soap. Still futzing with it."
"We got ice on the pipes down by the generators."
"Fuck me blue."
"Just thought you should know."
"Yeah, right." Mike Fenty looked shaken. "Goddamn fuckarow this is turning out to be."
Just then, Charlie happened to glimpse arms waving down on the foredeck from the corner of his eye. He turned to see Bryan Falmouth semaphoring to them from the bow, McEwan crouched on one knee before the hatch that led down into the crab tanks. The hatch was open and McEwan was peering in while dragging a hand across his scalp. Joe was bounding up the stairs of the control room, his eyes blazing like high beams in his head.
"Oh, shit," Charlie uttered. That sinking sensation in his gut suddenly amplified ten times over. He and Mike burst through the control room door and nearly collided with Joe, who was spouting gibberish, talking too fast.
"Jesus Christ, fellas— I mean, it's— Jesus—"
Charlie brushed past him and took the iron steps two at a time, Mike right behind him on his heels. Looking far from the Dynamo Joe who'd stepped on board the _Borealis_ just over a week ago, Joe Darling did not follow Charlie and Mike down the steps, he merely propped himself up against the iron railing and clung to it with both hands, all the color drained from his face.
McEwan held up a single hand, palm out, as Charlie and Mike approached the open hatch. "It's bad," McEwarn warned, his voice hollow.
Charlie stopped at the edge of the hatch and peered down into the tank.
Yesterday's catch of crabs populated the water—enough of them to compound the confusion of the scene, which required Charlie to do a double take. Then he realized what he was seeing, recognizing the whitish skin and the specifications of the protrusion of a human leg...finally, the undeniable fan of dark hair, undulating in the icy tank water like some undersea vegetation. The reddish, spidery crustaceans heaped on top of what remained of the body, moving with a mechanical, calculated slowness.
He felt his stomach lurch and he turned quickly to the side of the trawler to address the sea below. The vomit came up in a messy, pasty string that burned his esophagus and stank like the bait locker. Eyes squeezed closed, he waited for the nausea to pass before turning back around. Moisture from his eyes froze to his face. He saw Mike Fenty, poised precipitously at the lip of the hatch, not so much staring down as he was staring into a blind abyss. _Like talking into a tornado,_ Charlie thought. The captain's mind, it seemed, had temporarily shut down.
McEwan stood, albeit shakily. His small eyes appeared even smaller, almost disappearing altogether in the creases and folds of his weathered face. A sick tone to his voice, he mumbled, "How the hell could this have happened?"
"Shut it," Mike ordered him. He took a step backward and tore his eyes from the opening in the deck. "Shut the fucking thing already."
Together, Bryan and McEwan eased the hatch down and bolted it into the planking. They looked mutually disgusted and equally drained.
"It takes two men to open that hatch," Mike said. He could have been addressing them all or just talking to himself.
"Doesn't make sense." It was Bryan, hugging himself through his bright orange slicker. Bits of frost had collected about his eyelashes. "It's impossible..."
Charlie looked down at his hands. The tips of his fingers were blue. They were shaking something fierce.
7
Bryan put on a pot of coffee while Mike retreated to the control room once again. In his mounting agitation, McEwan grabbed a pack of Camels form his footlocker and tucked himself away at the rear of the boat where the diesel sauna fought to keep the cold at bay. With the sun full in the sky and the waters stretching around the world, looking alluringly calm, they would soon have to reclaim the pots and, in the wake of a unanimous decision, head back to Saint Paul Island.
Charlie crept down the corridor and, without knocking, pushed open Mike's cabin door.
Fully dressed in the clothes Charlie had given her the night before, the girl stood staring directly at him as if in anticipation of his arrival. A cold finger touched the base of Charlie's spine. He cleared his throat and was about to speak when she beat him to it—
"Did you find your friend?"
"Sammy's dead." He cleared his throat a second time, fearful he might choke on his own words. "I want to ask you something."
She eased herself down on the cot, folding her small hands in her lap. "Okay." Again: that helpless, childish voice...
With a grief so powerful it nearly shook him to his knees, her voice caused him to think of Gabriel, his son. Before he knew what was happening, his eyes began welling with tears, blurring his vision.
Like a puppy plagued with unending curiosity, the girl cocked her head to one side and examined him with coal-black eyes.
The feeling passed and Charlie regained his composure, quickly swiping his thumb over both eyelids. "Have you left this room since last night?"
She shook her head. "No."
"Not even to take a—not even to use the head?"
"The 'head'?"
"The toilet."
"No."
He said, "Then how did you know it was dark out this morning?"
She only stared at him, as motionless as a stone figure.
"When I came in here this morning," he went on, "you said that it was still dark outside. You said it was early and still dark. How did you know that if you hadn't been outside?"
"I'm hungry," she said.
"Answer my question first."
"But I want to eat."
"You won't get any food until you answer my question." Lowering his voice, he heard himself say, as if from the mouth of someone else speaking from a far distance, "What happened to Sammy?"
Almost imperceptibly, the girl's eyes narrowed.
_There's knowledge there,_ Charlie realized. _There's knowledge behind those eyes._
"Don't be angry with me," she said, and he could not tell if she was feigning innocence or if it was genuine. "I don't like it when people get angry with me."
Steeling himself, he said, "I want to know what happened to Sammy. I want you to tell me."
"Why do you think I know?"
"Because I do. And I'm not angry. I won't be. But you have to tell me."
"Maybe your friend Sammy couldn't help himself." A pause. "Sometimes people just can't help themselves..."
"If—"
There came a sudden jarring, books and framed photographs flipping off the nightstand, a ceramic coffee mug, and the lights blinked but stayed on. Charlie, his fingers digging into the doorframe, glanced around. "Jesus, I think we hit something."
He rushed down the corridor and out onto the foredeck. An elongated slip of ice, roughly the size of the trawler itself, had rushed up alongside them in some semblance of an attack. The hull of the boat was dented and streaming with heavy scrapes but it hadn't been punctured. At least, as far as Charlie could tell from peering over the side...
A cigarette dangling from his chapped, bloodless lips, McEwan appeared beside him. "The fuck's Mike doing?" he shouted over the sudden grinding of gears sounding up from the engine room. He waved a hand in the direction of the pilothouse but the lights behind the glass had gone dim; Mike Fenty was nothing more than a ghost among shadows.
"Something's funny," Charlie whispered.
"Yeah," McEwan agreed, his voice scratchy. "A regular fucking riot."
Bryan was cursing at the petrol stove when, five minutes later, Charlie and McEwan came down the galley steps.
"Damn thing won't work," Bryan growled, dropping a fist on top of the unit. "Useless."
"Maybe needs more fuel?" Charlie suggested.
"It's full. I just checked. And look." He reached up and slammed one of the cupboard doors, cracking it against its frame. It rebounded, easing itself back open. "See that?" said Bryan. The early stirrings of insanity glittered behind his eyes. Laughed humorlessly. "None of them close." He ran one finger along the inside of the door, prodding the magnetic panel screwed into the wood. "The magnets don't work anymore. None of 'em do."
For the first time, Charlie noticed all the cupboard doors were standing open.
Grumbling, McEwan retrieved a bottle of vodka from one of the open cupboards then dropped his considerable bulk, in tandem with a piggish grunt, into the booth. "Go complain to Fenty," he said, unscrewing the cap off the bottle. "It's his piece of shit rig."
Still glaring down at the petrol stove, Bryan said, "I don't get it. Everything worked fine until now."
"To the kid," McEwan toasted, bringing the bottle of vodka to his lips.
"How the hell did he get _down_ there?" Bryan asked, sliding into the booth beside McEwan. He grabbed the bottle from McEwan's lips and took a swing himself. "What was he _thinking?"_
"Mike's right," Charlie said, folding his arms. "Hatch is too heavy for one man to lift. And Sammy, he weren't no Superman."
"Sounds to me," McEwan said, "you're accusing one of us of bein' there when it happened." Without expression, he snatched the bottle back from Bryan. "Maybe even insinuatin' we had somethin' to do with him dying."
"I don't know what I'm insinuating," said Charlie.
"Why don't you go ahead and say what's on your mind, then?"
"I'd just like someone to explain to me how that kid got himself killed in the holding tank, that's all. Kid's dead. I'd like to know how it happened."
In the overhead, the lights blinked in their fixtures. All three of them cast wary glances. The ship was keeling to one side, items slid out of the open cupboards and onto the floor. A bag of sugar spilled like beach sand across the counter.
"We're turning around," Bryan observed. "Mike's taking us back."
"What about the pots?" McEwan said.
"Pots ain't goin' nowhere," Charlie said. He turned and rolled out of the galley, both hands planted on either wall for support as he made his way down the canting corridor. The bluish light from the head shone in the darkness. Joe was staring into the commode, his legs folded up under him, a dazed expression on his face. As Charlie approached, Joe turned his head slowly to address him, a silvery tightrope of spittle bowing from his lower lip to the rim of the toilet.
"Hey, Charlie."
"What's wrong, Joe?"
"Sick." And indeed he looked like death. In the bluish light of the tiny latrine, his skin had adopted a translucence that was almost corpselike. Dark rings encircled his eyes and his lips quivered, vibrating the trail of saliva that held him to the toilet. "Never been seasick b'fore. All my time on boats, ain't never been seasick. Funny, huh?"
Charlie leaned in and pulled the flush chain. The commode growled and, with a whoosh, devoured the whole mess.
"Mike taking us home?"
"Think so, yeah."
"I'm still seein' him, Charlie. Every time I close my eyes, man, I see him—or what was left of him—in that holding tank. The water all pink, the space-spiders creepin' and crawlin' all over him. His flesh all white and hanging off in chunks like bits of uncooked chuh-chuh-chicken—" He leaned over the commode and retched.
"Go lie down, Joe."
"Those crabs," Joe said, wiping a sleeve across his mouth. "I mean, we can't use 'em, right? We gotta let 'em back out into the sea. Christ, Charlie, they fucking _ate_ him."
Uneasy, Charlie turned away and climbed the galley steps that led out into the milky haze of an overcast day. It felt like forty below, the wind practically searing the skin from his face. He chased the tip of a cigarette around with a lighter until he caught it. Sucked vehemently. It was all he could do not to stare at the hatch. How in the world had Sammy managed to open it on his own, let alone fall in there?
He glanced up at the pilothouse. Just barely did he make out the seemingly disembodied face of Mike Fenty, floating like a white moon behind the salt-streaked windows. Lungs tugging on the smoke, Charlie ascended the steps toward the control room, his muscles almost audibly creaking in the cold, running one numbing hand along the iron rail. Around them, the sea was growing rough. Behind a veil of cumuli, the sun had repositioned itself in the sky, burning silver threads through the clouds.
The control room door was locked.
"Hey, Mike." Charlie knocked against the pane of glass. "Door's locked."
Mike did not turn to look at him; he merely stood behind the wheel facing straight out the windows.
Charlie knocked again, this time with more urgency. Through the pane, he could see that the control panel was unlit: still no power.
"Mike?"
Snapped from his daze, Mike craned his neck to stare at Charlie. With the dedication of a death-row inmate, Mike leaned over and flipped the latch on the door. Charlie stepped inside, expecting the usual blast of heat from the floor vents, but it was almost as cold in the pilothouse as it was out on the foredeck.
"You takin' us back to Saint Paul?"
"Sure," Mike said.
"Guess we'll come back for the pots another time."
"Sure will."
"Figure we might not want to touch the reds in the holding tank," he suggested. "In case, you know, Sheriff Lapatu wants to have first look. Scene of the crime and all that, I'm guessing."
"What crime is that?" Mike said. He continued to stare out the grime-streaked, salted windows.
"I guess not a _crime,_ per se, but...well, you know, we prob'ly shouldn't go messin' in that tank, is all." He put a hand on Mike's shoulder. Still, the captain would not look at him. "You all right?"
"Sure am."
"Couldn't get the power up?"
"Don't need it. Been navigating these waters since I was a teenager."
"Lights are blinking and the petrol stove is cold." Charlie tapped one of the floor vents with his boot. "Feels like the heat ain't makin' it up through the vents anymore, either. Like she's givin' up on us."
Mike swung his head around to face him, his eyes haunted and nearly fearful. "What do you mean 'she'?"
"The boat. She. Listen, Mike, why don't you head down, get something in your stomach. You're burning yourself out, man."
He returned his gaze to the sea. "Not hungry."
"Then take a nap."
"Not tired."
Defeated, Charlie bent and rummaged through the underside of the console for the first-aid kit. Once he located it he stood, his spine cracking, and cast one final glance at Mike Fenty before taking the first aid back below the deck.
Joe was curled in a fetal position on his cot when Charlie entered the cabin. His eyes were closed but he spoke Charlie's name when he entered. Charlie sat on his own cot and opened the kit in his lap. Bandages, adhesive strips, a needle and thread, a syringe, even a flare gun and two flare cartridges. Eventually he located some Dramamine. Joe dry swallowed two tablets without opening his eyes.
Charlie slid the first-aid kit beneath his cot and stood, unsure if the creaking sound he heard was from the cot's struts or his own tired bones. He suddenly felt a million years old. For whatever reason, he thought once again of Gabriel. The last time he'd seen the kid had been six months ago, back at the trailer in Saint Paul Village. He'd been sitting on a telephone book at the kitchen table, shoveling spoonfuls of some sugary cereal into his mouth. Through the kitchen windows, the tawny lights of an Alaskan predawn bled up into the sky behind the black serration of distant firs. The boy was up early for school, dressed in oversized corduroys and a Batman sweatshirt. Though seated at the table, he already had his matching Batman backpack strapped to his back.
Charlie tousled the boy's hair and kissed the top of his head. He too was up early, it being the first day of a new season. Down at the shore, the trawlers would be lined like soldiers along the seal rookeries, dressed and ready for a trek across the Imarpik. He grabbed a bowl for himself and, in sleepy silence, sat opposite his son at the small table, pouring his own bowl of cereal and milk. They ate without talking, content merely with their proximity, for the boy loved his father and the father loved the boy, and in the pauses between their crunching, Charlie could hear Johanna's light snoring emanating from the back bedroom.
When he'd finished eating, Charlie stood, raking the legs of the chair across the linoleum, and paused to grip the boy's chin. Pinched him gently.
"You do good in school," he told the boy.
"I know, I know."
"I'll see you in a couple weeks."
"You do good too," the boy said.
"I know, I know," he said, mimicking his son's tone.
Yet two weeks later, Charlie Mears returned from the great salt seas to an empty home—empty, it seemed, for so long that the smells representative of his wife and child no longer haunted the empty rooms...
"Where you goin'?" Joe practically croaked from the cot. The sound of his voice dragged Charlie back from his reverie.
"Finish talkin' with our no-name little guest in the next room," he said and left.
8
Unable to prepare any warm food without the use of the petrol stove, he entered Mike's cabin carrying a bowl of cereal and a glass of milk. The girl stood beside the dresser, holding one of Mike's framed photographs in her hands. It was a glamour shot of Mike's wife, one of those airbrushed, angelic portraits you can get at K-mart or some such place, her hair a nest of springy platinum curls, too much makeup on her face.
"She's pretty," the girl said, setting the picture back atop the dresser as Charlie came in.
"Brought you some food." He set the bowl of cereal and glass of milk on the dresser. "I wanted to pick up where we left off before."
"About your friend who died?"
"About who you are," said Charlie. He sat on Mike's footlocker, folding his hands between his knees, and motioned with his chin for the girl to sit on the cot. She sat without protest, her eyes never leaving his. "Who are you?" he said after a few moments of uninterrupted silence fell between them.
"I'm your catch," she said. "I'm your find."
"That makes no sense."
"You found me, didn't you?"
"What's your name?"
"I don't have one." Again—that timid head cocking. "You can give me a name, if you like."
"Forget names," he said. "Tell me how you got out here."
"You picked me up," she told him. "You brought me on the boat."
"No. Not how you got on the boat," he clarified, growing increasingly irritated at her evasiveness. "How did you wind up out here in the sea? On the iceberg?"
She held him in his gaze for several seconds, unspeaking. A cold, marrow-freezing chill overtook him and settled deep within his soul. He had to break her stare, to look away from her.
"You're one of the hard ones," she commented after a while.
"What does that mean?"
"It means some people are easy to reach. Most people, actually. But not all. You're one of the hard ones to reach. I think... I think it's because you're overtaken by something else." Wrinkling her nose and creasing her brow, she was trying to read something in him, something deep below the surface. "There is something keeping you shielded." She added, suddenly brightening, "It is a little boy."
This statement, for whatever reason, did not jar him. "My son, yes. Gabriel. He's been on my mind a lot lately. You can tell that?"
"You're a hard one," she said again, "but you're not difficult to read."
He sighed and leaned away from her, sitting straighter on the footlocker. "You did that to Sammy, didn't you?"
"Sammy did what he did to himself."
"He couldn't have opened that hatch by himself. Someone had to have helped him."
"There are a lot of big, strong men on this boat," she offered.
"None of them would have done anything to him. Let's stop playing games. Tell me how you got out here."
At first, he did not think she was going to answer. The only sound was their intermingled breathing and the ticking of Mike's wristwatch on the nightstand. Then, surprisingly, and with evident surrender, the girl said, "I was brought out here by a man. His name was Calvert Tackler. We came out on a boat, much like this boat, and he left me out here, presumably to die."
"Why did he do that?"
"Because," she said, "he was thinking the same thoughts about me that you're thinking right now."
This startled him. He began bouncing one leg up and down, up and down, up and down. "How long ago did he leave you here?"
"A very long time ago," she said. "I don't know exactly."
"Who was he? This Calvert Tackler?"
"Just a man."
"How did you know him?"
"We came to meet. He thought he loved me, or was in the process of falling in love with me, but that was not why he brought me out here. He brought me out here because he couldn't bring himself to kill me. Maybe it was because he loved me or maybe it because he simply did not have it in him to kill a person—"
"But why would he want to kill you?"
"Not just him."
"What do you mean?"
"There have been others," she said. "My whole life, there have been people who've tried to kill me. I can remember their names, all these people, and what each one looked like. I can remember the first one, a man named Frank Bodine, who nearly managed to kill me in a motel room outside Las Vegas. But in the end, I eventually got to him. I eventually got to them all, even the strongest ones. Strong ones like you, Charlie Mears. Ones who put up a mental wall, put up a fight. Strong ones like you."
Charlie stood. "I get it. You're out of your mind. Either that or you just like to play games. Well, I don't like games. I don't have time for them. You've got three seconds to start talking sense—"
"Don't yell, Charlie."
"—or you're gonna spend the rest of the trip back to Alaska locked in this room. Do you understand?"
"Don't be angry with me." She smiled.
"One," he said.
"Poor, poor Charlie. Misses his boy."
"Two." Grinding his teeth.
"You'll never see him again. You know it's true."
"Three," he said, simultaneously swiping the bowl of cereal and glass of milk from the top of the dresser and onto the floor.
"Look at the mess you've made." She cast her eyes to the cornflakes and broken shards of bowl in the puddle of milk. "Very messy, Charlie."
"You can talk to the cops when we reach land." He stormed out into the corridor, slamming the cabin door. In the darkness of the corridor, he nearly ran right into Joe, who was leaning against one wall, shrouded in darkness.
"She tell you anything?" Joe asked. Charlie couldn't see his face in the dark but it sounded as if he had something in his mouth.
"She'll tell Lapatu when we get back to Saint Paul," he promised Joe. "You should be in bed."
"You need to push her more, Charlie. You need to get her to stop."
"Stop what?"
"What she's doing to me."
"You're just seasick."
"Ain't never been seasick in my life, Charlie."
He pressed a hand to Joe's forehead then quickly withdrew it, disgusted by the moist clamminess of Dynamo Joe's flesh. A skein of perspiration came away with his hand, cool like menthol.
"Fuck, Joe. You're burning up, man."
Joe took a lumbering step forward, his face suddenly illuminated by the red emergency lights recessed in the overhead. A living skeleton, his skin looked like latex stretched taut over a large stone. Charlie could smell him too, and it was a sick-sweet, organic smell that reminded him of the breweries down in Anchorage. Though he didn't want to touch Joe again, he placed a hand on one of the man's shoulders and directed him back toward their cabin. Inside the room, Joe winced and recoiled from the lamplight. Joe growled for him to turn it off. Charlie flipped the switch and assisted Joe as he climbed back onto his cot.
"Fucking fuh-freezing," Joe stuttered.
"I know." Charlie grabbed the blanket off his own coat and draped it over Joe's quaking body. Even as he left the room, he could hear Joe's teeth chattering in his skull—could hear them as he walked all the way down the corridor.
In the galley, Bryan was looking down forlornly at the petrol stove. Billy McEwan was at the table, getting drunk. Charlie paused in the doorway and McEwan's eyelids fluttered. He waved a hand at Charlie. "C'mon, Mears. Drink with me."
"Damn thing," Bryan muttered, seemingly oblivious to Charlie's arrival.
"Is Mike still topside?" Charlie asked. When no one responded, he reached out and touched Bryan's elbow. As if shocked, Bryan jerked his arm away and practically threw himself back against the bulkhead. He stared at Charlie with wide eyes.
"Mike," expounded McEwan, drawing Charlie's attention to him, "is a damn fool. He got lucky yesterday with the catch, Mears, but there ain't no luck left out here. Not for us." Again that sloppy wave of the hand. "So come on over and let's you and me kill this bottle, eh?"
Charlie stepped down into the galley and, with two hands, ripped one of the cupboard doors off its hinges. Bryan's jaw dropped, still pressed against the wall as far away from Charlie as the cramped little room would permit. McEwan, even in his stupor, watched with speechless detachment.
Tucking the cupboard door under one arm, Charlie plucked the flashlight off the countertop. "I'm going down to the engine room for some tools. You two keep an eye on Mike's cabin, make sure that girl doesn't come out."
"What're you doing?" boomed McEwan, but Charlie was already gone.
9
Despite the pump of the generators and the grind of the diesel engine, it was freezing in the bowels of the trawler. Wagging his flashlight around the network of pipes, it didn't take Charlie long to locate a suitcase-sized metal toolbox, already open on the floor. Charlie crouched over it and fished around for a handful of carpenter nails and a recoilless hammer.
He heard it—the steady _plick-plick-plick_ of dripping water. Charlie cast the beam of light onto the floor and found he was crouching in a puddle of filthy gray water. Rings expanded in the puddle as drops of water fell from above. He followed the droplets up to the overhead to discover that the drops were actually sloughing off the tips of icicles clinging to the underside of the entire system of pipes.
It was ridiculous, he knew, but he stood and touched the pipes nonetheless. Cold as bone, powdered in frost. He traced the pipes with the flashlight back to the wall of generators. The pipes, he learned, led to the heating unit.
"Goddamn it..."
He approached the unit only to discover, with increasing horror, that it was dead. The dials all ran to zero; the archipelago of bulbs stood unlit. He pressed one hand against the heating unit to find it was still slightly warm but was quickly losing heat.
Frustrated, he administered a swift kick to the side of the unit. The clang played off the metal pipes for an eternity. He didn't want to think about what it would mean to be caught out here for an extended period without heat. Silently he prayed that Mike Fenty knew what the hell he was doing—that, in fact, he would find their way back to Saint Paul Island without the use of the GPS and the navigational system.
Back on the quarterdeck, Charlie cracked open the door to Mike's stateroom. The lamp on the nightstand was blinking sporadically. The girl was sitting up on the cot, staring at him through the crack in the door.
"You ready to start talkin' sense?" he said to her.
That coy little smile...
Without another word, he shut the door and proceeded to nail the section of cupboard across the stateroom door and the frame. The sound of the hammering was nearly deafening in these close quarters; still, he drove every nail home until he was left, exhausted and breathless, panting like a lion, outside the door. When the hammer slipped from his hand and dropped on his foot, he was brought back to reality. Shaken, tired, he crept down the corridor to his own room. Careful not to wake Joe, who was snoring wetly beneath a heap of blankets, Charlie peeled off his sweat-smelling clothes and, in nothing but long johns and wool socks, settled down on his own cot. The trawler rocking, the struts creaking and sighing and moaning all around him, he knew right away, despite his fatigue, he would not find sleep.
Eventually Gabriel worked his way into his head—out in the yard, overburdened by a heavy winter coat and snowpants, scooping up handfuls of graying snow and throwing them over the fence at Dale Carver's German shepherd. Johanna was there too, a wool cap on her head and a knit scarf around her neck. She looked fresh-faced and pure in the snow, her face barren of makeup. Calling to Gabriel as a gentle snow began falling in the yard. Dale Carver's German shepherd yelped and bounded after the fistfuls of snow tossed over the fence, confounded by the fact that the mysterious white balls disappeared the second they touched the snowy ground.
Charlie was there too, of course. In his bright red ski parka, his reddish beard neatly trimmed, he came out of the trailer and proceeded to chase Gabe around the yard. Giggling and wailing, his small legs pushing hard through the deep snow, Gabriel tore around the yard as Charlie pursued him, the German shepherd bounding after them from behind its fence. Barking.
Charlie's eyes flipped open. Not barking. Something struck the hull of the trawler. Maybe another iceberg.
"Joe?" His voice was empty, void of substance. "You awake?"
No answer. He could no longer hear Joe's snoring, he realized.
Sitting up on one elbow, he peered through the absolute darkness but could not see a thing. Fumbling on the floor for the flashlight, he located it and clicked it on. The dim, cataract light opened up on Joe's empty cot. The mound of blankets were strewn on the floor.
It wasn't until he sat up and squeezed his feet into his boots did he realize he was still mumbling Joe's name over and over.
_Yeah,_ he thought. _Losing my mind like a regular champ._
He dressed, the room bitter cold, and he could feel every muscle in his body wanting to cramp up. In the vague gloominess of the quarterdeck, he could see his breath, billowing out like tufts of cotton, nearly freezing to the bulkhead.
He all but collapsed in the doorway of the galley. Breathing hard, sweat freezing to his temples, he struggled to catch his breath. McEwan, seated alone at the table, glared up at him. Both his big hands were hugging the bottle of vodka, which was now mostly empty. Dead eyes lifted to examine Charlie, partially slumped in the galley doorway.
"Joe's very sick," he managed, realizing as he said it that it was probably the understatement of the year. "He's not in his room. Have you seen him?"
"This," McEwan grumbled, his rheumy eyes moving wetly in their sockets, "is all your fault, Mears."
"What are you talking about?"
"You're always trying to be the hero," McEwan said. "Always trying to save the world. Funny thing is, you can't even take care of your own domestic problems."
"Man—"
"We're no different than the crabs," McEwan went on. "You know it? We're no goddamn different than the moon-bugs in the tank. Each of us, we're all in our own tanks, all scuttlin' and clackin' and spittin' bubbles. Sure." He grunted in approval of himself. "Sure as shit." Those sloppy eyes worked their way up to meet Charlie again. "You know what happens to the spiders if they stay in that tank too long, don't you, Charlie?"
Charlie exhaled slowly. "What's that?"
"One of two things happen. Neither's very good." A grimace. "One—they freeze in that tank. Ain't enough to circulate the water so it gets icy, even colder'n where they come from on the sea floor. They freeze and then they start exploding, bits o' shell and claws—pincers, clusters of spidery red legs—all of that, just _poof!_ Like puttin' an M-80 in a mailbox, way we all did when we was kids.
"Then there's the other way," McEwan continued, not missing a beat, "an' maybe you'd think this way is worse, mostly 'cause it ain't as quick as explodin' into pieces of spider-shell, but also 'cause what it means—what, see, it _means—"_
"You're drunk," Charlie said flatly.
"They eat each other." Billy McEwan's voice was equally as flat. "Cannibalism. They get to starvin' in that tank, get to fightin' and gettin' on each other's last nerve. Close quarters, scrabbling over each other, probably learn to hate every other space-spider in there with you. You start pulling off a leg here, a claw there. Pretty soon you can't pull no more 'cause your _own_ claws are filled with the claws and legs of others, and anyway it's only a matter of time b'fore they start pulling you apart and eating out your guts while you're still alive."
Grabbing the bottle by the neck, McEwan smashed it against the edge of the table. It broke into a crystal spray, pellets of broken glass scattering across the table and onto the floor. The liquor sprayed everywhere, darkening his chambray work-shirt.
"We have to do something about our situation here b'fore we resort to eatin' one another, Charlie," said McEwan. A silvery threat of saliva drooled from his mouth. "Or before we start explodin' like mailboxes full of firecrackers." He was breathing heavy, practically panting. "You an' me, Charlie. We have to do something." He brought up his free hand and pressed an index finger to his left temple. "Before we start losin' it in here."
"You're drunk, man," Charlie said.
Those soul-piercing eyes—Charlie couldn't shake them off him. Then, to his amazement, Billy McEwan's ruinous lips splintered into a mock smile. His teeth were narrow, gray pickets protruding from purpling gums. "Oh, yeah," he said, still smiling. "I'm drunk, all right. To hell and back. Right, Charlie?" The lip-splitting grin widened. "Right, homeboy?"
"Joe's—"
"Haven't fucking seen Joe."
"Where's Bryan?"
Angrily, he tossed the broken bottleneck into the stainless steel sink. "Topside."
10
Out on the deck, the air tore into his face, neck and hands. His cheeks tightened and the moisture around his eyes seemed to freeze instantly. Still, with Billy McEwan's words still fresh in his ears, he was glad to be out here in the open and away from the increasing claustrophobia of the quarterdeck.
Pulling his slicker tighter around his body, he spotted Bryan Falmouth standing at the end of the bow. Beyond, the sea was growing rough, a gray-black patchwork of ice fields miles in length drifting along the shimmering surface. Too much ice. The sun was still struggling to break free of the clouds.
Suddenly, the boat rocked. A sound like tree limbs breaking sounded out over the bow. Steadying himself against the railing in case a second blow should accost the boat, he diligently maneuvered his way to the front of the trawler.
"Hey," he said, coming up behind Bryan. "The hell's Mike doing? There's too much ice out here."
Bryan spun around, instantly shocking Charlie with the emptiness that was so evident on his face. He brought his cigarette to his lips, his hand vibrating like a tuning fork, and displayed some difficulty actually getting it into his mouth. He sucked hard, his cheeks nearly touching, and blew a shaky pillar of smoke into the wind.
"You fucking leave Mike alone," Bryan uttered through chattering teeth.
"What?"
"Don't think I'm not on to you, Charlie. Tryin' to stir the fucking pot."
"Bryan, man, I don't know what you're talking about." He took a step forward, one hand outstretched—
"Don't come near me," Bryan said.
As if stung, Charlie quickly retracted his hand. "Bryan—what's going on, man? What the hell's happening?"
"Don't fucking play with me, Charlie. You just stay right where you are."
"Bry—"
"I'm not fucking playing with you, Charlie, so don't try to play with me!" Bryan screamed, spittle firing from his lips.
Speechless, Charlie backpedaled with his hands up in surrender. Bryan watched his retreat, the cigarette stuttering between two mercurochrome-colored fingers. As Charlie watched, something poked briefly from Bryan's right nostril. A second later it appeared again, more prominent this time, and Charlie realized, with a sinking sense of dread, that it was a bubble of dark blood.
"Bryan, please—"
"She's drilling holes," Bryan said. His teeth rattled in the cold. Charlie watched as the cigarette dropped to the foredeck and smoldered on the planking. "Holes everywhere." In a terrifying mimicry of McEwan, he brought up a set of fingers and jabbed at his temple. "In here," he said. "In the boat too." Looking briefly out over the roiling sea, he added, "The goddamn _world,_ Charlie." He managed a half-curled lopsided grin—again, just like McEwan's. "You get it, man? The whole goddamn _world."_
In a whisper, Charlie said, "What about the world, Bryan? What is it? Tell me."
Eyes wide and rimmed red with terror, Bryan Falmouth whispered back, _"Infected."_
"Infected by what?" When Bryan didn't answer—he just stood there, his eyes afire, his entire frame quaking in his slicker—he said it again. "Infected by what, Bryan?"
There came a sound similar to metal sheeting being crushed under a great weight, followed by a rumbling from beneath the boat. The whole trawler shook. Bryan lost his footing and slipped on the wet deck, his arms pinwheeling. Charlie ditched to the side and grabbed hold of the railing. Looking down over the side, he watched as a small drift of ice was sucked underneath the boat. He heard a snapping, recoiling sound and looked up in time to see the trawler mow through a second sheet of ice closer to the bow. The sheet literally split down the middle and parted in half by the cutting trawler.
At the bow, Bryan had righted himself against the railing and was also leering over the side of the boat, although he seemed unimpressed by the fact that the _Borealis_ was currently cutting through an ice field. As he looked, a length of salt-encrusted fiberglass siding, perhaps two feet long, snapped off the ship's hull and flipped end over end in the air until it crashed onto—and slid along—a shelf of frazil ice.
Charlie looked toward the darkened pilothouse. Sea salt had calcified on the paneled glass, making it impossible to see inside...and, he thought, impossible to see out. Nonetheless he began waving his arms high above his head, suddenly shouting Mike's name.
"No use, Charlie," Bryan called to him. He was fumbling another cigarette from out of his slicker. "He's locked on course now. You guys will be home soon."
He _almost_ didn't pick up on it. "What do you mean 'you guys', Bryan?" he asked. "What about you? You'll be home too, Bryan. We'll all be home."
Unable to light his fresh cigarette in the strong wind, Bryan flicked it over the bow. "No," he said. "Not me. Ain't supposed to be me."
"Bryan, please, what—"
Bryan appeared to crouch, lowering his center of gravity. For one bone-chilling moment Charlie thought the man was preparing to rush him. And in fact Bryan _did_ lower his head, ready to charge. Had it been his intention to execute a full-on rush into Charlie's solar plexus, he would have accomplished just that, as Charlie Mears was too slow getting out of the way. But as it turned out, such was not Bryan's intention. Head lowered, eyes ablaze, Bryan charged like a locomotive straight _past_ Charlie, his all-weather boots slamming on the foredeck, his arms and legs pumping like machinery. He ran straight across the planking toward the stern where, in a bluish cloud of exhaust, Bryan Falmouth spread wide his arms and, without pause, launched himself over the side of the trawler.
Charlie shrieked his name, already running in Bryan's direction. But by the time he reached the stern, there was no sign of Bryan—not even the ripples in the ice-black water. Still, he kept screaming his name, as if mere recital would affect the man's return, his own hands biting into the framework of the stern. As the trawler peeled away, carving a white-capped tract through the frozen sea, Charlie saw—or imagined he saw—one of Bryan's boots briefly bob to the surface.
_Holes everywhere,_ Bryan's voice echoed in his head. _You get it, man? The whole goddamn world..._
He spun around and ran for the pilothouse, mounting the steps in just three giant strides. He slammed his considerable weight against the pilothouse door, which, once again, was bolted from the inside. Shouting Mike's name, his breath blossoming on the filthy pane, he rattled the doorframe with his fists.
Mike, stock-still behind the control panel, did not turn and look at him.
"Goddamn it, Mike, open the fucking door!"
"Mears!" The voice boomed over the snarling engine, just barely audible despite the urgency of tone. It was McEwan, his features muddied by the low-hanging thunderheads trembling with snow. He was wearing only an open chambray shirt and, beneath, an unwashed wife-beater—no coat. The bristling tufts of his hair, unraveling in every direction, rustled like oak leaves in the strong wind. In his hands he held an ice axe.
Charlie took a step back, his blood freezing in his veins. "Bryan's dead," he heard himself say, his voice flimsy and paper thin. "Jumped off the stern."
"Come on down from there," McEwan said. There was a calculated levelness to his voice, Charlie noticed—a noticeable restraint. Something was trembling just below the surface. "Leave Mike alone."
Another grinding, peeling sound as jagged fingers of ice cut into the hull—
"He's gonna sink us," Charlie warned.
McEwan placed one heavy boot on the first iron step. His eyes settled hard on Charlie, dull like the heads of iron spikes driven into his skull. "He's a good, strong captain," said McEwan. "Said it yourself. He knows what he's doing."
Charlie shook his head. "No. She got to him." He cleared his throat as McEwan mounted another step. "She got to you too, Mac."
"Ain't nobody gettin' to me, Mears. Why don't you come on down? We'll talk it out."
Mike Fenty's face suddenly appeared at the pane of glass in the pilothouse door—just inches, despite the shield of glass, from Charlie's own. Charlie's heart leapt in his chest. Mike's eyes had soured, the sclera textured like curdled milk, and a network of whitish blisters had cropped up along the right corner of his mouth. As Charlie looked upon him, Mike Fenty grinned. His gums receded, his teeth looked wolfish.
"Can't have you messin' with the captain," McEwan said. He hefted the ice axe in his hands as he climbed yet another step. "We're almost home, Charlie. Then we can go about our shit. Like you." Just as the girl had done before him, McEwan cocked his head to one side like an inquisitive mutt. "Ain't you got a kid out there you're anxious to start lookin' for, Mears? A little boy? Hell, man, once we get back to Saint Paul, you can do all the lookin' you want. You can use my goddamn car. Got a brand new F-450, chains on the tires, the whole nine. All yours, _amigo_. Whatever you want." McEwan paused, halfway up the stairs. "Just come on down with me, huh? What'd ya say?"
Behind the glass, Mike Fenty's face appeared to blur like someone moving too quickly just as a photo was being snapped.
"Listen to me," Charlie said, trying to watch both Mike and McEwan at the same time. "You guys ain't thinkin' right. Did you hear what I said about Bryan? He jumped over the _side_ , Mac. He's dead."
"Parasites," McEwan said matter-of-factly. "In the head."
"I can't let this boat reach Alaska. I think that's what she wants."
"Talkin' crazy now, Mears."
"Someone dumped her out here for a reason. We can't let her get back."
"Hey, Mears—" he said, taking another step, "—you remember what I said 'bout them crabs? How we ain't really no different so's we gotta be careful, keep an eye out, make sure we don't do what they do?"
"Don't come up any farther," he warned.
"Well," McEwan continued, ignoring him, "you ain't kept such a close eye. Seems to me you started coming apart, gettin' ready to explode on y'self."
"Billy—"
Scraping: nails on a chalkboard. Wincing, Charlie looked to find Mike dragging the blade of a ten-inch boning knife down the length of the windowpane. His menacing grin widened, skeletal in its appearance.
With a grunt, McEwan lunged forward, swinging the ice axe in a wide arc. Overcompensating for the distance between them, the swing was undisciplined; the tapered point of the ice axe missed Charlie's thigh by a good foot and a half—though it seemed much closer to him—and wedged itself into the pilothouse door. Before McEwan could yank it free, Charlie administered a swift kick, which connected squarely with McEwan's chin. McEwan's head rocketed back on his neck, his bulky torso bowing backward until the distribution of his weight sent him spilling down the iron steps. The foredeck sustained the full brunt of his weight, the planks buckling but not breaking, while the back of McEwan's head rebounded off a slatted wooden crate.
Charlie vaulted down the steps and bounded over McEwan's prone form. As he rounded the foredeck, he happened to catch sight of an immense pillar of ice, its summit carving a notch in the silvery sun, rushing up to greet the starboard. Too late to brace himself against the collision, the flooring was ripped from beneath his feet, launching him into a succession of somersaults from starboard to portside in the blink of an eye. A moment later he was knocked stupid by a blood-freezing pummel of water that reached over the starboard side and, like the smiting Hand of God, smacked down on the foredeck. The icy wave burned through him. It seemed an eternity for it to spill away and for the trawler, now bobbing like a Coke bottle at sea, to right itself.
Gasping for air, his entire body flash numbed, Charlie scrambled to his feet just as McEwan, dazed in his own right, was trying to prop himself up against the pilothouse stairs. As their eyes locked—
_"Mears!"_ It was a roar, no more human than the guttural articulation of some mythical Himalayan beastie. _"Get the fuck back here, goddamn you!"_
The trawler shook again then tipped gradually to portside. All the crates, deck furniture, lines and hooks, loose tools and tool chests slid in that direction. Hands up in a defensive posture, Charlie felt the equipment slam into him, biting his flesh and snagging his clothes. Something solid ricocheted off his forehead, causing a fireworks display to erupt beneath his eyelids. Dizzy, he managed to climb to his feet and, staggering like a drunkard, propelled himself across the foredeck toward the narrow cutout of steps descending beneath the pilothouse station.
McEwan, having successfully retrieved the ice axe from the pilothouse door, lurched across the foredeck in pursuit. Chunks of graying ice adrift on silt-blackened water pool around McEwan's ankles. The trawler was foundering, the rising water breaching the sides quicker than it was able to dispatch it back into the sea.
Charlie slammed down the stairs and hurried down the corridor toward his cabin. The walls were frozen, the pipes dripping icy condensation from above. He burst into his room and slammed the door behind him, engaging the meager, useless slide bolt. A swift kick and the door would splinter down the middle.
He tipped over his cot, the four metal legs jutting up like the stiffening legs of a dead gazelle, and quickly scrambled for the first-aid kit. His located the white aluminum box but his big fingers, in their panic, fumbled at the latches. Out in the corridor, McEwan's bullish laughter erupted. Charlie froze. A second later, the cabin door buckled down the center in a perfect vertical stress line through the center of which projected the tapered iron tip of the ice axe. There was the sound of splintering wood as the ice axe was withdrawn. A second strike punched a fist-sized hole in the flimsy door.
"Mears!" McEwan shouted from the other side. "Goddamn you, Mears, you're fucking it all up!"
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the first-aid kit popped open. Charlie fumbled the flare gun out, shaking the flare cartridges into his lap.
"Mears!"
McEwan rammed the door with his shoulder, the weightless wood disintegrating nearly to sawdust. The big man stumbled a few steps, the ice axe now poised over one shoulder like a baseball bat. When his eyes lit on Charlie, who was crouched in the farthest corner of the room, they seemed to briefly emanate a fiery luminosity. Like the eyes of a lion.
"Goddamn you, Mears, you stupid son of—"
Flare gun raised, Charlie slammed the trigger. All in a single second there issued the faint hiss, the acrid burning smell, and—finally!—the belch of dazzling pink radiance from the muzzle of the flare gun. Almost in slow motion, Charlie watched the sparkling pink ball of fire propel across the room, flagging behind it a blackish contrail of sulfur-smelling smoke.
McEwan shrieked and attempted to sidestep the assault, but his great bulk moved too slowly; the sparkling magnesium flame, pink as a neon strip-club sign, drove itself into Billy McEwan's face where it seemed to grow brighter and larger, expanding, breathing like new lungs, and the ice axe clattered heavily to the cabin floor. McEwan's screams reached a girlish timbre, enough to fuzz out Charlie's eardrums, while his large, club-like hands began pawing at his face. The pink, starlight brilliance of the flare quickly diminished, and between the swiping of McEwan's hands, Charlie could see the charred, smoking crater that had replaced the man's left eye—
_"Muh—!"_
The half-word was actually punctuated by the expulsion of thick, charcoal-colored smoke from McEwan's mouth. As Charlie watched, McEwan accomplished a single uncertain step forward before his bones surrendered, sending him face first—not to the floor but toward one of the jutting metal legs of the overturned cot. There was a wet crunch as the metal pole impaled itself through the center of Billy McEwan's chest, followed by the softer susurration of McEwan's heavy bulk sliding lower and lower on the implement until, eventually, and like the conclusion of some dramatic stage play, Billy McEwan came to rest against the underside of the cot, the cot leg glistening with blackish-red gore, projecting from between his shoulders. In seemingly no time at all, a dark oil slick of blood expanded from beneath McEwan, filling in the grains of the cabin floor.
Charlie sat wide-eyed, staring, hugging both his knees with one large arm. The flare gun was still in his right hand, still pointing in the direction where, less than five seconds ago, McEwan had been standing. Smoke still trailed up from the muzzle and the entire cabin was suffocating with burnt sulfur.
How much time passed while he sat there, the gun still aimed at the empty space across the cabin, Charlie could not be certain. But when he finally lowered his arm, the muscles had tightened and grown sore, and the flare gun felt like it weighed two hundred pounds.
Eventually, he pulled himself up off the floor, his entire body trembling like an electric cable. The cabin floor was now soaked in McEwan's blood. He refused to look at McEwan's face—at the blackened, roasted divot where his left eye had been...and where wisps of ghost smoke still spiraled from the gaping socket.
He toed the ice axe across the floor, leaving an arc of blood in its path. The ice axe was wet with blood; it took great control over his tensing stomach muscles for Charlie to reach down and pluck it from the floor. The blood around its hilt had already begun to congeal—How the hell long had he been sitting here?—and it made his arms weak to carry it through the doorway.
The corridor was pitch-black, the lights having burned out in their fixtures, with only the faintest suggestion of light issuing from beneath the closed door of the head. His heartbeat suddenly in his ears, he proceeded down the corridor toward the head, one hand trailing along the wall. The whole corridor was canting to one side, taunting his equilibrium. He passed Mike's stateroom, his fingers running over the cupboard door still nailed across the frame...
As he approached the head, the ghostly bluish light outlining the door, the sound of gravelly respiration could be heard coming from the other side. The sound of it caused Charlie to freeze just on the other side of the door, his skin suddenly clammy with sweat. Shaky-handed, his fingers tacky with McEwan's blood, he reached out for the door and gripped its anchor-shaped handle. Tugged on it. Heard the bolt retreat from the frame. Opened the door—opened—
"Oh, Joe—"
He lay crumpled, nude, curled like a prawn on the floor of the claustrophobic little bathroom. Lids fluttering, only the milky whites of his eyes shown while a greenish, sudsy foam bubbled out of his mouth. The muscles in his thighs were so tense, Charlie could make out, beneath the taut, bluish skin, the individual filaments of musculature like piano cables strapped over the leg bones. Vomit pooled beneath Joe's head while a fouler, darker substance seeped from Joe's rear.
Charlie bent and clamped one hand around Joe's knobby, bluing shoulder. Touching his flesh was like petting damp, featherless gooseflesh and Charlie instinctively recoiled, leaving bloody fingerprints on his pale flesh. Joe rocked on the hump of his spine; membranous webbing veined with black, pubic-like filaments revealed itself as his legs parted. The membrane pulled taut then retracted like a mesh of elastic, clapping both of Joe's knees together with a hollow pop.
Charlie shuddered and threw himself backward, spilling back out into the corridor and down hard on his ass. The head of the ice axe clanged hollowly against the wall. A pathetic cry escaped him. As he watched, an inky jet of bile squirted from Joe's mouth and dribbled from both nostrils.
Managing to stand, righting himself against one wall, Charlie began staggering backward down the corridor. Framed in the fading blue light of the head, Joe continued to convulse on the head floor, the chalky, foul-smelling liquid maintaining steady evacuation from his body. One of Joe's hands slid blindly through the pool of thickening black fluid. There was the sound, _sssssllllit,_ of the sliding, the fingers—
A moan escaped from Joe's mouth, bubbles of dark green foam snapping and popping, but was instantly amputated by a wet, muddy cough, which sprayed thick crimson clumps of fibrous tissue onto the floor.
Charlie turned and ran, slamming one shoulder against something solid and immobile in the darkness. Stars exploded before his eyes. He reached out, sightless, grasping: a pipe. Cold as ice. Above, the vents pumped frigid air into the corridor— _uhhhhhhh,_ they moaned like the damned. In his frustration, he swung the ice axe into the pipe, piercing its shell without difficulty. A sludgy black stream of frozen water spouted from the rent.
_Heating ducts filled with water..._
They were floating on a frozen coffin.
_Who's "they"?_
Sammy Walper—dead. Bryan Falmouth—abandoned ship. Billy McEwan—impaled on an overturned cot leg. And Joe... _Jesus fucking Christ, Joe, what the hell?_
There would be no reasoning with Mike. The man was already too far gone. And he was determined to navigate the _Borealis_ back to Saint Paul Island. As keenly as he had ever understood anything in all his life, Charlie Mears knew he could not let that happen.
"You're not getting back," he bellowed, his voice like thunder in the lightless corridor. "You're going to stay out here."
He was speaking to the barricaded cabin door—Mike's old stateroom—behind which the trawler's mysterious guest was held prisoner. If he could—
But a fresh thought stopped him cold.
He was alone with his breathing again, his heartbeat. Reaching out, he tugged at the panel of wood—the cupboard door—he'd nailed across the cabin's doorframe. It was still securely in place...
_Kill her,_ a voice spoke up at the back of his head. Strangely, a woman's voice: eerily similar to Johanna's. _You have to kill her, Charlie. If she reaches land...if she reaches Alaska..._
He knew what would happen. All that had transpired aboard the _Borealis_ was a microcosm, was the world in miniature.
With the curved head of the ice axe, Charlie pried the cupboard door off the doorframe, the nails groaning as they were extracted from the wood. He kicked the door open with one boot; it swung inward, hinges squealing, upon a murky darkness. A smell not unlike something fetid and rotting struck Charlie and he shrunk back from the doorway, the ice axe, as if in protection, held up before his face.
The room was empty.
Charlie slumped against the bulkhead. He clutched the ice axe tighter. Someone had let her out, of course. _Someone_ —McEwan before going fucking screwball? Bryan, just prior to flinging himself into the frozen sea? Or was it possible, he wondered, that she let _herself_ out? Anything, it seemed, was possible.
The _Borealis_ jerked and seemed to come nearly to a stop. Charlie stumbled forward, spilling into Mike's empty, reeking stateroom, the ice axe clattering to the floor somewhere ahead of him in the darkness. A moaning, clangorous sound shrilled up through the flooring: banshee cries. Charlie actually felt the trawler's hull cutting through clutching mires, an unseen net of impenetrable ice, and the grinding of metal being sheared away grew to an intensity so great he had to clamp both hands over his ears. Something somewhere in the distant bowels of the ship popped— _Thwanggg!—_ and the _Borealis_ shuddered forward again, clear of whatever it'd run over.
_The fuel lines._ The thought blossomed in his head like a dazzle of Broadway lights. _The fuel lines are down in the engine room._
Fumbling around in the darkness of Mike's stateroom—
_(not Mike's stateroom)_
—his hands eventually fell on the ice axe. He gripped it and slammed back out into the corridor, the red emergency lights wholly useless save for drenching everything in a foreboding vermillion, and hurried toward the rung ladder leading down into the engine room. He moved quickly by the galley, food articles and utensils tossed in tangled nests, broken coffee mugs, oily petrol seesawing across the tabletop, operative notebooks and _Penthouse_ calendars, Scotch-Brite scouring pads, flecks of cornflakes sprayed in Big Dipper fashion along the sticky countertop, a sepia-toned map of the Aleutians, unfolded like an accordion—
Belowdecks, it was intestinally dark. The cold was instantly unbearable. The last rung of the ladder had been swallowed by dark, standing water, atop of which a film of filthy slush had already begun forming. Unfortunately, Charlie didn't see this until he'd already driven his boot straight down to the floor—hearing the _plosh;_ feeling, a second later, the ice water seeping through the worn creases of his boots. His foot bristled with needles then went immediately numb.
Steeling himself, he dropped his other foot down—hissed like a cat—and, poising the ice axe over his shoulder, pushing through the freezing water toward the rear of the engine room. Gears growled and chugged. His eyes slowly acclimated to the darkness. The furnace was a dead cylinder, hardly visible without its flickering yellow faceplate. Yet despite the loss of power throughout the rest of the boat, the turbines continued to hum from within an ancient steel enclosure.
He knew the fuel lines ran against the far bulkhead, though he couldn't see them in the dark. On deadened feet, his lower jaw shaking like a maraca, he stepped around the turbine enclosure, feeling with hands pained by the sharp, cutting temperature, for the line spout. He could feel his breath freezing in front of his face—could imagine the vaporous cloud crystallizing in midair and raining in a shower of ice pellets to the sloshing water around his ankles. Touched something—the goddamn blessed motherfucking _line spout,_ thank you, Jesus.
And the water level was rising; he could feel it creeping up the legs of his cargo pants. Mike's carelessness in traversing an ice field...
And there was _someone else down here with him—_
His breath caught in his throat. Froze. Dripping water sounds among the steady snarl of the turbines...and, somewhere _behind_ him, the sound of someone wading through the water.
"Who's there?" It was hardly a whisper—weak, ineffectual.
No answer.
He was shaking uncontrollably now, the ice axe growing increasingly heavy. Gripping it tighter, he gathered what strength was left in him to mutter, "Who the _fuck_ is there?" This time the sounds of the wading stopped but, again, there came no answer.
_Fuck it,_ he thought. _I'll drag this whole fucking boat—and everyone on it—straight to hell._
Hoisting the ice axe back over his shoulder, he expelled an exhausted grunt and swung the tool straight into the hub of the line spout. It was a solid strike, ringing through the heart of the _Borealis._ There came a teakettle hissing followed by a burning stream of hot fuel sprayed into the dark, scorching his flesh. Burned, he foolishly dropped the ice axe where it plunked through the frozen sludge. He dropped to his knees without thinking, though he immediately regretted his actions as his testicles retreated into the cavity of his abdomen and his muscles seemed to stiffen to broom handles.
Cold fingers clutched the nape of his neck. Charlie cried out and launched himself forward, sprinting in the sightlessness for the rung ladder. He heard the thing—
_(the girl)_
—slam through the water in quick pursuit. Hand over fist, he scrambled up the ladder, heavy boots tolling on the iron rungs, shrieking like someone in furious pain until he broke through the hatch and crawled across the floor toward the galley. But the corridor was midnight black, cramped like a coffin; there was no place to go.
Sour breath sawing from his lips, his chest hitching, Charlie Mears pulled himself into a ball and waited. Despite his blindness, he nonetheless trained his eyes in the direction of where he knew the engine room hatch to be.
Listening...listening...listening...
But she never appeared. There were no more sounds from below, save for the occasional thumping of ice against the bottom of the _Borealis._ He would have thought such a feat impossible, but in his exhaustion and before he knew it was happening, Charlie Mears fell asleep.
11
And awoke with a scream caught in his throat.
Couldn't feel his fingertips; couldn't feel his toes. Could he move them? He couldn't tell. How long had he slept? There was no way to tell. Was he dead? He didn't know.
But if he was dead, this was Hell.
He found matches in the galley. Igniting the corner of one of McEwan's paperback Westerns, he carried it like a torch while traversing the inner deck of the _Borealis_. The corridor closed in around him, the darkness diluted to a chalky grayness. The walls were overgrown with frost, the corridor a frozen white throat, which, upon bringing the makeshift torch too close, would weep runnels of melting ice like tears onto steel-colored frozen pools on the floor.
Dynamo Joe Darling was now a mummified, dehydrated husk webbed in a gelatinous black tar on the floor of the head.
Charlie walked through the cabins, smelling the disuse and, beneath that, the stronger vein of putrefaction. Had he anything in his stomach, he would have vomited.
He noticed that the ship was no longer rocking. In fact, it seemed unusually calm.
Lastly, he poked back inside Mike Fenty's old stateroom, still vacant. However, there was a moist, almost breath-smelling condensation to the air in the room. The flames danced off the paperback, already having consumed half the book while managing to fill the overhead with black columns of smoke, and Charlie had to creep farther into the room to make sure he was actually seeing what he thought he was.
The place on the cot where the girl had sat was _darker_ than the rest of the fabric. It was a stellated, tentacled shape, like a cannonball-sized asterisk, that Charlie at first thought was due to water dripping down onto the cot's fabric from somewhere up above. Dampened, darkened fabric. But when he touched the spot, his fingers came away dry as bone.
Taking a step back, he noticed two similar spots moldering on the floor—where, naturally, the girl's feet would have been while she sat on the edge of Mike's cot. It was a darkening of the wood, each one practically foot shaped. As if her flesh, not belonging to this world, was rotting whatever it touched, soiling it, marking it the way a wolf might mark its den.
He crept up to the foredeck and pushed open the double hatch. Shafts of hoary light stung his eyes, though he couldn't tell what time of the day it was. Or _what_ day it was.
Topside, he crossed over to the bow and looked out upon a vast ice field, its size indeterminable, upon which, at some point during his unconsciousness, the _Borealis_ had run aground. The hull was destroyed, stabbed by countless knives of ice, an explosion of boat pieces sprayed across the snow.
He turned and proceeded toward the pilothouse. Walking was less about moving his legs independently of each other but merely pivoting each foot and twisting at the hips, for this seemed the best way to conserve what warmth hadn't evacuated his body. At the control room door, he wiped away thick grime from the window and, cupping his hands at either side of his face, peered inside.
Mike was on the floor, his hand still clutching the hilt of the boning knife that he'd used to open his throat. His skin was gray as bird down, his eyes milky pustules overloaded in their sockets.
Shaking, shaking—
Breathing into his hands, he retreated down the steps and noticed something in the snow he hadn't seen when he'd first looked over the bow.
Footsteps.
_She._
And _she—_
12
Down in the galley he scooped handfuls of cereal off the countertop, which he ate without expression, then ate two slices of wheat bread, which were covered in frost. Afterward, he urinated in the galley's steal sink—a stream so pungent and yellow it was nearly solid. From his cabin, he retrieved the flare gun then, on second thought, packed the entire first-aid kit in his laundry bag. He pulled tight the laces on the bag and slung it over one shoulder.
There was a flashlight in Mike's room. It didn't work but, for some reason, Charlie was confident the farther he got from the trawler the greater the chance the flashlight might start to work. Again he thought of those blackened footprints on the floor of Mike's stateroom, the tentacled star on the seat of the cot. The girl, he knew, had poisoned the _Borealis,_ and everything on it. Well, almost everything.
While he prepared his gear and changed into warm clothes, he thought of Gabriel. When he was born, on the day Johanna and he had taken him home from the hospital, the infant had been silent as a dormouse. This reddened, squinty-eyed little garden gnome with a tiny, upturned nose and square little pink fists. And the hair on his head! Dark as the pelt of a black bear. They'd been living in Oregon then, in a small cabin backed by redwood trees as formidable as minarets while the front yard opened up on a pebbly gray beach where the cold Pacific waters rushed up to lap against the seawall. He'd been piloting charters back then while sustaining a hunger to get his hands back into the gullets of cod instead of just coolers of Bud. It was what he hoped for that pink, squirming little baby too—a lifetime of _doing_ as opposed to the _pursuit_ of doing. Anyway, he'd get back to the sea, the real sea, in due time. There was the baby. Gabe. Gabriel. The way Johanna, slight in frame and just as beautiful as she'd ever been, nursing the baby in the half-gloom of midday coming in through the cabin's windows, framing her in some angelic penumbra while she rocked gently in the old rocking chair that had once been her—or his?—grandfather's...
Back abovedecks, the world was colorless. Snow snowed. The boat's prow had shriveled and turned black as rotting fruit. There came the steady _glug-glug_ from the hull as the trawler slowly took on more and more water. With a pair of field glasses, Charlie surveyed the expansive strip of ice, miles long, practically its own continent. He could see the girl's footprints in the snow, soon to be covered over by the fresh fall.
Shouldering his gear, he climbed down the side of the trawler via an overhang of cable. The ice nails in the soles of his boots left pockmarks in the fiberglass hull. Touching down on the ice field, he found the frozen terra firma solid as pavement. Charlie hefted his gear and, without a second thought, pushed forward through the twirling snow. He followed the girl's footprints until the storm covered them up. Then he continued in their estimated direction, up over frozen buttes, across jagged crevasses and down the throat of winding, bluish canyons through which dense, crystalline fog called "pogonip" hung like spectral gauze. He walked until hunger cramped his stomach and the silver aurora of sun bled away behind the sea, leaving a velvety, star-encrusted firmament in its place.
In the dark and miles from the _Borealis,_ the flashlight came on.
Trudging through the snow, his head down and his stiff-bristled beard glistening with ice crystals, he pursued the ghostly mirage. When he caught a glimpse of her in the pale cast of moonlight, white against a whiter background, he had to question what he was seeing—was it real or only in his mind, a trick of his eyes? Had she _ever_ existed? Had any of them?
_Holes everywhere,_ Bryan's voice came back to him. _You get it, man? The whole goddamn world..._
At one point, he collapsed in the snow. Thinking, _Mailboxes full of firecrackers._ Thinking, _Moon-bugs._ He managed to roll onto his back and, with some semblance of consciousness, propped himself up against a pillar of ice. Shivering, he pulled his gear into his lap for warmth against the biting, unforgiving wind. However, the seat of his pants soon grew wet and cold, the snow soaking through both pairs of underwear, long johns, his BDUs. His buttocks went numb. Thinking of Gabriel, zigzagging around the yard in Saint Paul, lobbing fistfuls of snow over Dale Carver's fence. Dale's German shepherd barked wildly, poking its snout through the quadrangular rings in the fence. He chased the boy around the yard, feinting for him just as the boy pivoted in the snow and darted in the opposite direction. From the trailer's stoop, Johanna looked on, dressed in a heavy pink bathrobe and rabbit-fur slippers, her arms folded in mock-disapproval across her chest.
Just as his fingers looped into the collar of Gabriel's parka, he happened to look up and meet Johanna's eyes. Laughing, shrieking, Gabriel eventually pulled free and sprinted across the yard. Dale's dog loped wildly in the snow.
"Why you gonna leave?" he said suddenly to Johanna.
"What are you talking about, Charlie?"
"I know you're gonna leave."
"I don't know what you mean, Charlie."
"Yes you do." Gabriel's laughter faded into blackening ether. "You're gonna wait for me to go out so I won't know until I come back home. It'll give you a good head start."
"Charlie, please. You don't know that. You're dreaming this now and it's not real. It already happened. That's how you know. This isn't real."
"Don't go," he begged her, tears suddenly spilling down his face. He crossed the yard and, before the trailer's steps, dropped to his knees in the snow. "Please, Jo. Don't leave. Don't take him away from me. If you're unhappy—"
"It's not about me being unhappy. The boy shouldn't live like this, Charlie. Look around. This isn't normal for him. And with you gone half the year—"
"Please, Jo," he begged. "Please..."
13
And opened his eyes—
He was covered in frost, the back of his coat frozen to the pillar of ice. Likewise, his gear lay frozen to his legs. He had no feeling from the waist down. The snow had let up to a lazy flutter, the large flakes twisting and spiraling in the clear, crisp night air. Overhead, he saw—or imagined he saw—the great bruise-colored northern lights, the aurora borealis, the spirit of the great north. It gleamed like heat lightning.
Over the nearest bluff, a figure appeared. Small, inconsequential. Almost nonexistent. Charlie blinked his eyes and, with much difficulty, managed to bring his gloved hands, hooked now into inflexible talons, up to his face. He scrubbed the ice from his lashes and peered out along the moonlit pass. The figure was descending the bluff, coming toward him.
Charlie's breathing quickened. He tried to move his legs but couldn't. Moving anything but his arms—which were weak and practically useless anyway—was impossible.
"Huh...huh... _huuuuhhh..."_ Clouds of vapor wafted before his face before being carried off in the wind.
The figure stood before him now, peering down at his broken, immobile form.
"G-G- _Gabriel,"_ Charlie managed.
The boy was wearing his ski parka and Ninja Turtle earmuffs. Red mittens, yellow books with the bright red buckles.
"Daddy," said the boy.
_"G-G-Guh-Guhhh—"_
The boy crossed over to him. Bending down, he peeled Charlie's pack from his legs, the frost popping and tearing, until he was able to roll the pack down a nearby embankment. Then the boy climbed up into Charlie's lap, his weight and warmth so real, Charlie could not deny the boy's existence.
"How d-d-d-did you guh- _get—_ Huh-how...how..."
"Daddy," the boy said, pressing his face to Charlie's chest. His small arms found Charlie's neck, looped around it. "I missed you, Daddy."
"Oh, pal," said Charlie, his eyes welling with tears that froze the second they spilled from his eyes. He managed to bring one arm up and encircle the boy with it. Hugged him gently. "I was g-gonna f-f-find you, p-pal," he told the boy. The nacreous, velvety lights in the sky seemed to brighten, tremble, waver.
"I love you," the boy told him, his breath warm on his neck. "I love you, Daddy."
"Was g-g-gonna f-f- _find_ y-y-yuh-y-yuh—"
The boy's arms tightened around Charlie's neck. Charlie forced himself to smile, the flesh cracking and splitting and bleeding down his face and chin, and returned the boy's embrace with his one free arm. He squeezed the boy as tight as he could—
_"...find you..."_
—while the world around him went white, white.
About the Author
Ronald Malfi is the award-winning author of the novels _The Ascent_ , _Snow_ , _Shamrock Alley_ , _Passenger_ , and several others. Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi's dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres. He currently lives along the Chesapeake Bay where he is at work on his next book.
_A predator stalks the frozen woods!_
Dead of Winter
_© 2011 Brian Moreland_
At a fort deep in the Ontario wilderness in 1870, a ghastly predator is attacking colonists and spreading a gruesome plague—his victims turn into ravenous cannibals with an unending hunger for human flesh. Inspector Tom Hatcher has faced a madman before, when he tracked down Montreal's infamous Cannery Cannibal. But can even he stop the slaughter this time?
In Montreal exorcist Father Xavier visits an asylum where the Cannery Cannibal is imprisoned. But the killer who murdered thirteen women is more than just a madman who craves human meat. He is possessed by a shape-shifting demon. Inspector Hatcher and Father Xavier must unravel a mystery that has spanned centuries and confront a predator that has turned the frozen woods into a killing ground where evil has come to feed.
_Enjoy the following excerpt for_ Dead of Winter:
_December 15, 1870_
_Manitou Outpost_
_Ontario, Canada_
It was the endless snowstorms that ushered in their doom. Each day and night the white tempests whirled around the fort, harrowing the log houses with winter lashings. At the center of the compound, the three-story lodge house creaked and moaned. Father Jacques Baptiste chanted in Latin and threw holy water on the barricaded front door. Above the threshold, a crucifix hung upside down. No matter how much the Jesuit priest prayed, the devil would not release its grip on this godforsaken fort.
Something scraped against the wood outside. Father Jacques peered through the slats of a boarded window. Tree branches clawed violently at the stockade walls. The front gate stood open, exposing them to the savage wilderness. It also provided the only path of escape. If by chance they made it out the gate, which way would they go?
The priest considered their options. Beyond the fort's perimeter, the dark waters of Makade Lake knocked plates of ice against the shore. Crossing the frozen lake would be a dead man's walk. Last week two of the trappers fell through the ice. The only way out was through the woods.
Father Jacques shuddered at the thought of leaving the fort. The trappers had fortified the outpost to keep the evil out. They hadn't counted on the savagery attacking them from within. He prayed for the souls of the men, women, and children lost in the past few weeks. Last autumn the French-speaking colony was twenty strong. Now, in midwinter, they were down to four survivors and not a crumb of food to split between them. How much longer before the beasts within completely took them over?
"Forgive us, oh Lord, for our fall from grace." Father Jacques sipped the holy water. It burned his throat and stomach like whiskey. "Cast out these evils that prey upon us."
Behind him the sound of boots approached from the darkness. The priest spun with his lantern, lighting up the gaunt face of a bearded man. Master Pierre Lamothe, the fort's chief factor, wore a deerskin parka with a bushy fur hood. His eyes were bloodshot. He wheezed.
The priest took a step back. "Are you still with us, Pierre?"
The sick man nodded. "Just dizzy, Father. I'm so damned hungry."
Father Jacques knew the pains of hunger. Each passing day it pulled his flesh tighter against his ribcage. __ "We'll find something to eat soon, I promise. Here, take another sip." He offered the bottle of holy water.
Pierre took a swig and winced. Seconds later he stumbled back, rubbing his eyes.
"The burning will pass." Father Jacques grabbed his wrist. "Remember our plan?"
"Yes . . . check on the horses."
"We must hurry. Now may be our only chance." They removed the barricade from the door. A long staircase led down from the second floor to the snow-covered ground. "Bless me, Father." Pierre raised his shotgun and stepped out into the blizzard. He all but disappeared in the white squall. The only parts visible were his hood and the outline of his shoulders. Father Jacques nervously watched the fort grounds. At the surrounding cabins wind howled through shattered windows and broken doors. When Pierre reappeared at the stables, the priest released his breath.
_Please let the horses still be alive._
The chief factor pulled a horse out. The poor animal was so thin its hide sunk into its ribs. As Pierre threw a saddle on its back, he raised two fingers, signaling that a second horse was still inside the stable.
Father Jacques closed the door and clasped his hands. "Thank you, oh Lord."
Someone tugged at his cassock. He looked down to see a small French-Indian girl. Pierre's daughter Zoé had tousled black hair and large brown eyes that had kept their innocence despite the horrors they'd witnessed these past few weeks. The girl held a tattered Indian doll to her chest. "I'm afraid, _Père_."
Father Jacques touched her head and gave the most comforting smile he could conjure. "Don't worry, Zoé, the angels will protect us. Here, you need to bundle up." He fastened her fur parka, pulled the hood over her head.
"I want Mama to go with us."
"I'm sorry, Zoé, but she's too sick. She would die out there. You, your papa, and I are going to ride out to the nearest fort. Then we'll send help back for your mother."
The girl frowned. "Noël says you're lying!"
Father Jacques glanced down at the Indian doll. One green eye stared back. The other eye was a ragged hole. Since Zoé had stopped eating two weeks ago, she suffered from dementia. She spent most of her days whispering to her doll. Father Jacques wanted to rip its head off. He squeezed his fist. "Noël is just afraid like the rest of us. Now, pray for forgiveness for speaking to me in that manner."
"Sorry, _Père_." Zoé crossed herself and bowed.
"Now, drink." He gave the girl the last of the holy water. She drank it and winced as if it were castor oil.
Outside, the horses whinnied. A shotgun fired.
Father Jacques dashed to the window. He searched the fort grounds. A saddled horse ran in circles. Where was Pierre?
Behind the wall of whirling snow more shots were fired. Then came a scream. Pierre stumbled out of the mist. Blood spouted from the stump of his shoulder. He was missing an arm.
Peering out the boarded window, Father Jacques screamed at the sight of blood gushing from Pierre's shoulder. As the wounded man stumbled up the front steps to the lodge house, the white mist rolled in from behind and swallowed Pierre. His scream was cut short.
"Papa!" Zoé ran toward the barricaded door. "Let Papa in!"
"No, move away from the door." Father Jacques grabbed her hand and backed away.
Outside, the storm wailed. Snow blew in through the cracks of the boarded windows. Footfalls charged up the staircase like thundering hooves. Something rammed against the front door. The hinges buckled.
Zoé shrieked.
"Back to the cellar!" The priest pulled the girl through the dark corridors of the lodge house. Behind them, the front door crashed open. Terror stabbed Father Jacques' chest with icy pinpricks at the shattering of windows and splintering of wood. Growls echoed throughout the lodge.
_They're inside!_
Borealis
__
__
__
_Ronald Malfi_
On a routine crabbing expedition in the Bering Sea, Charlie Mears and the rest of the men aboard the trawler _Borealis_ discover something unbelievable: a young woman running naked along the ridge of a passing iceberg. The men rescue her and bring her aboard the boat. But they will soon learn her horrible secret. By the time they find out why she was alone on the ice—and what she truly is—the nightmare will have begun, as one by one she infects them with an evil that brings about unimaginable terrors.
**eBooks are _not_ transferable.**
**They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.**
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
Borealis
Copyright © 2011 by Ronald Malfi
ISBN: 978-1-60928-647-7
Edited by Don D'Auria
Cover by Scott Carpenter
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Original Copyright Date: 2009
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: October 2011
www.samhainpublishing.com
# Table of Contents
About the Author
Also Available from Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Copyright Page
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
} | 4,065 |
More than just physical therapy by more than just physical therapists.
Desire to give Ourselves generously to others.
This is the most proactive, well trained BLS CPR team yet!! This office, BreakOut Advisors Rehabilitation, take their BLS CPR training seriously, training faithfully to maintain their readiness! They do not come in to Start the Heart to just " get it done and over with ", they come as a team and take their training seriously, practicing team dynamics as though they were in their own office.
Grand accomplishment, they had the best Chest Compression Fraction time for the year; 75.18 !!!!
Congratulations!!! Great job, well done!
At Breakout, we are caring, concerned, and attentive professionals with 30+ years of combined experience in physical therapy in Wexford PA – here to help and both treat and prevent any injuries that are standing in your way or prepare for that upcoming surgery.
It has been wisely said that we can not really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
Jay is an award-winning physical therapist in Wexford and has previously opened and sold two successful physical therapy businesses in the greater Wexford area –Breakout Advisors & Rehabilitation, his third, will be his last hurrah!
We're on Route 19 right across from Whole Foods. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 8,224 |
General purpose ducts are manufactured from either twinwall or uPVC, conforming to no specific standards. This means you would use general purpose ducting for applications which do not require you to meet standards, but these pipes do imitate the ducting's which do fully conform to the standards.
Coloured black, this non kitemarked ducting retains many of the same features and benefits as the BS EN50086-2-4 system. You would use this ducting for a system which does not require a full BS EN specification. It is an ideal alternative to uPVC Daviduct in these applications.
Available in 2 type; Type 4660 and Daviduct. Both of these types have a smooth outer wall.
Type 4660 is manufactured to the dimensional requirements of BS4660 and offers a greater strength than standard uPVC general purpose ducting. This ducting is available in black or dark grey as a ring sealed system, although unsealed systems are available.
Daviduct is a cost-effective alternative to higher specification systems and it to be used in light to medium duty applications. This duct is not suitable for Highways Agency applications. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 4,656 |
// Copyright (c) Microsoft. All Rights Reserved. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See License.txt in the project root for license information.
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.PerformanceSensitiveAnalyzers;
using Test.Utilities;
using Xunit;
using VerifyCS = Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.PerformanceSensitiveAnalyzers.UnitTests.CSharpPerformanceCodeFixVerifier<
Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.PerformanceSensitiveAnalyzers.ConcatenationAllocationAnalyzer,
Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.Testing.EmptyCodeFixProvider>;
namespace Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.PerformanceSensitiveAnalyzers.UnitTests
{
public class ConcatenationAllocationAnalyzerTests
{
[Fact]
public async Task ConcatenationAllocation_Basic1()
{
var sampleProgram =
@"using System;
using Roslyn.Utilities;
public class MyClass
{
[PerformanceSensitive(""uri"")]
public void Testing()
{
string s0 = ""hello"" + 0.ToString() + ""world"" + 1.ToString();
}
}";
await VerifyCS.VerifyAnalyzerAsync(sampleProgram);
}
[Fact]
public async Task ConcatenationAllocation_Basic2()
{
var sampleProgram =
@"using System;
using Roslyn.Utilities;
public class MyClass
{
[PerformanceSensitive(""uri"")]
public void Testing()
{
string s2 = ""ohell"" + 2.ToString() + ""world"" + 3.ToString() + 4.ToString();
}
}";
await VerifyCS.VerifyAnalyzerAsync(sampleProgram,
// Test0.cs(9,21): warning HAA0201: Considering using StringBuilder
#pragma warning disable RS0030 // Do not used banned APIs
VerifyCS.Diagnostic(ConcatenationAllocationAnalyzer.StringConcatenationAllocationRule).WithLocation(9, 21));
#pragma warning restore RS0030 // Do not used banned APIs
}
[Theory]
[InlineData("string s0 = nameof(System.String) + '-';")]
[InlineData("string s0 = nameof(System.String) + true;")]
[InlineData("string s0 = nameof(System.String) + new System.IntPtr();")]
[InlineData("string s0 = nameof(System.String) + new System.UIntPtr();")]
public async Task ConcatenationAllocation_DoNotWarnForOptimizedValueTypes(string statement)
{
var source = $@"using System;
using Roslyn.Utilities;
public class MyClass
{{
[PerformanceSensitive(""uri"")]
public void Testing()
{{
{statement}
}}
}}";
await VerifyCS.VerifyAnalyzerAsync(source);
}
[Theory]
[InlineData(@"const string s0 = nameof(System.String) + ""."" + nameof(System.String);")]
[InlineData(@"const string s0 = nameof(System.String) + ""."";")]
[InlineData(@"string s0 = nameof(System.String) + ""."" + nameof(System.String);")]
[InlineData(@"string s0 = nameof(System.String) + ""."";")]
public async Task ConcatenationAllocation_DoNotWarnForConst(string statement)
{
var source = $@"using System;
using Roslyn.Utilities;
public class MyClass
{{
[PerformanceSensitive(""uri"")]
public void Testing()
{{
{statement}
}}
}}";
await VerifyCS.VerifyAnalyzerAsync(source);
}
[Fact]
[WorkItem(7995606, "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7995606/boxing-occurrence-in-c-sharp")]
public async Task Non_constant_value_types_in_CSharp_string_concatenation()
{
var source = @"
using System;
using Roslyn.Utilities;
public class MyClass
{
[PerformanceSensitive(""uri"")]
public void SomeMethod()
{
System.DateTime c = System.DateTime.Now;
string s1 = ""char value will box"" + c;
}
}";
await VerifyCS.VerifyAnalyzerAsync(source,
// Test0.cs(11,45): warning HAA0202: Value type (System.DateTime) is being boxed to a reference type for a string concatenation.
#pragma warning disable RS0030 // Do not used banned APIs
VerifyCS.Diagnostic(ConcatenationAllocationAnalyzer.ValueTypeToReferenceTypeInAStringConcatenationRule).WithLocation(11, 45).WithArguments("System.DateTime"));
#pragma warning restore RS0030 // Do not used banned APIs
}
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 7,812 |
Q: AngularJS Service function calling another function I have a AngularJS application that has a service module.
I have simplyfied what i want to do in the code below.
I want one service function to get a value from another function in the same service.
service.factory(....)
return {
//test function want to get the value from "info" in test2.
test: function () {
var text = this.test2;
return text;
},
test2: function () {
var info = "Hello World";
return info;
}
When i call "test" function it returns the entire function:
function () {
var info = "Hello World";
return info;
}
and not the "Hello World".
Can someone explain why its not returning the value?
A: You need to call test2.
test: function () {
var text = this.test2(); // <-- here
return text;
},
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 3,963 |
Front, D35, 4.10 gears, no extra parts just the gears.
60K street miles with a 3.0L/5sp, mechanic stated the gears are in good condition.
Looking at the gears and they show no signs of chipping or wear.
These might fit a USPS $18 box, will have to see. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 2,260 |
The Solidworks 'Pack and Go' feature is an indispensable tool for copying entire assemblies when replicating previously completed work. The only shortfall of this tool when used with ONGAA CAM is that external information could not be included and this would result in manually copying ONGAA CAM files and renaming them if parts or assemblies were renamed during the Pack and Go process.
The original ONGAA CAM Pack and Go feature would copy parts and assemblies WITH the ONGAA CAM programs but would not allow renaming of parts. Not being able to rename caused extra work if renaming was required.
It is not often that a customer is so pleased with a product that they take extra time to say 'thank you'.
In this case the thank you came as 'The First Part' the customer produced with ONGAA CAM.
The part was modeled in SOLIDWORKS 2011 and used ONGAA CAM V1.140 for the HOMAG series CNC machines.
Once processing was applied,ONGAA CAM produced the MPR file (compatible with WoodWOP 5 and 6) used to NC Gen the final instructions.
The only issues we ran into was getting the part drawn accurately. The beauty was as we corrected the drawing,all our processing moved with it. 'No recalculations required!'. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 5,816 |
2. Material: plastic ABS. (environmental protection material), press type, rotary type, twist type, metal material, plastic material, play the role of air suction, pumping. The front air nozzle is usually connected with 4*8 rubber tube, 5*7 close to the specification. Conventional color: black. Can be produced according to the specified color. Or according to the drawing. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 321 |
\section*{Introduction}\label{sec:introduction}
The notion of a prototypical dynamical system is
used whenever a certain system allows to study a
certain relevant phenomenon, being at the same time
simple enough that it is amendable for numerical
and (at least partial) analytic investigations,
without showing additional properties which could
obfuscate the study of the prime phenomenon of interest
\cite{cymbalyuk2005neuron,uccar2003chaotic,krupa2008mixed}.
Additionally, their dynamical behavior can often be
understood in terms of general concepts, such as energy
balance, symmetry breaking, etc.
Examples of prototype systems are the normal forms
of standard bifurcation analysis
\cite{gros2013complex,chow1994normal}
and classical systems, like the Van der Pol oscillator
\cite{gros2013complex} or the Lorenz model
\cite{lorenz1963deterministic}, which have been of
central importance for the development dynamical
system theory. As an example we consider the
Li\'enard equation
\begin{equation}
\ddot{x}+f(x)\dot{x}+g(x)\ =\ 0~,
\label{eq:lienard}
\end{equation}
a generic adaptive mechanical system, which
includes the Van der Pol oscillator and the
Takens-Bogdanov system
\cite{takens1974singularities,bogdanov1975versal}.
The periodically forced extended Li\'enard systems
with a double-well potential have also been studied by
many authors (see e.g. the double-well Duffing oscillator
\cite{venkatesan1997bifurcation, yamaguchi1989static, li2006chaos}).
In this paper we propose a new class of autonomous
Li\'enard-type systems, which allows to study cascades
of limit cycle bifurcations using a bifurcation parameter
controlling directly the balance between energy dissipation
and uptake, and hence the underlying physical driving
mechanism.
Though there are a range of construction methods for dynamical
systems in the literature (see e.g.\
\cite{sandstede1997constructing,deng1994constructing,qi2005four}),
they tend however to assume a somewhat abstract view, such as
starting from implicitly defined manifolds, or involve
mathematical tools accessible only to researchers with
an in-depth math training. In contrast to these methods, we
provide here a mechanistic design procedure, based on
the construction of attractors by the use of
potentials, a concept often used in many
interdisciplinary fields (e.g. in modeling cardiovascular
systems \cite{regan2012dynamical} or for solving
optimization problems \cite{ercsey-ravasz2011optimization}),
making it easily accessible and implementable for other
scientific communities (such as neuroscience, biology etc.) as well.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[height=0.60\textwidth]{./Figure-1-Gros}
\caption{The Bogdanov-Takens system (\ref{eq:bt_newton})
with the potential function $V(x)=x^3/3-x^2/2$ and a friction
term $x-\mu$ (\textit{top row}), and its generalization
(\ref{eq:prototype_system}) to a friction term $\mu_1-V(x)$
(\textit{bottom row}), compare
Eq.~(\ref{eq:friction_functions}).
\textit{Left column}: The potential function together
with the color-coded regions of respectively energy dissipation
and uptake, compare Eq.~(\ref{eq:bt_energy}).
\textit{Right column}: The phase planes at the respective homoclinic
bifurcation points, with the respective unstable foci and the saddles
by open circles. The green and blue trajectories are the stable and
unstable manifolds and the red trajectory corresponds to the homoclinic
loop.}
\label{fig:Bogdanov-Takens}
\end{figure}
As an introductory example for the role of balance between
energy uptake and dissipation in both local and global
bifurcations we reconsider the Bogdanov-Takens system,
\begin{equation}
\ddot{x} = (x-\mu)\dot{x}-V'(x), \qquad\quad
\begin{aligned}
\dot{x} &= y\\
\dot{y} &= (x-\mu)y-V'(x)~,
\end{aligned}
\label{eq:bt_newton}
\end{equation}
which is often used as a prototype system for homoclinic
bifurcations \cite{gros2013complex}. Here, the mechanical
potential is a third order polynomial, as illustrated
in Fig.~\ref{fig:Bogdanov-Takens}. The friction force is
directly proportional to the velocity $y$ and fixpoints
of (\ref{eq:bt_newton}) correspond hence to the
minima and the maxima of the potential $V(x)$.
The dynamics of the Bogdanov-Takens system is controlled
by the parameter $\mu$, defining,
in terms of the mechanical energy $E$, the regions of
dissipation and energy uptake in the potential valley,
\begin{equation}
\dot E = (x-\mu)y^2, \qquad\quad
E = \frac{y^2}{2} + V(x)~,
\label{eq:bt_energy}
\end{equation}
compare Fig.~\ref{fig:Bogdanov-Takens}. The region $x>\mu$
of energy uptake increases when the bifurcation parameter $\mu$
is decreased, leading to two consecutive transitions. Initially
the potential minimum becomes repelling, undergoing a supercritical
Hopf bifurcation and a stable limit cycle emerges. Decreasing $\mu$
further the extension of the limit cycle increases, merging
at $\mu_c$ with the stable and unstable manifolds of the saddle,
resulting in a homoclinic bifurcation.
\begin{figure}[t!]
\centering
\includegraphics[height=0.9\textwidth]{./Figure-2-Gros}
\caption{\textit{Left column}: Double well
potential, as defined by Eq.~(\ref{eq:V_predefined}) and
with $x_{1,2}=\pm1$, $V_{1,2}=0$, $z_{1,2}=1$ and
$p_{1,2}=1$. The regions of energy dissipation $\dot E<0$
and uptake $\dot E>0$ are color coded. For the friction
functions (\ref{eq:friction_functions}) we
used $f_1$, with $\alpha=1$ (\textit{top row}),
$f_2$, with $\mu_2=0.6$ and $\alpha=5$ (\textit{middle row}),
and $f_3$, with $\mu_2=0.3$, $\mu_3=0.6$ and $\alpha=5$
(\textit{bottom row}).
\textit{Right column}: Bifurcation diagrams of the respective
generalized Li\'enard systems (\ref{eq:prototype_system}),
as a function of $\mu_1$. All other $\mu_i$ (when present) are
kept constant. Stable/unstable fixpoints or limit cycles are
denoted by continuous/dashed curves respectively. Black lines
are fixpoint lines, while the maximal/minimal amplitude of $x$
in a cycle is denoted with red/green color.
$H$ points denote Hopf-bifurcations, $HO$ corresponds to
homoclinic bifurcations of a saddle, $SNC$ points denote
saddle node bifurcations of limit cycles.
The dotted, dashed and continuous vertical gray lines
are just guides for the eyes.
}
\label{fig:bifucations_V_diagrams}
\end{figure}
\section*{Results}\label{sec:results}
The key mechanism leading to a bifurcation in the
Bogdanov-Takens systems is the availability of a parameter
allowing to change the balance between energy uptake
and energy dissipation along limit cycles. Our aim is
to generalize this idea to the case of mechanical systems
characterized by an arbitrary number of potential minima.
For this purpose we consider with
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
\dot{\mathbf{x}} &= \mathbf{y}\\
\dot{\mathbf{y}} &= f(V(\mathbf{x}))\mathbf{y}-\nabla V(\mathbf{x})
\end{aligned}
\qquad\qquad \dot E\,=\,f(V(\mathbf{x}))\,\mathbf{y}^2
\label{eq:prototype_system}
\end{equation}
a $2d-$dimensional system, with $d$ spatial coordinates and with
friction forces depending via $f(V(\mathbf{x}))$ functionally
only on the mechanical potential $V(\mathbf{x})$, allowing a
fine-tuned control of the energy dissipation and uptake around
the respective potential minima. A well known example of the
system of type (\ref{eq:prototype_system}) is the
Van der Pol oscillator
\begin{equation}
\ddot x-\epsilon\left(1-x^2\right)\dot x+x=0,
\qquad\quad f(V) = \epsilon(1-2V),
\qquad\quad V(x) = \frac{x^2}{2}~,
\label{eq:Van_der_Pol}
\end{equation}
for which the regions of energy uptake and dissipation
remain fixed, with $\epsilon$ regulating the
overall influence of the velocity-dependent force.
The simplest generic class of friction functions $f(V)$
entering (\ref{eq:prototype_system})
are polynomial:
\begin{equation}
f_1(V) = -\alpha(V-\mu_1),
\qquad
f_2(V) = -\alpha(V-\mu_1)(V-\mu_2),
\qquad
f_3(V) = -\alpha(V-\mu_1)(V-\mu_2)(V-\mu_3),
\label{eq:friction_functions}
\end{equation}
where $\alpha$ regulates the overall strength of the
friction and where the individual $\mu_1<\mu_2<\mu_3$ are
the respective zeros, the points at which dissipation changes
to anti-dissipation and vice-versa, compare Fig.~\ref{fig:bifucations_V_diagrams}.
When using $f_1(V)$ and the mechanical potential $V(x)=x^3/3-x^2/2$,
the resulting flow in phase space is equivalent to the one of the
Bogdanov-Takens system (\ref{eq:bt_newton}), as shown in
Fig.~\ref{fig:Bogdanov-Takens}.
\begin{figure}[t!]
\centering
\includegraphics[height=0.9\textwidth]{./Figure-3-Gros}
\caption{Flow diagrams for the systems presented in
Fig.~\ref{fig:bifucations_V_diagrams}, using respectively linear / quadratic /
cubic friction functions $f_1(V)$ / $f_2(V)$ / $f_3(V)$
(\textit{top/middle/bottom row}).
The values $\mu_1^{(a/b)}=0.1/0.2$,
$\mu_1^{(c/d)}=0.1/0.11$ and
$\mu_1^{(e/f)}=0.032/0.04$
for the respective $\mu_1$ are indicated by arrows in the
corresponding bifurcation diagrams in
Fig.~\ref{fig:bifucations_V_diagrams}.
}
\label{fig:bifucations_flow}
\end{figure}
\subsection*{Generalized mechanical potentials}
\label{sec:general_potential_well}
We are interested in using (\ref{eq:prototype_system}) as
prototype dynamical systems, especially for the case of
non-trivial mechanical potentials $V(\mathbf{x})$ having an
arbitrary number $M$ of local minima. One could in principle
consider higher-order polynomials for this purpose, however
they do not allow to control the overall height of the
potential and the relative width of the local minimal in
as simple fashion.
For this purpose we use throughout this study potential
functions of the kind
\begin{equation}
V(\mathbf{x})=\prod_n \left(g_n(\mathbf{x}-\mathbf{x}_n)+\frac{V_n}{p_n}\right) ,
\qquad\quad
g_n(\mathbf{z})=\tanh(\mathbf{z}^2/{z_n}^2)~,
\label{eq:V_predefined}
\end{equation}
where the $z_n>0$ determine the half-width of the respective
local minima and where the $p_n$ satisfy the self-consistent
condition:
\begin{equation}
p_{n}=\prod_{m\neq n} \left(g_n(\mathbf{x}_n-\mathbf{x}_m)+\frac{V_m}{p_m}\right),
\qquad\quad
V(\mathbf{x}_n) = \frac{V_n}{p_n}\prod_{m\neq n}
\left(g_n(\mathbf{x}_n-\mathbf{x}_m)+\frac{V_m}{p_m}\right) = V_n~,
\label{eq:V_predefined_p_n}
\end{equation}
since $g(0)=0$. For deep minima, with
$(z_i+z_j)\ll\left|\mathbf{x}_i-\mathbf{x}_j\right|$,
the positions and the heights of the local minima
are close to $\mathbf{x}_n$ and $V_n$ respectively.
We found, that a relative accuracy of $10^{-2}$ for
$V_n$ can already be achieved in general after three or
four iterations.
\subsection*{Limit cycle bifurcation cascades}
\label{sec:bifurcations_cascades}
The system of type (\ref{eq:prototype_system}) allows to
describe complex cascades of limit cycle bifurcations and
in Fig.~\ref{fig:bifucations_V_diagrams} we show some
illustrative examples using a symmetric double-well potential
and linear / quadratic / cubic friction functions
$f_1(V)$ / $f_2(V)$ / $f_3(V)$ respectively,
see Eq.~(\ref{eq:friction_functions}). We used numerical
methods \cite{clewley2012hybrid} to obtain the respective
full bifurcation diagrams, with solid/dashed lines denoting
stable/unstable fixpoints and limit cycles. The corresponding
flow in phase space is illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:bifucations_flow}.
For negative $\mu_1$ values the two fixpoints $(\pm1,0)$ are stable,
for the case of $f_1(V)$ and $f_3(V)$, and stable limit cycles evolve
via two supercritical Hopf-bifurcation. For $f_2(V)$, on the other side,
a sub-critical Hopf bifurcation is observed at $\mu_1=0$.
The respective stable/unstable limit cycles merge for $f_1(V)$ and
$f_2(V)$ in a homoclinic bifurcation, whereas a more complex
bifurcation diagram emerges for $f_3(V)$. Saddle node bifurcation
of limit cycles are present for both $f_2(V)$ and $f_3(V)$.
\begin{figure}[t!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{./Figure-4-Gros}
\caption{Stable limit cycles and chaotic orbits of the Li\'enard
prototype system (\ref{eq:prototype_system}) in a
two-dimensional symmetric double well potential
$V(\mathbf{x})$ (color coded, as defined by Eq.~(\ref{eq:V_x_1_2}))
and with a linear friction term
$f_1(V(\mathbf{x})) = 0.5(\mu_1-V(\mathbf{x}))$. The bifurcation
parameter $\mu_1$ is $0.1, 0.15, 0.25, 0.265, 0.2698, 0.3$ from $(a)$
to $(f)$. In $(d)$ the four limit cycles can be mapped into
each other by using the symmetry operations $\sigma_{1,2}$
or $\sigma_{3,4}$, as discussed in the Methods section.
For $(e)$ only a single of the four stable
limit cycles is shown. This needs to circle the
two potential minima twice in order to retrace itself. In $(f)$
an example of a chaotic trajectory is given.
}
\label{fig:double_2D_potential_well_orbits}
\end{figure}
\subsection*{Chaos via period doubling of limit cycles}
\label{sec:chaos}
We consider now a prototype system (\ref{eq:prototype_system})
with a two-dimensional symmetric potential field
$V(\mathbf{x})$,
\begin{equation}
V(\mathbf{x}) = g(\mathbf{x}-\mathbf{x}_1) g(\mathbf{x}-\mathbf{x}_2),
\quad\quad g(\mathbf{z}) = \tanh(4\mathbf{z}^2/9)~,
\label{eq:V_x_1_2}
\end{equation}
as defined in (\ref{eq:V_predefined}), having two minima
$\mathbf{x}_{1,2}=\pm(1,-1)$, and a linear friction term
$f_1(V)=0.5(\mu-V)$. Both diagonals in the $(x_1,x_2)$ are
symmetries of the system, as discussed in the Methods section.
In Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_orbits} we present
examples of stable limit cycles and of a chaotic trajectory,
as projected to the $(x_1,x_2)$ plane.
In Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_bifurcations}
the corresponding bifurcation diagram is presented,
which shows Hopf bifurcations (H), homoclinic bifurcations (HO),
branching of limit cycles via spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB),
period doubling of limit cycles (PD) and a transition to chaotic
behavior:
\begin{description}
\item[H] At $\mu_1^{(H)}=0$ the two potential minima become unstable,
just as for the one-dimensional spatial system presented in
Fig.~\ref{fig:bifucations_V_diagrams}, resulting in two equivalent
super-critical Hopf bifurcations. We note that, as a result of
the symmetric potential function (\ref{eq:V_x_1_2}), a second branch
of limit cycles is created by the two Hopf bifurcations
(see the discussion in the Methods section and the Supplementary
Information). However,
since in the parameter region of interest these limit cycles are
mostly unstable, we have not investigated them in detail.
\item[HO] At $\mu_1^{(HO)}\approx0.143$ the limit cycles merge,
as in
Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_orbits}(a)~$\to$~(b),
in a homoclinic transition. The limit cycle stays, however,
exactly on the diagonal $x_1+x_2=0$.
\item[SSB] At the first branching point of limit cycles,
$\mu_1^{(SSB)}\approx0.171$ the symmetry with respect to the
diagonal $(1,-1)$ is spontaneously broken, as in
Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_orbits}(b)~$\to$~(c),
with the two limit cycles still being symmetric with respect to
the $(1,1)$ diagonal. The latter symmetry is broken at the second
branching point $\mu_1^{(SSB)}\approx0.260$, as in
Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_orbits}(c)~$\to$~(d),
with four symmetry related limit cycles being stable.
\item[PD] For larger values of the bifurcation parameter $\mu_1$
a series of period-doubling of limit cycles is observed, with
the first occurring at $\mu_1^{(PD)}\approx0.268$, as in
Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_orbits}(d)~$\to$~(e).
The next period-doubling transition occurs at
$\mu_1^{(PD)}\approx0.270$, as shown in
Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_bifurcations}.
\end{description}
For reference we note, that the saddle of the potential is
located at $V(0,0)=0.505$, viz at a substantially larger
value.
For $\mu_1>\mu_1^{(chaos)}\approx 0.2705$ we observe
seemingly chaotic trajectories, as illustrated in
Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_orbits}(f).
Studying the transition to chaos is not the subject of
the present investigation and we leave it to future work.
We presume however, that the transition occurs via an
accumulation of an infinite number of of period-doubling
transitions of limit cycles, similar to the ones observed
for the Lorenz system \cite{robbins1979periodic} and for the
R\"ossler attractor \cite{rossler1976equation,gardini1985hopf}.
\begin{figure}[t!]
\centering
\includegraphics[height=0.6\textwidth]{./Figure-5-Gros}
\caption{\textit{Top row}: The numerically obtained bifurcation diagram
for a two dimensional prototype Li\'enard system with symmetric
double-well potential and a linear friction force, as for
Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_orbits}. The second branches
of limit cycles emerging from the two destabilized minima
(see Supplementary Fig.~S1) are not shown here.
One observes Hopf and homoclinic bifurcations (H and HO), branching
of limit cycles via spontaneous symmetry breaking and period
doubling (SSB and PD), as well a transition to chaos for
$\mu>0.2705$. The red/green lines indicate the maximal/minimal $x_1$-values
of the respective limit cycles. The blue curve is the second
$x_1$-maxima after period doubling. The right diagram represents
a zoom-in of the transition to a chaotic region, indicated by the
shaded green and red areas. Only the first two period doubling
bifurcations are shown.
\textit{Bottom row}: The average Lyapunov exponent $\bar{\lambda}$
and the contraction rate $\sigma$, calculated as described in
the Methods section, for the corresponding $\mu_1$ parameter intervals.
For the left figure $\Delta \mu_1=0.001$ parameter stepsize was used.
Increasing the resolution more and more periodic windows
(with $\bar{\lambda}=0$) become visible, as shown on the right
plot, where $\Delta \mu_1$ is decreased with a factor of ten.}
\label{fig:double_2D_potential_well_bifurcations}
\end{figure}
Our prototype system (\ref{eq:prototype_system}) is not
generically dissipative. We have evaluated the
average contraction rate $\sigma$, as defined
by (\ref{eq:sigma_def}) in the Methods section,
and present the results in
Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_bifurcations}.
Phase space contracts trivially along the attracting
limit cycles, but also, on the average, in the chaotic
region, where the average Lyapunov exponent $\bar{\lambda}$
becomes positive. $\bar{\lambda}$ is negative also
for $\mu_1<0$, when only stable fixpoints are present,
vanishing for intermediate values of $\mu_1$, when
stable limit cycles are present. The later is due to the
fact, see Fig.~\ref{fig:dpw17_delta_r-time_example} and
the corresponding Methods section, that
two initially close trajectories will generically flow to
the same limit cycle with the relative distance becoming
then constant.
For larger values of $\mu_1>0.322$ the chaotic
region transients into a phase of intermittent chaos
as illustrated in
Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_transient_chaos},
in which an extended quasi-regular flow along the $(-1,1)$
diagonal is interseeded by a roughly perpendicular bursting
flow. This behavior is, to a certain extend, reminiscent to
a scenario of intermittent chaos \cite{lai1996symmetry},
in which a strange attractor is embedded in a higher-dimensional
space with partly unstable directions. We have, however, not
investigated the observed intermittent dynamics in detail.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[height=0.3\textwidth]{./Figure-6-Gros}
\caption{\textit{Left}: Quasi-periodic windows with different
time scales in the time-series plot of $x_1$
variable for $\mu_1=0.34$.
\textit{Right}: Phase space plot of the trajectory
projected to the $(x_1,x_2)$ plane for the same parameter.
The magenta curve corresponds to the $t_p=[4\cdot 10^3,12\cdot10^3]$
quasi-periodic time interval, denoted with the same color
in the $x_1(t)$ plot.
}
\label{fig:double_2D_potential_well_transient_chaos}
\end{figure}
\section*{Discussion}
We have proposed and discussed a prototype dynamical
system (\ref{eq:prototype_system}) in which the
friction forces $\propto f(V)$ depend functionally
only on the mechanical potential $V(\mathbf{x})$.
We have shown, that complex cascade of limit cycle
bifurcation can be obtained even for two dimensional
phase spaces when the friction function $f(V)$ alternates
between regions of energy uptake and dissipation.
We have also introduced a generic class of potential
functions (\ref{eq:V_predefined}) which allow to define,
in a relative straightforward manner, mechanical potentials
with an arbitrary number of local minima with varying
depth. Any other potential could be however used. For
example one could study the biquadratic version
\begin{equation}
V(\mathbf{x}) \ \to\
\big(\mathbf{x}-\mathbf{x}_1\big)^2
\big(\mathbf{x}-\mathbf{x}_2\big)^2
\label{eq:V_x_1_2_bi_quadratic}
\end{equation}
of the potential (\ref{eq:V_x_1_2}) used in our
study of chaotic behavior with the prototype
system (\ref{eq:prototype_system}). We did not
study in detail the bifurcation diagram for the potential
function (\ref{eq:V_x_1_2_bi_quadratic}), presume
however, that it would be similar to the results
presented in Fig.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_orbits}
and \ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_bifurcations},
having the same underlying driving mechanism in terms
of a linear friction function $f(V)\propto(\mu_1-V)$.
We have shown that a simple double-well prototype
system with two spatial dimensions (and with a four-dimensional
phase space) shows both symmetry induced bifurcations
of limit cycles together with a period-doubling of
limit cycle transition to chaotic behavior.
As a future perspective we note, that by changing the
depth of the minima, one could control the order
in which the fixpoints are going be destabilized,
which might lead to other interesting phenomena.
Adding an extra (maybe slow) dynamics to the positions
or heights of the minima, the metadynamics of the attractors
\cite{gros2014attractor}
may also be considered. In this case the $p_n$ parameters
should be recalculated in each time-step using
the self-consistent equations (\ref{eq:V_predefined_p_n}),
which proved to be fast enough for practical purposes.
Models, for which the equations of motion are derived
from higher order principles, provide promising
results for the understanding many different phenomena,
such as the optimization hardness of boolean
satisfiability problems \cite{ercsey-ravasz2011optimization}
or the complex dynamics of biological neural networks
\cite{markovic2010self,markovic2012intrinsic}.
Generally, these methods involve the construction of
a generating functional, such as the cost function or energy
functional
\cite{intrator1992objective,triesch2005gradient,friston2010free,prokopenko2013guided},
with the dynamics of the system being defined by a gradient decent
rule. When all equations are derived from the same generating
functional, the system corresponds mathematically to
a gradient system for which the asymptotic behavior
is determined by the stable fixpoints (nodes).
Thus they can not produce limit cycles or any
oscillatory behavior. To by-pass this problem,
usually additional equations of motions are defined,
derived either from a second generating functional
to produce objective function stress
\cite{linkerhand2013generating,gros2014generating}
or from other considerations.
In our model, the system has an inherent inertia,
which leads to damped oscillations around equilibria
(minima of the potential) in the presence of
dissipation. By creating regions of
antidissipation, stable oscillatory dynamics and
chaotic behavior can also be achieved.
Considering nonsymmetric, higher dimensional potential
functions we expect to find an even richer set
of dynamical behaviors (see the Methods section),
a scenario worth be investigated in the future.
Finally, we note that the concepts
of dynamical systems theory, such as attractors,
slow points and bifurcations have been used recently
to understand phenomena of surprisingly diverse
fields. For examples of some relevant applications
we mention here the modeling of birdsong
\cite{sitt2008dynamical}, migraine
\cite{dahlem2013migraine} dynamics and
the control mechanisms developed
for the movements of humanoid robots
\cite{ernesti2012encoding}.
Hence, we believe that prototype systems
which allow the construction of models with
predefined attractors in an intuitive manner
could offer a useful tool for understanding
the behavior of interesting interdisciplinary problems.
\section*{Methods}
\label{sec:methods}
\subsection*{Hopf bifurcations in the prototype system}
\label{sect:Hopf}
\subsubsection*{2-dimensional prototype systems}
The local maxima of the potential function, i.e.\ where
$V''(x^*)<0$, which are saddle points, separate the phase
plane into different attraction domains with their stable
manifold. Local minima with $V''(x^*)>0$ become, on the
other hand, repelling focuses as a result of an
Andronov-Hopf bifurcation, when dissipation changes to
antidissipation in their neighborhood, having a simple
pair of purely imaginary eigenvalues
$\lambda_{1,2}=\pm i\sqrt{V''(x^*)}$.
\subsubsection*{4-dimensional prototype systems}
Analogously, the
\begin{equation*}
\mathbf{q}^*=(x_1^*,x_2^*,y_1^*,y_2^*),
\qquad\quad y^*_{1,2}=0,
\qquad\quad
\left.\frac{\partial V(x_1,x_2)}{\partial x_{1,2}}\right\vert_{x_1^*,x_2^*} = 0
\end{equation*}
fixpoints of the 4-dimensional prototype systems
(\ref{eq:prototype_system}) correspond to critical points
of the $V(x_1,x_2)$ potential function. Classification of the
local minima and saddle critical points with respect to their
stability can be achieved by evaluating the eigenvalues of the
Jacobian of the system in terms of the Hessian of the potential
function:
\begin{equation}
J(\mathbf{q}^*) =
\begin{pmatrix}
0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\
0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \\
d_1 & c & a & 0 \\
c & d_2 & 0 & a
\end{pmatrix},\qquad\quad
H(x^*_1,x^*_2)=
\begin{pmatrix}
-d_1 & -c \\
-c & -d_2
\end{pmatrix}
\end{equation}
where we have defined with
\begin{equation}
a = f(V(x^*_1,x^*_2)), \qquad\quad
c = - \left.\frac{\partial^2 V}{\partial x_1 \partial x_2}\right\vert_{x_1^*,x_2^*}, \qquad\quad
d_{1,2} = - \left.\frac{\partial^2 V}{\partial x_{1,2}^2}\right\vert_{x_1^*,x_2^*}
\end{equation}
the friction term and the second order partial derivatives of the
potential at the respective critical points. Defining with
\begin{equation}
\gamma_{\pm} = \frac{1}{2}\left(-(d_1+d_2)\pm \sqrt{(d_1+d_2)^2 - 4(d_1 d_2 -c^2)}\right),
\qquad\quad \gamma_{\pm} \in \mathbb{R}
\label{eq:gamma_pm}
\end{equation}
we can express the eigenvalues of the Jacobian $J(\mathbf{q}^*)$ as
\begin{equation}
\lambda_{1,2,3,4}=\frac{1}{2}\left(a \pm \sqrt{a^2-4\gamma_{\pm}}\right).
\end{equation}
For general potential functions the local minima,
defined by the $\Delta=\det(H)=d_1d_2-c^2>0$
and $\rho=\tr(H)=-(d_1+d2)<0$ conditions
(or equivalently by $\gamma_{\pm}>0$),
undergo a Hopf bifurcation,
when the $f(V)$ friction term changes sign, i.e.:
\begin{equation}
a = f(V(x_1^*,x_2^*)) = 0 \qquad\Rightarrow\qquad \lambda_{1,2,3,4}=\pm i\sqrt{\gamma_{\pm}}.
\end{equation}
However, saddles of the potential function,
i.e. $\Delta=\det(H)<0$, are saddle type
fixpoints of the dynamical system,
having always a $\lambda_1$ positive eigenvalue,
as $\gamma_{+}>0$ and $\gamma_{-}<0$.
Here we note that in case of the potential function
(\ref{eq:V_x_1_2}), due to the symmetries one gets
a double pair of imaginary eigenvalues, since
$d_1=d_2$ and $c=0$, and thus Eq.~(\ref{eq:gamma_pm})
yields $\gamma_{+}=\gamma_{-}$.
This results in a second branch of limit cycle
solutions, not investigated in this paper,
emerging from the Hopf-point.
\subsubsection*{2d-dimensional prototype systems}
For arbitrary dimensions $d$ one can express the
Jacobian in terms of block matrices:
\begin{equation}
J(\mathbf{q}^*) =
\begin{pmatrix}
O_d & I_d \\
- H_d & a I_d
\end{pmatrix},
\end{equation}
where $a=f(V)$ and where $O_d$ and $I_d$ are
the $d$-dimensional zero and identity matrices.
$H_d=(H_{i,j}(\mathbf{x}^*))=\left(\left.\frac{\partial^2 V}
{\partial x_i\partial x_j}\right\vert_{\mathbf{x}^*}\right)$
is the Hessian matrix of the $V(\mathbf{q})$ potential,
evaluated for the respective
$\mathbf{q}^*=(\mathbf{x}^*,\mathbf{y}^*)$ fixpoint.
To determine the eigenvalues of the Jacobian
one has to solve the equation:
\begin{equation}
\det(J-\lambda I_d) =
\begin{vmatrix}
- \lambda I_d & I_d \\
- H_d & (a-\lambda)I_d
\end{vmatrix}=
\det(-\lambda(a-\lambda)I_d + H_d)=0,
\end{equation}
where we used the properties of square
block matrices. By introducing
$\gamma=\lambda(a-\lambda)$ on finds
with
\begin{equation}
\det(J-\lambda I_d) = \det(H_d -\gamma I_d)
= \prod_{i=1}^d(\gamma-\gamma_i)=0
\end{equation}
that the $2d$ eigenvalues $\lambda$ of the Jacobian can be
expressed in terms of the $d$ eigenvalues
$\gamma_i$ of the Hessian matrix and hence
\begin{equation}
\lambda_i^{\pm} = \frac{1}{2}\left(a\pm\sqrt{a^2-4\gamma_i}\right).
\end{equation}
Consequently, at the local minima of the potential,
i.e.\ when $\gamma_i>0$, a Hopf-bifurcation occurs,
with $\lambda_i^{\pm}=\pm i\sqrt{\gamma_i}$,
when the friction term $a=f(V)$ changes sign.
For general potential functions this might lead to
the birth of higher dimensional tori
or several branches of limit cycle bifurcations.
\subsection*{Symmetries of the 4-dimensional system}
\label{sect:4D_2D}
The results shown in
Figs.~\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_orbits},
\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_bifurcations} and
\ref{fig:double_2D_potential_well_transient_chaos}
are for a 4-dimensional prototype systems
(\ref{eq:prototype_system}) with a linear friction
force $f_1(V)$, as defined in (\ref{eq:friction_functions}),
and a mechanical potential $V(\mathbf{x})$ given by
(\ref{eq:V_x_1_2}). The minima $V(\mathbf{x}_{1,2})=0$
of the potential, viz.\
$\mathbf{x_1} = (+1,-1)$ and
$\mathbf{x_2} = (-1,+1)$ are connected by the symmetry
operations
\begin{equation}
\sigma_{1,2}=
\begin{pmatrix}
0 & \pm1 & 0 & 0\\
\pm1 & 0 & 0 & 0\\
0 & 0 & 1 & 0\\
0 & 0 & 0 & 1
\end{pmatrix},\qquad\quad
\sigma_{3,4}=
\begin{pmatrix}
0 & \pm1 & 0 & 0\\
\pm1 & 0 & 0 & 0\\
0 & 0 & 0 & \pm1\\
0 & 0 & \pm1 & 0
\end{pmatrix}
\label{eq:sigma}
\end{equation}
of the system. Thus, if $(x_1,x_2,y_1,y_2)$ is a
solutions, then
\begin{equation}
\begin{pmatrix}
x_1^\prime \\ x_2^\prime \\ y_1^\prime \\ y_2^\prime
\end{pmatrix} = \sigma_{1,2}
\begin{pmatrix}
x_1 \\ x_2 \\ y_1 \\ y_2
\end{pmatrix},\qquad\quad
\begin{pmatrix}
x_1^{\prime\prime}\\ x_2^{\prime\prime} \\
y_1^{\prime\prime} \\ y_2^{\prime\prime}
\end{pmatrix} = \sigma_{3,4}
\begin{pmatrix}
x_1 \\ x_2 \\ y_1 \\ y_2
\end{pmatrix}
\end{equation}
are also solutions.
\begin{figure}[t!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.43\textwidth]{./Figure-7-Gros}
\caption{The logarithmic growth rate
$\langle\ln(\Delta\mathbf{r})\rangle$ averaged for $100$
random initial conditions as a function of time for
three qualitatively different types of dynamics: spiraling
into a fixpoint ($\mu_1=-0.05$), limit cycle oscillations
($\mu_1=0.2$) and chaotic behavior ($\mu_1=0.3$).
Brown lines correspond to the best linear regression.
In the first and last case, the line is fitted
only to the first part of the trajectory.
The dashed line indicates that the distance of the point
pairs has reached the maximal accuracy of the integrator.
}
\label{fig:dpw17_delta_r-time_example}
\end{figure}
\subsection*{Lyapunov exponent and contraction rate}
\label{subsect:methods-Lyapunov_exponent_contraction_rate}
The local Lyapunov exponent $\lambda$ is determined from
the growth rate of the distance
$\Delta\mathbf{r}(t)=\Delta\mathbf{r}_0e^{\lambda t}$,
between point pairs with an initial displacement, which
we have taken to be $\Delta\mathbf{r}_0=10^{-8}$.
Measuring the Lyapunov exponent was started after a
transient of $t_{tr}=1.5\cdot10^4$. Considering
100 random initial conditions the
average Lyapunov exponent $\bar\lambda$ is
then given by the slope of the initial linear
part of the $\langle\ln(\Delta\mathbf{r})\rangle$ curve
(as given by the brown lines in
Fig.~\ref{fig:dpw17_delta_r-time_example}).
The contraction rate $\sigma$, is defined as the average
of local contraction rates along a set of
trajectories $\Gamma$ for different initial conditions:
\begin{equation}
\sigma\ =\ \left\langle\frac{1}{L}
\int_{\Gamma} \nabla\cdot\mathbf{f}\, ds
\right\rangle,
\label{eq:sigma_def}
\end{equation}
where $L=\int_{\Gamma}ds$ is the length of the trajectory and
$\mathbf{f}$ is the flow, viz the right-hand side of the
evolution equations (\ref{eq:prototype_system}).
$\sigma$ is negative for dissipative systems,
in which the phase space contracts
\cite{gros2013complex,chow1994normal}.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 1,658 |
Q: Solution to ODE $D_t f(t)=\alpha c(t) f(t)$ subject to $f(0)=f(1)$? I'm trying to solve the ordinary differential equation $$\left\{\begin{array}{c}D_t f(t)= \alpha c(t) f(t)\\ f(0)=f(1)\end{array}\right.$$ where $\alpha$ is a scalar. I guess the solution should be $$f(t)=e^{\alpha \int_0^t c(s)\ ds}+K\quad \quad (1)$$ but it seems I can't get $f(0)=f(1)$. Has the problem no solution or I'm going wrong when I suppose the solution must have the form $(1)$?
A: Let's do some intuition first: is $f(t)=0$ a solution? Yes, it is. But the solution you have written down as general does not include this. Next, if $f(t)$ is a solution, so is $Af(t)$, $t$ a constant. Therefore we expect $f(t)$ to have an overall arbitrary constant.
Rearranging the equation, we have
$$ f'(t)-\alpha c(t) f(t)=0 $$
An integrating factor is, as you suggest, $\exp{\left(-\alpha\int_0^t c(s)\, ds\right)}$, and so the solution is
$$ f(t) = A\exp{\left(-\alpha\int_0^t c(s)\, ds\right)}. $$
But then $f(0)=f(1)$, so
$$ A\left( \exp{\left(-\alpha\int_0^1 c(s)\, ds\right)}-1 \right) = 0, $$
so either $A=0$, or $\exp{\left(-\alpha\int_0^1 c(s)\, ds\right)}=1$, which occurs if and only if
$$ \alpha\int_0^1 c(s)\, ds =2k\pi i $$
for some integer $k$. In particular, if $c$ and $\alpha$ are real, then we must have $\int_0^1 c = 0$.
This is easy to believe: check the case $c(t)=1$. Then the solution is $f(t)=Ae^{\alpha t}$.
A: You should be careful while exponentiating, the constant is multiplicative,
$$
f(t)=K·e^{\alpha \int_0^t c(s)\ ds}
$$
Evaluating at the boundary points gives
$$
f(0)=K·e^{\alpha \int_0^0 c(s)\ ds}=K
$$
and
$$
f(1)=f(0)·e^{\alpha \int_0^1 c(s)\ ds}
$$
The condition is only satisfiable if
$$
\alpha \int_0^1 c(s)\ ds=0
$$
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,732 |
Села:
Хоробрів — Львівська область, Червоноградський район
Хоробрів — Тернопільська область, Тернопільський район, колишній (до 2020 року) Козівський район | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 3,078 |
Palo Santo – Endangered
Palo Santo Trees are found only in South America and nowhere else on the planet. The wood is known for it's sweet scent and smoke that is believed to be medicinal and therapeutic. Palo Santo is Spanish for "Holy Wood". It has been used by Shamans for centuries in prayer and healing ceremonies. It's smoke…
Spring Equinox: 1 degree Aries – March 20-23 Ostara is the first day of Spring. It marks the halfway point between Yule and Litha, when the hours of light and dark are equal. It is sacred to the Goddess Oestre who is the Goddess of spring, dawn, rebirth and fertility. Her symbols are the rabbit…
Ritual Preparation
Just about everyone has their own pre-ritual, ritual. But there are set things that really should be adhered to prior to any ritual, regardless of how you do them. First and foremost, you should not drink alcohol or do drugs a minimum of 12 hours prior to any ritual. It is not merely a matter…
The word Element means, literally, "basic part". The idea of the universe being composed of several elements dates back to the Sumerian civilization at least. Many ancient cultural societies used the elements in their religious rites and magickal work. Since modern magick draws so heavily from the ancient, the elements are foundations of such magicks…
June 20, 2018 May 4, 2019
History 5 – Margaret Murray
Margaret Murray was a prominent British Folklorist, Egyptologist and Anthropologist, born in India in 1863. During her lifetime she published approximately 100 books and articles. Margaret Murray began studies at University College London in 1894 as a student of linguistics and anthropology under William Flinders Petrie. In 1899 she was appointed Junior College Lecturer, and…
The Rose of Jericho
The Rose of Jericho is a much sought after plant for it's properties of resurrection. It can seemingly die, lay dormant for up to fifty years, and miraculously come back to life with nothing more than a bit of water. This plant is also known as the Dinosaur Plant, Resurrection Plant and Flower of Saint…
History 4 – Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley was an Occultist, and Ceremonialist Magician who founded the philosophy of *Thelema and in doing so, considered himself a prophet. Aleister Crowley was born into a wealthy English family and despite being raised a devout and conservative Christian he discovered occultism in the late 1890's . His father spent his time as a…
History 3 – Charles Godfrey Leland
Charles Leland was born on August 15th, 1824 to Charles Leland and Charlotte Godfrey in Philadelphia. He claimed that shortly after his birth his nurse performed a ritual on him using a bible, a knife and key among other items to ensure a long and prosperous life. After graduating from Princeton where he studied languages…
History 2 – The Inquisition
The Inquisition Era begins in the 8th century when the Church rules Witchcraft as heresy. By the early 1200's the Inquisition is established and the label Witchcraft is born. By the late 1400's the Witch Trials have begun in Europe and Witchcraft is officially illegal. The 1st Witchcraft act of England was established in 1542…
History 1 – An Introduction
Wicca and Paganism in general have many preconceptions and misconceptions regarding its actual history. In this series we will weed out what is and is not the true History of the Modern Wiccan Movement. Just how much of our modern practices and beliefs are related to ancient cultures? Which ones? What were the inquisition and… | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 5,484 |
Everybody recognizes just what Facebook is, and also it is difficult to locate the individual which does not have the account on this social media network. Facebook has several good sides-- we could get in touch with the people we enjoy regardless of just how much they live, we could share statuses, pictures as well as video clips, we could send messages, and so forth. There are some negative sides as well. Individuals do invest excessive time on the social network sites instead of going out even more as well as talking with each other, which is why some users decided to remove their social media accounts. If you do not wish to use Facebook any longer, this social media is giving you lots of time to thoroughly consider this, because when you delete the profile, there is no reversing. Every little thing will certainly be lost-- messages, images, friends, and more. And also, erasing your account is not something that you can do with a few clicks. Allow's see How To Permanently Delete Facebook Account Immediately.
If you intend to delete your Facebook account, you probably discovered that you can locate this alternative that easy.
The option you can find is to deactivate your account, as well as if you do this, your profile will not show up to your Facebook friends as well as other users of this social network. If you change your mind and want to utilize Facebook once more, all you have to do is visit. Your messages, images, friends - everything will exist.
Once again, if you delete the account, you will not have the ability to reactivate it and also the content you included will certainly be erased. That is why Facebook advises the users to download the duplicate of their info. To do that, click the account menu (triangle icon situated at the upper-right edge), click Settings and after that click "download a copy of your Facebook data", complied with by "Start my archive".
As you could see, when the web page opens, the message will show up to remind you that you will not have the ability to reactivate your account. If you make sure that you intend to do this, click "Delete my account" to send a request for removal. Facebook will not remove your account right away, and you will certainly have couple of a lot more days to transform your mind. If you do not want the account to be removed, terminate the request. When the account is officially removed, you will not have the ability to reactivate it, and the only choice will be to develop a new account. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 9,225 |
Aligia manitou är en insektsart som beskrevs av Ball 1901. Aligia manitou ingår i släktet Aligia och familjen dvärgstritar. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.
Källor
Dvärgstritar
manitou | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 3,281 |
Backlash Grows After Civil Rights Institute Reneges on Angela Davis Honor
Photo: Mike Coppola (Getty Images)
The fallout behind one of the most respected civil rights museums' snub of freedom fighter Angela Davis continued this week with an exodus of board members and widespread condemnation from activists, scholars, and donors around the world.
The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute rescinded its decision to honor Angela Davis with the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award, canceling the annual gala for the institute's highest honor bestowed upon activists from Harry Belafonte to Congressman John Lewis. In a statement, the museum's board said that Davis didn't "meet all of the criteria on which the award is based." Sources, including Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin, who also sits on the museum's board of directors, cited "protests from our local Jewish community and some of its allies" as the reason for the decision.
Civil Rights Institute Cancels Gala Honoring Angela Davis After Outcry From Jewish Community
One of the nation's most prominent civil rights museums has reneged on its plans to celebrate one…
The museum's backtrack reportedly revolves around Davis' support of the Boycott Divest and Sanctioning movement. Davis has been a vocal supporter of the BDS movement that urges individuals, companies, and organizations to boycott Israel because of the country's repeated documented human rights violations of the Palestinian people. To be clear, Davis has not been accused of any anti-Semitic statements or actions. The BCRI reneged like a cheating spades player and rescinded an award honoring people who fight for human rights simply because Davis chose to fight for human rights.
In a statement on Facebook, Davis said she was "stunned" to hear the gala was cancelled, noting that it was "certain to be the highlight of my year, especially since I knew Rev. Shuttlesworth personally and attended school with his daughter, Patricia, and because my mother, Sallye B. Davis, worked tirelessly for the BCRI during its early years."
"The rescinding of this invitation was thus not primarily an attack against me but rather against the spirit of the indivisibility of justice," said Davis, who was born and raised in Birmingham before going on to become one of the most outspoken and radical fighters for freedom. In her statement, Davis explained that her support for Palestine has nothing to do with a prejudice against the Jewish people, writing:
I support Palestinian political prisoners just as I support current political prisoners in the Basque Country, in Catalunya, in India, and in other parts of the world. I have indeed expressed opposition to policies and practices of the state of Israel, as I express similar opposition to U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to other discriminatory U.S. policies.
Since the outcry by local activists, three members have resigned from the BCRI board of directors that snatched back the award. The outgoing moonwalkers include the institute's chairman, Mike Oatridge, the vice president of manufacturing for Honda Alabama (please don't ask how a white mechanical engineer became the chair of the leading civil rights museums because I don't know. I'm guessing it probably has something to do with money).
According to AL.com, the former board members issued a joint statement saying in part, "As members of this board, we regret the circumstances surrounding the selection process regarding the 2018 Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award and the dissension this has caused."
On Wednesday, over 350 academics signed a statement from the Jewish Voice for Peace calling on BCRI to honor its initial announcement and honor Davis. The organization's supporters said, in part:
The cancelling of this award by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is unjust, insulting and ill-conceived, especially because it is likely premised on Professor Davis' long-standing support for Palestinian human rights. The decision seems to stem from a misinformed view that to advocate for Palestinian human rights is somehow offensive to the Jewish community.
As a Jewish organization dedicated to justice, dignity and equality for all people in Palestine/Israel, we share Professor Davis' visionary commitment to the "indivisibility of justice," and believe we are all responsible for pursuing social justice for all human beings, without exception—which includes pursuing social justice for Palestinians.
Professor Davis's activist and scholarly life epitomizes the spirit and intention of this award and we call upon the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to honor Professor Davis for the totality of her work.
Another organization, Palestine Legal, noted that "Davis joins a long list of scholars and activists who have been censored, fired, de-funded, defamed, harassed and targeted with frivolous litigation because of concerted efforts by the Israeli government and anti-Palestinian organizations in the U.S. to silence debate," adding that "BCRI similarly joins a long list of institutions that have rescinded benefits or otherwise punished critics of Israel in response to pressure from the Israeli government and anti-Palestinian organizations in the U.S."
"Exactly who pressured BCRI, and what complaints they made about Davis, are still coming to light," said the group's statement. "But the pattern of censorship targeting Israel's critics is already well documented. So are attempts by Israeli government officials to divide black leaders and suppress those who draw connections between freedom struggles of black Americans and Palestinians."
A Birmingham coalition who opposed the Davis snub has organized an alternative event to honor the native daughter. AL.com reports that the group of community leaders, religious leaders and activists, which includes Mayor Randall Woodfin, announced that the event will take place on Feb. 16. The event will not be ticketed and will feature a conversation with Angela Davis.
The location has not been announced but it will probably not take place at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
They'd probably cancel at the last minute, anyway.
The Intersectional Feminist part dos
Being anti-Israel's treatment of Palestinians =/= anti-Semitism. FFS, BCRI. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 6,489 |
Q: How to select only some fields from entity with ManyToMany related table I have two entities: BlogPost and Category. BlogPost entity has ManyToMany unidirectional relation with entity Category. I wrote a function in BlogPost repository to get only some fields of BlogPost entity and all fields of Category entity. This is it:
private function getLitePosts(){
$q = $this->_em->createQuery(
'select p.id as pid, p.updateDate, p.postTitle, c from ESGISGabonPostBundle:CorporatePost p left join p.categories c'
);
return $q->getResult();
}
When it runs I got error:
"message": "[Semantical Error] line 0, col -1 near 'select p.id,': Error: Cannot select entity through identification variables without choosing at least one root entity alias."
I don't know how to deal with it. I excepted to get something like this (represented in json):
[
{
"pid": 1,
"updateDate": 2015-09-26T00:00:00+0100,
"postTitle": "This is a test",
"categories": [
{
"id": 1,
"title": "Uncathegorized"
}
]
},
{
"pid": 1,
"updateDate": 2015-09-26T00:00:00+0100,
"postTitle": "This is a test 2",
"categories": [
{
"id": 1,
"title": "Uncathegorized"
}
]
}
]
May somebody help me ?
A: I'd recommend using query builder for this simple operation.
$query = $this->createQueryBuilder('p')
->select('p.id as pid, p.updateDate, p.postTitle, c')
->leftJoin('p.categories', 'c')
->getQuery();
return $query->getResult();
More inspiration can be found in this answer
A: I finally found a solution:
$query = $this->createQueryBuilder('p')
->select('partial p.{id, updateDate, postTitle}')
->leftJoin('p.categories', 'c')
->addSelect('partial c.{id}')
->getQuery();
return $query->getArrayResult();
It works like I want. Thank you Tomáš Votruba for your answer.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 3,889 |
Q: Vector bundles trivial on complement of a hypersurface section Assume we have a smooth projective variety $X$ over a field (finite field if matters). Consider a smooth hypersurface section $H$ of $X$. Let $Spec(A)=U=X \setminus H$ be an affine variety. I want to know whether there are any nice description of vector bundles on $X$ such that they are trivial on $U$ and $H$? My suspicion was that they are all direct sums of line bundles of the form $O(nH)$ is that correct?
Edit: Let's assume that we are talking about rank $m$ vector bundles that are subsheaves of the constant sheaf given by the vector space $F(X)^{\oplus m}$ which $F(X)$ is the function field or equivalently field of fractions of $A$. Does that change anything?
A: In many cases, $\mathcal{O}_X(n \cdot H)$ itself will not be trivial on both $H$ and $U$, because it will be nontrivial on $H$. For example, if $H \subset \mathbb{P}^n$ is a degree $d$ hypersurface, then $ \mathcal{O}_{\mathbb{P}^n}(H) \simeq \mathcal{O}_{\mathbb{P}^n}(d)$ and so $\mathcal{O}_{\mathbb{P}^n}(H)|_H \simeq \mathcal{O}_H(d)$ which is non-trivial as long as $n> 1$, for instance because it is ample.
EDIT: I realize what this shows is: not all sums of line bundles of the form $\cal{O}_X(n \cdot H)$ are trivial on both $U$ and $H$. All the same it seemed relevant.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 5,953 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.emathhelp.net\/cubic-inches-to-liters\/","text":"# Cubic inches to liters\n\nThis free conversion calculator will convert cubic inches to liters, i.e. in^3 to l, cu in to l. Correct conversion between different measurement scales.\n\nConvert\n\nThe formula is $V_{\\text{l}} = \\frac{2048383}{125000000} V_{in^3}$, where $V_{in^3} = 15$.\n\nTherefore, $V_{\\text{l}} = \\frac{6145149}{25000000}$.\n\nAnswer: $15 in^{3} = \\frac{6145149}{25000000} \\text{l} = 0.24580596 \\text{l}$.","date":"2021-09-18 05:15:02","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.936566174030304, \"perplexity\": 8894.97303537013}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": false, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-39\/segments\/1631780056297.61\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210918032926-20210918062926-00535.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
import React, { PropTypes } from 'react';
import './../styles/styles.scss';
import Movie from './../components/Movie';
export default class MovieList extends React.Component {
constructor(props) {
super(props);
}
render() {
const movieNodes = this.props.data.map((movie)=> {
let genres = [];
movie.genre_ids.forEach((elem) => {
let genre = this.props.genre.filter((item)=> {
return item.id === elem;
});
genres = [...genres, ...genre]; //concatinating both arrays...
});
return (
<Movie movie={movie} key={movie.id} genres={genres}>
{movie.title}
</Movie>
);
});
return (
<div ref="movieList" className="movieList">
<h4>{this.props.pageName || 'All Movies'}</h4>
{movieNodes}
</div>
);
}
}
MovieList.propTypes = {
pageName: PropTypes.string,
genre: PropTypes.array.isRequired,
data: PropTypes.array.isRequired
};
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 4,004 |
Q: PCA and FA example - calculation of communalities I'm trying to understand how Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis work by
implementing examples. Although I'm mainly using Python and Numpy here, this isn't Python-specific, as I'd like to know how to get the correct result generally speaking.
There is an example in chapter 16 of Statistics in a Nutshell, but
I can't understand how some of the resulting values are obtained. I'm not sure whether (a) there's something wrong with my implementation/calculations or (b) I'm misunderstanding the "jump" from PCA to FA.
(The examples are on page 300-303. It wouldn't be appropriate to reproduce material from the book, but I hope it's reasonable to quote its short numerical example.)
From the example table (psychometric test results) in the data matrix below:
import numpy as np
# (Table 16-1 in the book)
# Columns are:
# Reading, Music, Arith., Verbal, Sports, Spelling, Geometry
data = np.array(
[[ 8, 9, 6, 8, 5, 9, 10],
[ 5, 6, 5, 5, 6, 5, 5],
[ 2, 3, 2, 6, 8, 6, 4],
[ 8, 9, 10, 9, 8, 10, 6],
[ 10, 7, 1, 10, 5, 10, 2],
[ 9, 8, 4, 9, 1, 7, 2],
[ 3, 9, 10, 2, 6, 4, 9],
[ 8, 10, 3, 8, 5, 7, 2],
[ 10, 9, 3, 10, 6, 10, 3],
[ 7, 10, 1, 9, 6, 10, 2]])
# Transposing for np.corrcoef
data = data.T
corrmat = np.corrcoef(data)
The values calculated this way using NumPy for the correlation matrix match those in the book (Table 16-2 for those who have it).
Here is the same input data for R:
data <- matrix(c(8, 9, 6, 8, 5, 9, 10, 5, 6, 5, 5, 6, 5, 5, 2, 3, 2, 6, 8, 6, 4, 8, 9, 10, 9, 8, 10, 6, 10, 7, 1, 10, 5, 10, 2, 9, 8, 4, 9, 1, 7, 2, 3, 9, 10, 2, 6, 4, 9, 8, 10, 3, 8, 5, 7, 2, 10, 9, 3, 10, 6, 10, 3, 7, 10, 1, 9, 6, 10, 2), ncol=7, byrow=T)
pc = prcomp(data, scale. = T)
NumPy's output for the correlation matrix is this:
[[ 1. , 0.53484056, -0.25290194, 0.86021546, -0.46870501,
0.76225482, -0.38632342],
[ 0.53484056, 1. , 0.24875809, 0.26248971, -0.26308503,
0.38020761, 0.06879192],
[-0.25290194, 0.24875809, 1. , -0.50102461, 0.20615027,
-0.30668865, 0.75803231],
[ 0.86021546, 0.26248971, -0.50102461, 1. , -0.23649405,
0.89522479, -0.56880086],
[-0.46870501, -0.26308503, 0.20615027, -0.23649405, 1. ,
0.05436758, 0.26604241],
[ 0.76225482, 0.38020761, -0.30668865, 0.89522479, 0.05436758,
1. , -0.29078439],
[-0.38632342, 0.06879192, 0.75803231, -0.56880086, 0.26604241,
-0.29078439, 1. ]]
I'm using the following to perform the PCA. The data matrix is turned into the pca_output matrix.
The cummulative % also match the book's example (Table 16-4).
eigenvalues, eigenvectors = np.linalg.eig(corrmat)
# Order the eigenvalues by decreasing value
# (and then order eigenvectors).
evals_order = np.argsort(-eigenvalues)
eigenvalues = eigenvalues[evals_order]
eigenvectors = eigenvectors[:, evals_order]
# pca_output: columns are the principal
# components, after transposition (used here)
pca_output = np.dot(eigenvectors.T, data).T
cummulative_perc_variance = 100 * np.array(
[ eigenvalues[:i].sum()/eigenvalues.sum() for i in range(1, eigenvalues.shape[0] + 1)])
The first 3 eigenvectors I get are:
[[-0.48310951, -0.2554222 , -0.08049741],
[-0.20665755, -0.60274754, -0.16463817],
[ 0.31165047, -0.56586657, 0.02618752],
[-0.5112334 , -0.00690029, 0.19728832],
[ 0.21569808, 0.04569528, 0.83434948],
[-0.43878073, -0.18261299, 0.4643702 ],
[ 0.35546879, -0.46450701, 0.12258562]]
I get the same results using R's prcomp:
> pc
Standard deviations:
[1] 1.8676341 1.2850439 1.0568965 0.6517665 0.4837756 0.2582021 0.1344177
Rotation:
PC1 PC2 PC3 PC4 PC5 PC6 PC7
[1,] -0.4831095 0.255422196 -0.08049741 0.2324959 -0.1897195 0.76737470 -0.12638483
[2,] -0.2066575 0.602747536 -0.16463817 -0.6995409 0.2296628 -0.05498277 0.14750200
[3,] 0.3116505 0.565866565 0.02618752 0.1601325 -0.7081318 -0.22419271 -0.06802832
[4,] -0.5112334 0.006900293 0.19728832 0.2433956 -0.1357962 -0.28997811 0.73341720
[5,] 0.2156981 -0.045695275 0.83434948 -0.3293147 -0.1060965 0.33662557 0.14908327
[6,] -0.4387807 0.182612988 0.46437020 0.1413347 0.1812280 -0.38481239 -0.59798379
[7,] 0.3554688 0.464507012 0.12258562 0.4932350 0.5892964 0.11120226 0.19982732
The book then produces this table (Table 16-3: Communalities) and says: "The first step after computing PCA is to examine what proportion of variance is accounted for by the factor structure.
This is done by examining the communalities [...]."
$$
\begin{array}{r|r|r}
& \mbox{Initial} & \mbox{Extraction} \\
\hline
\mbox{Reading} & 1.0 & 0.929 \\
\mbox{Music} &1.0 & 0.779 \\
\mbox{Arith.} &1.0 & 0.868 \\
\mbox{Verbal} &1.0 & 0.955 \\
\mbox{Sports} &1.0 & 0.943 \\
\mbox{Spelling} &1.0 & 0.967 \\
\mbox{Geometry} &1.0 & 0.814 \\
\end{array}
$$
It's not clear to me where these extracted communalities values come from.
My understanding is that they are the sum of the squares of the loadings in a given row of the eigenvector matrix (over the first p columns where p is the number of selected components).
According to the eigenvalues I get above, this would be $(-0.483)^2 + (-0.255)^2 + (-0.080)^2 = 0.305$ for "Reading" (first row) and 3 Components, and not $0.929$ (as in the table in the book).
The book shows a table (Table 16-7) called "unrotated component matrix", as follows:
$$
\begin{array}{r|r|r}
& Comp 1 & Comp 2 & Comp 3 \\
\hline
\mbox{Reading} & 0.902 & 0.328 & -0.085 \\
\mbox{Music} & 0.386 & ... & ... \\
\mbox{Arith.} & -0.582 & ... & ... \\
\mbox{Verbal} & 0.955 & ... & ... \\
\mbox{Sports} & -0.403 & ... & ... \\
\mbox{Spelling} & 0.819 & ... & ... \\
\mbox{Geometry} & -0.664 & ... & ... \\
\end{array}
$$
This table does explain the communalities values ($(0.902)^2 + (0.328)^2 + (-0.085)^2 = 0.929$).
My understanding was that the unrotated component matrix when doing FA was the same as the matrix of eigenvectors obtained for the PCA.
From these examples, this doesn't seem to be the case.
How should the "unrotated component matrix" be obtained and how does it differ from the PCA eigenvectors?
A: Component/factor matrix is the matrix of component/factor loadings. "Loading" pertains to it, not to eigenvector matrix. That matrix is obtained from eigenvector matrix by normalizing the columns of the latter: column sum-of-squares (which are all 1 there) are brought to corresponding eigenvalues. $a_{ij}=\sqrt{\lambda_j}u_{ij}$, where $a_{ij}$ is the loading and $u_{ij}$ is the element of eigenvector matrix and $\lambda_j$ is the eigenvalue.
A: Note that there a several ways to do a factor analysis which differ in the way you extract the factors: "Principal Factors", "Principal Component Factors", "Iterated Factors", "Maximum-Likelihood" are, for instance, implemented in Stata.
In Principal Factors, for example, you start by calculating the R² for each variable on all other variables and use them as a lower bound of communality. They are saved in an extra matrix which you subtract from the original correlation matrix. Then you continue by calculating a SVD on this reduced data matrix.
PCA is simply a SVD on the original data's correlation matrix.
Therefore you can see differences. Rotation only refers to the rotation after the extraction.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 742 |
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Warner Bros. Animation
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Animation division of Warner Bros. Television Group
Warner Bros. Animation, Inc.
Warner Bros. Cartoons (1933-1969)
1980; 40 years ago (1980)[1]
Hal Geer
411 N. Hollywood Way,
Sam Register (President, Warner Bros. Animation and Warner Digital Series)
www.warnerbros.com/studio/divisions/television/warner-bros-animation
Warner Bros. Animation is the animation division of Warner Bros. Television. The studio is closely associated with the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies characters, among others. The studio is the successor to Warner Bros. Cartoons, the studio which produced Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon shorts from 1933 to 1963, and from 1967 to 1969. Warner reestablished its animation division in 1980 to produce Looney Tunes-related works.[1]
In recent years, Warner Bros. Animation has focused primarily on producing television and direct-to-video animation featuring characters created by other properties owned by Warner Bros., including DC Comics, the original Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio (through Turner Entertainment Co.) and Hanna-Barbera Productions.
1970-1986: Restarting the studio
The original Warner Bros. Cartoons studio, as well as all of Warner Bros.' short subject production divisions, closed in 1969 due to the rising costs and declining returns of short subject production. Outside animation companies were hired to produce new Looney Tunes-related animation for TV specials and commercials at irregular intervals. In 1976, Warner Bros. Cartoon alumnus Chuck Jones began producing a series of Looney Tunes specials at his Chuck Jones Productions animation studio, the first of which was Carnival of the Animals. These specials, and a 1975 Looney Tunes retrospective feature film titled Bugs Bunny: Superstar (distributed by United Artists, the previous owner of the pre-1950 Warner Bros. library), led Jones to produce The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie for Warner Bros. in 1979. This film blended classic Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies shorts with newly produced wraparounds of Bugs Bunny introducing each cartoon. Warner Bros. responded to the success of this film by reestablishing its own cartoon studio.
Warner Bros. Animation opened its doors in 1980 to produce compilation films and television specials starring the Looney Tunes characters. The studio's initial head was Hal Geer, who had been the original studio's sound effects editor during its final days, and he was soon joined by Friz Freleng, who left DePatie-Freleng (which became Marvel Productions after being sold to Marvel Comics), and returned to Warner as executive producer. The new wraparounds for The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie (1981), Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales (1982) and Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island (1983) featured footage by a new Warner Bros. Animation staff, composed mainly of veterans from the golden age of WB cartoons, including writers John Dunn and Dave Detiege.
By 1986, Freleng had departed, and Hal Geer also stepped down the following year. Geer was briefly replaced by Steven S. Greene, who in turn was replaced by Freleng's former secretary Kathleen Helppie-Shipley, who would spearhead a major revival of the Looney Tunes brand in the years that followed. The studio continued production on special projects starring the Looney Tunes characters, sporadically producing new Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies shorts for theaters such as The Duxorcist (1987), Night of the Living Duck (1988), Box-Office Bunny (1990), and Carrotblanca (1995). Many of these shorts, as well as the new footage in the compilation film Daffy Duck's Quackbusters (which includes The Duxorcist), were directed by Greg Ford and Terry Lennon, as well as Darrell Van Citters.
1986-1998: Moving into television animation
Beginning in 1986, Warner Bros. moved into regular television animation production. Warners' television division was established by WB Animation President Jean MacCurdy, who brought in producer Tom Ruegger and much of his staff from Hanna-Barbera Productions' A Pup Named Scooby-Doo series (1988-1991). A studio for the television unit was set up in the office tower of the Imperial Bank Building adjacent to the Sherman Oaks Galleria northwest of Los Angeles. Darrell Van Citters, who used to work at Disney, would work on the newer Bugs Bunny shorts, before leaving to form Renegade Animation in 1992. The first Warner Bros. original animated TV series Tiny Toon Adventures (1990-1995) was produced in conjunction with Amblin Entertainment, and featured young cartoon characters based upon specific Looney Tunes stars, and was a success. Later Amblin/Warner Bros. television shows, including Animaniacs (1993-1998), its spin-off Pinky and the Brain (1995-1998), and Freakazoid! (1995-1997) followed in continuing the Looney Tunes tradition of cartoon humor.
Warner Bros. Animation also began developing shows based upon comic book characters owned by sister company DC Comics. These programs, including Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995), Superman: The Animated Series (1996-2000), The New Batman Adventures (1997-1999), Batman Beyond (1999-2001), and Justice League/Justice League Unlimited (2001-2006) proved popular among both children and adults. These shows were part of the DC animated universe. A Batman spin-off feature, Mask of the Phantasm, was produced in 1993 and bumped up to theatrical release. The film was near universally-well received by critics but performed poorly at the box-office, though it eventually became a commercial success through its subsequent home video releases.
1991-2004: Warner Bros. Feature Animation
In 1991, Warner Bros. distributed its first animated film, Rover Dangerfield. Its title character is a dog whose look and mannerisms are inspired by his voice actor Rodney Dangerfield. The film received mixed reviews and under-performed at the box office due to lack of promotion.[] Three years later, Warner distributed Don Bluth's Thumbelina, which also received mixed reviews from critics and under-performed at the box office.
That same year, Warner Bros., as well as several other Hollywood studios, moved into feature animation following the success of Walt Disney Feature Animation's The Lion King. Max Howard, a Disney alumnus, was brought in to head the new division, which was set up in Sherman Oaks near the television studio in nearby Glendale.[2] Turner Feature Animation, later merged and named Warner Bros. Feature Animation, like all of the in-house feature animation studios, proved an unsuccessful venture, as six of the seven films, under-performed during its original theatrical releases (due to lack of promotion).[]
The first of Warners' animated features was Space Jam (1996), a live-action/animated hybrid which starred NBA star Michael Jordan opposite Bugs Bunny (Jordan had previously appeared with the Looney Tunes in a number of Nike commercials). It was directed by Joe Pytka (live-action) and Bruce W. Smith and Tony Cervone (animation). Space Jam received mixed to negative reviews from critics but proved to be a success at the box office. Animation production for Space Jam was primarily done at the new Sherman Oaks studio, although much of the work was outsourced to animation studios around the world.
Before the success of Space Jam, a Turner Entertainment-run studio that spun off from Hanna-Barbera were already producing animated features following the success of the Disney features. The first was The Pagemaster, a fantasy adventure featuring the performances of Macaulay Culkin and Christopher Lloyd with live-action segments serving as bookends for the film's story. Released by 20th Century Fox, the film under-performed and received negative reviews from critics during its holiday release of 1994. After the merger with Turner and Warner Bros' parent Time Warner in 1996, Turner Feature Animation completed its second and last feature, Cats Don't Dance (1997), which was met with warm critical and audience reception but under-performed due to little marketing and fanfare.[] By the time of the film's release, however, Turner Feature Animation had merged with Warner Feature Animation and transferred a majority of its staff from said studio.
The following year, its next film, Quest for Camelot (1998), underwent production difficulties and received negative reviews from critics, however, its soundtrack (such as one of the songs, "The Prayer") received some accolades.
The third animated feature from Warner Feature Animation, Brad Bird's The Iron Giant (1999), received a positive reception from critics and audiences. However, the studio decided to rush its release to the end of the summer with a rushed marketing push.[]
The studio's next film, Osmosis Jones (2001), was another animated/live-action mix that suffered through another troubled production. This time, the animation segments, directed by Tom Sito and Piet Kroon, were completed long before the live-action segments were filmed, eventually directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly and starring Bill Murray. The resulting film received mixed reviews and underperformed, although it was successful on home video for Warner's Television Animation department to produce a related Saturday morning cartoon, Ozzy & Drix (2002-2004) for its WB broadcast network.
Following the releases of The Iron Giant and Osmosis Jones, the feature animation staff was scaled back, and the entire animation staff - feature and television - were moved to the larger Sherman Oaks facility.
Looney Tunes: Back in Action was released in 2003. It was intended to be the starting point for a reestablishment of the classic cartoons brands, including a planned series of new Looney Tunes theatrical shorts, produced by Back in Action writer and producer Larry Doyle.[] After Back in Action, directed by Joe Dante (live-action) and Eric Goldberg (animation), received mixed reviews from critics and under-performed at the box office, production was shut down on the new shorts. However, several TV series based upon the Looney Tunes property - Baby Looney Tunes (2002-2005), Loonatics Unleashed (2005-2007), The Looney Tunes Show (2011-2014) and Wabbit (2015-present) - have assumed the place of the original shorts on television.
1996-present: Acquisitions and Warner Bros. Animation today
Warners' parent company Time Warner merged with Turner Broadcasting System in 1996, not only regaining the rights to the previously sold Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts but also taking on two more animation studios: Turner Feature Animation and Hanna-Barbera Productions. Turner Feature was immediately folded into Warner Bros. Feature Animation, while Hanna-Barbera merged with Warner Bros. Animation itself. Until 1998, Hanna-Barbera operated on its original lot at 3400 Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood, California, one of the last "big name" studios with a Hollywood zip code. Studio operations, archives, and its extensive animation art collection were then moved northwest to Sherman Oaks. Hanna-Barbera occupied space in the office tower adjacent to the Sherman Oaks Galleria along with Warner Bros. Animation.
With the death of William Hanna in 2001, Warner fully took over production of H-B related properties such as Scooby-Doo, producing a steady stream of Scooby direct-to-video films and two new series, What's New, Scooby-Doo? (2002-2006) and Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue! (2006-2008). The Turner merger also gave WB access to the pre-May 1986 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer library, which included its classic cartoon library (including such characters as Tom and Jerry (originally created by the H-B duo), Droopy, Barney Bear, Screwy Squirrel, and many more of Tex Avery's MGM characters). WBA has since co-produced a series of direct-to-video films with Turner which starred Tom and Jerry. Besides producing content for the daytime market, Warner Bros. Animation also produced Baby Blues with sister company Warner Bros. Television and 3 South with MTV Animation for primetime.
The series which Hanna-Barbera had been producing for Turner's Cartoon Network before and during the Time Warner/Turner merger were shifted to production at Cartoon Network Studios, a sister company to Warner Bros. Animation. WBA is today exclusively involved in the production of animated television programming and direct-to-video features. It produced many of the shows airing on the Kids' WB Saturday morning programming block of The CW until May 24, 2008. These programs included Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!, Krypto the Superdog, Xiaolin Showdown, The Batman, and the aforementioned Loonatics Unleashed and Tom and Jerry Tales. By 2007, the studio had downsized significantly from its size during the late 1990s. Warner Bros. downsized the studio further in June, shut down the Sherman Oaks studio, and had Warner Bros. Animation moved to the Warner Bros. Ranch in Burbank, California. In early 2008 after the demise of Kids' WB!, Warner Bros. Animation became almost dormant with only Batman: The Brave and the Bold in production at the time.
To expand the company's online content presence, Warner Bros. Animation launched the new KidsWB.com (announced as T-Works) on April 28, 2008. The website gathers its core animation properties in a single online environment that is interactive and customizable for site visitors. The Kids WB offers both originally produced content along with classic animated episodes, games, and exploration of virtual worlds. Some of the characters to be used in the project from the Warner libraries include those of Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera, pre-1986 MGM animated characters and DC Comics.
In 2009, sister network Cartoon Network announced Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated in the Fall 2009-2010 season by Warner Bros. Animation.[] Warner Bros. Animation recently announced several new projects, such as The Looney Tunes Show (formerly called Laff Riot); a reboot of ThunderCats, and several series based on DC Comics properties such as MAD, Green Lantern, and Young Justice.[]
Warner Bros. Animation is also producing DC Showcase, a series of short subjects featuring lesser-known comic book superheroes, to be released in tandem with direct-to-video films based on DC Comics properties.
On July 30, 2010, Coyote Falls, a 3D cartoon featuring Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner was released, being the first time WB Animation produced theatrically released content since The Karate Guard (the last Tom and Jerry short) in 2005, and the first time the animation studio used full CGI and stereoscopic 3D. Two more theatrical Road Runner cartoons have followed during the year (Fur of Flying and Rabid Rider). On June 8, 2011, three more shorts were announced: I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat with Sylvester, Tweety, and Granny, which was released with Happy Feet Two; Daffy's Rhapsody with Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd, which was released with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island; and Flash in the Pain starring Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. All of these 6 shorts, directed by Matthew O'Callaghan and produced by Reel FX Creative Studios are available on the official Warner Bros. Animation YouTube channel.[3]
On October 27, 2014, Warner Bros. Animation produced its first show for Adult Swim, entitled Mike Tyson Mysteries, as it follows retired boxer Mike Tyson, the ghost of the Marquess of Queensberry, Tyson's adopted daughter, and a pigeon as they solve mysteries. The style of the show borrows heavily from '70s cartoons, most notably Hanna-Barbera productions such as Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and The Funky Phantom; however it also contains adult language and concepts, in the manner of Family Guy or South Park. While each episode involves a mystery as a framing device, often these are ignored altogether as the plot takes another direction, and episodes sometimes end on cliffhangers which are never resolved.
On December 16, 2014, Warner Bros. Animation's stop-motion Christmas special Elf: Buddy's Musical Christmas debuted on NBC. Based on the 2003 New Line film Elf, and its Broadway musical adaptation Elf: The Musical, the special was animated in stop-motion in the style of Rankin/Bass Productions Christmas specials, such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town. In Buddy's Musical Christmas, Santa narrates the story of Buddy's travels to New York City to meet his father. Along the way, his unrelenting cheer transforms the lives of everyone he meets and opens his father's eyes to the magic of the holiday.
On June 11, 2018, a new series of shorts, Looney Tunes Cartoons, was announced by Warner Bros. Animation. Set for release in 2019 on both linear and streaming television platforms, its first "season" would feature 1,000 minutes (or 16 hours and 40 minutes) of new one-to-six minute cartoons featuring the brand's marquee characters, voiced by their current voice actors in "simple, gag-driven and visually vibrant stories" that are rendered by multiple artists employing "a visual style that will resonate with fans." Sam Register, president of Warner Bros. Animation, and Peter Browngardt, creator of Secret Mountain Fort Awesome and Uncle Grandpa, would serve as executive producers.[4]
2013-present: Warner Animation Group
The Warner Animation Group logo.
In January 2013, Jeff Robinov (then the head of the studio's motion picture division) founded a screenplay development department, nicknamed a "think tank" for developing theatrical animated films, known as the Warner Animation Group,[5] the successor to the dissolved hand-drawn animation department Warner Bros. Feature Animation. The group includes John Requa, Glenn Ficarra, Nicholas Stoller, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and Jared Stern.[5] Warner Bros. created the group with the hope that the box office reception of its films will be competitive with other animation studios' releases.[5] The group is reportedly somewhat similar to Pixar Animation Studios' "brain trust" in terms of how its members consult with one another and give feedback on each other's projects.[6]
On February 7, 2014, Warner Animation Group released its first film, The Lego Movie, a film animated by Animal Logic. It was met with positive reviews and proved to be a box office success.
On January 7, 2013, Warner Animation Group announced its second film, Storks, which was originally scheduled for a 2015 release but was pushed to September 23, 2016.[7] On the same day, it announced its third film, Smallfoot, which was originally scheduled for release in 2016, but was later moved to September 28, 2018.[7]
On February 7, 2014, the same day The Lego Movie was released, it was reported that Jared Stern and Michelle Morgan were hired to write The Lego Movie Sequel.[8] The sequel was announced to be released on May 26, 2017,[9] but later that year, it was reported that a spin-off film featuring Batman from The Lego Movie might take the sequel's release date, pushing the sequel to May 18, 2018.[10] Phil Lord and Christopher Miller returned to script and co-direct the sequel. Rob Schrab was set to direct the film, but was later replaced by Mike Mitchell due to "creative differences".[11] On June 2016, the release date was pushed to February 8, 2019.
Storks was animated by Sony Pictures Imageworks and was met with mixed reviews from critics.[12]
On February 10, 2017, Warner Bros. released The Lego Batman Movie, which received positive reviews from critics.[13][14]
The Lego Ninjago Movie, based on the Lego Ninjago theme of Lego toys, was released September 22, 2017. Upon release, the film was met with mixed reviews from critics.[15][16]
On January 24, 2018, it was announced that an animated Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat film was in development as part of a creative partnership with Seuss Enterprises.[17]
On May 23, 2018, it was announced that WAG will produce an animated adaptation of The Ice Dragon, a children's fantasy book by George R. R. Martin. Martin will produce and possibly write the script for the film.[18]
On July 12, 2018, it was announced that WAG will produce an animated movie about Toto from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The new film will be based on the children's book Toto: The Dog-Gone Amazing Story of The Wizard of Oz.[19]
As of August 29, 2018, Warner Bros. is developing Coyote vs. Acme, a Wile E. Coyote animated movie with Lego Batman director Chris McKay on board to produce.[20]
Upon its September 2018 release, Smallfoot received a 76% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes with mostly positive reviews from critics and has grossed over $214 million worldwide.[21][22]
In October 2018, it was announced that a live action/animated hybrid film based on Tom and Jerry is in development and that it would begin production in 2019.[23] With a release date set for December 23, 2020.[24]
On February 22, 2019, Space Jam 2, starring LeBron James, is scheduled for release on July 16, 2021.[25]
Upon its February 2019 release, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, a sequel of The Lego Movie, received a 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes with mostly positive reviews from critics and has grossed over $183.4 million worldwide.[26][27]
Animation portal
Greater Los Angeles portal
Warner Bros. Family Entertainment
Turner Entertainment Co.
List of Warner Bros. theatrical animated features
List of unproduced Warner Bros. Animation projects
List of animation studios owned by Warner Bros. Entertainment
Documentary films about Warner Bros. animation history
Bugs Bunny: Superstar
^ a b Maltin, Leonard (1980, rev. 1987). Of Mice and Magic. New York: Plume/Penguin Books. Pg. 273.
^ Kenyon, Heather (April 1998) "An Afternoon with Max Howard, President, Warner Bros. Feature Animation". Animation World Network. Retrieved June 16, 2007.
^ "Warner Bros. Animation". YouTube. Retrieved 2019.
^ Patrick Hipes (June 11, 2018). "'Looney Tunes' Getting Short-Form Revival At WB Animation". Deadline Hollywood.
^ a b c Kit, Borys (January 7, 2013). "Warner Bros. Creates Animation Film Think Tank". The Hollywood Reporter. Prometheus Global Media LLC. Retrieved 2014.
^ Shaw, Lucas (February 9, 2014). "'The Lego Movie' Snaps a Bright, Colorful Franchise Into Place for Warner Bros. Animation". The Wrap. The Wrap News Inc. Retrieved 2014.
^ a b "Warner Bros. Pictures Dives Into Animation Think Tank". ComingSoon.net. January 7, 2013. Retrieved 2013.
^ Shaw, Lucas (February 3, 2014). "Warner Bros. Already Working on Sequel to 'The Lego Movie' (Exclusive)". The Wrap. Retrieved 2014.
^ McNary, Dave (February 21, 2014). "'Lego' Sequel Set For May 26, 2017". Variety. Retrieved 2014.
^ Kit, Borys (October 10, 2014). "'Lego Batman' Spinoff Movie in the Works at Warner Bros. (Exclusive)". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2014.
^ Kit, Borys; Galuppo, Mia (February 3, 2017). "'Lego Movie' Sequel Enlists 'Trolls' Director Mike Mitchell (Exclusive)". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2017.
^ "Storks reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved 2016.
^ Kit, Borys (April 20, 2015). "'The Lego Batman Movie' Gets Release Date". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2015.
^ "The Lego Batman Movie (2017)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2017.
^ "Warner Bros Dates Lego Spinoff 'Ninjago' For Fall 2016". Deadline. May 20, 2014. Retrieved 2014.
^ "The Lego Ninjago Movie (2017)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2017.
^ "'The Cat in the Hat' Animated Movie to Kick Off Dr Seuss Franchise". January 24, 2018.
^ Kit, Borys (May 23, 2018). "George R.R. Martin's 'The Ice Dragon' to Get the Animated Movie Treatment". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2018.
^ "Wizard of Oz Animated Film to Retell the Story from Toto's Perspective". Screen Rant.com. July 15, 2018. Retrieved 2018.
^ McNary, Dave (August 29, 2018). "Wile E. Coyote Movie in the Works at Warner Bros". Variety. Retrieved 2018.
^ "Smallfoot (2018)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2019.
^ "Smallfoot (2018)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2018.
^ Prasad, R. A. Karthik (January 24, 2019). "Tom And Jerry Live-Action Movie Will Begin Production In Summer 2019, Plot Details". Pursue News. Retrieved 2019.
^ D'Alessandro, Anthony; D'Alessandro, Anthony (October 25, 2019). "'Tom & Jerry' Jumps To Christmas 2020, 'The Witches' Inches Up A Week Next Fall". Deadline. Retrieved 2019.
^ Pedersen, Erik (February 21, 2019). "Warner Bros Dates 'Space Jam 2', Shifts 'Annabelle' Sequel & 'Godzilla Vs. Kong'". Deadline. Retrieved 2019.
^ "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2019.
^ "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2019.
Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist by Chuck Jones, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-12348-2
Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin, Revised Edition 1979, Plume ISBN 978-0-452-25993-5 (Softcover) ISBN 978-0-613-64753-3 (Hardcover)
Warner Bros. Animation on IMDb
Official YouTube channel, hosting 6 shorts directed by Matthew O'Callaghan and produced by Reel FX Creative Studios.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia page available here. It is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
Amblin Entertainment Warner Bros. Animation (2003-2007)
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Warner Bros. Animation Announces New 'Looney Tunes' Project
Warner Bros. Animation (1991)
THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE Extendet TV Spot (2017) Warner Bros. Animation Movie HD-JWFchBk8ZJs
THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE TV Spot 'Justice League Party' (2017) Warner Bros Animation Movie HD-tzqMmR0dads
THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE 'I Work Alone' (2017) Warner Bros Animation Movie HD-wBzeeGsDZlw
THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE TV Spot 'Family' (2017) Warner Bros Animation Movie HD-RxSIiMuxzjg
THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE 'I'm Look Amazing' (2017) Warner Bros Animation Movie HD-kJ3Ju1N5q4I
THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE TV Spot 'Cue The Music' (2017) Warner Bros Animation Movie HD-lp-vBEID6qY
THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE TV Spot 'Always Be Yourself' (2017) Warner Bros Animation Movie HD-A8ms5oRa0N8
Warner Bros. Animation (2001/2003) #2
Warner Bros. Animation Opening Logo (2008)
Read Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation Ebook READ Ebook
Warner Bros. Animation (2015-present)
(FANMADE) Warner Bros. Animation (2014) (Version 2)
[Download] That's All Folks: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation (Owl Books) [Read] Online
Warner Bros. Animation (2008-2015)
Beat Freaks Performance at Warner Bros Animation Billboard Unveiling
Warner_Bros._Animation
Music Topics
History of Music
Music & Mathematics
Music & Politics
Music Censorship
Popular Music Brands
Ampeg Bass Amplifiers
Alesis Electronic Drums
Dunlop Picks
ENGL Guitar Amplifiers
Ernie Ball Guitar Strings
GHS Bass Strings
Ibanez Guitars
Mapex Drums
Shure Microphones
Vic Firth Drumsticks
Warwick Bass Guitars
Studio Chairs
Music Scenes
Lansing, Michigan
Los Angeles,California | {
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I was recently asked how to query SRM for protected VMs and I decided it would make a good quick blog post. There is a great post here on using PowerCLI with SRM, but it doesn't show the information to return per virtual machine information by default. Needs a bit more.
The first post in this two-part series was about the general new feature of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 6.0 and Storage DRS. Read about it here. In this post, I am going to take a bit more of a specific look at this when it comes to the FlashArray and our Storage Replication Adapter (SRA).
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 6.0 was mostly a compatibility release–getting it to work right with vCenter 6.0 essentially. That being said, there were a few new features (and some nice tweaks in the GUI) included in the release. One of the new features that sparked my interest was SRM and Storage DRS compatibility enhancements.
Ben Meadowcroft a VMware PM who works on amongst other things, SRM, blogged about this new feature here. Find the VMware KB here.
Replication status is assigned as soon as SRM (and it's respective Storage Replication Adapter) discovers it to be replicated through a Device Discovery operation. Upon this discovery a consistency group tag is also assigned. If the volume is not advertised by the SRA as being in a consistency group a unique one will be created for that volume–basically indicating it is in its own consistency group.
A protection tag is not assigned until the volume is actually added to a protection group. Once the datastore is assigned to a protection group it will receive the tag (remember a volume can only be in one PG and SRM only supports being in one CG so there will always only be one to assign).
Basically Storage DRS will not move a VM from one datastore to another if it deems it to cause a change in the configuration of the protection group or consistency of a virtual machine.
So automatic Storage DRS will never make these moves. It may suggest them if it cannot find a better option, but it will never make a move that will violate these rules. If for some reason you want this to occur you can always override the warning and execute the operation.
Let's take a look now at the relevant configurable behavior in SRM.
storage.enableSdrsStandardTagCategoryCreation This creates the three tag categories in vCenter for you.
storage.enableSdrsTagging This actually applies the tags to the datastores when discovered etc.
storage.enableSdrsTaggingRepair This allows SRM to fix datastore tag when something has changed (PG/CG membership changes for instance).
storage.sdrsTaggingPollInterval How often SRM checks tags to make sure they are accurate.
All of these options are enabled by default, well, kinda, the last one is just set to 50 seconds.
When enableSdrsTagging is enabled, SRM will place the correct tags at the appropriate times. So when a new device is discovered or its protection group membership changes.
The option enableSdrsTaggingRepair is a little more to think about. New tags will still be placed on datastores, replicated/cg tags during device discovery, pg tags upon adding it to a new or different pg. But it will not fix or remove them, if you remove it from a PG or delete the PG, the tag will remain. If you delete the SRM provided tag and replace it with you own, it will not fix it. Though if you add it to a new PG it will remove an old one if it exists and then give it the correct one. But it won't ever do that unless you make that PG change.
A note about the repair functionality. If you decide to delete a SRM-provided tag and make you own, it will not last long if this feature is enabled. SRM will right things quite quickly (50 seconds or less). So if you want more control over this tagging for SRM-related devices, disabling this is an option. Of course disabling this can easily lead to stale information in the tags, so do so at your own risk.
In general, I think this is a great enhancement. I would like to see more granular control from the SRM side of things (enable/disable CG auto-tagging when a CG doesn't exist for that device for instance. This also should have a play in non-SRM environments, it's just a bit more work because you have to do the tagging yourself.
In Part II, I will take a look at how this works with the FlashArray SRA and what's involved in that.
Join Pure Storage on June 1st for the future of Flash!
Beginning June 1st, Pure Storage will be hosting events in 50+ cities all over the world to make some exciting announcements concerning the future of flash in the datacenter as well as a sweet new product launch. We'll be talking about a vision that is transforming the storage industry and more. I highly recommend registering for one in a city near you!
This week I received a question from a customer about some slowness in the vSphere "Add Storage" wizard they were seeing. This is a problem that has occurred over the years quite a few times for a variety of different reasons. VMware has fixed most of them, this latest reason luckily was known and has a relatively simple solution. An option called VMFS.UnresolvedVolumeLiveCheck.
If my past posts are any indicator, there are a million ways to set/change/manage ESXi settings. Direct configuration (CLI or GUI) PowerCLI etc. One option I often overlook is host profiles. This has came up a few times in the past month so I thought I would visit this and do a quick walkthrough on configuring Pure Storage FlashArray multipathing best practices with host profiles.
Here is another "look what I found" storage-related post for vSphere 6. Once again, I am still looking into exact design changes, so this is what I observed and my educated guess on how it was done. Look for more details as time wears on.
Allow XCOPY to use a much larger transfer size (current maximum is 16 MB) a.k.a, how much space a single XCOPY SCSI command can describe. Things like Microsoft ODX can handle XCOPY sizes up to 256 MB for example (though the ODX implementation is a bit different).
Allow ESXi to query the Maximum Segment Length during an Extended Copy (XCOPY) Receive Copy Results and use that value. This value tells ESXi what to use as a maximum transfer size. This will allow the end user to avoid the hassle of having to deal with manual transfer size changes.
Allow for thin virtual disks to leverage a larger transfer size than 1 MB.
The first two are currently supported in a very limited fashion by VMware right now, (but stay tuned on this!) so for this post I am going to focus on the thin virtual disk enhancement and what it means on the FlashArray. | {
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<div class="box box-primary">
<div class="box-header">
<h3 class="box-title">Formulario de contacto</h3>
</div>
<?php echo form_open(base_url().'contacto/enviar'); ?>
<div class="box-body">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="txtNombre">Nombre</label>
<?php
$opciones = array('name'=>'txtNombre','class'=>'form-control' ,'type'=>'input', 'value'=> $nombre, 'maxlength'=> '200');
echo form_input($opciones);
echo form_error('txtNombre', '<div class="error">', '</div>');
?>
</div>
<div class="form-group">
<label for="emailCorreo">Correo</label>
<?php
$opciones = array('name'=>'emailCorreo','class'=>'form-control' ,'type'=>'mail', 'value'=> $correo, 'maxlength'=> '200');
echo form_input($opciones);
echo form_error('emailCorreo', '<div class="error">', '</div>');
?>
</div>
<div class="form-group">
<label for="txtAsunto">Asunto</label>
<?php
$opciones = array('name'=>'txtAsunto','class'=>'form-control' ,'type'=>'input', 'value'=> $asunto, 'maxlength'=> '200');
echo form_input($opciones);
echo form_error('txtAsunto', '<div class="error">', '</div>');
?>
</div>
<div class="form-group">
<label for="txtareaAsunto">Mensaje</label>
<?php
$opciones = array('name'=>'txtareaAsunto','class'=>'form-control', 'value'=> $mensaje);
echo form_textarea($opciones);
echo form_error('txtareaAsunto', '<div class="error">', '</div>');
?>
</div>
</div>
<div class="box-footer">);
<?php
echo form_submit(array('value' => 'Enviar', 'class'=>'btn btn-primary'));
echo form_close();
?>
</div>
</form>
</div> | {
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Бериа Онгер (, ) — турецкая писательница и феминистка. Возглавляла организацию прогрессивных женщин Турции до её запрета после государственного переворота 1980 года. В 1979 году баллотировалась от коммунистической партии в Сенат.
Биография
Примечания | {
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{"url":"https:\/\/matplotlib.org\/api\/_as_gen\/matplotlib.lines.segment_hits.html","text":"# matplotlib.lines.segment_hits\u00b6\n\nmatplotlib.lines.segment_hits(cx, cy, x, y, radius)[source]\n\nDetermine if any line segments are within radius of a point. Returns the list of line segments that are within that radius.","date":"2018-11-21 03:44:50","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.6026945114135742, \"perplexity\": 756.1129270568256}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.3, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2018-47\/segments\/1542039747024.85\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20181121032129-20181121054129-00491.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
A ThinkIn with Ed Miliband
by Tortoise
The former Labour leader in conversation with James Harding.
Our daily digital ThinkIns are exclusively for Tortoise members and their guests.
Try Tortoise free for four weeks to unlock your complimentary tickets to all our digital ThinkIns.
If you're already a member and looking for your ThinkIn access code you can find it in the My Tortoise > My Membership section of the app next to 'ThinkIn access code'.
We'd love you to join us.
Ed Miliband knows the highs and lows of leadership - as MP for Doncaster since 2005, as cabinet minister under Gordon Brown, and as leader of the Labour party between 2010-2015. He is currently Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. A longtime and vocal advocate of bold climate action, he is at the forefront of Labour's green agenda and has recently urged the government to lead "by example" in the run up to COP26 next November. He made a blistering speech in the House of Commons in September over Boris Johnson's handling of the Internal Market Bill, saying "he hasn't read it, he doesn't know his stuff" and pointing out that "he has in one short year united his five predecessors" in a "point of agreement which is that he is trashing the reputation of this country and the reputation of his office."
Join James Harding in conversation with Ed Miliband, reflecting on his own life in politics and what 2020 has taught us all about the state of leadership in the 21st century.
How does a digital ThinkIn work?
A digital ThinkIn is like a video conference, hosted by a Tortoise editor, that takes place at the advertised time of the event. Digital ThinkIns are new to Tortoise. Now that our newsroom has closed due to the coronavirus outbreak, we feel it's more important than ever that we 'get together' to talk about the world and what's going on.
The link to join the conversation will be emailed to you after you have registered for your ticket to attend. When you click the link, you enter the digital ThinkIn and can join a live conversation from wherever you are in the world.
Doors open at 6:25pm for a welcome and briefing. Come early to get settled, meet the team and chat to other members. ThinkIn starts at 6:30pm.
Members can enter their unique members' access code to book tickets. Find yours in My Tortoise > My Membership in the Tortoise app.
If you have any questions or get stuck, please read our FAQ's or get in touch with us at memberhelp@tortoisemedia.com
Read our ThinkIn code of conduct here
What is a Tortoise ThinkIn?
A ThinkIn is not another panel discussion. It is a forum for civilised disagreement. It is a place where everyone has a seat at the (virtual) table. It's where we get to hear what you think, drawn from your experience, energy and expertise. It is the heart of what we do at Tortoise.
In conversation with Anne Boden, CEO Starling Bank
Goodbye Donald: end of an era, or start of the sequel?
Open News
Trans kids: what has been happening inside the Tavistock?
Feeding the world sustainably after Covid: how will we do it?
The Future of Money Summit
Global Health Summit: The six major health challenges now
#Health #Conference
Sensemaker Live
A ThinkIn with Ashley Audrain on The Push | {
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Absalom Andrew Sydenstricker (, 1852–1931) was an American Presbyterian missionary to China from 1880 to 1931. The Sydenstricker log house at what later became the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace in Hillsboro, West Virginia, was Absalom's early childhood home.
His daughter, Pearl S. Buck, became an award-winning author. The book Fighting Angel, written as a companion to her memoir of her mother, The Exile, recounts the life and work of Absalom (called "Andrew" in the book). Her representation of her father was conflicted between respect for his steadfastness, and bitterness for his treatment of her mother. She wrote that his was
This brief summary of the family life and missionary work of Absalom and Caroline Maude "Carie" (Stulting) Sydenstricker (1857–1921) shows the perseverance, under extreme hardships, of missionaries to China during this time period.
The names of the family members appear in quotes as they are given in the books The Exile and Fighting Angel. Absalom is called "Andrew", Caroline is called "Carie", Pearl is called "Comfort". Names of cities of China are given in the modern Pinyin form, with names used in the books given in parentheses.
Notes
That whole chart is copied from somewhere else.
Bibliography
, originally New York: John Day.
Buck, Pearl S. The Exile. Portrait of an American Mother (John Day, 1936; rpr. with a new Introduction, Norwalk, CT: EastBridge, D'Asia Vu Reprint Library, 2009 .
.
.
.
1852 births
1931 deaths
American expatriates in China
American Presbyterian missionaries
People from Hillsboro, West Virginia
Presbyterian Church in the United States members
Presbyterian missionaries in China
Presbyterians from West Virginia | {
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Actéon es una opéra-comique francesa en un acto, con música de Daniel-François-Esprit Auber y libreto de Eugène Scribe. Se estrenó en la Opéra-Comique el 23 de enero de 1836.
Referencias
Fuentes
Eugène Scribe, Œuvres complètes, 4.ª serie: "Opéras-comiques", vol. 5, E. Dentu, París, 1878.
Licencia
Enlaces externos
Libreto de Actéon en Gallica.
Revue des deux mondes
Óperas de Daniel-François Auber
Óperas en francés
Óperas de 1836
Óperas estrenadas en París | {
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Help today… for a better tomorrow.
The Embracing Hope for Mental Health Event is set to be held on May 19th!
We have a new office in Dunlap!
Posted on March 1, 2019 under News.
May is mental health awareness month and this event embraces spreading mental health awareness.
Volunteer is so proud to be a sponsor for the Embracing Hope Event!
top talent and restaurants, with performances and food being available throughout the day.
Please click HERE for more information about the event, how to sponsor and statistics on mental health.
Make sure and follow the Embracing Hope Facebook page too! | {
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"use strict";
const randomItem = function (arr) {
if (!Array.isArray(arr)) {
throw new TypeError('Expected an array');
}
return arr[Math.floor(Math.random() * arr.length)];
};
const pf = require ("./facts.json");
exports.handle = function(ev, ctx, cb) {
cb(null, [
{
to: ev.target,
body: [
{body: randomItem(pf)}
]
}
]);
};
| {
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Bilboes (always plural) are iron restraints normally placed on a person's ankles. They have commonly been used as leg shackles to restrain prisoners for different purposes until the modern ages. Bilboes were also used on slave ships, such as the Henrietta Marie.
According to legend, the device was invented in Bilbao and was imported into England by the ships of the Spanish Armada for use on prospective English prisoners. However, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the term was used in English well before then.
Description
Bilboes consist of a pair of "U"-shaped iron bars (shackles) with holes in the ends, through which an iron rod is inserted. The rod mostly has a large knob on one end, and a slot in the other end into which a wedge or a padlock is driven to secure the assembly. Bilboes occur in different sizes, ranging from regular large ones to smaller sizes particularly fitting women's ankles and even sizes to restrain the wrists. The rod can also be fastened to a wall or a rigid trestle as it was mostly used in prisons. This way the person is restrained to stay put, while only allowing movement of the feet sideways inside the limited range the rod allows for.
History
Bilboes used as public punishment in former times combined physical discomfort with public humiliation. The person was often restrained barefoot, which added to the humiliation. They were popular in England and America in the colonial and early revolutionary periods (such as in the Massachusetts Bay Colony). They were used in England to "punyssche transgressours ageynste ye Kinges Maiesties lawes". Bilboes appear occasionally in literature, including Hamlet (Act V, Scene 2: "Methought I lay worse than the mutinies in the bilboes") and the journals of Captain Cook.
A notable case of excessive use is documented from Trinidad under British administration by governor Thomas Picton during the criminal procedure against eighteen-year-old Louisa Calderon in 1801. The former maid of governor Picton was accused of theft from his household and interrogated. She was also subjected to the picket torture, which first led to an extorted confession. Subsequently she was left restrained in bilboes over the continuous period of eight months while the legal inquest was in progress. The shackles were rigidly fastened to the wall of her confinement cell, so she was forced to remain in one place for the entire duration of her imprisonment. The charges were eventually dropped, so Louisa Calderon was released from her incarceration and the bilboes were taken off after months of being incessantly restrained. This excessive form of incarceration along with the preceding torture was later assessed as inhumane in a juridic reappraisal.
Use in slavery
Bilboes were used to restrain slaves on slave ships. Components forming more than eighty bilboes have been recovered from the Henrietta Marie, an English slave ship that was wrecked in the Florida Keys in 1700 after delivering slaves to Jamaica. Bilboes were also found in the Molasses Reef Wreck, a Spanish wreck in the Turks and Caicos Islands from very early in the 16th century, which may have been a slave ship hunting Lucayans in the Bahamas. Bilboes were used to fasten two slaves together, so that the eighty-plus bilboes found on the Henrietta Marie would have restrained up to 160 slaves. Bilboes were usually not placed on every slave transported, nor were they left on for all of a voyage. Only the slaves that were strongest and presumably most likely to revolt or escape were kept in bilboes for all of a voyage.
See also
Stocks
References
Physical restraint | {
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Palmarès
Mondiali
1 medaglia:
1 bronzo (Parigi 1989)
Europei
2 medaglie:
1 argento (Birmingham 1989)
1 bronzo (Göteborg 1985)
Collegamenti esterni | {
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For Pearl S. Buck
I belong to China for I have lived there from childhood to adulthood . . . Happy for me that for instead of the narrow and conventional life of the white man in Asia, I lived with the Chinese people and spoke their tongue before I spoke my own, and their children were my first friends.
Pearl S. Buck
_My Several Worlds_
Behind the calm steadfast eyes of a Chinese woman, I feel a powerful warmth. We might have been friends, she and I, unless she had decided first that I was her enemy. She would have decided, not I. I was never deceived by Chinese women, not even by the flower-like lovely girls. They are the strongest women in the world. Seeming always to yield, they never yield. Their men are weak beside them. Whence comes this female strength? It is the strength that centuries have given them, the strength of the unwanted.
Pearl S. Buck
_Letter from Peking_
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Three
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part Four
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Part Five
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Author's Note
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
**Part One**
Chapter 1
Before I was Willow, I was Weed. My grandmother, NaiNai, insisted that naming me Weed was better. She believed that the gods would have a hard time making my life go lower if I was already at the bottom. Papa disagreed. "Men want to marry flowers, not weeds." They argued and finally settled for Willow, which was considered "gentle enough to weep and tough enough to be made into farming tools." I always wondered what my mother would have thought if she had lived.
Papa lied to me about my mother's death. Both he and NaiNai told me that Mother died giving birth. But I had already learned otherwise from neighbors' gossip. Papa had "rented" his wife to the town's "Bare-sticks" in order to pay off his debts. One of the bachelors got Mother pregnant. I was four years old when it happened. To rid her of the "bastard seed," Papa bought magic root powder from an herbalist. Papa mixed the powder with tea and Mother drank it. Mother died along with the seed. It broke Papa's heart, because he had intended to kill the fetus, not his wife. He had no money to buy another wife. Papa was angry at the herbalist, but there was nothing he could do—he had been warned about the poison.
NaiNai feared that she would be punished by the gods for Mother's death. She believed that in her next life she would be a diseased bird and her son a limbless dog. NaiNai burned incense and begged the gods to reduce her sentence. When she ran out of money for incense, she stole. She took me to markets, temples, and graveyards. We would not act until darkness fell. NaiNai moved like an animal on all fours. She was in and out of bamboo groves and brick hallways, behind the hills and around ponds. Under the bright moonlight, NaiNai's long neck stretched. Her head seemed to become smaller. Her cheekbones sharpened. Her slanting eyes glowed as she scanned the temples. NaiNai appeared, disappeared, and reappeared like a ghost. But one night she stopped. In fact, she collapsed. I was aware that she had been ill. Tufts of hair had been falling from her head. There was a rotten smell to her breath. "Go and look for your father," she ordered. "Tell him that my end is near."
Papa was a handsome man in his thirties. He had what a fortuneteller would describe as "the look of an ancient king" or "the matching energy of sky and earth," meaning he had a square forehead and a broad chin. He had a pair of sheep eyes, a garlic-shaped nose that sat on his face like a gentle hill, and a mouth that was always ready to smile. His hair was thick and silky black. Every morning, he combed and braided it with water to make his queue smooth and shining. He walked with his back straight and head up. Speaking Mandarin with an Imperial accent, Papa wore his voice like a costume. But when Papa lost his temper, his voice would slip. People were shocked when Mr. Yee suddenly took up a strange voice. Ignoring NaiNai's opinion that his ambitions would never be realized, Papa dreamed that one day he would work for the governor as an adviser. Papa attended teahouses where he showed off his talent in classic Chinese poems and verse. "I must keep my mind sharp and literary skills tuned," he often said to me. One would never guess from the way he presented himself that Papa was a seasonal coolie.
We lived in Chin-kiang, a small town far away from the capital, Peking, on the south side of the Yangtze River in Jiangsu province. Originally, our family was from Anhui province, a harsh region where survival depended on an endless round of crushing physical labor. For generations my family worked the region's thin and unfertile soil and struggled with famine, flood, locusts, bandits, and debt seekers. NaiNai bragged that it was she who brought "luck" to the Yee family. She was purchased by my grandfather when he was forty years old. No one was allowed to mention that the purchase took place in a local sing-song house. When NaiNai was in her prime, she had a slender figure, a swanlike neck, and a pair of fox eyes with both ends tilted up. She painted her face every day and modeled her hairstyle after the Imperial empress. It was said that men's blood would boil when NaiNai smiled.
By the time the family crossed the Yangtze River and migrated to the south, NaiNai had given the Yee family three sons. Papa was the eldest and the only one sent to school. Grandfather expected a return from his investment. Papa was expected to become an accountant so that the family could fight the government's tax collectors. But things didn't turn out right—Grandfather lost his son to the education.
Papa believed that he was too good to work as a coolie. At sixteen, he developed the expensive habits and fantasies of the rich. He read books on China's political reform and chewed tea leaves to sweeten his peasant garlic breath. An ideal life, he told others, would be to "compose poems under blossoming plum trees," far away from the "greedy material world." Instead of returning home, Papa traveled the country, making his parents pay the bills. One day he received a message from his mother. The message informed him that his father and brothers were gravely ill and near death from an infectious disease that had swept through his hometown.
Papa rushed home, but the funeral was already over. Soon enough, his house was possessed by the debt seekers. NaiNai and Papa fell into poverty and became coolies. Although NaiNai vowed to regain their former prosperity, she was no longer healthy. By the time I was born, NaiNai suffered from an incurable intestinal disease.
Papa struggled to keep his "intellectual dignity." He continued to write poems. He even composed a piece titled "The Sweet Scent of Books" for my mother's funeral. Invoking a newfound spirituality, he insisted that his words would make better gifts than jewelry and diamonds to accompany his wife in her next life. Although Papa was no different from a beggar in terms of possessions, he made sure that he was lice-free. He kept his appearance by trimming his beard and never missed a chance to mention his "honorable past."
Papa's honorable past didn't mean anything to me. For the first years of my young life, food was the only thing on my mind. I would wake hungry every morning and go to sleep hungry every night. Sometimes the clawing in my stomach would keep me from sleeping. Having to constantly scavenge for scraps, I existed in a delirium. Unexpected luck or a good harvest might bring food for a while, but the hunger would always return.
By the time I was seven, in 1897, things had only gotten worse. Although NaiNai's health had continued to deteriorate, she was determined to do something to better our lot. Picking up her old profession, she began to receive men in the back of our bungalow. When I was given a fistful of roasted soybeans, I understood that it was time to disappear. I ran through the rice paddies and the cotton fields into the hills and hid in the bamboo groves. I cried because I couldn't bear the thought of losing NaiNai the same way I had lost Mother.
Around this time, Papa and I worked as seasonal farmhands. He planted rice, wheat, and cotton and carried manure. My job was to plant soybeans along the edges of the fields. Each day, Papa and I woke before dawn to go to work. As a child, I was paid less than an adult, but I was glad to be earning money. I had to compete with other children, especially boys. I always proved that I was faster than the boys when it came to planting soybeans. I used a chopstick to poke a hole and threw a soybean into each one. I kicked dirt into the hole and sealed it with my big toe.
The coolie market where we got our jobs closed after the planting season was over. Papa and I couldn't find any work. Papa spent his days walking the streets in search of a job. No one hired him, although he was received politely. I followed Papa throughout the town. When I found him wandering into the surrounding hills, I started doubting his seriousness about finding a job.
"What a glorious view!" Papa marveled as he beheld the countryside spreading below his feet. "Willow, come and admire the beauty of nature!"
I looked. The wide Yangtze flowed freely and leaped aside into small canals and streams that fed the southern land.
"Beyond the valleys are hidden old temples that have stood for hundreds of years." Papa's voice rose again. "We live in the best place under the sun!"
I shook my head and told him that the demon in my stomach had eaten away my good sense.
Papa shook his head. "What did I teach you?"
I rolled back my eyes and recited, "Virtue will sustain and prevail."
Virtue finally failed to sustain Papa. The demons in his stomach took over—he was caught stealing. Neighbors no longer wanted to be associated with him. The pity was that Papa never actually succeeded as a thief. He was too clumsy. More than once I witnessed him being beaten by the folks he stole from. He was thrown into the open sewage. He told his friends that he had "tripped over a tree stump." Laughing, they asked him, "Was it the same stump you tripped over the last time?" One day Papa came home holding his arm, which had been knocked out of its socket. "I deserved it," he said, cursing himself. "I shouldn't have stolen from an infant's mouth."
By the time I was eight years old I was already a seasoned thief. I began by stealing incense for NaiNai. Although Papa criticized me, he knew that the family would starve if I stopped. Papa would sell the goods I stole.
I snatched small items at first, such as vegetables, fruit, birds, and puppies. Then I went for farming tools. After selling what I stole, Papa would rush to a local bar for rice wine. He took his sips slowly, closing his eyes as if concentrating on the taste. When his cheeks began to redden, he would recite his favorite poem. Although his friends had long since left him, he imagined his audience.
_The Grand Yangtze River runs toward the ocean,_
_Never to return, so went the dynasty's glorious days._
_When would the time come again for heroes?_
_Though music continues playing, swiftly and triumphantly,_
_Reform miscarried, reformers beheaded,_
_Foreign troops plagued the country_
_His Majesty locked in the island of Yintai._
_Where have been the gods' responses?_
_Weep the learned man,_
_Brokenhearted and in despair . . ._
One day a man clapped. He was sitting in a corner. He stood up to congratulate Papa. He was tall, a giant in the eyes of the Chinese. He was the brown-haired and blue-eyed foreigner, an American missionary. He was by himself with a thick book and a cup of tea in front of him.
He smiled at Papa and praised him for his fine poem.
Absalom Sydenstricker was his name. The locals called him the "plow-nosed and demon-eyed crazy foreigner." He had been a fixture in town for as long as I could remember. Not only was he ceiling tall, he also had hair growing on his forearms and the backs of his hands like weeds. All year long Absalom wore a gray Chinese gown. A queue went down his back, which everyone knew was fake. His costume made him look ridiculous, but he didn't seem to care. Absalom spent his time chasing people on the street. He tried to stop them and talk to them. He wanted to make us believe in his God. As children, we were taught to avoid him. We were not allowed to say things that would hurt his feelings, such as "Go away."
Papa was familiar with Absalom Sydenstricker since he, too, spent time wandering the streets. Papa concluded that Absalom was laying up credit for himself so that his God would offer him a ticket to heaven when he died.
"Or else why leave his own home to wander among strangers?" Papa questioned.
Papa suspected that Absalom was a criminal in his own land. Out of curiosity that day, Papa listened to what the foreigner had to say. Afterward, he invited Absalom home for "further discussion."
Thrilled, Absalom came. He didn't mind our dirty hut. He sat down and opened his book. "Would you like a story from the Bible?" he offered.
Papa was not interested in stories. He wanted to know what kind of god Jesus was. "Based on the way he was tortured, stabbed to death, nailed and tied to posts, he must be a royal criminal. In China such elaborate public torture would be given only to criminals of high status, like the former Imperial prime minister Su Shun."
Excitement filled Absalom's voice. He began to explain. But his Chinese was difficult to understand.
Papa lost his patience. When Absalom paused, Papa interrupted. "How can Jesus protect others when he couldn't even protect himself?"
Absalom waved his hands, pointed his fingers up and down, and then read from the Bible.
Papa decided that it was time to help the foreigner. "Chinese gods make better sense," he said. "They are more worshipper-friendly . . ."
"No, no, no." Absalom shook his head like a merchant's drummer. "You are not understanding me . . ."
"Listen, foreigner, my suggestions might help you. Put clothes on Jesus and give him a weapon. Look at our god of war, Guan-gong. He wears a general's robe made of heavy metal, and he carries a powerful sword."
"You are a clever man," Absalom told Papa, "but your biggest mistake is that you are knowledgeable of all gods but the true God."
I observed that Absalom's face was a big opium bed with a high nose sitting like a table in the middle. His eyebrows were two bird's nests and under them were clear blue eyes. After his talk with Papa he went back into the streets. I followed him.
"God is your best fortune!" Absalom sang to the people who paused in front of him. No one paid attention. People tied their shoelaces, wiped snot off their children's faces, and moved on. Absalom stuck his long arms out like two brooms in the air. When he saw Papa again, he smiled. Papa smiled back. It took Papa quite a while to figure out what Absalom was trying to say.
"We have shed blood unlawfully," Absalom said, waving the Bible in Papa's face. "It may be innocently, but the stain remains upon us. Mankind can only remove it by prayers and good deeds."
I discovered where Absalom lived. His house was a bungalow located in the lower part of town. His neighbors were coolies and peasants. I wondered what had made Absalom choose the place. Although Chin-kiang was the smallest town in Jiangsu province, it had been an important port since ancient times. From the water's edge, stone-paved streets led to shops and then the center of the town, where the British Embassy was located. The embassy occupied the highest point, with a broad view of the Yangtze River.
Although he was not the first American missionary to come to China, Absalom claimed he was the first to arrive in Chin-kiang during the late nineteenth century. According to old folks, soon after Absalom arrived, he purchased a piece of land behind the graveyard, where he built a church. His intention was to avoid "disturbing the living," but to the Chinese, disturbing the dead was the worst crime one could commit. The church's tall shadow stretched out over the graveyard. The locals protested. Absalom had to abandon the church. He moved down the hill and rented a shop as his new church. It was a room with a low ceiling, crooked beams, falling studs, and broken windows.
Most of the people thought Absalom a harmless fool. Children loved to follow him around. His feet were the main attraction, because they were huge. When Absalom asked the local shoemaker for a pair of Chinese shoes, it became news. People visited the shop just to see how much material it would take and if the shoemaker would double the charge.
When asked his reason for coming to China, Absalom replied that he was here to save our souls.
People laughed. "What is a soul?"
Absalom let us know that the world was coming to an end, and that we would all die if we failed to follow God.
"What evidence do you have?" Papa asked.
"That is what the Bible is for." Absalom winked an eye and smiled. "The Lord explains the one and only truth."
Papa said that he was rather disappointed by Absalom's description of the Western hell. Chinese hell was much more terrifying. Papa loved to challenge Absalom in teahouses and bars. He reveled in the gathering crowd and his growing popularity. Behind Absalom's back, Papa admitted that he followed Absalom around for the food, especially the cookies baked by Absalom's wife, Carie.
Compared to NaiNai, Carie was a big woman. She had light brown eyes and a wrinkled, soft, white round face. She wore a funny-shaped hat, which she called a "bonnet." Stuffed inside this hat was her brown curly hair. Carie wore the same dark dress all year long. It was the color of seaweed. Her skirt was so long that it swept the ground.
Carie had been warning her husband about Papa. She didn't trust Papa. But Absalom continued to treat Papa like a good friend, although Papa refused to attend his Sunday church on a regular basis.
Like a true artist, Papa fooled Absalom by pretending that he was interested. He was giving me an opportunity to steal. The day after I took the church's doormat, I heard Carie cry, "There is no need for housekeeping because everything is gone!"
Chapter 2
When Absalom held up his Bible-story drawings, I asked about the beard-men who had golden rings on their heads. "Why are they walking in the desert with sheets draped around them?"
Absalom didn't know that I only asked questions to distract him, so I could carry on with my stealing.
It was hard for Absalom to concentrate. He was interrupted by people's cries. "When can we have food, Master Absalom? Would you ask God to bring food for us now?"
As Absalom went on with his speech, children pulled his arms and pushed him around. "Who is Virgin? Who is Mary?"
"Who is Madonna?" I asked loudly, attaching myself to Absalom like a leech. My hands were inside his pockets.
By the time Absalom blessed me with a "Jesus loves you," I had his wallet.
Slipping the wallet into my pocket, I hurried down a side street and made my way out of town. I sensed that I was being followed and cut a jagged path. Still I felt the pair of blue eyes at my back. They belonged to a cream-skinned white girl wearing a black knitted cap. She was a little younger than me. She always sat in the corner of the church room with a black leather-bound book in her hands. Her eyes seemed to say, "I saw you."
By now I knew who she was. She was the daughter of Absalom and Carie. Her family servant had called her Pearl. She spoke to the servant in the Chin-kiang dialect. Her mother and father never seemed to need her. She was always by herself and was always reading.
To get rid of her, I ran as fast as I could toward the hills. I passed the wheat and cotton fields. After a couple of miles, I stopped. I looked around and was glad that she was no longer in sight. I took a deep breath and sat down. I was excited about my harvest.
As I began to open the wallet, I heard a noise.
Someone was approaching.
I froze and held my breath.
Slowly, I turned my head.
Behind me, in the bushes, was that pair of blue eyes.
"You stole my father's wallet!" Pearl yelled.
"No, I didn't." I imagined the food the money in the wallet could buy.
"Yes, you did."
"Prove it!"
"It's in your pocket." She put down her book and tried to reach into my pocket.
I knocked her aside with an elbow.
She fell.
I held tight to the wallet.
She rose. Anger made her pink lips quiver.
We stood face-to-face. I could see sweat beaded on her forehead. Her skin was white, as if bleached. Her nose had a pointed tip. Like her father's fake queue, her black knitted cap hid her blonde curly hair. She wore a Chinese tunic embroidered with indigo flowers.
"Last chance to give the wallet, or you'll get hurt," she threatened.
I worked up a mouthful of saliva and spit.
While her hands went up to protect her face, I ran.
She followed me through the fields and up and down a hill. By the time she caught me, I had already hidden the wallet. I raised both of my arms and said, "Come and search me."
She came and didn't find the wallet.
I smiled.
She gasped, taking off her knitted cap. Golden curls fell across her face.
From then on she followed me everywhere. I was unable to steal. I spent day and night thinking about how to get rid of her. I learned that she had one living sibling, a younger sister, Grace. The Chinese servant who took care of the girls, Wang Ah-ma, had been with the family for a long time.
"Pearl and Grace want so much to look like the Chinese girls," Wang Ah-ma chatted to her knitting friends. They sat outside the house under the sun. Wang Ah-ma was making new caps for Pearl and Grace. The caps would cover their blonde hair so that they could look like Chinese girls. Wang Ah-ma said that she had to knit fast because the girls were wearing the old ones out. "Poor Pearl, every day she begs me to find a way to help her grow black hair."
The women laughed. "What did you tell her?"
"I told her to eat black sesame seeds, and she went crazy eating them. Her mother thought that she was eating ants."
Before the spring planting season, farmers came to town to purchase their supplies for the year. While men bought manure and had tools fixed and sharpened, women inspected the livestock. Going in and out of food stalls and supply shops, I hunted for stealing opportunities. It had been weeks since I'd had a full meal.
Papa had pawned nearly every piece of furniture we owned. The table and benches and my own bed were all gone. I now slept on a straw mat on the packed-earth floor. Centipedes crawled over my face in the middle of the night. NaiNai suffered from an infection that wouldn't heal. She could barely move from the one bed we still owned. Papa spent more time with Absalom, trying to get hired.
"Absalom needs my help," Papa said every day. "Absalom doesn't know how to tell stories. He puts people to sleep. I ought to be the one to tell his Bible stories. I could turn Absalom's business around."
But Absalom was only interested in saving Papa's soul.
One night I heard Papa whisper to NaiNai, "The dowry would be handsome." It took me a while to figure out what he meant. One of his friends had made an offer to purchase me as his concubine.
"You are not selling Willow!" NaiNai hammered her chest with her fist. "She is just a child."
"It takes money to make money," Papa argued. "Besides, you need to buy medicine. The doctor said that you are getting worse . . ."
"As long as I am breathing, don't even think about it!" NaiNai broke down.
What if NaiNai died? I became scared. For the first time I looked forward to Sunday, when I could attend the church, where Absalom would talk about heaven and Carie would serve meals. Papa and NaiNai wanted to join me, but they were embarrassed to show their despair in front of foreigners.
Absalom's church was a room with benches. The walls were mud-colored. Absalom said that his God was a humble god, one who cared more about his followers than about the appearance of his temple. Absalom said that he was in the middle of raising funds to build a proper church.
I wanted to tell Absalom that people were not interested in his God or his church. Food was the reason we came. We waited for Absalom to finish preaching. We had to endure. I cried joyfully when it was time to clap our hands together and say "Ah-men."
After the meal we felt good. We sang songs to thank Absalom's God. Carie taught us Hymns and Oratorio. The first song Carie sang to us was called "Amazing Grace." Her big voice surprised everyone. It was deep like a Chinese gong. The room vibrated. The sound was like a spring waterfall pouring down from the mountains. Carie's soft round face melted into a sweet expression. She sent her notes up through the ceiling effortlessly.
I fell in love with "Amazing Grace." The song moved me in a strange way. I grew up with Chinese operas, but it was Carie's song that made me think of my own mother. Never before had I been able to imagine what my mother looked like. The song brought her to me, vivid and clear. Mother was as beautiful as a Chinese goddess. I could almost smell her fragrance. Her face was egg-shaped and her eyes gentle and bright. She was petite but had a full figure. "Come, my child," I could hear her say. "I have been longing to see you."
Tears filled my eyes. I noticed that I was not the only one who was falling in love with "Amazing Grace." NaiNai wanted me to learn the song so that I could sing it at her funeral.
Carie had a monstrous instrument she called a "piano." She often played it to accompany her singing. Her fingers danced over the keys as she sat on a stool with the bottom of her dress covering the ground. We spent many Sunday afternoons together. Word by word, Carie taught me "Amazing Grace." I went home and practiced in front of NaiNai and Papa.
_Amazing Grace,_
_How sweet the sound,_
_That saved a wretch like me_.
I sang the same way I would sing a Chinese opera. My voice was charged and loud.
_I once was lost but now am found,_
_Was blind but now I see._
Papa and NaiNai enjoyed the song and waited eagerly for me to go on. I had to tell them that this was all I had managed to learn so far.
Papa went quiet for a while and then said, "Although 'Amazing Grace' is a foreign song, it is about us, because we are lost, confused, and scared." NaiNai agreed. "Willow," she said, turning to me, "make sure you learn the full piece from Carie, because I could go at any time."
I asked NaiNai if she was going to heaven and if so whether she and my mother would meet. NaiNai nodded. "Your mother would love to hear you sing 'Amazing Grace.'"
I went to Carie and begged her to teach me the rest of the song. She was delighted. She sat me next to her by the piano and began.
_The Lord has promised good to me,_
_His word my hope secures;_
_He will my shield and portion be,_
_As long as life endures._
Carie's voice changed. The tone became tender, reminding me of a gentle creek flowing through a meadow.
_And mortal life shall cease;_
_I shall possess within the veil,_
_A life of joy and peace._
From Wang Ah-ma, we learned that Carie had lost four of her children after arriving in China. "I don't know any woman who has experienced worse, four male children," Wang Ah-ma sighed, putting up her four fingers.
According to Wang Ah-ma, Carie had her dead sons' names carved on her bed board. "The Mistress speaks to their spirits every night before sleep."
People wondered what kind of food Absalom's family ate and what it tasted like.
"Cheese and butter," Wang Ah-ma said. She stuck a finger in her throat and bent over to imitate retching. "It tastes like spoiled tofu."
"What about Pearl?" I asked.
"Pearl is different. She has a Chinese stomach." Wang Ah-ma smiled with approval. "Pearl eats what I eat. She is strong as an ox."
"Do you mean she won't die like her brothers?" I asked.
Wang Ah-ma lowered her voice to a whisper. "It doesn't make sense to me that four of Carie's children had to die. It was the same disease. I mean, the boys suffered the same as the Chinese children. Why did the Chinese children survive? Pearl's body has learned to fight the disease like a Chinese. For Buddha's sake, she has been successful!"
The listeners nodded in admiration. "You did well for your mistress, Wang Ah-ma!"
Wang Ah-ma's face bloomed like a summer lotus. "Pearl eats double meals. One in the kitchen with the servants, and the other with her parents. The child has an incredible appetite. She loves soy nuts, lotus seeds, and roasted seaweed. Pearl's favorite is scallion pancakes, which I buy every week especially for her."
I should have seen it coming when Pearl caught me. My mouth was stuffed with pancake, which I had stolen from Wang Ah-ma. Pearl waited for the moment. She made sure that she had a witness. My hand was in Wang Ah-ma's basket, although Wang Ah-ma hadn't realized what was happening.
Pearl dragged me to Carie, who was sitting in front of her piano.
The town followed.
Papa and NaiNai were called.
" _A rat naturally knows how to dig a hole_ ," children cheered. "What do you expect, the father sets an example?"
"I caught her in the act," Pearl announced.
Carie didn't look at her daughter. She turned to me.
"You didn't do it, did you, Willow?" Carie asked, closing the piano lid.
Fearing that Papa and NaiNai would lose face in front of the town, I boldly lied. "No, I did not do it."
Carie rose to greet Papa and NaiNai. In a gentle voice she said to them, "I'm sorry, my daughter made a mistake."
"But Mother!" Pearl interrupted. "I caught Willow in the middle of her act!" She turned to Wang Ah-ma. "Please, Ah-ma, tell Mother the truth . . ."
"Mistress," Wang Ah-ma said, stepping up. "Pearl made no mistake . . ."
Carie signaled a stop with her right hand and said, "Ah-ma, the soup on the stove is boiling."
"It is not boiling, Mistress. I have just checked."
"Go and check again," said Carie.
"Yes," Wang Ah-ma said, nodding, "I'll go now. But Mistress, Pearl was right about the pancake. Willow did steal it."
"No, Willow did not," Carie repeated without looking at anyone.
NaiNai and Papa exchanged relieved glances.
"Mother!" Pearl's tears streamed down her cheeks. "If you check Willow's breath, you will smell the scallions!"
"That's enough, Pearl." Carie waved a hand.
"I swear to God." Pearl began to weep.
"Go and help set the dinner table," Carie said. "Your father is on his way home."
"Mother, I'm not the one who lied!"
"I didn't say you lied, Pearl."
I had a hard time that afternoon. My neck felt stiff , as if pressed under a stone grinder. I went up into the hills and sat alone. I didn't move until the sun set and the boatmen returned. Mist began to spread along the riverbank. The moisture was thick in my lungs. I lost sleep that evening. I was deeply ashamed. Pearl's tearful face hovered before me all night long. I got up and admitted to Papa and NaiNai that I had taken the pancake.
They were not surprised.
Chapter 3
The teahouses celebrated spring by hosting parties. "Men of words" gathered around blossoming camellias and peach and plum trees and composed poems. Papa loved the parties, while I loved the blooming peach flowers that looked like pink clouds. Then came the April wet season. The southern China rain didn't come in showers. It came like a spreading thick fog. When I stuck out an arm, I could feel no drops. But once I stepped outside, wetness would wrap me. In ten minutes of walking, moisture would soak through my clothes. If I wiped my face with a hand, water would come off. Very slowly, my hair would droop. Strands of hair would paste against my skull.
In a month, the river would rise a few inches. Water and sky would become one gray color. Toads, eels, earthworms, and leeches would be found everywhere. The dirt path would become sluggish. Bamboo would thrive. By the time summer arrived, it would cover the southern slopes of the hills.
My teeth were green from chewing milkweeds. I had just turned nine. It became harder to resist the urge to steal. I had been thinking about a boy who had visited us during the past Chinese New Year. He was a distant relative and seventeen years old. His name was San-bao. He was an apprentice working for the local blacksmith. What I really had been thinking about were the soy nuts San-bao had promised me. I wondered when he would deliver his gift.
My legs carried me to San-bao's shop. I wished that I had nicer clothes. San-bao was surprised to see me. He wore a dirty apron and was bare-shouldered. He was a strong and cheerful man who had a horse's jaw. I could see wormlike thick veins under his skin. Putting down his sledgehammer, he asked what had brought me to visit.
I couldn't tell him the truth. I couldn't say that I had come for the soy nuts. I said that I was just passing by. He smiled gleefully.
"Have you eaten?" he asked after a moment.
"No." I was embarrassed for replying too quickly.
"What would you like me to get you?"
Before I could stop myself, my tongue went, "Soy nuts would be nice."
"Oh, right, soy nuts." He remembered his promise. He told me to wait and went inside the shop. When he came out, he said, "We'll take a walk, and I'll get you the soy nuts."
As soon as San-bao paid for the soy nuts, I reached for the bag.
"No, not yet." San-bao took it away. "I don't want the beggar children to jump on you. We must find a quiet place to sit."
I followed San-bao. We arrived at the back of the old churchyard where the weeds were waist-high. Black crows shot into the sky. Field mice ran through the wild berry bushes. We sat down. San-bao watched me eating the soy nuts. As soon as I finished, he put his arm around my shoulders.
"I am good to you, aren't I?" he asked.
I nodded, feeling a little awkward.
"Do me a favor," he said, pulling my hand over and placing it on top of his crotch.
I was shocked.
"You don't have to be so serious." He grinned.
"I'm going home, San-bao."
"Come on, Willow."
"No, San-bao."
"You owe me." He dropped his smile and his voice turned cold.
I was frightened. I got up and ran, but he caught me.
"You really believe that I'd let a cooked duck fly away?" He pushed me down.
I struggled to free myself.
He held my neck and twisted my head to the side. "I paid for your soy nuts."
"I'll give you the money back!"
"You have no money."
"I'll find a way."
"I want it right now!"
"I don't have it."
"Yes, you do. You have something I like. All you have to do is to let me touch it . . ." He reached inside my clothes.
"San-bao, please!"
"Willow, give me no trouble."
"Let me go!"
"Don't make me hurt you."
"No!"
"You bitch!"
"No!"
He pressed my face down to stop me from screaming.
I fought and kicked, but he was too strong.
My clothes were ripped.
I begged him to stop.
Refusing, he forced himself onto me.
Losing strength, I broke down. There was no way I could escape. I regretted my foolishness.
It was when San-bao pushed my face to the side that I saw a shadow. There was a figure hiding behind a stone tablet.
A familiar black knitted cap revealed who it was.
"Help!" I screamed.
Before San-bao could react, Pearl ran up. She struck San-bao with a big rock.
Instantly, San-bao fell over and was still.
"Oh, my God." Pearl stepped back. "Did I kill him?"
I gasped getting up.
Pearl bent down and put a finger under San-bao's nose.
"He's not dead!" Pearl said. "Should I hit him more?"
"No, no more!" San-bao pleaded, trying to raise himself.
"You deserve to die!" I yelled.
Pearl picked up the rock again.
"No!" San-bao rose and ran.
Pearl chased him until he disappeared.
Gratitude filled my chest.
Pearl came back and brushed the dirt off my clothes.
"Thank you for the rescue, my friend," I uttered.
"Who is your friend?" She turned away. "Liar!"
"Please forgive me, Pearl. I'll do anything to make it up to you."
"Do you expect me to trust you?" She looked at me, disgusted. "You took my father's wallet and spent his money; you stole Wang Ah-ma's pancakes and lied to my mother . . . You little donkey ass!" You little donkey She walked down the hill, swinging her basket.
I tried to hold back my tears.
She sang a Chinese song that I knew well. The hills echoed. The colorful wild flowers in her basket bounced under the bright sunshine.
_Jasmine flower, sweet jasmine flower_
_Your beauty and fragrance is the best among the spring_
_I'd like to pick you and wear you in my hair_
_But I fear that you would be upset and wouldn't come back the next year_
Noises filled the Sunday church. Men exchanged opinions on the weather and methods for pest control. Women knitted, mended, embroidered, and chatted. Someone shouted across the room. Children threw pine nuts at each other. Mothers nursed their infants and yelled at their elder children. Absalom was unable to quiet the crowd until Papa rang a merchant's bell.
"Folks, the Western monk needs our help," Papa said with raised voice. "In my opinion, Absalom offers not an alternative but a better deal. Look, we have fed our gods and they are fat and happy. But what have they done for us? Nothing. Now, folks, I'd like you to take a hard look at Absalom's God, Jesus Christ. Just look at his appearance. Anyone who is not blind can tell that he works harder than the Chinese gods. So listen, folks, listen to Absalom."
Absalom picked up the opportunity. "Today we shall learn about the Baptism of Christ." He pulled out his color drawing and pointed. "The two men are Lord Christ and John."
I saw two figures standing in a river performing a ceremony. John and Christ had almost oriental features, with smaller noses and slightly slanted eyes. Absalom had finally taken Papa's advice. He had smoothed the deep-set Western eyes and flattened their pointed noses. Christ now had longer earlobes, resembling Buddha's.
Papa told me that Absalom at first had insisted on presenting a fully bearded Christ. It wasn't until Papa proved to him that no Chinese would worship a god that looked like a monkey that he agreed to trim the beard.
"Buddha's face changed as he traveled from India to China." Papa pointed out to Absalom the difference between the early India Buddha and the later Chinese Buddha. Buddha's eyes grew smaller as he arrived in China, his skin lighter and smoother. The Chinese sculptors made sure that Buddha appeared well fed. With his eyes half closed, Buddha looks like he is about to nap after a satisfying meal.
When Absalom baptized Papa, it was a big day for the town. Everyone wanted to see Papa being dipped in the river like a pot sticker in soy sauce. It was the first time Pearl and I sat together. We both had been trying to help our fathers draw a crowd.
Absalom and Papa stood face-to-face in the river with water up to their waists. Absalom was in his dark gray robe, while Papa wore his washed white cotton gown. Papa was red-faced and looked nervous, while Absalom was serious and solemn.
Speaking his heavily accented Chinese, Absalom explained, "Descending into the waters implies a confession of guilt and a plea for forgiveness."
Papa repeated loudly after Absalom.
"Make a new beginning!" Absalom shouted. "Come to the light on the Cross!"
Papa tried to stand still but wasn't able to. "When should I take a breath?" he asked.
Absalom ignored him. "'Take me and throw me into the sea,' says Jesus," he sang.
"Tell me when," Papa spoke again.
"Wait." Absalom held him.
"I am afraid of drowning," Papa said. "I really am."
"Trust in God."
Gently, Absalom pushed Papa back until his head went under the water.
The crowd held its breath.
"Lord Jesus bears all righteousness!" Absalom hailed.
The crowd cheered.
Papa looked frozen. He emerged from the water and immediately sank back again.
"Papa, what are you doing?" I shouted.
"He is accepting Christ's death," Pearl said quietly.
"For what?"
"For his sins and the sins of humanity."
Papa reemerged from the river, spilling water like a fountain. He didn't choke. I was relieved. I saw NaiNai among the crowd wiping her tears. The night before she had told us that she liked the idea that her son was getting a cleaning.
"God calls out, 'This is my beloved son!'" Absalom shouted. "'This is the anticipation of his death on the Cross and his Resurrection!'"
Led by Absalom, Papa walked out of the river.
"I feel God and his Will!" Papa said to the crowd. "Jesus made me shake off a failed life. I am to begin a new one!"
I was sure Papa did it for Absalom to thank him.
As if touched by Papa's transformation, Absalom stuck out both of his arms toward the sky, calling out, "Praise the Lord!"
Speaking together as if singing a duet, Papa and Absalom stood side by side in the church on Sundays. Folks were curious when they heard about Papa's new luck on getting blessed by the foreign god. They came to see if they could acquire the same protection.
Papa delivered an outstanding performance for Absalom.
"We live in an underworld filled with demons," Papa began with the same enthusiasm he showed when reciting his Chinese poems. "Doomed by fate, we are captured by evil, spellbound by mean spirits. We, the incense burners, the coolies, the losers, gamblers, drunkards, thieves, and deaf-n-blinds. Be afraid no more, because Jesus is here to help. All you have to do is to make a new start by signing up with Absalom."
Papa asked the town's seventeen-year-old widow, Lilac, who was an egg seller, "Am I right to guess that Buddha hasn't answered your prayers?"
"No, he certainly has not," Lilac replied.
"Are you losing faith in him?"
"I am afraid to say yes, but yes."
"You are disappointed."
"I don't mean to offend Buddha. But yes."
"Lilac, you have been visiting the temple since birth. The incense you have burned could make a hill. Did your life change for the good? You were bought and sold twice. You were married to a sick man who was dying. You were forced to sleep with the crop in order to balance his yin and yang elements. You barely escaped from your in-laws. You came to Chin-kiang friendless and family-less and still are. Have you ever questioned the god you worship?"
Lilac shook her head and began to weep.
"Well, consider your disappointment an investment!" Papa said.
"An investment?" Lilac's big eyes widened.
Absalom frowned.
Papa's tongue had never been so slippery as his words poured. "This investment warns you not to make any more bad choices, so that you won't end up captive to evil spirits forever!"
"But I have been burning incense!" Lilac protested. "I don't deserve bad luck forever!"
"Have you ever asked yourself the reason that bad luck still follows you?" Papa asked.
Lilac shook her head.
"Why you and no one else?"
"Why?"
To drive home his point, Papa punched his right fist into his left palm. "It's the wrong god you have been worshipping!"
Lilac was stunned.
"The Christian God says, Lilac, you deserve a chance for a better life. Yes, you, Lilac!" Like an opera singer, Papa commanded the stage. "God tells me that Lilac deserves the same chance as his beloved son, the Lord Jesus Christ! Now make your wish and claim it!"
"I'd certainly make that wish," Lilac said in a small voice. "But first and most of all I wish that my eggs be given a chance to become chickens."
I admired Lilac because she never complained about her misfortune. She was always cheerful and kind. Her egg service was fully booked before winter. This year she thought that I was old enough to help her separate the good eggs from the bad. She hired me. What surprised me was that Pearl was there too. I learned that Pearl had been visiting Lilac since she had been a little girl. Lilac's egg house was her playground. Lilac adored Pearl because she was such a dependable helper. Carie told Lilac that her daughter was permitted there for the learning experience. Pearl had so much fun that she would forget to go home. Wang Ah-ma had to come and drag her back at the end of the day.
At Lilac's request, Pearl showed me the way. I learned that it would take about a month and a half for the eggs to hatch. Pearl taught me to separate eggs from the main basket. We removed the eggs that were too small or whose shells were too thin, or had a broken yolk or had been in the storage too long.
Pearl told me that what she loved to do most was shine the eggs. This was done after Lilac sealed the egg house, leaving only a small hole in the door. Pearl and I took turns holding the eggs in front of the hole where the sunlight shone through. This was called "the first look." The purpose was to see if the egg yolk carried a pearl. If there was a pearl, the hen had been visited by a rooster, which meant that the egg would turn into a chick.
After the examination, we placed the qualified eggs in warm baskets padded with cotton. Lilac would take the baskets and store them underneath her big brick bed behind her stove. We had to wait for four days to have "the second look."
The purpose of the second look was to see if the pearl had swelled. Lilac taught us to hold the egg in our palm. Back and forth we turned the egg toward the sun. We looked for a shadow, the pearl. It was not an easy task and it took an experienced eye. Afterward we removed the eggs that hadn't swelled. Again we put the qualified eggs in the cotton-padded baskets and put them under Lilac's bed.
We would repeat the procedure every four days. It was what Lilac called "the third look" and "the fourth look." When the shadow became clear to our eyes, we moved all the egg baskets from underneath Lilac's big bed and transferred them to ceramic pots. Inside the pots was a mixture of earth and straw. It looked like a hot cave. A tiny fire was built underneath the pots to keep the temperature warm. According to Lilac, this was the most crucial step. If it was too hot, the eggs would be cooked. If it wasn't warm enough, the pearl wouldn't turn into a chick.
The success or failure of Lilac's year would be determined in a few days. Lilac invited all her gods onto her walls. She lit incense and performed ceremonies begging to be blessed. This year she put up a picture of Jesus Christ.
I was tempted to take a peek into the pots. But Pearl refused to go along with me. She followed Lilac's instruction faithfully. Like a mother hen, Lilac wouldn't leave her eggs. Day and night, she guarded the pots, adding and withdrawing straw to and from the fire. She no longer spoke but whispered—she was afraid to disturb the eggs. I watched Pearl draw pictures of Lilac, who was sleeping with her mouth wide open. Lilac had been talking about making good money hatching her eggs before she fell asleep. In the last two-week period Lilac had grown thin. She had no time to eat or sleep. She feared that the temperature would waver and destroy her harvest. Her eyes became red and her cheeks sunken. Pearl and I avoided talking to Lilac because she was irritable and nervous.
When Lilac put out the fire, we knew that the winter was over. In just a few days the air warmed. Spring came with dampness, and we had to battle excessive moisture.
The three of us took the eggs out of the giant ceramic pots to air them. We put the eggs on Lilac's brick bed with cotton pads underneath. Lilac sent Pearl and me to notify the farmers that the time to pick up their baby chicks had come.
We were thrilled when we saw the little beaks appearing. The young chickens chipped away at the shells and worked their way out. Pearl called it a grand birthday party when all the chicks finally broke through.
"What beauties!" Pearl cried to the chicks hopping on and off her hands.
Lilac was too tired to celebrate. She snored, leaning against the wall, while Pearl and I counted the chicks. We put the chicks into baskets to be picked up. Lilac laughed and cried in her sleep. Her face glowed with pleasure. "What should be done in summer, you don't do in spring!" she yelled. "Am I not right?"
"You are perfectly right, Lilac!" Pearl and I answered. We helped her to the bed, where she would sleep for days.
Chapter 4
It was early September. Hot, sweet air filled my lungs. Pearl and I ran down the hills. We passed little children playing with dirt and earthworms. We passed the town's oldest man napping in the shade of a tree. I was thrilled because Pearl had finally invited me to her home.
"My mother doesn't know that I am bringing you," Pearl said excitedly.
"Will she . . . mind?" I felt nervous. "After all, I did lie."
"Oh, she has long forgotten that."
"Has she?"
"Mother said that sometimes people can't be held responsible for what they do, because they don't know God."
I stopped. "What if she remembers? What if she tells me, 'I don't want a liar as my guest'?"
"Oh, she knows you, and she's always liked you."
"How do you know?"
"Willow, my mother was bound to adore you."
"Why?"
"Because you can sing."
I looked at her.
"Willow, my mother has been trying to organize a children's choir, but she can't find any children who can sing or are willing."
"She knows that I'm willing," I said. "But I don't know if she thinks I can sing well enough."
"Yes you can."
"My voice can't hold the highest notes. It cracks."
"Mother will teach you how to carry the high notes. Besides, the church songs are no Chinese operas. They are much easier to sing."
"Will you sing too, Pearl?"
"Yes, I love singing, although I don't really have much of a voice. But it doesn't matter. I can sing 'Jasmine, Sweet Jasmine' forever."
She began the tune and I joined. When we finished, Pearl began again in the Yangchow accent, and I followed. We sang in both Soochow and Nanking accents, too.
"Do you have a favorite Chinese opera?" I asked after we exhausted all our accents.
" _The Butterfly Lovers_!"
"That is my favorite too!"
"The Ming dynasty version or the Ching dynasty version?" Pearl asked. I was surprised at her knowledge. "The Ching version, of course."
She nodded and then we began.
_I live by the Yangtze River near its source,_
_While you reside farthest down its course._
_You and I drink water out of the same stream,_
_I haven't seen you though daily of you I dream._
_When will this river water cease to run?_
_When shall I not love you, the way I do?_
_I only wish our two hearts would beat as one,_
_And you wouldn't disappoint me in my love for you._
Hand in hand we walked along the riverbank. I asked if she was allowed to sing Chinese opera at home.
"Are you kidding?" she mocked. "Absalom allows no other sound than God's."
I asked if she got along with her parents.
"My parents use a fork and knife; I use chopsticks."
* * *
Both Absalom and Carie were out when we arrived, so Pearl gave me a full tour of her home. The house was a three-room bungalow made of brick and wooden boards. The middle room served as a living and dining area. On each side were bedrooms. Pearl shared hers with her baby sister, Grace. Her parents' bedroom had a big wooden bed. The sheets were washed white and made of coarse cloth. The stains on the wall showed a leaky roof. The place was extremely clean. Even the worn-out furniture glowed. Pearl pointed out the pink curtains. "Mother made them herself with fabric from America." On the side of the house there were two large ceramic jars containing water from the river. I was surprised that the family lived just like us.
"Mother leaves our door open all year long," Pearl said.
"She will receive anyone who knocks?"
"My parents love any opportunity to introduce Jesus Christ."
"But Carie cares about people, doesn't she?"
"Yes, my mother does, a great deal, unlike my father, who cares only about God."
"I don't know about leaving the door open all the time," I said. "Beggars might get in and it would be hard to get them out."
"People who show up are 'too poor to afford a string to hang themselves with,' in my mother's words. 'Foreign Mistress, Carie TaiTai,' they call her, and beg for food."
"Your mother has to put up with a lot."
"This is nothing compared to what she has been putting up with from her husband." Pearl told me that Carie had tried to convince Absalom to leave China in order to save her dying children.
"Does your mother still want to leave China?" I asked.
"No, she gave up." Pearl paused and then went on. "The visitors Mother truly enjoys are sailors from America. She bakes cookies for them and they love her for it. After food and wine, Mother and the sailors sing 'Afar from Home' together. They all laugh and cry at the same time."
* * *
As Pearl predicted, Carie was pleased the moment she found out that I was willing to join her children's choir. She took me to the piano and I sang "Amazing Grace."
Carie showed me how to steal breaths when hitting the high notes. I learned not to strain my voice. To instruct me, Carie began to sing other songs. I loved Carie's voice although I had no idea what she was singing. I promised to come again for lessons. Carie believed that my voice would change for the better with practice. After a couple of months, I did improve. I was able to carry the high notes effortlessly. I could imitate Carie's voice, and I also had the ability to memorize a song once Carie had sung it. Soon, Carie invited me to sing at Absalom's Sunday service. I sang the song clearly with emotion as if I understood the lyrics.
Pearl was proud. Her face glowed when Carie said, "I thank God for Willow!"
Absalom was also impressed. "Keep up the good work for the Lord," he encouraged.
I knew in his heart Papa didn't care much about God although he pretended that he did. I figured that I could do the same. What I loved was to sit by Carie as she played the piano. Carie never quizzed me regarding my knowledge of God. I was grateful that she didn't mind that I sat quietly. She said that a child ought not to miss the joy of music. She would sing a tune that came to her mind. I would hear seasons in Carie's voice. The sound of spring was like the Yangtze River filling up the creeks. Her sound of summer was like the sun's touch. Autumn was colors that vibrated and heightened my senses. Her voice of winter was deep, a story of snow.
While sitting by Carie I felt happiness. But once in a while the words would fill my heart with sadness. It would happen in the middle of my practice. I would choke and break down. Carie would put her arm around me.
"Let's take a break," she would suggest. "I'll play you my favorite tune."
Carie's music never failed to cheer me up. When Carie was in a good mood, she would sing duets with me. I loved the sound we made together. If I began to get an idea about heaven, it was through singing with Carie.
"Willow, how I wish that I could take you to see America," Carie said one day.
Carie spoke about her homeland. She said that she didn't mean to live in China forever. It was her duty as a Christian wife to follow Absalom to China and set up her tent in the small town of Chin-kiang. It was not her choice, she emphasized.
I asked Pearl if she shared her mother's feelings.
"Well, China feels more like home to me than America," she replied matter-of-factly. Pearl hadn't been to America since she was three months old. "America is my mother's real home and she says it's mine too." She paused and then added, "America is where Mother comes from and where she wishes she could return."
"What about you?" I asked.
"I have no idea where I will end up eventually."
I asked if she missed America. She laughed. "How could I miss something I have no idea of?" I asked if she knew her relatives in America. "I know their names," she replied, "but I don't know them personally. My parents talk about my aunts, uncles, and my cousins. They are strangers to me. The only people I know besides my parents and sister are your people. I am afraid that one day my father will decide to return to America. I can't imagine leaving China."
I looked at her, trying to picture the moment of such a departure.
"In a way it is sad that my mother is not like her husband," Pearl resumed after a while. "Absalom's home is where God's work is. He doesn't care where he lives, be it America or China. My mother lives with a broken heart. As far as she is concerned, her life is as an exile. She holds on to her piano, because it is from her home."
I had noticed the way Carie cared for her piano. Its legs were in slippers—Carie raised the piano from the packed earth to protect it from moisture. In Chin-kiang water came into the rooms at the end of each rainy season. Wooden furniture had to be put on bricks. We laid planks from room to room when the water was too high. Carie's biggest concern was that mold would eventually destroy her piano.
We practiced for the Christmas performance. Carie had translated the lyrics from English to Chinese. Although I was literate in neither language, I liked the English version better. I told Carie that the sound of "Silent Night" in Chinese was not as beautiful as in English. Carie replied, "The beauty of a song shouldn't matter as much as its message."
Absalom had his highest attendance ever—the children's singing drew people in from the streets on Christmas Eve. For the first time, I saw a big smile on Absalom's face. To celebrate, he got rid of his fake Chinese queue and let his shoulder-length brown hair hang down. It took the crowd a while to get used to his new Western-man look. Papa told NaiNai that Absalom needed the success. He had returned from a rough tour recently. While Absalom was preaching in a neighboring village, he was beaten by folks who had never seen a foreigner in their lives and who thought that Absalom was there to do harm. Dogs were let out to chase him away.
Pearl showed me Carie's yard. "Mother is determined to create an American garden. She brought plants from America. This is dogwood and that is a Lincoln rose, Mother's favorite."
"This looks like a Chinese butterfly flower." I pointed at the dogwood. "And the Lincoln rose must be a cousin of the peony."
"I am sure there is some sort of connection. Mother said God created nature the same way he did humans. What we see is God's generosity."
"Do you really believe in God, Pearl?" I asked.
"I do," she said. "But you know me. I am also Chinese. Part of me can't talk to my parents, not that they care."
"Do you get confused too?" I asked carefully. "I mean, about God?"
She kicked a rock off the road. "It hurts me that God doesn't respond to my mother's prayers."
"Is your mother mad at God?"
"Mother is angry at Father, not at God," Pearl explained. "She is still unable to accept the deaths of my four brothers."
"Is that why she doesn't preach, even though her Chinese is much better than Absalom's?" I asked.
Pearl nodded. "Mother wants to have faith in Father's work, but she can't convince herself. She told me that she has a hard time staying on the sunny side."
"Your mother shows the goodness of God to us."
"Mother says that she helps others because it helps in healing herself."
"A woman hides her broken arm inside her sleeve," I told Pearl, repeating something NaiNai had said. "Your mother abandoned her parents for her crazy husband."
Pearl and I discovered that God had a strange way of making things work for Carie. At first she wasn't able to get people to join Absalom's church, but when she started to help the locals, attending their sick and dying, administering Western medicines for humans and animals while refusing money or gifts, the locals began to crowd the church.
Carie was concerned that I had become a distraction to Pearl's study. Absalom disagreed. He told her, "Pearl is doing a great service to the Lord when she takes the opportunity to influence her friend."
To encourage my friendship with his daughter, Absalom gave me gifts such as a picture of Christ by his own hand. Absalom put Pearl to work with me using his own translation of the Bible. We fooled around instead. Pearl had a hard time concentrating on doing God's work. Only when we saw Absalom's shadow passing by the window did we recite the Bible in dramatic, loud voices.
Carie set new rules for Pearl about spending time with me. She was only allowed to play after she completed her studying. Carie taught Pearl at home herself. Pearl was also given Chinese lessons by Mr. Kung, a chopstick-thin Chinese man in his fifties. I sat by Pearl's door and waited patiently. I noticed that Pearl often went ahead of Mr. Kung. She finished the novel _All Men Are Brothers_ before the lesson even started. Pearl had told me that the novel was about a group of poor peasants who were driven into desperate situations and became bandits. In the story, they seek justice and become heroes. Mr. Kung was impressed that Pearl had memorized the novel's one hundred and eight characters, but he criticized Pearl the way any Chinese teacher would. "A truly smart person . . ." Mr. Kung paused and smoothed his goat beard with his thumb and first finger before continuing, ". . . is the kind of person clever enough to hide her brilliance."
"Yes, Mr. Kung," Pearl answered humbly, and winked at me.
Papa celebrated the day Absalom made him a "Clergy."
"I thought my best luck would be to become the church's gateman." Papa wept as he sat on the doorsill.
NaiNai was overwhelmed with happiness. "Promise me, son, you will honor Absalom by weathering the storms with him."
Papa promised like a son of true piety. He told NaiNai that Absalom had started training him to be in charge of the Chin-kiang church.
"What will Master Absalom do when you take over?" NaiNai questioned.
"Absalom will work on expansion. He plans to go deep into the countryside."
Papa told NaiNai that although he felt honored, he was having difficulty committing himself to God.
"Absalom has assigned a dog to be in charge of catching mice,"
NaiNai sighed. She worried that her son would let Absalom down.
Papa tried his best to play the part. He said that he would never admit that he was in it for the money. Papa told NaiNai that his promotion came as a result of Absalom's fight with another man of God.
"Is there another God's man?" NaiNai and I asked.
"A new missionary who called himself a Baptist," Papa explained.
"Is Absalom a Baptist as well?" we asked.
"No, Absalom is a Presbyterian."
Regarding the difference, Papa said that he was confused himself, although Absalom had explained it to him.
"As far as Absalom is concerned, Chin-kiang is his territory," Papa concluded.
The Baptist was a red-haired heavy fellow with one blind eye. He often came by our church and told the crowd that Absalom had it all wrong. He pointed out, for example, that Absalom only sprinkled the heads of his converts when he ought to soak their heads in the water.
This made sense to the Chinese. The logic was that if a little water was good for the soul, more water should be better, and that a deep soaking would be the best way to go.
Absalom was convinced that the Baptist was here to destroy his work by snatching away his converts. "He is planting doubts in their heads about me," Absalom complained to Papa.
I didn't know how to deal with the Baptist when I met him outside the church. By walking away, I would insult him. So I waited until he finished his preaching about immersion.
Our encounter upset Absalom. He vowed revenge.
NaiNai predicted rather gladly, "The fisherman profits when a crab and a lobster are locked in a fight." By fisherman, she meant Papa.
Papa agreed. "I heard Absalom shout at his wife," he reported, mimicking Absalom. "'I have taught, labored, and suffered all the troubles of instilling the fundamentals of Christianity into the heathens! It is nothing short of religious thievery when my future members would be added to the Baptist's glory!'"
"Is it that serious?" NaiNai wondered.
"Oh, yes, for Absalom," Papa said. "How otherwise would I receive my promotion as a Clergy? Absalom is no fool."
"You'd better not meddle," NaiNai warned.
Papa smiled. "I would benefit more if their fight continues."
NaiNai shook her head and said, "Being a crippled donkey walking on a broken bridge—you are going to fall sooner or later."
"I am no longer the same rotten character you think," Papa said. "I'll not be the one to bring Absalom's church into contempt. Absalom will win."
"I just want to be able to have a clean conscience when I die." Tears filled NaiNai's eyes. Papa took out a string of copper money and laid it by NaiNai's pillow.
"Absalom paid me for your medicine, Mother."
NaiNai cupped her face in her palms and began to weep.
"Where is Absalom now?" I asked Papa.
"He is touring the countryside. Perhaps he is in the middle of conducting a study class."
"Does he teach?"
"Yes."
"What does he teach?"
"Absalom teaches Bible history, philosophy, religions, Greek, and Hebrew. He spreads the Gospel."
"Does he take women disciples?"
"No, Absalom's disciples are men only."
"How far does he travel?"
"As far as he is able to reach." Papa paused for a moment and then added, "The man is ambitious. I have little doubt that his Christian God will conquer China one day."
Papa told me that he was amazed by the fact that educated Chinese youths were willing to follow Absalom.
"Absalom has converted even Chinese Muslims." Papa scratched the back of his head in disbelief. "I believe it is the way Absalom wages the war of God that attracts young people. He is absolutely committed and stubborn. A zealot, so to speak. The young worship his energy and determination. More than anything else, he sells God's victory. People want to follow a strong man, a leader."
I asked Papa, "How can you be a Clergy if you don't believe in God one hundred percent?"
"Keep your voice down, my daughter." Papa was embarrassed. "Be the keeper of my secret. According to Absalom, God will call."
"Have you been waiting?"
"Yes, I have, and I must be patient."
"I hope you mean it."
"I do," Papa swore.
The winter of 1899 was brutally cold. Sky and hills merged in one bitter whirl of wind and snow, which was rare in southern China. In the mornings the valleys were silent under their blanket of whiteness. The weather helped Papa achieve the attendance he had promised Absalom. Attracted by the church's warm fire, the poor gathered under the portrait of Jesus Christ and prayed.
The way Papa preached the Bible was different from Absalom. Papa told it the way he would a Chinese story. He prepared his material carefully so that it would always have a suspenseful beginning and a satisfying end.
When Absalom returned from his trips, he was bothered by Papa's exaggeration and invention. Especially when Papa compared Jesus to the Chinese folk heroes, even the fictional Monkey King. Papa argued that the Monkey King had the same kind heart as Jesus. Papa's aim was to do whatever it took to keep the audience coming back.
"Stick to the Bible from now on," Absalom ordered Papa. "Emphasize that the journey of the faithful will be over a lifetime of poverty and sacrifice."
Papa convinced Absalom to at least allow him to mention Buddhism. "I'll use the concept as a tool to ease people toward Christianity," he promised. Answering Absalom's doubts, Papa said, "Nobody likes to be told that their religion is bad and silly."
People attended the church, but no one agreed to the conversion. Calling on his wits, Papa became inventive. Inspired by the local fortune-teller, Papa copied drawings from the Bible onto cards with which he played with the locals. The rewards for joining the church and obeying God would be good harvests, sons, and longevity. For punishment, Papa described scenarios borrowed from the Chinese hell, where men and women were chopped to pieces and fed to beasts.
Pearl burst out laughing when Papa exchanged the names of Chinese gods with Christian saints. For example, Guan-ying as Mary.
"Absalom will tear out his hair for this one," Pearl said.
I asked if she missed her father when he was away. She said that she didn't. "I don't know him enough to miss him." She adored Papa and thought that he was funny and creative. Pearl especially enjoyed the New Year's couplets and riddles Papa created. The phrases were from the Bible. Papa gave Bible Sticks for people to draw—an idea he stole from the Buddhist temple, where drawing fortune sticks was part of the worshipping ceremony.
Absalom continued to complain, and even threatened to fire Papa. But he was impressed with the results. Church attendance soared. The Chin-kiang church was now known throughout the province, although there were still not enough converts.
Pearl and I were told by our fathers to influence our playmates. I didn't feel comfortable talking about a foreign god. Pearl shared my feelings. We bribed our playmates with games and food in exchange for promises that they would show up at the church on Sundays. The trouble was that once the children became too familiar with Papa's Bible stories, they wanted different stories or they would stop coming. In the meantime, spring arrived—and the laborers left for home to work in the fields.
Papa worried that when Absalom returned from his latest trip, he would find the numbers down. Papa didn't want to lose his job. Every night, Papa worked hard on refreshing the Bible stories.
For several Sundays, Pearl and I sat in the back of the church listening to Papa speaking to an almost empty room. Pearl didn't seem to be bothered by the declining numbers. She continued to bury her face in her books.
I wondered what we would do if Papa lost his job. NaiNai's illness had worsened during the winter. The medicine no longer had any effect. NaiNai was reluctant to call for a doctor for fear of going deeper into debt. At the thought that I might lose NaiNai, tears came to my eyes. As I raised my chin to push back the tears, I noticed something strange was happening to the church's ceiling. The beams were covered with brown-colored spots. I went to Pearl and pointed out what I saw. She wondered if the spots were bugs.
For the next few days we watched. The bugs did not move. A week later we found that the bugs had swelled and were turning into green leaves.
"The leaves are growing!" Pearl and I looked at each other and were excited.
In a week, the green leaves took up the entire corner of the ceiling. They began to spread over to the window and then to the top of the doorsills. We called all our friends to come and look. They came. They went home and told their parents about the green miracle on the church's ceiling.
Eventually we learned that the green growth was willow sprouts. The beams had been made of willow trunks. Although the trunks were stripped bare, the warm spring had brought them back to life.
The news that the foreign god was showing signs of his existence brought people rushing back. Papa called the church's ceiling God's Garden. The place was packed the day Absalom returned. The willow beams were flourishing. The new sprouts were five and seven feet long. With the breeze from the window, the leaves swayed like dancers' sleeves across the room.
With Absalom by his side, Papa read from the Book of Revelation. The crowd listened while enjoying the miracle of God at work. Bees, butterflies, and birds flew in and out of the room and drove the little children wild.
Chapter 5
An opera troupe, the Wan-Wan Tunes, arrived. For the Spring Moon Festival it would play _The Butterfly Lovers_. The moment Pearl and I heard the news, we could barely contain ourselves. Pearl begged Carie for permission to join me and NaiNai, who said it was the last show she wanted to see before she died.
We dressed up for the performance. I wore a blue floral cotton gown and Pearl wore a purple silk dress embroidered with pink butterflies. Pearl carefully stuffed her curly hair under the black knitted cap. From the back, we looked like twin sisters. We made necklaces with fresh jasmine buds. Hand in hand, we walked toward the riverbank where the performance was to take place.
The stage was next to the riverbank. It was an abandoned temple with four columns. The crowd began to gather at sunset. Some people came with boats and others watched from rooftops. There were also people watching from a faraway hillside. With Pearl and me on either side of NaiNai, we pushed through the crowd. We settled near the stage. NaiNai took out roasted soy nuts for Pearl and me to share as we waited for the curtain to open.
The drums finally began. Our hearts raced. We cheered with the crowd. " _Wan-Wan Tunes! Wan-Wan Tunes!_ "
The curtain moved aside. The stage warmers entered. A string of cartwheels followed. The chorus singers introduced the story. A moment later the actors appeared. The star actor, who played the male lover, the handsome Liang, was a girl. She wore heavy makeup. She was dressed in a splendid sun-colored costume with long jade beads. Her voice had what opera fans would call a copper sound to it, considered the highest quality for a young male voice. Her Wan-Wan tune brought joyful tears to NaiNai's eyes.
My eyes followed Liang's every move. His lover, Yin-tai, was a supreme beauty. The actress was wrapped in a long-sleeved pink silk costume. She moved like a goddess stepping from the clouds. Although her breath seemed a little labored, her voice was sweet.
The evening deepened. The stage was brightly lit with lanterns. In front of our eyes, the love story unfolded. The lovers proclaimed their passion and fought the feudal force that tried to separate them. Pearl and I both wept at the end—the lovers had taken their own lives in the face of society's brutality.
Later on, Pearl would tell me that she had learned the Chinese version of _Romeo and Juliet_ before she knew the name Shakespeare.
The dead lovers came back to life as butterflies. They reunited and lived happily ever after. It was a tragedy with a happy ending. Spreading their giant wings, the lovers danced and sang:
_Dreams possessed me_
_I wandered and finally was where you were_
_We sat on the veranda_
_And you sang the sweet old air_
_Then I woke_
_With no one near me_
_The moon shining on_
_Lighting up dead petals_
_Making me think that you have passed and gone_
After the performance, we escorted NaiNai home. Pearl and I went back to the stage and waited at the exit, hoping to steal glances at the actors. We were fascinated that the entire cast was female. A turtle-faced, bald-headed lady was in charge of the girls. She had played the evil rich man in the opera. Pearl recognized the actor who had played Liang and the girl who had played Yin-tai, her partner. Without makeup and costume, she looked bone-thin. She went and sat on a stool. Her head rested against the wall. She was pale and looked ill. Liang helped her remove her boots and then folded the costumes and packed them into cases.
We learned that the troupe lived in two boats docked by the lower bank. This was where the night soil and trash were dumped. Although the air stank, we didn't want to leave until the turtle-faced lady threatened to send for our parents.
Pearl and I talked about the opera on our way back. We entertained ourselves with the Wan-Wan tune and the opera's theme song. We danced as the butterflies, swinging our arms up and down.
The next afternoon Pearl met with me again. We visited the troupe before they departed for the next town. We witnessed something we didn't expect: The troupe girls were forced to practice their acrobatic skills on the stone pavement. Pearl and I felt fortunate that our parents had not sold us.
Finally we located Liang, who was washing a bucket by the water.
Pearl introduced herself and expressed our admiration.
Liang gave a grateful nod but lowered her eyes. We saw tears running down her cheeks.
"What happened?" Pearl asked. "Where is your friend, Yin-tai?"
"She is sick."
"Maybe she is just exhausted," Pearl comforted her. "Give her a day to rest. I'm sure she'll recover."
"No, there is no hope."
"What do you mean?"
"She is dying of tuberculosis," the actor sobbed. She pulled over the clothes she was washing and showed us a bloodstain.
Pearl and I were shocked.
"Isn't she supposed to perform tonight?" we asked.
"The performance has just been canceled." The actor broke down. "The doctor said that she wouldn't make it through the night."
We didn't know what else to say.
The beautiful actress died. Having no money for a proper burial, the turtle-faced lady dumped the body into the river. Since the girl had been sold to the troupe at a young age, neither her parents nor any relatives had been notified about her death. After Pearl told Carie what had happened, she called Absalom and Papa. Both men went to the river and brought the body back. Absalom conducted a modest ceremony and the actress was buried in the back of the old church. NaiNai, Wang Ah-ma, and Lilac washed the young actress and dressed her in the dress I had worn to the opera. I was comforted to see that she fit my dress perfectly.
Liang came for the farewell. She was sorrow-stricken. For a moment my mind went back to the stage scene where he expressed his undying love for her as she lay dying.
Pearl couldn't stop weeping. Weeks later, she went to Absalom demanding an answer. "Why didn't God do something?"
Absalom told her that "one has to work to earn God's protection."
The distressed Pearl came to NaiNai. She took her to the Buddhist temple and asked to read a chapter from the Buddhist scripture. The title was "Heavenly Deaths and Circle of Life." Afterward, Pearl and I burned incense and prayed for the actress's soul.
"I am learning what is gay as well as what is terrible," Pearl said, as if to herself. "I'll accept the Buddhist notion that all that is truthful is beautiful."
Dysentery claimed countless lives during the Year of the Rat. NaiNai was among the sick. The local doctor refused to let Absalom and Carie treat NaiNai with their Western medicine. He insisted that the effect of the Chinese herbs that he prescribed would be disturbed.
Papa spent all his savings. NaiNai continued to get worse. I was with Pearl in the hills when a neighbor came and told me that NaiNai was about to depart. By the time I reached NaiNai's bed, she was almost unconscious. "Carie . . ." she kept calling.
I flew from the house and went to Carie. Without saying a word, Carie picked up her medicine box and came.
"My mother is possessed by evil spirits," the panic-stricken Papa warned. "If you touch her, bad luck will follow you home."
"What a shame that my husband converted you!" Carie was disgusted. "You certainly don't sound like a Christian." Opening her medicine box, she ordered Papa, "Stay away."
Taking out her needle and tube, Carie administered a shot for NaiNai. "The dose will do the job," she said. "Let me know if it doesn't. I'll fetch the doctor at the embassy."
By midnight, NaiNai was asking for water. At sunrise, she said that she was hungry.
While Papa got down on his knees to express his gratitude to Carie, Absalom said that it was God's will that NaiNai lived.
"It has nothing to do with my wife," Absalom insisted. "It's the church members' collective praying that God answered."
If Papa was a fake Christian, he changed at that moment. So did NaiNai, who officially said good-bye to the little Buddha statue in her room. She replaced it with a clay figure of Christ—a gift from Absalom.
Still, some things would never change. In NaiNai's Christian heaven, angels took the form of peach flowers, butterflies, and hummingbirds. God himself lived in a Chinese landscape where lakes reflected clouds and bamboo and pine covered the mountains. What amused Pearl and me the most was that NaiNai's Christian God traveled on the backs of deer and rode a crane if traveling great distances.
By the time I turned eleven, Pearl knew almost everyone in Chin-kiang. Our favorite person was the popcorn man, who made it to our town the first week of every month. The man spoke a northern dialect and his skin was the color of coal. Dirt thickened his hair and he wore the same canvas clothes with patches on top of patches year after year. Although he never smiled, he couldn't have been a nicer fellow. His fan-shaped nose was forever smeared with coal dust. Pushing his little cart, he wandered from village to village.
On the popcorn man's cart was a cannon-shaped cooker made of iron. The firebox was made of tin cans. Connected to the bottom of the firebox was a wooden bellows with an aluminum pipe. A crate of firewood was on the side. On top of the wood sat a cotton sack. We got excited when the man started to heat up the cannon. We watched the flames shoot high. We kept our distance after adults warned that the cannon might explode.
Pearl and I stood by the popcorn man and watched for hours on end. He rotated the cannon with his left hand and worked the bellows with his right. The man needed no clock to tell him when it was time to pop the corn. When he felt that the temperature was just right, he picked up the cotton bag and covered the cannon with it. Using an iron pipe, he pried the cannon open. The sound of an explosion followed. This was what the children had been waiting for.
"Pop!" the man would shout right before the explosion.
While small children covered their ears and some closed their eyes, Pearl and I enjoyed the sound of the explosion. Following the sound came a delicious smell. The cotton sack was instantly full. To us, it was pure magic—a can of corn or rice could be made many times its original size.
Pearl and I jumped for joy the day Carie finally agreed to give us a can of dry corn. It was already dark and the popcorn man was gone. We caught him and begged him to pop the corn for us. The man shook his head and said that the stove was already shut down. We begged and begged. We offered to help him.
We were thrilled when he finally agreed. I worked the cannon while Pearl pulled and pushed the bellows. The flames blazed. Pearl kept looking at the popcorn man—she didn't want the cannon to explode. About ten minutes later, the moment arrived. The man took over.
We heard the grand sound of the explosion. It felt as if we might go deaf.
That night, the popcorn tasted better than ever.
It became our passion to follow the popcorn man. We were like two fools, said Carie. Her rice jar was our target. Before long, Carie found out that we had been gradually emptying her grain storage. When the popcorn man came, Carie showed up. She called him a crook. Her opera-like voice was heard by the entire town. Carie grabbed the popcorn man by the arm and demanded that he leave.
Pearl and I were embarrassed. We each held Carie back as the man collected his things.
Carie yelled, waving her fist, "Don't you ever come back and steal from my children!"
The man hurried away, dragging his cart.
For days Pearl and I were sad. We could not forget the popcorn man. We felt guilty about ruining his business.
Chapter 6
Absalom had been working hard to convert the town's newcomer, Carpenter Chan. He was sixteen years old and originally from Canton. He limped a bit. He told Absalom that he had been beaten by his former employer. He had no job and was homeless and in debt. Absalom took him under his wing, hiring Chan to build his church in exchange for shelter and food. Absalom knew exactly the kind of church he wanted. He had a plan and he had purchased the land. It was a leveled lot on the main street near the market.
What Absalom didn't expect was Carpenter Chan's stubbornness and peculiar sense of style. Although the man was smart, he was incapable of following Absalom's design because he found it ugly. Chan had grown up building Chinese temples and was proud of his craft. His ancestors were among those who built the Forbidden City for the emperor. Carpenter Chan's speciality was Tokung, the traditional interlocking wooden structure. He was frustrated that he was not given an opportunity to use his skills. Carpenter Chan took every opportunity to convince Absalom to alter the design. He told Absalom, "The best Chinese architecture always has the Tokung style. It is a symbol of power, wealth, and nobility."
"I'd like to have none of that." Absalom was determined. "The church is a place where souls gather under God. No soul is above or under any other. Instead of power, wealth, and nobility, I'd like you to demonstrate simplicity, humbleness, and warmth." Absalom wanted his new church to follow a Western design, to be inviting instead of intimidating.
"Why won't you let me offer Jesus the best of my abilities?" Carpenter Chan was confused. "I should build him a temple instead of a house."
Nail by nail, Absalom and the carpenter fought. Carpenter Chan was polite and obedient, but the moment Absalom turned his back, he put back what he was ordered to take down.
Absalom threatened to fire Carpenter Chan. He demanded that all the windows be changed. "Make the frames narrower with pointed arches," Absalom ordered Chan and his crew. "Or I'll have you walking, all of you!"
Carpenter Chan was miserable when he eventually complied. To him, the rough stone façade was an insult to his reputation.
Absalom called the work a masterpiece, and he praised Carpenter Chan for his fine skills.
When Carpenter Chan started to work on the interior, he invited his friends, the local artists and sculptors, for ideas.
"I understand that you are masters of rendering Chinese gods,"
Absalom warned them instead of greeting them. "But I don't want my Entrance Jesus to look like the Kuang-yin Buddha. You are forbidden to make Jesus's expression vicious like the Chinese gate god. Do not show his teeth. As for my Worshipping Jesus by the altar, I don't want him to look like the Chinese kitchen god. Heaven forbid—do not make Jesus fat."
By the time the Jesus was presented to Absalom, he had a Buddha belly.
"No Chinese would worship a god who mirrors a bone-thin coolie," Papa advised.
Absalom was upset. He took up the scraper and carved the fat off of Jesus's belly himself.
At Sunday church, Carpenter Chan met Lilac, the egg lady. He fell in love with her at first sight. She liked him but was troubled by his limping. Knowing that she was already a converted Christian, he converted himself to please her. It made Papa happy, because he could add one more number to his book. In the meantime, Absalom began another project—to create a school. Carpenter Chan was hired to build an addition behind the church.
Papa was put in charge of the fund-raising. While Absalom was impressed by Papa's effectiveness and enthusiasm, he was irritated by his methods. Papa told the local businessmen that an investment opportunity had arrived—God would reward them with fortune and prosperity.
Under Absalom's nose, Papa inflated the numbers for the church attendance. He became bold. He signed up the walk-ins as church members and put out more food to attract beggars from neighboring villages.
"See the rug you walked on when entering this church?" Papa would open his preaching with the same sentence. "That's the rug my daughter Willow tried to steal before she was saved by God. Yes, the same God who will change your life too."
Pearl wouldn't tell me what was bothering her. NaiNai suspected that something was going on inside her family.
"Absalom is in big trouble," Papa came home and told us. "He is being investigated by the Christian headquarters in America."
"What did he do?" NaiNai asked.
"He was suspected of cheating."
"On what?" I asked.
"On his conversion numbers," Papa sighed.
We went silent. We knew that Papa was guilty.
"Maybe you should stick your head out for him," NaiNai said.
"The problem is that Absalom doesn't exactly know what I've done. He believes in my work so much that he recommended the investigators talk to me directly."
"Oh, no!" I was afraid for Papa.
"You are going to let Absalom down." NaiNai shook her head.
Under the candlelight Papa's slanting eyes narrowed into slits. He sighed and sighed.
"How could you do this to Absalom?" NaiNai wiped her tear-filled eyes.
"I only meant to help," Papa responded. "Half of the people I helped convert are for real."
"Absalom can certainly count on me for a solid member," NaiNai agreed. "Son, I want you to make it right for Absalom."
Papa went door-to-door to talk to the converts. "We must be prepared to protect Master Absalom," he urged, describing the investigation. "Act like a real Christian when questioned. Try your best to memorize the key elements, such as Jesus bore mankind's guilt down into the depths of the Jordan, and that Jesus inaugurated his public activity by stepping into the place of sinners."
Papa wouldn't let people sleep until they could respond with the correct answers. By midnight everyone was exhausted. They kept giving Papa the wrong answers.
"What did Jesus say to the crew of the ship?" Papa drilled again.
"I don't remember . . ."
" _Take me and throw me into the sea!_ " Papa shouted out for them.
"What does the word _baptism_ mean to Jesus?" Papa kept pounding.
"His death!" people chanted. "Jesus's own death!"
The next morning Pearl arrived.
"It didn't work," she reported. "Absalom has been fired."
"It can't be true," cried NaiNai.
Pearl burst into tears. "A new minister is on his way as Father's replacement."
Papa was shocked.
"How is your mother doing?" NaiNai was concerned.
"Mother is in distress. She told me that Father is going to lose his salary."
It took Carie a while to make us understand what had happened. Absalom had never paid much attention to his accounts. Papa had led Absalom to believe that he kept an accounting book. The trouble was that Absalom was unable to produce the book. Papa had spent all the church funds without bothering to make a detailed record. He had been taught by Absalom that as long as the money was spent doing God's work, he had the right. To help increase the conversion numbers, Papa had loaned most of the church money to families whose homes had been destroyed by floods and storms.
"Is your family going to starve without Absalom's salary?" I asked Pearl.
"I don't know," Pearl replied. "Mother has already told the servants that she might not be able to keep them."
"The town will not let its pastor and his family starve." NaiNai turned to Pearl. "Tell your mother that you have my invitation to move in and live with us."
For the next few weeks, the town of Chin-kiang united in defending Absalom. The investigator from the Christian headquarters accused Papa of being a man of corruption with a history of theft. Absalom responded by saying that God had restored Papa's soul. "Since his conversion, Mr. Yee has been a model Christian for the community." Absalom acknowledged that his work needed improvement, but he refused to admit that he had been misusing the church funds.
The new pastor arrived on a boat from America. He was a young man with red hair. He had a small head and a white face. If Absalom were a lion, this man would be a goat. He didn't want to speak to Papa, who tried to negotiate.
"God doesn't negotiate," the new pastor told Papa.
At the next Sunday service, Papa presented a petition to the new pastor. It was signed by the entire town of Chin-kiang. It requested Absalom's reinstatement or all the church members would leave.
The young pastor could hardly believe what he read. When he avoided the subject and started to preach, people got up and left. Children swarmed after the young pastor. "Absalom! Give us back Absalom!" they shouted.
The young man reboarded the same boat he came on and went back to America. He never returned.
Before the month ended, Absalom was reinstated.
A celebration was held at the church. Donations spilled from the paper box. Absalom was also asked to host the wedding between Carpenter Chan and Lilac. Within a year, a set of twins was born. Carpenter Chan and Lilac asked Papa to think up names for the boys. After discussing it with Absalom, Papa named them Double Luck David and Double Luck John.
The town of Chin-kiang was peaceful and quiet until Carpenter Chan got in trouble with a powerful warlord.
Although he was only in his early twenties, the warlord was famous along the Yangtze River. His nickname was Bumpkin Emperor. His territories included most of the canals in Jiangsu province. He had two sworn brothers, whom the locals nicknamed General Lobster and General Crab. Until now, their main enemies had been other warlords.
It happened when Bumpkin Emperor entered the town and took a fancy to Lilac. He claimed that Carpenter Chan had stolen his mistress. The two men had a fight and Bumpkin Emperor swore revenge.
Under Papa's questions, Lilac confessed the truth. She had had a one-night affair with the warlord and agreed to be his concubine before she met Carpenter Chan.
"Absalom knew my story," Lilac said to Papa. "He told me that God would forgive and protect us as long as we accepted Jesus as our savior and we did! I thought my troubles were over."
Papa comforted Lilac and Chan, telling them to place their trust in God.
Bumpkin Emperor returned the next day with his troops. He threatened to burn down the church if he was refused Lilac.
Papa was out of his wits because Absalom was not in town. Absalom was away on a preaching tour. Papa was given three days to turn over the couple.
Panicking, Papa sent a messenger to find Absalom.
Pearl and I visited Carpenter Chan and Lilac, who had hidden themselves in the back of the church. Believing that they would not survive, the couple huddled together and sobbed. Pearl had an idea when she learned that Bumpkin Emperor was extremely superstitious.
"I feel like I know this type of character from _All Men Are Brothers_ ,"
Pearl told Carpenter Chan. "Please tell me the gods he worships."
"Bumpkin Emperor worships gods and ghosts of all kinds," Carpenter Chan said. "He invites a ba-gua master to tell him what to do before engaging in battles. He burns incense and kowtows to not only Buddha, but also to the sun god, moon goddess, god of earth, god of war, god of water, god of thunder, god of wind and rain, and even the god of animals. Bumpkin Emperor believes in supernatural powers and fears the revenge of any god."
The three-day ultimatum had passed. Bumpkin Emperor arrested Lilac and Carpenter Chan and held a public rally. He was set to have Carpenter Chan beheaded.
It was the first time Pearl and I saw Bumpkin Emperor up close. He had a pair of big frog eyes, orange skin, and meatball cheeks. His head was pear-shaped. His dark-brown uniform was made of wool with lace sticking out from both shoulders. There were medals pinned on his breast. Carrying a sword, he stood in the middle of the town square. Behind him stood a squad of his soldiers.
Pearl and I walked toward Bumpkin Emperor. Pearl carried a bucket of ink. For the first time, she was without her knitted black hat. Under the bright sun her curly golden hair shone like autumn leaves.
No one paid attention to Pearl at first. All eyes were on Bumpkin Emperor. Carpenter Chan and Lilac were tied with their hands behind their backs. Bumpkin Emperor announced Carpenter Chan's beheading.
The executioner was called to choose his ax.
Lilac fell to her knees. She crawled toward her lover.
The crowd begged Bumpkin Emperor.
Papa and NaiNai prayed for God's mercy.
The soldiers drove the crowd back.
In my ear, Pearl whispered, "Now!"
Raising the bucket, she poured the black ink water over her head.
"Angry spirit!" I shouted.
Pearl pretended to be possessed by evil as she ran toward Bumpkin Emperor with ink dripping from her face.
The crowd gasped. "Angry spirits!"
"Black blood!"
Pearl landed in front of Bumpkin Emperor. She waved her arms and kicked her legs, knotting herself into a ball, and groaned as if being tortured by invisible spirits.
"What is this?" Bumpkin Emperor asked loudly. "Who are you?"
Kicking her feet, Pearl uttered a string of words no one understood.
"Speak! Who are you?" Bumpkin was visibly nervous.
NaiNai turned to Bumpkin Emperor and said, "You must have done something to offend the gods."
The warlord got down on his knees in front of Pearl. "Can I help you, whoever's spirit you are?" He tried to steady his shaky voice.
"I must speak to the one who is in charge," Pearl murmured in a husky voice, her eyes tightly shut. "I must speak to the general himself."
"I am the general," Bumpkin Emperor rose.
Pearl began to speak English.
"What, what is she rumbling about?" Bumpkin Emperor became tense. "Which god are you representing? Is she talking to me?"
"Yes." I told the warlord that I could be his translator.
"What is she saying?" Bumpkin Emperor turned to me.
"She said, 'The fire is at your door.'"
"Fire at my door? What does that mean?"
"In the name of the Holy Spirit . . ." Pearl continued.
"Holy Spirit?" Bumpkin Emperor was confused. "Mother of a mule, I don't understand!"
"Would you like me to stop?" I asked.
"Of course not," he said. "Carry on, dammit!"
"Well, she is not making sense."
"Do the best you can to make her words into sense!"
I began acting, bending down to get close to Pearl. "Yes, I heard you . . . Went out to him? All the country of Judah? Wait a minute." I turned to the warlord. "She said, 'All the people of Jerusalem are going toward the river to confess their sins . . .'"
Confused, Bumpkin Emperor cried, "Which god is this?"
I shook my head.
"A powerful God," Papa said, raising his arm to point at the sky. "Perhaps the true God."
"What is his name? Tell me, please!" Bumpkin Emperor begged.
"Angel," Pearl uttered.
"His name is Angel," I translated.
"I have never heard of such a god," Bumpkin Emperor responded. "Is he new?"
"He is ancient," Pearl continued. "He's been here since the beginning of time. Only the wise can hear him. He is mad at you."
"What . . . what does he want from me?" Bumpkin Emperor's voice grew weak.
Pearl went silent.
"The God no longer wants to speak to you," I translated. "The God is leaving."
"Please! Don't go!" Bumpkin Emperor was scared. "Ask what business he had here! If he is a foreign god, who is his patron in China?"
"I was invited by the Dowager Empress of your country," Pearl began to speak in Chinese. "I was escorted here by the Imperial Minister-in-Chief Mr. Li Hung chang . . ."
Before Pearl ended her sentence, Bumpkin Emperor fell down and kowtowed, hitting his forehead on the ground. "Your Majesty, I mean no offense! I . . . I deserve to die three thousand times! Please, forgive me!"
Again, Pearl closed her eyes.
"Please don't leave! Grant me a chance," Bumpkin Emperor begged. "Your Majesty, I am asking for a last chance!"
"Release Carpenter Chan and his lady," Pearl spoke with an imperial tone. "And leave Chin-kiang right away."
"Yes, Your Majesty, I shall depart instantly."
"Well, let us have no doubt that God sent Pearl to save you," Absalom said to Carpenter Chan and Lilac. "My daughter is no angel, but she is a good Christian."
Later, Pearl told me that she didn't like what her father said, although she was happy that the trick worked.
"I am sure your father loves you," I comforted my friend.
Pearl shook her head. "To tell you the truth, I am jealous of those whom he baptizes. He offers affection to strangers, to you, NaiNai, your papa, Carpenter Chan, Lilac, and almost everyone in the town. He will never spare affection for his own children. He is always cold with me."
"Absalom loves you, Pearl."
"I don't feel it. My mother doesn't feel his love either. Absalom shuts himself in the study so that he can be with God without any distraction!"
"Your father is proud of you, or he wouldn't say that you were a good Christian."
"Absalom cares about Chinese people so much that he's willing to risk his life for them. In the meantime, he believes that they are heathens and he is their superior. He lives to convert people. He even wants a chance with the warlords."
"Absalom wants to convert Bumpkin Emperor, General Lobster, and General Crab?" I laughed.
"Yes, and their fish wives, shrimp siblings, and snail concubines."
"That's impossible!"
"Oh, yes, God works miracles, hah, hah, hah!"
"Papa will believe whoever saves his ass."
"My father is a nut and your father is a crook."
We laughed and put our fathers out of our minds.
We walked to the outskirts of town, where someone was getting married. We joined the children who had been invited to the wedding to help inspire fertility. We were given nuts and seeds to throw at the new couple. The groom was a young peasant who was already drunk. He meant to thank the guests but instead he threw up. The bride was dressed in a bright-red embroidered costume. Her face was covered with a piece of silk. Pearl and I admired the costume and the bride's glittering hair ornament. When the band started the wedding song, we joined in.
_Buddha sits on a lotus pad,_
_Beautiful fingers orchidlike._
_Sun goes down and moon comes up,_
_May your life be peaceful and tranquil._
_Mud walls and straw pillows,_
_Fruits, seeds, and many sons._
_Happiness and longevity,_
_May you have the spring and all its fair weather._
Chapter 7
The Boxer Rebellion hadn't hit Chin-kiang until the first years of the new century. It had spread like a wildfire. Peasants from inland came wearing red turbans. They believed that foreigners were destroying China. It didn't occur to me that Pearl and her family were foreigners. Pearl didn't like Westerners. She had witnessed opium addicts in our town and had criticized the white folks and their opium trade. As far as she was concerned, the Boxers' fight would have nothing to do with her.
But times had changed. There had been incidents where foreign missionaries had been murdered in the northern provinces. Carie made sure that Pearl dressed like a Chinese girl and wore her black knitted cap at all times.
Pearl came to me one day and told me that Carie had been talking about their departure. "Mother said that a ship will come and it will take us all back to America."
Pearl's words devastated me. I didn't know how to respond.
She looked disturbed and nervous.
"But . . . you don't know anything about America!" I said.
"Mother said that America is a place where I would belong," Pearl said matter-of-factly. "At least I will look like everyone else. I am sick of wearing this damn black knitted cap! I'll burn it the moment I arrive in America."
"But you said that you don't know anyone in America," I insisted.
"I don't."
"Will you still go then?"
"I don't look forward to leaving, however much Mother tries to reassure me."
"To leave China is Carie's wish, not yours!" I tried to sound calm, but it was impossible. I felt like crying. "You will not be able to find a friend like me in America!"
"Perhaps not, although Mother promised that I would."
"She is tricking you." I gave a cold laugh. "You'd be a fool to believe that."
"But I can't stay if Mother decides to go."
For the next few weeks the departure became the only thing we talked about. But the more we talked about it, the deeper our sense of doom became. We ran up and down the hills and laughed, pretending that it was not going to happen. But time and time again we were reminded. For example, Wang Ah-ma became depressed because Carie told her to prepare to go her own way. The pregnant Lilac and Carpenter Chan came to visit Papa and NaiNai to update them on the murder cases involving foreign missionaries.
Pearl and I learned that more people had joined the Boxers. The swelling numbers began to demand that the Imperial government throw out foreigners and shut down their businesses in China forever. When they didn't receive the government's response, they began to mob foreign banks and buildings and destroy the national railways. Our neighboring Christian churches were disrupted. Foreign missionaries were taken from their homes and publicly tortured. When the news reached us, Pearl and I realized that our days together were numbered.
Pearl began to talk more about her "real home" in America, while I became cynical and irritable.
"Real home?" I sneered. "I'll bet that you won't even know where your front door is." I asked Pearl if she knew the feng shui of her American home and was pleased that she had no answer.
"Your house could be facing the wrong direction. Bad luck will stick to you forever!"
"What if I tell you that I don't give a damn if my American home has the wrong feng shui?" She picked up a rock and threw it into the valley. "It'll be my mother's home, not mine!"
"But you will be living in it. You will be alone and miserable because you know better!"
"I will have the company of my cousins!" she countered.
I laughed and said that her cousins might know her name, but they would have no idea who she was and what she liked. "They won't even care. To them you'll be a total stranger!"
"Stop, Willow, please," she begged.
We sat in silence and tried not to weep.
The news regarding the Boxers got worse. They were seen in Soochow, which was less than a hundred miles from Chin-kiang. Carie tried to convince Absalom to temporarily relocate. Absalom wouldn't consider it.
"I won't abandon God's work" was Absalom's answer.
Carie threatened to leave on her own and said that she would take Pearl and Grace with her.
"Mother told me that I must learn to trust in God and accept my destiny," Pearl said. We held each other's hands and sat on top of the hill. We watched the sun set without speaking another word.
It felt like living in a bad dream. I imagined Pearl's American house. According to Pearl, it was built by her grandfather. Pearl's description of the house was word for word from Carie. "It is large and white with its pillared double portico set in a beautiful landscape," she told me. "Behind the house are rich green plains and mountains."
I also imagined Pearl's relatives, who all had milk-white faces. I imagined them receiving her warmly. They would hug her as if they knew her. They would say, "How are you, my darling? It's been so long . . ." Pearl would be surrounded with clean sheets and soft pillows. She would be served plenty of food, but not the kind that she liked. No more Chinese food, of course. No more Chinese faces. No more Mandarin, or stories, or Peking operas. No more "Jasmine, Sweet Jasmine."
"I suppose I'll get used to it." Pearl gave out a long, deep sigh.
She would be forced to adapt. She had no other option. She would forget China and me.
"We might not recognize each other if we meet again," Pearl teased.
It was not funny, but I played along. "We probably wouldn't even remember each other's names."
"I might lose my Chinese."
"You will."
"Perhaps not," she said. "I'll try my best not to lose my Chinese."
"Maybe you'll want to. What's the use of Chinese in America? Who would you speak Chinese to? Grace? She's too young. You two don't play together. Maybe you will when you get to America. You won't have a choice."
She turned her head and stared at me, her blue eyes big and clear. Tears began to well up.
"You'll be drinking milk and eating cheese." I tried to cheer her up.
"And I'll turn into a big fat farmwife," she responded. "My belly will be the size of a Chinese winter melon, with breasts like round squashes."
We laughed.
"I could be married, you know," I said. "NaiNai has already been approached by matchmakers. I could end up marrying an old, greasy rich man and be his concubine. He could be a monster and beat me every night."
"Wouldn't that be awful?" She looked at me seriously.
"Awful? What would you care? You will be gone by then."
Pearl's hands reached out for me. "I'll pray for you, Willow."
I pushed her away. "You know I have a problem with that. You haven't been able to prove to me that your God exists!"
"Then pretend that he does!" Pearl's tears fell. "I need you to believe in him."
We decided to stop talking about the departure. We decided to celebrate our time together instead of wallowing in sadness. We went to see a troupe on wheels called the Great Shadow Art Show. It featured the Drunkard Monkey King and the Female Generals of the Yang Family. We had a wonderful time. Pearl was fascinated by the handmade shadow figures. The figures were created from scraped and sculpted cattle hides. The troupe master was from mid-China. He invited Pearl and me backstage, where he demonstrated how the figures worked. The actors hid under a large curtain, each holding a character with four bamboo sticks. The figures were able to tap their feet, dance to the rhythm, and fight a martial art battle while the owner sang in a high-pitched voice our favorite Wan-Wan tune.
By early fall a children's game was becoming popular. It was called Boxers and Foreigners. It was played by the rules of traditional hide-and-seek. The boys wouldn't let Pearl and me join because we were girls. All day long Pearl and I sat on top of the hill sucking milkweeds. We watched the boys with envy. One morning Pearl came to me wearing an outfit of Western clothes she had borrowed from the British ambassador. It was a camel-colored jacket with copper buttons in the front and an open neck. The sleeves were wide at the elbow and tight on the wrists. The pants were made of brown wool. "It is their daughter's horse-riding pants," Pearl explained.
When I asked why she had dressed up, Pearl replied, "We shall play our own game of Boxers and Foreigners." She showed me a red-colored scarf. "This is your costume. Tie it around your forehead. You'll be the Boxer and I'll be the foreigner."
To make herself look more the part, she took off her black knitted hat and let her waist-long hair fall freely.
I became excited. I wrapped the red scarf around my forehead like a turban.
With wood sticks as our swords, we charged down the hill. The boys were stunned by Pearl's appearance.
"A real foreign devil!" they cried.
Soon children begged to join us. Pearl became the leader of the foreign troops, while I was the chief of the Boxers.
We threw rocks, ran around the hills, and hid in the bushes. In the afternoon, my group climbed onto the roofs of houses while Pearl led a door-to-door search for us. We roamed through the streets until it was dark.
When it was time to round up the Boxers, my group let Pearl's people tie our hands behind our backs. My group lined up to be executed. Pearl offered each of us an imaginary cup of wine, which we drank before reciting our last wish. When the shots were fired, we fell to the ground. We remained dead until Pearl announced that it was time to round up the foreigners.
My group chased until Pearl and her people were captured. We tied the foreigners together like a string of crabs and paraded them through the streets. People were invited to watch the execution. Pearl had great fun shouting in English. The villagers were shocked at first, then they applauded and laughed with us.
Chapter 8
At Sunday service Absalom announced his family's departure. "God will prevail" were his farewell words to the crowd. He promised to return as soon as he settled his family in Shanghai.
"Monkeys will scatter when the tree falls," Papa said. He was worried.
Led by Absalom, the converts packed the church's valuables and hid them within their own homes. Carie's piano was a big problem. There was no way to hide it. Papa volunteered to go to Bumpkin Emperor and his sworn brothers for help. The warlords were enemies of the Boxers.
The first thing Papa said to Bumpkin Emperor was "A smart rabbit digs three holes for security. If I were you, I wouldn't miss this opportunity to make friends with the foreign god." Papa went on to tell how the Western fleets had recently destroyed the Chinese Imperial Navy.
Bumpkin Emperor took Carie's piano and hid it in his concubine's mansion.
Carie was relieved. She thanked Papa. For the last time, she trimmed her roses and cleaned her yard. Watering each of her plants, she broke down. She sat on the dirt and wept.
Pearl and I exchanged farewell souvenirs. I gave her a pink silk fan painted with flowers. Pearl gave me a hairpin with a silver phoenix. She would be leaving in ten days, perhaps sooner.
I shut my eyes and told myself to go to sleep that night. But my eyes stayed open. I tossed until dawn. NaiNai told me to forget about Pearl and to spend time with other girls in town. Over the next few days I tried, but without much luck. People didn't care to be my friend. Since I'd begun to attend the church school, I had changed. I didn't like the town girls, whom I considered narrow-minded and shallow. I couldn't help but compare them with Pearl, who was kind, curious, and knowledgeable. The town girls fought over food and territory, and they fought among themselves. They could be best friends and worst enemies and best friends again all in one day. They often singled someone out to be the enemy of the moment. Then they attacked her by embarrassing her. I avoided them because I knew that Papa and NaiNai's past would be used to torment me.
Unlike peasant daughters, who were too burdened and exhausted to have time to themselves, the Chin-kiang town girls had time on their hands. Many of their parents were shop owners and merchants. They loved to pretend to be big-city girls. But they knew very little about the big cities, like Shanghai, where Carie once lived before Pearl was born. The Chin-kiang girls looked down on peasants. They made fun of their uncivilized habits and forgot that they were not much different.
I had long accepted the reality that I was considered an odd character among the town girls. Catfighting didn't suit me. Since I had become Pearl's friend, I had been the target of these girls. The fact that Pearl and I were so close drove them mad. They watched us with jealousy and envy. Now I was having trouble. I couldn't break into the town girls' social circle. I feared that people would say I had been abandoned.
I played cards with the town girls one afternoon. My heart ached for Pearl. She would be here only a few more days and I wanted to be with her. I forced myself to concentrate on the cards. One girl cheated and I caught her. She argued and denied everything. She didn't mean aggression, nor did she say anything to provoke my anger, but I attacked her. I stopped the game and called the girl a liar. Step-by-step I exposed her tricks. The cards flew from my hands. The girl was embarrassed and exploded. No one was able to break us apart until Pearl arrived.
Pearl knew it was not my character to fight with others. She knew that I was troubled by her departure. She carefully wiped the blood off my forehead with her handkerchief. The spot on my left cheek where my opponent had scratched me with her fingernails swelled. Looking at me with her gentle blue eyes, Pearl sighed.
"I don't need you here," I said.
"Does it hurt?" she asked.
"No."
"It's not like we won't see each other forever," she said in a soft voice.
"But when? When will you come back?" I cried out.
She was unable to answer.
It was a clear day when Pearl's family boarded a steamboat that came from the upper Yangtze River. The townspeople filled the pier to see them off. Papa, NaiNai, Carpenter Chan, Lilac, and their twins, Double Luck David and Double Luck John, and a newborn son were among the crowd. Absalom had recently baptized the boys and named the newborn Triple Luck Solomon.
Absalom made Carpenter Chan promise to continue his work on the second floor of the new school until the job was finished. Reciting from the Bible, Absalom encouraged him, " _It will be the offer of a sacrifice made_ _by fire which ye shall offer onto the Lord_."
Carpenter Chan nodded and gave his word.
Wang Ah-ma begged Carie to take her with them.
"My husband's mind is set," Carie told her tearfully. "You must go your own way. We no longer have the money to keep you."
"I'll work for free!" Wang Ah-ma stuffed her mouth with the corner of her blouse to avoid crying aloud. "I'll cost you no money. I have no one else, no place to go. You and the children are my family."
The actors from the Wan-Wan Tunes opera troupe came. Many of them, including the nasty turtle-faced lady, had become Christians to Absalom's credit. "Actors travel," Absalom once told Papa. "They will be perfect to spread the Gospel."
The actors wished Pearl's family a safe journey and sang their new aria, adapted from the Bible.
_Surely goodness and mercy_
_Shall follow you all the days of your life,_
_And here we shall remain your faithful servants_
_We shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever._
Pearl promised to return, but she and I both knew that it was wishful thinking. The Boxers were moving toward the coast and might reach Shanghai soon. America would be the place where Carie and her family would eventually end up.
Pearl and I struggled to find pleasant farewell words, but it was impossible.
We bade good-bye and embraced silently.
The steamboat pulled away from the pier, creating big ripples in the water.
I waved as my tears ran.
The ripples went away. The water became calm again.
I stood on the empty pier and a Tang dynasty poem Pearl used to recite came to mind.
_My friend left the Mansion of Crane for the South where fish would bite_
_Hazelike willow down drift, petals scattered in full flight_
_Her boat disappears where the waves meet the great river_
_The bright moon is over the sky's dome_
_Wild geese fly by mountains and pavilions ancient_
_Have you achieved the smile after red sorghum wine sweet_
_Wear the blossoming chrysanthemums full in my hair_
_Draw the bamboo curtains over the windows and dream for the night_
**Part Two**
Chapter 9
The day I was engaged to be married, I was fourteen. I had no say in the decision. The town's matchmaker told Papa, "The only medicine that will help your mother regain her health will be news of Willow's marriage."
I wanted to reach Pearl desperately, but our lives had taken separate paths. Pearl had enrolled in a missionary middle school in Shanghai. Her life was a world away from mine.
"Shanghai is like a foreign country," Pearl wrote."The international military forces maintain peace here. My father is waiting for things to calm down in the countryside so that he can return to Chin-kiang. At this moment, he is translating the New Testament. At night, he reads out loud from the original Greek text and Pauline theology. He also chants intonations of Chinese idioms. Mother has fallen ill. She misses her garden in Chin-kiang."
Although I wrote back, I was too ashamed to tell my friend that I would soon be married to a man who was twice my age. I felt helpless and close to despair. Pearl's letters showed me that there were other possibilities in life, if only I could escape. Now I understood why I loved _The Butterfly Lovers_. The opera allowed my imagination to take flight. In my daydreams, I escaped the life I was living to live the life of a heroine.
The more dowry that arrived from my future husband, the worse I felt. It didn't seem to occur to Papa and NaiNai that I deserved better. Papa was angry when I begged to go to school in Shanghai. NaiNai told me that for a small-town girl, "the more she fancies the outside world, the worse her fate will be."
* * *
I had written to tell Pearl that her bungalow home had been set on fire when the Boxers raided the town. To save the church, Papa had replaced the statue of Jesus Christ with the sitting Buddha. Papa told the Boxers that he was a Buddhist and that the church was his temple. To strengthen his lie, Papa dressed like a monk. The converts chanted the Buddhist sutras as the Boxers inspected the property. It was not hard because all the converts were former Buddhists.
Papa begged Bumpkin Emperor to help protect the church. "The foreign god will return the favor," he promised. "God will save a seat for you in heaven. You will be reunited with all your dead family members and have an extravagant banquet."
Papa's tricks didn't last. Once the Boxers discovered that the "monks" were Christian converts, they were slaughtered. A member of the Wan-Wan Tunes opera was dragged out in the middle of their performance and killed in front of Papa's eyes.
Carpenter Chan and Lilac were on the Boxers' list to be beheaded.
They barely escaped.
Papa was the last convert to flee the town. On the morning of the Chinese New Year, the Boxers caught him. A public execution was to be held in the town square.
Papa begged the Boxers to let him live. He admitted that he was a fool.
The Boxers laughed and said they needed to show the public that the Christian God was a hoax. "If your God is real, call him, because we are going to hang you!"
Papa fell upon his knees and hailed, "Absalom!"
Although Papa didn't believe in God, he believed in Absalom. When a voice answered Papa's call, everyone was stunned. The voice came from the riverbank. A tall figure jumped off a boat. It was Absalom! His hands were above his head waving a piece of paper. Behind him were Bumpkin Emperor, General Lobster, and General Crab.
"Old Teacher!" the converts screamed.
The Boxers carried on. They slipped the noose around Papa's neck.
"Stop the execution!" Absalom halted in front of the Boxers. "Here is the copy of Her Majesty Dowager Empress's decree! Her Majesty has signed a peace treaty with the foreign troops! The eighth item in the treaty says, _Foreign missionaries and their converts are to be protected_."
Five more years would pass before Pearl and I would see each other again. By then I was nineteen and Pearl was seventeen. Our reunion happened soon after our ruler, Dowager Empress Tsu Hsi, died. It was said that she had exhausted herself putting out the wildfire that was the Boxer Rebellion. The new emperor she appointed was only three years old. The nation went into a long period of mourning for the Dowager Empress. Nothing had changed locally, although the country was said to have become a headless dragon.
I went to the pier to greet Pearl and Carie the day they returned to Chin-kiang. I was nervous because my appearance had changed. My dress and hairstyle indicated that I was a married woman. Instead of a braid, I wore a bun in the back of my head. In letters, I had avoided mentioning my married life to Pearl. What was there to say? The moment I entered my husband's home, I found out that he was an opium addict. The matchmaker had lied. His fortune had been squandered long ago. The family was a fabulously embroidered evening gown chewed by moths. He was in so much debt that the servants had fled. My husband had borrowed money to pay for my dowry. The marriage was my mother-in-law's idea. It was "one stone for two birds." Her son would get a concubine and she would get an unpaid servant.
My existence was about serving my husband, his mother, and his elder wives and their children. I cleaned beds, emptied chamber pots, washed sheets, and swept the gardens. I had to sneak out to see Pearl and Carie. My husband would never have given me permission had I asked.
Pearl had grown into a stunning beauty. She was tall and slender and dressed in Western clothes. She carried the air of a free spirit. Her smile was full of sunshine.
"Willow, my friend, look at you!" she called from a hundred yards away with arms wide open. "What a pretty lady you have become!"
"Welcome home" was all I could utter.
Laughing radiantly, Pearl hugged me. "Oh, Willow, I missed you so much!"
Papa, Carpenter Chan, and others came. We helped carry the luggage to Absalom's newly rented house. It was a former merchant's home located on the top of the hill.
"What a beautiful house!" Pearl marveled. "Father, how have you allowed us such luxury?"
"It is a haunted house," Absalom explained. "No locals will take it. The rent is very cheap. I took advantage of the opportunity since I don't believe in Chinese ghosts."
As soon as Pearl settled in, we took off to climb the hills. Pearl's younger sister, Grace, wanted to join us, but Pearl and I flew away together. Pearl told me that Shanghai was very flat and that she had missed the mountains and hills. She had been itching to go on a hike. She spoke about ideas I had never heard of. She described a world I could only imagine. Her Mandarin vocabulary was more sophisticated. She told me that she was getting ready for college in America. "After that, I will travel the world!"
I didn't have much to share, so I told her how we had survived the Boxers. In the middle of my story, I stopped.
"What's wrong?" Pearl asked.
"Nothing."
"Willow," she called gently.
I told myself to smile and to turn away from dark thoughts. But my tears betrayed me.
"Is it your marriage?" she asked, her hand reaching for mine.
My marriage was not uncommon for a Chinese girl, but it was too much for Pearl.
I told Pearl that on my husband's good days he smoked and gambled; on his bad days, he would take out his anger on me. He would beat me and sometimes rape me. I had to be obedient toward my mother-in-law. As far as she was concerned, it was my fault that the family was going down the drain.
"This is slavery!" Pearl concluded, her features twisting into an expression of anger.
Pearl told me that she had worked with girls in Shanghai who had been forced into abusive marriages or prostitution. "You don't have to hide your broken arm inside your sleeve anymore, Willow," she said.
My husband got himself a new concubine. It surprised me because I knew he didn't have any money. He ignored me when I questioned him. Tradition gave a man the right to dispose of his wife at will. To protest, every morning I went and stood by the village well that everyone shared. I shouted out the terrible things his family had done to me. But I received no sympathy. The village elder criticized me and said that I should commit suicide.
Standing up for myself only gave me a bad reputation. Papa considered me selfish, while NaiNai called me foolish. I didn't feel completely deserted because I had Pearl's support. I went to Carie and offered to help with the school and with setting up the new clinic. Besides teaching me English, Carie trained me and other girls to become nurses.
Pearl and I continued to spend time together, but our friendship was no longer the same. The more she looked forward to college in America, the less we could say to each other. She was sensitive and knew how I felt about my own future.
I didn't believe she would return to China after college. She seemed less sure now too. After all, it had been Carie's long-held wish to return to America.
Absalom was not interested in Pearl's departure, nor was he sad that she might never return. Absalom was more excited about his upcoming preaching tour farther inland.
Papa was a different person when he was with Absalom. He respected and worshipped him.
"You can tell just from Absalom's face that he is no ordinary human being," Papa told the Sunday crowd. "Absalom experiences a radiant joy when he lifts his hand to bless you. You can feel that God is with him."
Pearl again admitted that she was jealous of the Chinese converts who received Absalom's affection. It was one of the reasons she wanted to go away. She told me that she was even unhappy about the donkey Papa had bought for Absalom. "The animal has enabled Father to take farther and longer trips."
"But your father is happy," Papa told Pearl.
Although Pearl agreed, she said, "Sometimes I don't think he is my father. He will tolerate others interrupting his sermon with a question, but never me."
"Will you consider marriage?" I asked Pearl. "And if so, when?"
She laughed. "I'll see what happens when I get to America."
Pearl said that she had already started missing China. "I may have been saying that America is my real home, but I doubt that it is true."
Pearl knew that revealing her thoughts would disturb Carie, so she kept them to herself. "I never intended to defy my ancestors or Western culture," she told me. "It is just that China is what I know."
Carie had been in a good mood although she had been ill. She was happy to be able to grow roses and have a garden again. She said that with Pearl gone she would have more time to sit in the garden and read her favorite Western novels. Carie didn't want Pearl to know that she dreaded her departure.
Pearl was not fooled by her mother's cheerfulness. She knew that her mother wept behind her back. Pearl worried that Carie might need her when she was in America.
I assured Pearl that I would take care of her mother and would keep her informed about Carie's health.
Chapter 10
_October 23, 1913_
_Dear Pearl,_
_How happy I am to learn that you have been well and are in good health. Your mother is weak although, as always, she shows good spirits. She finally_ _listened to me and has quit teaching. I took over her classes. Can you believe_ _it? I also wanted to tell you that I have begun your Charles Dickens books._
_I am not sure if your mother told you what happened to Absalom. He_ _went too far inland and got stoned by mobs again. Thank the Lord he_ _is fine. Two of your father's Chinese disciples died, I'm sorry to report. Papa has been running the church for Absalom. He is much improved at_ _preaching. Absalom is so pleased with him that he has started to take even_ _longer preaching tours, although his absence makes your mother unhappy._
_I also have this sad news to share: NaiNai passed away last month. Through Absalom's efforts she finally accepted the conversion. Papa insisted_ _on waiting for Absalom to conduct the burial ceremony. Papa believed that_ _God would favor Absalom's wishes regarding NaiNai's next life. Papa_ _didn't want to take any chances. We all thought it was impossible because_ _Absalom was so far away. Only a few months ago, Absalom had refused to_ _return even when Carie called him about her own worsening condition, so_ _we had little hope._
_Well, Absalom showed up. He rode the donkey all day and night. The_ _animal collapsed! NaiNai is so fortunate, because her journey to Heaven_ _was blessed by Absalom. To a Chinese person, a good death is more_ _important than a good birth._
_Carie lives alone now after she sent your sister to Shanghai for schooling. Absalom resumed his tour the day after NaiNai's burial. He wouldn't stay_ _for Carie. Of course, this is nothing new to you._
_Papa has achieved several new conversions. These came from some of_ _the people he invited to NaiNai's burial. They liked Absalom better than_ _their head monk at the Buddhist temple. There is trouble though. One of_ _the men has more than one wife, and the other is an alcoholic. Absalom_ _has disqualified them before, but Papa faked the papers. Will Papa never_ _learn? He gets carried away in his desire to please Absalom._
_March 7, 1914_
_Dear Pearl,_
_Your mother shared your letter with me. Congratulations on your new_ _popularity. In just one year you've gone from being unable to make friends_ _to being Captain of the class. I'd also like to congratulate you on winning_ _the highest honor in the writing competition. It seems that you have made_ _good use of your Chinese background. By the way, do people in the West know_ _Confucius?_
_Your mother may have already told you what happened to me. I was a few_ _months pregnant when I walked out on my husband. I felt terrible carrying_ _his seed. I thought about taking the Chinese herb medicine to abort the fetus. My mother died taking that herb and you can imagine how scared I was._
_But about three weeks ago I began to bleed. I went to your mother for help._
_Before I developed enough courage to tell her the truth, she figured it out. The_ _blood wouldn't stop. She knew that I must be miscarrying. She said that I_ _could have died if I hadn't come to her. All I could do was cry. She took me to_ _the British Embassy doctor. I was unconscious when the doctor finished. I am_ _fine today and that is the good news. The bad news is that I might not be able_ _to have children in the future. This has made me sad beyond words._
_I have been taking piano lessons from Carie. She was right that music_ _could help me heal. It brings me closer to understanding God. I have_ _wanted to learn piano ever since we were children. It's truly a dream come_ _true for me._
_Carie has put me in charge of the elementary students. Did she tell you that_ _our church school has expanded? We will soon have a middle school. Instead_ _of three classes, we now have five. The school has become so popular that some_ _locals have even signed up their daughters. You must remember how difficult it_ _used to be to get peasant families to support their children's education. This year,_ _we had to deny a number of applicants due to lack of space. Papa addressed the_ _problem to the governor of Jiangsu, who in turn promised a parcel of land to_ _expand the school. Carpenter Chan will be the chief builder._
_December 2, 1915_
_Dear Pearl,_
_You won't believe this: I am writing you from Shanghai. This is what_ _happened: My husband abducted me. As far as he was concerned, I was_ _still his property. He didn't tell me that he had sold me. Remember, I had_ _wondered where he got his money to buy a new concubine?_
_Anyway, I ran away and hid in the church. My husband and his hired_ _men chased me. They beat up Papa when he refused to tell them where_ _I was hiding. Eventually, they found out. They broke into the church at_ _night and took me. It was Carie who sent a message to Absalom. Without_ _delay, Absalom appealed to the governor. He said that my abduction was a_ _violation of the treaty law. The next day the governor ordered my husband_ _to either free me or be arrested and beheaded!_
_I didn't feel safe, because I suspected that my husband would look for_ _another way to kidnap me. Papa saw suspicious men hanging around our_ _house. Carie thought that it would be a good idea for me to leave Chin-kiang_ _for a while. She made introductions for me at the Christian School_ _for Women in Shanghai. I was offered a scholarship. All I can say is that I_ _am truly blessed by God._
_March 24, 1916_
_Dear Pearl,_
_Who would believe that the "Paris of the East" is built on sand? The city's_ _old name even says it. "Shang-hai-tan," meaning a sandbank at the_ _mouth of our great Yangtze River. Emperor Guangxu considered it next_ _to worthless, I've been told. His imperial opinion must have lessened the_ _sting when he was forced to give it up to foreigners after losing the Second_ _Opium War. What a lot the English, French, and Germans have done with_ _that sandbank, my new home!_
_I shouldn't be singing about Shanghai as if you knew nothing about_ _it. I well know that you once lived here. In fact, I often picture you here,_ _imagine where you may have gone, what places you liked best. But forgive_ _me, I can't help but share my feelings with you because I have no one else._
_The Christian school is perfect for me. I have been taking as many classes_ _as I can. The teachers have all been very helpful, sometimes even staying_ _after class to answer my many questions. I never knew that there were so_ _many books, so much to learn._
_The students are nice, too. At first I was shy and awkward around_ _them. I felt like such a country bumpkin. I didn't even know that the_ _Manchu dynasty had been overthrown! So many other things! But isn't_ _it wonderful that we no longer have an emperor, that China will soon_ _become a republic!_
_My first weeks at the school now seem like a lifetime away. I feel more at_ _home now and have begun to make some friends. Not like you, of course. But_ _there are some brilliant people here and there is an electricity in the air. The_ _most interesting people are the artists, writers, journalists, and musicians. They form a loose group that gathers at certain bars and restaurants in_ _the city, talking and drinking and arguing for hours on end. I seem to_ _be falling in with these people more and more. I find it exhilarating, so_ _different from the life we knew together in Chin-kiang._
_Dr. Sun Yat-sen is among us. He has been single-handedly leading the_ _New Republicans to change China. He is a Christian and a Cantonese_ _by origin. Before he became a revolutionary, he was a physician. He was_ _educated in the West and studied political science. He went to Japan to_ _study how the Mingji Reform has changed the country. In 1911, Dr. Sun_ _returned to China and succeeded in stirring up a military uprising._
_Pearl, as you can tell, my universe is expanding at the speed of light. If_ _it wasn't something I had promised Carie, I would have skipped Sunday_ _church. My stomach is full, but my mind is hungry._
_I miss your mother, and I'll forever be in her debt. Two days ago I went_ _to visit Grace to deliver your mother's package. Your sister is turning into_ _a fine young lady. She is sweet, but a little shy compared to you. Oh, how I_ _wish you were here with me._
_September 2, 1916_
_Dear Pearl,_
_It's been six months since I last wrote you. Things have kept speeding up. I have been involved with the National Party of China. Most of our_ _members are followers of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Although I'll always have faith_ _in God, I find myself open to other ideas. I must now leave for a meeting_ _and will continue to write when I return._
_October 27, 1916_
_This letter is taking too long. My life is in fabulous chaos. I don't know day_ _from night anymore. China is undergoing a political transformation._
_December 13, 1916_
_Pearl, I must share with you my sorrow, China's sorrow: Dr. Sun Yat-sen_ _has been diagnosed with cancer. He is not expected to live. The man who_ _will succeed him is Chiang Kai-shek. We are not sure if he is trustworthy._ _His record shows that he has been an opportunist. Unfortunately, there is_ _no other candidate equal to him in military experience and connections. He_ _has been the Commander-in-Chief of China and claims himself a disciple_ _of Dr. Sun. The fact is that he is the only man who can control the warlords_ _and who is committed to Dr. Sun's cause_.
_January 28, 1917_
_Dear Pearl,_
_I must inform you about Carie's condition. I am sure she has been hiding_ _the truth from you. I visited her last month. It was lovely to be back in_ _Chin-kiang, to see all the familiar faces. But I was taken aback when I_ _called on your mother. She could no longer get out of bed. Apparently, her_ _health took a turn for the worse when she went back to work at the school_ _soon after I left for Shanghai. She told me she didn't want you to return to_ _China to help care for her. She worries about you constantly. Are you really_ _planning to return?_
_Before I came back to Shanghai I accompanied Carie to the Deng Family_ _Village, where she purchased a burial plot for herself. I have no idea why_ _she picked that place. We didn't speak of her reasons. I only sensed that she_ _is so deeply disappointed in Absalom that she doesn't care to be with him in_ _death. But the place is beautiful and serene although remote. It broke my_ _heart that she is quietly doing this. Am I betraying Carie by sharing this_ _information with you? Carie can't stand the thought that she might not be_ _there to receive you when you return._
_April 15, 1917_
_Dearest Pearl,_
_How wonderful it is to learn that YOU ARE ENGAGED, and that you_ _are on your way back! My good God! I was deeply surprised to learn this_ _momentous news, the more so because I haven't heard a word from you for so_ _long. Of course you have my blessing. In your letter to Carie you said that "the_ _decision to register for the marriage" was for the "convenience of traveling." But do I misunderstand something? Should "convenience" be the reason for_ _marriage? Forgive me for being overly cautious—my own marriage almost_ _ruined my life. But I suspect that your mother's condition only gave you an_ _additional reason to hurry the happy plans for your marriage._
_I am grateful to Carie for sharing your letters and photos. I understood_ _immediately what brought you and Mr. Lossing Buck together. A mutual_ _love of China, for one. How lucky to find someone with a lifelong interest_ _in China in America. And of course you were impressed with Lossing. A Cornell degree, his professorship at Nanking University, and his_ _commitment to helping the Chinese peasants. His agricultural expertise_ _will be greatly appreciated here. He certainly is handsome. You two make_ _a beautiful couple! What a wonderful idea to have the wedding ceremony_ _in Chin-kiang_.
_I feel that you ought to learn your mother's feelings. Although she wishes_ _that you were with her, she doesn't want you to follow in her footsteps. She_ _prefers that you make your life in America. I certainly don't share those_ _feelings, but I thought that you should know._
_Another letter of yours arrived today. I understand that you and Lossing_ _have applied as a couple to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions,_ _and that Lossing was granted the appointment to China as an agricultural_ _missionary. Forgive me for being selfishly joyful, but this is more wonderful_ _news. I can't wait to see you again._
_I have been thinking about returning to Chin-kiang. Life in Shanghai_ _has been exciting, but I feel like a lotus pad floating on the surface—rootless. Every day I speak about helping my country, but in truth I have achieved_ _little of significance. I have been working menial jobs just to cover living_ _expenses. My days are spent discussing politics and shouting for reform. The_ _Republican Party provides a forum for exhibiting one's debating talent. It_ _is best suited for those who love the sound of their own voices._
_I fear I am turning into a teahouse revolutionary. Increasingly, I am_ _aware of how different I am from my comrades. They have been scholars_ _and students all their lives. I have learned much in the last two years,_ _but at heart I am still a girl from the small town of Chin-kiang. I have_ _lived outside the world of books. I have worked, sometimes only to put food_ _in my stomach. It has made me impatient with idealists and dreamers,_ _however well intentioned. Many of my comrades can't be prevented from_ _rushing to their own destruction. How can they save their country when_ _they themselves are lost?_
_You have written to suggest that I "meet people where they are." I am_ _trying. I have always envied your ability to find healing in people's very_ _presence. You see humanity and kindness in all people. I see the same thing_ _only rarely. Your mother is an example._
_You are a different creature than your parents. I understood when you_ _said that you "live in many mansions." I am trying to bring down the_ _walls of my own culture. Being a Chinese woman, I am prone to certain_ _sentiments. I try not to be as sour as our famous Chin-kiang brown_ _vinegar. I love my country, so much so that I hate her for not being all I_ _want her to be._
_I am thinking about establishing a local newspaper when I return to_ _Chin-kiang. I am counting on your contributions._
_Love_ ,
_Willow_
Chapter 11
The Nanking railroad station had stood as a witness to wars and sorrow. Built in 1894, it had gone through destruction and restoration several times. The station had a small waiting room and a ticket booth.
Carie wasn't really healthy enough to travel, but she wanted to be there when Pearl got off the train. The prospect of hosting her daughter's wedding had given her new energy.
The manager of the train station was a Christian. He invited Carie to rest inside his little ticket booth. "Although it is March, madame, the cold air outside might make you sick."
Carie didn't want to go inside until the man told her that the train was going to be late.
We waited. After two and a half hours, we heard the sound of the approaching train. Excited, I ran outside.
The old steam engine puffed smoke and made terrifying sounds. My heart raced in anticipation. It had been four years since Pearl and I had last seen each other. I knew that I was not the same person she had left behind. I wore a fashionable navy blue jacket with a low collar and a matching skirt. I had on a pair of black leather boots.
The train came to a stop. Passengers started to come out. I spotted my friend instantly, although something felt amiss. It had never occurred to me before that Pearl was a foreigner. She stood out among the Chinese crowd. She was accompanied by Lossing Buck, who was tall and brown-haired. I watched Pearl search the crowd, and her eyes stopped on me.
"Willow, is that you?" Pearl cried. "I can barely recognize you, a fashionable Shanghai lady!"
"Pearl!" I embraced her. "This _is_ you—I'm not dreaming!"
Pearl turned around and introduced Lossing Buck.
We shook hands, but my eyes wouldn't leave Pearl. Her blue jacket and tight skirt made her look like a model in a Western magazine. The design of her clothes showed that she was proud of her full figure. I remembered that she used to feel awkward about her developing breasts.
Lossing was about Pearl's age, twenty-six years old. He had a long face with a big square jaw. He had a thin-lipped mouth and a high nose. His large eyes were deep set and brown. He was friendly and apologized that he didn't speak Chinese.
"Where is Mother?" Pearl asked.
"She is in the ticket booth waiting for—" Before I finished the sentence, I saw Pearl's smile freeze as her eyes looked past me. Shock flooded her face. I turned and saw that Carie had come outside of the booth.
Later on Pearl told me how crushed she felt the moment she saw her mother. I should have warned her that Carie had shrunk to the size of a child.
Carie had powdered her face and rouged her cheeks and lips. But it didn't help. She looked gravely ill and ghostly. Her missing side teeth made her cheeks look hollow, as if she were permanently inhaling. Her skin was dry and waxy. She insisted on painting her eyebrows herself. They were visibly uneven. The right eyebrow was higher than the left.
"Mother!" Pearl cried, throwing herself at Carie.
Smiling, Carie addressed her daughter as her tears ran. "God is good, my daughter."
Carie stood straight, as if her illness was gone. "Let's go," she said. "Your father is waiting in Chin-kiang." She told Pearl and Lossing that she had already made all the arrangements for their wedding.
On the train back to Chin-kiang, Carie fell asleep on Lossing's shoulder. I sat with Pearl across the aisle and insisted that she share the story of her romance. She had met Lossing on a ship. She told me Lossing had been on a Chinese-language tour, and Pearl was returning to China from America via Europe. During the voyage, they had several weeks to become acquainted.
"How did he court you?" I asked.
"With his China studies," she said, laughing. "Lossing's academic work outlines what he plans to do in China. The title of his degree thesis is _Chinese Farm Economy and Land Utilization in China_. Lossing's plan is to live in China and conduct experiments that will help the peasants."
It was easy for me to imagine how my friend had been swept off her feet.
"When Lossing told me that Chinese peasants would be freed from their backbreaking labor if his methods succeed, I fell in love with him. Lossing was fascinated by my life growing up in China. When he realized I spoke so many Chinese dialects, he proposed right away."
"When did you say yes?" I asked.
"Just after I found out that Lossing's Chinese would never get him anywhere. He is tone-deaf. How can you be tone-deaf and learn Chinese?"
"So he needs you."
"I need him, too. I haven't been able to fall in love with any man in America, to tell you the truth." Pearl said that she had made efforts to date, but she had felt like a foreigner in America. "I spoke English, but I didn't understand the culture. I felt out of place and confused. What we would consider rude in China, Americans consider attractive. My relatives thought that I was strange and I thought that they were strange. On the surface, I got along with everybody, but inside I was lonely. For the entire four years I felt that way. I was afraid that I might never like a man enough to marry him. In the meantime, my Chinese mind told me that I'd better hurry or I'd end up an old maid."
"Lossing's timing is perfect," I commented.
"Yes, China brought us together. God has answered my prayers. Lossing and I couldn't be more blessed!"
For Pearl's sake, I hoped that she was right.
I sensed that Pearl had given up America to come back and care for her mother. I asked if it was the truth.
She admitted that Carie was an important reason why she returned. "I love America, but not enough to stay," she said.
"You can go back to America anytime you want, can't you?"
"That's true. But Lossing is like Absalom. He is determined to die in China." She laughed. Her eyes were radiant with cloudless pleasure.
The first time I witnessed Pearl and Lossing's differences was at their wedding. Pearl was wearing a Western wedding gown, while Lossing wore a dark suit. Pearl held a bouquet of flowers picked that morning from Carie's garden. As Pearl was led to the church, the town's children sang American songs Carie had taught them. Afterward they sang the Chinese wedding song, which delighted Pearl because she used to sing the song as a child.
_Buddha sits on a lotus pad,_
_Beautiful fingers orchidlike._
_Sun goes down and moon comes up,_
_May your life be peaceful and tranquil._
_Mud walls and straw pillows,_
_Fruits, seeds, and many sons._
_Happiness and longevity,_
_May you have the spring and all its fair weather._
Lossing didn't care for the song. When our friends from the Wan-Wan Tunes troupe came to congratulate the couple and performed the popular musical _The Pig's Wedding_ , Lossing became upset.
While Pearl felt honored, Lossing felt humiliated. He didn't like the pig bridegroom, although the character was a hero in the classic Chinese novel _Journey to the West_. I could tell that Lossing's offense and lack of humor bothered Pearl, but she didn't make a show of it.
Carie had planned the wedding to the last detail. Besides Papa, Carpenter Chan, Lilac, and many of her other Chinese friends, Carie invited the English consul, the embassy doctor, their wives, and her other missionary friends. Carie didn't expect the entire town of Chin-kiang to invite itself. However, the Chinese believe that a good wedding must be packed, and the townspeople felt that Carie's daughter deserved everyone's blessing.
Pearl wanted me to be the hostess. She didn't care that I had been married before. But all the women in town, myself included, thought it was a bad idea. I was considered abandoned by my husband, and therefore I was bad luck for a new bride. Instead Pearl asked me to hire the local chefs and pick the size and color of the melons and fruits that would be piled throughout the entrance and hallway. It was important in Chinese custom to invite all the gods by displaying the symbols of festivity and fertility.
Seeds, nuts, and fruits were thrown at the couple as soon as Pearl and Lossing were pronounced husband and wife. The church courtyard was overflowing with cheerful people. I helped Carie as she gave candies to people and thanked them for coming.
Led by Papa, the crowd paraded through the town. We arrived at Absalom and Carie's house. The new couple's room was on the second floor. The pink curtains and the beautiful Persian rug were from Carie's own room. The banquet was to be held downstairs, where nine courses of Chinese dishes would be served.
Pink-cheeked and in a red Chinese dress, Pearl came downstairs and served tea. She lit cigarettes for the elderly and placed jasmine buds in the palms of young children. Outside, there was the sound of firecrackers. This was to invite good omens. The local band started to play.
Lossing said in English that he didn't want to play clown and be pushed around by a Chinese crowd. He wanted no part of what he called their "silly games." It was no use that the locals kept cheering. Pearl ended up apologizing for Lossing.
Told by their parents to help inspire fertility, children hid themselves under the wedding-night bed. They were chased away by Lossing.
Lossing was disgusted when he saw all the chopsticks reaching toward the same plate. He said he would rather starve.
When Pearl encouraged Lossing to taste her favorite Chin-kiang sesame candy, Lossing pointed out the seller's dirt-filled fingernails and gave Pearl a lesson on how disease spreads.
Pearl was confident that Lossing would soon get used to the Chinese culture. She never doubted that she could create harmony in her marriage. She had faith in Lossing's ability to understand. "After all, he graduated from Cornell," she told me.
At Lossing's request, Pearl accompanied him into the countryside. Lossing began his agricultural project by surveying the land. Pearl became his personal assistant, interpreter, guide, interviewer, field secretary, and footman. She got up at dawn and worked with Lossing in the fields until nightfall.
As I had feared, it didn't take long for Pearl to lose her enthusiasm. She found herself fighting the widening gap between herself and her husband.
"Conflict is a sign of a healthy relationship," she said when I asked about her marriage. It pleased her that Lossing was getting what he needed. Pearl wanted to fulfill the role of a good wife. She made it her duty to be pleasant and cheerful.
"Lossing carries far too heavy a burden," she told me. "His well-being depends on me." She wouldn't admit that he didn't even notice what she cooked for him. Unlike the Chinese, who lived to eat, Lossing ate to live.
While Carie accepted Lossing, Absalom began to have trouble. He disapproved of Lossing's interference with the way Chinese peasants did their business. The two fought often and finally quit speaking to each other.
Pearl was right that there were similarities between Absalom and Lossing. Absalom's mission was to save Chinese souls, and Lossing's mission was to fix Chinese farming methods. Absalom believed that the Christian God ought to be the only God. Lossing believed that his farming method was the best.
But Pearl had her doubts. She said to Lossing, "The Chinese have survived, farming for thousands of years, on the same land and by the most skillful use of fertilizers and irrigation. They produce extraordinary yields without modern machinery!"
The couple moved away soon after Lossing's proposal was approved by the governor of Anhui province. Lossing didn't take the governor's advice to move after the winter. He couldn't stand Absalom another minute.
Reluctantly, Pearl followed Lossing. They moved to a town north of Chin-kiang called Nanhsuchou, in Anhui province. Pearl didn't want to leave her mother behind. I asked Pearl why Lossing had to go to the poorest province in China. "Why can't he find a better place to conduct his project?"
"The farmers of fertile southern land are satisfied with their ways," Pearl explained. "They are not interested in Lossing's experiments."
The governor of the poor province supported Lossing's ideas because he had little to lose. The governor would gain all the benefit if Lossing succeeded. What Lossing needed was the commitment of the farmers to follow his methods. To make it all work, the governor promised to compensate the farmers if Lossing's experiment failed.
After a few weeks, I went north and visited Pearl to see how she was faring. Her new home was a two-room cottage. It had previously been occupied by a Christian missionary family. Pearl's door and windows didn't keep out the dust. No matter how hard she cleaned, within hours the inside of her house would be covered by a new layer of dust. Pearl's neighbors were Chinese peasant families. They lived in horrible poverty. Pearl told me that she was grateful for the roof over her head.
"Moisture seeped through my walls last month," she said. She showed me the mold that grew underneath her bed and between her mats and sheets. "I have to always be careful when opening the chamber pot." She tried to sound lighthearted. "I never know what could be hunting for food in there. It could be a giant spider or a grandmother stinkbug."
The second time I visited Pearl, she shared with me the exciting news that she was pregnant. "I am finally released from my official duties for the agriculturalist."
"The agriculturalist" was what Pearl had started to call Lossing. "I thought when I got married I would no longer have to take orders like I did from my father when I was a child."
As a way to escape her troubles, Pearl began to write. She found comfort in writing. She told me that her imagination was the only place where she could be herself and be free. I knew she had a zest for stories. Charles Dickens was her inspiration. I remembered the first time we met that she held in her hand a black leather-bound book, which she later told me was _A Tale of Two Cities_. She loved _Oliver Twist_ , _Bleak House_ , and _The Pickwick_ _Papers_. She read the stories so many times that she could practically recite them. She had always enjoyed writing and had won awards for her work when she was at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in America. She knew that she had to keep her writing a secret. Absalom had made it clear to her that serving God was the only purpose of living. Lossing made Pearl feel guilty for pursuing anything of her own interest. He wanted her to continue to be his interpreter and was upset when she refused. Pearl joked, "Am I conditioned to a man's dominance?"
Using pregnancy as an excuse, Pearl wrote whenever Lossing wasn't around. She no longer complained about Lossing's long trips that took him away for months at a time. She learned to be alone and to keep discontent locked inside herself.
Pearl confessed to me that she feared she was becoming Carie—in exile in her own home. As she made friends with the neighboring peasants, her writings began to fill with their stories.
"It's a shame that China's intellectuals prefer fantasy over realism,"
Pearl wrote to me. "It's easier to close one's eyes on disease and death."
I wrote back and told her that my newspaper, the _Chin-kiang_ _Independent_ , had finally launched. Pearl promised to contribute a monthly column. Using a Chinese man's name, Wei Liang, she discussed politics, economics, history, literature, and women's issues. Her articles were well received. Although the distribution was pitiful, we felt proud that we had a voice of our own.
Early in 1920, the light began to go out of Carie's eyes. She was in and out of consciousness. Pearl rushed back from Nanhsuchou. She sensed that her mother might not live to see her grandchild.
Chapter 12
The _Chin-kiang Independent_ would have to close after a year. No matter how hard I pushed, the newspaper was not selling enough copies to make ends meet.
Papa offered to be the sponsor under two conditions. The name must be changed to the _Christian Chin-kiang_ , and the contents would need to promote Christianity.
"If I spend Absalom's money, I must sing God's songs," Papa insisted. "No reporting that would make Jesus lose face."
I told Papa that I couldn't accept his offer. In fact, my newspaper was in the middle of investigating a scandal regarding Chinese converts who continued to practice the worst of traditional Chinese customs. I had been interviewing wives whose Christian husbands kept purchasing new concubines.
Papa was upset because he, too, was having affairs with different local ladies, which he kept a secret from Absalom. Papa asked, "Why do you have to pick the teapot that isn't boiling?"
"My readers are entitled to the truth," I replied.
"No money from the church then."
"So be it."
I took the matter to Pearl, whose care of her mother was doing wonders. She was confident that the newspaper could survive. We discussed strategy and made adjustments to target the young intellectuals.
Pearl took another male-sounding pen name, Er-ping, meaning "An Alternative View." She began to write about China's place in the world. She introduced Western history, the industrial revolution, different models of government, the concept of political democracy, and the world's important schools of philosophy and art.
Pearl's analysis and essays generated great interest. Her eloquent Chinese impressed the readers so much that no one suspected that Er-ping was a Caucasian and a woman. The number of subscribers increased. My advertising space was sold without a struggle.
My own writings improved because Pearl edited my drafts. I practically lived in the printing factory, which was located near the town's border. From my window, I watched the construction of the future Chin-kiang Christian Hospital, a two-story brick building funded by Absalom's church.
Although Pearl was eight months pregnant, she didn't get much rest. Besides helping me with the newspaper, she had to play the role of a peacemaker between her parents. The conflict between Carie and Absalom intensified. Carie could no longer stand Absalom. She forbade Absalom from ever visiting her.
"You go and save your heathens" were her last words to him.
Pearl spent nights at her mother's bedside, sitting in a rattan chair. I would come and relieve her at dawn for a few hours. On some nights, after the day's newspaper was out, Pearl and I would take walks, as we had when we were younger. Carie would be sound asleep as we ventured into the moonlight.
We discussed everything from China to America, from my former husband and mother-in-law to her troubled marriage.
"How is your agriculturalist?" I asked.
"Well, he is turning into a disillusionist," Pearl replied. "Lossing resents the attitudes of Chinese farmers. He feels less sympathy toward their misery because they are closed to his ideas. His efforts didn't succeed and the farmers quit his experiments."
"Were you surprised?" I asked.
"No, and I don't blame the peasants," she replied frankly. "They have good reason to see Lossing as a foolish man. Chinese peasants know what their land is capable of producing and how to do it. Lossing believes that if his method works in Iowa, it must work in Anhui."
"What about the government's offer of compensation?" I asked.
"The peasants no longer want to practice Lossing's methods even with compensation."
"So what is Lossing going to do?"
"He has been looking for a way out. Two weeks ago he received an invitation from his former professor, who is now the dean at the College of Agriculture and Forestry at Nanking University. The dean offered a teaching position and Lossing accepted it. To hell with the farmers in Nanhsuchou."
"So you are moving to Nanking?"
"What choice do I have?"
"What about your mother?" I asked.
"I'll see her," she replied. "Thank God for the railway."
One day I ventured to ask Pearl if she and Lossing still loved each other.
Tears welled up in her eyes. "For heaven's sake, I am carrying his child. Even if I don't need him, the child does."
Carol Buck was born on March 4, 1920. Although it was a smooth birth, a tumor was discovered in Pearl's uterus. The doctor insisted that Pearl go to America to have the tumor removed, which she did. It was a long journey that took four months. As a result of the surgery, Pearl could no longer have children. The news crushed her. She wrote, "I am grateful to have the opportunity to lavish my affection abundantly on Carol."
Pearl and Carol followed Lossing to Nanking. "We simply abandoned Nanhsuchou," Pearl reported.
To Pearl's dismay, Nanking was in the middle of a war. Different Chinese warlords and political factions were fighting for dominance of the city and outlying regions.
"I was shaken when bullets whistled across my garden," she wrote. "I tried to help the civilian casualties. One woman was shot in the stomach and died in my arms. I felt powerless."
Carie longed to spend time with her granddaughter. Painstakingly, Pearl made arrangements. She took the train and visited as much as possible. To hold the baby in her arms, Carie struggled to push herself out of the bed. Carol was a milk-skinned, chubby, and beautiful child.
Motherhood brought Pearl profound happiness. The birth of Carol also saved her marriage. She no longer complained about Lossing. Instead she talked about her handsome new home in Nanking with all its lovely trees and a bamboo grove at the far end of the garden.
Pearl applied for a part-time job teaching English at the university's night school. She was pleased that with only their two small salaries she and Lossing were able to afford servants. "Believe it or not, we have three," she said. "One takes care of the laundry and the garden, one does the cooking, and one helps me with Carol. It's hard to believe that I now have extra time on my hands. I have been writing every chance I get and I have just completed a new novel!"
None of us had any sense of the tragedy that was looming. Carol showed no sign that she was a victim of phenylketonuria, but Pearl would soon find out. It was an inherited metabolic disease that would lead Carol to suffer severe mental retardation.
Pearl started to come to Chin-kiang less frequently. By this time, Carol had had her first birthday. When Pearl did come, she didn't stay long. She had to leave before Carie had had enough time with Carol. Pearl grew tense when watching Carol play. I noticed that although baby Carol looked healthy and was sweet, she didn't talk when she was supposed to.
Without any warning or word, Pearl stopped coming. After a two-month silence, she came without Carol. She made excuses when her mother questioned. She sat with Carie and tried to look cheerful, but I could tell it was an act.
Carie had her bed moved next to the window, where she could better see the trees and mountains. She was silent most of the time while Pearl held her hand. She said nothing when it was time for Pearl to leave.
Carie stared out into the darkness after Pearl was gone. To cheer her up, I told her about the Chin-kiang Christian Girls' Choir. "I have been teaching the girls all the songs you taught me," I reported, "and we have been rehearsing for the Christmas Eve performance."
Carie enjoyed my news, but deep down she missed her daughter and granddaughter.
Months went by and Pearl didn't visit. Then I received a letter from her. It broke my heart. Doctors had confirmed her worst nightmare—Carol would never grow up mentally. In her letter, Pearl begged me to keep the news from Carie. "Tell Mother that I will come as soon as I get a chance and I promise that I will stay longer next time."
Carie sensed that her end was approaching. She called me to her bed. She wanted to visit Kuilin in Guangxi province before she died. "Would you accompany me, Willow?" she asked.
I made arrangements immediately. I wrote to Pearl, who was in America with Lossing getting treatment for Carol, that her mother was determined to make the trip. We arrived in Kuilin by train after five days. Sitting on a chair on a bamboo raft, Carie floated down the Li-jiang River. With tears in her eyes, she gazed over the ink-painting-like landscape. The clear, smooth water mirrored the green mountains against a cloudless sky.
"I am ready to die now," Carie said quietly.
"No, you cannot," I responded. "You haven't heard Carol call you Grandma yet."
She shook her head slightly. "Carol might never be able to."
That was when I realized that Carie had known all along what was happening. She had tried to take away Pearl's burden by pretending to know nothing. She had seen too much death and illness over the years to be fooled.
"But why aren't you fighting?" I wept with my cheek against the back of her hand. "You have always been a fighter. You fought for your children, your own fate, and everybody else's. I remember the way you scrubbed my hair with soap trying to get rid of the lice."
Carie gave a weak smile. "I am too tired."
I understood the reason Carie had come to Kuilin. It was her way to help Pearl. If she wasn't home, Pearl wouldn't have to rush back to Chin-kiang.
"You have been hard on yourself, Carie," I said.
"Nothing is hard when I have you by my side." She smiled.
I asked if there was anything else that I could do for her.
She was silent for a while and then uttered, "Be there for Pearl after I'm gone."
Chapter 13
Carie died the day before Christmas. Pearl and I were with her till the end. Carie's last wish touched me deeply. All her belongings were to be sold and the funds given to her lifelong maid and friend Wang Ah-ma, so that she could retire and return to her provincial town. The funeral was held on Christmas Day. Absalom performed a simple ceremony, the same ceremony he offered the locals. We were stunned that Absalom didn't do more for his wife.
The casket was lowered slowly into the ground. Behind Pearl and Absalom, the entire town of Chin-kiang stood. Grief-stricken, Wang Ah-ma fainted. The Chin-kiang Christian Girls' Choir sang "Amazing Grace." Playing Carie's piano, I made a promise to myself to maintain Carie's grave like a Chinese daughter would.
Hundreds of candles were placed in cut-off gourds filled with sand. Members of the girls' choir lit the candles and prayed for Carie's spirit. The candles were then placed on lotus pads and set free to drift with the current. Slowly the candles floated into the canal and then the Yangtze River. We prayed that Carie's spirit would travel across the Pacific Ocean and reach her birthplace in America.
Absalom was upset when Lilac proposed hosting a "tofu banquet" to honor Carie. It was the Chinese Buddhist tradition. The wish came from people who felt deeply indebted to Carie. Papa reminded Absalom that the majority of the provincial people, whose lives Carie had touched and helped, were not Christians.
Lilac told Absalom, "We would like to send off old spirits and greet new ones so Carie may gain favors in her next life, not only with the Christian God but also the Chinese gods."
Papa explained to Absalom, "It is an honor only people of high standing and wealth can afford."
"No!" Absalom frowned with his eyebrows and said firmly. "That is against the Christian principle. An elaborate funeral is wasteful. Carie did nothing more than her Christian duty."
Pearl tried to convince her father that by honoring Carie, the people were honoring the Christian God. But it was no use.
An idea proposed by Carpenter Chan and his friends to build a memorial gate for Carie was also dropped. In order to allow the tofu banquet to take place, Papa fabricated an emergency in a neighboring village church. It sent Absalom on his way out of Chin-kiang.
The tofu banquet lasted a week. It was held in Carie's name. It symbolized her thanks to all who came to help her complete the transition from one life to another.
People traveled long distances to attend the ceremony. Staying up all night, I helped Lilac soak and cook the soybeans. We ground the beans and made a variety of tofu dishes, including tofu chicken, tofu duck, tofu fish, tofu ham, tofu bread, and a big tofu cake.
Pearl received families dressed in traditional mourning costume, white from head to toe. The white cotton robes were matched with white hats pinned with white flowers and white shoe covers. Pearl had no idea that her mother had so many friends.
I was called the Other Pearl because Carie, in many ways, had adopted me. I sang the crying tune with the crowd. It was Chin-kiang's tradition to mourn this way. The tune asked the gods to hear our complaints for taking Carie away too soon.
Carpenter Chan and his crew built makeshift gates that guided the crowd to Carie's grave. Wood carvings of protective gods stood on top of each gate. Every gate had its own title, which stood as a symbol of blessing for Carie's next life.
The first gate was titled Sleeping Seeds, which stood for winter; the second was Flower Buds, which meant spring; the third was In Full Blossom, representing summer; and the last gate, Harvest and Fruits, was for the fall. Carie was assured all four seasons in her next life.
As people passed through the gates they kowtowed. Children were told to beg the gods to guard Carie's spirit. The Wan-Wan Tunes troupe played _The Celebration_ and the mourners entertained gods of the universe. First was the god of death, who was believed to have ordered Carie's departure from earth. He was entertained to make sure no mistakes had been made. Next were the demons that were believed to have escorted Carie. They were asked to "be gentle with the sorrowful spirit." Third was the Heavenly Judge, who was in charge of counting Carie's virtues and deciding her future. The message from the mourners to him was "Please be fair and kind." Food and wine were offered to this god to assure a receptive mood.
Pearl was grateful that the local people thought to honor her mother with their ancient traditions. She participated in the piety ceremony, where she lit incense at Carie's altar and prayed for the comfort of her mother's spirit.
I asked Pearl where her husband was.
"Lossing is an American . . ." Pearl said. "And he has been very busy."
I sensed she was upset.
"Lossing should have been here for you, if for no other reason."
Pearl appeared hurt, although she explained, "I told him that he didn't have to come if he was busy."
"Pearl." I made her look at me. "What is going on?"
Reluctantly, she replied, "Lossing complains that I am too demanding. He didn't even think that I should come. He wanted me to stay in Nanking and take care of Carol."
I shook my head.
"Carol is not getting better . . ." Pearl broke down. "I don't want to believe what I see. But I am forced to. My daughter doesn't talk and doesn't respond to me. I have tried to teach her, but I am not reaching her . . . Lossing thinks it is my fault. And I think it's my fault, too . . . I didn't make Carol right in the first place. I don't know what happened . . . Lossing is devastated. He can't believe that she is his child. He left us last week, again, for a field trip in the north. Maybe it's for the better—we don't have to fight endlessly . . . Lossing will be gone for three months, maybe longer. I am afraid that he won't return . . ."
"Lossing will return," I comforted her. "He is Carol's father. Give him time."
"You don't know the truth of our marriage, Willow. It hasn't been working. Carol's trouble is like salt on top of a wound. I thought I could take it. I don't mind Lossing taking his anger out on me. But when he is mean to Carol, I . . ."
I let her sob on my shoulder.
"I can't see myself living with him anymore," she continued. "Carol doesn't know what is wrong. She doesn't deserve her father's cruelty."
"You need Lossing at this moment," I said.
She agreed. "We need money to pay Carol's doctors in America."
Pearl's searching for Carol's cure would eventually end. After years of disappointment, she would accept her fate. Pickled in sorrow, she began to imagine her own accidental death and contemplated suicide. I wrote her as much as I could.
Pearl told me that writing had become her salvation. It was the only way that she could take her mind off her daughter. If she couldn't fix Carol, she could fix the characters in her novels.
After Carie's death, Absalom traveled deep inland, sometimes a year at a time. As a result, more Christian churches were established. Carpenter Chan followed Absalom. He brought his wife and children with him.
Papa continued to be responsible for the Chin-kiang Christian community. His recent achievements included the conversion of the richest man in Chin-kiang, the head of the famous Chin-kiang Vinegar Company. Receiving handsome contributions, Papa transferred the money to Absalom, who in turn funded Christian schools inland.
Besides being publisher and editor of the newspaper, I was also in charge of the Chin-kiang Christian Girls' Middle School. I followed Carie's original curriculum and added Chinese history, science, and mathematics.
I wasn't aware of the _Chin-kiang Independent_ 's popularity until I received a letter from the _Nanking Daily_ offering me a position as its editor.
I accepted the offer without hesitation because I had always admired the _Nanking Daily_. The paper was as prestigious as the _Shanghai Daily_ , and its readership reached all of southern China. The offer would expand my horizons and also enable me to reunite with Pearl.
As if our childhood had returned, Pearl welcomed me to Nanking. We climbed the famous Purple Mountain together. Beneath our feet spread the city of Nanking. Temples, shrines, and the tomb of the fourteenth-century Ming emperor were scattered over the mountainside. The city had a twenty-four-mile-long wall and nine elaborately decorated, forty-foot-high gates. Running beside the city was the Yangtze River, which flowed on to Chin-kiang.
"I love the winding cobbled streets and the little shops glimmering with candlelight at night," Pearl said. "I adore the flickering oil lamps that light the streets. I can't help but imagine the family life of the people within these ancient walls."
After I settled into my small apartment near the newspaper office, we began to visit each other regularly. Pearl lived in a three-room brick house. It was modest compared to the residences of other foreigners. The house belonged to the university compound occupied mostly by faculty. Lossing had been living here for four years now. Like Carie, Pearl tended to her garden. Besides roses and camellias, there were tomatoes and cabbages.
I was pleased to see Carol again, although I was sad to witness her condition. She was five years old. I tried to communicate with her, but she did not respond. I also saw Lossing. His skin was whiter than I had remembered. He taught in the classroom, where he felt that he was wasting his time. He longed to return to the field.
"Please, Willow, stay for dinner," Pearl insisted one evening. "It will be no trouble for me at all. The servants do everything for three bags of rice at the end of the month. It makes me feel guilty even though almost every white family in the city enjoys such help. My chef is from Yangchow, but he can also cook Peking and Cantonese style."
It was at the dinner table that I witnessed the couple fight. Lossing needed Pearl to be his translator for his new field experiment, but Pearl refused.
"I no longer know who this woman is." Lossing turned to me, speaking half jokingly. "She certainly doesn't need a husband. She is having an affair with her imagined characters."
"Perhaps writing eases her anxiety." I tried to make peace.
Lossing interrupted me with laughter. "No, you don't know her, Willow. My world is too small for this woman. Vanity and greed are the true demons here. And yet if Pearl has ambition, she has little skill or training. She wants to be a novelist, but she has no academic training and no material. She is lost as a mother, and she is bound to lose if she tries to make it as a writer."
Pearl stared at Lossing, disgusted.
Lossing ignored her and continued, "It is destructive when a hobby turns into an obsession."
"Stop it, Lossing," Pearl said, trying to control her anger.
"You have a responsibility," Lossing went on. "You owe this family!"
"Please, stop."
"I have the right to express myself. And Willow has the right to know the truth."
"What truth?" Pearl's eyes were burning.
"That this marriage is a mistake!" Lossing said loudly.
"As if we even have a marriage!" Pearl responded.
"No, we don't," Lossing agreed.
"You have no right to ask me to give up writing," Pearl said.
"So you have made up your mind." Lossing looked at her. "You have decided to ignore my needs and abandon this family."
"How have I abandoned this family?"
"You disappear mentally when you write. We don't exist. I know I don't. You refuse to work with me to support this family. You well know that without your help I can't do my job. You treat your writing as if it is a job, but all I see is an amateur at play. Let me remind you, I am the one who earns the money, who pays for the rent, all the living expenses, and Carol's doctor fees!"
"Writing helps me stay sane." Pearl was on the verge of tears.
"It doesn't seem to be helping on that score."
Pearl struggled to compose herself.
Lossing carried on.
Pearl looked defeated. She got up and went to the kitchen.
From the living room, I heard Carol's screaming and the maid's voice, "Put it down!"
"I am only talking common sense," Lossing said to me. "I can understand that Pearl wants to write novels to escape her life. But who wants to read her stories? The Chinese don't need a blonde woman to tell their stories, and the Westerners are not interested in China. What makes Pearl think that she stands a chance of succeeding?"
Chapter 14
Taking the _Nanking Daily_ job proved to be the best decision I ever made in my career. I was surrounded by people who were intelligent and open-minded. Our staff competed with the _Peking Daily_ and the _Shanghai Daily_. I often brought work home that I couldn't finish in the office. After a year, I had moved to a new place, a little bungalow located outside the ancient city gate. It was close to the woods and mountains. The fresh air, the views, the privacy—all of these did me good. Clearing the weeds, I discovered that I actually had a garden. I planted roses, lilacs, and peonies. It pleased me that I would be able to bring fresh flowers to Carie's grave site by the time of the Spring Memorial Festival.
Pearl continued her teaching at Nanking University. We celebrated our birthdays together. We had reached our midthirties and we joked and teased each other about our lives. I was still legally married to my former husband, since China didn't have such a thing as divorce. I had no idea how many new concubines my husband had married and how many children he had. I asked my father if he, as the head of the church, would make an announcement to disassociate me from the man.
Papa didn't think that it was necessary. "Out of sight, out of mind," he said. "Your husband has been telling everyone that you are dead. I am getting tired of explaining to people that you are not dead."
I asked Papa if he would like to come to Nanking so that I could take care of him. He declined. He said that he was God's foot soldier. The church was his home, its members his family.
Pearl, on the other hand, talked the head dean of Nanking University into offering Absalom a nonpaying position teaching a course on Western religion. Pearl convinced the seventy-three-year-old Absalom to slow down, to move to Nanking and live with her. He finally agreed.
Following Absalom, Carpenter Chan and Lilac also moved to Nanking. They found a modest place a mile from Pearl's house. Carpenter Chan believed that Absalom would need him, for he "will never stop expanding God's kingdom."
Lilac was convinced that it was her husband's commitment to Absalom's causes that brought her happiness. Lilac was one among hundreds of Absalom's followers.
I said to Pearl, "Absalom feels content enough to quit risking his life going inland."
"Remember the beginning, when Absalom preached on the streets of Chin-kiang?" Pearl smiled.
"Oh, yes. Everyone thought he was mad."
Pearl tried to get Carol to say the one word she had been teaching her all week. But Carol would not deliver. It drove both of them crazy. The Chinese servants had been feeding Carol relentlessly, for they believed that the fatter the child, the better the health. Although mentally handicapped, Carol developed a strong body. One day Carol hit Pearl on the forehead with a stone paperweight.
Blood crawled down Pearl's face like an earthworm. Carol, unaware of what she had done, went on playing. Pearl sat on the floor, quietly wiping the blood from her forehead.
Lossing, meanwhile, made peace with reality. He avoided Pearl and Carol. He spent long hours working in his office, even on Sundays.
Pearl's refusal to give up on Carol aggravated the strain in their already suffering marriage. Pearl called Lossing a coward when he tried to convince her that there was no point in fighting God's will.
Pearl often expressed her anger in Chinese. Lossing understood but couldn't respond fast enough. Pearl would say, "Maggots don't just breed in manure pits, they breed in expensive meat jars too."
When Pearl yelled, "Only the toes know when the shoe doesn't fit," it was unclear whether Lossing understood her meaning.
Fighting with her husband and caring for her daughter consumed Pearl. She no longer paid attention to her appearance. She wore the same wrinkled brown jacket and black cotton skirt every day. More and more, she looked like a local Chinese woman. With her hair tied up in a bun, she walked in a hurry with a stack of books under her arm.
Eventually Pearl quit making demands on Carol. I often found Pearl sitting quietly, watching her daughter. Her expression was infinitely sad.
At the university, Pearl was a beloved teacher. The fact that she was a native Chinese speaker made her the most popular foreign instructor on campus. She was promoted and became an official university staff member. Besides English, Pearl taught American and English literature. Pearl was sincerely interested in her students. She loved it when they compared their lives to those of the characters in Charles Dickens's novels. Pearl taught older students, too. As they practiced their conversation skills, Pearl learned about their families and their lives outside of school.
Pearl shared with me one of her students' stories. "This happened only three months ago," she began. "A massacre took place in the town of Shao-xing. A group of young Communists were beheaded by the nationalist government. Their bodies were chopped up, ground, and made into bread stuffing. The bread was advertised for sale at the local bakery! Can you believe that, Willow? What a way to scare people into submission!"
Pearl discovered that her servants had been hiding something from her. "Last night," she came to tell me, "I followed a noise to the back of my house and found a woman living there with her newborn baby. The woman was my age, perhaps younger. Her name was Soo-ching. She told me that she had been living there for six months and had given birth to her son only days before."
"She begged you to let her stay?" I asked.
"Of course."
"What did you say to her?"
"I didn't know what to say. I can't kick her out. The strangest thing was that this beggar lady named her son Confucius."
I was not surprised. It could have been my name too. When Papa was a beggar, he decided that if I had been born a boy, he would have named me after Confucius, or Mencius, or the ancient Chinese philosophers Lao Tse or Chuang Tzu.
"Will you publish such stories if I write them?" Pearl asked. "I mean the stories of real people?"
"Personally, I'd love to. But I'm not sure if the newspaper would agree," I responded.
"Why not?" Pearl asked. "They are moving, human stories. Readers would be interested and the stories might do some good."
"Yes, perhaps. But the paper has a tradition of publishing only what will inspire, not what will depress. Remember, this is the _Nanking Daily_ , not the _Chin-kiang Independent_. Our funding is from the government."
"What is the purpose of a newspaper if not to tell the truth?" Pearl said. "People will get a false picture of what is truly happening in China."
"Read the alternative papers published by the Communists if you want the truth. I have books by Lu Hsun, Lao She, and Cao Yu."
Pearl couldn't wait. She came to my home and borrowed the books I recommended.
Though I continued to attend church regularly, great changes were happening in the outside world, and my job brought me into their midst. For Pearl, her reading soon expanded beyond my recommendations and helped push her marital troubles to the back of her mind. Her enthusiasm returned. She was once again the Pearl I used to know.
* * *
We discussed works by Lu Hsun. Pearl's favorites were _The True Story of_ _Ah Q_ and _The Story of Mrs. Xiang-Lin_. Although the author's criticism of society was sharp and original, we didn't love the stories. Pearl's trouble with Lu Hsun was that he depicted his characters as if he were standing on a roof looking down.
"The peasants he portrays are all narrow-minded, stubborn, and stupid," Pearl pointed out.
"Well, it was considered revolutionary that he even made peasants his subjects," I commented.
Pearl and I both loved Lao She and Cao Yu. Among their best were _The Big House, Full Moon_ , and _The Marriage of a Puppet Master_. We favored _Full Moon_ in particular for the author's sensitivity. The story was about a single mother who was driven into prostitution. Although her daughter tries to avoid following in her mother's footsteps, she ends up succumbing to the same fate.
Pearl liked the story but resented the novel's bitter hopelessness. She preferred stories that offered hope in the end, however tragic. "The character must believe in himself, and he must have the stamina to endure."
"Beautiful, heart-wrenching tragedy has been central to the Chinese tradition for thousands of years," I reminded her. "Both novelists and readers relish what you call hopelessness."
"That is not always true," Pearl challenged. "The novel _All Men Are_ _Brothers_ is the best example. The poor peasants were forced to become bandits. But the novel is filled with energy. There is no bitterness to it. To me, this is the Chinese essence!"
"Chinese critics don't share your opinion," I argued. "They say _All Men_ _Are Brothers_ lacks sophistication. They consider it folk art, not literature."
"That is exactly why things must change," Pearl shot back. "Everyday life has a power of its own. And it's important to pay attention to it. Look at Soo-ching, the lady who delivered her son in my backyard! I bet she bit off the umbilical cord like the character Er-niang in _All_ _Men Are Brothers_! I didn't see her pity herself. She was ready to go on. That poor lice-infested beggar lady! I think her a worthy subject, even heroic!"
I remembered the first time Pearl and I discussed the Chinese classic _Dream of Red Mansion_. I was sixteen and had just learned to read. Pearl didn't like the novel, especially the hero, Pao Yu.
"Have your views changed regarding _Dream of Red Mansion_?" I asked.
"No. Pao Yu is nothing but a playboy," Pearl replied.
"By Chinese estimations, Pao Yu is a rebel and an intellectual prince," I said, smiling. "The popular view is that Pao Yu deserves more respect than an emperor."
"What do you mean by popular? The people who hold such views are only a tiny minority."
"Well, that minority rules the literary world."
"Are you telling me that the majority, who happen to be peasants, don't count in China?" Pearl was annoyed.
I had to agree with her that it was not right.
_Dream of Red Mansion_ was a classic, Pearl admitted. "But it is an ill beauty, so to speak. It is about escapism and self-indulgence. I am not saying that the novel doesn't deserve credit for criticizing the feudalism of the time."
"I am glad that you acknowledge that. It is important."
"However," Pearl continued, "the novel, in its essence, reminds me of Goethe's _Sorrows of Young Werther_. The difference is that Werther fell in love with one girl, Lotte, while his Chinese counterpart Pao Yu fell in love with twelve maidens."
"In China, educated men still spend their lives imitating Pao Yu."
"Drinking clubs and brothels have become the only source of inspiration. What a pity!" Pearl went on. "I think it is a crime that there is no representation in literature for the greater part of the Chinese people."
Chapter 15
Days of drizzle announced the coming of spring. Camellias blossomed. Leaves shone glossy green. Heavy with moisture, massive flowers began to plop to the ground. I was working late at night when I heard a knocking on the door.
It was Pearl without an umbrella. Her hair was drenched and she looked devastated.
"What happened?" I let her in and closed the door.
"Lossing . . ." Unable to go on, she passed me a piece of wadded paper.
It was a letter, a hand-copied ancient erotic Chinese poem.
"It's not his handwriting," Pearl pointed out.
"From a female student, you think? Where did you find it?"
"In his drawer. I went to his office looking for an address. I was writing to his aunt, who had some questions concerning Carol."
I was stunned. "Do you think that Lossing is having an affair?"
"How could I think otherwise?" Tears welled from her eyes.
"Where is Lossing now?"
"I don't know."
"Does he know that you know? How long could this have been going on?"
"I haven't paid attention to anything else but Carol."
"Who is this girl?"
"I think I know who she is. Her name is Lotus, a first-year student in the agricultural department. I ran into her several times at Lossing's office."
"Is she pretty?"
"I don't remember . . . that she was particularly pretty. She was the translator he hired for his fieldwork. He has taken trips with her. I was foolish to trust him." She took the towel I offered and wiped her face. "I can't say that I didn't see it coming."
I sat down with her and made tea. "What are you going to do?" I asked quietly.
"If I didn't have Carol, I'd leave now," she answered. Her eyes became tearful again.
"The trouble is that you don't earn enough money."
"No, I don't."
I thought about Pearl's mother and the way she had felt trapped all her life.
"Would you put up with him for Carol's sake?" I asked.
Pearl's hands went through her wet hair. She bit her lower lip and shook her head, slowly but firmly.
"The reality is . . ."
"Listen, Willow. Last month I succeeded in placing two essays, in _South East Asia Chronicle_ and the _American Adventure Magazine_. Although the payments weren't much, it gave me hope."
"Pearl, look, it's difficult for anyone to make a living these days. It's doubly hard for a woman. You know that."
"I am not going to let anything stop me." She was determined. "My gut feeling tells me that writing is my best chance. I must try."
"With your Chinese stories?"
"Absolutely. I believe in my Chinese stories. No other Western author can come close to what I offer—what life is really like in the Orient. For God's sake, I'm living it. The Chinese world cries out for exploration. It's like America once was—fertile and full of promise."
Pearl and I made a new discovery: the poet Hsu Chih-mo. In the summer of 1925, Hsu Chih-mo was called "the Renaissance Man" or "the Chinese Shelley." Promoting the working class's right to literacy, he became the leader of China's new cultural movement. Pearl and I were strong supporters of Hsu Chih-mo.
" _A bush at the foot of the mountain can never enjoy what a pine would_. . ." I shared with Pearl from Hsu Chih-mo's essay titled "On Universe." " _To_ _touch the fantastic rolling clouds the pine must hang dangerously from the cliff_."
In return, Pearl sent me a section of his essay "Morality of Suicide," enclosed with her own note: "Let me know if you don't fall in love with the writer's mind."
_What is wrong is that these suicides embody the values of our society and set_ _our moral standard: a village girl who drowns herself instead of yielding_ _to her abusive mother-in-law; a businessman who hangs himself to escape_ _debt; an Indian who sacrifices himself to feed crocodiles and a minister who_ _drinks poison to demonstrate his loyalty toward the emperor._
_We dishonor the integrity of the individual by honoring these deaths._ _We make death sound glorious. In my opinion, the people who commit_ _suicide are not heroes but victims. I offer them pity and sympathy but not_ _respect and admiration. They are not martyrs, but fools. There are other_ _types of suicide, which I think are truly glorious and worthy—such as that_ _of the characters in Shakespeare's_ Romeo and Juliet. _Their deaths touch us_ _because we identify with their humanity._
The wind was harsh. Gigantic pines stood solemnly against the gray sky. Pearl and I sat with the city view below our feet, discussing Hsu Chih-mo. We knew a lot about him already. He earned a degree in law at Peking University. Then he went to England to study economics but instead earned a degree in literature. Next he attended Columbia University in America and majored in political science. What interested us most was his graduate thesis, _The Social Position of Women_ _in China._
Pearl recited Hsu Chih-mo's poem titled "Cancer in Literature."
_The language smells of a dying room_
_Rotten, filthy and stinky_
_Anxiety and struggle_
_No means of escape_
_Youthful enthusiasm_
_Hope and ideal_
_Grass grows through concrete_
_To reach sunlight and air_
"You are falling in love with Hsu Chih-mo," Pearl teased.
I wished that I could deny it. I took an assignment in Shanghai so that I could attend Hsu Chih-mo's poetry reading. I was excited to find that he was everything I had imagined. He was a six-foot-tall, handsome northern Chinese. He had silky, curly black hair. His leaf-shaped eyes were gentle, although his gaze was intense. Under his Mongolian high-bridged nose was a sensuous mouth. He read passionately. The world around me disappeared.
_I entrust_
_The poplar catkins have all fallen_
_I entrust_
_The cuckoos confuse nights with days_
_And cry "It's better to return!"_
_To the bright moon_
_I entrust an anxious heart_
_Who says you are a thousand miles away_
_I entrust_
_Moonlight will shine on you_
_I entrust_
_The frost kisses the marshland's tender reeds_
I followed Hsu Chih-mo and bought tickets to his lectures. I dressed for him and hoped that our paths would cross. He didn't appear to notice me, but I felt rewarded just to be able to see him.
In Shanghai I learned that I was among thousands of women who dreamed of Hsu Chih-mo. We threw ourselves at him like night bugs at a light.
Pearl told me that Hsu Chih-mo was a constant subject of gossip columns. His affairs with three different women had made headlines in the _Shanghai Evening News_ and the _Celebrity Magazine_. The first was his wife by an arranged marriage. She was the daughter of a wealthy family in Shanghai and followed Hsu to England. The couple committed the unthinkable: They issued a public letter claiming that their relationship was loveless and wrong. Chinese society was stunned by the word _divorce_. Cynics believed that Hsu had abandoned his wife to pursue other women. The wife returned home to give birth to their son and continued to live with and serve Hsu Chih-mo's parents.
It was said that the beautiful Miss Lin was Hsu Chih-mo's second lady. She was an American-educated architect and the daughter of Hsu's mentor, a professor of Chinese literature in England. Miss Lin was said to be torn between Hsu Chih-mo and her fiancé, a famous scholar of Chinese architecture. After much publicized drama, Miss Lin chose her fiancé over Hsu Chih-mo. Hsu Chih-mo's third lady was a courtesan from Peking. He married her in an effort to save her from opium addiction and alcohol. Their marriage was troubled from the start. It had been a staple on the front pages of newspapers and magazines.
Pearl sent me a telegram while I was still in Shanghai. My heart took flight with every word: " _Hsu Chih-mo is scheduled to visit Nanking_ _University. He is accompanying Tagore, a poet from India. You'd better hurry_ _because I have sent Hsu Chih-mo an invitation to give a talk in my class and_ _HE HAS ACCEPTED!"_
Chapter 16
The roles of host and guest were reversed from the beginning. Hsu Chih-mo was getting more attention than his distinguished guest, Tagore. The two stood shoulder to shoulder onstage in front of a podium. Tagore read his poem _Gitanjali_ as Hsu Chih-mo translated. Listeners packed the hall. Students applauded at each of Hsu Chih-mo's sentences.
Looking like a brass temple bell, Tagore was wrapped in a brown blanket. Although he was only in his fifties, the Chinese thought him older because of his chest-length gray beard. In contrast, Hsu Chih-mo was slender, youthful, and stylish. One could easily tell that he was what the crowd had been waiting for. He was the reigning prince of Chinese literature.
Tagore grew increasingly uneasy as the students cheered Hsu Chih-mo. Turning to Hsu Chih-mo, Tagore said, "I thought the crowd was here to see me."
"Yes, sir," Hsu Chih-mo assured him. "The people have come to celebrate your work."
Pearl and I sat in the front row. I wore my silver Shanghai-style coat with a crimson silk scarf. Pearl had arrived late. She wore her wrinkled brown jacket and black cotton skirt and was in a pair of Chinese peasant shoes. Her socks were so worn they hung loose at her ankles. From the disarray of her hair, I knew she'd just had a problem with Carol.
"I can't believe it. You didn't bother to dress up," I whispered in her ear.
She cut me off. "Just be glad that I am here."
I wouldn't let her off easily. "It's Hsu Chih-mo, for God's sake. How often do we get to meet with a celebrity?"
She gave me a tired look.
"What?" I asked.
"Don't."
"Say it." I held her elbow.
"Fine." She turned and whispered in my ear, "I wouldn't have minded missing Hsu Chih-mo. Tagore is the one I came for."
"How about I take the young one and you take the old?" I teased.
"Shush!"
The duet on the stage continued. Hsu Chih-mo translated Tagore's last poem:
_I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands_
_That is why it is so late and why I have been guilty of such omissions_
_They come with their laws and their codes to bind me fast_
_But I evade them ever_
_For I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands_
_People blame me and call me heedless_
_I doubt not they are right in their blame_
"Tagore is lucky," I whispered to Pearl.
Nodding, she agreed. "Hsu Chih-mo is particularly good at reconstructing Tagore's sentences into Chinese."
"Tagore doesn't seem to fully appreciate it."
Hsu Chih-mo continued,
_The market day is over and work is all done for the busy_
_Those who came to call me in vain have gone back in anger_
_I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands_
Pearl and Hsu Chih-mo stood together in front of her class. She had invited the poet to speak to her students the day after his appearance with Tagore. This was before they knew what was going to happen—long before historians wrote about this moment.
I could tell that Hsu Chih-mo was surprised by the excellence of Pearl's Chinese. Except for her Western features and the color of her hair, Pearl was Chinese in every way.
"My apologies for the humble reception, but our hearts are sincere." Pearl smiled and gestured to one of her students to come pour tea for Hsu Chih-mo.
"Long Jing from Hangchow," Pearl said, taking the tea to Hsu Chih-mo. She bowed lightly after placing the cup in front of him.
In retrospect, it was I who didn't see that Hsu Chih-mo was attracted to Pearl the moment he laid eyes on her. Her ease and confidence caught him.
"Where are you from?" Hsu Chih-mo asked Pearl, ignoring the class.
In a perfect Chin-kiang dialect, Pearl replied, "The pig is from River North."
He understood her joke and laughed.
Many southern Chinese called coolies, drifters, beggars, and bandits River North Pigs, because they came from the northern, unfertile part of the Yangtze River and were poor and a lower class. With this joke, Pearl revealed two facts about herself. First, she was a native. Second, she identified with the people. If she had wanted, she could have spoken perfect Mandarin with an Imperial accent.
During the class Hsu Chih-mo discussed his effort in translating Tagore.
Pearl was charming, although her questions were daring. She challenged Hsu Chih-mo on the Indian rhythm compared to the Chinese. She also asked him to explain the art of his translation, especially the difference between being "faithful in appearance" and "faithful in essence."
Infatuated with Hsu Chih-mo, I was blind and deaf to what was truly happening between him and Pearl.
"What influenced you to become a poet?" a female student raised her arm and asked.
"Craziness," Hsu Chih-mo replied. "My mother said that I was a spooky child. My eyes were open and my lips uttered strange words at night. Poetry to me was like rocks and cards were to other boys."
A male student with glasses asked, "You are called the Chinese Shelley. What do you make of that?"
"It doesn't mean anything to me." Hsu Chih-mo smiled. "But I am honored, of course."
"What do you do to make your poems successful?" Pearl asked.
Hsu Chih-mo thought before he replied. "I feel very much like a tailor making a pair of pants. I first study the fabric so I know how to cut it. A good pair of pants takes a great deal of fabric. I make sure that my cuts go with the grain instead of against it."
A loud voice came from the back of the room. "Mr. Hsu, what is your view of the literary movement in our society today?"
The question threw a boulder into a calm pond. Hsu Chih-mo was stirred. "It disturbs me that our country debates whether or not the Chinese language should be made accessible to the peasants!" His voice resonated. "As we all know, the emperor we overthrew thirteen years ago spoke a private language, which nobody but he and his tutor understood. Our proud civilization and heritage become ridiculous when our language is used to create not communication and understanding, but distance and isolation."
As the editor in chief of the _Nanking Daily_ , I created, sponsored, and produced the news program _China Literary Front_. The program was syndicated across all of China. I was able to travel, dine, and converse with some of the brightest minds of our time. But what I enjoyed most was my time with Hsu Chih-mo. He was guarded at first, but I earned his trust. By the end of our work together, we had become good friends. I asked him about the inner force that drove him.
"The inner force is far more important than talent," Hsu Chih-mo revealed. "Writing is my rice and air. One shouldn't bother picking up a pen if that is not the case."
"That is exactly the case with my friend Pearl Buck," I said.
"You mean the River North Pig?" He smiled remembering her.
"Yes."
"What has she written?"
"She has written essays, poems, and novels. She is my special columnist. I'll send you copies of her articles if you are interested."
"Yes, please."
As we continued talking, Hsu Chih-mo asked how Pearl and I had become friends.
The problem with people who end up digging their own grave is that they often have no idea they are digging it. Such was my case as I told Hsu Chih-mo stories about my friend.
After Tagore went back to India and Hsu Chih-mo returned to Shanghai, I felt inspired and enlightened. Against my better judgment, I gave in to my emotions. If I had never believed in fate and coincidence before, it wouldn't be long before I did. When the Nanking University board asked me to help invite Hsu Chih-mo to come back and teach, I did everything within my power to make it happen.
Pearl didn't think that Nanking University stood a chance of getting Hsu Chih-mo. "He has been teaching at Peking University and Shanghai University," she reminded me. I decided to play a card that at the time I thought was brilliant. As friends, Pearl and I together wrote Hsu Chih-mo a personal invitation.
A few weeks later, Hsu Chih-mo responded and said he was on his way.
Chapter 17
After Hsu Chih-mo's arrival, the center of China's literary society shifted from Shanghai to Nanking. Nanking University became the main stage of the New Cultural Movement. I hosted weekly events featuring journalists, writers, and artists from all over the country. I was so busy that I ate my meals standing up. I hadn't had time to visit Pearl for weeks, so one evening I decided to drop by.
She surprised me with the news that Lossing had moved out.
"He is living with Lotus," Pearl said in a subdued voice.
"What about Carol?" I asked.
"Lossing said that Carol wouldn't know the difference. He insists that she doesn't even know that he is her father."
I tried to comfort her. "The important thing is that you are doing the best you can."
She shook her head.
"You have your own life to live, Pearl."
"Carol doesn't deserve this. Her own father abandoning her . . ."
"Carol may not be aware . . ."
"But I am!" she almost shouted.
I went quiet.
She began to sob.
I walked to the kitchen to get her a cup of water.
"Pearl," I said gently. "You have to comb your hair and dress yourself, and you have to eat."
"I would like to simply slip away, to die," she responded. "I need to be released from this trap."
"Have you been writing?" I asked.
"I can't do anything else but write. Here." She tossed me a stack of pages. "From last week. Two short stories."
I glanced at the titles. "The Seventh Dragon" and "The Matchmaker."
"You have been productive, Pearl."
"I was going crazy until I started typing."
I asked if there was any interest from publishers.
"No. One editor from New York was kind enough to send me a note of explanation after rejecting my manuscript. What he said was no news to me. Lossing has been telling me the same thing all along."
"That Western readers are not interested in China?"
She nodded.
"Well, perhaps they are only accustomed to stories of little merit. It may take time to convince them that what you write is different," I said. "Have you tried Chinese publishing houses?"
Have you "Yes."
"And?"
"I made a fool of myself," she sighed. "The right-wing Chinese houses want pure escapism, while the left-wing want nothing but Communism and Russia."
"And you don't care about either of those?"
"No."
"Unfortunately, you still need money."
"Unfortunately."
I invited Pearl to come with me to a New Year's party hosted by the _Nanking Daily_. Pearl didn't want to go, but I insisted.
"Hsu Chih-mo will be there." I could hardly contain my excitement.
"Too bad he is your interest—not mine."
"He's the only one who hasn't read you. He told me he wants to read your work."
"I am not going."
"Please. I don't want to look desperate."
"Desperate? Oh, I see."
"Will you come?"
"Okay, I'll go for tea only."
Hsu Chih-mo stood on a chair waving his arms. "Ladies and gentlemen, I want to present my best friend, the great hope of China's new literature, Dick Lin! He is the seventh translator of Karl Marx's _Communist_ _Manifesto_ and the editor of the _Shanghai Avant-Garde Magazine_." Hsu Chih-mo was dressed in a Western black silk suit with a Chinese collar and Chinese cotton shoes. His hair was neatly combed from the middle to the sides.
The crowd cheered. "Dick Lin! Dick Lin!"
Dick Lin, a short and broad-shouldered man with black-framed glasses, came to shake hands with Pearl and me. He was in his thirties. He had a pair of lizard eyes and a crooked nose. The corners of his mouth drew downward and gave him a serious, almost bitter expression.
"I admire your work at the _Nanking Daily_ ," Dick blurted out to me. "How about working for us?"
Though I was flattered, I was taken aback by his directness.
"You will be guaranteed your own page plus the weekend edition,"
Dick continued. "You can run it any way you want. We'll match your current salary and add a bonus."
I turned to Pearl. My eyes said, "Can you believe this man?"
She smiled.
Dick turned to Pearl and began to speak English with a Chinese accent. "Welcome to China," he said, bowing with exaggeration. "It is my honor to meet you! Hsu Chih-mo tells me that you came to China in diapers. Is that true? No wonder your Chinese is flawless. Do you know Chinese is a very dangerous language for foreigners? One slip in tone and 'Good morning' becomes 'Let us go to bed together.'"
The debate was moderated by Hsu Chih-mo. The topic was "Should novelists write for people or write as people?" The discussion soon became heated.
"A novelist's duty is to wake society's conscience," Dick insisted. "He must make the peasants learn shame—I am talking about those who bought and ate the bread made of the bodies of the revolutionaries!"
The crowd clapped.
"China is where she is because our intellectuals are selfish, arrogant, decadent, and irresponsible," Dick continued. "It's time for our novelists to demonstrate leadership . . ."
Pearl raised her hand.
Hsu Chih-mo nodded for her to speak.
"Have you ever thought," she said, "that it might be the author's choice to write _as_ the people? No matter how you justify the horror of an act like the one you just used as an example, the fact is that China's majority is made of peasants. My question is, Don't peasants deserve a voice of their own?"
"Well, you must pick a worthy peasant to portray," Dick responded. "Like harvesting a fruit tree, you pick the good apples and throw away the rotten. Again, you have an obligation toward society, which needs a moral compass."
"Does that mean you won't publish authors who write with the voice of the real people?" I asked.
"Personally, I won't."
"Then you are denying representation to ninety-five percent of China's population." Pearl's voice was pitched.
Holding firm in his view, Dick declared, "We deny these small-minded, ill-mannered characters a voice."
"Who will you publish then?" I asked.
"The authors who are committed in their fight against Capitalism," Dick replied. "In fact, we are aggressively seeking to publish works by authors that represent the proletarian class. We'll assure these authors' success."
"Dick wants to change the world," Hsu Chih-mo teased.
"Shouldn't it be up to the readers?" Pearl challenged.
"No," Dick said. "Readers need guidance."
Smiling, Pearl disagreed. "Readers are smarter than we think."
"Mrs. Buck." Dick lowered his voice, although it was still loud enough for the room to hear. "I was the editor who rejected your manuscript. I am sure you have tried other publishers without success. My point is that we, not readers, decide."
Pearl got up and quietly walked out of the room.
I rose and followed her.
Outside in the hall, Pearl rushed toward the door. Hurrying my steps, I suddenly heard footfalls behind me. I turned and there was Dick Lin, coming my way.
I paused, thinking that he might wish to apologize for his rudeness toward my friend.
"Willow," he called out as I stopped. "Willow, when can I see you again? I would love to buy you a cup of tea sometime."
I sneered and turned, making my way toward the door.
Hsu Chih-mo's wet hair fell across his face. He stood in front of me by the garden door. His hand reached up to his face to wipe away the rain. "I come to apologize to Pearl for my friend if he has offended her."
I said, "Pearl Buck has told me that she no longer wishes to be part of the Nanking literary circle."
"Dick didn't mean to attack." Hsu Chih-mo insisted that he have a chance to speak with Pearl face-to-face.
I stood looking at him and wanted time to stop. My emotions churned and I started to feel sick inside. I kept telling myself: The man has no interest in me! But my heart refused to listen. My eyes luxuriated in the sight of him.
Hsu Chih-mo looked away uneasily.
"I will pass the message," I said like a fool.
Pearl sat by the table and drank her tea as if she was lost in her own thoughts. I had torn her away from her writing and brought her to my house so that Hsu Chih-mo could talk to her. I was sure that Pearl would leave as soon as he delivered his friend's apology. I waited impatiently for my own private time with Hsu Chih-mo.
"Dick is oblivious." Hsu Chih-mo leaned forward, holding his cup in both hands. "He is combative by nature, but he is good-hearted. He is a genius. To have a conversation with him is like planting seeds together. Wisdom will sprout once you allow sunshine. Only those who appreciate honesty can enjoy Dick. He is passionate about what he believes."
"So you are here to deliver Dick Lin's message?" Pearl's eyes were on the tree outside the window.
"No," Hsu Chih-mo said so gently that it was as if he had merely breathed. "I come to deliver my own message."
She didn't ask to know.
He waited.
I found myself tortured by the fact that he tried to get her attention, tried to get her to turn her head.
Chapter 18
Many years later, after Hsu Chih-mo's death and after Pearl had become an American novelist and had won both the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, she wrote about him.
_He claimed me with his love, and then he let me go home. When I arrived_ _in America, I realized that the love was with me, and would stay with me_ _forever._
_He used to sit in my living room and talk by the hour and wave his_ _beautiful hands in exquisite and descriptive gestures until when I think of_ _him, I see first his hands. He was a northern Chinese, tall and classically_ _beautiful in looks, and his hands were big and perfectly shaped and smooth_ _as a woman's hands._
I sat in the same room with Pearl and Hsu Chih-mo. It was my home, but I felt like a ghost.
Dick Lin was no longer their topic of discussion.
Hsu Chih-mo was talking about a famous musician, a blind man named Ah Bing who played the erhu, a two-stringed violin.
"Ah Bing is a perfect example of someone who created his art _as_ the people." Hsu Chih-mo's tone was rushed, eager to get his point across. "Before Ah Bing became an artist, he was a beggar—something the critics choose to ignore. Ah Bing spent years wandering the streets of the towns of southern China. He dressed in rags and was bitten by hungry dogs. He became famous because his music moved people. Listening to his erhu was like hearing him tell the stories of his life. He made my heart weep and made me want to be a good human being. He didn't set out to inspire or guide . . ."
"What do you imagine occupied Ah Bing's mind when he played?" Pearl asked.
"I have asked myself the same question." Hsu Chih-mo's hands gestured like birds in the air. "Did Ah Bing think that he was creating a masterpiece? Was he impressed with himself? Did he think that he was claiming an important place in Chinese music history?" Hsu Chih-mo turned to look at Pearl as if asking for her opinion.
"More likely, he was thinking about his next meal," Pearl responded.
"Precisely!" Hsu Chih-mo agreed.
"Ah Bing wanted only to please the passersby for a penny or two,"
Pearl continued. "Hunger drove him. I imagine him apologizing for being a bother. At night, he slept below the ancient walls or outside the train station . . ."
"Yes, and yes," the poet Hsu Chih-mo echoed. "During his waking hours, he played his erhu to forget his misery."
"Ah Bing would take up his bow. Sorrow would pour from his strings . . ." Pearl followed.
"Yes, Ah Bing, the greatest erhu player that ever lived. His music is considered the symbol of the Yangtze River. It starts at the bottom of the Himalayas and flows like water across the vast plains of China to the East Sea and out into the Pacific Ocean."
They spoke as if I were not in the room, as if I didn't exist. I could feel the force pulling them closer. It was strong. They were my real-life Romeo and Juliet, the Butterfly Lovers. I sat behind Hsu Chih-mo in the corner of the room by the shadow near the curtains. I held my breath and dared not stir. Moment by moment I saw love take root in their hearts. They blossomed like flowers. It was fate.
I was amazed to be both witness to and victim of a great love. I was touched by their birth of feeling but sad beyond description because my heart withered.
"I share Ah Bing's joy in the warmth of springtime." Pearl's voice came gentle and soft. "I smell the sweet scent of jasmine and I see all beauty under the sky. Ah Bing's love of life touches a commoner's heart. My favorite is 'The Fair Maiden.' His longing for her is endless and deep. His musical depiction of the sunshine in a girl's eyes brings tears to my eyes."
Hsu Chih-mo turned toward Pearl and their eyes locked on each other.
"It was in music that Ah Bing escaped the life he was living." Hsu Chih-mo's voice was so quiet he was almost whispering.
"Yes," Pearl uttered. "Through music Ah Bing became the hero he desired to be."
They stopped.
The sound of a teakettle boiling came.
"Excuse me." I got up and went to the kitchen. I tried to press back my tears.
I emptied the teapot and refilled it with cold water. My hands were shaking.
After a time, I heard Hsu Chih-mo say, "That is how I felt when I read your manuscript."
I didn't hear Pearl's response.
I looked out the window. The sky was dark gray. The sound of the mountain creek was clear.
"I have to go," I heard Pearl say.
I tried not to think that Hsu Chih-mo stayed because he felt sorry for me. I invited him for dinner and drinks. Alcohol went to our heads and we became animated. I joked about my marriage and he his. Hsu Chih-mo spoke of his confusion with feminism. I asked about his infamous love life.
"Don't tell me that you hate it," I said.
"I do, believe it or not."
"Come on, you are living every man's fantasy!"
"Willow, my friend, you have had too much to drink. A cold shower would do you some good." Hsu Chih-mo shook his head.
I let him know that I was upset that his thoughts were still with the one who had left.
"You are attracted to Pearl Buck." I turned to him and made him look at me. "Don't even attempt to lie."
He smiled. "What makes you think that?"
"Can you tell me that it is not true?"
He lowered his eyes. "I am a married man."
"I am drunk." I threw my cup at him. It missed. "Now get out!"
I would have felt better if Pearl and Hsu Chih-mo had admitted their attraction to each other. Their denial and resistance made it worse. Pearl avoided Hsu Chih-mo at the university. She went to Lossing and persuaded him to move back home, which he did.
Pearl buried herself in her room and wrote feverishly. She sent out her manuscript _East Wind, West Wind_ and finally found a small American publisher willing to take on the book. She was happy, even when the book didn't sell well. She didn't care. She couldn't stop writing.
She started another novel. She let me see a few pages a day from her rough draft. I ended up reading the entire manuscript. It was _The Story_ _of Wang Lung_ , a title later changed to _The Good Earth_. I could see the shadows of villagers whom we both knew. Pearl described a world I was familiar with but had never encountered in Chinese literature. She changed my perspective. She made me see things I intuitively knew to be true.
"I am doing this behind her back," I told Hsu Chih-mo when I shared Pearl's manuscript with him. I asked him to help find the manuscript a home so that Pearl could earn an advance.
Hsu Chih-mo promised to try.
I must say that I brought this upon myself—if Hsu Chih-mo hadn't already been in love with Pearl, this would have pushed him over the edge. Hsu Chih-mo believed that Pearl was a true artist, the Ah Bing of literature.
We went on being good friends. Finally, after much beating about the bush, Hsu Chih-mo asked if I could pass along a letter to Pearl Buck.
It was a thick letter.
I told Hsu Chih-mo that I would think about it. The truth was that my jealousy of Pearl was growing by the day. And I was hurt by the fact that she had never even made an effort to attract him.
Pearl was the only faculty member who voted against the renewal of Hsu Chih-mo's teaching contract. She refused to explain her action to the others.
"He wasn't telling the truth when he said that money was the reason he applied," she said, frying cabbages in her wok. "He needed to pay off his wife's debts, so he jokingly claimed. He fooled everyone on the committee but me."
"Did you read Hsu Chih-mo's comments about your new novel?" I asked.
"I did."
"What do you think?"
"What do you expect me to say?"
"Did they please you?"
"Yes, very much so. It was generous of him."
"Do you think he understands what you wrote?"
"He is the only other Chinese person besides you who understands my writing."
"There is a big difference between us. Hsu Chih-mo's credentials give him the power to influence others."
"I didn't say I couldn't use his help."
"Then why do you keep rejecting him?"
She closed the lid on the wok and turned away from the stove. "I am confused about my feelings for him." She paused before continuing. "He inspires my confidence and creativity, but . . . I am terrified at the same time."
"Are you falling in love with Hsu Chih-mo?" I watched her eyes.
"I feel like I am about to tumble down a hill."
"Yes or no?"
"Willow, please."
"Don't you think you owe me at least a clear answer?" I couldn't help raising my voice. "I am not blind and deaf as you assume. I have been poisoned by the air you two breathe. I am a strong woman capable of handling my own crisis. I am honest with myself. I have the courage to chase after my own dreams. Unfortunately, I can't force a man to fall in love with me. By God's grace, I have been blessed with everything else but the love of a man. One thing is clear: As long as you are in the picture, I don't stand a chance with Hsu Chih-mo. What can I say? Bad luck? Or do I tell myself, Okay, you can't have him but your best friend can? To tell you the truth, my heart is not that big."
"What would you like me to do?" Pearl said apologetically.
"I want you to stop lying to me!"
"Willow, I didn't lie to you. I have never lied and never will."
"Oh, donkey shit! 'I am confused about my feelings for him,' for example. Are you, really? You know exactly what is going on! You know you are in love with Hsu Chih-mo. You know you can't run away from him, though you tried and tried like a rabbit running from a forest fire."
"All right, I sinned. How do I make it right?"
"Admit the truth. Can't you see that I need a shoulder to cry on?"
I accepted Dick Lin's invitation for tea. We met at a small teahouse at the foot of the Purple Mountain. It was a warm autumn afternoon. I was in my blue coat with a black silk scarf.
Dick wore a French-style collarless jacket and a matching French hat.
The moment we sat down he started to talk about himself.
"I worked in the fields with my parents before I was five," he began. "My father was determined to get me an education although he was a poor peasant. I went to school naked like other boys in the village. The new teacher was from the city, and she didn't expect to see a bunch of bare-assed monkeys. She screamed the moment she stepped into the classroom."
Dick had an abundance of self-confidence. He demanded his audience's attention.
I studied his features as he talked without pause. It was a strange picture of harmony. The lizard eyes went well with the crooked nose. The thin-lipped mouth fit the small chin. Although I didn't like him at first, I began to warm up to him, to his openness, his childlike enthusiasm, and, most of all, his will to believe in dreams.
"I traveled after I escaped my village," Dick continued. "My father chased me and beat me. He even pushed me into the river trying to drown me. I went abroad as a student worker. I lived in France for three years. I worked during the day and went to school in the evening. In Paris I experienced Communism firsthand."
Dick laughed and then paused to observe me.
I tried to be present, but it had been a long day and my mind began to wander. I nodded and asked, "So, what brought you back to China?"
"I didn't miss my family, but I did miss my country," he went on. "I was twenty-two. Never before had I felt so strongly that I could do something to help change the world, to reverse the inequity between the rich and poor . . ."
Although he lacked the grace of Hsu Chih-mo, I found myself listening.
"I could have been silent and remained unaffected." He looked at me, eager for a response. "I could have imitated an ancient sage and hid myself away in the mountains. Instead I chose to lead a purposeful life and fight for the people."
His tone was charged with energy. I was strangely moved.
The clouds drifted low to the ground and the crowns of pine trees spread like beggars' arms. Dick and I followed the trail leading to the top of the Purple Mountain. I thought about asking him to reconsider publishing Pearl's novel. But the moment he said he would do anything for me, I changed my mind. I didn't want to be beholden to him.
Pearl deserves honor, not mercy, I thought.
Dick said that he was nervous whenever he was near me. He complimented and flattered me. I wished that his words were coming from Hsu Chih-mo. I wondered where Hsu Chih-mo was and what he was doing. Was Pearl's name written in the sky of his mind? For the past few months, Hsu Chih-mo had made visits to Shanghai to be with his wife. Each time he returned to Nanking, he would be even more depressed. When I asked about his wife, he would reply, "My wife lives in her opium den. She doesn't talk unless it is to ask me for money."
The gossip publications following Hsu Chih-mo revealed the massive debts his wife owed. The latest reports had the former courtesan spending time with a wealthy patron. Hsu Chih-mo was said to be fighting with his wife over money and her drug habit. One source said that Hsu Chih-mo had gone back to his former architect mistress. The public had become obsessed with the drama.
"It's time for you to think about taking Hsu Chih-mo as a lover," I said.
Stunned, Pearl turned to me. "You are crazy, Willow."
"Why not?" I went on. "After all, Lossing is with Lotus."
"No," she said bluntly.
"Hsu Chih-mo . . ."
"Stop, would you? I don't feel like discussing Hsu Chih-mo."
"But I do."
She was quiet.
I felt sick with myself, but couldn't stop.
"I am not a fool, Willow," I heard Pearl say. "I can see . . ."
"Then answer my question."
"I don't know how to answer your question. As you know, we both are married. Frankly, I don't enjoy this kind of joke. Or . . . is it a joke?"
"What do you think?"
"It is pure Chinese that you indulge in this game of cruelty. This is how you drive away misery. But is it working? Are you less miserable than yesterday?"
"You speak like your father, wearing God's clothes!" I responded. "You can't face the truth!"
"I am trying to act decently. I am your friend."
"Then damn your decency!"
"Fine!" She came to face me. "You want the truth? Here it is! Yes, Hsu Chih-mo and I are in love with each other! And yes, we will go to bed together, tonight!"
Chapter 19
I accepted Dick Lin's offer to be the editor of his magazine. I made up my mind to move to Shanghai for good.
Pearl was devastated.
A month before I left, Hsu Chih-mo paid me a visit. He pleaded with me to save his relationship with Pearl. "She fell apart after learning about your departure. She told me that she would view me as an enemy if I continued to visit her. She's engaged in a war with me."
I refused to talk to Hsu Chih-mo. I had done enough for him.
Confused, he said, "I'll come back when you are in a better mood."
After he left, I couldn't escape the sound of his voice praising Pearl. "Pearl and I are soul mates!" " _The Good Earth_ is like no other novel I have ever read. It's a masterpiece!" "It takes a humanitarian to be a good novelist." "She denied that love has passed between us!"
Before I could say hello to Shanghai and to Dick Lin, I knew that I must settle my past accounts and say good-bye to Nanking. Yet the shadows of Pearl Buck and Hsu Chih-mo followed close upon me.
Dick promised me independence. He said that he would always be there for me if I needed him.
"You are coming to Shanghai," he said in his letters, "and that is all that counts."
Dick was confident that I would grow to love him.
I warned him that I was taking advantage of him.
"You don't owe me anything" was his response.
Dick told me that Shanghai had been the red cradle ever since the Communist Party had been created in 1921. Although the party was still considered a guerrilla group, it was becoming the major opposition force against the ruling nationalist government. Dick played an important role in the party. He had become Mao Tse-tung's chief adviser and he ran the party's bureau of propaganda.
I was not terribly interested in the new world Dick described. I didn't care whether or not the Communists would win China. What I cared about was having a place in Shanghai where I could tend to my wounds and try to start my life again. Dick made it convenient.
"You used to be a tiny creek and now you are part of an ocean." Dick was as happy as a goalie after catching a ball.
The day of my departure was approaching. I wasn't living a lie, yet I wasn't living truthfully either. Pearl and Hsu Chih-mo had called a cease-fire and had finally become lovers. I took credit because I had helped. My home was their love nest. There, they were able to escape the prying eyes of the public. But I was wrong about myself. I was consumed by envy and jealousy.
Pearl knew me too well to feel comfortable with the situation. She even refused to show up when Hsu Chih-mo gave me a farewell dinner. On the one hand, I was comforted by the fact that Hsu Chih-mo didn't know that I was in love with him. On the other, I suffered when he shared with me his feelings for my friend. "I am in love" was written all over his face. It hurt me, but Hsu Chih-mo couldn't stop talking and I couldn't stop listening.
Hsu Chih-mo was convinced that Pearl was more Chinese than he was. He was infatuated with her perspective, her Chinese habits, her love of camellias. He was especially thrilled when she cursed in Chinese. He loved "the Chinese soul under the white skin."
Hsu Chih-mo told me that he used to play with peasant children when he was young. "My family were small landowners, so I was surrounded by peasant children. But I had no understanding of them when I played with them. I only knew that I was the young master and they were my slaves. They were not my equals as human beings. My family owned them or hired them. All Chinese schoolboys have the same attitude. When they become adults they look down on peasants. But Pearl believes that all spirits are equal before God. This respect for her subjects makes her work wonderful. In her, one hears the voice of a peasant as a human being."
I drank and toasted with him.
Hsu Chih-mo confessed, "Pearl makes me happy. I never know what she is going to say next. She's brilliant, cunning, and funny. The mix of the Chinese and American cultures in her fascinates me always. I find myself looking forward to her thoughts."
"What about love?" I asked.
"What about it?" He blinked.
"Does she . . . love like a Chinese woman?"
Hsu Chih-mo's lips stretched into a big smile. "That is my secret."
"Share with me a little, please."
"I must go, Willow."
"How dare you destroy the bridge after crossing the river!"
I imagined the hands she described, his hands, touching her. Pearl told me that she had woken up from her foolishness. I asked what she meant. She said that Lossing vanished from her mind the moment she was alone with Hsu Chih-mo. She was afraid she was becoming obsessed with Hsu Chih-mo. "I used to think that what I went through with Lossing happened in every marriage. I write about romance because it hasn't existed in my life."
"And romance is frightening?"
"I am afraid of what that knowledge will do to me."
"So this may be more than just an affair?"
"I don't know anymore. Hsu Chih-mo is a green refuge in the desert of my life. Because of him, I am more patient with Carol and tolerant of Absalom. I am no longer disgusted with myself. My despair has left me. I have even been thinking about adopting a little girl. In fact, I've already begun the process. And yet . . ." She stopped for a moment before continuing. "It is hard to see that Hsu Chih-mo and I would have a future together."
"Because you are both married? Or because you are too different as individuals?"
"All I know is that I am in love with him, and that common sense has deserted me."
"Hsu Chih-mo will continue to pursue you."
"He doesn't understand my responsibilities. He doesn't understand that I will never be free because of Carol. He told me that he lost his own son at the age of five. He was able to dig himself out of his own sorrow. But I can't. I am not like him. For Carol's sake, I must stay with Lossing . . . for the money."
"Will you give up Hsu Chih-mo?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Your mother used to say that life is about being forced to make choices."
We both went quiet. "I am watching life escape before my eyes," she said.
The air was filled with the sweet scent of summer blossoms. I had come to the riverbank to say good-bye to the city of Nanking. I knew that under the cover of darkness, in the shadow of the magnolia canopies, Hsu Chih-mo and Pearl walked the streets of Nanking. Pearl had told me that the place they most often frequented was a local restaurant called Seven Treasures. Her favorite was Chin-kiang mushroom noodle soup.
Lossing had moved away again with Lotus. He had accepted a new position as the head of the agricultural department at a university in southwest China. Hsu Chih-mo was free to visit Pearl, although in secrecy. The love she could not let go of revived Pearl, and she changed. She began to pay attention to the way she dressed and she joined a dance class at the university. She went with Hsu Chih-mo to collect fresh camellias during the early spring. Inspired, Hsu Chih-mo published a poem titled "The Camellia Petals on My Pillow."
Rumors spread and the public assumed that Hsu Chih-mo had gone back to his former mistress. The newspapers competed to predict Hsu Chih-mo's next move.
I didn't answer Pearl's request for a chance to say good-bye.
I felt that we had said enough to each other. I didn't want to hear the name Hsu Chih-mo again. I left quietly. The pier was crowded. I boarded the steamboat and stood by myself. As the boat began to pull away, I got a surprise.
Pearl ran down the stone terrace toward the water.
I didn't think she would be able to find me.
She slowed and finally stopped. Behind her, people waved, cheered, and shouted.
Then she found me. Her eyes. I knew she saw me because she stood completely still, gazing in my direction. She wore an indigo-colored Chinese outfit. Her hair was in a bun. The sun shone down on her. She looked like Carie.
I wished that I could shut my eyes.
The porters let go of the ropes. The steamboat began to pick up speed.
"Farewell!" the crowd on the pier cried.
One wife shouted at her husband affectionately, "Hey, you idiot and soon-to-be-beheaded. Don't forget to save firewood after lighting the stove!"
The husband laughed and yelled back, "Hey, dumb wrinkleface, you'd better remember to come home or you will find me spending all your savings on a concubine!"
I wept, wishing that my arms were around Pearl. By leaving I meant to escape my own misery, but I had ended up punishing her.
The departure would preserve what we had, I hoped.
Yet could I truly leave?
The water gap between us widened. People screamed back and forth in a contest of comic insults.
Then, in a Chin-kiang tone, I heard Pearl yell, "I am not a bird but a mosquito—too tiny for you to use a rifle on!"
Knowing I was forgiven, I shot back, "Be careful when you think that you have gotten a good deal. Check on your handsome rooster. Don't be surprised if he grows a set of teeth one day!"
"Go ahead and cartwheel on the back of a bull! I am a loyal admirer!"
"Yeah, the fox comes and cries at the chicken's funeral. Go away!"
Chapter 20
I wasn't sure whether it was my door or the neighbors' when I heard the knocking. The attic room where I lived was near the Shanghai waterfront, the Bund. At night I could hear porters at work and the sighing sound of passing ships. I tried to go back to sleep but the knocking grew louder. I realized that it was my door. I glanced at the clock. It was four in the morning.
"Willow!" came Dick's voice.
I went to open the door.
The expression on Dick's face scared me. His eyes were red and swollen, as if he'd been crying.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
Dick handed me a stack of newspapers.
I glanced at the headlines and staggered back in shock.
POET DIES IN PLANE CRASH!
HSU CHIH-MO'S PASSING AT 34 STUNS THE NATION!
POSTAL PLANE CRASHES NEAR NANKING, PILOT AND PASSENGER. NONE SURVIVE.
I recognized the words, but my mind refused to acknowledge their meanings. I kept flipping the newspapers back and forth. The date was correct, November 20, 1931. Hsu Chih-mo's face was on every front page. I looked at him, the handsome smiling face, the leaf-shaped gentle eyes and the silky black hair. The classic good looks of a northerner. I touched the image of his face with my fingers. My tears smeared the ink.
Dick held my shoulders and sobbed like a child. "Did you know about him taking free rides on postal airplanes?" he asked.
Of course I knew. Hsu Chih-mo had been in touch with me because Pearl had again been refusing to see him. Pearl wanted to end their affair. Hsu Chih-mo figured it was because he was still a married man. He returned to Shanghai and asked for a divorce from his wife. But his wife wouldn't release him without an impossible monetary settlement. To make money, Hsu Chih-mo accepted lecture invitations all over the country. He traveled every few days from city to city. He was also teaching part-time at both Shanghai University and Peking University. He was offered free airplane rides by a friend, a postal pilot. Hsu Chih-mo was grateful to save the money. The friend also flew Hsu Chih-mo to Nanking to meet Pearl in secrecy.
"Once bitten by a snake, forever in fear of ropes," Hsu Chih-mo once said about Pearl's anxiety about a new marriage.
"Isn't it enough that you are lovers?" I asked.
"No." His voice was soft but determined. "I'd like to spend the rest of my life with her."
The expression on Hsu Chih-mo's face was still vivid in my mind. He had sat on the chair in my attic. When he stood, his head touched the ceiling. He hunched to make himself fit. Behind him, beyond an open window, was a sea of Shanghai rooftops.
Pearl would learn the news in the next few hours. She would discover her lover's death at the breakfast table, perhaps. Carol wouldn't notice her mother's shock, and the servant wouldn't know where the mistress's tears sprang from.
I hadn't told Pearl about Hsu Chih-mo's last visit. He had been upset and angry at me for supporting Pearl's decision.
In the past, their separations had never lasted. It was like cutting water with a sword. They simply couldn't resist each other. Hsu Chih-mo took the free plane ride three times a week to be with her. I learned from Hsu Chih-mo that the pilot let him borrow his farmhouse near the airport. Pearl described to me her visits to the farmhouse.
"I was like an addict running toward opium," she said of her meetings with Hsu Chih-mo.
I kept finding out new details about the plane crash. On the day of the accident the weather was foggy. The pilot misjudged. The plane hit the mountaintop and crashed. One source said that the pilot often got absorbed in conversation with Hsu Chih-mo. They thought the accident might have taken place because the pilot was distracted.
The papers said that Hsu Chih-mo's wife was so heartbroken that she vowed to quit opium. She declared to the public that she would devote her life to publishing all Hsu Chih-mo's remaining work and letters.
Hsu Chih-mo's funeral was held in Nanking.
I asked Dick, "Why not Peking? Why not Shanghai?"
"It was Hsu Chih-mo's wish," Dick replied. "He wanted his ashes to be scattered over the Purple Mountain and the Yangtze River."
Had Hsu Chih-mo anticipated the possibility of his crash? I was astonished at the thought. Certainly the poet had had an active imagination. It wouldn't have been unthinkable for him to have entertained the idea of a dramatic exit.
I remembered Hsu Chih-mo's description of his last falling-out with Pearl. He visited me after days of drinking and sleepless nights. In fact, it was two days before he took the fatal flight.
"Will you give this to her?" he asked, holding out a package.
"She told you that this had to stop," I responded.
"It will be the last time that I impose on you."
"What is it?"
"My new book, a collection of poems."
I gave him a she-won't-read-it look.
"I don't care. She inspired it."
Mourners filled the streets of Nanking. White magnolias and jasmine were sold out. Dick and I had taken a train from Shanghai to Nanking. We arrived in the afternoon. Dick had sent Pearl a message before we left but received no response.
The Nanking crematorium was covered with white flowers. A photo of Hsu Chih-mo on the wall greeted the visitors. A banner that ran the length of the hall read, people's poet rests in peace. Beyond the flower wreath was the closed casket. Dick had seen his friend's body and said that Hsu Chih-mo would have wanted the lid closed.
No one in Pearl's house knew where she was. The maid said that her mistress had gone to the university. Eventually I thought of the pilot's farmhouse.
I only had Pearl's vague description of the place, but I told Dick that I would look for her. Once outside the city, I was lost. It was a peasant child who pointed me in the right direction. The child had seen an airplane landing and taking off at an abandoned World War I–era military airport near the house. The spot was cradled by the surrounding hills. Waist-tall weeds grew in patches across the cracked runway.
The farmhouse was covered with wild ivy. Frogs and crickets ceased their singing as I walked to the door. Grasshoppers jumped over my feet, and one almost got into my mouth. Giant mosquitoes buzzed around my head.
The door was ready to fall from its hinges. It leaned to one side and was open. I let myself in. Once inside, I smelled the incense.
She was in an ocean-blue Chinese dress, embroidered with white chrysanthemums, the symbol of grief. She was on her knees lighting incense. She had been performing the traditional Chinese soul-guarding ceremony for Hsu Chih-mo. She had set up an altar with flowers and water.
"Pearl," I called.
She rose and came to me and collapsed in my arms.
Softly, I told her that I had come to deliver Hsu Chih-mo's package.
She nodded.
I passed her the package and said, "I'll be outside."
When she emerged from the farmhouse, she looked like an Oriental, her eyes were so swollen from crying.
She asked me to take a look at the first page of Hsu Chih-mo's book. The title was _Lonely Night_.
_Across the screen the autumn moon_
_stares coldly from the sky_
_With silken fan I sit and flick_
_the fireflies sailing by_
_The night grows colder every hour_
_it chills the heart_
_To watch the spinning Damsel_
_from the Herd Boy far apart_
_A wilderness alone remains_
_all garden glories gone_
_The river runs unheeded by_
_weeds grow unheeded on_
_Dusk comes the east wind blows and birds_
_pipe forth a mournful sound_
_Petals like nymphs from balconies_
_come tumbling to the ground_
I had known Pearl's loneliness since we were children. She had always searched for her "own kind." That didn't mean another Westerner. It meant another soul that experienced and understood both the Eastern and Western worlds.
It was in Hsu Chih-mo that Pearl had found what she was looking for. With him she had not been lonely. If she were the cresting wave's cheerful foam, Hsu Chih-mo would be the wrinkled sea sand beneath.
Ashes gathered at the bottom of the incense burner.
The sun set behind the hill and the room fell instantly dark.
In the future I would understand the connection between Pearl's accomplishments as a novelist and her love of Hsu Chih-mo. Over the eighty books she would create in her lifetime, she would carry on her affair with Hsu Chih-mo.
"Writing a novel is like chasing and catching spirits," Pearl Buck would say of her writing process. "The novelist gets invited into splendid dreams. The lucky one gets to live the dream once, and the luckiest over and over."
She was the luckiest one. She must have met with his spirit throughout the rest of her life. I will never forget the moment Pearl lit her last stick of incense. She composed a poem in Chinese bidding good-bye to Hsu Chih-mo.
_Wild summer was in your gaze_
_Earth laughs in flowers_
_Lust in the chill of the grave_
_Wind's hand touches_
_Mind bent with the weight of sorrow._
_Orchid boat I board alone_
_Spring rain blurs the lantern light_
_Deep green are my parting thoughts of you_
I considered myself lucky too. Although Hsu Chih-mo didn't love me, he trusted me. It made our ordinary friendship extraordinary. There was commitment and devotion between us. Hsu Chih-mo had asked me to keep the original manuscripts of his poetry. His wife had threatened to burn them because in the pages she "smelled the scent of another woman."
I became the keeper of Hsu Chih-mo's secrets. I was so faithful that I didn't even share those manuscripts with Pearl. I'd like to think that Hsu Chih-mo loved me in a special way. The most important lesson he taught me was that there was no one singular perspective on things or emotions in the universe—no one way of comprehending truth.
Hsu Chih-mo, the man, the child, the poet who smiled at all that passed beyond his understanding, would remain in my life. I possessed, literally, his poetry, although I wished that I had won his heart. After Hsu Chih-mo's wife died, I began to release his poems one at a time. My intent was to make his legacy last. I created ambiguity and the public embraced it. "Let's allow mystery to pervade," I said to journalists.
Columnists speculated about what might have happened if Hsu Chih-mo had lived. The result was that the poems I released were printed in the newspapers. The public was hungry for Hsu Chih-mo. There were always new discoveries about his romantic life. He was more famous after death.
Over time, I became the collector of everything Hsu Chih-mo. In addition to his poems and letters, I sought copies of written materials about him, including the most frivolous gossip.
After Hsu Chih-mo's death I moved to Nanking to be closer to Pearl and to his memory.
In the name of the _Nanking Daily_ , I organized the Hsu Chih-mo Conference. The event satisfied my desire to hear his name pronounced on the lips of the young. Female university students carried _The Collected_ _Poems of Hsu Chih-mo_ under their arms like fashionable handbags. They reminded me of myself, the way I once was in love, still was, and would forever be. I whispered Hsu Chih-mo's name in darkness and daylight, alone or with Pearl or without her.
People from every corner of China attended my conference. There were suspicions, rumors, and questions regarding the reason Hsu Chih-mo had chosen me to keep his papers. "We were best friends," I answered with ease.
I felt as if I were living in a fictional world when the list of Hsu Chih-mo's mistresses and love interests continued. The details were imaginative and vivid. Some did get close to the truth. Yet in the end none hit the target.
I enjoyed the colorful interpretations of Hsu Chih-mo's life while knowing that I alone held the truth.
**Part Three**
Chapter 21
Hsu Chih-mo's death reminded us how fragile life could be. Looking back, I realized that it was Dick's love for Hsu Chih-mo that bound us together. Dick had once been combative and imposing, and Hsu Chih-mo had changed him. Dick acknowledged, "If I am a giant today, it is because Hsu Chih-mo taught me the difference between physical and intellectual height."
I married Dick Lin after Hsu Chih-mo died. He worked in Shanghai and came to see me in Nanking once a month.
Pearl continued to teach at Nanking University but she no longer lingered on campus. Every time she saw the tree that Hsu Chih-mo used to sit under waiting for her, she would burst into tears. Hsu Chih-mo was more in her life than when he had been alive.
"Hsu Chih-mo was the only Chinese man I know who was true to himself," Pearl told me. "In his way, he was daring and almost impulsive. I couldn't help but love him. It was selfish of me. But I needed him. We needed each other."
One thing Pearl seemed unaware of was that Hsu Chih-mo had also been her challenge. I was never a challenge for Pearl, in contrast. She was attracted to challenges. When she lived in China, she never looked down on anyone, but she also never looked up to anyone until Hsu Chih-mo.
Without Pearl and Hsu Chih-mo in my life, I never would have been the person I am today. The three of us discussed Shakespeare, Rousseau, Dickens, and classic Chinese poets and novelists. Although I published and impressed others as a writer, it was never my air and rice, as it was for Pearl and Hsu Chih-mo.
Like Carie, Pearl worked obsessively for the church and offered her charity. She played Carie's piano, which was falling apart. The keys either didn't work or were out of tune. Pearl made the best of it. During Christmas season, we gathered. Pearl retranslated Absalom's lyrics into Chinese. We spent the evenings singing Carie's favorites, from "The God of Glory" to "Hail the Heaven-Born Prince of Peace"; from "Love Has Come" to "Hark the Herald Angels Sing."
Papa no longer worried about the church attendance—the members of the Chin-kiang congregation by now far outnumbered those of the local Buddhist temples. More and more people were choosing the Foreign God Jesus Christ.
Pearl's home became what Carie's once was, a shelter for the needy. Neighbors came by unannounced. People borrowed whatever they needed, from gingerroot and garlic to pots and pans, medicine and clothing. As they visited, they shared words with Pearl. They complained about bad weather, failed business deals, nasty mothers-in-law or troubled children. Pearl listened and comforted them. She believed that only when one understood suffering was one capable of happiness.
It was the house rule that no one mentioned Carol's condition to outsiders, but Pearl realized that people drew closer to her because of Carol. Pearl was better understood. Local children were taught to play with Carol as if she were normal.
I had a feeling that Pearl knew Dick's true identity, although she never asked. By 1933, Dick was the head of the Shanghai branch of the Communist Party. The party survived the Nationalists' brutal purge. Mao retreated to Shan-hsi province, a remote area in the northwest mountains. Dick was left alone to be in charge. He barely had time to travel to Nanking.
While the Nationalists fought the Communists, Japan penetrated into China. In early 1934 Japan launched a full-scale invasion and took Manchuria. The nation protested and forced the head of the Nationalists, Chiang Kai-shek, to unite with the Communists instead of hunting them down.
While the Nationalist troops turned around and marched toward Manchuria to fight the Japanese, Mao expanded his forces. Dick received secret orders from Mao to focus on key generals who served Chiang Kai-shek. Dick's goal was to inspire them to lead an uprising inside the Nationalist military.
"We will take the troops who rebel to Mao," Dick told me.
Although I was aware of the danger, I supported Dick. It was clear that he simply couldn't be stopped. What concerned me was his safety.
One day my fear turned into a reality: Dick's plan ran into trouble when sensitive information was leaked. By the time I heard the news, Dick was on the run. Overnight, he was on the government's most-wanted list. Dick was followed everywhere. Soon he ran out of places to hide in Shanghai. Whoever received him was followed and arrested.
I went to Pearl and asked if she could help by getting Dick a temporary job at Nanking University. "Dick must have a job in order to register with the city as a legal resident," I told Pearl. "Dick will take any job, even as a janitor or night guard. There would be no financial burden to the university because we'd give you money to pay his salary."
Pearl promised to try, but she warned me that the situation in Nanking was becoming uncertain.
"I would hire Dick as my house servant if it wouldn't be so suspicious," Pearl added. "I am watched because all foreigners are considered allies of Japan."
The moment Dick arrived in Nanking, he was arrested. He was thrown into the Nationalist military prison. Although his true identity was still undiscovered, he was tried as a Communist. He was asked to cooperate and produce the names of his comrades. When he refused, he was beaten and his jaw broken.
"Has he been allowed a doctor?" Absalom asked when I told Pearl the news.
"No," I replied.
"Nonsense!" Absalom said. "I don't think that we are helpless." He turned to Pearl. "There must be something we can do to help Dick."
"Father, we must be cautious. We are not the only ones at risk," Pearl said, reminding him of the other people in her house. "We are responsible for their lives as well."
Pearl's house was crowded. Besides Absalom and Carol, Pearl's sister, Grace, had moved in. Her family had also stayed in China, as missionaries. Pearl's new adopted daughter, Janice, was there too. She was a little older than Carol. The two were already close sisters.
Pearl insisted that I stay with her instead of going back to my own house.
When Nanking University turned down Pearl's proposal to hire Dick, the seventy-seven-year-old Absalom went to the Nanking government and claimed that Dick was his assistant working for the church.
"It was the first time in his life that Absalom chose to sin," Pearl later said, after Dick's release.
Absalom made it his duty to protect the members of his church. He had difficulty because Dick was not a Christian. It was Papa who convinced Absalom that by helping Dick he was helping our family.
"Dick needs to see God's work in action," Papa said to Absalom. "Because of your good deed, you may soon see his conversion."
Absalom knew that Chiang Kai-shek was a new Christian himself, although he'd converted only to satisfy his wife's marriage request. When Absalom heard this, he knew that he stood a chance.
"What if Dick refuses to convert afterward?" I asked. "We don't want to disappoint Absalom."
Papa replied, "Dick will remember that he was saved by a man of God."
Even covered with a beard, Dick's face was horribly misshapen. The right side of his jaw was swollen and much larger than the left. Pearl arranged for a doctor from the American Embassy to come. The doctor reset Dick's jaw and wired his mouth shut.
For days, Dick couldn't speak. This was perhaps fortunate, because he couldn't respond to Absalom's talk of God. If Dick had been able to speak, the two would have been in combat.
Laughing at the thought, Pearl said, "Dick would try to convert Absalom to Communism."
Eventually Dick had enough. He left without saying good-bye to Absalom.
Two weeks after Dick's release, an order arrived from Communist headquarters. He left the next day to join Mao at his base in Yenan. Dick told Pearl he was grateful for Absalom's rescue, but that he could never believe in God.
"Your father must learn that we Communists are fighting for a real cause," Dick said to Pearl. "China will one day be free of politics and religion. People will be their own gods."
Pearl told Dick that she and her father had disagreements on many things. "He is God's fighting angel. I don't understand him, but I love him."
Dick replied that it didn't make sense to him. "I could not love my father if he were my political enemy," he said.
Pearl smiled. "There is no enemy for me."
In retrospect, Dick's encounter with Pearl and Absalom helped him become a different kind of Communist. In a way, it was a perfect example of how God worked. Only the future would reveal the changes that had occurred in Dick. Without knowing it, his horizon had been expanded as God's light shone on him.
* * *
Before my husband left we spent the evening together. His jaw was still tender but I cooked him his favorite meal and we stayed up late into the night discussing our plans. Dick was excited by the journey he was about to take, although we both shed tears at the idea of parting. He promised to come back and fetch me as soon as he was settled. I knew that if I insisted, Dick would stay in Nanking. He would do it for me, even though his heart was already with Mao and his comrades. Dick left me with a quote from Madame Curie: _The weak one waits_ _for opportunity while the strong one creates_. By _opportunity_ , he meant his dream of a people's China.
When I sent my first letter to Dick two months later I had some news to share with my husband. On our last night together we had shared a bed and I had become pregnant. I was thrilled because years before, a doctor had told me after my miscarriage that I would not be able to bear children. I was forty-three years old and Dick forty-six. It was the happiest letter I've ever sent.
Pearl suggested that I start collecting medicine and packing it into bags. She had learned from an American journalist friend who had interviewed Mao that "medicine is the best currency in Yenan." And besides, I didn't want to be without medicine for my newborn.
Chapter 22
The day Papa abandoned his church in Chin-kiang and came to Nanking was the day Pearl sensed that the safety of foreigners in China was a thing of the past.
Papa told us that the church had been attacked. The Nationalist government was convinced that Communism was a foreign idea, thus the church must be a hiding place for Communists.
"Dick was fortunate to depart earlier," Papa said. "He could have been captured and murdered if he had stayed."
We learned that all the escape routes from Nanking to inland and coastal cities were now controlled by warlords who had become allies of the Nationalists.
The city of Nanking showed no sign of what was about to take place as we gathered on Sunday morning at the church. People believed that what had happened in Chin-kiang wouldn't happen here, because Nanking was a capital city and had a number of foreign embassies.
Absalom led the Bible reading. We studied chapter twenty-seven, Paul's voyage to Rome. I had difficulty concentrating. I worried about Dick and the safety of the baby inside me. Tracing the words with my finger, I followed Absalom. " _And when neither sun nor stars in many days_ _appeared, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved_ _was then taken away_. . ."
As Absalom strained to convince us that God would not let evil win, a young red-haired officer from the American Embassy ran in. He was breathless and drenched in sweat.
"Yes, sir?" Absalom was annoyed by the interruption. "How can I help you?"
The officer passed a letter to Absalom and said, "The consul general has ordered the immediate evacuation of all Americans in Nanking."
" _What_ is going on?" Absalom put down the Bible.
"The Chinese government informed us that it has lost control over the spreading chaos." The officer spoke quickly. "There have been riots in the provinces of Shandong, Anhui, and Jiangsu. Mobs and soldiers have killed foreigners."
"We have seen none of this in Nanking," Absalom responded. "Are you sure our consul general is not making a storm out of a little breeze?"
"Sir, I must move on," the officer said and excused himself.
The church was silent.
All eyes were on Absalom.
Absalom gave an unconcerned expression as he picked up the Bible. He turned a page and began to read. His voice was calm, as if nothing had happened. " _And now I exhort you to be of good cheer: for there shall be_ _no loss of any man's life among you, but of the ship. For there stood by me this_ _night the angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve_. . ."
Absalom asked the crowd to join him, and we followed. " _Saying, Fear_ _not, Paul; thou must be brought before Caesar and God hath given thee all them_ _that sail with thee, wherefore, sirs, be of good cheer, for I believe in God_. . ."
Papa was becoming nervous. Finally he couldn't contain himself. "Absalom," he called.
Absalom ignored him.
"Master Absalom." Papa's voice trembled.
"Yes, Mr. Yee?" Absalom was visibly disturbed. "You'd better have a good reason for interrupting like this."
With a note of panic in his voice, Papa cried, "Nanking will be the next Chin-kiang!"
"Calm down, Mr. Yee!"
"Time is short," Papa pleaded. "You and your family need to evacuate right away!"
"What are you talking about, Mr. Yee?" Absalom stared at him.
"Where do you suggest that we go?"
"Home, Master Absalom!"
"We are home."
"No! I mean your home in America!" Papa began to stutter. "Sir, your life is in danger!"
"I'll be going nowhere." Absalom responded firmly. "My home is China."
Pearl watched the evacuation of all her Western friends. Laborers worked day and night carrying cases and bags toward the river, where steamboats waited. The last American family to depart was the embassy doctor's. When their boat pulled away, Pearl lost her composure.
"What if Carol gets sick?" she cried to Absalom. "What if you fall off your donkey and break a leg?"
Absalom replied, "Chinese people have survived thousands of years without Western medicine."
"What if surgery is needed?" Pearl asked.
"God will take care of us."
"Please, Father, this is a practical matter."
"I _am_ talking about a practical matter." Absalom became impatient. "You must have faith in God."
"I have a sick child, Father, and I can't do without a doctor."
Absalom spoke without looking at Pearl. "God's work requires sacrifice."
"God's work?" Pearl became angry. "It's your work! It's Absalom's glory, Absalom's obsession! Why should the rest of us sacrifice for you?"
Grace joined Pearl, begging her father to reconsider.
"What's wrong with you all?" Absalom yelled. "By all means go ahead and evacuate! Get going before the steamboats are gone."
"We can't leave without you," both Pearl and Grace said. "You are an old man!"
"The Lord won't let anything happen to me." Absalom was confident. "He needs me to do his work."
The air smelled like it was burning. The streets of Nanking had turned ghostly. Businesses were closed. Nearly all foreigners had already fled. Pearl and Absalom hid inside their house. Although Pearl's servants were willing to stay on, Pearl insisted that they leave. She promised that she would hire them back once the danger was over. The servants departed. They knew that if they stayed, they could be killed for having served the foreigners.
Papa and I got busy trying to fill the water jars and stockpile food. Each day we checked on Pearl's family. Pearl told me that Absalom had become a problem. He refused to stay inside. He believed that what was happening was perfect for his work. "Desperate people turn to God," he said.
Pearl and Grace came to Papa for help. They begged him to find a way to stop Absalom.
Papa challenged Absalom on his Chinese translations of the Bible. The two men argued loudly.
"It's not an error," Papa insisted. "Some of the stories just don't make sense in Chinese."
Eventually, Absalom decided to sit down and work on his revisions.
In only a few days, the streets were filled with strangers. The boarded-up shops were broken into. People were running and others chasing. Screams and shouts could be heard day and night. I could hear the sound of distant gunshots.
I visited the university, wondering what had happened there. The campus was as quiet as a cemetery. I went to the science building and saw windows with bullet holes in them. Then I saw bloodstains on the sidewalk.
"Help!" I heard a voice.
To my horror, I found a foreigner hiding behind the bushes in a pool of blood. He had been shot in the chest. "Help!" the man cried, struggling to speak. "I am the dean of the school and I . . . am an American missionary."
Before I could ask for his name, he passed out.
"Sir! Sir!" I knelt and shook him.
The man died in my arms. The sound of gunshots was so near now that I listened for the whistling of bullets. I set the dead man down and covered him with my blouse. I walked toward the town. The wind felt cool on my face. It was an otherwise perfect spring day with camellias blossoming.
There was a woman running toward me. Her arms were waving frantically in the air.
I recognized her. "Lilac!"
"The mobs have come!" Lilac yelled. "They are looking for foreigners! They have already killed one. I heard that he was the dean of the university."
"Lilac, that man died in my arms!"
Lilac saw the blood on my hands and clothes. The color drained from her face.
We took shortcuts through the hills toward Pearl's house. I regretted not insisting that Pearl and her family leave days ago. Panic began to overtake me as I pictured the mob. Lilac told me that she had witnessed the murders of Chinese Christians, our friends and neighbors.
Pearl felt fortunate that everyone in the family had survived so far. The house had been looted three times by soldiers and groups of angry men. Every valuable thing had been taken. The last group had left disappointed because nothing was left.
Absalom's forehead was bleeding. He had tried to stop the mob and had been knocked down. Even that hadn't stopped Absalom from continuing to reason with the intruders. He was determined to show God's grace. It had been Papa who had offered his last money to the looters so they would leave.
Pearl was devastated to learn that the dean of the university, a personal friend, had been killed.
"More soldiers will be coming to Nanking," Papa predicted.
Pearl and Grace held their children. Grace wept. The sisters wondered if it would be wise to separate the family.
Papa told Pearl that soldiers and mobs were everywhere and that it wasn't safe to be outside. "They will shoot the moment they see a foreigner."
Absalom talked again about faith in God.
Pearl turned away.
Absalom suggested that they all pray together. "Let us properly prepare to meet our fate."
No one responded.
Absalom went to his room and closed the door.
Pearl and Grace looked at each other. Their eyes were filled with tears.
I was afraid. No one knew what to do.
Pearl took a pen and paper and began to write quickly.
"I'm going to the pier," she announced. "Perhaps a foreign ship might take pity on us. It won't hurt to try. I am writing down all our names."
"Let me do it," I volunteered. "You'd be a walking target with your blonde hair."
Pearl gave me the folded letter. "Give this to anyone whom you think could help us."
"Let me go," Papa offered. "The soldiers will rape Willow. Besides, she is pregnant."
"No, Papa," I said. "You are old . . ."
Before I could say more, Papa took the letter from Pearl and left the house. I had never seen him run so fast. His small frame bounded like a deer as he moved out of sight.
We dared not light candles. The children were asleep. Pearl and Grace stood behind the front door. They listened to every sound. I was exhausted from carrying water to the house and tried to sleep on a straw mat on the floor. I thought about Dick and Papa and prayed for their safety.
Hours later, a loud banging on the door woke me from a deep sleep.
Thinking it was the mob, everyone jumped up.
"Who is it?" Pearl asked.
"Open the door, please! It's me, Soo-ching!"
"Do I know you?" asked Pearl.
"Yes, I delivered my son in your backyard!"
"What?"
"My name is Soo-ching, and my son's name is Confucius!"
"Oh, Confucius, yes, I remember!" Pearl opened the door.
A heavy manure stink came with her into the room.
"What has happened to you, Soo-ching?" Pearl asked.
"I poured a bucket of feces over myself for safety," she said.
"How can I help you?" Pearl asked.
"Help me? No, I'm here to help you! Because tomorrow you will be dead!"
"What do you mean, Soo-ching?"
"I was forced to cook for the soldiers. They are preparing a celebration banquet for tomorrow. I asked what for, and they said they were going to kill all the foreigners in Nanking, tomorrow!"
Pearl's face turned pale.
"I come to offer you a hiding place, Mrs. Pearl," Soo-ching said.
"How kind of you, Soo-ching!" Pearl cried.
"Buddha blesses you, Pearl. You offered me a drop of water when I was dying of thirst. Now it is my turn to offer you a flowing creek." Soo-ching turned to introduce her son. "Confucius, come and pay your respect."
Confucius, a stick-thin, cross-eyed boy, bowed to Pearl.
With tears in their eyes, Pearl's family, including Absalom, gathered. They followed Soo-ching and arrived at her thatched hut.
The moment Soo-ching opened the door, mosquitoes came swarming out like brown balls. They targeted our faces, arms, and legs. Their buzzing was like ten erhus playing at the same time.
"Everyone stays away because of the stink," Soo-ching said.
As soon as Pearl, Grace, Absalom, and the children had let themselves into the hut, Soo-ching moved bales of hay against the door to seal it shut and make it difficult to open. She brought buckets of donkey piss and slopped it on the hard-packed ground before the door.
Papa showed up exhausted. He hadn't been able to find any help. I asked what he'd done with Pearl's letter. He told me that he had given it to Carpenter Chan. "He'll find a boat if there is a boat to be found."
I was upset. "Pearl has been waiting for your return."
Papa said that it was time for us to think about our own survival. "Have you heard anything from your husband?" he asked. "I thought he would come to fetch you."
"Dick did send a message," I said. "But who is going to help Pearl and her family?"
"We have done our best," Papa replied.
"Why don't you go and find yourself a hiding place?" I was disappointed.
"I will."
I never anticipated what would happen next: Papa and I were kidnapped in broad daylight. Unable to resist a reward, an acquaintance sold Papa to the soldier mobs.
The informer pointed at Papa. "This man knows exactly where the foreigners are hiding."
Papa and I realized that we were dealing with professional soldiers whose leader was a warlord we used to know, Bumpkin Emperor.
It had been over twenty years since I had first met him. The man had gone from being a local warlord to becoming the commander of the Nationalist forces in our region. Bumpkin Emperor claimed that he had killed more foreigners than anyone else in the country. He was responsible for the dean's death.
The soldiers prepared to torture us. They wanted to know the hiding place of the foreigners. I clenched my teeth and prayed. The soldiers choked me with hot-pepper water until I passed out.
* * *
I woke to a clean room. Papa was sitting next to me.
I sensed his nervousness and asked, "Papa, where are we?" I saw that his fingertips were wrapped in cloth bandages.
"Have some water, Willow." He passed me the cup.
"No, Papa. Please, first explain what happened."
"I'm getting you out of here."
"Papa, what is going on?"
"I made a deal, and we are both going to be released."
"Deal?" I stared at him. "What kind of deal? What did you do?"
He avoided my eyes.
"Speak, Papa!" I tried not to let my imagination run wild.
"The important thing is that both of us are safe," he insisted. "Look at you, blood all over. You could have lost your baby."
The possibility of what he might have done hit me.
"Don't tell me, Papa, you didn't . . ." I stopped, realizing what must have happened.
Papa lowered his head.
"This can't be! No! Papa, it mustn't be . . ."
Papa began to cry like a guilty child.
I could feel my blood freeze in my veins.
"I have committed a terrible crime." Papa spoke in a small voice. "I deserve to go to hell."
I pulled at his arms and shook him. "No! You didn't do it!"
"They used sharpened bamboo splinters and shoved them under my fingernails." He raised his hands and pulled off the cloth, revealing bloody fingers. "They said that they were going to kill you if I refused to cooperate."
"You told them where Absalom and Pearl were hiding?"
Collapsing to his knees, Papa nodded.
Chapter 23
"There are no foreigners here!" Soo-ching and Confucius shouted as they tried to push the soldiers away from the hut.
A crowd gathered and watched in fear.
One soldier hit Soo-ching with the butt of his rifle. She stumbled back, dazed, and her nose started to bleed.
Confucius jumped on the soldier and bit him.
Other soldiers pulled Confucius off and kicked the boy in the stomach.
Standing hidden in the crowd, Papa and I were ashamed and scared.
"Let's burn the hut," one soldier suggested.
The other soldiers agreed. "Let's roast the foreigners!"
"No!" Soo-ching screamed.
The crowd moved forward. "There are no foreigners in the hut!" They began to push the soldiers.
The sharp crack of a gunshot came. A man in a high-collared military uniform with bars on his shoulders strode through the crowd. It was Bumpkin Emperor. A row of bright gold buttons ran down the center of his jacket. Medals were pinned across his chest. His hat looked like a lotus pad.
"Is there anyone here hungry for a bullet?" Bumpkin Emperor's fat cheeks quivered.
Soo-ching crawled to him and grabbed his legs. "Respected general," she cried. "Please spare my home!"
"Only if you produce the foreigners." Bumpkin Emperor waved his pistol.
"I know nothing of foreigners," Soo-ching cried.
"Mother of louses! How dare you lie to me?" Bumpkin Emperor slapped her face. He turned to his soldiers. "What are you idiots waiting for?"
"Please!" Soo-ching pulled at Bumpkin Emperor's arms.
"You stinking female hog!" He kicked her. "Get off me!"
The soldiers came. They removed the bales of hay from in front of the door.
Bumpkin Emperor walked to the door and kicked it open.
Soo-ching threw herself at Bumpkin Emperor's feet. "I will die first before you burn my home!"
Bumpkin Emperor walked away from Soo-ching and fired a shot at her.
"Mother!" Confucius screamed.
The soldiers pinned Soo-ching down, and she squirmed to be free.
"You are going to have a lingering death, crazy lady!" Waving his pistol, Bumpkin Emperor ordered, "Skin the rabbit and set fire to the hut!"
The soldiers started to tie Soo-ching with a rope.
Lit straws were thrown on top of the roof.
A voice came. "Stop in the name of God!"
Absalom filled the opening at the door of the hut.
Behind him stood Pearl, Grace, and the children.
"Tie the foreigners," Bumpkin Emperor ordered. "Line them up."
"Absalom!" Papa threw himself at Absalom's feet.
"Mr. Yee, my friend!" Absalom replied.
Papa slapped his cheeks with both hands. "I have betrayed you! I gave in to the torture! May God punish me."
Papa turned to Bumpkin Emperor and pleaded, "These foreigners have done China no wrong. They have been living with us all their lives. Look, this is Pearl. You remember her when she was a little girl? She was raised in Chin-kiang under your lordship . . ."
"Stay away or you will die with them!" Bumpkin Emperor yelled.
"Your lordship!" Papa cried.
The soldiers dragged Papa away.
Absalom, Pearl, Grace, and the children were lined up against the burning hut.
I no longer knew where I was. All I could think about was Dick's knife in a basket in my kitchen. My legs began to carry me home. I ran.
When I returned, a larger crowd had gathered. Many of the people were from surrounding towns and villages, having sought refuge in our city from the chaos. They outnumbered the city folks. Among them were many who believed foreigners were China's curse. They felt that the sooner we got rid of them, the better.
I pushed my way through the crowd, shoving people aside to reach Bumpkin Emperor. My intent was to stab him.
"You!" He saw me.
I held back, hiding Dick's knife under my shirt.
Bumpkin Emperor was standing near where Absalom, Pearl, Grace, and the children had been lined up. While I had been gone, their hands had been tied behind their backs.
I hoped I could reach Bumpkin Emperor before he shot me.
"I'll die first," Absalom said in a calm voice. He looked at his daughters and grandchildren. "We will be with God."
Terrified, the crowd watched in silence.
Absalom turned to face the crowd and started to sing.
_The greatest gift the world has known_
_When the God of Glory_
_Who is full of mercy_
_Sent His Son_
Pearl, Grace, and the children joined him.
_Love has come_
_Hope has begun_
_Still a higher call_
_Had He, deliverance from our sins_
"Master Absalom," the Chinese Christians called out as they dropped to their knees and joined in the singing.
_For by the sin of man we fell_
_By the Son of God_
_He crushed the power of Hell_
_Death we fear no more_
Absalom sang as if he were in his church.
"Prepare to shoot!" Bumpkin Emperor shouted.
I moved behind Bumpkin Emperor and took out the knife.
Hearing the noise, Bumpkin Emperor turned. I could clearly see his big frog eyes.
I have no memories after that. I only knew that I had lifted the knife and then everything went dark.
"You are an ant who tries to shake a pine!" was what I was told Bumpkin Emperor had said, after one of his soldiers had hit me in the back of the head.
When I opened my eyes I heard "Kill the rice Christians!" I discovered that my hands were tied behind my back and I was on the ground. The back of my head throbbed with pain.
"Have mercy!" I heard Pearl beg. "Willow is pregnant!"
"Pregnant?" Bumpkin Emperor laughed. "Good! I will save a bullet!"
The soldiers lifted me and placed me next to Absalom.
"Praise the Lord," Absalom said. "He will bless you with courage."
Papa threw himself to the ground and kowtowed to Bumpkin Emperor. "Let my daughter go!"
Soldiers beat Papa with their rifles until he was silent.
"Willow, we are going home," Absalom said to me.
I looked into Absalom's eyes. I saw no fear—only confidence and love.
"The angels are here," he murmured. "God is waiting for us."
I shut my eyes and leaned against Absalom. I didn't want to die.
The soldiers took up their positions and pointed their rifles at us.
Bumpkin Emperor shouted, "Get ready and . . . f—"
Before Bumpkin Emperor finished his sentence, the earth leaped beneath me. There was a flash followed by a loud roar.
I lost my balance and fell.
Clods of dirt rained down.
I choked as clouds of dust rolled across the ground.
"What is happening?" I heard Bumpkin Emperor yell.
"It must be the Christian God showing his anger!" Papa's voice said.
The soldiers ran like scattered monkeys.
When the dust cleared, I saw that hills near the city were burning and black smoke spiraled into the sky.
"The American fleet is here!" Carpenter Chan and Lilac shouted, running along the riverbank toward the crowd.
Another round of explosions came. The earth trembled again. There was more dust and smoke and flames.
My ears filled with a ringing sound. It was as if someone had stuffed them with cotton.
Bumpkin Emperor followed his soldiers and ran as fast as he could.
The crowd scattered, and soon we were alone in front of Soo-ching's burned-down hut.
Carpenter Chan untied Pearl's ropes. "Sorry it took so long for me to deliver your letter!"
"What letter?" Absalom asked.
"How did you do it, Chan?" Pearl's face was animated with excitement.
"I thought I was never going to find any help, but I was lucky,"
Carpenter Chan replied. "I found the American fleet near the mouth of the Yangtze and managed to get your note to their leader. He sent one warship."
"God has heard our prayers," Absalom said in his loud preacher's voice.
Pearl stared at the river. She then turned to Lilac, who was tending to Carpenter Chan's blistered feet.
The warship steamed along the shore. Flames burst from the muzzles of the cannons and there were more explosions in the hills. The ground kept shaking. I watched Pearl's lips as she said, "Thank you, America."
Chapter 24
Twenty-four hours was all she had to say good-bye. She would be uprooted and transplanted to America, a country she called home but barely knew. Later in her life, this last day in China would haunt her. It never stopped haunting her as long as she lived. It was useless to tell herself, "My roots in China must die."
Life simply caught her. The American captain wouldn't wait. His ship was literally the last boat leaving China. Pearl had only a few hours to pack up forty years of her life.
I convinced myself that our separation would be temporary. Since we had been children, it had happened before. She had gone to Shanghai and then America, but always she had returned. I had no doubts that we would see each other again.
Pearl said that she didn't feel at home when she was anywhere else, even when she was in America, her birthplace. When she talked of home, she meant China.
"How could I go someplace else when my mother's grave is here?" she once said.
Pearl was used to accepting reality. She knew that Bumpkin Emperor and his kind would return and murder again. "There is a positive side to moving to America," she reasoned. "Carol will receive better medical care there."
"What about Lossing?" I asked.
"I haven't heard from him," Pearl said. "He hasn't bothered to send one word or to try to find out how his daughter is."
The American captain insisted that Pearl and Grace leave all their belongings behind. Pearl wanted to take Carie's piano, but she had to give that up. Instead she took Carie's sewing machine.
Absalom gathered his congregation at the church and announced that Carpenter Chan would take his place. Carpenter Chan was to head the Nanking church while Papa continued to head the Chin-kiang church.
But Carpenter Chan had no confidence in himself. With tears filling his eyes, he pleaded, "Old Teacher, I am not capable of doing as good a job as you."
"God has let me know that you're the one to carry on in my place."
Absalom told Carpenter Chan that if he ran into difficulty, Papa would be there to help.
Papa was touched—he couldn't believe that Absalom's feelings hadn't changed after he had betrayed him.
While the children's choir sang, Absalom delivered his final sermon. It was the first time Lilac's youngest son, Triple Luck Solomon, led the singing. The young man had inherited his mother's beauty. Carie would have loved his sweet voice. We all wished Pearl's family a safe journey to America.
I told Pearl that I would take care of her garden. "I'll bring fresh flowers to Carie's grave in the spring."
"I'll return soon," Pearl promised.
If I had known that this was the last time we would see each other, I would have held her longer and closer. I would have made an effort to remember how she looked, the clothes she wore and the expression on her face. I would have perhaps tried to talk her out of leaving.
But I didn't know. In fact, we wanted to get the pain of saying goodbye over with as quickly as possible. The sooner the parting was over, the sooner we could start working our way back together. Pearl was not usually one to dwell on sadness. It was Carie's training to press back and swallow your bitter tears. Always look forward and be hopeful.
We all started for the river. Lilac came with her children and Soo-ching brought her son, Confucius.
We carried the family's luggage to the smaller boat waiting to take them out to the warship in the middle of the river.
The large ship excited the children. They called it a big floating temple.
Carpenter Chan followed Absalom. He had been weeping and begging. "I can't do without you, Old Teacher!"
Papa echoed, "Absalom, without you as our compass we will lose our direction on the sea."
"Have faith in God" was Absalom's reply.
"But there are qualities needed in a pastor I don't possess," Carpenter Chan insisted. "People won't follow me the way they follow you! Monkeys will flee when the big tree is down. I am afraid the church will fall apart."
"Carpenter Chan is right," Papa agreed. "No matter how hard we work, people see God's spirit in you, Absalom—not in us."
Wang Ah-ma, Carie's former servant and Pearl and Grace's nanny, arrived to say good-bye. The seventy-year-old woman surprised everyone. After Carie died, Wang Ah-ma had moved back to the provincial village where she had grown up. After hearing the news of foreigners being murdered in Chin-kiang and Nanking, she had come to check on Absalom, Pearl, and Grace. Wang Ah-ma hadn't known that she was reaching Nanking just in time for the family's final departure.
"Wang Ah-ma!" Pearl and Grace cried, getting down on their knees to kowtow.
"My sweet girls!" Wang Ah-ma touched Pearl and Grace all over with her trembling hands. She said that her sight was failing and that she could barely see.
"You shouldn't travel so far." Pearl wiped her tears.
"When will you return to China?" Wang Ah-ma wanted to know. "Before the New Year or after?"
"What's the difference?" everyone asked.
"The fortune-teller predicted that I will expire soon after the New Year," Wang Ah-ma replied.
"Grace and I would like to prove that you wasted your money on the fortune-teller," Pearl said.
Wang Ah-ma smiled, cupping Pearl's face with her hands. "My child, promise that you will come back as soon as you can."
"I promise." Pearl gently kissed Wang Ah-ma's cheeks.
"On board now or never!" the captain of the American warship yelled through a loudspeaker.
Wang Ah-ma let go of Pearl and Grace as she broke down.
The family got on the smaller boat that would take them to the warship. Absalom went to stand in the bow with his back to shore. Looking out across the water, he seemed frozen.
The horn blasted.
The Chinese Christians moaned, "Old Teacher, Absalom!"
Carpenter Chan and Papa sobbed like two abandoned children.
"May the wind blow in your favor!" the crowd chanted.
Absalom was no longer at the spot where he had been standing. It was as if he had suddenly vanished.
"Father!" Pearl and Grace called.
Papa was stunned. "Oh, dear God, Old Teacher has changed his mind!"
Running along the gunwale, Absalom moved quickly. Like a mountain goat, he jumped into the water and began to swim toward the shore.
"Old Teacher!" the crowd cheered. "Old Teacher!"
"Absalom has decided to stay with us!" Papa cried.
Carpenter Chan waded into the water and swam toward Absalom.
"Captain, help!" Grace cried. "Please, stop my father!"
The crowd received Absalom with happy tears.
A few minutes later the American captain arrived from the warship on another small boat. He talked with Pearl.
I could guess exactly what Pearl said to the American captain. She would have said, "Let the fighting angel be."
When Pearl, Grace, and the children went aboard the ship, Absalom smiled. He waved good-bye to his daughters and grandchildren. His long arms rose like flagpoles in the air.
Pearl waved back. I sensed that she knew that she had made the right choice in letting go of her father.
What Pearl did not know was that she would never see her father again. Absalom would continue to do what he loved all the way to the end. One day Absalom would deliver his sermon. Afterward he would tell Carpenter Chan that he would take a break. Minutes later Carpenter Chan would find him in his room, lying on his bed as if sleeping. But he would be dead. Before that moment, Absalom had lived his dreams. With the help of Papa and Carpenter Chan, Absalom had built the largest Christian community in southern China.
**Part Four**
Chapter 25
I felt lonely and alone after Pearl left. Living in Nanking became difficult. In order to rid the country of the Japanese and the Communists, the Nationalist government increased taxes. To buy a bag of rice, one had to bring three bags of paper money to the store. Dick wrote repeatedly from the Red Base in Yenan, urging me to join him. Finally I made my decision. I let him know that I was ready to be a "bandit's wife." Dick was elated. He prepared me for the hostile, unfertile land and the hardship in Yenan.
"Try to look on the bright side," Dick encouraged. "After all, the first emperor of China was born here two thousand years ago."
I told Papa that I would worry about him. He told me not to. Before my departure he went back to Chin-kiang. Even Absalom agreed that Papa was a changed man. To redeem himself, Papa had become absorbed in church work. His devotion enabled Absalom to take longer trips inland. During Absalom's absence, Papa asked Carpenter Chan to build a stained-glass window featuring Jesus Christ for his church. When the work was completed, it delighted everyone. Every morning the sun shone through the glass. Christ looked as though he was floating on top of clouds.
The stained glass boosted attendance. People loved the "Moving Foreign God." Sunday-morning service became Papa's showtime. People told Papa that they liked and felt closer to the image of this particular Jesus Christ. Papa was pleased. He had slightly altered Christ's features. The stained-glass version of Christ had slanting eyes, a flatter nose, and full lips. The Christ also had large earlobes and browner skin.
"This goes to show you that ideas spring fastest from a well-furnished mind!" Papa said proudly.
My daughter was born in a Yenan cave on a snowy day. I tried to find a good name for her but nothing satisfied me. Dick was filled with joy when he held the baby for the first time. "What a beauty!" he exclaimed. "Instead of my lizard eyes and crooked nose, she has her mother's features: a Chinese princess's bright almond eyes, a delicate, straight nose, and fine pink lips! What good fortune!"
Dick had been working with Mao's inner circle. Mao called Dick his secret weapon. Because of Dick, Mao's image had slowly changed from that of a guerrilla leader to that of a national hero. Through his propaganda, Dick had convinced the masses that Mao, not Chiang Kai-shek, had been fighting the Japanese.
In 1937, Dick's agents successfully infiltrated Chiang Kai-shek's organization. Dick was able to persuade several generals of the Nationalist army to join Mao. One general even arrested Chiang Kai-shek. In history this came to be called the Xian Incident.
Mao's name began to appear regularly in the headlines. Chiang Kai-shek was pressured to invite Mao to talk peace. Dick turned the occasion into a publicity opportunity. The stories he created about Mao made him into a myth.
Dick worked through the night. He composed Mao's speeches and set up interviews. He often stayed inside a bomb shelter printing leaflets till dawn. Dick put my English to good use. I translated Mao's articles and mailed them to outside news agencies. These attracted the attention of Western journalists, who came to Yenan seeking private interviews with Mao.
The town of Yenan was no longer a spot on the map no one could find. Yenan was now the headquarters of the nation's war against Japan. Mao had become an equal to Chiang Kai-shek.
Mao was so pleased that he wrote a poem and dedicated it to Dick. In Chinese tradition, this was the highest honor. Mao's poem was titled
"In Contrast to Poet Lu You." As all know, Lu You, born in 1172, wrote the famous lines " _With a mountain-high aim, but an old mortal frame._ "
_Lake Tongting_
_Lake Green Grass_
_Near the mid-autumn night_
_Unruffled no winds pass_
_Thirty thousand acres of jade light_
_Dotted with the leaflike boat of mine_
_The sky with pure moonbeam overflow_
_The water surface paved with moonshine_
_Drinking wine from the River West_
_Using Dipper as our wine cup_
_Felicity to share with you my friend_
_No more talk of the bitter Poet Lu You_
_Brightness above_
_Brightness below_
While life meant hardship for most people in Yenan, Dick and I lived like royalty. We were given one of the best caves for our home. It had two rooms and faced south and was warmed by the sun. We had meat once a week, while the rest ate yam leaves mixed with millet. At first I enjoyed the luxury and Dick's new status. People came to him at all hours for instructions. But soon I began to resent the intrusions. Sleep was difficult with so much coming and going. I also had trouble reading and writing by candlelight. Dick's eyesight was so bad he had to wear thick glasses, which enlarged his pupils to the size of mung beans. When Dick took off his glasses at night, his eyes looked like pigeon eggs bulging from their sockets.
Dick didn't care about his eyes. He wanted me to be more conscientious about his comrades' political sensibilities. He asked me to hide my bourgeois habits. My desire for privacy, for instance.
"It is ridiculous to call privacy or basic hygiene and love of nature bourgeois habits," I protested.
The real fight began with naming our daughter. I preferred Little Pearl, but Dick had another idea. He wanted our daughter to be called New Art. By _new_ Dick meant the proletarian art. To create proletarian art was his job for Mao.
Dick decided to take our argument to Mao, who lived three caves down the slope.
Mao was in the middle of studying the French Revolution, but he received us warmly. When asked his opinion regarding our daughter's name, Mao thought that neither of our choices was good. He took a brush pen and wrote down his choice in red ink.
Thus Rouge Lin was created. It became our daughter's official name.
I didn't like the name. Peace and tranquillity were what I had in mind. In Chinese, _Rouge_ meant revolution. The name was associated with violence and blood.
"That's what we are fighting with, our blood!" Dick quoted Mao. "All the parents living in Yenan give their children revolutionary names: Red Base, Yenan, Bright Future, and Soldier of Mao. Our next generation must carry on the red flag and Communism until . . ."
"What?"
"Until the world is rouge—in revolution!"
I could take Yenan's hardship but not the brainwashing. I resented the fact that I was not allowed to even mention the word _God_. Dick did everything he could to hide the fact that I was a Christian.
"It could cost my job—worse, my life—if you are not careful," he warned. He asked me to promise to never mention that I knew any foreigners like Pearl and her family. "In Yenan, who one _was_ is more important than who one is," Dick said. "You must be pure in order to be trusted."
My daughter was called Comrade Rouge Lin in kindergarten. Like every other toddler, she had to wear the gray, poorly tailored cotton uniform. After she grew out of it, she passed it on to a younger child. Rouge was taught combat skills the moment she learned to walk. Her first spoken line was "I am a brave soldier." By the time Rouge was two, she could sing "My Red Army Brother Is Coming Back." She had no interest in learning "Silent Night." She thought that I was strange and was closer to her father. When she was four, she won a competition reciting Karl Marx's famous phrase "Capitalism is a greedy monster."
Although I told Rouge how I grew up and she knew that Pearl Buck was my best friend, she didn't know any foreigners and never saw anyone dressed differently from herself. Even the way people cut their hair at the Red Base was the same. Everyone was focused on the revolution and nothing else. Rouge's world was red and white. One was either a comrade or an enemy. By the time she was eight years old, she was clear about who she was and what she wanted to do with her life. She worshipped Mao and wanted to liberate the poor.
It bothered me when Dick told our ten-year-old daughter that Communists and Christians were enemies.
"Not all Christians believe that China is evil until it accepts God," I argued. "Pearl Buck, for instance. She is a Christian and she criticizes Christianity's worst practices." To prove my point, I read an essay Pearl had published in _Southeast Asia Missionary Magazine_ a few years earlier. In this essay, Pearl pointed out that she had seen missionaries lacking in sympathy for the local people: _"So scornful of any civilization except_ _their own, so harsh in their judgments upon one another, so coarse and_ _insensitive among a sensitive and cultivated people that my heart has fairly_ _bled with shame_."
Dick was surprised. "Absalom's daughter wrote that?"
I nodded.
"That's unexpected," he admitted.
"If only Mao could be more open-minded . . ."
Dick interrupted me and whispered, "My darling wife, you are not in Shanghai or Nanking. Remember, I have rivals. Jealous hearts do murder. Remember your Shakespeare?"
Dick believed that Mao would be more relaxed and allow more freedom when he became sure of his power.
"For now we must unite as one to survive." Dick turned to Rouge. "No more criticism of the Communist Party, because it will be considered disloyal and a betrayal."
Rouge's eyes widened. She nodded seriously. "Baba is right and Mama is wrong," she said.
"What about your name, _Dick_?" I challenged. "It definitely doesn't sound proletarian!"
"My comrades know that Dick is my work name." My husband smiled.
"What do you mean, work name? Do you have another name?"
"Yes."
I laughed. "Why don't I know it? After all, I am your wife."
"Such is the life of a Communist." Dick extended his arms and rocked his head from side to side, stretching his neck.
"What is your real name, Baba?" Rouge asked curiously.
"Well, we call it the work name or the current name."
"So, what is your current name?" I asked.
"Well, it is Xinhua."
"Xinhua? _New China_?" I laughed. "I think _Old China_ would fit you better. You come from a background of scholars, landowners, and Capitalists! You studied Shakespeare and Confucius in college! Old China is in your blood! You have Western friends and you speak English!"
"No comment." Dick was embarrassed.
From the few letters that reached me, I learned that Pearl had settled into a life of sorts in America. Although the United States was in a financial depression, she published and her books sold well. In 1932, she had won the Pulitzer Prize for _The Good Earth_ while still among us. In 1938, she won the Nobel Prize for literature. In her letters, she mentioned her new awards casually. Her tone was no different than when she told me how she admired the American plumbing system, and she never explained how important the awards were. It wasn't until many years later that I discovered that Pearl had become an international celebrity. The subject Pearl asked about most was Rouge. She wanted to know what my daughter's life was like and if she had friends. She said that she had never realized how fortunate we had been to have each other as childhood playmates.
I wanted so badly to talk to Pearl about my daughter, but I didn't want to remind her of what she didn't have with Carol. Instead, I asked Pearl about her writing methods. She replied that her trick was to think like a Chinese farmer. "Before planting, the farmer already knew what, where, and how much to grow, the budget for seeds, fertilizer, animals, and field hands," she wrote. "In other words, I try to make the best use of my material."
About her daughter, Pearl reported that American doctors confirmed Carol's early diagnosis that she would never have a chance to lead a normal life. There was nothing new in this news, but Pearl still sounded devastated. "The conclusion took away any happiness I would have felt in my accomplishments," she wrote.
She did gain some comfort knowing that the income from her writing enabled her to provide permanent care for Carol. "Since Carol loves music, I made sure that the cottage, which my money helped build, was equipped with a phonograph and a collection of records," she continued.
She talked about the farmhouse she had bought in Pennsylvania. "It is gigantic by Chinese standards!" she wrote. "I have been renovating the place so that I can adopt more children."
Pearl and I still talked about Hsu Chih-mo. She let me know that she had finally been able to grieve and move on. "A new man has appeared on the horizon of my lonely love life," she reported. "But I can't do anything until my divorce with Lossing is finalized."
The new man was her editor and publisher, Richard Walsh. Pearl was proud of the fact that they were best friends before they were lovers.
I was so happy for her and wrote to congratulate her. In my letter, I complained about Dick and the Red Base.
To my shock, the letter was intercepted by Communist intelligence agents. It got Dick in trouble.
"I have warned you!" Dick hissed at me. "We Communists don't trust the Americans! Our enemy is supported by the Americans! Why is it so difficult for you to remember that? Yenan's security is about Mao's survival!"
In the past Dick had discouraged me from writing to Pearl. Now I was ordered to stop.
I refused to sign the Communist membership application Dick put in front of me. No matter how many times Dick explained the benefits and the necessity, I wouldn't pick up the pen.
Finally, after months of struggle, I agreed to sign. I did so out of loyalty to my husband. Without my being a member of the Communist Party, Dick would never gain Mao's full trust.
My biggest problem was following the Communist Party's rules. I seemed to always say the wrong thing at the wrong time. I would praise the wrong people and criticize the right ones. For example, I remarked that I felt sorry for high-ranking heroes because they had achieved their rank only by killing a great number of people. I also said that all war was wrong. Because of these mistakes, I was ordered to criticize myself in public.
Dick was demoted as a result. His temper was no longer containable. Instead of fighting with me, Dick exploded at work. He applied for a transfer to be nearer the fighting. He was eager to join the battles. He wanted to be the first to engage the enemy and the last to retreat. The irony was that it turned out to be good for his career. He earned medals and promotions. His courage earned him the respect of the Communist leadership. He was restored to his former job. Mao welcomed Dick back and praised him as "the Red Prince."
"Does that mean that Mao is the Red Emperor?" I joked the moment Dick entered the cave.
Dick didn't find my comment funny, and warned me not to say such things again.
My life, as a fortune-teller had once predicted, was about the constant turning of feng shui, meaning that my fortunes were always changing. My future as a Communist would soon prove the fortune- teller's wisdom. I had never imagined that there would be a benefit to claiming my background as a beggar. For the family background section in the party's membership application, I truthfully wrote "Beggars." This qualified Papa as a proletarian, and that included Rouge and me. If my grandfather hadn't lost all his money, my father would have inherited his land and become the enemy of the Communists. I would have been denounced and perhaps shot as a spy.
The strain between Dick and me had much to do with the innocent souls Mao murdered at the Red Base. It happened before my eyes. People were arrested in broad daylight, sent away, and disappeared for good. These were young people, former college students. They were independent thinkers—people whom Dick had personally recruited. They had joined Mao to fight the Japanese. Overnight they were labeled as enemies, arrested, denounced, and murdered.
Dick said that my Christian values had ruined me. I told him that he was ruined, not me. Dick refused to see Mao's flaws and the fact that he had become a bully. Mao had learned from Stalin, a man who murdered whoever disagreed with him. Half of Dick's friends were detained and questioned and one third executed as traitors.
"How can you sleep at night?" I asked my husband.
Dick encouraged me to make friends with Madame Mao. "She is a better choice than Pearl Buck," he insisted.
I tried, but I couldn't get Madame Mao to like me. She was the opposite of Pearl, judgmental and opinionated. Blessed with good looks, she was also flashy, pretentious, and egotistical. As a former actress, she knew her craft. She called herself "Chairman Mao's humble student" and was proud to be his trophy. She was not shy about her "capital." Her skin didn't turn potato brown as the rest of ours did in the desert sun and harsh wind. Her eyebrows were as thin as a shrimp's feelers. She and Mao made a perfect couple. They both wanted power and fame. Madame Mao loved to say that she was a peacock among hens. By hens, she meant the women of Yenan, and that included me.
My biggest disappointment was that Mao didn't turn out to be the hero I had expected. Under the guise of a scholar, Mao sold confidence to people. He made the peasant soldiers hear their own voices when he spoke to them.
When I listened to Mao, I watched his eyes. They appeared to be smiling even when he uttered the most violent phrases. Mao had a broad forehead, a rice-patty-shaped face, and a feminine mouth. He never looked people in the eyes when he talked with them. Mao let people observe him. Never once did I hear him answer a question in a straightforward manner, although he encouraged others to do so. Mao was a master when it came to the art of beating around the bush. He even said himself that he enjoyed catching his enemy by surprise, whether in conversation or on the battlefield.
Dick made the best conversational partner for Mao in the inner circle. He and Mao often talked deep into the night. "We simply enjoy each other's minds," Dick told me. Yet Dick failed to learn one important lesson, which was that Mao hated to lose.
Dick had yet to find out that Mao wanted absolute power, though he appeared to desire the opposite. Mao repeated the same phrase over and over again to foreign journalists: "My dream is to become a classroom teacher." He would open his conversation with a Chinese poem and close by reciting Marx or Lenin. People were easily charmed by Mao. His broad knowledge and sharp wit disarmed. Once, Dick helped Mao issue a telegram to the war front. He was shocked that Mao insisted on ending the communiqué with a line from a poem. " _Only flies are afraid_ _of winter, so let them freeze and die_."
Dick told me later that when Mao had trouble giving direction during battles or was unsure of his next move, he would telegram poems to his generals. The confused generals would have no choice but to make up their own minds about whether to charge or retreat.
"Such is Mao's brilliance," Dick said admiringly.
* * *
Dick brought Madame Mao the local singer who wrote the song "Red in the East." Dick never guessed that one day the tune would become China's unofficial national anthem.
I went to listen to "Red in the East" being performed at a weekend party for high-ranking officials. Madame Mao introduced the singer, whose name was Li You-yuan. Li was a peasant dressed in rags with a dirty towel wrapped around his forehead. He was in his forties and had three missing front teeth. Dick did a background check and found that Li was not one hundred percent proletarian, because his family owned a half acre of land.
When Dick reported this to Madame Mao, she said, "If I say Li is a peasant, he will be a peasant."
The song "Red in the East" was Madame Mao's birthday gift to her husband.
When the peasant opened his mouth, the listeners' jaws dropped. Li's voice was like a goat's cry.
Mao remained seated, because he had the good sense to trust his wife's magic-making abilities.
After Li exited the stage, Madame Mao presented her version of "Red in the East." The singing was performed by the Yenan repertory group conducted by Madame Mao herself.
_Red in the East_
_Rises the sun_
_China has brought forth Mao Tse-tung_
_Creating happiness for the people_
_He is our greatest savior_
Li You-yuan didn't write more than the first line of "Red in the East." The peasant had no knowledge of the Red Base or its leader, Mao. He hummed the tune to pass the time when he plowed his field. Dick happened to cross his path and heard him singing. Dick foresaw the usefulness of the tune and brought Li to Madame Mao's attention.
To demonstrate his modesty, Mao rejected Madame Mao's proposal to list "Red in the East" as a "must-learn song" for the troops.
Madame Mao insisted that it was the people's wish that Mao be regarded as the rising sun of China.
Madame Mao asked Dick to send me a message. She criticized me as arrogant. I tried to hide my disgust for the sake of Dick.
Madame Mao was unaware that I had some knowledge of her past. Before coming to Yenan, she had been a third-rate movie actress in Shanghai. She had had an affair with a newspaper reporter who happened to be Dick's friend. At the Red Base, Madame Mao's past was a stain on an immaculate embroidery. Desperate to get rid of the stain, she behaved like a passionate revolutionary. She invited me to watch her perform a newly learned skill—making yarn out of raw cotton.
I was instructed by Madame Mao to follow her making yarn instead of spending time with my daughter. Sitting next to Madame Mao, I was miserable. She recited her husband's phrases as she rolled the wheel. " _We_ _will never understand peasants if we don't soak our hands in manure, make yarn_ _out of raw cotton, and sweat in the fields. We won't be qualified to be a member_ _of the proletarian class until we smell like manure and garlic instead of perfume_."
I did something behind Dick's back. I bribed the base's special postman who traveled between Yenan and Shanghai as a merchant. The man smuggled my letters out to Shanghai and then mailed them to Pearl in America using a secret address. In my letters, I reported that I had begun telling Christian stories to Rouge. I told Pearl that my day was brightened when Rouge started to fall in love with "Amazing Grace."
Like raindrops in the middle of a drought, I received a letter from Pearl. It comforted me and soothed my anxiety, for I had been friendless. Pearl told me that she had been traveling the world and had spent a great deal of time in India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. The line that filled my eyes with tears of happiness was that she was "dying to return to China."
Chapter 26
When Mao defied Stalin and crossed the Yangtze River in pursuit of Chiang Kai-shek in 1948, Dick told me that the Communists would win China. By May 1949 it was a reality. The people had suffered for twelve years: eight years fighting Japan and then four years of civil war. It was hard to believe that the wars were over. Russian and American advisers on both sides had to admit that they had been wrong. Mao believed that there ought to be only one lion on the mountain. He would never share power with Chiang Kai-shek.
The day his capital, Nanking, fell, Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan. Mao would have continued the chase until he captured Chiang Kai-shek if it hadn't been for the American military forces on the island. Mao was cautious. He didn't want to be stretched too thin, so he claimed a nation and named it the People's Republic of China.
I was ordered to pack immediately and move north. Rouge was excited. The fifteen-year-old had never stepped outside of Yenan. She had joined the Communist Youth League the previous year and had been working as a frontier journalist for the _Yenan Daily_. Several times Rouge had received awards as an Outstanding Comrade and had been given a Mao Medal. Her favorite songs were Soviet anthems and she favored a Lenin jacket.
We were to meet Dick in Peking. Mao had decided to make the city his new capital, and he had its name changed from Peking to Beijing. Also seeing a change were troops from the Eighth and Fourth Army Divisions. Previously under the command of Chiang Kai-shek, they now fell behind Mao and were incorporated into the People's Liberation Army.
Dick drove an American jeep to pick us up. Although he was dark brown and thin from the stomach ulcers he had developed, he was happy. He told us that the car's former owner had been Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
The People's Liberation Army was received joyously by the city residents. Dick's American jeep was part of the parade when we entered Beijing. The cheering crowd beat drums. Children threw flowers. "Long live Chairman Mao!" they shouted. "Long live the Communist Party of China!"
October 1, 1949, was the day of celebration for the nation. Standing on top of the Gate of Tiananmen, Mao proclaimed China's independence to the world. He promised freedom and human rights. From that moment on, Mao was regarded as the wisest ruler heaven had ever bestowed on China. Few knew that it was Dick who had negotiated the peaceful transition.
Dick had been secretly working with General Chu, who had guarded Peking for Chiang Kai-shek. Dick had talked General Chu into surrendering. He convinced the man that Chiang Kai-shek had abandoned him. In Dick's view, further fighting would mean a bloodbath from which Chu would emerge the loser no matter how hard he fought. In Mao's name, Dick promised General Chu a high-ranking position in the People's Liberation Army. Dick signed his name on this secret agreement for Mao. The moment General Chu raised the white flag, he would be called the People's Hero.
I couldn't believe my eyes when Dick took us to see our new home. It was inside the Forbidden City. We were to occupy one of the palaces. Dick told me that Mao and his wife, along with his vice chairman, his ministers, and their families, had already moved into the Forbidden City.
It took me days to convince myself that my life had really changed. At last, I didn't have to live in a cave. I no longer had to endure air raids. Food would never again be a problem. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a face I hardly recognized as my own. At age fifty-nine, I was finally able to settle down.
Instead of calling the palaces by their former Imperial names, the Communist housing authority gave them numbers. Our residence used to be called the Palace of Tranquillity; now it was called Building number 19.
I walked around my new home admiring the splendor of the Imperial architecture. The palace was a living work of art. Like a true beauty, she changed her face according to the light. Tremendous arching beams and brick columns reminded me of opera stage sets. Rouge was impressed by the huge wooden gate. She ran from room to room cheering and singing. We had four spacious main rooms and seven utility rooms. There was a roofed hallway to the garden with evergreen trees, luxurious bushes, and wonderfully scented flowers.
"How can we afford to live here?" I asked.
Dick smiled. "It's free."
"What do you mean free?"
"I didn't choose this place," Dick said. "It was Chairman Mao's decision." Looking at my expression, Dick explained, "It's for Mao's convenience. He wants me to be near for the sake of business." He paused, looking at me attentively. "I thought this arrangement would make you happy. How many people in China get to live in a palace like this?"
I would have chosen a place where we could be private. I understood that Dick had no choice. Rouge was to join other children of high-ranking officials attending a private school where she would be taught more Russian than Chinese. The school's goal was to prepare its graduates for the University of Moscow.
I felt a growing distance from my daughter after she started school. She no longer wanted to pray with me. She threw away the little picture of Jesus I kept in my bathroom. She told me that she had been selected captain of her class. Instead of a hug and a good-bye in the morning, she would raise her right hand to her temple and say, "Salute, comrades!" One day I found a portrait of Mao in my bedroom, replacing my favorite lotus painting. When I protested, Rouge said, "It is for your own good, Mother. You don't seem to understand what is going on outside our family."
I was not used to my new role as a revolutionary's housewife. For security reasons, I was not allowed to share my address with anyone, including Papa. I complained to Dick and said that I missed my father. A month later, Papa was dropped at my door like a package. Although robust in health and glad to see me, Papa described his journey as being "kidnapped." Mao's secret agents plucked him from Chin-kiang and brought him to Beijing. Papa was not told where he was going or whom he was going to see. During his stay in the Forbidden City, Papa was reprimanded for trying to exit the gates without permission. He fought with the guards and said that he didn't want to be a prisoner. Finally Papa begged me to buy him a ticket so that he could return to Chin-kiang. I bought him a ticket and was sad when he didn't turn his head as he boarded the train. We barely had time to talk and catch up about our lives. I didn't even get a chance to ask Papa how everyone was doing in Chin-kiang.
I tried to find a way to let Pearl know about my move to Beijing. I assumed that she would know about Mao's victory. I wondered what she thought about Chiang Kai-shek's defeat. In a way, Pearl had predicted the outcome during our earlier correspondences. So many had been impressed by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who had campaigned in America for her husband and succeeded in rallying the public behind her. But Pearl did not believe her claims. Pearl had often said in the past that the Chiangs were in power for themselves. She believed that there was a divide between the Chiangs and the peasants of China. She had said long ago that Mao's power came from his understanding of the peasants.
Pearl never trusted the Communists. She enjoyed her friendship with Dick and supported my marriage to him because she saw that he loved me. On the other hand, Pearl didn't like my being brainwashed by Dick. When I mentioned Dick's worship of Karl Marx in a letter, Pearl wrote back and asked, "Do you know who Karl Marx is? He is this strange little man, long dead, who lived his narrow little life, and somehow managed by the power of his wayward brain to lay hold upon millions of human lives!"
This made sense to me, although nothing I said changed Dick's mind. With Mao's victory, Dick had gone further on what I would call a journey of no return.
A party commemorating national independence was next on Mao's agenda. Dick was put in charge of arranging it. He was grateful that Mao trusted him with the job. He was finally doing what he loved—bringing talented people together. I rarely got to see Dick in daylight. I told myself that I was lucky my husband had not died in battle, and that I should be satisfied our lives were taken care of by the Communist Party. We were given chefs, drivers, doctors, dressmakers, bodyguards, and house cleaners.
I wrote to Pearl the first chance I got. Beijing was a huge city where I could easily melt into the crowd when visiting a post office. I told Pearl that while Dick became an ever more devoted Communist, I remained an independent bourgeois liberal, and worse, I continued to be a Christian. "The changing China excites me and scares me at the same time," I confessed. "Mao has made himself into a god to the people. I feel like I am losing my husband and daughter to this man. The irony is: I am the person they think mad."
For the sake of my daughter, I stopped trying to seek out churches in Beijing in which to worship. But even if I wanted to, I could never give up my faith in God. I prayed in the dark. I was on my knees when Dick and Rouge were asleep. I was also determined to keep up my correspondence with Pearl as long as I could.
Dick's stomach pain worsened and finally he needed surgery. Two thirds of his stomach was removed. He continued to work from his hospital bed. He met with some of the day's most influential people, from Chiang Kai-shek's former ministers to famous artists. Dick's goal was to secure domestic and international legitimacy for Mao. "Chairman Mao must make more friends. At any time, America could use Taiwan as its military base to launch an attack on China," Dick told Rouge.
As China's new minister of the Bureau of Culture, Science, and Art, Dick encouraged overseas Chinese to return to their homeland. For the next ten years Dick would write hundreds of letters telling his friends all over the world that "Mao is a wise and merciful leader who recognizes and appreciates talent."
Among those who returned were intellectuals, scientists, architects, playwrights, novelists, and artists. In the name of the Communist Party, Dick guaranteed their salaries and offered privileged lifestyles and freedom of expression. Dick appointed them as heads of national theaters and universities. Every morning, Dick drove his jeep to pick up the new arrivals. Every evening, he hosted a gay welcoming party.
At one welcoming party, Dick drank too much. The next morning, with puffy, bloodshot eyes, he said, "If Hsu Chih-mo hadn't died, I would have invited him. He would have enjoyed himself."
"Hsu Chih-mo would not hide himself like I do," I responded. "He would have criticized Mao. He would have told Mao to his face that he was an amateur poet."
"Who are you trying to challenge?" Dick was irritated. "Why are you so cynical all the time?"
"I just question how true China's freedom of expression is," I said. "Are you sure that you can keep the promises you have made to so many?"
Dick understood my concern. He could not answer my question, because deep down he knew that "Mao's will" would be the "nation's will."
"You might end up carrying the stone that will eventually smash your own toes," I said, afraid.
Dick put his arm around my shoulders and said that he agreed with me. "But I must have faith in what I do."
I rubbed my face against his hand and told him that I understood.
"I must trust that others share my values," Dick said in a gentle voice.
"You are being naïve."
"I know, I know," he cut me off. "Your worries are legitimate but unnecessary."
"I can see it coming."
"Willow, you have a wild imagination. Don't let it drive you crazy."
"I won't say this again. Listen, I am your wife, and I know you enough to know that you and Mao are different people."
"We complement each other."
"That is not what I mean."
"I know what you mean, darling."
"Let me finish, will you?" I was upset. "To get his way, Mao will not hesitate to persecute or—dare I say the word?—murder. He's done it before."
Dick stood and put some distance between us. "Mao doesn't own the party," he said in a firm voice. "Communism is about justice and democracy."
Dick led me to his room and opened the top drawer in his desk. He took out an envelope. I could tell that the Chinese writing on the envelope was Pearl's. The stamps showed that the letter had arrived two months ago, and the letter had already been opened. The envelope was empty.
"My privacy has been invaded," I protested.
"Mao's internal security agents opened it."
"Where is the letter?"
"The central bureau has it. They notified me that it was to be confiscated."
"Why didn't you speak up for me?"
"You would not be here now if I hadn't!" Dick almost yelled.
I knew Dick had done his best.
"Look." Dick pulled more documents from his drawer. "Here is more evidence. I have fought for you not once but repeatedly."
I had had no idea that I was in so much trouble.
"You are being watched by internal security," Dick continued. "You are one step from becoming known as an enemy sympathizer. Your friendship with Pearl Buck is seen as a threat to national security. Pearl's status in America and her public criticism of Mao and the Communist Party have categorized her as an enemy of China."
"Am I a suspect?"
"What do you think? You were caught passing her information."
I remembered that in my letters I had shared with Pearl my doubts about Dick's efforts to recruit people to the Communist cause. I had confided to her that I could never forget what had happened in Yenan in the thirties. Several Shanghai youths Dick had recruited had been arrested as spies and shot. All these years later, their families still wrote to Dick asking for information about their loved ones. Dick put on a mask when talking to them. He had no answers for them. He felt responsible and couldn't forgive himself no matter how many times he told himself that the murders had been caused by the war with Japan.
I didn't mean to mail Pearl another letter. I knew it was too dangerous. The political atmosphere had begun to change after Mao's experiment called the Great Leap Forward. It began in the year 1958 and lasted three years before utterly failing. It forced the entire nation to adopt a communal lifestyle. The result was millions of deaths and a starving nation. By the end of 1962, respect for Mao had faded. There were voices calling for a "competent leader."
Feeling that his power was threatened, Mao suppressed the growing criticism. Madame Mao opened a national media conference to "clear away the confusion." Dick was to draft a "battle plan." The first thing Dick was ordered to do was close China's door to the outside. He had to personally apologize to foreign journalists and diplomats for canceling their entry visas. "It is temporary," Dick assured them. "China will be open for business again sooner than you know."
But when Dick came home he told me that he had little confidence in what he had promised his friends. Mao had no intention of reopening China's door. It led me to think that mailing the letter would be my last chance to contact Pearl. It would be now or never.
Acting like an undercover agent, I disguised myself as a peasant and dropped my letter in a post office outside Beijing. It was a warm day in April. The sunshine filtered through the clouds. The trees were light green with new leaves. Children wearing red scarves on their necks were singing cheerful songs. I made sure to cover my tracks by taking different buses. On my way back I couldn't help wiping my tears. I sensed that I might never again hear from Pearl.
Hard as I tried, I could no longer put on a smiling face and maintain a positive attitude. As far as the party was concerned, this meant being politically correct at all times. It grew harder every day. I would attack Dick at home and my anger would spill over.
"Mao robs the lives of innocent people!" I would yell and throw my chopsticks at the wall. "It's brutality!"
"Sacrifice would be a better word." My husband hushed me and went to shut the windows.
"Speak to me without your mask, Dick! Tell me, in your heart have you questions, reservations, doubts?"
Dick went silent.
"How can you bear the thought that you have murdered for Mao? You are struggling to justify yourself."
"Enough, Willow. This is 1963, not 1936! The proletarians rule today. Our Chairman is following in Stalin's footsteps. One wrong word and you can lose your tongue, if not your head."
"You haven't answered my questions."
"I am tired."
We sat facing each other for a long time. Our dinner was on the table, but we had no appetite.
"When Mao panics, he gets carried away," Dick said, taking a deep breath. "He needed to purge the anti-Communist bug."
"Did he do the right thing ordering the murders of those young people you recruited?"
"At the time, yes. But now, no. The tragedy was the party's loss. It benefited no one but our enemies."
"Dick Lin, I have been watching you running around trading on your reputation to get people to return to China. What if Mao changes his mind? What if those people say and do things that end up displeasing and offending Mao? Are you going to be the executioner?"
"It won't happen."
"I thought by now that you knew Mao."
"I do."
"Then you are evil to follow him."
"I am riding on the back of a tiger. I will die if I try to get off."
"What a selfish statement!"
Dick turned away and went to sit in a chair. He cupped his face with his hands. "You have never approved of what I do anyway."
"You refuse to acknowledge the truth."
"What truth?"
"There is no Communism but what Mao wants!"
"Comrade Willow." Dick stood up. "I have never insulted your God, so please stop insulting mine."
Chapter 27
I was arrested at home while washing the dishes. I never expected a postal officer to turn me in. I was denounced and accused of being an American spy. Without a trial, I was thrown in prison. I had seen this happen to others, but I was shocked when it happened to me.
Dick pulled strings. But no one dared to help. My crime was my friendship with Pearl Buck. Dick said that it wasn't Pearl Buck's literary success that made her China's enemy, but her refusal to be the Maos' friend.
Since taking over China, the Maos had wished that Pearl would give her support to the regime. But Pearl kept her distance. Agents from China repeatedly contacted her hoping that she could do what the American journalists Edgar Snow and Anna Louise Strong had done for China. Although Pearl was friendly with both journalists, she held her own political views. In the late 1950s, when millions of Chinese starved to death during the Great Leap Forward, Pearl criticized Mao. She pointed out a crucial fact that others had ignored: "Mao allowed his people to die of starvation and disease while he helped the North Koreans fight a war against the Americans."
"Is Pearl Buck a friend or an enemy?" Dick told me Mao had once asked him.
Dick answered truthfully that Pearl Buck loved the Chinese people, but she didn't believe in Communism.
Mao instructed Dick to work on Pearl Buck. Mao wanted Dick to repeat the success he had achieved when he had talked General Chu into switching sides in 1949. Mao made Pearl Dick's next challenge. Mao's order to Dick was clear: "I'd love to gain a Nobel Prize winner as a comrade."
Behind my back, Dick wrote to Pearl. She didn't respond, and she didn't mention Dick's efforts in any of the letters she wrote to me.
Frustrated, Dick asked Mao why he had to have Pearl Buck.
"There is no comparison between Pearl Buck and Edgar Snow," Mao replied. "Pearl Buck is read in every country on the world map. Her books have been translated into over a hundred languages! If Edgar Snow is a tank, Pearl Buck is a nuclear bomb."
Dick failed in his mission because Pearl was too knowledgeable about China to be fooled. Pearl judged Mao by his actions, not by his fancy slogans. "Serve the people with heart and soul" meant nothing to her. Like her father, Absalom, Pearl refused to be bought. The novels she wrote during the 1960s depicted the tragic lives being led under Mao, although she wrote them from across the sea and was only guessing. It seemed that her senses were growing sharper as she aged.
Dick never shared with Mao his opinion that Pearl Buck was the only Westerner with the ability to write about China's reality with both humanity and accuracy. Dick never mentioned that he admired Pearl, but I knew he did.
Dick didn't have the courage to challenge Madame Mao when she declared Pearl's newest novels attacks on Communism. Madame Mao believed that Pearl was part of the American conspiracy against China. Dick was ordered to encourage China's propagandists to mount a counterattack. Pearl Buck was labeled a "cultural imperialist."
Madame Mao set Pearl Buck up as a negative example. She was getting ready to help her husband launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The goal was to secure Mao's power in China and beyond.
Making his personal passion for destroying his enemies the nation's obsession was Mao's greatest talent. Dick said that I was better off in prison. When Rouge visited me in May of 1965, she told me that the outside world had turned upside down. Teenage mobs calling themselves Mao's Red Guard chanted, "Whatever our enemy embraces, we reject, and whatever our enemy rejects, we embrace." They sang Mao's slogans as they attacked people they suspected were anti-Mao.
Rouge was worried about my declining health and the fact that I was not allowed to see a doctor. She prayed with me for the first time in many years. She told me she wanted to learn more about God, but I feared that she had been brainwashed too thoroughly and one day might turn on me. I felt the best way to influence her was through my own example.
Early one morning, I was dragged from my cell. I was told that the Red Guard had taken over the prisons. I was to be beaten to death unless I denounced Pearl Buck.
Thin, rancid rice porridge was all I was fed and there was never enough. Hunger gnawed at my insides. There was no electricity or water. My cell was a dark concrete box without windows. I lost all sense of time. I knew many people had been driven mad that way.
To preserve my sanity, I began singing Christian songs to myself. When I was ordered to stop singing by the prison guards, I changed my methods. I practiced finger calligraphy, recalling sentences from the Bible. Since there was no water available, I wet my index finger in the urine bucket and wrote the words on the concrete surface of the floor as if it were rice paper. I moved from left to right. By the time I reached the lower corner, the top corner was dry and ready for me to write on again.
Time passed without measurement. There was no mirror, so I didn't know how I looked. One day I noticed strands of my own hair on the floor and realized that my hair had turned white.
Eventually, a prison guard came and led me to another room, where there was a table, chair, and sink. I was given a comb and a toothbrush and was told to make myself presentable.
"You have an assignment," the guard told me. I was to meet a high-ranking party official.
After I had cleaned up, two men in soldiers' uniforms escorted me to a car. One of them tied a cloth blindfold over my eyes.
It was a long ride over bumpy roads.
When the blindfold was removed from my eyes, I discovered that we had arrived in front of a military complex. We passed through a narrow entrance. I smelled food cooking. The soldiers led me to a large room where there was a stained carpet, red sofas, and deep-green curtains. There was a basket of bananas on the table.
"Help yourself," a female attendant said in perfect Mandarin.
I would not have touched anything if I hadn't been dying of hunger. Like a monkey, I grabbed a banana. Quickly peeling off the skin, I stuffed the banana into my mouth. I was so absorbed in chewing that I didn't pay attention to anything else. When I reached out for another banana, I noticed a person sitting on the sofa. At first I thought it was a man because she was dressed in a man's army uniform. She was wearing the green cap with a red star in the front.
"Take your time," she said.
I froze. I couldn't believe my eyes.
"Old friend, have you already forgotten me?" She smiled.
I stared, recognizing the long, bony fingers. "Madame Mao, is that you?"
"Yes, it's been a long time." She smiled. "See, I didn't forget you."
She offered to shake my hand.
I refused, explaining apologetically that my fingers smelled of urine.
Madame Mao withdrew her hand. "The Chairman sends his greetings. As you can imagine, he's been very busy. I'd like to work with you toward a solution that will please him."
"How could I possibly be useful to you?" I said.
"Comrade Willow Yee, I am offering you a great opportunity. You can change your life by proving your loyalty to the Chairman."
It was hard to figure out the meaning of her words. She looked changed since the first time I had met her in Yenan. Still imposing, the Madame Mao in front of me today had dyed her hair ink black. Her eyes said, "I am powerful." She kept herself in shape physically, but she was no longer a beauty. Although her eyebrows were still as thin as a shrimp's feelers, the dark-framed glasses took away her femininity.
"I see that you are hungry," she said, showing her bright white teeth. "Would you like to start lunch?"
Before I could answer, she clapped her hands.
A door on the far side of the room opened.
"A private banquet has been waiting for you," Madame Mao said cheerfully, as if we were at a party.
The servants came and lined themselves up against the wall.
Stretching out her arms, Madame Mao took up my hands. "Let's have a heart-to-heart chat, just the two of us."
"We are fighting a cultural war with the Western countries led by America," Madame Mao said dramatically. Her thin lips quivered. She reached out and grabbed my hands again and squeezed them. "We will defeat the American cultural imperialists. We will chase them to the end of the universe. They will have no time to catch their breath!" She shivered as if she was cold.
"Excuse me . . ." I didn't know what to say.
She put a hand up in a let-me-finish gesture and continued. "When we succeed, we will take over the Capitalists' propaganda machine. We will have our voice heard and views printed in the newspapers of the world. Imagine—the _New York Times_ , the _London Times_. It will be the victory of the proletarians of the world! The Chairman will be so proud of your efforts!"
"I am not quite following you, madame . . ."
"You eat, eat." Madame Mao placed a dish of roast duck in front of me.
"I'd like to know my assignment if I may," I requested.
"Relax, dear comrade." Madame Mao smiled gleefully. "Believe me, I would not assign you a task that you would be incapable of accomplishing."
"What is it exactly, then?"
"The assignment is easy: Write two articles. One will be titled ' _The_ _Good Earth_ Is a Poisonous Plant' and the other 'Exploitation: Pearl Buck's Forty Years of Evildoings in China.' The subtitle will be 'Crime Exposed by a Childhood Friend.'"
Although I had no idea what exactly was going on, I sensed that Pearl had done something that had offended Madame Mao personally, over and above her refusal to endorse Mao's policies for China. Many years later, I would learn that Madame Mao had dreamed of having Pearl Buck write her biography. With _The Good Earth_ being made into a Hollywood movie, Madame Mao had imagined that she could be the next subject for the Nobel Prize–winning novelist. With characteristic confidence, Madame Mao had her agents approach Pearl Buck. The book's title would be _The Red Queen_ and the character of Madame Mao would have the style and flavor of Scarlett O'Hara from _Gone with the Wind_.
Pearl's rejection had come quickly. Madame Mao had been in the middle of watching _Gone with the Wind_ for the fourteenth time. She had imagined Vivien Leigh playing her.
Seeds of revenge had sprouted. Madame Mao vowed destruction.
"Besides attacking Chairman Mao through her writings, Pearl Buck has been discovered helping Chinese dissidents escape to America," Madame Mao told me.
I asked if I could just "digest" her words first.
"I am not asking whether or not you're willing to do it," Madame Mao said, raising her chin toward the ceiling. "I am asking for the date you will deliver the weapon."
I was reunited with my husband and daughter. We were provided with a room in the complex. My punishment if I did not cooperate had been spelled out. Saying no to Madame Mao meant saying yes to the continuing prison sentence and perhaps death. My age had never bothered me before but it did now. My body was tired and sick. I was over seventy and the idea of dying in a cold cell terrified me.
"You should not consider this an act of betrayal," Dick tried to convince me. "You won't hurt Pearl if you denounce her. She will understand. She is not in China. It is very likely that you two will never see each other again. Pearl won't even know that you wrote the criticism."
"But God will know," I cried.
"Consider the circumstance," Dick said. "We must protect our public from Pearl Buck's influence. Her books have damaged the Communist Party's reputation worldwide. Pearl is no longer the friend you used to know."
"Unfortunately, I have read _The Good Earth_ ," I replied. "I read it when it was a handwritten manuscript thirty years ago. Pearl Buck didn't insult Chinese peasants, as Madame Mao claims. On the contrary, she showed what we were truly like."
"You are letting your personal feelings get in the way of your political judgment," Dick warned.
"To hell with my political judgment!"
Rouge came. She sided with me.
Dick was upset. "Nobody says no to Madame Mao."
"I can't do it," I said.
"Make up stories," Dick suggested. "Lie!"
"I can't tell the world how evil Pearl and her family were!"
"You have to do it to survive, Willow. You can tell Pearl that you didn't mean it later."
I looked at my husband and was overwhelmed by unspeakable sadness. Telling lies had become Dick's way of life. I wished that I could bend with the wind the way he had.
"I don't want to teach my daughter a lesson of betrayal by my own example," I concluded.
Dick pleaded, "Because of you, Rouge is having a hard time finding a man who will marry her, and she's already passed her thirtieth year!"
The words stabbed me like a knife. I blamed myself for ruining Rouge's life. So many times my daughter had suffered a broken heart. Young men fell in love with Rouge at first sight, but as soon as they found out that her mother was a people's enemy, they avoided her like a virus. To pursue Rouge would mean a lifetime of hardship and persecution.
My prison sentence was increased to ten more years and then reduced to five more because I was Dick's wife. I was sent to a labor prison in a remote province near Tibet. I spent my days working in the fields planting wheat and cotton and my nights scavenging for food and fighting cold, heat, and vermin. Our family was spread out over hundreds of miles. Dick was in the north, Rouge in the south, and I in the southwest. Dick and Rouge took turns visiting me once every three months and during New Year's. Rouge never complained about the hardship, but the pain was written on her face. She had become a quiet woman, more mature than her peers. After graduating from Beijing University with a degree in medicine, she was not allowed to practice. She worked at a textile factory as a laborer. Dick wouldn't tell me his punishment, but I learned what it was anyway. He was demoted and sent to an obscure post in the provinces. After a year, Mao called him back. Dick worked hard to regain Mao's trust.
Rouge and I tried to keep our perspective. We saw that ours was not the only family that suffered. Millions of others shared the same fate. By the end of 1969, the Cultural Revolution was showing itself to be one of the most destructive episodes in China's long history.
After serving five years in the labor prison I was ordered to go back to where I came from, Chin-kiang. It was considered a continuing punishment. I was ordered to reform through physical labor as long as I lived. I was nearly eighty years old.
Rouge was given the option to stay where she was or come with me. She chose the latter and quit her job. She said that she had barely been earning enough to eat anyway.
We went home on a slow train. My skin was sun-beaten and my back was in constant pain. I couldn't walk straight. I had injuries to my joints, spinal cord, and legs. But my spirit had not been crushed. I was proud of myself for paying the price for decency—I could honestly say that I had never betrayed God, and that God had never abandoned me.
Dick was given no option but to remain at Mao's side in Beijing. For fifteen years Dick had been China's chief propaganda director. He was the ghostwriter for both Mao's and Madame Mao's speeches and articles. When he begged for my release so I could join him, Madame Mao answered, quoting her husband's poem, " _Enjoy the beauty of snow_ _while feeling no pity for the flies that freeze_."
I thought Dick had suffered from my absence and had been waiting for me. But I was wrong. One year after I was sent to the labor prison, the party provided him with a young woman one third his age to be his secretary and nurse. In the beginning, Dick was unaware of the trap that had been set for him. By the time he figured it out, he had fallen in love.
Chapter 28
Summer in Chin-kiang was hot and humid, like living in a steam bath. Papa came to pick us up at the Chin-kiang station. We hadn't seen each other for many years. It was amazing that Papa was still alive. He had shrunk in size and was bald and stooped. Our tears fell when we embraced. Rouge was excited to see her grandfather, although she barely knew him.
"I have lost track of your age, Grandpa," Rouge said. "How old are you exactly?"
"Twenty-nine!" Papa said.
"You must mean ninety-two," Rouge said.
"You got the joke! Yes, but actually I'm even older," Papa said, straightening his back to look taller.
"But you do look like twenty-nine!" Rouge said.
"I do?" Papa was pleased. "I feel like twenty-nine, too."
"I don't remember your being this short," I said. "Four feet?"
"I used to be double the height," replied Papa.
"What made you shrink?" Rouge asked.
"My body knew how to conserve when times were hard."
Rouge laughed. "I can't imagine myself shrinking like you."
" _Thirty years in the river east, and then the next thirty years in the river_ _west_ ," Papa said, reciting Confucius.
"What does that mean?" Rouge asked.
"In the concept of feng shui, it means that there are equal opportunities in the circle of life."
"What is the secret of your longevity, Grandpa?" Rouge asked.
Papa smiled and whispered, "Having faith."
"In Buddha?" Rouge teased.
"How dare you forget who I am?" Papa pretended to be upset, but not very convincingly.
"What will our living arrangements be, Papa?" I changed the subject. "Where are we to stay?"
"In the church," Papa said.
"The Chin-kiang church?"
"Yes, Absalom's Chin-kiang church."
"But the Chin-kiang church was not built for people to live in . . ." I immediately realized the silliness of my statement. Living conditions in China had deteriorated so much that people had turned animal barns into living quarters.
"To many people, it is no longer a church," Papa explained. "It was the headquarters of the Nationalist troops during the war against Japan. When the Japanese took over, it became a barracks. After the 1949 Liberation, the Communists repossessed it. It has been put into different uses ever since. First it was a military headquarters, and then a utility storage for the new government. During Mao's People's Commune movement, it was a public cafeteria. After the communes failed, it was turned into a shelter for the homeless. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards from outside the province took over. They broke my stained-glass windows and painted Mao's picture over every image of Jesus on every wall. They climbed the roof and knocked down the cross."
"Are there families living inside now?" I asked.
Papa nodded.
"How many?"
Papa stuck up two of his fingers.
"Two?" Rouge guessed.
"Twenty."
"Twenty families?"
"Yes, twenty families, one hundred and nine people."
"How can anybody manage?"
"Oh, we manage, like caged pigeons."
Memories of Absalom and Carie rushed up at the sight of the Chin-kiang church. I had to stop for a moment to collect myself. The gray structure had faded, but the building looked sound. The stone steps at the entrance were so worn they looked polished.
Although Papa had warned me about the crowded space, I was still shocked when I stepped into the church. I was prepared to see a pigeon cage, but what was in front of me looked like a beehive. There were no windows except those high up near the ceiling where the stained glass had been. These were the only light source for the entire interior. From floor to ceiling, the walls of the church had been divided into wooden, man-sized boxes, like giant wall-to-wall bookshelves, for people to sleep in. One could only lie down inside. To get into the boxes, people used a tangle of rope ladders. Young people and children occupied the top levels, while the old lived on the lower levels. Every inch of space was put to good use. The washing area was dominated by a large sink made from a water pipe about twenty feet long and split open at the top. Ten faucets poured weak streams of water. Below the sink was a slanted open gutter covered by a metal grate. Plumbing pipes and a dragonlike aluminum chimney were suspended in the air by wires. A loft had been built right under the ceiling as a shared storage space. Where the rows of church benches used to be was now a communal dining area. A large wooden table was surrounded by crooked benches. The raised stage where the altar had been was now a kitchen. There was split firewood piled high against the back wall. Baskets of coal spilled their contents. Wooden frames held buckets, pans, and woks. The podium where Absalom had preached now housed a stove. Behind the stage there was a room in which chamber pots were divided by curtains.
"What do you think?" Papa asked.
"Well, what ingenuity!" Rouge remarked.
Trying to ignore the terrible odor from the chamber pot area, I told Papa that I was impressed.
"No windows and it is so hot!" Rouge wiped sweat off her face. Her shirt was drenched.
"Welcome home," Papa said.
Rouge and I were given one of the larger sleeping boxes. Rouge tried to slide into the narrow space and bumped her head.
Before we had a chance to unpack, the sound of knocking erupted. Papa went to open the door. A group of people rushed in. The men were bare-chested and the women wore thin shirts. They all had wooden slippers on their feet. They called my name excitedly.
"Don't tell me that you don't remember me!" said a wrinkled, hunchbacked old lady who grabbed me by the shoulders.
"Lilac?"
"Yes, I am. Are you Willow?" she cried. "How you have aged! Your hair is gray and white! Is this really you? Where have you been? Where is Pearl?"
At the mention of Pearl, I broke down.
"I can't believe that I have lasted to see you return!" Lilac said. "Here, come meet your aunt Willow!" She turned to her sons. I didn't recognize the men in front of me, although I knew they must have been Double Luck David and John and their younger brother, Triple Luck Solomon.
"Where is Carpenter Chan?" I asked.
"Oh, he is long dead," said a toothless man.
"Dead?" I asked, then instantly recognized Carpenter Chan himself.
"Don't expect an elephant's ivory teeth to grow in a dog's mouth." Lilac slapped her husband's back. "Since Absalom's death, Chan is good for nothing."
"When did Absalom leave?" I asked. "And how were his last days?"
"Old Teacher had a good ending," Carpenter Chan said.
"Absalom didn't suffer?"
"No, he didn't. I was with him until the end. Old Teacher delivered his last sermon and went to lie down. Shortly after, I found him sleeping on his bed, and he was with God."
A white-haired woman squeezed through the crowd and jumped on me. She scrunched her eyelids together and then stretched them as if trying to open her eyes, but couldn't. "Guess who I am?" She drew her face so close that I could smell her rotten breath.
I shook my head and said that I couldn't recognize her.
"I am Soo-ching, the beggar lady!"
"The beggar lady, yes! How are you? What's wrong with your eyes?"
"I can only see a shadow of you, Willow. I am blind. But I remember your face before you left us."
"How have you been?"
"I am a believer in Jesus Christ," Soo-ching said. "How is Pearl? Is she here with you? I am upset that you two no longer visit."
"Where is Confucius, your son?" I asked.
"You remember him? Good!"
"How could I not? He has such a unique name!"
"He is no longer Confucius," Soo-ching said. "He changed his name to Vanguard."
"Vanguard? Why?"
"Confucius is no longer a beggar lady's boy," Lilac whispered in my ear. "He has become somebody important."
"That's right," Papa confirmed. "Vanguard was the first person in Chin-kiang to join the Communist Party. He is the town's boss today."
"Donkey shit!" Soo-ching coughed up phlegm and shot it at the ground. "I regret naming him Confucius. He doesn't deserve it. Willow, you'll see him soon enough."
"How is your husband, Dick?" everyone asked me.
I hesitated, because I didn't know how to answer.
"Oh, my father is well," Rouge answered for me. "He is busy working in Beijing."
Papa sat down and told me how the town of Chin-kiang had changed over the years. "It is a place of exile," he began. "The government dumps people back in their hometowns once they can no longer be of benefit."
Carpenter Chan explained further. "The government seems to think that undesirables should fall back on their native regions and relatives to survive."
"It saves prison costs," Papa said. "We had to build all this ourselves." He waved an arm indicating the inside of the church.
Carpenter Chan smiled. "I am still building it."
"We are truly under God's roof now," Papa said.
"Chan never learned his lesson," Lilac said. "We could have stayed in Nanking if he had denounced Absalom. I told him that Absalom wouldn't mind because he was dead. My stubborn husband wouldn't do it. So we were sent back to Chin-kiang. What can I complain about? The old rule for a woman has always been: _Marry a dog, follow the dog;_ _marry a rooster, follow the rooster_. But our children's future was ruined. In Nanking they would have had opportunities, better schools and better jobs. Here in Chin-kiang, my twins work as coolies, and my youngest son is a field hand . . . They see no brightness in their future." Lilac began to weep.
"Who is making that racket?" a man's voice came from above.
I raised my eyes and saw three figures crawling out of the sleeping boxes.
A dark, bearded old man came down a rope. He was followed by two other men. "Damn lousy bones, they won't stop protesting! This rotten body is falling apart."
The voice was familiar, but I couldn't place the speaker.
The bearded man approached me. He smiled, mocking. "I bet you'd never guess who we are."
The other two men echoed, "But we know you and your friend well."
I searched the corners of memory but could find nothing that would match the images in front of me.
The bearded man sighed. "Twenty years in the national prison must have changed my appearance . . . Willow, look hard at me. I am Bumpkin Emperor." He turned around and pointed at the men behind him. "They are my sworn brothers."
"Bumpkin Emperor? General Lobster and General Crab?"
"Yes, that's us!" the men cried in unison.
Papa came and put his arm around the men's shoulders. "They are with us now."
"What do you mean by 'with us'?" I asked. "Bumpkin Emperor almost killed Absalom, Pearl, Grace, and their children! Absalom would have sent him to hell!"
"On the contrary, my child, on the contrary." Papa shook his head. "In fact, it was Absalom's wish. He made sure that everyone in his church forgave Bumpkin Emperor and his sworn brothers. After all, Christ died for our sins and his Father forgives us."
"I don't believe it, Papa."
"Ask Carpenter Chan."
"Is it true?" I asked.
"Yes." Carpenter Chan nodded. "It was indeed Absalom's wish."
"To forgive Bumpkin Emperor for what he did?"
"Yes."
"God is good, God is fair, and God is kind," Bumpkin Emperor murmured with tears in his eyes.
"Absalom is happy with me in heaven!" Papa sang his words. "I converted the three of them."
The sound of Sunday service woke me. It took a moment to realize that I was not dreaming. I was inside my sleeping box. I rolled over onto my stomach and stuck my head out to see what was going on. I saw Papa performing a sermon in front of the kitchen stove, which was covered with a white cloth. Papa was dressed in his old minister's robe, so washed and worn that it looked like a rag, the color no longer black. Papa's expression was solemn and calm. As he continued speaking, I could hear Absalom in his voice.
I glanced at the door in fear, and I noticed that it was closed and secured with a thick wooden bar.
The hundred and nine residents of the old church listened to Papa quietly. They were either sitting on the benches or on the floor or inside their sleeping boxes.
When Papa finished, people began to sing "Amazing Grace." Memories of sitting with Carie at her piano rushed back to me. I had never understood the lyrics until now
_'Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear,_
_And Grace my fears relieved;_
_How precious did that Grace appear,_
_The hour I first believed._
_Through many dangers, toils, and snares,_
_I have already come;_
_'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far,_
_And Grace will lead me home._
I slid back into my sleeping box. I hadn't cried when Dick had told me that he had fallen in love with his secretary and had decided to end our marriage. But now I was hit by an emotion that felt like the ocean's high tide.
Rouge rolled over and hugged me as I sobbed.
"You are home, Mama." She gently wiped my tears. "We are home."
Chapter 29
The person in charge of my reform was Chin-kiang's Communist Party boss, Vanguard, formerly known as Confucius, the son of the beggar lady Soo-ching. Vanguard had grown into a squirrel-faced, cross-eyed, middle-aged man with a fat belly. He enjoyed denouncing me so much that he ordered others to do the same.
Vanguard pretended that he did not know me. He spoke Mandarin with a heavy Chin-kiang accent, and he was proud of being an illiterate. Since becoming the party boss, he had banned the worship of God and made it a crime to mention the names of Absalom, Carie, and Pearl.
When Vanguard learned that Pearl had won the Nobel Prize, he saw an opportunity to advance his political career. He invited Mao's favorite journalists to Chin-kiang to tour the hometown of the notorious American cultural imperialist. The event caught Madame Mao's attention. Vanguard was summoned to the Forbidden City to be honored as "Chairman Mao's great foot soldier." Madame Mao awarded Vanguard with a work of her calligraphy that read, " _The hope of launching_ _a cultural atomic bomb on the world's Capitalism rests on your shoulders_."
Vanguard called me "the evil twin sister of Pearl Buck" and "Chin-kiang's shame." He encouraged children to call me scum. He ordered me to clean out the town's sewage drains and public restrooms daily. Every Friday afternoon I reported to Vanguard to confess my crimes. Depending on my response, Vanguard would either pass or fail me. If he was displeased, he would add more to my workload. He might order me to clean his office, which was the former British Embassy. If he felt I needed further humiliation, he would order me to walk through the town banging a chime with a stick. I was instructed to shout, "Come and see the American running dog!"; "Down with Willow Yee!"; and "Long live the proletarian dictatorship!" Vanguard hated it when I protested by staring at him in silence.
"I can have you tortured, you know," he threatened constantly.
Vanguard expected me to tell him the details of my relationship with Pearl Buck.
"I want you to trace back all the way to your childhood," he ordered.
Papa taught me to forget about preserving my dignity. "Speak the wolf's language!" If he were me, Papa said, he would toy with Vanguard.
I tried, but it didn't work. Vanguard was determined to please Madame Mao. He didn't buy my abstractions and empty words. "How dare you try to fool the Communist Party!" he yelled at me.
To pressure me further, Vanguard organized rallies. They took place in the town's square. The crowd repeated after Vanguard as he shouted, "Confess or be tortured to death!"
While Vanguard pulled my hair back to show the public my "evil features," I imagined the opera _The Butterfly Lovers_. I remembered every detail of Pearl and me going to see the performance together with NaiNai. When Vanguard used a whip to beat me, I saw the birds, bees, and dragonflies flying into Absalom's church. When the blood came and pain burned inside my body, I heard Carie singing her favorite Christmas song, "What Child Is This?"
In my dreams, I visited Pearl in her American home. The furniture I imagined for Pearl was made of red sandalwood in the style of the Chinese Ming dynasty. I saw the pictures on her walls, beautiful Chinese brush paintings and ink calligraphy. Also, I dreamed of Pearl sculpting. It was something she had said that she would love to learn. We used to watch Chin-kiang's craftsmen making cookie figures out of sugared flour. For three pennies, we bought our favorite colored animals and opera figures. At our playground behind the hills, Pearl once sculpted a mud head using me as a model, and I did one of her. To emphasize our individual characteristics, I made her nose high and she slanted my eyes. Both faces were smiling because we couldn't help laughing while making them.
I dreamed of Pearl's play stove, a real one built by Carie's gardener. It was located behind the hillside. It was there that we cooked real food. Wang Ah-ma taught us to bake yams and roast soybeans and peanuts. I could still hear the sound of Pearl and me chewing beans as if our teeth were made of steel.
Since moving back to Chin-kiang, I had been praying with Papa. Vanguard had no power over my spiritual being. My resistance against the Communists grew stronger. I decided to try to bore the crowd with my confessions, filling and padding them out with Mao quotations, slogans, and self-name-calling. My typical first sentence would be "I was a cat that lost her way before I was guided back home by Chairman Mao's teaching." My second sentence would be "Although I have never read a word of _The Good Earth_ , my desire to read the book is absolutely reactionary and criminal."
After Vanguard's lectures and criticisms, it was my task to lead the crowd in shouting, "Burn, fire, fry, and roast Willow if she doesn't surrender!" To amuse myself, I created variations. "Down with Willow Yee" became "Down with the American running dog Willow Yee!" and then "Down with the big liar, big traitor, big bourgeoisie, big snake, and big rotten, assless, slummy, and poisonous spider Willow Yee!" I began to play with the crowd's breath. I dragged the sentences out as long as I could. I invented slogans to shout as breathing exercises. My favorite only a few could follow: "Long live our great leader, great teacher, great helmsman, great leader Chairman Mao's great, glorious, and forever correct revolutionary line!"
In the winter, Vanguard conducted a political rally in the former British Embassy's ballroom. The crowd was ordered to sit on the floor for hours on end. As I confessed, men smoked cigarettes and played cards, while women sewed their clothes and knitted. Old people napped and babies screamed. Vanguard insisted that my confessions were not heartfelt. He concluded that I purposely resisted reform and ought to be further punished.
I was put to work as the town's slave.
To those who were sympathetic toward me, Vanguard warned, "The word _mercy_ doesn't exist in our proletarian dictionary!"
When Vanguard decided to lead Chin-kiang to "enter Communism overnight," he eliminated the use of chamber pots. Everyone was to use the public restrooms, but because restrooms didn't belong to anyone, no one cleaned them. They became a breeding ground for maggots, flies, and mosquitoes. It became my responsibility to clean them.
I labored day and night. Rouge helped when she could. Her old job as a textile worker had been given to a relative of her boss, and now she worked as a concrete mixer for a construction company. Close to the Chinese New Year in 1970, Rouge was ordered to work both the night and day shifts. I made my rounds of the public restrooms alone. As my tired hands scrubbed the walls of the feces-filled pits, I felt helpless and exhausted. I asked myself, "What is the point of going on?"
I had to restrain myself from crying or I would wake everyone. Papa was asleep. Rouge was working. The shadow of Dick's secretary-nurse would not leave me alone. I had finally learned her name, Daisy. My mind's eye saw that she had a full-moon face, big eyes, and a cheery mouth. She and Dick were embracing in the bed that used to be mine.
"Papa," I called.
No answer.
I got up, climbed down, and landed on the floor. Papa was not in his sleeping box.
I went searching for him. I checked the washing area and the dining area. Passing the stacked firewood and coal buckets, I arrived in the kitchen. I heard a noise over my head. It came from the storage area behind the kitchen. Standing still, I listened carefully. It was the sound of a radio—someone was tuning through the channels.
Like an old monkey, I climbed the rope ladder. My legs were shaking and I was out of breath. I lost my balance and my shoulder hit the storage door.
The radio stopped.
After a long moment of silence, the door opened.
Holding a candle, Bumpkin Emperor stuck his head out. "What are you doing here?"
"I am looking for Papa."
"He is not here."
"I heard the sound of a radio. What's going on?"
"Nothing."
"Can I come in?"
"No, you can't."
"Don't make me wake up everyone," I threatened.
"I said no."
"Let me in, please."
"No."
"You are hiding something, aren't you?"
"It's none of your business . . ."
"Let me in!"
"Don't make me push you . . ."
"Willow!" Papa's voice came from inside.
Bumpkin Emperor pivoted his body, and I entered.
Papa's face was lit by candlelight. He was holding a brick-sized box. It was a radio of a fancy make, better than the one Dick had owned. Papa turned the radio dial. Static filled the shadowy room. The scene reminded me of a propaganda film in which criminals gathered in conspiracy. Papa was in his pajamas. He was calm and focused. I had never seen him concentrating like this. He tilted his head to the side as he searched for a signal and listened. I looked around and saw more faces. Besides Bumpkin Emperor and his sworn brothers, there were Carpenter Chan, his sons, and a few others. They all looked nervous but excited.
"What are you listening to?" I asked.
"Sh-sh!" Bumpkin Emperor pushed my head down.
Papa kept adjusting the dial. Finally there was a human voice. Papa was ecstatic. "I got it, I got it!" The signal didn't last. It turned to static again. Papa kept trying while the others waited patiently. After a long while the signal returned. A voice speaking foreign-accented Mandarin came on. "This is Voice of America broadcasting from the United States."
Chapter 30
The radio had belonged to Bumpkin Emperor. It had been a gift from Chiang Kai-shek when Bumpkin Emperor was at the peak of his power as a warlord. The two men had joined forces against Mao. What made the radio valuable was that it had been made in America for military use. Bumpkin Emperor had donated the radio to the church after Papa had converted him.
Papa no longer felt isolated since he'd mastered the radio. He was obsessed with it. Papa shared the latest world news with carefully selected church members. Life became more bearable, although not better. The Cultural Revolution continued and Mao worship intensified. Food shortages became the worst they'd been since the Great Leap Forward. Vanguard loosened his grip on me in order to catch people who were selling vegetables they grew in their backyards.
One day, a stranger visited me. His name was Chu. Although I didn't recognize him, I remembered the name. He was the Beijing general Dick had talked into surrendering in 1949. Dick had been proud when he saved the Imperial city and avoided a bloody battle in the streets of Beijing. Dick had negotiated with General Chu. Mao had promised Chu a high-ranking position in the People's Liberation Army.
The man who stood in front of me was sick and thin. He had wax-yellow skin and sunken eyes. He spoke in a whisper and his words confused me. He said that he had been Dick's cellmate in prison. He then explained that he was on a medical release from the national prison. I told him that Dick was working for Mao. He said that it was no longer the case.
"What do you mean by 'cellmate'?" I asked. I hadn't talked to Dick for two years. I knew nothing about his life.
General Chu produced a wadded paper on which ink letters the size of ants were written.
_Dear Willow,_
_This letter gives me a chance to explain everything, which I consider a_ _blessing._
_I am writing from the Southwest Labor Prison near Tibet. You might_ _wonder what I did to offend Mao. Well, again, the story has to do with_ _Pearl Buck. But truly my own ambition is to blame._
_Mao summoned me on the evening of May 30, 1969. Madame Mao_ _was there and unusually friendly toward me. Mao didn't seem to be aware_ _that it was the middle of the night. He was dressed in a white bathrobe. His hair was wet and he was barefoot._
_Once I was seated he simply said, "Pearl Buck wants to come to China._ _Premier Chou En-lai thinks we should make an exception and open the_ _door for her. What do you think?"_
_Out of the corner of my eye I was aware of Madame Mao's wooden_ _expression. A slight smile quivered on her lips._
_Given all my personal history with Pearl Buck, I marveled at Mao's audacity. Had he forgotten that you, my wife, had gone to prison because of your refusal_ _to denounce your friend? But I also knew that Mao's desire for international_ _recognition had only grown stronger over the years. No matter how strong he_ _was at home, his reputation had not kept up abroad. He would do anything_ _to gain the prestige that had eluded him. I saw at once that he was willing to_ _rewrite history if it would fulfill his ends. I wasn't so sure about his wife._
_I sat there sweating in my chair as Mao went on. He asked me to_ _cultivate Pearl Buck and convince her to change her mind about China. "Tell her we now rule a quarter of the human race on earth," Mao said._
_Mao revealed that his intelligence agency had recently reported that_ _Pearl Buck had been a consultant to President John Kennedy. Mao believed_ _that she had the potential to be his bridge to America._
_Looking back, my fate was set. Madame Mao was jealous of any female_ _Mao was interested in. She had made secret arrests, tortured, and murdered_ _in order to gain Mao's affection back._
_Unfortunately, my own ambition made me willfully blind. Connecting_ _Mao and Pearl Buck would be the best thing I could do to advance my_ _career. Going down in history tempted me so much that I played with fire. The wind was in my favor, I thought, and I'd be a fool not to ride it. I_ _planned on making a case to back up Chou En-lai's position._
_I translated Pearl's recent articles on China and carefully edited out her_ _negative comments. But before I submitted the material to Mao, the wind_ _changed its direction. Madame Mao got ahead of me._
_As evidence against Pearl, Madame Mao presented parts of her latest_ _novel,_ Three Daughters of Madame Liang, _in which Pearl depicted_ _senseless murders taking place during the Cultural Revolution as if she had_ _witnessed it. The novel amazingly mirrored the truth._
_From that moment on, Mao lost interest in Pearl Buck. But Madame_ _Mao was not finished with me. She saw Pearl Buck as a personal threat_ _and was determined to punish anyone with a connection to her. Accusing_ _me of deceiving Mao, Madame Mao had me arrested._
_I expected Mao to offer his protection, but he didn't._
_I met General Chu in prison. What a twist of fate! On one hand, I felt_ _guilty because Mao never honored his promises—the terms I negotiated. Once Chu surrendered, he became useless to Mao and was abandoned. Although Chu was granted the title of commanding general of the People's_ _Liberation Army, it was a paper title only. Chu ended up without the_ _army or his freedom. I felt that I had let the man down. Ending my life_ _in prison almost makes me feel better, because it separates me from Mao._
_The Tibetan weather is harsh and the air is thin. We live like rodents_ _in underground holes, which we dug ourselves—talk about digging one's_ _own grave. However, the dead do not get buried here. The prison doesn't_ _have enough prisoners to dig the holes to bury them all. Instead, the dead_ _are dragged away and left in the open about a half mile from where we_ _live. When the wind is strong, we can smell the rotten stench. Eventually,_ _Tibetan wolves and buzzards eat what is left._
_I live on leaves, earthworms, and mice. Before summer ends, the leaves_ _and earthworms will be gone. We have stripped the trees of bark and eaten_ _the rough fiber. Now those trees have died. We don't have enough energy to_ _catch mice. I have begun eating "suicide seeds." This is a kind of grass seed_ _that one slowly dies from. At least it cures the hunger. I've been constipated_ _for weeks. My belly hurts so much that I pass out from time to time. You_ _would never imagine the scene: cellmates helping each other scoop the shit_ _from each other's rear ends with bare fingers. It is a bloody business._
_Chu was my partner. He hadn't shit for nine days. I used a chopstick_ _and tried to break the stool and scoop it out with a spoon. But his stool was_ _as hard as a rock. He was in terrible pain. His stomach swelled like a big_ _balloon. Another cellmate was from Shanghai, a doctor. Yesterday he died_ _of constipation. He was only thirty-seven years old._
_People here don't count on waking up when they go to sleep. Strangely,_ _most people die quietly in their sleep. Like the end of a burning candle, the_ _flame flickers and is swallowed by eternal darkness. Each night I think_ _of you. I regret deserting you for Daisy. She reported my complaining to_ _Madame Mao. My foolish pillow talk! Near the end, before I went to_ _prison, she admitted that she was Madame Mao's spy. I knew Daisy kept_ _a diary, but I didn't know it would be used as a weapon against me. I_ _thought I was on top of the world when I said to her, "Human beings make_ _mistakes. Mao is a human being. He makes mistakes." Daisy received a_ _promotion for reporting my comment. Before my arrest, Mao invited me to_ _accompany him to Russia. He made me believe that I was his most trusted_ _man._
_There was never a hint that I was to be punished. Then all of a sudden,_ _Madame Mao told me that Mao was upset with me. Next I was stripped_ _of my Party membership. I was to go to prison because I was no longer a_ _comrade but a reactionary. Mao wouldn't answer my calls or letters._
_I know I have hurt you by my disloyalty. I have stayed away as you_ _wished. I am writing this letter because I believe that I won't last much_ _longer. My belly is larger than a pregnant woman's. I am chewed up by_ _remorse and shame. I deserve Hell. I don't expect myself to live beyond the_ _New Year. There is no mail and almost no one gets out alive. In case Chu_ _succeeds in getting out and this letter reaches you, I want you to know that_ _I still love you and have always loved you, even when I was a foolish man._
_Dick_
My only thought was to see Dick before it was too late. I didn't bother asking Vanguard for permission to leave because I knew he wouldn't agree. Rouge bought the ticket, and I left Chin-kiang by train the next day. It was a standing-only ticket because I didn't have enough money to buy a seat. For the next seventy-two hours, I stood during the day and managed to rest at night, curled up next to urine-soaked newspapers.
After the train, I traveled on foot. It took me two weeks to reach the prison camp. Then they made me wait for days before I was told the truth, that Dick had already died. He had been punished for stealing food. The story was that Dick hadn't reported the death of another prisoner so that he could claim the dead man's share of food. Dick slept with the corpse until the stink of rotting flesh gave him away. After that, the prison guards starved Dick and he died.
I wept imagining Dick sleeping with a corpse. I asked that I be allowed to identify Dick's remains, but I was refused. I went to the prison headquarters and put on a hunger strike. After a week, I was taken to the open graveyard Dick had described in his letter.
As Dick had written, none were buried. Bodies and bones were everywhere. The smell was horrible. I stumbled from body to body looking for my husband. It was almost impossible to recognize any of the dead. I refused to give up. Hours later, I found him. Dick was naked. I recognized him by a scar I remembered. The flesh on his body had been torn by vultures and chewed on by wild dogs.
I fainted. When I woke up, I struggled to remember Dick's face as I had known him. I did not want to remember him like this. I went and found a local peasant who owned a donkey. I paid him to bring me a bucket of gasoline and some firewood. I borrowed a rusty old shovel and dug a ditch. I dragged what was left of my husband to the ditch and piled the wood on him and poured the gasoline over that. I set this on fire. Afterward, I collected Dick's bones, but they were too big to fit inside my bag. I had to abandon most of them. I never imagined Dick would end like this.
After I returned to Chin-kiang, Papa performed a memorial for Dick. We invited only the people we trusted who had known Dick. I meant to invite General Chu, but he was nowhere to be found. He had gone into hiding. Papa said that prison life must have made Chu cautious and distrustful. "Let's remember him as a loyal friend to Dick."
"What's important is that Chu risked his life to deliver Father's letter," Rouge said.
"God must have guided General Chu," Papa agreed.
I remembered Chu's words. He felt blessed to be the messenger because he believed that he would soon join Dick. He believed that finding me would be the best gift he could offer to his friend.
I burned Dick's writing, which I had saved over the years. Dick would have liked me to do that. He had worshipped Mao and Communism with all his heart. It was what Dick had believed.
I saved Dick's last letter for Pearl, although I had no idea if we would ever see each other again. A reunion with my friend was becoming harder and harder to imagine. Today's Chinese children knew Americans only as enemies, and things seemed to be getting worse. I wondered whether Pearl would be amused or horrified at the fact that Mao had considered converting her into a proletarian.
Chapter 31
Papa was a master when it came to tricking the authorities. "Mao fought guerrilla style and won China," Papa said to his congregation. "We stand the same chance to save souls for God if we follow his example."
I warned Papa that he was asking for trouble.
"I have an advantage over Mao," Papa replied with confidence. "I have the radio."
I was worried. "You will end up in prison."
"That already happened before you came home." Papa stuck up three fingers. "Three times I was in and out of that filthy place. What more can the authorities do to a century-old man?"
Papa reminded me more and more of Absalom. He attended births, marriages, and funerals. He fooled the government spies with the language he used. He commenced each ceremony the traditional way and then turned it into a Christian event without anyone being the wiser—even when an agent was in the crowd. Papa started each sermon with Mao's Quotation Book in his hand. He would begin with " _We are people from all_ _walks of life_ " and conclude by reciting from the Bible, " _He that had gathered_ _much had nothing over; and he that had gathered little had no lack._ "
Papa developed a language only his Christian congregation understood. He referred to God as "the Cloud-walker," punishment in hell as being "handpicked by Karl Marx," the Bible as "the Quotation Book," and salvation as "the revolutionary mission."
During the celebration on China's twenty-second National Independence Day, Papa was arrested for the fourth time for spreading poisonous thoughts. Papa confessed quickly to avoid torture. He denounced himself and made promises to the authorities, but he had no intention of keeping them.
He came home quoting a Chinese saying: " _A hero is someone who_ _doesn't swim against the current_."
Papa forgave himself in God's name. He called his lies strategies to avoid unnecessary sacrifices. Using himself as an example, he taught his congregation how to deal with the authorities. Once, Papa pretended to have a nervous breakdown. He claimed that he suffered flashbacks from the time when he was "poisoned" by Absalom. At public rallies Papa pointed at himself and shouted, "Down with Absalom's number-one running dog!" This caused stifled laughter to ripple through the crowd.
When ordered to criticize himself, Papa said, "My hands would be busy picking your pockets if Absalom hadn't introduced me to Jesus Christ."
Vanguard tried to stop Papa. "How dare you praise that American cultural imperialist!" he yelled.
"Down with Absalom!" Papa shouted back as he punched his fists into the air. "I salute Comrade Vanguard!" Turning toward Mao's portrait on the wall, he bowed deeply. "I'll confess more to you, Chairman Mao!"
"More confessions!" the crowd cheered. "More confessions!"
Papa carried on. "Chairman Mao teaches us that 'we must educate the masses by exposing what our enemy has done.' Now, let me tell you what Jesus Christ has done."
I learned from Papa not to "swim against the current." I still felt hurt when children called me evil, but I no longer felt guilty. My true healing started when I began to help Papa with his guerrilla church.
To his amazement, Papa started to receive shocking confessions. Although he did not share them with me at first, eventually he did. I learned that Carpenter Chan had confessed that he had been a secret member of the Communist Party and Vanguard had been his leader. Carpenter Chan joined the party in 1949 believing that Mao and the Communists represented the poor. Carpenter Chan's assigned task was to report on Papa. However, Chan became troubled when he realized how flawed and power-hungry Vanguard was. As the years went by, Carpenter Chan became convinced that Vanguard was a false prophet and Mao a false God.
My childhood memories were like splendid Imperial Palaces where I wandered and lingered. Often I imagined that Pearl and I were reunited. That scene was my favorite daydream. I felt closest to God when thinking about Pearl. I considered such moments like opening gifts from heaven.
Unlike me, my daughter, Rouge, was a realist, especially after her father's death. Memories weren't the same to her as they were to me. She chose to forget over remembering.
I would live with Rouge until she was in her forties and finally married. My son-in-law was a hardware-factory technician who had lost his wife to illness. The man struggled to raise his two young daughters. I was pleased when Rouge married him and adopted both girls. A year later Rouge gave birth to her own baby girl. My favorite activity was taking my granddaughters to visit the places where Pearl and I used to play hide-and-seek. I enjoyed the sunshine and the gentle rolling scenery, especially when the wind blew softly, brushing against my face. During such moments, I forgot how old I was. I felt like a girl again until one of my granddaughters started singing Carie's favorite song and I realized that she wasn't Pearl. That's when I wondered if Pearl was still alive.
The day before Chinese New Year's Eve in 1971, Papa came with a surprise.
"Pearl Buck will speak on Voice of America!" Papa could barely contain his excitement.
So, she was alive! I got down on my knees and thanked God. It had been thirty-seven years since I had last seen her. I was white-haired and imagined her to be the same.
It was no use when Papa advised people not to come.
"It's an enemy radio station," Papa warned. "You will be considered a traitor if caught listening. You will be arrested and sent to prison."
The day was carefully planned. The secret gathering would be disguised as a Chinese New Year's banquet.
I was surprised when Vanguard and his assistant, nicknamed Catfish, walked into the church moments before the broadcast.
"Secretary Vanguard, welcome, and please join us," Papa greeted the two with a smile.
I pulled Papa aside and whispered in his ear, "Have you lost your mind?"
Papa ignored me. He took out his radio and began to set it up.
"Bring out the best wine for our boss," Papa said.
People started to crawl out of their sleeping boxes and climb down the ropes. Carpenter Chan and Lilac came to stand near Papa. Behind them were Bumpkin Emperor and his sworn brothers.
The hallway and the dining area soon became crowded.
Papa poured wine and made sure that Vanguard and Catfish had the largest share. He poured an inch into the other glasses, but filled theirs to the top. Papa made a toast. "Let's drink to demonstrate our loyalty to Chairman Mao!"
Vanguard had to drink all of his wine. Papa waited until Vanguard's glass was empty before he refilled it and toasted to Mao's health. Glasses were emptied and refilled again. Papa's third toast was to the victory of the Cultural Revolution. The fourth full glass and toast were for Vanguard's continued success in leading Chin-kiang into Communism.
When Vanguard slipped from the chair onto the floor, his face was the color of a rooster's comb. Catfish was still awake, but Papa ignored him and changed the radio's channel. The church filled with the sound of Voice of America.
We listened intently.
In Mandarin the host introduced Pearl S. Buck.
I stopped breathing when I heard a female voice say in Chin-kiang-accented Mandarin, "Happy Chinese New Year! I am Pearl Sydenstricker Buck."
The first reaction was that no one could believe their ears. We all thought that it was our imagination.
As the conversation continued, the reality sank in.
"It's her! It's our Pearl!" Jumping for joy, we screamed and hugged each other.
"Happy New Year to you too, Pearl!" Papa said. He was smiling, but tears streamed down his cheeks.
It was as if she had never left China. Her accent hadn't changed. Her tone was gentle and clear. She began to tell us about her life. We had little understanding of the events she was talking about, such as the Great Depression and the Vietnam War. But it didn't matter. We were gathered to hear her voice. The fact that she was alive filled me with happiness.
Pearl talked about her books, including her translation of _All Men_ _Are Brothers_. She mentioned that _The Good Earth_ had been made into an American movie. "Although it's a wonderful movie," she said, "I am afraid that you wouldn't like it, because all the Chinese characters are played by Western actors. They all have high noses and speak English." She said that she lived in Pennsylvania and had adopted eight children, most of them of Asian descent.
We wept when Pearl said that she wanted to visit China.
"The details of my youth have become more and more clear to me as I have aged." We could hear that Pearl's voice was full of emotion. "When I close my eyes, I see Chin-kiang's hills and fields at dawn and dusk, in sunshine and in moonlight, in summer green and winter snow." She said she missed the Chinese New Year's celebration the most. "I would be having a banquet with my friends right now if I were among them. As we all know, to be Chinese means one lives to eat."
The host asked Pearl to describe a typical scene in Chin-kiang for the world's listeners.
She paused for a moment and then replied, "A typical scene would be the mist over the big pond under the weeping willows. There would be frail clouds in the sky, and the water would shine silver. Against this background, I would see a great white heron standing on one stalk of a leg."
I let my tears flow as I imagined the smile on my friend's face.
Pearl went on. "My American friends often praise Chinese artists for their vivid imaginations, but no, let me tell you, the artist only puts down what he sees. I grew up and spent forty years of my life enjoying such scenery. It is the China I know and the China I continue to live in within my mind."
Catfish grew terrified as he listened. He was not drunk and was aware of the consequences. He slapped Vanguard's face and splashed water over him. "Boss! Wake up! We must go!"
Like a pile of wet mud, Vanguard did not move.
"We are trapped!" Catfish became hysterical. He turned to Papa and threatened, "I'm going to report this!"
"Go ahead!" Papa said. "Don't forget to mention that Vanguard supported us and that is why he was here with us. He was so excited to listen to Voice of America and Pearl Buck that he got drunk to celebrate. Everyone in this building saw him do it."
Chapter 32
Although Vanguard confiscated Papa's radio, he lost his position. He was replaced by Carpenter Chan, who was appointed the new Communist Party secretary of Chin-kiang. Carpenter Chan didn't want the job, but Papa convinced him to accept the position. Papa believed that God's work needed information and intelligence. "I'd appreciate it if you could get me the monthly Communist Party newsletter, the _Internal_ _Reference_."
Papa's wisdom paid off. The _Internal Reference_ forecast the changes in China's political weather. Papa devoured every issue. He analyzed and looked for traces of change, especially in Mao's attitude toward the United States.
In July 1971, Papa noticed a stamp-sized announcement that Mao was to receive a special guest from America, a man named Henry Kissinger.
"Mao's pot is cooking!" Papa said to Carpenter Chan.
Three months later Papa learned that China had been accepted as a member of the United Nations.
"A deal is in the works," Papa predicted.
Papa and Chan became the first in town to figure out that America's President Nixon was about to visit China. Through the _Internal_ _Reference_ , Papa and Carpenter Chan also learned that there were two powerful factions within China's Communist Party. One was called the Wife Party, Madame Mao's faction, which Mao trusted to carry on his Cultural Revolution. The other was the Premier Party, led by Premier Chou En-lai, which Mao trusted to manage the country. Both factions competed for Mao's favor.
The battle between the two intensified when Nixon's visit was announced publicly. A group of investigators came to Chin-kiang. We had no idea that it had to do with the fact that Nixon had selected Pearl Buck to accompany him to China. It was only later that we learned the momentous news.
By candlelight Papa conducted discussions with his guerrilla-church members. "The world's attention will be focused on Nixon when he comes," Papa said, his eyes glowing and every wrinkle dancing. "Imagine, our Pearl introducing Nixon to Mao in perfect Mandarin and Mao to Nixon in American English!"
The question seemed to be: Would Madame Mao let it happen? Would she stand for another woman taking over the role she believed she was entitled to?
"Hundreds of cameras will be clicking and flashing," Papa continued.
"Madame Mao will be jealous of Pearl standing between Mao and Nixon."
"There is another possibility," Carpenter Chan said. "Mao might show interest in Pearl, like he did with the wife of Philippine president Marcos. I saw the documentary in which Mao kissed the lady's hand."
I wouldn't be surprised if Mao was charmed by the blue-eyed Pearl. I imagined Pearl dressed up. She would look like Carie, beautiful and elegant. Mao would ask questions in his native Hunanese, and Pearl would answer in the same tune. As far as I knew, Pearl was fluent in many Chinese dialects besides Mandarin. It would only be natural for Mao to extend an invitation to Pearl to visit him in private, as he had with so many famous Chinese actresses, poets, and novelists.
"Perhaps Mao will offer Pearl a personal tour of the Forbidden City,"
Papa imagined. "I can see the two strolling together down the Imperial Long Corridor, where the Last Empress, Tsu Hsi, walked every day after dinner. Mao would share his knowledge of Chinese history."
"Mao might suggest visiting the Great Wall," Carpenter Chan added. "He and Pearl would be carried by the palanquin bearers."
Lilac nodded. "Certainly Mao would propose dinner at the Imperial Summer Palace."
"Yes," Papa agreed. "The dishes would be given names after Mao's poems. Crabs with ginger and wine would be called Taking Down the Capital Nanking. Roasted duck with wheat pancakes would be called Autumn Uprising Triumph."
"Hot red pepper with fried frog legs would be called The Birth of the People's Republic." Bumpkin Emperor and his sworn brothers drooled.
The pictures continued to scroll through my mind. Pearl might win Mao's heart if she presented to him her translation of _All Men Are_ _Brothers_ , a favorite of Mao's. He would assume that Pearl shared his passion for the peasant heroes.
I could hear Mao call Pearl "My comrade!" Mao would forget his age, his toothaches, his sore eyes and stiff joints. He would take Pearl's hand and tell her that it was _All Men Are Brothers_ that had inspired him to become a revolutionary. To earn her affection, he would want Pearl to know how he became the modern emperor of China. He would expect her to share the story with Nixon.
" _People, only the people, are the creators of history_." Carpenter Chan mimicked Mao's famous quotation. "Pearl would be flattered."
"I don't think so," Lilac disagreed. "Pearl wouldn't like Mao at all."
"Pearl is lucky that Mao still hasn't read _The Good Earth_ ," I said. "If he had, he would know that Pearl will never be his comrade. Nothing Mao says or does will change Pearl's view. And I believe that Pearl would disappoint Mao as well. Mao would discover that although Pearl spoke his language and knew his culture, she could never worship him like the rest of China. Pearl would see his flaws. She could be Mao's nightmare."
"We'll see," Papa said. "Wine might bring alive the poet in Mao. He could pick up a brush pen and write Pearl a calligraphy couplet as a gift. Pearl might demonstrate her appreciation by recognizing the rhythm in which Mao composed, and she would sound out the phrases in ancient Chinese."
"Mao would ask Pearl to stay for late-night tea," said Bumpkin Emperor, nodding.
"Pearl would refuse," Rouge said. "And she would say, 'President Nixon is waiting for me.'"
"The rejection would be worse than Nixon dropping a nuclear bomb on China," everyone agreed.
The town of Chin-kiang was to be given a task of national importance. As the party boss, Carpenter Chan started to receive messages from his superiors. The first was from Premier Chou En-lai, instructing him to prepare for Pearl Buck's homecoming.
"Get ready to show the town to America's President Nixon," the message read.
The second message contradicted the first. It ordered the town to cooperate with Madame Mao's investigators. "It is time to reveal Pearl Buck and her parents' crimes against China and the Chinese people," that message read.
Believing that it would be an opportunity to get back on top, Vanguard exposed the underground Christian church. "Absalom's ghost is not only alive but active in turning people against Mao and Communism," he claimed.
The Communist newspaper, the _People's Daily_ , published an article titled "The Nobel Prize Winner Makes Her Living Insulting China." Carpenter Chan told us that Madame Mao had barred Chin-kiang from receiving the American guests.
Secretly, Carpenter Chan took back the confiscated radio. He and Papa tuned in to Voice of America for the latest news. Between the lines, they learned that Nixon's delegation would depart from the United States for China in a week, and that the Chinese authorities had refused Pearl Buck entrance.
Carpenter Chan composed a petition signed by everyone in town and sent it to Premier Chou En-lai.
" _Pearl Buck grew up in Chin-kiang_ ," the petition pleaded. " _It is her_ _right to visit her mother's grave and our duty as her neighbors and friends to_ _see her wish granted._ "
Never before had the entire town been united in one common goal. It was not Pearl Buck's visit that we were fighting for, but our own lives and our children's future. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, those whose paths had crossed Absalom's and Carie's had been denounced and made to suffer. The major events had happened years ago, but our memories were still fresh. Some people had been affected more directly than others, but all had stories to tell. I remembered that the teenage mob that called itself Mao's Red Guard had even come to Beijing to "clear Pearl Buck's evil influence." They knew that I had delivered letters to Pearl from Hsu Chih-mo. They took me out of the prison to attend a public rally, where the teens hung a wooden board around my neck that read, pimp. The crowd demanded that I confess Hsu Chih-mo and Pearl Buck's relationship. Pearl's former students were terrorized. They were forced to inform on me. One pointed out to the crowd that I was Pearl's best friend and Carie's adopted daughter. Other students recalled that I was the one who had tried to steal Hsu Chih-mo from Pearl Buck.
The Red Guard located Absalom's grave near Chin-kiang and vandalized it. They smashed the stone-carving tablet honoring Absalom's lifelong service to God. The Red Guard also sought Carie's grave. It was Lilac who removed the tombstone to a different location. The grave the Red Guard destroyed was not Carie's.
Lilac's sons were ordered to change names. Double Luck David and John were now Down with Christ and War on God. Triple Luck Solomon's new name was Mao's Loyalist.
When the Red Guard ordered Bumpkin Emperor and his sworn brothers to smash a ceramic figure of Christ, the former warlords exploded. They took the anti-Christ boards off their necks and smashed them instead. When they were locked up, they escaped into the mountains.
Papa took the risk of protecting Absalom's hand-drawn pictures of Jesus Christ. He hid them behind the wall-sized portrait of Mao. When Carpenter Chan and his workmen learned that the Red Guard had decided to burn the church, they transformed the church into an "Education Museum" in which Mao's head was painted on every surface. The sculptures of Christ and the saints were boxed and caged and captioned "The Negative Teachers." The boxes were put on display for criticism. To prevent the sculptures from being defiled, the workmen wrapped them in red ribbons with slogans like "Long Live Chairman Mao!" and "Salute to Madame Mao!" written on them.
What pained Papa the most was when members withdrew from the congregation. Although Papa understood that people did it under pressure and out of fear, he couldn't help feeling defeated. He threatened people with "going to hell," although he was appalled by their response: "Hell will be a better place than where we are."
For years Chin-kiang was considered an area severely infected by a "Christian plague." It was decided that the town needed a deep cleaning. Although Vanguard set himself as an example for denouncing Christianity, few followed him. People called Vanguard "the Chin-kiang Judas." The police discovered that Bibles were hidden inside the covers of Mao's books and clay figures of Christ were hidden inside rice bags. Christmas songs were heard during the Chinese New Year, and flowers by Carie's grave never failed to blossom in spring. Children who woke up in the middle of the night to relieve themselves would find themselves tripping over their parents, on their knees praying in the dark. Despite his age, Papa made his rounds rain or shine when there was no place safe to worship God.
Age finally took its toll on Papa. He collapsed one day as he went from house to house, visiting members of his congregation. Rouge and I rushed to his side. When he woke up, he told me that he had met Absalom.
"Old Teacher still rode his donkey," Papa said.
"Did you ask him if he was pleased with your work?" I asked, teasing.
"I did."
"What was the reply?" Rouge was curious.
Papa took a few deep breaths before he answered, "Absalom cried, which was rather out of character. It was about Pearl."
"Pearl?"
"Absalom regretted that he never got the time to be a good father to Pearl."
"What was your response?" both Rouge and I asked.
"I told him that he should be proud, because she carried on his work—that we all heard her on Voice of America."
A week later, Papa stopped breathing. Like a ripe melon, Papa hung happily on his vine before dropping to the ground. He went to sit under the tree outside the converted church building and looked like he had just fallen asleep with his chin on his chest.
**Part Five**
Chapter 33
Overnight, the "Down with American Imperialists" slogans were replaced with "Welcome American President Nixon." Mannequins dressed in U.S. Army uniforms for military bayonet practice at schools nationwide were removed. Children were instructed to learn the English phrases "Welcome" and "How do you do?"
The day Nixon arrived in China, children filled the streets from the airport to the hotel where the president would stay. Each child was given paper flowers and instructed to smile with their teeth showing.
Carpenter Chan received an urgent dispatch that Nixon was to visit Chin-kiang, and that Pearl Buck was with him.
The town vibrated with anticipation.
I so wished that Papa could have lived to see this day. It would have thrilled him to greet the American president—but even more, the daughter of his beloved Absalom.
The guerrilla-church members counted the hours and then the minutes. In the morning, state police came to secure the town. Everyone was ordered to stay inside until called. While the men exchanged news and information, the women began to prepare Pearl's favorite foods. Every family contributed. We soaked rice and soybeans, steamed bread and yams, and brought out all the pickled radishes and dried meats, which were usually saved for New Year's. The sound of chopping vegetables lasted all day, and the smell of roasting garlic peanuts filled the air. "Pearl will smell our cooking miles away when she arrives," Lilac said.
When I heard the sound of drums and the music of China's national anthem, I knew the American guests were here. I rinsed my hands, combed my hair, and slipped on my blue Mao jacket. Rouge wanted to join me but her boss wouldn't give her permission. As Dick's daughter, she was ill-treated.
I was nervous and tense. My doubts had grown when my friend's face had failed to appear in newspapers. There were photos of Mao and Nixon shaking hands. And Madame Mao, her big, wide mouth smiling like a white sailboat. But no Pearl. Was I foolish to believe that she would be allowed to come?
"Is Pearl with Nixon or isn't she?" I kept asking Carpenter Chan.
"I don't know" was Chan's reply.
I had been more than living for this moment. To me, it was as if my life depended on it. Now I was afraid. I imagined what Madame Mao might have done to keep Pearl out of China. Dick's fate reminded me not to underestimate her power.
Yet I couldn't stop hoping. I rose before dawn to climb the rolling hills. When I reached the top of a favorite hill where Pearl and I used to play, I lay on the grass and closed my eyes. The scent of jasmine drifted from below and brought back memories. I could see my friend's clear blue eyes. She looked at me without speaking.
My tears welled up at the thought that we would be like two strangers. She might not even recognize me. Maybe she had simply forgotten me. But no, another voice spoke inside my head. "You will always be able to recognize each other." We would pick up where we had left off. I would satisfy her every curiosity about China.
"Tell me how you followed Dick and what happened," my friend would say. She knew that Dick had been Mao's right-hand man.
Or maybe Pearl would not ask. She was not the kind to presume. She would have heard about Mao's persecutions and would have wondered about Dick's fate. In comparison to Hsu Chih-mo, Dick was hot in temper and strong in character. Although he had tried to ride the tiger, he was too honest for Mao. He didn't even know when he had off ended Mao. The people of Chin-kiang thought that Dick deserved his tragic ending because he had followed Mao. Papa and Carpenter Chan had never understood Dick. His rejection of Christianity made him suspect to both men. But Dick was against all religions. Like Mao, Dick claimed himself godless. But he had ended up doing exactly what he hated, worshipping Mao.
Pearl was the only one who understood both Dick and me, the same way she understood China. Perhaps this was why Nixon had picked her to accompany him.
Pearl would not have forgotten Hsu Chih-mo. I was sure of that. But I would tell her that Hsu Chih-mo was a lucky man. By that, I meant that he was better off dead. Hsu Chih-mo would have suffered horribly if he had lived to see the Cultural Revolution. He would have ended up worse than Dick.
We were falling asleep waiting inside when we heard Carpenter Chan's voice.
"They are gone!" He came through the door, gasping.
"Who's gone?"
"The Americans."
"Was Nixon here?" Rouge asked.
Carpenter Chan nodded, trying to recover his breath.
"We saw the foreigners," Double Luck David said, "but the authorities took them away as fast as they came."
"Where is Pearl?" I asked.
Carpenter Chan shook his head. "I am afraid that she didn't come."
I tried not to let the disappointment get to me. I composed myself and asked again, "Do you mean Pearl didn't come to China, or do you mean she didn't come to Chin-kiang?"
"Take a look at this." Carpenter Chan produced a paper from his pocket. "It has Madame Mao's signature on it."
_Miss Pearl Buck:_
_Your application for a visa was duly received. In light of the fact that for_ _a long time you have in your works taken an attitude of distortion, smear,_ _and vilification toward the people of New China and its leaders, I am_ _authorized to inform you that we cannot accept your request for a visit to_ _China._
In the past, families chose different couplets to decorate their door frames for the Chinese New Year. The most popular couplets focused on luck, health, and fortune. But this year, every family in Chin-kiang wanted the lines I tacked to my door.
The right side read: _Mountains stay erect forever_.
The left side read: _No worry for getting firewood_.
The horizontal top read: _As long as it takes_.
It was the town's silent protest. It expressed our feelings for our friend in exile.
The next morning an unexpected message came: The American guests had requested another tour of Pearl Buck's hometown. Carpenter Chan was instructed to order the people to tear down all the couplets as soon as possible.
But people were slow to act. By the time the Americans appeared, the families were still on their ladders trying to take down the couplets.
I forgot rules, warnings, and the possibility of imprisonment as I moved toward the center of the town.
The crowd followed me.
We didn't see Pearl. We saw a big-nosed foreign man surrounded by guards. He must be Nixon, we figured. Nixon was talking to people, perhaps asking what they were doing. People had stunned looks on their faces. With his big smile, Nixon asked the Chinese translator, a young woman, what the couplets said.
The translator looked frightened. She avoided explaining the meaning behind the couplets.
Nixon was confused and said that he had a lot to learn about Chinese culture.
Followed by the Chinese authorities, the police, and his American Secret Service agents, Nixon moved on.
We followed quietly at a distance. Rouge joined me. The crowd grew larger.
Nixon was led to his car. Before entering, he stopped as if he'd changed his mind. He turned to the translator and asked, "Do you by any chance know Pearl Buck?"
"No, I don't," the young woman replied quickly.
"Would you ask the crowd if anyone knew Pearl Buck?"
"I am sorry. I don't think so." The translator shook her head.
"Would you ask, for me?" Nixon pressed gently.
The translator grabbed the tail of her braided hair and sank her teeth into it. Her fear was obvious.
Nixon repeated the question.
The translator burst into tears. She stared into her notebook and forced out the words "It is beyond my duty."
"Pearl Buck is a personal friend of mine," Nixon said. "She grew up right here in Chin-kiang. She asked me to say hello to her friends. She wanted so much to come back . . ."
I could hear every word even from where I stood, a few yards away. My heart felt like it was bursting inside its chamber.
Receiving no response from the translator, Nixon turned to the crowd and asked, "Do any of you know Pearl Buck?"
A dead silence was the response.
The government's shadow hung like a thick black cloud over our heads.
"I am sorry," Nixon said, nodding. He stepped back and turned again toward his car.
"Wait a moment, Mr. President," Rouge called out. "My mother does."
"Your mother?" Nixon was delighted.
"Yes, my mother. She knew Pearl Buck, and she is right here." Rouge pushed me toward Nixon.
Nixon stepped between the Chinese guards and stopped in front of me before anyone could react. The guards looked confused. It was obvious they didn't know how to respond, how to stop him. Nixon's Secret Service agents stayed close to their president, so the Chinese agents couldn't get near him.
"So you know Pearl Buck?" Nixon asked.
"So does everyone here," I said in English. "Not only did we know Pearl, but we knew her father, Absalom, and her mother, Carie . . . Pearl and I grew up together." I stopped, trying desperately to press back my tears.
"How wonderful that you speak English!" Nixon's face lit up. "What is your name?"
"My mother's name is Willow Yee," Rouge spoke.
"Richard Nixon." The American president offered his hand. "Nice to meet you, Willow Yee."
The moment I touched his hand, my tears poured. The reality that I might never see Pearl again caught up with me.
"What is the meaning of the couplets?" Nixon asked. "And why are they being taken down?"
" _Mountains stay erect forever_ means that our hearts continue to pray for Pearl's return," I answered. " _No worry for getting firewood_ means that we don't worry because opportunities will come our way again. _As long_ _as it takes_ means we have faith in God."
"Good couplets!" Nixon nodded. "Now everything makes sense to me."
"Mr. President, why isn't Pearl with you?" voices in the crowd asked. "Why didn't she come?"
"Well, folks," Nixon said, smiling, "all I can tell you is that Pearl really wanted to come. Trust me, she did everything she could. Absolutely everything!"
"Please help make her visit happen, President Nixon," I pleaded. "For Pearl and for all of us."
"Please try, Mr. American President," the crowd echoed.
"I will," Nixon said, and we heard the sincerity in his voice.
Knowing exactly what might await me once Nixon was gone, I spoke my last words. "President Nixon, would you tell Pearl that her friend Willow misses her and the entire town of Chin-kiang misses her?"
"You have my word." Nixon bit his lower lip and made the promise.
The moment Nixon and his guards moved on, the government agents arrested me.
"Madame Mao has authorized me to take charge of this case," Vanguard said. "Your days are numbered!"
I was charged with four crimes. First, for insulting Madame Mao. Second, for exposing national secrets to Nixon. Third, for degrading China with couplets. Fourth, and the worst, for being a "planted agent" of Pearl Buck's.
I did not feel defeated. Instead, I luxuriated in the memory of my encounter with Nixon. I imagined him returning home and meeting with Pearl. I imagined him describing his experience. Pearl would be pleased. She would say, "Willow. Of course I know her. She was my best friend."
The prison was called Donkey's Crotch by the inmates. The area was desolate and rocky and covered with snow year-round. The inmates were forced to do hard labor before their execution. Because of my age, I was given a job making straw mats for the other prisoners. The mats were used to wrap the dead. Since they didn't have to make coffins, it saved wood. The mats were in short supply, so I was ordered to work long hours. I had to make ten a day or starve. It was impossible to complete the task, so I starved. The prison also limited the inmates' water usage. Each inmate was allowed a half cup a day for drinking. There was no water for washing.
I had no idea how Nixon found out about my imprisonment. Pearl must have insisted that he check on me. She knew how cruel Madame Mao could be and must have sensed that I might be in trouble. Pearl must have convinced Nixon not to trust any information provided by the Chinese government regarding my safety. Nixon's aides must have inquired about me. They must have eventually learned about my imprisonment from Rouge. Premier Chou En-lai must have gone to Mao with Nixon's request regarding my release. He must have received Mao's permission to let me go. If Madame Mao might have ignored Premier Chou En-lai's request, she wouldn't disobey Mao. What counted was that Mao needed Nixon to be on his side in order to keep Russia from starting a war with China.
After nine months in prison, I was free to go home.
Chapter 34
Cameras followed her as she moved like a famous actress. In her sixties, Madame Mao shined like a superstar. She was in a crisply pressed green army uniform with two mini red flags on both of her lapels. The matching green cap held in all her hair. Standing between her husband and Nixon, she smiled broadly. Her head turned left and right as she laughed and nodded. Viewers of this documentary film would get the impression that it was not Mao but Madame Mao who had invited Nixon to China. The climax of the film came when Madame Mao led the Americans to the grand national theater. There, she presented her propaganda ballet _The Women of the Red Detachment_. The crowd roared her name.
For the next four years, the people of Chin-kiang were forced to watch this film as part of the punishment called "mind reform." Chin-kiang was cut off from the outside world. I had no idea that history was about to change.
In January 1976, Premier Chou En-lai died. Rumor said that the man had spent his last days pleading for Mao to end the Cultural Revolution. He tried to convince Mao that to save the economy was to save the public's respect for the Communist Party. Chou En-lai suggested that his replacement be the former vice premier Deng Xiaoping, who had been in exile for years. Mao didn't listen. He insisted on carrying on the revolution. Nobody was aware that Mao himself was reaching the end of his life. Madame Mao, on the other hand, figured that her time had finally come, and she positioned herself to take power after her husband.
Like everyone else, I was forced to attend the self-criticism meetings. I was eighty-six years old. I followed the crowd and shouted slogans. Inside my mind, I continued to cherish my dreams. I did not desire longevity. It was just a way of life for me to indulge in my past. I had no idea that Pearl had quietly passed away in 1973, less than a year after her request for a visa to China had been rejected.
One morning in October, Bumpkin Emperor went about the town striking his gong and shouting, "Down with Madame Mao and her gang!"
We all thought that he had gone mad.
What was unusual was that Vanguard didn't come out to arrest Bumpkin Emperor.
"Madame Mao has been overthrown!" Bumpkin Emperor continued. "Deng Xiaoping has taken power!" Bumpkin Emperor tried to convince the people that he was not crazy, but nobody believed him.
A week later an official announcement came from Beijing. What Bumpkin Emperor had told us was true. Madame Mao and her gang had indeed been arrested and were in prison. All her victims, including the people of Chin-kiang, were liberated.
Vanguard was tossed aside as if he were Madame Mao's trash. My daughter, Rouge, was appointed by the new regime to replace him. Rouge was offered an instant membership in the Communist Party. The decision came from the top. It was the Communist Party's way to compensate our family for the loss of Dick. Rouge's only condition was that she be allowed to keep her Christian faith. Papa would have been proud of his granddaughter.
The excitement produced an unexpected tragedy. Carpenter Chan had a stroke after getting drunk during the celebration. He was laughing when it happened. The smile froze on his face. His grandchildren thought he was playing dead with them. They kept pinching his nose. By the time the doctor arrived, it was too late.
The first thing Rouge did as the town's new boss was hold Carpenter Chan's funeral. The ceremony took place in the same church he had built for Absalom half a century ago. In his will, Carpenter Chan named Bumpkin Emperor as the next pastor for the Chin-kiang Christian Church.
I sat behind the rows of benches and watched the wide-eyed children. Although their parents had been members of Papa's guerrilla church for years, this was the first time they had been able to worship openly as a Christian family. Also, it was the first time the church had officially opened its doors in decades. Curious people poured in just to look.
Over the years, we had lost Carie's piano. But Carie's songs had survived and been passed on through generations. The children were fascinated by the modern tape player. It played Christmas melodies Lilac had bought from a Hong Kong tourist. "Amazing Grace" remained the all-time favorite.
I closed my eyes as I followed along with the lyrics. I could feel the spirits of Carie, Absalom, and Pearl. I smiled when I remembered how the wood beams had sprouted and how Pearl and I had watched the butterflies coming in and out of the windows while Absalom preached.
Bumpkin Emperor was not a natural when it came to preaching. He tried hard to imitate Papa. "I can't find words to describe my happiness in serving the Lord," he said. "That I read from the Bible translated by the founding father of this church, Mr. Absalom Sydenstricker, is a great honor."
The new regime sought to open the doors to the outside world.
Overnight, Chin-kiang became the focus of the media because of its connection to Pearl Buck.
In 1981, the government granted funds to restore the Pearl Buck Residence in Chin-kiang, although Pearl's family had lived in it for only a short time. The original bungalow, at the lower end of the town, where Pearl had grown up, was long gone. During the seventies, concrete Russian-style buildings had filled the landscape where it once stood. Though many opposed her, Rouge fought to honor Absalom and Carie as the original founders of the Chin-kiang middle school and the Chin-kiang hospital.
My life changed dramatically. I was protected by the government as "living history." I was respected and preserved as a "national treasure" and was given many privileges as if I were a baby panda. I moved to a senior home reserved for high-ranking party officials. Doctors were available for me around the clock. To further please me, the government ordered Pearl Buck's books directly from America. I was given a pair of new glasses plus a magnifier to help me with reading. I sobbed through _The Good Earth, The Exile_ , and _Fighting Angel_. I felt Pearl's affection for China on every page. I imagined her frustration and loneliness when she cried, "My Chinese roots must die!" She had more money than she could spend, but she couldn't buy one ounce of Madame Mao's mercy.
"Mother," Rouge said, "my position in the party allows me to see that you get one last wish before your life ends. Name it, and I will see that it is done."
I already knew the answer. "I would like to visit Pearl Buck's grave in America."
Rouge smiled. "I thought you would say that."
Rouge had inherited her grandfather's sense of practicality. Although she was not moved by power, she was aware of what power could do. Rouge outlined a proposal regarding my wish to visit America. She made it sound like my visit would benefit the Communist Party.
I worried about rejection when I applied for the passport. Like everyone in China, I understood that when the government spoke about an open-door policy, it didn't mean that common people were allowed to travel abroad freely, especially to America. The shadow of persecution for having any contact with foreigners still weighed heavily on my mind.
However, Rouge was confident. She wrote letters to important people and made personal visits to the governor's office, the police bureau, and the passport agency. She didn't hesitate to play the role of the Communist Party boss that she was.
"Willow Yee's trip to America will build a bridge between China and America," Rouge insisted. "Chin-kiang strives to be a model town when carrying out Deng Xiaoping's new foreign policy. Willow Yee is a loyal citizen whose only motive is to serve her country. As the party leader, I suggest that we make use of her before she expires."
I went to Carie's grave and collected a bag of dirt before my departure for America. I packed the bag next to my medicines in my suitcase. Although I suffered only age-related stiffness, the doctors were worried. They didn't trust that I was fit to travel long distances.
I knew I would make the trip easily. I had been living my life to see Pearl one last time. Rouge was concerned that the American consulate wouldn't grant me a visa due to my age. She was right. The consul requested proof of health insurance. We didn't understand what "insurance" meant and had never heard of it. The consul suggested that we purchase a temporary policy for traveling in America. When Rouge received the estimated cost, she was stunned. "The cost of a three-month insurance policy is more than a Chinese person earns in ten years!"
Like Papa, Rouge felt no guilt about taking risks. She redoubled her efforts and pulled strings. She located Dick's former prisonmate, General Chu, who not only was the new head of the national congress but also knew the American consul general himself. My visa was instantly granted. While Rouge confirmed the last details of my trip, I walked the hills, with the help of my grandchildren, where Pearl and I had once played. My legs were shaky, but I was happy.
I didn't have to imagine Pearl's American home, because Rouge showed me the photos sent by the Sino-American Friendship Association. It was beautiful. The place was a complex of houses against green rolling hills and blue sky. I couldn't wait to see the interior. I imagined the rooms filled with tasteful furniture and decorated with Western art. Pearl would have a library, for she had always been a lover of books. I also imagined that she would have a garden. She had inherited Carie's passion for nature. The garden would be filled with plants whose names I wouldn't know, but it would be beautiful.
Where would she lie? I wondered. Growing up in Chin-kiang, she was familiar with the concept of feng shui. But would she apply the concept to her own resting place? After all, she had lived in America as long as she had in China. I wondered what her grave would look like. What would she surround herself with? Would she have a tombstone? Would there be carvings on the stone?
I intended to conduct a little ceremony after I arrived. I would light incense handmade by her friends in Chin-kiang. I would then spread the soil collected from her mother's grave on her grave. I wanted to see the spirits of Carie and Pearl reunited. It would make me happy if I could accomplish only that.
Chapter 35
In Washington, D.C., the Chinese consul, a handsome young man dressed in a Western suit, was upset with me. He had a television crew waiting to document my journey, but I insisted on going alone.
It took a few days for the consul to accept my terms. He bought me a train ticket to Philadelphia. He told me that he had also made a reservation for me at a local inn. I was excited and nervous. I could barely sit still after I got on the train. The landscape passing my window fascinated me. Springtime in America seemed to carry a more masculine yang element than southern China's feminine yin. America's mountains and trees were in contrast to Chin-kiang's rolling bamboo-covered hills and swaying willows. If I were to describe the landscape using a Chinese brush, I would paint America with big strokes and splashes of ink, and I would paint China with hair-thin lines in elaborate detail.
I kept thinking of the time Pearl told me about her first trip to America. She was shocked that not everyone had black hair. She was fascinated at the different-colored people. She had never considered that she was not Chinese until that moment.
I wondered what it had been like for her to return to America and to be with her own people. Except for her face and the color of her hair, she was a complete foreigner. Beneath her skin, she was Chinese. I wondered how she had changed from the Pearl I had known and what she had looked like after she had grown old.
The old lady sitting opposite me had a petite figure. She was fair-skinned with blonde hair. Had Pearl looked like her when she was older? What did my friend have to change about her Chinese self to fit in to American society? It was possible for her to change her tone of voice, but what about her tastes and views that she had formed in China as a child, a teen, and an adult? Pearl once said that she felt enriched, like she owned more than one world. I liked that idea and envied her.
The moment I checked in to the inn, I received a phone call from the Chinese consul. He wanted to make sure that everything was going well. He suggested that I rest and visit the Pearl Buck House the next morning. I thanked him and said that I couldn't wait. He then suggested that I leave my luggage at the inn. Over the phone, the consul admitted that he was a fan of Pearl Buck, and that he believed that Pearl had honored the Chinese people. He felt terrible about Madame Mao using her influence to have Pearl's request for a Chinese visa rejected. "Madame Mao was a mad dog," he concluded.
The consul told me that he had learned from American books and newspapers that Pearl had been wearing a brightly colored, embroidered Chinese robe prior to her death.
"It was said that for weeks Pearl sat in a large chair facing east staring out her window," he said. "I wonder if what she was looking at is still there. I am curious about the final image she was seeing."
What had she been thinking? I wanted to know too. Would it be thoughts of her childhood? Would I be in them? To survive, I had been escaping into my past for decades. I often recalled the popcorn man, the way Pearl pushed and pulled the bellows while I rotated the cannon. It was easy to close my eyes and see a vivid image of the popcorn man putting his dirt-colored cotton bag over the cannon while Pearl and I covered our ears. The big bang was always real and loud to my ears. I could even imagine the smell of the delicious popped corn and see Pearl's smile as we stuffed handfuls into our mouths.
* * *
It was late afternoon when I first stepped inside the Pearl Buck House. I stopped just inside the door and examined the space. The room was exactly as I had imagined it. Friendly Caucasian women greeted me. They seemed to be accustomed to receiving non-English-speaking visitors. They suggested that I join the last house tour of the day. I was led to what was called the "Chinese view."
I held my breath, afraid that it would vanish.
I could no longer hear what the guide was saying. It sounded faraway. I was in shock. The view on the other side of the glass looked like Chin-kiang. I felt like I had stepped into one of my dreams.
There was a gemlike pond cradled by rolling hills. White clouds drifted across the blue sky. Oriental maple trees stood by the pond like giant brown mushrooms. Mandarin ducks waddled about. Baby ducks followed their mothers and played in the water.
Like Carie, who had created an American garden in the middle of Chin-kiang, Pearl had created a Chinese garden around her American home. I remembered Carie's struggle in growing American roses and dogwood. She helped the plants adapt to the southern Chinese climate and had to fight fungus and diseases. Carie's roses would produce buds but no flowers. She used soap water and vinegar to kill the bugs and she composted her own soil with wood chips. She held a garden show when her roses finally bloomed.
To what lengths did Pearl go to surround herself with the memories of China? Traces of her effort were everywhere. The rocks laid and plants arranged were according to classic Chinese paintings. I imagined Pearl explaining Chinese aesthetics to her gardeners. I smiled thinking that she might have ended up confusing them.
The tour moved to Pearl's greenhouse, which was filled with camellia trees. Although it was a large greenhouse, the camellias were crowded. It looked more like a garden nursery. The tour guide said that Pearl Buck was determined to see camellias blossom in the middle of Pennsylvania's winter. She insisted that it could be done because she had seen camellia trees blossom in the winters in China.
Indeed, camellias thrived during the winter season in southern China. Their blooming branches could be seen on country hills and city streets. Chinese families loved camellias in their living rooms as ornaments. Camellias were among the most popular subjects for Chinese artists.
"The gardener suggested replacing the dying camellias with American winter plants, but Pearl refused," the tour guide continued. "Pearl insisted on her Chinese camellias. They inspired her to write."
I learned that Pearl had tried to grow Chinese tea trees, lotus, and water lilies, but they had all failed to survive. Who would understand that this was Pearl's way of going back to her home in China?
Pearl's surviving camellias were mature trees now. There were eighteen of them in the greenhouse. They were cramped. They were only two feet apart when it should have been ten. The camellias had run out of space to grow. The view amused me, because I could tell that my friend had been truly desperate. Like a Chinese, she was so in love with camellias that she acquired every variety and color and filled the greenhouse with them. Judging by the size of their trunks, the trees were more than twenty years old. I imagined my friend watering them in the morning. I could see her running around trying to clear weeds, loosen the soil, and spread fertilizers. She loved to use her hands. Her fingernails would look like Chinese peasants', filled with earth.
The tour showed the visitors that Pearl Buck constantly remodeled her house. In order to create a Chinese-style kitchen, she tore down walls and rearranged studs and beams. She had a large wooden table made, with long benches on each side.
"The kitchen used to be four bedrooms," the guide said, pointing to where the walls used to be. "Pearl changed things around because she wanted a spacious kitchen." When she was a child, the kitchen was Pearl's playground. It was where she spent time listening to stories told by Wang Ah-ma and other servants. It was also where she played hide-and-seek with me.
I was impressed by the door design. It was carved with Chinese characters that said Precious Gem, which was the Chinese translation of Pearl's name. I didn't see American arts and crafts. I also didn't see pictures of Jesus Christ. Instead there was Chinese art and other objects throughout the house. Beautiful indigo carpets, Chinese glass bottles painted with cloud-patterned symbols of luck. Chinese brush-and-ink paintings and calligraphy hung on the walls. Under a single-stemmed lotus was a line from a classic Chinese poem: " _Rise out of dirt_ _she remains pure and noble_." The tour guide pointed at the roofed hallway that connected the main house to the cottage and said, "Pearl told her workmen that the Dowager Empress of China had a roofed walkway in the Summer Palace."
I wondered how Pearl felt when she received the set of Chinese nest boxes—a gift from President Nixon after he returned from China. Pearl must have been pleased and heartbroken at the same time. Did the gift give her hope? Did she still believe that she would one day return to the land of her dreams? Or did the gift make her think that there would never be another opportunity?
My eyes caught the shelf where Pearl's books lay. Among them was the Dickens novel Pearl had held under her arm when we first met. I would have pulled the book out and kissed its cover if there hadn't been a do not touch sign.
In the bedroom I saw Carie's sewing box laid on the table. I was so impacted by the sight of it that my entire being was thrown back in time.
"The soil is prepared and you don't plant!" I could hear Absalom yelling at Carie. He wanted her to help convert people when they came to thank her for healing their children with Western medicine. Absalom couldn't get anyone to listen to him because he was seen as a crazy man. He blamed Carie and Pearl for not making their best efforts. "Christians are not Christ!" he told them constantly. Sewing was Carie's way to escape Absalom. She sewed quietly while Absalom exploded.
Although Pearl defended her father in public, she told me that Absalom deserved his defeats. Pearl couldn't bear her mother's sadness, especially when she saw Carie's tears soaking the cloth she was sewing. "Absalom's flaw is too big for him to overcome," she said. "Mother and I are afraid of helping him."
Chapter 36
If it hadn't been for the heavy bag I was carrying, I wouldn't have believed that I was walking on American soil. It was early evening. The tour was over and the other visitors were gone. The air was brisk and the sky was turning dark. The trees and earth were blending into one gray color like shadows. It was clear that Pearl had bought this house and the land around it because the place had reminded her of Chin-kiang. For the rest of her life, this was the China she lived with.
How many times had she walked the path where I stood?
Darkness had almost settled in when I exited the house. I went on looking for Pearl's grave, but it was getting hard to see. I moved like a ghost following the barely visible path. The side road led me back to the inn where I was staying.
The innkeeper, a middle-aged lady, asked if I'd had a pleasant visit.
"I missed seeing Pearl's grave," I told her.
"You must have walked right by it," she said. "It's easy to miss."
"There wasn't a sign, or did I miss that too?" Since arriving in the United States, I had learned that Americans were good with signs.
"Well, it was the way Pearl Buck wanted it." The lady took out her keys and led me to my room. "Would you like me to book you a cab for tomorrow morning? What time is your train or flight?"
"I won't leave until I see Pearl's grave," I said.
The lady looked at me and I could see the questions in her eyes.
"I have some business at the grave," I tried to explain, hoping that my English would make sense to her.
"What kind of business?" She sounded cautious, a little suspicious.
I unzipped my backpack and took out the incense and the bag of dirt. I made a gesture of sprinkling dirt and put my palms together under my chin.
She didn't seem to understand but said, "Here, let me draw you a map."
I had been awake for a long time waiting for the dawn. At first light, I got up. I followed the inn lady's map carefully. After turning off the main road, I went down a small dirt path.
The sun outlined the mountains and trees and coated the leaves gold. The view was unfamiliar yet I felt I had been here before. I could hear the sound of my feet moving through the sandy dirt. After a while, I thought I heard the sound of running water. Was it my imagination, because Chin-kiang was known for its creeks? I didn't expect myself to be missing home, not yet. But no, I wasn't imagining the sound of water. Here it was, in front of me, under my feet, a running creek.
I decided to inspect the creek and then continue my search for the grave.
The sunlight played across the water's surface. I followed a path along the creek as it curled into the hills. On the far side of the creek were giant pine trees.
A view opened up. In front of me was a stand of bamboo—the same kind of golden bamboo we had in Chin-kiang.
Then I saw it, my friend's grave, hidden among the bamboo.
My strength fled me. I dropped to my knees.
There was no English. The grave had three Chinese characters carved in the stone. , meaning Pearl Sydenstricker.
My eyes filled with tears of happiness, and this time I did not fight them. I understood Pearl's intent. Her roots in China hadn't died. China was the final thing on her mind. China was what she took with her to eternity. It was impossible for her to remove her love, for she, in her own words, "had known the fullness of such love, which was absolute in height and depth." A Westerner wouldn't understand the meaning of these Chinese characters, but Pearl didn't care. No wonder the innkeeper had said that the grave was easy to miss.
I felt as if Pearl were greeting me. I could hear her voice. "How was your journey?"
The three Chinese characters were Pearl's signature stamp, given to her by her Chinese tutor, Mr. Kung. Pearl once explained her name to me when we were young. The first letter was pronounced _Sy_ , as in Sydenstricker. Out of many same-tone-sounding characters, Mr. Kung chose the one with a "mansion, which has a grand roof," and a "baby" playing underneath.
"My last name in Chinese means 'a darling doll in the mansion.'"
Pearl was proud as she explained. "Do you like it?"
"I do," I remembered replying, although I couldn't read. I tried to hide this by examining the shape of the first character, . "Look," I said.
"This is not an ordinary mansion. It is the symbol of money."
"That's not money," my friend laughed. "That's the people shape."
"Four of them under the roof!"
"Four workers. My father said that we are all the Lord's workers."
"The baby is big-bellied," I cried.
"She loves food!" Pearl laughed.
The second Chinese character, , was the picture of an oyster, but when combined with the third character, , the meaning changed into _Pearl_.
My friend had chosen her final resting place beside the creek on purpose. The grave faced east, demonstrating that she had followed the rule of feng shui. The surrounding garden was walled in by pines and cypresses. Besides the bamboo, there were maples, evergreen bushes, and flowers. Wild lilies were scattered alongside the creek. There was a seemingly dead old tree that looked as if it had fallen across the creek. Its trunk was about two feet in diameter and it was rotten and hollow inside. What amazed me was that the tree had a lush green canopy. In the center of the rotten trunk, a young branch was healthy and robust. Pearl must have liked this tree. It fit a line from a Chinese poem, " _Spring_ _shows its power in rotten wood and dying trees_."
I touched the cold stone and rested my cheek against it.
* * *
_Dear Pearl_ ,
_Since you couldn't go to China, I have brought China to you._
_It is not the reunion I wished for for so long, but I feel blessed to have the_ _opportunity. Because my memory is failing, and because I didn't want to forget_ _a thing, I have written six notes to be burned with the incense at your grave._
_The first note regards the end of Madame Mao. When she denied you_ _a visa, she was sure of her power. She believed that she would rule China_ _after her husband. But she didn't last. After Mao died, she was arrested and_ _sentenced to death. It was less than four years after Nixon's visit._
_The second note regards your mother's grave. It almost didn't survive_ _during the Cultural Revolution. Mao's teenage mobs came to destroy the_ _grave. Lilac removed the stone tablet and fooled them. In other words,_ _what the Red Guard destroyed was not your mother's grave. Today the_ _town of Chin-kiang has reclaimed Carie's status. She is officially titled_ _the founder of the Chin-kiang middle school. Her spirit is celebrated and_ _honored at each Spring Memorial._
_The third note regards you. The mansion where your mother last lived_ _has been turned into the Pearl Buck Residence. I can hear you say, "But_ _that wasn't my house!" True, however, it is important that the residence_ _in your name be presentable. You should understand that to a Chinese, the_ _place that houses your spirit has to be a temple. Copies of your photos, letters,_ _and books are on permanent display. I was not happy about the display_ _of your calligraphy, because the strokes were not yours. Your writing was_ _touched up by a professor from Beijing College of Art and Calligraphy. It_ _was part of the act of transforming you into a goddess so that people could_ _worship you. I didn't bother to fight, because I thought that it was better_ _than calling you an American Cultural Imperialist._
_The fourth note regards the people who knew you, who, as long as they_ _lived, wondered how you did in America. I'd like to begin with Dick because_ _he knew you well and had the worst luck. He was too close to Mao and died_ _a horrible death. Please forgive me for being unable to report more about_ _him. Dick knew that Hsu Chih-mo loved you. Dick wanted to congratulate_ _you in person when he learned that you won the Nobel Prize. We were not_ _allowed to send a telegram to America. Dick said that Hsu Chih-mo would_ _have been so proud. He would have danced on his head. You will be pleased to_ _know that today Hsu Chih-mo's poems are extremely popular. Young people_ _worship him as a poet whose voice speaks to their own generation. Newspapers_ _continue to print stories of his affairs as if they took place yesterday, and, of_ _course, they continue to miss the real target._
_Papa kept the church going until he died. He became a fighting angel like_ _Absalom except he fought guerrilla style. I am sure you missed Carpenter_ _Chan and Lilac. You knew that Carpenter Chan became a Christian,_ _converted by Absalom, but you might not have known that he joined the_ _Communists after Mao took power. Later he went back to God and worked_ _for Papa. I don't think Americans are able to comprehend such a life, but_ _you would. You lived in China and knew how things can be._
_Lilac missed you so much that she could never stop talking about you. She_ _is the town's longevity star and is in her nineties. Her three sons inherited_ _their father's trade. It was a pity that you couldn't see how they rebuilt_ _Absalom's church, which is called the Chin-kiang Christian Church. Lilac_ _still fights with Vanguard, the beggar lady Soo-ching's son, whose name_ _used to be Confucius. This was the mother and son you found in your_ _garden so long ago. He betrayed everyone to please Madame Mao. Soo-ching_ _wanted to disown her son, but Papa convinced her that she'd better_ _forgive or she wouldn't go to heaven._
_You don't know my daughter, Rouge, but she knows everything about_ _you. She is currently the mayor of Chin-kiang and is in charge of the_ _Pearl Buck Scholarship and the Hsu Chih-mo Scholarship. She gave birth_ _to one girl and adopted two girls from her husband's previous marriage. All my granddaughters share the same middle name, Pearl. They are Pearl_ _Delight, Pearl Bright, and Pearl Flight._
_Remember Bumpkin Emperor, the warlord? He became an ardent_ _Christian and the pastor of our church. You will be shocked. Who wouldn't_ _be? Like your father, Bumpkin Emperor was obsessed with converting_ _people. He tried to save them the way your father saved him. Bumpkin_ _Emperor remembered you as the mean, straw-haired girl. He never got_ _tired of telling people the story of how you fooled him with that bucket_ _of ink. The People's Publishing House approached him with the idea of_ _publishing a children's comic book based on the story._
_My fifth note regards the dirt I brought here. It is from your mother's_ _grave. I'll sprinkle it around. In the meantime, if I may, I will dig some soil_ _here, a little, just enough to fill the bag. I'll carry it to your mother's grave as_ _soon as I return and mix the soils. It pleases me to join your spirits._
_The last note regards my own wish. If you don't mind, I'll collect some_ _seeds from your trees here. I have no idea of the names of all the trees except_ _that they are American trees. According to the shapes of the nuts, they are_ _flowering trees. The importance of the trees is that they are from where you_ _are buried. I wouldn't be surprised if you planted them yourself. I imagine_ _you would have. You understood that spirits gather through nature. I hear_ _your voice speaking through the creek, the pines, maples, bamboo, birds, and_ _bees. I will plant the seeds where I will be buried when my time comes. We_ _should then accompany each other forever. I have brought your favorite Tang_ _dynasty poem, "The Tune of Posaman." "Yangtze River" ought to be changed_ _to "Pacific Ocean," but I leave it the way it is. I know you always preferred_ _the original._
_I live by the Yangtze River near its source,_
_While you reside farthest down its course._
_You and I drink water out of the same stream,_
_I haven't seen you though daily of you I dream._
_When will this river water cease to run?_
_When shall I not love you, the way I do?_
_I only wish our two hearts would beat as one,_
_And you wouldn't disappoint me in my love for you._
_Joy, gratitude, and sense of peace are what this moment means to me. I_ _thank God for the fortune of having known you._
_The creek is singing a happy song. The wind whispers like our old_ _conversations through trembling leaves. The air is pure and the sun warm. Once again, I see you running toward me with sunshine in your face. You_ _look like a jumping cloud in your indigo floral Chinese dress, your golden_ _hair bouncing._
_"Willow," I hear you call, "hurry up, the popcorn man is here!"_
THE END
**Author's Note**
I was ordered to denounce Pearl Buck in China. The year was 1971. I was a teenager attending the Shanghai 51 Middle School. Trying to gain international support for rejecting Buck's China entry visa (to accompany President Nixon on his visit), Madame Mao organized a national campaign to criticize Buck as an "American cultural imperialist."
I followed the order and never questioned whether Madame Mao was being truthful. I was brainwashed at that time, although I do remember having difficulty composing the criticisms. I wished that I had been given a chance to read _The Good Earth_. We were told that the book was so "toxic" that it was dangerous to even translate it. I was told to copy lines from the newspapers: "Pearl Buck insulted Chinese peasants therefore China." "She hates us therefore is our enemy." I was proud to be able to defend my country and people.
Pearl Buck's name didn't cross my path again until I immigrated to America. It was 1996 and I was giving a reading at a Chicago bookstore for my memoir, _Red Azalea_. Afterward, a lady came to me and asked if I knew Pearl Buck. Before I could reply, she said—very emotionally and to my surprise—that Buck had taught her to love the Chinese people. She placed a paperback in my hands and said that it was a gift. It was _The Good Earth_.
I finished reading _The Good Earth_ on the airplane from Chicago to Los Angeles. I broke down and sobbed. I couldn't stop myself because I remembered how I had denounced the author. I remembered how Madame Mao had convinced the entire nation to hate Pearl Buck. How wrong we had been! I had never encountered any author, including the most respected Chinese authors, who wrote about our peasants with such admiration, affection, and humanity.
It was at that very moment that _Pearl of China_ was conceived.
In setting out to tell Pearl Buck's story I faced a number of challenges. I wanted to convey the full sweep of Pearl's life and also tell her story from a Chinese perspective. There are, of course, many sources in English about Pearl's life, but I wanted to see her as my fellow Chinese saw her. In order to do this, I proposed to tell Pearl's story through her relationships with her actual Chinese friends. As a novelist, I knew that the story of a single friendship, over many years, would be best. It is even my sense that such a friendship really existed. And yet, as far as I know, though Pearl had many Chinese friends, there was no one lifelong friend that made it into the historical record.
Using my license as a writer of fiction, I combined a number of Pearl's actual friends from different phases of her life to create the character of Willow. To respect the privacy of the living families of these individuals, and to protect their ongoing reputations in China, where my books are still banned, I withhold their names here. The other two major instances in which I have altered the historical record are the date at which Pearl Buck's father, Absalom Sydenstricker, dies (1931); and the date of the Nanking Incident, which occurred years earlier than it does in the novel. Both liberties were taken for the sake of the story.
I would also like to clarify that Pearl and Lossing Buck were married for eighteen years, from 1917 to 1935, and the reason for their divorce is not publicly known. Lossing Buck was a missionary agriculturalist who worked in China from 1915 to 1944, and produced the country's first land utilization study, which is still highly valued in China.
A Note on the Author
Anchee Min lived in China for twenty-seven years. Born in Shanghai in 1957, she grew up during Mao's Cultural Revolution (1964–1976). As a teen, she was taught to denounce Pearl S. Buck as an American cultural imperialist. At age seventeen, Min was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao recruited her to work in propaganda films as an actress because of her proletarian look.
Min arrived in Chicago in 1984. She first learned English through American public radio, children's television programs, and talk shows. To earn a living, she worked as a part-time maid, a waitress, and a fabric painter and in construction and plumbing, while going to school at night. Her memoir, _Red Azalea_ , was published in 1994 and was chosen as a _New York Times_ Notable Book. Min is also the author of bestselling historical fiction, including _Becoming Madame Mao, Empress Orchid_ (nominated for the British Book Awards Best Read of the Year 2006), and _The Last Empress_. Min's books have been translated into thirty-two languages.
The legacy of Pearl S. Buck continues at her charity, Pearl S. Buck International: www.pearlsbuck.org.
By the Same Author
_Red Azalea_
_Katherine_
_Becoming Madame Mao_
_Wild Ginger_
_Empress Orchid_
_The Last Empress_
Copyright © 2010 by Anchee Min
This novel is a work of imagination. Although the main characters and events are based on or inspired by real life, this is a work of fiction, and characterizations and events have at times been fictionalized or altered for literary effect.
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Min, Anchee, 1957–
Pearl of China : a novel / Anchee Min.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13 : 978-1-59691-697-5 (hardcover)
1. Buck, Pearl S. (Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892–1973—Fiction. 2. Women novelists—Fiction. 3. Americans—China—Fiction. 4. Friendship in children—Fiction. 5. Female friendship—Fiction. 6. China—History—20thcentury—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.I4614P43 2009
813´.54—dc22
2009024264
First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2010
This e-book edition published in 2010
eISBN: 978-1-60819-151-2
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
} | 1,807 |
1 Handmade Polymer Clay Beads Red Dot Stripe And Band 15mm x 22mm. A medium sized handmade bead fashioned from translucent and solid clay marbled together. Then sanded, buffed and sealed for protection and shine. A silver mica clay band with dots is applied and then the bead is re-baked. As each focal bead is unique, dimensions will vary, but the length hole to hole is 15mm with a diameter of 22mm.
These unique designs were produced by polymer clay artist Erika Davis of Erika Davis Designs. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 8,147 |
#include "2d/CCActionPageTurn3D.h"
#include "2d/CCGrid.h"
#include "2d/CCNodeGrid.h"
NS_CC_BEGIN
PageTurn3D* PageTurn3D::create(float duration, const Size& gridSize)
{
PageTurn3D *action = new (std::nothrow) PageTurn3D();
if (action && action->initWithDuration(duration, gridSize))
{
action->autorelease();
return action;
}
delete action;
return nullptr;
}
PageTurn3D *PageTurn3D::clone() const
{
// no copy constructor
return PageTurn3D::create(_duration, _gridSize);
}
GridBase* PageTurn3D::getGrid()
{
auto result = Grid3D::create(_gridSize, _gridNodeTarget->getGridRect());
if (result)
{
result->setNeedDepthTestForBlit(true);
}
return result;
}
/*
* Update each tick
* Time is the percentage of the way through the duration
*/
void PageTurn3D::update(float time)
{
float tt = MAX(0, time - 0.25f);
float deltaAy = (tt * tt * 500);
float ay = -100 - deltaAy;
float deltaTheta = sqrtf(time);
float theta = deltaTheta > 0.5f ? (float)M_PI_2*deltaTheta : (float)M_PI_2*(1-deltaTheta);
float rotateByYAxis = (2-time)* M_PI;
float sinTheta = sinf(theta);
float cosTheta = cosf(theta);
for (int i = 0; i <= _gridSize.width; ++i)
{
for (int j = 0; j <= _gridSize.height; ++j)
{
// Get original vertex
Vec3 p = getOriginalVertex(Vec2(i ,j));
p.x -= getGridRect().origin.x;
float R = sqrtf((p.x * p.x) + ((p.y - ay) * (p.y - ay)));
float r = R * sinTheta;
float alpha = asinf( p.x / R );
float beta = alpha / sinTheta;
float cosBeta = cosf( beta );
// If beta > PI then we've wrapped around the cone
// Reduce the radius to stop these points interfering with others
if (beta <= M_PI)
{
p.x = ( r * sinf(beta));
}
else
{
// Force X = 0 to stop wrapped
// points
p.x = 0;
}
p.y = ( R + ay - ( r * (1 - cosBeta) * sinTheta));
// We scale z here to avoid the animation being
// too much bigger than the screen due to perspective transform
p.z = (r * ( 1 - cosBeta ) * cosTheta);// "100" didn't work for
p.x = p.z * sinf(rotateByYAxis) + p.x * cosf(rotateByYAxis);
p.z = p.z * cosf(rotateByYAxis) - p.x * sinf(rotateByYAxis);
p.z/=7;
// Stop z coord from dropping beneath underlying page in a transition
// issue #751
if( p.z < 0.5f )
{
p.z = 0.5f;
}
// Set new coords
p.x += getGridRect().origin.x;
setVertex(Vec2(i, j), p);
}
}
}
NS_CC_END
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Samoa stands with Forum position on West Papua
By Sapeer Mayron, 22/12/2018
Samoa will take the position of Pacific Island Forum members and support "constructive engagement" with Indonesia on issues relating to West Papua.
Earlier this week, the Bishops of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia called for Samoa to increase vocalisations of concerns against the reported actions of Indonesian military against West Papuans.
In a public statement, they expressed "deep disappointment" at what they described as the continued suppression of the first people of West Papua.
The Bishops said they are praying that the Indonesian authorities halt human rights abuses, and proposed a four-fold course of action for the governments within the Anglican Church's jurisdiction—New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga Samoa, American Samoa and the Cook Islands—to take.
Despite the call, Prime Minister Tuilaepa Dr Sa'ilele Malielegaoi said he agrees with the consensus of the Forum, which can press the Indonesian government on moral issues.
In September, the Forum supported "constructive engagement" over human rights, and members of the Forum were asked to support a resolution to go before the United Nations General Assembly.
"On the moral issue, we hold the common stance of the Pacific Island countries.
"The Indonesians should deal with the issue appropriately of human rights abuses," he said.
The Prime Minister continued that the government and the army of Indonesia may be acting independently of each other, and that should be taken into consideration.
The Anglican Bishops also called for governments to pay attention to the denial by the Indonesian government of the "first people's right of self-determination and the abuse of their natural resources by foreign corporations."
On the issue of West Papuan desire for self-determination, Prime Minister Tuilaepa said he does not feel he has the power to interfere.
"The more important issue for the people of West Papua themselves, that they have been pressing, is the issue of self-determination and that is where we have no power," he said
"This is part of Indonesia.
"It is like telling New Zealand that the North Island should be given to another race of Maori, and that's interference."
However, he did say the United Nations are the only authority that can help West Papua gain independence, just as Samoa did in 1962.
"That is the road we travelled in order to become independent," Tuilaepa said.
"We sought the approval of the United Nations. There was no other way, it was the U.N that granted us our independence."
Father's dilemma over daughter's fees
A 48-year-old man was collecting firewood for the kitchen on Saturday and the day was just like any other, though he has had a lot on his mind lately. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 4,802 |
Q: How can I bold text in ASP .NET How can I bold my output like this
Student "John" assigned to Officer "Mick".
i want John and Mick bold in web
This is my code aspx :
this.lblAssignee.Text = " Student \"" +
StudentAssign + "\" assigned to Officer \"" + objAssign.FullName +
"\".";
A: Try this
this.lblAssignee.Text = " Student \"<b>" + StudentAssign + "</b>\" assigned to Officer \"<b>" + objAssign.FullName + "</b>\".";
or this (better maintainability)
this.lblAssignee.Text = " Student \"<span class='highlight'>" + StudentAssign + "</span>\" assigned to Officer \"<span class='highlight'>" + objAssign.FullName + "</span>\".";
and in your stylesheet
.highlight { font-weight: bold; }
A: Another option would be setting the Font.Bold property of the label to True.
Something like:
myLabel.Font.Bold = True
Assuming you can use several labels of course.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 410 |
Q: Android Development - starting activity from service I've got a bit of code which is listening for a message on a socket, and parsing data from the socket into an email to be sent. I'm able to create the intent, and set the FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK flag on it, but yet, when i call
startActivity(Intent.createChooser(intent, "Email"));
I get an AndoridRuntimeException: Calling startActivity() from outside of an Activity context requires the FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK flag. Is this really what you want?
What confuses me on this is that I have explicitly called
intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK);
Am I missing something obvious here?
protected void doEmail(DataInputStream in) throws IOException {
String id = in.readUTF();
createEmail(id);
}
protected void createEmail(String rawEmailString) {
// need to get to, subject, body and path from string
String[] stringArray = rawEmailString.split("~");
Intent intent = prepareEmail(stringArray[0], stringArray[1], stringArray[2], stringArray[3]);
intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK);
startActivity(Intent.createChooser(intent, "Email"));
}
public Intent prepareEmail(String to, String subject, String body, String pathToAttachment){
Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_EMAIL, to);
intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, body);
intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, subject);
intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_STREAM, Uri.parse(pathToAttachment));
intent.setType("*/*");
return intent;
}
A: The Intent you get back from createChooser() may not have your flag. Try adding it to the result of createChooser().
Note that:
*
*Having a service pop up an activity is very unusual and should be able to be disabled by the user, as it can be very intrusive.
*Having a service pop up a chooser is lousy UX. Do you honestly think your users are going to have any idea what is going on when this "Email" chooser dialog appears out of nowhere?
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 5,727 |
Published in 2018 by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. 29 East 21st Street, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © 2018 by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.
First Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hurt, Avery Elizabeth, author.
Title: Confronting LGBTQ+ discrimination / Avery Elizabeth Hurt. Description: New York: Rosen Publishing, 2018. | Series: Speak up! Confronting discrimination in your daily life | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Audience: Grades 7-12.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017017641| ISBN 9781538381748 (library bound) | ISBN 9781538381724 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781538381731 (6 pack)
Subjects: LCSH: Homophobia—United States—Juvenile literature. | Sexual minorities—Civil rights—United States— Juvenile literature. | Discrimination—United States—Juvenile literature.
Classification: LCC HQ76.45.U5 H87 2018 | DDC 306.76— dc23
LC record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017641>Manufactured in the United States of America
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER -1 THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE ILLEGAL
CHAPTER -2 IT'S NOT JUST THEM
CHAPTER -3 DISCRIMINATION HAPPENS
CHAPTER -4 CHANGING YOUR SCHOOL
CHAPTER -5 CHANGING THE WORLD
CHAPTER -6 THE FUTURE
GLOSSARY
FOR MORE INFORMATION
FOR FURTHER READING
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
# INTRODUCTION
Times have certainly changed. Prior to 1973, the American Psychological Association (APA) listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. In the interim forty-two years, a substantial body of scientific research (and a great deal of common sense) finally persuaded the APA that being LGBTQ+ was not in fact a mental disorder. After the Supreme Court ruled it was unacceptable to deny same-sex couples the marriage rights afforded to other couples, many Americans' attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people changed rapidly.
According to Gallup's 2016 Mood of the Nation survey, 60 percent of Americans are satisfied with the level of acceptance of gays and lesbians in the United States. That's up from 53 percent in 2015, and only 32 percent as recently as 2006. And when the survey lens is fixed on people age eighteen to thirty, that percentage jumps to 80-92. So, that's the good news. But for people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or who are sexually or gender nonconforming in other ways (LGBTQ+), discrimination is still a fact of everyday life.
The Federal Civil Rights laws that protect Americans' rights based on race and gender do not cover sexual orientation. A gay couple can legally marry in all fifty states, but could in many states lose their jobs for exercising that right. Not only may LGBTQ+ people (married or not) be fired, they can also be evicted from their homes, denied service at restaurants, denied credit, and excluded from juries. It can be difficult for them to adopt children, buy health or life insurance, or get into college. And in many states, all of this is still perfectly legal.
In fact, many people who identify as LGBTQ+ don't have to wait until they're adults to learn what discrimination is like. LGBTQ+ students can be excluded from clubs and school organizations and face resistance when they try to form their own clubs. They have been mocked and bullied by fellow students and sometimes by teachers as well. Transgender students face additional problems regarding restroom and locker room access, and many LGBTQ+ students feel isolated and even unsafe at school.
Students have difficulty finding information about LGBTQ+ sexuality and other issues. In several states, laws prevent teachers from discussing homosexuality in class. In one case, when a seventeen-year-old gay student in Utah asked his health teacher about safe sex, he was told that the teacher was not allowed to talk about it. Though some schools have enacted antidiscrimination policies that protect LGBTQ+ students, many more have not. And often the policies that do exist are ignored or poorly enforced.
Despite all of this, progress is still being made. It sometimes seems that when it comes to LGBTQ+ discrimination, the United States takes a step back for every two steps forward. But those forward steps are huge ones, and if everyone just keeps marching, LGBTQ+ discrimination will one day be a thing of the past.
Discrimination is not always bad. One definition of the word is simply "the quality or power of finely distinguishing." An avid gamer would likely discriminate between various video game consoles. People are using their powers of discrimination whenever they say something like "I prefer science fiction to thrillers," or "I like math, but chemistry, not so much." There is nothing bad about that, though it might not be great for their chemistry grades!
One can even discriminate between people in perfectly harmless ways. You may prefer to spend time with your soccer mates on the weekend rather than your friends from school—and that's okay. Discrimination becomes a problem when it is used to exclude certain people from places and activities that are open to all others, or to treat people differently based on categories such as the color of their skin, their ancestors' place of origin, whom and how they worship, whom they love, or what gender they are. When one group of people chooses to deny another their rights, they are engaging in bad discrimination.
##### WHAT DISCRIMINATION LOOKS LIKE
You can find discrimination almost everywhere. When women or people of color are paid less than white men for doing the same job or when minorities are passed over in favor of nonminority job applicants, this is discrimination in the workplace. Discrimination in housing occurs when a landlord refuses to rent to black, Jewish, or LGBTQ+ families. Discrimination in education happens when college applicants are turned down for belonging to a minority, when a teacher calls on only the boys in a class (or only the girls), or when clubs or sports teams won't allow LGBTQ+ students to join. Racial slurs, insults, bullying, and hate speech aimed at minorities or marginalized groups are all forms of discrimination as well.
The phrase LGBTQ+ refers to a collection of sexual orientations and gender identities. Here is a breakdown of what those letters mean:
• Lesbian: A woman who is sexually attracted to other women.
• Gay: A person who is sexually attracted to people of their own gender. This term can be used by men or women, but often refers to men attracted to other men, while lesbian is used only for women.
• Bisexual: A person who is sexually attracted to both men and women.
• Transgender: A person who does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.
• Queer: A person whose sexual orientation or gender identity falls outside the heterosexual mainstream or the gender binary. This is often a kind of catchall term, meaning one person may identify as both queer and lesbian whereas another may use the term "queer" because he or she falls along the gender spectrum but does not identify as male or female.
• Similar to the term "queer" the "plus" is always added for inclusivity's sake, to make sure any individual whose sexual orientation or gender identity is not covered by the acronym "LGBTQ" is still embraced. This often includes "I" (intersex), "A" (asexual), and nonbinary individuals, among others. And this list is always growing!
These kinds of discrimination are obvious, but discrimination can be subtle, too, and sometimes unintentional. Ignoring a female colleague when she contributes an idea at a meeting, encouraging African American students to try out for basketball but not to apply for scholarships, using the word "gay" to mean "bad"—all of these are quiet forms of discrimination called microaggressions. Sometimes the people who do these things do not mean any harm; they may even be completely unaware that they've discriminated against someone. Someone who says, "Oh, that's so gay!" may not realize they are spreading a subconscious message that being LGBTQ+ is uncool.
The problem with subtle discrimination is that it can be hard to prevent. When an action is not obviously a violation of someone's rights or is not technically illegal, it may be very difficult to right that wrong. When much of the discrimination being perpetrated against a group of people is subtle, both policy makers and the public may underestimate its extent in society—causing them to fail to support the laws necessary to prevent it.
This is, in part, what happened when in 2012 the Supreme Court invalidated key parts of the Voting Rights Act, which protected the rights of African Americans to vote. As a voice of the majority opinion in that case, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that racial discrimination in voting was no longer a serious enough issue to require the full protections offered by the 1965 law. He wrote, "Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions." African Americans who are still having trouble exercising their right to vote are painfully aware that voting discrimination has not ended—it has simply become more subtle, as overtly discriminatory poll taxes and literacy tests have given way to irregular hours at the registration office and far fewer polling places in poor communities.
On Friday evening, June 27, 1969, the popular gay bar Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York, was filled with regulars. In New York at this time—as in most US cities—public homosexuality was illegal. People who were LGBTQ+ met and socialized in private establishments and gay bars around the city. Police regularly raided these places and arrested and harassed the customers, who for the most part did not resist. But this time something was different. When the police arrived, a few people fought back. They threw things at the police, shouting "gay power" and refusing to get into the police wagons. Soon, a riot broke out. Eventually the police dispersed the crowd, but the next night more than 1,000 people arrived to continue rioting. Over the next few days, demonstrations against police harassment took place all around the city.
The Stonewall riots inspired LGBTQ+ people and their supporters in other towns and cities to stand up for LGBTQ+ rights, beginning what came to be known as the gay rights movement. Fortunately, most of the demonstrations inspired by the Stonewall riots were peaceful.
##### LGBTQ+ DISCRIMINATION
LGBTQ+ people in America began to publicly and loudly insist on their rights at about the same time as African Americans began to demand theirs in the 1960s. The Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969 are considered the true beginning of the Pride movement and the organized and concentrated effort to prevent LGBTQ+ discrimination. The fight for LGBTQ+ rights has met with a lot of success. The recent nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage was a huge win, but guaranteeing the right of same-sex couples to marry does not immediately guarantee LGBTQ+ citizens all the rights taken for granted by so many other people.
Today, roughly half a century after Stonewall, LGBTQ+ people still face a great deal of discrimination—being paid less for the same work, passed over for jobs or promotions, kicked out of apartments or turned down for mortgages, called insulting names, and alarmingly often, becoming victims of violence—simply because they are LGBTQ+. Transgender people face all of these problems and are also denied the use of public bathrooms and locker rooms, making it difficult for them to even enjoy public spaces or engage in routine business. The legalization of gay marriage, wonderful though it is, does not mean that the "current conditions" for the LGBTQ+ community are just fine and dandy.
Despite these problems and setbacks, the good news is overtaking the bad. Recall that a majority of Americans support LGBTQ+ rights, and those under the age of thirty do so overwhelmingly. We can expect future successes in the fight against LGBTQ+ discrimination. Unfortunately, the people in charge of making laws are not always so overwhelmingly supportive. It is still going to take some work to get the message out. Protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination will involve not only a working knowledge of civil rights laws and how to change them, but also a deep understanding of why people discriminate against other people.
It's easy to write off discrimination and the people who use it as mean and hateful. But simply condemning the actions or beliefs of another person does nothing to change them; it just makes you angry and puts the other person on the defensive. Discrimination can be a little easier to confront when you know where it comes from.
##### STONE AGE SKILLS
Classifying things into groups is not only natural to humans, it may even be necessary in some ways. The ability to sort things into categories, such as edible or not edible, animal who might eat me or animal who won't eat me, good camping spot or bad camping spot, had a lot to do with how our prehistoric ancestors survived to pass their genes along to us. When it came to social organization, being able to sort people into groups was probably pretty helpful to our ancient ancestors, too. Those guys with the rocks and clubs coming over the ridge may be a hunting party that left the group this morning, or they may be a tribe from the other side of the ridge coming to kill your tribe and take over your hunting grounds. Being able to quickly tell who's in your group and who's not was a handy skill—a few hundred thousand years ago. But in the modern world, just because someone belongs to a different group doesn't mean they pose an immediate threat.
In addition to fighting for the basic rights other people take for granted, many LGBTQ+ people have to deal with insults, slurs, and rude comments. Their straight friends and allies can help a lot by speaking up when they witness these things.
It doesn't take a sermon to make a point. When a person says something offensive—say, uses a derogatory slur or makes an anti-LGBTQ+ comment—you can calmly and politely say something like, "Those comments make me very uncomfortable. I believe LGBTQ+ people should be treated with the same respect as anyone else." It's usually more effective to state these objections from your point of view, saying, "It bothers me" or "I believe," rather than criticizing the speaker by saying things like, "It's so unkind to speak that way" or "You're such a bigot." Even if the speaker is an unkind bigot, you won't accomplish much by pointing that out, and you might just close off any chance of engaging in a constructive dialogue.
When that doesn't work, sometimes the best thing you can do is to be a role model. Show—rather than tell—others what nondiscrimination looks like.
Modern humans still have a tendency to distrust— and sometimes even reject or attack—people from other groups. Experts call this "tribal psychology," and even the most open, accepting people in the world probably still have a bit of this tendency in them. It's perfectly normal to find ourselves a little edgy or uncomfortable when we encounter someone who is very different from us and the people we live around. In fact, noticing that we feel this way is the best first step toward turning that slightly uncomfortable feeling into welcome rather than hatred.
##### BUT I THOUGHT I WAS COOL WITH THAT
In 1998, three scientists began a nonprofit organization and research collaboration that studied people's subconscious beliefs and attitudes in order to educate the public about hidden biases and prejudices. They called it Project Implicit, and over the years the program has sponsored a lot of research into the biases we all have. Today, Project Implicit offers the Implicit Attitudes Test (IAT), an online test—actually, a group of tests— that collects data about hidden biases. You can take the IAT yourself at <http://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit>. The data is useful for research, but it is also very eyeopening for individuals who take the tests. People are often surprised to learn that they have biases that they weren't aware of, and even biases that they are ashamed of. A person who is quick to condemn ageism, for example, might be shocked when his or her IAT results show that he or she has a strong preference for young people over old people.
You are not alone in your biases. Studies have shown that everyone has at least some biases and prejudices—sometimes people are even biased against groups to which they themselves belong! You can find women who believe that females are unfit to run large corporations or teenagers who believe all teens are irresponsible. One study found that female scientists evaluated research less favorably when they thought it had been done by a woman than when they thought it was done by a man—even though it was the same research. Having unconscious or implicit biases doesn't make you a bad person; in fact, it is quite normal. It is through discovering and acknowledging those biases that you will grow as a person. Put in the effort to recognize when implicit bias is affecting your own behavior in ways you don't like, so you can change that behavior before any harm is done.
One of the biggest advantages to understanding your own implicit biases is that it helps you understand the biases of others. Even people with some very unhealthy biases may be quite a lot like you—their prejudices are just different and perhaps a lot stronger. This does not mean that discrimination is acceptable—it is absolutely not! But it does benefit you to know your opponents before you begin a conversation with them. And if you are going to speak for change about anything— especially about LGBTQ+ discrimination—it helps to begin with empathy.
MYTH
Antidiscrimination laws give LGBTQ+ citizens special rights..
Fact
LGBTQ+ non-discrimination laws are just like the laws already on the books to protect people from discrimination based on race, religion, and so on. Laws aimed at protecting LGBTQ+ Americans simply add the categories "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" to the list of characteristics already protected by law.
MYTH
LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination laws infringe on the liberties of people whose religion forbids homosexuality.
Fact
Federal law already prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion (which protects religions that oppose homosexuality as well as those that don't). Laws that forbid LGBTQ+ discrimination typically exempt churches. However, courts have ruled repeatedly that nondiscrimination laws that regulate commercial activity, such as those banning hospitals or restaurants from turning people away based on their race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other protected characteristic, do not violate the first amendment protection of freedom of speech and religious liberty.
MYTH
With Donald Trump as president, the Supreme Court decision upholding the rights of same-sex couples to marry is likely to be overturned.
Fact
While it is possible that a leader in Donald Trump's position could appoint enough justices to tip the court's balance in an anti-LGBTQ+ direction, it is unlikely that the court would overturn the gay marriage ruling. In order for the court to reverse its historical decision on gay marriage, a plaintiff would have to prove that they had standing to bring a case before the court, and that would require proving that they had been harmed by someone's else's right to get married. Since this would be a very difficult argument to make, same-sex marriage is safe for now.
In addition to marriage equality, LGBTQ+ Americans have seen some other significant gains in recent years. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law the first-ever Hate Crimes Act that covers LGBTQ+ Americans. As of December 2010, gays and lesbians have been able to serve openly in the US military, and in July 2016, the US military ended the ban on transgender people serving openly. Boy Scouts of America ended their ban on gay scouts in 2013, and began to allow openly gay scout leaders to participate in 2015. In January 2017, the Boy Scouts began accepting transgender boys into the organization. An article in the _New York Times_ said that the change in the Boy Scouts' policy "may help a new generation of Americans think more rationally and compassionately about gender identity." And indeed, it may. However, these gains—especially the Supreme Court's ruling on marriage equality, which had so much positive attention in the media— may give a false sense of progress when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights.
##### STILL A LONG WAY TO GO
According to a 2016 survey by the LGBTQ+ rights advocacy organization GLAAD, half of non-LGBTQ+ Americans think that "gay people have the same rights as everybody else." But as we have seen, that is not true. LGBTQ+ Americans still face discrimination in almost every facet of life, and sadly, much of the discrimination is perfectly legal. In over half of states, landlords can legally evict same-sex couples; in thirty-one states, it is legal to fire an employee because he or she is LGBTQ+. Surveys find that as many as eight out of ten students who are LGBTQ+ (or perceived to be LGBTQ+) experience bullying and other forms of harassment in schools. Thirty-six states have no laws to protect these students, though federal laws do offer some protections for LGBTQ+ students.
In May of 2016, the Obama administration issued guidelines to public schools providing a standard policy on how schools should resolve issues relating to transgender students, making sure transgender students would be allowed to use the restroom that matched their gender identity rather than the gender they were assigned at birth. However, less than a year later, a newly elected President Donald Trump rescinded these protections, leaving it to various states and school districts to either offer the protections themselves or, in the case of most states, not offer them at all.
Knowing your rights is one thing, but insisting that they are honored is quite another. Here are a few tips for making sure your legal rights are respected:
• If you think your rights have been violated, make sure you report the incident.
• Keep a record of the incident, including the date or dates it happened, and as many specifics as you can. If the school asks you to fill out any forms, keep copies for yourself.
• Be calm and respectful at all times. Don't give the school an excuse to give you grief.
• Ask for help and guidance from national organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
##### SOME RIGHTS REMAIN
LGBTQ+ students do have some rights and protections against discrimination. A federal law called Title IX requires public schools to treat incidents of bullying, harassment, name-calling, and physical assaults on LGBTQ+ students in the same way they would address those issues for non-LGBTQ+ students. Schools must also protect the privacy of LGBTQ+ students. Courts have ruled that outing LGBTQ+ kids or threatening to out them is a violation of the constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy. This includes telling an LGBTQ+ student's parents, if the student does not want them informed.
Schools must respect students' right to free speech. LGBTQ+ students cannot be prevented from expressing their gender identity at school. Schools have the right to make rules about what students can and cannot wear to school (requiring uniforms or forbidding shorts or excessively worn jeans, for example), but they cannot legally prevent a male from dressing in traditionally female clothing or vice versa. If a school allows students to wear T-shirts with slogans, that school cannot prevent students from wearing LGBTQ+-themed T-shirts, such as a gay pride shirt (though they can ban obscene images or slogans). Nor can schools prevent LGBTQ+ students from talking about their sexual orientation with other students, though teachers do have the right to control class discussions. The First Amendment to the Constitution and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees the rights of LGBTQ+ students to take a person of their same gender to the prom and other school events.
These rights apply to transgender students as well as gay, lesbian, and bisexual students, but some rights that would pertain to transgender students are still working their way through the courts and vary from state to state. These include the right to be called by the name and pronoun the student prefers, to be listed on school records by his or her preferred gender, or, as we saw above, to be able to use the locker room or bathroom that matches his or her gender identity rather than the gender he or she was assigned at birth.
Though discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans is still very much a problem, there are some protections, especially for students. And you can't stand up for your rights and the rights of your fellow students until you know them.
1. I am gay, but not yet out. I want to stand up for other kids who are getting grief at school, but I'm afraid if I do ; will out me before I'm ready. How can I help from the clc
2. I have always been very supportive of LGBTQ+ rights, but whe one of my best friends told me that she is really a guy, I was totally confused and upset. How can I let him know that I real do care, but I just need some time to get used to the idea?
3. The majority of Americans may support LGBTQ+ equality, but they don't live in my town. What can I do to make a difference in a place where there is so much resistance to LGBTQ+ right
4. Plenty of things go on at my school that I suspect are illegal, but pointing this out to the teachers and administration woul only get me in trouble. Is there a safe way I can make sure the laws are observed?
5. Speaking up when you see injustice is a great idea, but I extremely shy. Speaking up about what I want for lunch difficult. How can shy people make it clear that they object to discrimination?
6. I would like to join an LGBTQ+ rights organization, but ther no groups in my area. Does online activism really work?
7. How do I start a Gay-Straight Alliance at my school?
8. Do you need permits or permission of some kind to have a Pride Parade or an LGBTQ+ demonstration?
9. Some kids at my school think there is no harm in words like fag and homo. How can I convince them that that kind of language really does hurt?
10. I totally support LGBTQ+ rights—but even so, I suspect I have some implicit bias myself. How can I examine and get rid of it?
While it is important to know—and insist upon— the legal rights of LGBTQ+ students, much of the discrimination you will see is not easily addressed by pointing out the legal rights of the LGBTQ+ community. Often, the best approach is not through court but in the classroom or the lunchroom. A great amount can be done to end discrimination by addressing the problem before the discrimination actually happens. Education and awareness are powerful tools in the battle to end LGBTQ+ discrimination.
##### TO KNOW ME IS TO LOVE ME
Many people were surprised at how quickly attitudes toward homosexuality changed in the United States— more than a 45 percent jump in approval in just over two decades, a virtually unprecedented change in public opinion in such a short period of time. Various theories have been offered to explain the shift. Some of it is simply due to a generational shift. People under thirty are almost entirely supportive of LGBTQ+ rights.
If this seems wildly optimistic to you, keep in mind that even if only 15 percent of the under-thirty population is hostile to LGBTQ+ people, depending on where you live you may have met a disproportionate number of them. According to a survey released in 2014 by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a nonpartisan research organization, only 44 percent of rural Americans favored same-sex marriage—and that number is considerably lower among older rural Americans. However, generational change is slow and cannot begin to account for the pace of the shift in attitudes.
Another factor is the increasingly positive image of LGBTQ+ people in films and on television. Probably the most significant factor is simply visibility, or exposure to LGBTQ+ individuals. The more LGBTQ+ people come out, the more the rest of the culture comes to accept them.
In the early 1990s, polls showed that only about 20-30 percent of Americans knew someone who was LGBTQ+. By the turn of the century, that figure had reached 50 percent, and now that number is close to 90 percent. Getting to know LGBTQ+ classmates, neighbors, and family members has normalized being LGBTQ+.
##### LET'S ALL COME OUT TOGETHER
There are many things students—LGBTQ+ or not— can do to help fellow students (and teachers) get to know LGBTQ+ people, even in schools where few or no students are out. Students can do book reports on LGBTQ+ literary and historical figures; you may be surprised to learn how many options you have. School assemblies and class projects often offer opportunities to speak about LGBTQ+ issues. Asking an LGBTQ+ relative or member of the community to speak at career day or similar events or requesting LGBTQ+ writers to do author visits can be great ways to help schools get to know LGBTQ+ people. Gay-Straight Alliance clubs are extracurricular groups designed to be a safe place for LGBTQ+ and straight high school and college students to talk about sexual orientation and gender identity. Schools that start GSAs are taking a huge step toward equal education on LGBTQ+ issues.
Until LGBTQ+ discrimination is completely eliminated, many LGBTQ+ students will often feel uncomfortable and sometimes unsafe at school. When teachers create designated safe spaces at schools, the school experience is much, much better for LGBTQ+ kids. Research has shown that they not only feel safer, they also skip class less often and achieve higher grades. Having an official safe space can also send a powerful message to the rest of the student body and administration about how much LGBTQ+ students need protections. GLSEN (pronounced "glisten")—a national organization working to make sure all students, no matter what their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, are respected and kept safe in school—provides a safe space kit, which you can access online at http://glsen.org. It gives teachers and schools help setting up a safe space: a welcoming, warm, supportive environment for LGBTQ+ students. LGBTQ+ students and their allies can share the kit with sympathetic teachers and offer to help them get the program going.
It is not always physically or emotionally safe for LGBTQ+ people to come out, and the decision about if and when to come out is very personal. No one should ever be pushed to make that decision before they are ready. However, those who are already out, as well as friends and allies of LGBTQ+ students, can make a big difference in changing attitudes and thus ending the fear of discrimination.
Students are often surprised to learn that many of the people they study in history and literature classes were LGBTQ+. Some were openly so, or at least open enough that historians are sure of their sexual orientation. Others left enough clues to make a good case. The astronaut Sally Ride was a lesbian, writer Virginia Woolf and blues singer Billie Holiday were bisexual, poet Langston Hughes and playwright Tennessee Williams were gay. Poet Walt Whitman, although he never publicly admitted it, is widely believed to have been gay (or perhaps pansexual). Some scholars think that Emily Dickinson may have been a lesbian. And some evidence from first lady Eleanor Roosevelt's correspondence with her long-time friend and openly lesbian companion, Lorena Hickok, suggests the two may have had a romantic relationship (though many people dispute this, and there is also evidence in the letters that Mrs. Roosevelt was not Hickok's lover). Whether she was LGBTQ+ or not, Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the strongest pre-Stonewall supporters of LGBTQ+ rights. Introducing your school to more LGBTQ+ people may just take cracking the books.
Irish playwright Oscar Wilde is one of many LGBTQ+ people you'll study in school. Unfortunately, he was bom in 1854 and lived in a time when being gay was not accepted; he was imprisoned for his sexuality.
##### WHEN YOU SEE IT, STOP IT
Even though acceptance of homosexuality has rapidly increased in recent decades, and acceptance of transgender and other gender nonconforming people is on the rise as well, depending on where you live, you still may see or experience a lot of discrimination. History has shown that one of the best ways to end discrimination of any kind is to refuse to ignore it. When people look the other way and hope that things will get better, they usually just get worse. It is when people speak up when they see discrimination and refuse to accept it that things start to change.
Speaking up doesn't mean being confrontational— simply saying, "I don't appreciate being spoken to like that," or "Hey, don't talk to my friend that way," can defuse a lot of situations. It is also important to report any violations of legal rights. Schools and administrators can't protect anyone's rights if they don't know they are being violated. Of course, it is essential to always report any outright acts of bullying or threats of violence to the authorities. Safety is paramount, and if things look like they are about to get out of hand, leaving the scene is almost always the best idea. If another person is being harmed or threatened, it is essential to get help immediately.
It is important to remember that confronting LGBTQ+ discrimination is not just the responsibility of the victim. The more people who stand up and speak up, the easier it will be to stop it. Preventing LGBTQ+ discrimination or stopping it in its tracks is always a team effort. LGBTQ+ students, their families, friends, classmates, and teachers all have a responsibility to stop it when they see it.
School may be where young people are most likely to encounter LGBTQ+ discrimination, but much more discrimination is happening out there in the larger world. As we have seen, among Americans over thirty years old, there is far less support for LGBTQ+ rights than among younger people. Despite recent gains, discrimination in housing, employment, health care, and other areas is still a huge problem for LGBTQ+ people. Kids and teens often think that because they are still students and not yet old enough to vote there is not much they can do to address discrimination in the world outside of their own school community. But young people are citizens, too, and there is actually a tremendous amount they can do—even before they are old enough to make their feelings known in the ballot box.
##### SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER
Members of Congress, state houses, and city councils represent everyone in their districts, not just voters. Obviously, they listen most closely to the people who have the power to vote them out of office, but that doesn't mean young people can't influence their decisions. Educating the public and advocating for LGBTQ+ rights can influence voters, who in turn influence elected officials. Talking with friends, family, and neighbors and sharing information about LGBTQ+ issues and pending legislation on social media and other platforms, is a great way to get the word out to voters. When young people are well-informed, accurate, and persuasive, yet nonconfrontational, in addressing these issues, they can be a powerful force for change in the rest of society.
Sometimes, young people can have a very powerful and direct effect on elected officials. In 1993, when the Massachusetts state legislature was considering legislation to prohibit discrimination in public schools on the basis of sexual orientation, thousands of students, both LGBTQ+ and straight, wrote letters, spoke at rallies, and met with their state representatives to share their experiences of bullying and harassment and show their leaders the faces of the students this legislation would protect. Massachusetts' Gay and Lesbian Student Rights Law—the first state law of its kind anywhere in the United States—was passed because young people got involved with the political process.
##### WORKING ON THE INSIDE
Another way young people can get involved in the political process before they are old enough to vote is by supporting LGBTQ+ political candidates, both local and national, or candidates who are committed supporters of LGBTQ+ rights. This can mean discussing the candidate with friends and relatives, posting information and campaign advertisements on social media, or simply sporting the candidate's T-shirt or bumper sticker.
Though there is a lot you can do even before you're old enough to vote, it is important to know when and how to get registered once you are old enough; in some states, you don't even have to wait until you're eighteen. That's right—a few states allow seventeen-year-olds to vote in primary elections if they will be eighteen in time for the general election. Voter registration is handled at the county level, so you'll need to call your county courthouse to find out how and when to register and where to go to vote on the big day. The rules and deadlines for registering vary from state to state, and sometimes even from year to year. If you are getting close to voting age, call your local office and find out what you need to do to be registered in time to vote as soon as you're old enough. And don't wait for the next presidential election! Local elections are important, too. In fact, if you want to get involved with politics, your local government is the best place to start.
If you aren't old enough to vote and won't be anytime soon, you can still help out by making sure older friends and siblings understand what is at stake and how to get registered. One of the best things you can do as a nonvoter is to help ensure that those who can vote, do vote.
Young people who really want to get involved can go even further; political candidates need all the help they can get. By volunteering to pass out flyers, work phone banks, speak at neighborhood meetings, and do any of the myriad other tasks involved in running for office, young people can have far more power in determining who makes the decisions that affect their lives—and all lives—than some people have by simply voting every few years. By the time these politically active youths finally turn eighteen and become eligible to vote, they've already been responsible for a lot of change.
Verbal expressions of hatred and abuse are among the most visible and disturbing examples of discrimination. It's very tempting for schools and other institutions to pass rules or laws forbidding such language. On the surface, it sounds like a great idea: hate speech is bad, so ban it. However, the same first amendment right to free speech that guarantees the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans to express their gender identities (and to say whatever else they want to) also guarantees that other people can say what they like about that—even if it is hate-filled and offensive.
This hat is a direct reaction to President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign slogan "Make America Great Again." Responding to hate speech and contradictory viewpoints with love speech is often the most effective approach.
And oddly enough, there can be an advantage of sorts—beyond a commitment to free speech for everyone—to letting haters have their say. When hate is expressed openly, everyone can see it for what it is and counter it with their own free speech.
Hate crimes are another matter. The FBI defines a hate crime as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity" Though the FBI points out that hate itself is not a crime and the Bureau is very mindful of First Amendment rights, they do take hate crimes very seriously because, as they state on the FBI website, "Hate crimes are the highest priority of the FBI's Civil Rights program, not only because of the devastating impact they have on families and communities, but also because groups that preach hatred and intolerance can plant the seed of terrorism here in our country"
Young people who get involved with campaigns often discover they have a taste for politics and might one day like to run for office themselves. There are many organizations who work with young people to train them to run for political office, whether at the local, state, or national level. Volunteering with LGBTQ+ advocacy groups such as the Human Rights Campaign or GLSEN can be a great way not only to learn more about LGBTQ+ issues and how to confront discrimination, but also can be excellent experience for running for office in the years to come.
Getting involved in school politics by running for student government or a leadership position in an extracurricular organization can also be an enriching experience. Who knows, that student who once organized the first Gay-Straight Alliance club at your school might one day become your state senator—and that student could be you. Even students who never plan to run for office will find that there are many ways to engage in the political process in their own communities to help end LGBTQ+ discrimination and ensure all Americans enjoy the rights and freedoms that are fundamental to our nation.
There is no doubt that these are challenging times for the LGBTQ+ community. Many states offer no protection for LGBTQ+ rights, and federal protections are often ignored. Other protections, such as federal guidelines for transgender students, are being rolled back. But this is no time to lose heart. More than ever before, people are aware of the needs and challenges facing LGBTQ+ Americans, and increasing numbers of straight Americans have the will and the courage to stand up to LGBTQ+ discrimination. Americans, young and old, LGBTQ+-identifying or not, are signing petitions, joining marches, and calling their legislators to demand an end to LGBTQ+ discrimination. Corporations have pulled money out of states that pass religious-freedom laws to legalize LGBTQ+ discrimination. Citizens of all sexual orientations and gender identities are increasingly likely to speak up when they witness acts of LGBTQ+ discrimination.
##### IN THE HALLS OF POWER
While as of 2017, there are only six openly LGBTQ+ members in the United States House of Representatives and one openly LGBTQ+ member in the US Senate (Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin), there are many more LGBTQ+ candidates running for and winning state and local offices, which is a good sign for the future. And it doesn't take parity (when the proportion of LGBTQ+ to straight representatives matches that of the population) to make a difference.
According to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Institute, an organization that works to get more LGBTQ+ candidates elected to public office, a small number of LGBTQ+ representatives in a state legislature can still influence their colleagues to pass laws that prevent LGBTQ+ discrimination. Studies have shown that the more openly LGBTQ+ public officials there are at any level or position in a given state, the more equality there is in that state. According to a 2016 report by the Victory Institute, "Nearly 70 percent of the states with high levels of LGBTQ+ equality have three or more openly LGBTQ+ people serving in their state legislatures."
Although as of 2017 there were only seven LGBTQ+ members of the United States Congress, the LGBTQ+ community has been more widely represented in the halls of power than that number suggests—and somebody had to be the first.
• Elaine Noble of Massachusetts was the first openly lesbian or gay candidate elected to a state legislature.
• Cathy Woolard of Atlanta, Georgia, was the first openly gay president of a city council.
• Jim McGreevey of New Jersey was the first openly gay governor in the United States.
• Kate Brown of Oregon was the first openly bisexual governor and the first LGBTQ+ governor to be out when taking office.
• Maura Healey of Massachusetts was the first openly lesbian state attorney general.
Since these politicians were brave enough to come out, more and more LGBTQ+ Americans have been willing to step up and serve their country in political office.
The Student Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit public schools from discriminating against students based on actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity, was introduced into the United States Congress in 2015. It did not pass, but it did garner the support of every Democratic senator and seven Republicans. The sponsors of the bill intend to keep trying to push through this and other legislation to protect LGBTQ+ rights, such as bills to prevent LGBTQ+ discrimination in housing, employment, and health care.
##### SEEING THROUGH THE SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Though some states are passing discriminatory laws aimed at the LGBTQ+ community, there are good signs on the local level. In the 2016 elections, the only incumbent governor to lose his or her reelection bid was Pat McCrory, the anti-LGBTQ+ governor of North Carolina who supported House Bill 2 (also known as the bathroom bill). This infamous legislation would have, among other anti-LGBTQ+ provisions, required people to use public restrooms and changing facilities that accord with the gender they were assigned at birth, rather than the gender with which they identify. HB2 was the critical issue that cost McCrory the election. Even voters who supported Donald Trump in that election voted overwhelmingly against the anti-LGBTQ+ Republican governor. Clearly, despite recent setbacks for progressives, Americans are not reversing all of their opinions on LGBTQ+ rights.
One of the reasons for the backlash against North Carolina's HB2 was that when LGBTQ+ people—and particularly transgender people—spoke out about it, the rest of the community at large got a chance to hear their stories and attach names and faces to the people and families who are harmed by these discriminatory laws. For most people, it is much easier to discriminate against seemingly faceless groups than against known individuals. When the ridiculous fictions of gay men "recruiting" school children or transgender women stalking other women in restrooms are countered by the stories and faces of very real, very human Americans who just want to live their lives with equal access to the same rights and freedoms as everyone else, support for LGBTQ+ discrimination withers very quickly.
One of the reasons recent anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has been met with such resistance is because LGBTQ+ discrimination is bad for business—and some of the biggest supporters of LGBTQ+ equality are big businesses. Google has been widely lauded for its support of LGBTQ+ equality, but other companies have made their support clear as well. When a Starbucks investor criticized the company's CEO, Howard Schultz, by speculating that the company's outspoken support for LGBTQ+ issues could hurt the company's bottom line, Schultz reminded the investor that if he was so concerned, he could sell his Starbucks stock and invest elsewhere.
Chevron may not be a company you associate with progressive values, but the giant energy company offers benefits to same-sex couples and transgender employees and includes nondiscrimination in its company policies. Other companies that are known for supporting LGBTQ+ rights are Apple (whose CEO is openly gay), Doritos (a company that once released special rainbow edition packaging in support of a program to reduce suicides of LGBTQ+ teens), Levi's, Oreo's, Home Depot, Nike, Target, Adidas, Gap, Coca-Cola, and many other companies both large and small.
As more Americans step up and tell their individual stories, a broader listenership will begin to see these restrictions to LGBTQ+ rights for what they are: smoke and mirrors working to steal attention from other, equally dangerous issues facing LGBTQ+ people and their fundamental, inalienable rights. There are still companies that do not want to employ, landlords who do not want to rent to, and insurance companies that do not want to extend health care benefits to LGBTQ+ Americans.
However, the election of seven LGBTQ+ members of Congress, the repeal of a bathroom bill here, and a passage of an anti-LGBTQ+ bullying bill there are not minor victories in an overall dismal landscape, even though it may seem that way at times. They are strong indications that the United States is taking two steps forward for each step backward in the march toward full equality for everyone and the end to LGBTQ+ discrimination. And there is reason to expect that pace to increase, as young people—who overwhelmingly support LGBTQ+ rights—grow older and move into more positions of power and authority. The world will only get better for LGBTQ+ people and everyone else.
### GLOSSARY
allies People who do not identify as LGBTQ+ themselves, but support LGBTQ+ rights.
asexual Lacking any sexual attraction or desire toward others.
binary A system that has two as its base; in the case of gender, this would be male and female.
cisgender A person whose gender identity corresponds with the gender they were assigned at birth.
disproportionate Larger or smaller than would be expected in relation to something else.
district An area of a city, state, or nation organized for administrative purpose, such as a US Congressional district.
extracurricular An activity or project completed outside the normal course of study.
gender The state of being male, female, or neither based on social rather than biological differences.
gender identity A person's perception of having a particular gender.
heterosexual Sexually attracted to people of the opposite gender.
implicit Implied but not stated; woven into the fabric of something.
inclusive Involving or embracing any section of society; opposite of exclusive.
intersex A term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a variation in their sex characteristics, inclusive of chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals, that does not fit within the standard medical definitions for male or female bodies.
microaggression A subtle but offensive comment or action directed at a minority group that is often unintentional but reinforces a stereotype.
nonconforming Going against rules, standards, or laws.
nonpartisan Not adhering to the values or goals of any particular political party or philosophical position.
pansexual Being sexually attracted to any sex, gender, or gender identity.
parity The state of being equal or equivalent.
plaintiff The individual or other entity that brings a lawsuit against another party.
progressives People or political groups who support social reform.
rescind To take back, invalidate, or repeal, as in an agreement or law.
sexual orientation A person's sexual identity in relation to the gender to which they are attracted; being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.
standing In the legal sense, having sufficient proof of harm to able to bring a lawsuit in a particular circumstance.
subconscious Feelings or behaviors that are below the awareness of the person exhibiting them.
visibility Being able to see or be seen.
### FOR MORE INFORMATION
American Civil Liberties Union
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10001
(212) 549-2500
Website: <https://www.aclu.org>
An organization that works to defend and protect the individual rights and liberties that are guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.
Egale Canada Human Rights Trust
185 Carlton Street
Toronto, ON M5A 2K7
Canada
(888) 204-7777
Website: <http://egale.ca/about/>
A Canadian Nation Charity that works to support LGBT human rights.
Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)
110 William Street, 30th Floor
New York, NY 10038
(212) 727-0135
Email: Info@glsen.org
Website: <http://www.glsen.org>
An organization dedicated to making sure that every student in every school, no matter what sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, is valued and respected.
GSA Network
1611 Telegraph Avenue, Suite 1002
Oakland, CA 94612
(415) 552-4229
Email: Info@gsanetwork.org
Website: <http://gsanetwork.org>
A national network of gay-straight alliance groups that empowers and trains LGBTQ+ youth to create safer schools and healthier communities.
LGBT Youthline
Wood Street Post Office
PO Box 73118
Toronto, ON M4Y 2W5
Canada
(800) 268-9688
Website: <http://www.youthline.ca>
A Canadian organization that provides LGBTQ+ peer-to-peer support.
Teaching Tolerance
400 Washington Avenue Montgomery, AL 36104
(888) 414-7752
Website: <https://www.splcenter.org/teaching-tolerance>
A project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group dedicated to combatting prejudice among youth and promoting equality, inclusiveness, and equitable learning environments in the classroom.
##### WEBSITES
Because of the changing nature of internet links, Rosen Publishing has developed an online list of websites related to the subject of this book. This site is updated regularly. Please use this link to access this list: <http://www.rosenlinks.com/SPKUP/LGBTQ+>
### FOR FURTHER READING
Albertalli, Becky. _Simon and the Homo Sapiens Agenda._ New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2015.
Bronski, Michael. _A Queer History of the United States._ Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011.
Garden, Nancy. _Hear Us Out: Lesbian and Gay Stories of Struggle, Progress, and Hope, 1950 to the Present._ New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Gay, Kathlyn. _Activism: The Ulimate Teen Guide._ Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
Konigsberg, Bill. _Openly Straight._ New York, NY: Scholastic, 2013.
Kuhn, Betsy. _Gay Power! The Stonewall Riots and the Gay Rights Movement, 1969._ Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2011.
Kuklin, Susan. _Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out._ Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2014.
Pohlen, Jerome. _Gay & Lesbian History for Kids: The Century-Long Struggle for LGBT Rights._ Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2016.
Sadowski, Michael. _Safe Is Not Enough: Better Schools for LGBTQ Students._ Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2016.
Savage, Dan, and Terry Miller. _It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living._ New York, NY: Plume, 2012.
Signorile, Michelangelo. _It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality._ New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.
Thompson, Laurie Ann. _Be a Changemaker: How to Start Something That Matters._ New York, NY: Simon Pulse, 2014.
Baksh, Kurina. "Workplace Discrimination: The LGBT Workforce." _Huffington Post,_ June 22, 2016. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kurina-baksh/workplace-discrimination-_b_10606030.html>.
"Civil Rights 101: Gays and Lesbians." The Leadership Conference. Retrieved February, 2017. http://www.civilrights.org/resources/civilrights101/sexualorientation.html.
Eckholm, Erik. "Next Fight for Gay Rights: Bias in Jobs and Housing." _New York Times,_ June 27, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/us/gay-rights-leaders-push-for-federal-civil-rights-protections.html?_r=2&mtrref=undefined&assetType=nyt_now.
Green, Emma. "The Federal Government's Reversal: Let the States Deal with Transgender Kids." _The Atlantic,_ February 22, 2017. <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/transgender-guidance/517530>.
Grewal, Daisy. _"The Evolution of Prejudice. Scientific American,_ April 5, 2011. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-of-prejudice>.
Horsley, Scott. "White House Sends Schools Guidance on Transgender Access to Bathrooms." NPR.org, May 13, 2016. <http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/13/477896804/obama-administration-to-offer-schools-guidance-on-transgender-bathrooms>.
Isidore, Chris. "How Businesses Can Still Discriminate Against LGBTQ People." _CNN Money,_ June 26, 2015. <http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/26/news/companies/lgbt-discrimination>.
Joslin, Courtney. "Protection for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Employees Under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act." _Human Rights Magazine,_ vol. 31, no. 3. <http://www.americanbar.org/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/human_rights_vol31_2004/summer2004/irr_hr_summer04_protectlgbt.html>.
Kuo, Maggie. "Consciously Combatting Unconscious Bias." _Science,_ January 30, 2017. <http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/01/consciously-combating-unconscious-bias>.
Masci, David. "Key Findings about Americans' Views on Religious Liberty and Nondiscrimination." Pew Research Center, September 28, 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/28/key-findings-about-americans-views-on-religious-liberty-and-nondiscrimination.
McGill, Andres. "Americans Are Embracing Transgender Rights." _The Atlantic._ August 25, 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/americans-are-embracing-transgender-rights/497444.
Morris, Bonnie J. "History of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Social Movements." American Psychological Association. Retrieved February 2017. <http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/history.aspx>.
Richards, David A. J. _The Case for Gay Rights: From_ Bowers _to_ Lawrence _and Beyond._ Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005.
"Shelby County v. Holder, Attorney General, et al." SupremeCourt.gov. Retrieved February 2017. <https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf>.
Signorile, Michelangelo. _It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality._ New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.
"So Far So Fast: Marriage Equality in America." _The Economist,_ October 9, 2014. <http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21623671-week-americas-supreme-court-dealt-supporters-gay-marriage-great-victory-we-look>.
"Stonewall Riots: The Beginning of the LGBT Movement." The Leadership Conference, June 22, 2009. <http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2009/06/449-stonewall.html>.
Thoreson, Ryan. "Like Walking Through a Hailstorm: Discrimination Against LGBT Youth in Schools." Human Rights Watch, December 7, 2016. https:// www.hrw.org/report/2016/12/07/walking-through-hailstorm/discrimination-against-lgbt-youth-us-schools.
"What Is Discrimination?" Findlaw.org. Retrieved February 2017. <http://civilrights.findlaw.com/civil-rights-overview/what-is-discrimination.html>.
Zezima, Katie. "Boy Scouts of America Will Allow Transgender Children to Join." _Washington Post,_ January 30, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/01/30/boy-scouts-of-america-will-allow-transgender-children-to-join/?utm_term=.c92423190cdc.
### INDEX
B
Boy Scouts of America, 24
bullying, 11, 26–29, 41
businesses, 47, 52–53
C
campaigning for change, 43, 45–46
D
discrimination
discernment versus rejection, 8
forms of in different states, 5
subtle, 11
tribal psychology and overcom-
ing of, 19
unknown versus known
threats, 51
E
economy and LGBTQ+ laws, 47, 52–53
education, discrimination in, 9, 11
F
Federal Bureau of Investigation
and hate crimes, 45
First Amendment rights
free speech rights, 28, 44–45
Title IX protections, 28–29
versus nondiscrimination
laws, 22
Fourteenth Amendment, 28
G
Gay and Lesbian Victory
Institute, 48
gay rights movement, 13
Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA)
clubs, 34, 46
GLAAD, 25
GLSEN, 34–35
H
Hate Crimes Act, 24, 45
HB2 ("bathroom bill"), 15, 50–51
historical LGBTQ+ figures, 36–37
housing discrimination, 9, 15, 25–26
L
legislation, anti-LGBTQ+, 52–53
legislators, openly LGBTQ+, 49s
LGBTQ+, meaning of the acro-
nym, 10
M
Massachusetts' Gay and Lesbian
Students Rights Law, 41
N
nondiscrimination laws, 22
North Carolina and "bathroom
bill," 50
O
Obama, Barack, 24
"outing" of LGBTQ+ students, 28, 36
P
politics
candidates, 41, 43
LGBTQ+ politicians, 48–49
running for office, 43, 46, 49
state government and LGBTQ+
legislators, 48
Public Religion Research
Institute (PRRI), 32
public spaces and bathrooms, 15, 27–28
R
religious-freedom laws, 22, 47
rights
free speech, 44–45
knowing your own, 27
nondiscrimination laws, 22
Title IX, 28–29
Roberts, John, 11–12
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 38–39
S
same-sex marriage
benefits offered by companies, 52
biases against, 26
Supreme Court decision, 4–5, 15, 23
survey of attitudes toward, 32
schools
activities to educate and unify, 32, 34
antidiscrimination policies, 7, 26–27
bullying and hate speech, 26–27
educating through activities, 32, 34
political process to gain
protections, 26, 41, 50
safe space for LGBTQ+
students, 34–35
sexual orientation issues, 4–5, 10, 22, 28, 34, 36–37
Stonewall riots, 12–14
Student Non-Discrimination Act, 50
suicide, 53
Supreme Court and same-sex
marriage ruling, 4–5, 15, 23
T
Title IX, 28–29
tribal psychology, 19
Trump, Donald, 23, 27, 50
U
US Congress, 47–48, 50
US military, 24
V
violence against LGBTQ+ peo-
ple, 15, 38
voters
educating about LGBTQ+
issues, 41, 43, 50
registration, 42–43
Voting Rights Act, 11–12
W
workplace, discrimination in, 4–5, 9, 14, 15, 26
##### ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avery Elizabeth Hurt is a children's writer and journalist who for many years has covered LGBTQ+ issues for several publications, including the _New Physician_ magazine. She is thrilled about the recent progress in LGBTQ+ rights and is committed to continuing to work toward full equality for everyone, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
##### PHOTO CREDITS
Cover David McNew/Getty Images; pp. 4-5 (background) igorstevanovic/Shutterstock.com; p. 5 (inset) Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images; p. 6 Sara D. Davis /Getty Images; pp. 8, 16, 24, 31, 39, 47, 81/ Shutterstock.com; p. 9 alphaspirit/Shutterstock.com; p. 13 Larry Morris/The New York Times/Redux Pictures; p. 14 Stephen Culp/RTR/Newscom; p. 17 Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images; p. 20 Project Implicit; p. 23 Steven Frame/Shutterstock.com; p. 25 Stewart F. House /Getty Images; pp. 26, 52 © AP Images; p. 29 Jack Stutts (jackstuttsphotos@gmail.com); p. 33 Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic/Getty Images; p. 35 Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images; p. 37 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; p. 40 The Boston Globe /Getty Images; p. 42 Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times /Getty Images; p. 44 Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images; p. 48 U.S. Senate; p. 51 J. Bicking/Shutterstock.com.
Design: Michael Moy; Layout: Nicole Russo-Duca; Editor: Carolyn DeCarlo; Photo Research: Nicole DiMella
1. INTRODUCTION
2. CHAPTER -1 THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE ILLEGAL
3. CHAPTER -2 IT'S NOT JUST THEM
4. CHAPTER -3 DISCRIMINATION HAPPENS
5. CHAPTER -4 CHANGING YOUR SCHOOL
6. CHAPTER -5 CHANGING THE WORLD
7. CHAPTER -6 THE FUTURE
8. GLOSSARY
9. FOR MORE INFORMATION
10. FOR FURTHER READING
11. BIBLIOGRAPHY
12. INDEX
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The Pacific Gallery at Fairmont Pacific Rim Launches with Inaugural Exhibition by Douglas Coupland
The Pacific Gallery at Fairmont Pacific Rim has now opened with its inaugural exhibit, Green Light Red Light by Douglas Coupland, featuring a multitude of pieces from Canada's iconic visual artist and novelist.
Visitors and guests can view Coupland's works on the hotel's second floor and in The Lobby Lounge, Vancouver's living room and a place where collaborations with artists and musicians blend together for a unique experience. Coupland is widely viewed as one of the most original commentators on mass culture of the late 20th and the 21st centuries. His exhibit, Green Light Red Light expresses a dynamic that fuses nostalgic pop culture with violence, a dynamic that was clearly expressed in the recent Netflix series, Squid Game.
Green Light Red Light explores the tail end of the twentieth century. Coupland's pieces share a tone that is at once distinctly menacing, yet wryly camouflaged by his signature broad-spectrum color palette. The two large figures above the main fireplace, Future Boy and Future Girl, from 2016, vividly evoke that same sense of dread generated by oversized nostalgic anime figures commonly seen outside of Japanese and Korean retail stores in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. "It's strange how quickly the past became 'history,' — and it's even stranger how quickly the future is becoming the present. I think we maybe no longer have a present," said Coupland. "I think we now inhabit the future 24/7."
"The launch of The Pacific Gallery at Fairmont Pacific Rim is an exciting addition to our evergrowing art collection, allowing us to prominently feature local and international artists," said Regional Vice President and Fairmont Pacific Rim General Manager, Jens Moesker. "We are excited to open The Pacific Gallery with renowned artist, Douglas Coupland, a Vancouver local whose work aligns with our ethos from not only an aesthetic lens but also from a sustainability perspective."
The south wall features a series of 1970s muscle car hoods painted in a style reminiscent of the mineral Fordite, an anthropocenic neo-mineral that is excavated from the demolished automotive spray-paint booths of Michigan and southern Ontario — countless layers of automotive lacquer are sanded and buffed to make a new sort of jewel, its colors evocative of North American society at a peak cultural moment of exotic and brash colors and industrial plenitude. The LED target forms so highly reminiscent of road infrastructure are direct overhead views of a series of 20-metre tall conical outdoor sculptures produced by Coupland in northern Toronto. Its colors are derived from coloured pencil crayons which have been seasonally separated into winter, spring, summer, and fall tones.
The Japanese film starlets of the early 1960s began as a series of work by Coupland in the early 2000s that explored the faces that appended the ends of film countdowns on celluloid heads and tails film trailers. Though seen for only a fraction of a second, these faces etched themselves more deeply in the brain than any film poster — or even the film itself — a classic instance of the medium overriding the message and becoming itself a far more resonant long-term memory. The collection came to The Pacific Gallery at Fairmont Pacific Rim through its ownership group, Westbank, longtime collaborators with Douglas Coupland and one of North America's leading mixed-use real estate development practices. The exhibit will be on display at The Pacific Gallery into the new year and pieces from the collection are available for purchase through Toronto's Daniel Faria Gallery.
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In the spirit of sustainability, we're proud to say we have made some serious strides to the guest experience and our operation over the past few years.
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Mid-Autumn Festival at Fairmont Pacific Rim
In partnership with Oakidge and Westbank, join us at Fairmont Pacific Rim for a celebration of nature, culture, artistry, and creativity. | {
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Antiochtha longivincula is a moth in the family Lecithoceridae. It was described by Chun-Sheng Wu and Kyu-Tek Park in 1998. It is found in Sri Lanka.
The wingspan is 16–18 mm. The forewings are dark brown with a purple lustre. The pattern is dark milky yellow. The costal blotch is well developed and found at three-fourths of the costa. The termen is sinuate, with a yellowish white line along the margin. The hindwings are brown.
Etymology
The species name is derived from Latin longus (meaning long) and vinculum.
References
Moths described in 1998
Antiochtha | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 3,964 |
{"url":"http:\/\/www.optimization-online.org\/DB_HTML\/2012\/02\/3372.html","text":"- Numerical Optimization of Eigenvalues of Hermitian Matrix Functions Mustafa Kilic(mukilicku.edu.tr) Emre Mengi(emengiku.edu.tr) E. Alper Yildirim(alperyildirimku.edu.tr) Abstract: The eigenvalues of a Hermitian matrix function that depends on one parameter analytically can be ordered so that each eigenvalue is an analytic function of the parameter. Ordering these analytic eigenvalues from the largest to the smallest yields continuous and piece-wise analytic functions. For multi-variate Hermitian matrix functions that depend on $d$ parameters analytically, the ordered eigenvalues from the largest to the smallest are continuous and piece-wise analytic along lines in the $d$-dimensional space. These classical results imply the boundedness of the second derivatives of the pieces defining the sorted eigenvalue functions along any direction. We derive an algorithm based on the boundedness of these second derivatives for the global minimization of an eigenvalue of an analytic Hermitian matrix function. The algorithm, which is globally convergent, is driven by computing a global minimum of a piece-wise quadratic under-estimator for the eigenvalue function and refining the under-estimator in an iterative fashion. In the multi-variate case, the computation of such a global minimum can be decomposed into solving a finite number of nonconvex quadratic programming problems. The derivatives of the eigenvalue functions are used to construct quadratic models that yield rapid global convergence in comparison with traditional global optimization algorithms. The applications that we have in mind include the $H_{\\infty}$ norm of a linear system, numerical radius, distance to uncontrollability, and distance to a nearest defective matrix. Keywords: Hermitian eigenvalues, analytic, global optimization, perturbation of eigenvalues, quadratic programming Category 1: Global Optimization (Applications ) Category 2: Nonlinear Optimization (Quadratic Programming ) Citation: Technical Report, Department of Mathematics, Koc University, Sariyer, 34450, Istanbul, Turkey Download: [PDF]Entry Submitted: 02\/22\/2012Entry Accepted: 02\/28\/2012Entry Last Modified: 02\/22\/2012Modify\/Update this entry Visitors Authors More about us Links Subscribe, Unsubscribe Digest Archive Search, Browse the Repository Submit Update Policies Coordinator's Board Classification Scheme Credits Give us feedback Optimization Journals, Sites, Societies Optimization Online is supported by the Mathematical Optmization Society.","date":"2017-11-22 05:46:16","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.6689151525497437, \"perplexity\": 1205.593846316778}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2017-47\/segments\/1510934806465.90\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20171122050455-20171122070455-00240.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.physicsforums.com\/threads\/srednicki-43-10.511111\/","text":"# Srednicki 43.10\n\n1. Jul 1, 2011\n\n### Lapidus\n\nTrivial question...\n\nHow exactly does the minus sign arise in eq. 43.10? The sentence below states because the functional derivative goes through one spinor, but I can't see how that works...\n\nbook is online here http:\/\/www.physics.ucsb.edu\/~mark\/ms-qft-DRAFT.pdf\n\nequation 43.10 is on pdf page 273\n\nthank you\n\n2. Jul 1, 2011\n\n### qbert\n\ni'll take a shot.\n\nlet me argue by analogy, maybe making the rule plausible. suppose i have anticommuting\nnumbers x,y,h. and i'm given the expression yx and i want to differentiate it with respect to x.\n\nlacking any better choice i form the difference quotient\n$$\\frac{d}{dx}(yx) = \\lim_{h \\rightarrow 0} \\frac{1}{h} ( y(x+h) - yx )$$\n$$= \\lim_{h \\rightarrow 0} \\frac{1}{h} yh$$\nnow because the numbers are anticommuting i can't just cancel h. i have to first swap\nyh or h^(-1) and y and then i can cancel.\n\n$$= \\lim_{h \\rightarrow 0}\\left( -y \\frac{1}{h} h \\right)= -y$$\n\n3. Jul 2, 2011\n\n### Lapidus\n\nqbert, I thank you very much!","date":"2018-01-20 17:29:16","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8063725233078003, \"perplexity\": 3441.3744782934014}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2018-05\/segments\/1516084889677.76\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20180120162254-20180120182254-00509.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
\section{Introduction}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
An inverse problem of obviously major practical significance is the detection of cracks inside a body using measurements at the boundary of the body. If the body in the absence
of the crack is a homogeneous material, such as a metal, the calculation of the fields inside the body is a straightforward numerical problem and in this way
cracks can be detected. But, for example, with the advent of aeroplanes built from carbon fibre composite materials it is becoming increasingly important to detect
cracks in composites, or more generally in inhomogeneous bodies. Ideally one would like to solve the inverse problem of locating the position of a crack in an inhomogeneous
body with an unknown configuration of the phases in the body,
but at the very least one would like to be able to identify those boundary fields that necessarily imply there is a crack in the body, or that some other
breakdown in the equations has occured inside the body. It is the purpose of this paper to identify such boundary fields.
While many of the arguments are elementary and
while it seems highly likely that the results presented here can be improved, the paper is perhaps the first to embark on this significant problem and has the goal
of introducing the inverse problem community to it, so that further progress can be made. Another important, but related, detection problem is in
breast cancer, where the breast is again an inhomogeneous body, perhaps modelled a two phase medium, where the phases are the glandular tissue (containing the milk-producing
cells) and adipose tissue (fatty cells). In this context large interior fields, or a breakdown in the two-phase equations, could signal breast cancer.
A material often breaks down if the local field exceeds a certain critical value. This may be the current field strength which causes melting in a conducting material,
the electric field strength which causes dielectric breakdown in an insulating material, or the value of the stress field which causes plastic yielding or cracking
in an elastic material. Usually one wants to
avoid this and so it is helpful to have some idea of the maximum field within a body $\Omega$ from measurements of the
(voltage, current flux) or (displacement, traction) at the boundary $\partial\Omega$ of the body. If the body is homogeneous then we may
numerically solve for the fields in the interior and thus calculate explicitly the maximum field. However if the body is
inhomogeneous, say containing two phases in an unknown geometry as illustrated in figure 1, then we cannot do this but still we would like to say
something rigorous about the field inside. As we are making no assumptions about the geometry there could be sharp corners
or other singularities in the surface between phases inside the body, and these will lead to infinite local fields in the absence of breakdown or nonlinearities. Thus
all we can hope for are lower bounds on the magnitude of the maximum local field, where the maximum is taken over
one or both phases. Thus we want to identify boundary data which are certainly dangerous in the sense that they necessarily imply that breakdown has occurred inside the body, or that some other nonlinearities must have occurred. We assume that the response of each phase is linear up to the point of
breakdown, or up to the point of onset of nonlinearities.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.50\textwidth]{Omega.pdf}
\caption{The body $\Omega$ containing phase 1, in black, occupying the region $\Omega_1$ and phase 2, in white,
occupying the region $\Omega_2$.}
\label{fig:Omega}
\end{figure}
Similar questions have been addressed before in the context of periodic or statistically homogeneous composite materials of infinite extent: rigorous
bounds have been obtained on the effective yield surface of polycrystalline materials \cite{Bishop:1951:TPD, Kohn:1999:SMP, Nesi:2000:IBY, Goldsztein:2001:RPP, Garroni:2003:STD}, on the set of recoverable strains of polycrystalline shape memory materials \cite{Bhattacharya:1997:EEM}, and on the lowest value of the maximum field magnitude (or maximum of some norm of the field, for matrix valued fields) within two phase linear composites
\cite{Lipton:2004:OLB, Lipton:2005:OLB, Lipton:2006:OLB, He:2007:LBS, Alali:2009:OLB, Chen:2010:OLB, He:2010:LSS, Alali:2012:NBL, Liu:2014:GIM}. Also results have
been obtained on the lowest value of the maximum of some norm of the field for one or more inclusions in an infinite body when uniform fields are imposed at infinity \cite{Wheeler:2004:IMS, Liu:2014:GIM}. To our knowledge such bounds have not been obtained for a two-phase body $\Omega$ of finite extent with general boundary conditions at $\partial\Omega$ and it is the purpose of this paper to address this.
While the bounds we obtain are very crude (because we bound the average in each phase of the square of fields, by the square of the maximum field) we believe
they are the first rigorous inequalities addressing this problem, and as such should serve as a benchmark for future progress. Furthermore, they are sharp for certain geometries. In particular, many of the bounds are sharp when the field in one phase is constant. Numerous examples have been found of periodic or statistically homogeneous two-phase composites having the property that the field is constant in one phase
\cite{Maxwell:1954:TEM, Hashin:1962:EMH, Milton:1980:BCD, Milton:1981:BCP, Tartar:1985:EFC, Lurie:1986:EEC, Norris:1985:DSE, Milton:1986:MPC, Francfort:1986:HOB, Grabovsky:1995:MMEa, Vigdergauz:1986:EEP, Vigdergauz:1994:TDG, Grabovsky:1995:MMEb, Vigdergauz:1996:RLE, Vigdergauz:1999:EMI, Vigdergauz:1999:CES, Sigmund:2000:NCE, Benveniste:2003:NER, Liu:2007:PIM}. Also sets of inclusions in an infinite matrix have been found such that the field in them is uniform when a uniform field is applied at infinity
\cite{Cherepanov:1974:IPP, Kang:2008:IPS, Liu:2008:SEC, Liu:2014:GIM, Dai:2015:USF}. Liu, James and Leo \cite{Liu:2007:PIM} call these inclusions $E$-inclusions.
For a single inclusion in a matrix with a uniform field at infinity the field is uniform when the inclusion is an ellipsoid
\cite{Poisson:1826:SMS, Maxwell:1954:TEMb, Eshelby:1957:DEF, Eshelby:1961:EII, Khachaturyan:1966:SQC, Willis:1981:VRM} and it was conjectured by Eshelby
\cite{Eshelby:1957:DEF, Eshelby:1961:EII} that this is the only simply connected inclusion with this property. Eshelby's conjecture was proved for planar elasticity
in \cite{Sendeckyj:1970:EIP}, for two-dimensional conductivity or equivalently antiplane elasticity in \cite{Ru:1996:EIA}, for three-dimensional conductivity
and elasticity when the uniformity property holds for all uniform applied fields in \cite{Kang:2008:SPS,Liu:2008:SEC}, and in three-dimensional elasticity
when it holds for two independent uniform applied fields in \cite{Ammari:2010:PSE}. On the other hand Liu \cite{Liu:2008:SEC} has shown that for three-dimensional conductivity
with a single uniform applied field there are nonellipsoidal inclusions which have a uniform field inside.
Inclusions with a uniform field inside retain this property if we truncate the material to a body $\Omega$ of finite extent and apply appropriate boundary conditions.
However given a body $\Omega$ there could exist a wider class of inclusions called $E_\Omega$-inclusions contained within $\Omega$ for which the field is uniform for some
boundary condition: $E$-inclusions lying inside $\Omega$ are $E_\Omega$-inclusions, but the converse is not true. For two-dimensional conductivity simply connected
$E_\Omega$-inclusions were constructed by Kang, Kim and Milton \cite{Kang:2011:SBV}. Here we show that these inclusions remain $E_\Omega$-inclusions under appropriate affine transformations, and that they are also $E_\Omega$-inclusions for elasticity with appropriate boundary conditions.
\section{Real conductivity with one boundary condition}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
In this section, we consider the equations of real conductivity in the body $\Omega$ in the absence of source terms:
\begin{equation} {\bf J}({\bf x})=\sigma({\bf x}){\bf E}({\bf x}),\quad \nabla \cdot{\bf J}=0,\quad {\bf E}=-\nabla V, \eeq{0.1}
in which ${\bf J}$ is the current field, ${\bf E}$ is the electric field, $V$ is the potential, and
\begin{equation} \sigma({\bf x})=\sigma^{(1)}\chi_1({\bf x})+\sigma^{(2)}\chi_2({\bf x}) \eeq{0.1a}
is the (scalar valued) local conductivity, where $\sigma^{(1)}$ and $\sigma^{(2)}$ are the scalar conductivities of phases 1 and 2, respectively,
and $\chi_i({\bf x})$ is the characteristic function of phase $i$ taking the value $1$ in phase i, and zero outside it
(thus $\chi_1({\bf x})+\chi_2({\bf x})=1$ within the body). Breakdown at a given point
${\bf x}$ in phase $\alpha=1,2$ is assumed to depend only the local electric field ${\bf E}({\bf x})$ at that point. As the phases are isotropic
it should only depend on the magnitude $|{\bf E}({\bf x})|$. Thus the local criterion for breakdown in phase $\alpha$ at point ${\bf x}$ is that
\begin{equation} |{\bf E}({\bf x})|\geq c^{(\alpha)}, \eeq{0.1b}
and conversely if $|{\bf E}({\bf x})|< c^{(\alpha)}$ we will say the material has not broken at the point ${\bf x}$. From boundary measurements we can
determine the potential $V$ and the current flux ${\bf J}\cdot{\bf n}$ at the boundary $\partial\Omega$. We seek criteria which enable us to say with
certainty that the boundary measurements imply breakdown has occurred somewhere inside the body (assuming the linear equations \eq{0.1} hold
up to the point of breakdown).
\subsection{In which phase does breakdown first occur?}
In the two-dimensional situation, we have the following result.
\begin{theorem}
In two-dimensions $|{\bf E}|$ takes its maximum value over a given phase on the boundary of that phase, which may be at the interface between phases, or on the boundary of the
body $\Omega$.
\end{theorem}
\begin{proof}
In two dimensions, the conductivity equations take the form
\begin{equation} \mathbf{E} = \left[
\begin{array}{ cc }
-\dfrac{\partial V}{\partial x}, & -\dfrac{\partial V}{\partial y}
\end{array} \right], \quad {\bf J}=\sigma{\bf E},\quad \nabla \cdot \textbf{J} = \frac{\partial\mathbf{J}_1}{\partial x}+\frac{\partial\mathbf{J}_2}{\partial y}=0.
\eeq{1.1}
Let us set $z = x + iy$. Now $V$ is harmonic in each connected part of one phase and there is no net charge inside the connected
part if it is multiply connected. So within this connected part $V$
is the real part of some analytic function $g = V + iW$, and we have
\begin{equation} \mathbf{E} = \mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits \left[
\begin{array}{ cc }
-\dfrac{\partial g}{\partial x}, & -\dfrac{\partial g}{\partial y}
\end{array} \right] = \mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits \left[
\begin{array}{ cc }
-\dfrac{\partial g}{\partial z}\dfrac{\partial z}{\partial x}, & -\dfrac{\partial g}{\partial z}\dfrac{\partial z}{\partial y}
\end{array} \right] = \mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits \left[
\begin{array}{ cc }
-\dfrac{\partial g}{\partial z}, & -i\dfrac{\partial g}{\partial z}
\end{array} \right].
\eeq{1.2}
Then if we let $f(z) = \partial g/\partial z$, $\textbf{E} = (-\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits f, \mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits f)$. But $f$ is analytic, so by the maximum modulus principle $|f|$ takes its maximum on the boundary of this connected part of the phase. On the other hand, $|{\bf E}| = |f|$, so the maximum value of ${\bf E}$ occurs on the boundary between the two phases, or at the boundary of $\Omega$
\end{proof}
With this, it follows that breakdown must occur at the boundary $\partial\Omega$ or at the interface between the phases. The following theorem gives conditions under which we can know whether the breakdown occurs first in phase 1 or first in phase 2.
\begin{theorem}
In two-dimensions, electrical breakdown definitely occurs in phase 1 first, if it does not first occur at the boundary $\partial\Omega$, if
\begin{equation} (c^{(2)})^2>(c^{(1)})^2\max\{(\sigma^{(1)}/\sigma^{(2)})^2, 1\}, \eeq{1.10}
and definitely occurs in phase 2 first, if it does not first occur at the boundary $\partial\Omega$, if
\begin{equation} (c^{(2)})^2<(c^{(1)})^2\min\{(\sigma^{(1)}/\sigma^{(2)})^2, 1\}. \eeq{1.11}
\end{theorem}
\begin{proof}
Let $\mathbf{E}^{(1)}$ denote the field in phase 1 and ${\bf E}^{(2)}$ denote the field in phase 2. At a point on the boundary between the phases, assuming the boundary is smooth at that point, we have the decomposition
\begin{equation}
\mathbf{E}^{(1)}=\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_n+\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_t, \quad
\mathbf{E}^{(2)}=\mathbf{E}^{(2)}_n+\mathbf{E}^{(2)}_t,
\eeq{1.11a}
where $n$ and $t$ label the normal and tangential components of each electric field, and these field components satisfy the jump conditions
\begin{equation} \sigma^{(2)}\mathbf{E}^{(2)}_n=\sigma^{(1)}\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_n, \quad \mathbf{E}^{(2)}_t=\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_t, \eeq{1.11b}
implied by continuity of the flux, and continuity to the potential at the interface.
To motivate the conditions which appear in \eq{1.10} and \eq{1.11} let us suppose that breakdown simultaneously begins to occur in both phase 1 and phase 2 at one point on
the interface between the phases. At that point we have
\begin{equation}
\frac{|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}|^2}{(c^{(1)})^2}=\frac{|\mathbf{E}^{(2)}|^2}{(c^{(2)})^2}=1
\Rightarrow (c^{(2)})^2 |\mathbf{E}^{(1)}|^2= (c^{(1)})^2 |\mathbf{E}^{(2)}|^2,
\eeq{1.11c}
and hence
\begin{equation}
(c^{(2)})^2 (|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_n|^2+|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_t|^2)
=(c^{(1)})^2 (|\mathbf{E}^{(2)}_n|^2+|\mathbf{E}^{(2)}_t|^2).
\eeq{1.11d}
Substituting the jump conditions \eq{1.11b} into this and gathering terms, we see that
\begin{equation}
[(c^{(2)})^2-(c^{(1)})^2(\sigma^{(1)}/\sigma^{(2)})^2]|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_n|^2=[(c^{(1)})^2-(c^{(2)})^2]|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_t|^2.
\eeq{1.20}
If $(c^{(2)})^2-(c^{(1)})^2(\sigma^{(1)}/\sigma^{(2)})^2$ and $(c^{(1)})^2-(c^{(2)})^2$ have opposite signs then this equation will have no real solution
for $|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_n|$ and $|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_t|$, other than the trivial solution $|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_n|=|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_t|=0$ which will not correspond to breakdown.
If in particular \eq{1.10} holds then the $=$ sign in \eq{1.20} can be replaced by a $>$ sign for all
nonzero $\mathbf{E}^{(1)}$ and tracing back the equations one concludes
that $(c^{(2)})^2 |\mathbf{E}^{(1)}|^2> (c^{(1)})^2 |\mathbf{E}^{(2)}|^2$, implying that any point on the interface between the phases, breakdown will first occur in
phase 1. Similarly, if \eq{1.11} holds then the $=$ sign in \eq{1.20} can be replaced by a $<$ sign
for all nonzero $\mathbf{E}^{(1)}$, and tracing back the equations one concludes
that $(c^{(2)})^2 |\mathbf{E}^{(1)}|^2<(c^{(1)})^2 |\mathbf{E}^{(2)}|^2$, implying that any point on the interface between the phases, breakdown will first occur in
phase 2. We remark if neither \eq{1.10} nor \eq{1.11} holds then \eq{1.20} may have a nontrivial solution for $|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_n|^2$ and $|\mathbf{E}^{(1)}_t|^2$,
and it seems likely that we cannot determine in which phase breakdown first occurs in without knowing the phase geometry and boundary fields.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Elementary Breakdown Criteria}
If the materials in the body have not broken down anywhere, then they certainly will not have broken down at the surface $\partial\Omega$.
If we know $V(\mathbf{x})$ at $\partial \Omega$, then we know $\mathbf{t}\cdot\nabla V$ for any unit vector $\mathbf{t}$ tangential to $\partial\Omega$. Also because
the materials are isotropic $\mathbf{J}\cdot\mathbf{n}/\sigma$ gives us the normal component of $\mathbf{E}$. Assuming we know $\sigma$ at the boundary, we can determine $\mathbf{E}$ at the boundary. \\
\noindent \textbf{Criterion 1}. In two dimensions if the material has not broken down in phase $\alpha=1,2$, then the inequality
\begin{equation}
c^{(\alpha)} > |\mathbf{E}|= \sqrt{\left(\frac{\mathbf{J}\cdot\mathbf{n}}{ \sigma^{(\alpha)}}\right)^2+(\nabla V \cdot \mathbf{t})^2}
\eeq{1.30}
must be satisfied for all points at the surface $\partial\Omega$ which are in phase $\alpha$.
In three dimensions, if $\mathbf{n}, \textbf{t}_1, \textbf{t}_2$ are three orthonormal normal and tangential vectors, then if the material has not broken down in phase $\alpha=1,2$, the inequality
\begin{equation}
c^{(\alpha)} > |\mathbf{E} |= \sqrt{\left(\frac{\mathbf{J}\cdot\mathbf{n}}{ \sigma^{(\alpha)}}\right)^2+(\nabla V \cdot \textbf{t}_1)^2 + (\nabla V\cdot \textbf{t}_2)^2}
\eeq{1.31}
must be satisfied for all points at the surface $\partial\Omega$ which are in phase $\alpha$.
\subsubsection{Breakdown criteria based on the average fields}
Here we find expressions for the average over each phase of the electric field, and using the fact that the variance, over each phase,
of the electric field must be nonnegative, we obtain simple breakdown criteria.
Using the fact that $\textbf{E} = - \nabla V$, we have
\begin{equation} \langle\E\rangle
= \frac{1}{|\Omega |} \int_{\Omega} -\nabla V~d\textbf{x}
= \frac{1}{|\Omega|}\int_{\partial\Omega}-V{\bf n}~dS,
\eeq{1.32}
where ${\bf n}$ is the outward normal to the boundary $\partial\Omega$.
Now consider $\langle \mathbf{J} \rangle$. Let $x_i$ be the $i$-th coordinate. Then since $\nabla \cdot \mathbf{J} = 0$, we find $\nabla \cdot (x_i \mathbf{J}) = J_i$ where $J_i$ is the $i$-th component of $J$. Then directly by the divergence theorem,
\begin{equation} \int_{\Omega} J_i ~d \textbf{x} = \int_{\Omega} \nabla \cdot (x_i\mathbf{J}) ~d \textbf{x} = \int_{\partial \Omega} x_i (\mathbf{J}\cdot \mathbf{n})~dS .
\eeq{1.33}
Hence we can find both $\langle \textbf{E} \rangle$ and $\langle \mathbf{J} \rangle$ from the boundary measurements and from these we can determine
\begin{equation} \langle\E\rangle_1= \frac{\langle \chi_1 \mathbf{E} \rangle }{f_1}=\frac{1}{|\Omega_1 |}\int_{\Omega_1}\mathbf{E}~d {\bf x},\quad\mbox{ where }~ \Omega_1=\chi_1\Omega,
\eeq{1.34}
and
\begin{equation} \langle\E\rangle_2= \frac{\langle \chi_2 \mathbf{E} \rangle }{f_2}=\frac{1}{|\Omega_2 |}\int_{\Omega_2}\mathbf{E}~d {\bf x}\quad\mbox{ where }~\Omega_2=\chi_2\Omega,
\eeq{1.35}
which represent the average over each phase of the electric field, and $\Omega_1$ and $\Omega_2$ are the regions occupied by phases 1 and 2 respectively.
To see this, notice that
\begin{eqnarray} \langle\E\rangle & = & \langle \chi_1 \mathbf{E} \rangle +\langle \chi_2 \mathbf{E} \rangle
= f_1 \langle\E\rangle_1+ f_2 \langle\E\rangle_2, \nonumber \\
\langle\J\rangle& = & \langle \chi_1 \mathbf{J}\rangle + \langle \chi_2 \mathbf{J}\rangle
=\sigma_1 \langle \chi_1 \mathbf{E}\rangle + \sigma_2 \langle \chi_2 \mathbf{E}\rangle
=f_1\sigma_1\langle\E\rangle _1 +f_2\sigma_2\langle\E\rangle _2, \nonumber \\
&~&
\eeqa{1.36}
which when solved for $\langle\E\rangle_1$ and $\langle\E\rangle_2$ give
\begin{equation}
\langle\E\rangle_1=\frac{\langle\J\rangle-\sigma_2\langle\E\rangle}{f_1(\sigma_1-\sigma_2)},\quad \langle\E\rangle_2=\frac{\langle\J\rangle-\sigma_1\langle\E\rangle}{f_2(\sigma_2-\sigma_1)},
\eeq{1.37}
where we have assumed that $\sigma_1\ne\sigma_2$. Analogous formulae to \eq{1.37} are well known in the theory of composites: see for example, equation (6) in
\cite{Polder:1946:EPM}.
Now from the positivity of the variance of the electric field in phase 1, and if the material has not
broken down in phase 1, we have
\begin{equation} 0\leq \langle[\chi_1({\bf E}-\langle\E\rangle_1)\cdot({\bf E}-\langle\E\rangle_1)]\rangle=\langle\chi_1|{\bf E}|^2\rangle-f_1|\langle\E\rangle_1|^2\leq f_1[(c^{(1)})^2-|\langle\E\rangle_1|^2], \eeq{1.38}
with equality if and only if the field is constant in phase 1, having magnitude $|{\bf E}|=c^{(1)}$. Similarly if the material has not broken down in
phase 2, then $(c^{(2)})^2\geq |\langle\E\rangle_2|^2$.
This gives us the following criterion. \\
\noindent \textbf{Criterion 2}. \textit{Let $\langle\E\rangle_{\alpha}$ be the average over phase $\alpha$ of the electric field, given in terms of the boundary data
through \eq{1.37}, \eq{1.32} and \eq{1.33}. If neither phase has broken down then the inequality $|\langle\E\rangle_\alpha|\leq c^{(\alpha)}$ must hold. (Note that
the derivation of the inequality assumes that both phases have not broken down, not just phase $\alpha$.) } \\
A similar criterion for two phase periodic or statistically homogeneous composite materials (with a similar derivation)
follows directly from the results of
\cite{Lipton:2004:OLB}.
Notice that we also have
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle\mathbf{J} \cdot \mathbf{E} \rangle
& = & \frac{1}{|\Omega |}\left( \int_{\Omega_1} \sigma_1 |\mathbf{E} |^2+\int_{\Omega_2} \sigma_2 |\mathbf{E} |^2 \right) d \textbf{x} \nonumber \\
& \leq & \frac{1}{|\Omega |}\left( \sigma^{(1)} \int_{\Omega_1} (c^{(1)})^2 d \textbf{x} + \sigma^{(2)}\int_{\Omega_2} (c^{(2)})^2 \right) d \textbf{x} \nonumber \\
& \leq & \sigma^{(1)}(c^{(1)})^2f^{(1)}+\sigma^{(2)}(c^{(2)})^2f^{(2)},
\eeqa{1.39}
and
\begin{equation} \int_{\Omega} \mathbf{J}\cdot \mathbf{E} \ d \mathbf{x} = \int_{\Omega} -\mathbf{J} \cdot \nabla V d \mathbf{x} = -\int_{\partial\Omega} V (\mathbf{J} \cdot \mathbf{n}) dS,
\eeq{1.40}
where we have made use of the fact that $\nabla \cdot(V\mathbf{J})=(\nabla V)\cdot\mathbf{J}+V\nabla \cdot\mathbf{J} = \nabla V \cdot \mathbf{J}$. This gives us the following criterion.\\
\noindent \textbf{Criterion 3}. \textit{If the material has not broken down, $\langle \mathbf{J} \cdot \mathbf{E} \rangle$ satisfies the bounds \eq{1.39} and is given in
terms of the boundary data by \eq{1.40}.}\\
In contrast to Criterion 2, this may still be useful even if $\langle\E\rangle_{1}$ and $\langle\E\rangle_{2}$ are both zero, as may happen if the body, phase geometry, and
boundary conditions have appropriate symmetries.
\subsection{Improved criteria by perturbing the conductivity}
Criteria 2 and 3 are derived from inequalities on $\langle\chi_1|{\bf E}|^2\rangle$ and $\langle \chi_2|{\bf E}|^2\rangle$. If we can determine these quantities
directly from suitable measurements this will lead to improved breakdown criteria. It may be the case that the conductivities $\sigma_1$ and $\sigma_2$ can be perturbed
by a small amount, by for example changing the temperature, or by introducing boundary conditions which oscillate with time at some low fixed frequency
$\omega$ (in which case the conductivities may have a small imaginary part).
Suppose we fix the potential $V=V_0$ on $\partial\Omega$ and that under the perturbation a quantity $a$ goes to $a+\delta a$, except $\delta V=0$ on $\partial\Omega$, i.e. the surface maintains the same voltage.
Then to first order in the perturbation we have
\begin{equation} \mathbf{J}+\delta\mathbf{J} =(\sigma+\delta\sigma)(\mathbf{E}+\delta\mathbf{E})
\approx\sigma\mathbf{E}+(\delta\sigma)\mathbf{E}+\sigma(\delta\mathbf{E}),
\eeq{1.42}
implying
\begin{eqnarray}
\int_\Omega (\mathbf{E}+\delta\mathbf{E})\cdot(\mathbf{J}+\delta\mathbf{J})~d {\bf x}
& \approx & \int_\Omega (\mathbf{E}+\delta\mathbf{E})\cdot[\sigma\mathbf{E}+(\delta\sigma)\mathbf{E}+\sigma\delta\mathbf{E}]~d {\bf x} \nonumber \\
& \approx & \int_\Omega \mathbf{E}\cdot\sigma\mathbf{E}~d {\bf x} +\int_\Omega \mathbf{E}\cdot(\delta\sigma)\mathbf{E}~d {\bf x}+2\int_\Omega \mathbf{E}\cdot(\sigma\delta\mathbf{E})~d {\bf x}. \nonumber \\ & ~ &
\eeqa{1.43}
The quantities
\begin{eqnarray} &~&\int_\Omega (\mathbf{E}+\delta\mathbf{E})\cdot(\mathbf{J}+\delta\mathbf{J})\ d{\bf x} = -\int_{\partial\Omega} V(\mathbf{J}+\delta\mathbf{J})\cdot\mathbf{n}~dS \quad \mbox{since $\delta V=0$ on $\partial\Omega$},
\nonumber \\
&~&\int_{\Omega} \mathbf{E}\cdot\sigma\mathbf{E} \ d\mathbf{x} = \int_{\Omega} \mathbf{E}\cdot\mathbf{J}~d {\bf x}= -\int_{\partial\Omega} V (\mathbf{J} \cdot \mathbf{n})~dS, \nonumber \\
&~& \int_\Omega \mathbf{E}\cdot(\sigma\delta\mathbf{E})~d {\bf x} = \int_\Omega \mathbf{J}\cdot\delta\mathbf{E}~d {\bf x}=-\int_{\partial\Omega}\delta V(\mathbf{J}\cdot\mathbf{n})~dS=0\quad \mbox{since $\delta V=0$ on $\partial\Omega$}, \nonumber \\ & ~ &
\eeqa{1.44}
can all be evaluated from boundary data from the perturbed and unperturbed problems. Therefore, using \eq{1.43},
\begin{equation}
\int\mathbf{E}\cdot\delta\sigma\mathbf{E}~d {\bf x}
= \delta\sigma_1\int_{\Omega_1}|\mathbf{E}|^2~d {\bf x}+\delta\sigma_2\int_{\Omega_2}|\mathbf{E}|^2~d {\bf x}
\eeq{1.45}
can be determined from boundary data (to first order in the perturbation), together with
\begin{equation} \int_{\Omega}\mathbf{E}\cdot\sigma\mathbf{E}~d {\bf x}
=\sigma_1\int_{\Omega_1}|\mathbf{E}|^2~d {\bf x}+\sigma_2\int_{\Omega_2}|\mathbf{E}|^2~d {\bf x},
\eeq{1.46}
and these may be solved for $\int_{\Omega_1}|\mathbf{E}|^2 \ d\mathbf{x}$ and $\int_{\Omega_2}|\mathbf{E}|^2 \ d\mathbf{x}$ provided
\begin{equation} \det \left[\begin{array}{c c}
\delta\sigma_1 & \delta\sigma_2
\\ \sigma_1 & \sigma_2
\end{array}\right] \neq 0.
\eeq{1.47}
Thus we obtain \\
\noindent \textbf{Criterion 4}. \textit{If the material has not broken down, we have the bound
\begin{equation} \int_{\Omega_\alpha}|\mathbf{E}|^2 \ d\mathbf{x}\leq |\Omega|f_\alpha(c^{(\alpha)})^2, \eeq{1.48}
for $\alpha=1,2$ where if \eq{1.47} is satisfied the quantity of the left can be determined from boundary data obtained by perturbing the conductivities.}
\section{Real conductivity with two separate boundary conditions via the splitting method}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
In this section we consider conditions which guarantee breakdown occurs within the body, for at least one of two potentials separately
applied to the boundary of the body $\Omega$.
The equations we consider are now
\begin{equation} \nabla \cdot{\bf J}_i=0,\quad {\bf E}_i=-\nabla V_i,\quad {\bf J}_i({\bf x})=\sigma({\bf x}){\bf E}_i, \eeq{0.1aa}
where the scalar conductivity $\sigma({\bf x})$ is real, and $i=1$ labels the fields associated with one set of boundary conditions, while $i=2$ labels the fields
associated with the other set of boundary conditions. If the material has not broken down for both boundary conditions, the inequality
\begin{equation} |\mathbf{E}_m^{(\alpha)}(\mathbf{x})|\leq c^{(\alpha)} \eeq{0.2}
must be satisfied for all ${\bf x}\in\Omega$, for $m=1,2$ and for $\alpha=1,2$, where $\mathbf{E}_m^{(\alpha)}(\mathbf{x}) = \chi_\alpha(\mathbf{x})\mathbf{E}_m(\mathbf{x})$. Formally the equations \eq{0.2} are equivalent
to the quasistatic equations
\begin{equation} \nabla \cdot{\bf J}=0,\quad {\bf E}=-\nabla V,\quad {\bf J}({\bf x})=\sigma({\bf x}){\bf E}, \eeq{0.3}
with a real conductivity $\sigma({\bf x})$ but complex fields
\begin{equation} {\bf J}={\bf J}_1+i{\bf J}_2, \quad {\bf E}={\bf E}_1+i{\bf E}_2, \quad V=V_1+iV_2, \eeq{0.4}
where a subscript $1$ here denotes the real part, while a subscript $2$ here denotes the imaginary part. However, the breakdown conditions \eq{0.2}
are not generally appropriate
for the quasistatic equations, as discussed later in section 4.1. Despite this, the connection with the complex conductivity equations allows us to use much of the
analysis of Thaler and Milton \cite{Thaler:2015:BVI}, who derived bounds on the volume fractions of the two phases, from boundary measurements
using the splitting method introduced by Milton and Nguyen \cite{Milton:2011:BVF}. (See also the paper of Kang, Lim, Lee, Li, and Milton \cite{Kang:2014:BSI}
which addresses the problem of bounding
the volume fraction from boundary measurements with complex conductivities using the translation method, extending earlier work of Kang, Kim, and Milton \cite{Kang:2011:SBV}
and Kang and Milton \cite{Kang:2013:BVF3d} that bounded the volume fractions
using the translation method when the conductivities were real.)
By contrast, we will assume the volume fractions are known, but instead find boundary measurements which necessarily signal that \eq{0.2} is violated.
Thaler and Milton \cite{Thaler:2015:BVI} consider the quantity, for $\mathbf{x} \in \Omega, \mathbf{c}^{(\alpha)} \in \mathbb{R}^2$, and $\alpha = 1,2$
\begin{equation}\label{g}
\mathbf{g}^{(\alpha)}(\mathbf{x};\mathbf{c}^{(\alpha)}) := \displaystyle\sum_{m=1}^2 c^{(\alpha)}_m \left[\mathbf{E}_m^{(\alpha)}(\mathbf{x}) - \dfrac{\chi_\alpha(\mathbf{x})}{f_{\alpha}}\langle\mathbf{E}_m^{(\alpha)}\rangle\right],
\end{equation}
with $\mathbf{E}_m^{(\alpha)}(\mathbf{x}) = \chi_\alpha(\mathbf{x})\mathbf{E}_m(\mathbf{x})$. From the nonnegativity of the variance $\langle \mathbf{g}^{(\alpha)} \cdot \mathbf{g}^{(\alpha)} \rangle \geq 0$, they deduce that the symmetric matrix
\begin{equation} {\bf S}^{(\alpha)} = \left [
\begin{matrix}
A_{11}^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{11}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} && A_{12}^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{12}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} \\
A_{21}^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{21}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} && A_{22}^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{22}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}}
\end{matrix}
\right ] \eeq{0.6}
must be positive semi-definite, where $A_{mn}^{(\alpha)} = \langle \mathbf{E}_m^{(\alpha)} \cdot \mathbf{E}_n^{(\alpha)} \rangle$ and $D_{mn}^{(\alpha)} = \langle \mathbf{E}_m^{(\alpha)} \rangle \cdot \langle \mathbf{E}_n^{(\alpha)} \rangle$. The average fields $\langle \mathbf{E}_m^{(\alpha)} \rangle$ and hence the $D_{mn}^{(\alpha)}$ can be determined from boundary data, but not the constants
$A_{mn}^{(\alpha)}$.
Using the splitting method, we can split
$$\langle \mathbf{E}_k \cdot \mathbf{J}_l \rangle = \langle \chi_1 \mathbf{E}_k \cdot \mathbf{J}_l \rangle + \langle \chi_2 \mathbf{E}_k \cdot \mathbf{J}_l \rangle
=\sigma^{(1)}A_{kl}^{(1)}+\sigma^{(2)}A_{kl}^{(2)}.$$
Notice that in contrast to the complex conductivity case,
we have $\langle \mathbf{E}_k \cdot \mathbf{J}_l \rangle = \langle \mathbf{E}_l \cdot \mathbf{J}_k \rangle$. This gives us the following linear system:
\begin{equation}\label{powersystem}
\begin{bmatrix}
\sigma^{(1)} & \sigma^{(2)} & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\[0.1cm]
0 & 0 & \sigma^{(1)} & \sigma^{(2)} & 0 & 0 \\[0.1cm]
0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & \sigma^{(1)} & \sigma^{(2)}
\end{bmatrix}
\begin{bmatrix} A_{11}^{(1)} \\[0.1cm] A_{11}^{(2)} \\[0.1cm] A_{21}^{(1)} \\[0.1cm] A_{21}^{(2)} \\[0.1cm] A_{22}^{(1)} \\[0.1cm] A_{22}^{(2)} \end{bmatrix}
=
\begin{bmatrix} \langle \mathbf{E}_1\cdot\mathbf{J}_1\rangle \\[0.1cm] \langle\mathbf{E}_1\cdot \mathbf{J}_2\rangle \\[0.1cm] \langle \mathbf{E}_2 \cdot \mathbf{J}_2 \rangle \end{bmatrix} .
\end{equation}
We pick our free variables $x^{(1)} := A_{11}^{(1)}, y^{(1)} := A_{21}^{(1)}, z^{(1)} := A_{22}^{(1)}$. Let $x^{(2)} = A_{11}^{(2)}, y^{(2)} = A_{21}^{(2)}, z^{(2)} = A_{22}^{(2)}$, then from our linear system we find
\begin{align} \label{Aeqns}
\begin{split}
x^{(2)} & = (\langle \mathbf{E}_1\cdot\mathbf{J}_1\rangle - \sigma^{(1)} x^{(1)})/\sigma^{(2)}, \\
y^{(2)} & = (\langle \mathbf{E}_1\cdot\mathbf{J}_2\rangle - \sigma^{(1)} y^{(1)})/\sigma^{(2)}, \\
z^{(2)} & = (\langle \mathbf{E}_2\cdot\mathbf{J}_2\rangle - \sigma^{(1)} z^{(1)})/\sigma^{(2)}.
\end{split}
\end{align}
This, of course, has a unique solution if and only if $\sigma^{(2)} \neq 0$. We can assume that at least one of the phases has a nonzero conductivity (otherwise, we have nothing interesting to say) and then assign the label 2 to a phase with nonzero conductivity to ensure that $\sigma^{(2)} \neq 0$. If \eq{0.2} is satisfied, then the inequalities
$x^{(\alpha)}, y^{(\alpha)}, z^{(\alpha)} \leq (c^{(\alpha)})^2 f_{\alpha}$ must hold for $\alpha=1,2$, and these inequalities with \eq{Aeqns} define a rectangular prism in $(x^{(1)}, y^{(1)}, z^{(1)})$ space, which we
call the compatible region.
\begin{remark}
This analysis shows one can apply the techniques in the paper of Milton and Thaler \cite{Thaler:2015:BVI} to bound the volume fractions of the phases in the case of real conductivity:
the volume fractions must be such that there is a nonempty feasible region of values of $(x^{(1)},y^{(1)},z^{(1)})$ such that the matrices $S^{(1)}$ and $S^{(2)}$ are both
positive semidefinite. We do not explore this further here.
\end{remark}
\begin{remark}
Before proceeding, we note that now, the matrix ${\bf S}^{(\alpha)}$ can be written as
$${\bf S}^{(\alpha)} =
\left [
\begin{matrix}
x^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{11}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} && y^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{12}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} \\
y^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{21}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} && z^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{22}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}}
\end{matrix}
\right ].$$
\end{remark}
The values of $x^{(1)}$, $y^{(1)}$ and $z^{(1)}$ for which ${\bf S}^{(1)}$ and ${\bf S}^{(2)}$ are both positive semidefinite define what we call the feasible region in
$(x^{(1)}, y^{(1)}, z^{(1)})$ space.
\subsection{Bounds in Three Dimensions}
If the feasible region is empty or does not contain the compatible region then the material must have broken down for at least one of the two boundary conditions.
This condition is however not so easy to check without plotting the regions in $(x^{(1)}, y^{(1)}, z^{(1)})$ space, so let us now seek simpler algrebraic conditions
(which may however not be as tight).
The fact that the ${\bf S}^{(\alpha)}$ are positive semi-definite if breakdown has not occurred imposes the following conditions:
\begin{equation}\label{tr11}
x^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{11}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} \geq 0 \Rightarrow (c^{(\alpha)})^2 (f_{\alpha})^2 \geq D_{11}^{(\alpha)},
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}\label{tr22}
z^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{22}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} \geq 0 \Rightarrow (c^{(\alpha)})^2 (f_{\alpha})^2 \geq D_{22}^{(\alpha)},
\end{equation}
\begin{align}\label{detBound}
\det S^{(\alpha)} \geq 0 & \Leftrightarrow \left(x^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{11}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}}\right)\left(z^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{22}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} \right) \geq \left(y^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{12}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}}\right)^2 \nonumber \\
& \Rightarrow \left((c^{(\alpha)})^2 f_{\alpha} - \dfrac{D_{11}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}}\right)\left((c^{(\alpha)})^2 f_{\alpha} - \dfrac{D_{22}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} \right) \geq \left(y^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{12}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}}\right)^2,
\end{align}
where we have used the fact that $x^{(\alpha)}, z^{(\alpha)} \leq (c^{(\alpha)})^2 f_{\alpha}$.
The inequalities (\ref{tr11}) and (\ref{tr22}) give us elementary upper bounds on $D_{11}^{(\alpha)}$ and $D_{22}^{(\alpha)}.$
A potentially sharper bound on how close the $D_{nn}^{(\alpha)}$ can approach these elementary upper bounds is given by (\ref{detBound}), depending on the value of the right hand side. The $y^{(\alpha)}$ are unknown, which presents a problem. There is a way to deal with this: sum (\ref{detBound}) over $\alpha$ (possibly multiplying each equation by a
positive weight $w^{(\alpha)}$) and substitute in the expression for $y^{(2)}$ given in (\ref{Aeqns}). Take the minimum of the right hand side, when treated as a quadratic with respect to $y^{(1)}$, which is likely to be nonzero.
We have shown the following theorem.
\begin{theorem}
Suppose one of the phases has nonzero conductivity; let it be phase 2, so $\sigma^{(2)} \neq 0$. Suppose neither of the volume fractions $f_{\alpha}$ are zero, and that both are known. Define $x^{(\alpha)}, y^{(\alpha)}, z^{(\alpha)}$ as before. Suppose further that the material has not broken down. Then
the feasible region must be nonempty and intersect the compatible rectangular prism region and \emph{(\ref{Aeqns})-(\ref{detBound})} are satisfied.
\end{theorem}
\subsection{Improved Bounds in Two Dimensions}
\label{sec:ImprovedBounds}
In \cite{Thaler:2015:BVI}, having knowledge of two additional null Lagrangians gives an improved bound on the volume fraction.
This is also the case in our situation; the additional null Lagrangians allow us to obtain a sharper bound than in (\ref{detBound}). The null-Lagrangians, which can be determined from boundary measurements, are ${\bf E}_1 \cdot {\bf R}_\perp {\bf E}_2$ and ${\bf J}_1 \cdot {\bf R}_\perp {\bf J}_2$ where
\begin{equation} {\bf R}_\perp=\begin{bmatrix} 0 & 1 \\ -1 & 0 \end{bmatrix}
\eeq{2.18}
denotes the matrix for a $90\,^{\circ}$ clockwise rotation. Assuming $|\sigma^{(1)}| \ne |\sigma^{(2)}|$ they show the quantities $B_{12}^{(\alpha)}\equiv\langle{\bf E}_1^{(\alpha)}\cdot{\bf R}_\perp{\bf E}_2^{(\alpha)}\rangle$ can be expressed in terms of these null-Lagrangians through the identity
\begin{equation}
\begin{bmatrix}
B^{(1)}_{12} \\[0.1cm] B^{(2)}_{12}
\end{bmatrix}
= \dfrac{1}{|\sigma^{(2)}|^2 -
|\sigma^{(1)}|^2}
\begin{bmatrix}
|\sigma^{(2)}|^2 \langle {\bf E}_1 \cdot {\bf R}_\perp {\bf E}_2 \rangle -
\langle {\bf J}_1 \cdot {\bf R}_\perp {\bf J}_2 \rangle \\[0.1cm]
-|\sigma^{(1)}|^2 \langle {\bf E}_1 \cdot {\bf R}_\perp {\bf E}_2 \rangle +
\langle {\bf J}_1 \cdot {\bf R}_\perp {\bf J}_2 \rangle.
\end{bmatrix}
\eeq{2.18a}
The paper \cite{Thaler:2015:BVI} considers the following quantity. For $\mathbf{c}^{(\alpha)}, \mathbf{d}^{(\alpha)}$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$ and for $\alpha = 1, 2$, define
\begin{align}\label{h}
\mathbf{h}^{(\alpha)}(\mathbf{x};\mathbf{c}^{(\alpha)}, \mathbf{d}^{(\alpha)}) := \displaystyle\sum_{m=1}^{2} & c^{(\alpha)}_m \left[\mathbf{E}^{(\alpha)}_m(\mathbf{x}) - \dfrac{\chi_\alpha(\mathbf{x})}{f_{\alpha}}\langle\mathbf{E}_m^{(\alpha)}\rangle\right] \\ & + \displaystyle\sum_{n=1}^{2} d^{(\alpha)}_n \left[R_{\perp}\mathbf{E}^{(\alpha)}_n(\mathbf{x}) - \dfrac{\chi_\alpha(\mathbf{x})}{f_{\alpha}}\langle R_{\perp} \mathbf{E}^{(\alpha)}_n\rangle\right].
\end{align}
From the positivity of the variance $\langle \mathbf{h}^{(\alpha)} \cdot \mathbf{h}^{(\alpha)} \rangle \geq 0$, for all $\mathbf{c}^{(\alpha)}, \mathbf{d}^{(\alpha)}$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$,
they derive the improved bounds
\[
\det[{\bf S}^{(1)}]\geq \tau^{(1)}\quad{\rm and}\quad \det[{\bf S}^{(2)}]\geq \tau^{(2)},
\]
where
\begin{equation}
\tau^{(\alpha)} := \left[B_{12}^{(\alpha)} - \frac{1}{f^{(\alpha)}}\langle{\bf E}_1^{(\alpha)}\rangle \cdot R_{\perp} \langle{\bf E}_2^{(\alpha)}\rangle\right]^2 \ge 0.
\eeq{2.19}
can be determined from boundary measurements. These improved bounds imply a reduced feasible region in $(x^{(1)}, y^{(1)}, z^{(1)})$ space
and imply
\begin{align}\label{lgrnBound}
\left((c^{(\alpha)})^2 f_{\alpha} - \dfrac{D_{11}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}}\right)\left((c^{(\alpha)})^2 f_{\alpha} - \dfrac{D_{22}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} \right) \geq \left(y^{(\alpha)} - \dfrac{D_{12}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}}\right)^2 + \tau_f^{(\alpha)},
\end{align}
where we have again used the fact that $x^{(\alpha)}, z^{(\alpha)} \leq (c^{(\alpha)})^2 f_{\alpha}$.
Recall the issue with the $y^{(\alpha)}$ being unknown. Equation (\ref{lgrnBound}) allows us to bypass the $y^{(\alpha)}$ altogether, and obtain
\begin{align}\label{lgrnBound1}
\left((c^{(\alpha)})^2 f_{\alpha} - \dfrac{D_{11}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}}\right)\left((c^{(\alpha)})^2 f_{\alpha} - \dfrac{D_{22}^{(\alpha)}}{f_{\alpha}} \right) \geq \tau_f^{(\alpha)},
\end{align}
which gives us separate inequalities that constrain how close the $D_{nn}^{(\alpha)}$ can approach their elementary upper bounds. Alternately, we can again take a weighted sum
of \eq{lgrnBound} over $\alpha$ and minimize the quadratic on the right hand side, and derive a sharper bound than in (\ref{lgrnBound1}).
\begin{theorem}
Suppose, as before, $\sigma^{(2)} \neq 0,$ neither volume fractions $f_{\alpha}$ are zero, and both are known. Define $x^{(\alpha)}, y^{(\alpha)}, z^{(\alpha)}$ as before, and suppose the two-dimensional material has not broken down. Then, the reduced feasible region must be nonempty and intersect the compatible rectangular prism region, and \emph{(\ref{Aeqns})-(\ref{tr22}),(\ref{lgrnBound}),(\ref{lgrnBound1})} are satisfied.
\end{theorem}
\begin{remark}
We suspect that although there will be geometries where $\tau_f^{(\alpha)} = 0$, it will usually be nonzero.
\end{remark}
\section{Complex Conductivity}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
\subsection{Simple Conditions on the local field for the onset of nonlinearities}
The electromagnetic response of a body to oscillating fields of a given frequency $\omega$ is well
described by the quasistatic equations when the relevant wavelengths and attenuation lengths are large compared to the body. The quasistatic
equations, in a locally isotropic body, are just like those for static conductivity
\begin{equation} {\bf J}({\bf x})=\sigma({\bf x}){\bf E}({\bf x}), \quad \nabla \cdot{\bf J}=0,\quad {\bf E}=-\nabla V, \eeq{2.1}
except the conductivity $\sigma({\bf x})$, and the fields ${\bf J}$, ${\bf E}$ and $V$ are complex:
\begin{equation} \sigma=\sigma_1+i\sigma_2, \quad {\bf J}={\bf J}_1+i{\bf J}_2, \quad {\bf E}={\bf E}_1+i{\bf E}_2, \quad V=V_1+iV_2, \eeq{2.2}
where a subscript $1$ denotes the real part, while a subscript $2$ denotes the imaginary part.
The local physical electric field is
\begin{equation} {\bf e}({\bf x},t)=\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits\{({\bf E}_1({\bf x})+i{\bf E}_2({\bf x}))e^{-i\omega t}\}, \eeq{2.3}
where $t$ is the time. In general as the time $t$ varies the endpoint of the vector ${\bf e}({\bf x},t)$ describes an ellipse (in the plane
spanned by ${\bf E}_1$ and ${\bf E}_2$). Let us assume that the onset of nonlinearities at a point ${\bf x}$ just depends on the value the
electric field ${\bf e}({\bf x},t)$ takes at the point ${\bf x}$ as time varies. Since the condition must be independent of how we choose the origin of time,
the condition must only depend on the invariants, namely the lengths of the minor and major axes of the ellipse. If at our point ${\bf x}$ the major axis happened to coincide
with the value ${\bf E}_1({\bf x})$ of ${\bf e}({\bf x},t)$ at $t=0$ then its easy to check that ${\bf E}_2({\bf x})$ is the minor axis of the ellipse, and since these axes are perpendicular
${\bf E}_1({\bf x})\cdot{\bf E}_2({\bf x})=0$. In this case our invariants can be taken as $|{\bf E}_1({\bf x})|$ and $|{\bf E}_2({\bf x})|$. More generally, if we choose a different origin of time $t_0$
(which could depend on ${\bf x}$), then the physical electric field is
\begin{equation} {\bf e}({\bf x},t)=\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits\{({\bf E}_1'({\bf x})+i{\bf E}_2'({\bf x}))e^{-i\omega (t-t_0)}\}, \eeq{2.4}
where
\begin{equation} {\bf E}_1'({\bf x})+i{\bf E}_2'({\bf x})=e^{-i\omega t_0}({\bf E}_1({\bf x})+i{\bf E}_2({\bf x})). \eeq{2.5}
Thus we have the identification
\begin{equation} {\bf E}_1'({\bf x})=[\cos(\omega t_0){\bf E}_1({\bf x})+\sin(\omega t_0){\bf E}_2({\bf x})], \quad {\bf E}_2'({\bf x})=[\cos(\omega t_0){\bf E}_2({\bf x})-\sin(\omega t_0){\bf E}_1({\bf x})], \eeq{2.6}
and
\begin{equation} {\bf E}_1'({\bf x})\cdot{\bf E}_2'({\bf x})=\cos(2\omega t_0)[{\bf E}_1({\bf x})\cdot{\bf E}_2({\bf x})]-\sin(2\omega t_0)[|{\bf E}_1({\bf x})|^2-|{\bf E}_2({\bf x})|^2]/2 \eeq{2.7}
is zero when
\begin{equation} \tan(2\omega t_0)=\frac{2{\bf E}_1({\bf x})\cdot{\bf E}_2({\bf x})}{|{\bf E}_1({\bf x})|^2-|{\bf E}_2({\bf x})|^2}, \eeq{2.8}
or when $2\omega t_0=\pi/2$ if $|{\bf E}_1({\bf x})|^2=|{\bf E}_2({\bf x})|^2$. With $t_0$ chosen in this way, the invariants which are the axes of the ellipse
can be taken as $|{\bf E}'_1({\bf x})|$ and $|{\bf E}'_2({\bf x})|$.
\begin{remark}
In summary, at each point ${\bf x}$ the endpoint of the physical electric field vector ${\bf e}({\bf x},t)=\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits\{({\bf E}_1({\bf x})+i{\bf E}_2({\bf x}))e^{-i\omega t}\}$
describes at ellipse in the plane spanned by ${\bf E}_1({\bf x})$ and ${\bf E}_2({\bf x})$ with axes $|{\bf E}'_1({\bf x})|$ and $|{\bf E}'_2({\bf x})|$, where ${\bf E}'_1({\bf x})$ and
${\bf E}'_2({\bf x})$ are given by \eq{2.6} and $t_0$ is given by \eq{2.8}.
\end{remark}
\begin{remark}
The condition for the onset of nonlinearities for at the point ${\bf x}$ in phase $\alpha$, if local, must just depend only on the local invariants of the field,
namely the ellipse axes. Thus the condition for the onset of nonlinearities at the point ${\bf x}$ in phase $\alpha$ can be expressed in the form
\begin{equation} F^{(\alpha)}(|{\bf E}'_1({\bf x})|,|{\bf E}'_2({\bf x})|)\geq 0, \eeq{2.9}
for some function $F^{(\alpha)}$ which is symmetric in its arguments. We will only consider the simple case where
\begin{equation} F^{(\alpha)}(|{\bf E}'_1({\bf x})|,|{\bf E}'_2({\bf x})|)=|{\bf E}'_1({\bf x})|^2+|{\bf E}'_2({\bf x})|^2-(c^{(\alpha)})^2=|{\bf E}_1({\bf x})|^2+|{\bf E}_2({\bf x})|^2-(c^{(\alpha)})^2, \eeq{2.10}
for some positive constants $c^{(\alpha)}$ (where the last identity in \eq{2.10} follows by taking the modulus of both sides of \eq{2.5}). The motivation for considering
such a criterion is not just for simplicity, but also because the intensity $I({\bf x})=|{\bf E}_1({\bf x})|^2+|{\bf E}_2({\bf x})|^2$ is proportional the time averaged dissipation of electrical power into
heat, and it makes physical sense that the materials may break down if this is too high. To see this, note that the physical electric and current fields at the point ${\bf x}$
can be expressed as
\begin{eqnarray} {\bf e}({\bf x},t) & = &\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits\{({\bf E}_1({\bf x})+i{\bf E}_2({\bf x}))e^{-i\omega t}\} \nonumber \\
& = & [({\bf E}_1({\bf x})+i{\bf E}_2({\bf x}))e^{-i\omega t}+({\bf E}_1({\bf x})-i{\bf E}_2({\bf x}))e^{+i\omega t}]/2, \nonumber \\
{\bf j}({\bf x},t)& = & \mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits\{({\bf J}_1({\bf x})+i{\bf J}_2({\bf x}))e^{-i\omega t}\} \nonumber \\
& = & [({\bf J}_1({\bf x})+i{\bf J}_2({\bf x}))e^{-i\omega t}+({\bf J}_1({\bf x})-i{\bf J}_2({\bf x}))e^{+i\omega t}]/2. \eeqa{2.10-0}
Their dot product ${\bf j}({\bf x},t)\cdot{\bf e}({\bf x},t)$ represents the instantaneous electrical power density which is dissipated into heat. Averaging over time,
and using the fact that the time average of $e^{-2i\omega t}$ and $e^{+2i\omega t}$ is zero, we see that
\begin{eqnarray} \langle{\bf j}({\bf x},t)\cdot{\bf e}({\bf x},t)\rangle_t & = & [{\bf J}_1({\bf x})\cdot{\bf E}_1({\bf x})+{\bf J}_2({\bf x})\cdot{\bf E}_2({\bf x})]/2 \nonumber \\
& = &\sigma_1[|{\bf E}_1({\bf x})|^2+|{\bf E}_2({\bf x})|^2]/2=\sigma_1I({\bf x})/2,
\eeqa{2.10-1}
in which $\langle\cdot\rangle_t$ denotes a time average.
Alternative criteria can also have merit from a physical viewpoint. For example, if the frequency $\omega$ is low the breakdown of materials might be dictated
by the peak strength of the electric field, in which case the criterion would be
\begin{equation} F^{(\alpha)}(|{\bf E}'_1({\bf x})|,|{\bf E}'_2({\bf x})|)=\max\{|{\bf E}'_1({\bf x})|,|{\bf E}'_2({\bf x})|\}-c^{(\alpha)}, \eeq{2.10a}
or it could be dictated by the peak value of the power dissipation into heat,
\begin{eqnarray} {\bf j}({\bf x},t)\cdot{\bf e}({\bf x},t) & = & [\sigma_1I({\bf x})+\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits\{({\bf J}_1({\bf x})+i{\bf J}_2({\bf x}))\cdot({\bf E}_1({\bf x})+i{\bf E}_2({\bf x}))e^{-2i\omega t}\}]/2,\nonumber \\
&~&
\eeqa{2.10-2}
in which case the criterion would be
\begin{eqnarray} &~& F^{(\alpha)}(|{\bf E}'_1({\bf x})|,|{\bf E}'_2({\bf x})|) \nonumber \\
&~&\quad =\sigma_1^{(\alpha)}[|{\bf E}'_1({\bf x})|^2+|{\bf E}'_2({\bf x})|^2]/2+\sqrt{(\sigma_1^{(\alpha)})^2+(\sigma_2^{(\alpha)})^2}||{\bf E}'_1({\bf x})|^2-|{\bf E}'_2({\bf x})|^2|/2-(c^{(\alpha)})^2,\nonumber \\
&~&
\eeqa{2.10-3}
in which $\sigma_1^{(\alpha)}$ and $\sigma_2^{(\alpha)}$ are the values of $\sigma_1({\bf x})$ and $\sigma_2({\bf x})$ in phase $\alpha$.
We will not consider these criteria further, as they are more difficult to treat than the criteria \eq{2.10}.
\end{remark}
\subsection{Conditions from boundary measurements which guarantee nonlinearities are present}
Consider a two phase isotropic material, in two or three dimensions, with complex conductivity
\begin{equation}
\sigma^{(\alpha)}=\sigma_1^{(\alpha)}+i\sigma_2^{(\alpha)},
\eeq{2.11}
where the superscript $\alpha=1,2$ denotes the phase and the subscript denotes the real and imaginary component of the conductivity.
In general the complex conductivities $\sigma^{(1)}$ and $\sigma^{(2)}$ depend on the frequency $\omega$. It is helpful
to also introduce the fields
\begin{equation}
{\bf E}^{(\alpha)}({\bf x})=\chi_{\alpha}({\bf x}){\bf E}({\bf x})=({\bf E}_1^{(\alpha)}({\bf x})+i{\bf E}_2^{(\alpha)}({\bf x})),
\eeq{2.12}
where $\chi_{\alpha}({\bf x})$ is the characteristic function taking the value $1$ in phase $\alpha$ and zero elsewhere. Our simplified condition for the onset on nonlinearities
at point ${\bf x}$ in phase $\alpha$ is given by
\begin{equation} |{\bf E}_1^{(\alpha)}({\bf x})|^2+|{\bf E}_2^{(\alpha)}({\bf x})|^2 \geq (c^{(\alpha)})^2. \eeq{2.13}
If this condition is met, then we say that our material has become nonlinear. As observed in \cite{Thaler:2015:BVI} the quantities
\begin{equation} \langle{\bf E}_i^{(\alpha)}\rangle,\quad \langle{\bf E}_i\cdot{\bf J}_k\rangle \eeq{2.14}
can be determined by boundary measurements for all $\alpha$, $i$, and $k$. Employing the splitting method as described earlier, the six quantities
\begin{equation} A_{mn}^{(\alpha)} =
\langle{\bf E}_m^{(\alpha)}\cdot{\bf E}_n^{(\alpha)}\rangle \quad
(\text{for} \ \alpha, \ m, \ n = 1, \ 2)
\eeq{2.15}
are related by four equations, which when solved give
\begin{equation} \begin{bmatrix}
A_{21}^{(1)} \\[0.1cm] A_{21}^{(2)} \\[0.1cm] A_{22}^{(1)}
\\[0.1cm] A_{22}^{(2)}
\end{bmatrix}
= \begin{bmatrix}
-\sigma_2^{(1)} & -\sigma_2^{(2)} & 0 & 0 \\[0.1cm] \sigma_1^{(1)}
& \sigma_1^{(2)} & 0 & 0\\[0.1cm] \sigma_1^{(1)} & \sigma_1^{(2)}
& -\sigma_2^{(1)} & -\sigma_2^{(2)} \\[0.1cm] \sigma_2^{(1)} &
\sigma_2^{(2)} & \sigma_1^{(1)} & \sigma_1^{(2)}
\end{bmatrix}^{-1}
\begin{bmatrix}
\left\langle {\bf E}_1\cdot{\bf J}_1\right\rangle - \sigma_1^{(1)} x - \sigma_1^{(2)} y
\\[0.1cm] \left\langle {\bf E}_1\cdot {\bf J}_2\right\rangle -\sigma_2^{(1)} x -
\sigma_2^{(2)} y \\[0.1cm] \left\langle {\bf E}_2\cdot {\bf J}_1 \right\rangle \\[0.1cm] \left\langle
{\bf E}_2 \cdot {\bf J}_2 \right\rangle
\end{bmatrix}.
\eeq{2.16}
in terms of the ``free variables'' $x\equiv A_{11}^{(1)}$ and $y \equiv A_{11}^{(2)}$
(assuming $\beta = \sigma_1^{(1)}\sigma_2^{(2)} - \sigma_2^{(1)}\sigma_1^{(2)}\ne 0$). These two free variables $x$ and $y$ cannot however be directly evaluated from boundary
measurements if data are only available at one frequency. If the materials have a linear response everywhere then we have for $\alpha=1,2$,
\begin{equation} A_{11}^{(\alpha)}+A_{22}^{(\alpha)}=\langle {\bf E}_1^{(\alpha)}\cdot{\bf E}_1^{(\alpha)}+{\bf E}_2^{(\alpha)}\cdot{\bf E}_2^{(\alpha)}\rangle\leq f^{\alpha}(c^{(\alpha)})^2, \eeq{2.17}
and by using \eq{2.16} to eliminate $A_{22}^{(1)}$ and $A_{22}^{(2)}$
each of these conditions reduces to a linear inequality in the $(x,y)$ plane. The intersection of the two linear inequalities defines what we call the compatible region in the $(x,y)$ plane.
Following the procedure of Thaler and Milton \cite{Thaler:2015:BVI}, we can use the positivity of the variance, $\langle \mathbf{g}^{(\alpha)} \cdot \mathbf{g}^{(\alpha)} \rangle \geq 0$, for all $\mathbf{c}^{(\alpha)} \in \mathbb{R}^2$,
where $\mathbf{g}^{(\alpha)}$ is given by \eq{g}, to obtain the condition that the matrices ${\bf S}^{\alpha}$ given by \eq{0.6} are positive semidefinite. Making the substitutions \eq{2.16}
and the symmetric matrices ${\bf S}^\alpha$ can be expressed in terms of $x$ and $y$:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
{\bf S}^{(1)}(x,y) &:= \begin{bmatrix} x - \dfrac{\|\langle{\bf E}_1^{(1)}\rangle\|^2}{f^{(1)}} & S_{21}^{(1)}(x,y) \\ S_{21}^{(1)}(x,y) & -x + \eta^{(1)} - \dfrac{\|\langle{\bf E}_2^{(1)}\rangle\|^2}{f^{(1)}} \end{bmatrix}, \\[0.1cm]
{\bf S}^{(2)}(x,y) &:= \begin{bmatrix} y - \dfrac{\|\langle{\bf E}_1^{(2)}\rangle\|^2}{f^{(2)}} & S_{21}^{(2)}(x,y) \\ S_{21}^{(2)}(x,y) & -y + \eta^{(2)} - \dfrac{\|\langle{\bf E}_2^{(2)}\rangle\|^2}{f^{(2)}} \end{bmatrix}, \\
\end{aligned}
\eeq{2.17a}
where
\[
\begin{aligned}
S_{21}^{(1)}&(x,y) = -\gamma x - \psi^{(1)} y + \xi^{(1)} - \dfrac{\langle{\bf E}_1^{(1)}\rangle\cdot\langle{\bf E}_2^{(1)}\rangle}{f^{(1)}} ;\\
S_{21}^{(2)}&(x,y) = \psi^{(2)} x + \gamma y - \xi^{(2)} - \dfrac{\langle{\bf E}_1^{(2)}\rangle\cdot\langle{\bf E}_2^{(2)}\rangle}{f^{(2)}} ; \\
\beta &= \sigma_1^{(1)}\sigma_2^{(2)} - \sigma_2^{(1)}\sigma_1^{(2)} ; \quad
\gamma = \frac{\sigma_1^{(1)} \sigma_1^{(2)} + \sigma_2^{(1)} \sigma_2^{(2)}}{\beta} ; \quad
\psi^{(1)} = \frac{\left|\sigma^{(2)}\right|^2}{\beta} ; \quad
\psi^{(2)} = \frac{\left|\sigma^{(1)}\right|^2}{\beta} ;\\
\xi^{(1)} &= \dfrac{\sigma_2^{(2)} \left\langle {\bf E}_1\cdot{\bf J}_2\right\rangle + \sigma_1^{(2)} \left\langle {\bf E}_1\cdot {\bf J}_1\right\rangle}{\beta} ; \quad
\xi^{(2)} = \dfrac{\sigma_2^{(1)} \left\langle {\bf E}_1\cdot{\bf J}_2\right\rangle + \sigma_1^{(1)} \left\langle{\bf E}_1\cdot {\bf J}_1\right\rangle}{\beta} ; \\
\eta^{(1)} &= \dfrac{\sigma_1^{(2)}\left(\left\langle{\bf E}_2\cdot{\bf J}_1\right\rangle - \left\langle{\bf E}_1\cdot{\bf J}_2\right\rangle\right) + \sigma_2^{(2)}\left(\left\langle{\bf E}_1\cdot{\bf J}_1\right\rangle + \left\langle{\bf E}_2\cdot{\bf J}_2\right\rangle\right)}{\beta} ; \\
\eta^{(2)} &= \dfrac{\sigma_1^{(1)} \left(\left\langle{\bf E}_1\cdot{\bf J}_2\right\rangle - \left\langle{\bf E}_2\cdot{\bf J}_1\right\rangle\right) - \sigma_2^{(1)}\left(\left\langle{\bf E}_1\cdot{\bf J}_1\right\rangle + \left\langle{\bf E}_2\cdot{\bf J}_2\right\rangle\right)}{\beta} .
\end{aligned}
\]
The constraint that the matrices ${\bf S}^{(\alpha)}$ must be positive semidefinite confines the pair $(x,y)$ to lie within a region which is the intersection of the ellipse
$\det [{\bf S}^{(1)}(x,y)]\geq 0$ with the ellipse $\det [{\bf S}^{(2)}(x,y)]\geq 0$. We call this region of intersection the feasible region. If it is empty, or does not intersect the
compatible region, then one or both of the materials must have become nonlinear somewhere (see Figure 2).
We have outlined the proof of the following theorem
\begin{theorem}
Suppose that $\beta = \sigma_1^{(1)}\sigma_2^{(2)} - \sigma_2^{(1)}\sigma_1^{(2)}\ne 0$, and that the volume fractions $f_{\alpha}$ are both nonzero and known. Defining $x$ and $y$ as above, if the material has not experienced the onset of nonlinearities, then it is necessary that the region of intersection of the two
ellipses in the $x-y$ plane given by the constraints on ${\bf S}^{(\alpha)}$ must be nonempty and intersect the compatible region.
\end{theorem}
\begin{figure}[htp]
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.3\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=1.3\textwidth]{GuaranteedBreakdown.pdf}
\caption{}
\end{subfigure}\hspace{60 pt}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.3\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{GuaranteedBreakdown1.pdf}
\caption{}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{The material must have experienced nonlinearities if either (a) the feasible region (which is the region of intersection
of the two ellipses) is empty or (b) The feasible region does not intersect the compatible region (which is the polygonal region shaded with black lines).}.
\label{fig:Guaranteed}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[htp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.50\textwidth]{PossibleBreakdown.pdf}
\caption{Here the feasible region intersects the compatible region, so the material may, or may not, have experienced the onset of nonlinearities depending on the internal geometry of the body.}
\label{fig:Possible}
\end{figure}
Using the additional null-Lagrangians ${\bf E}_1 \cdot {\bf R}_\perp {\bf E}_2$ and ${\bf J}_1 \cdot {\bf R}_\perp {\bf J}_2$, as described in section \ref{sec:ImprovedBounds} and as in reference \cite{Thaler:2015:BVI},
the feasible region is reduced to the region in the $(x,y)$ plane which is the intersection of the
two ellipses
\begin{equation}
\det[{\bf S}^{(1)}(x,y)]\geq \tau^{(1)}\quad{\rm and}\quad \det[{\bf S}^{(2)}(x,y)]\geq \tau^{(2)},
\label{eq:TighterBounds}
\end{equation}
where $\tau^{(\alpha)}$ is given by \eq{2.19}. Here we note that it is necessary but not sufficient to say that if the material has not experienced the onset of nonlinearities then the feasible region must be nonempty and intersect the compatible region.
\begin{theorem}
Suppose that $\beta = \sigma_1^{(1)}\sigma_2^{(2)} - \sigma_2^{(1)}\sigma_1^{(2)}\ne 0$, and that the volume fractions $f^{(\alpha)}$ are both nonzero and known. Defining $x$ and $y$ as above, if the material has not experienced the onset of nonlinearities, then it is necessary that the region of intersection (in the $x-y$ plane) of the two ellipses given by (\ref{eq:TighterBounds}) is nonempty and intersects the compatible region given by \eq{2.17}.
\end{theorem}
\begin{figure}[htp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.50\textwidth]{ImprovedBound.pdf}
\caption{The dashed and dotted elliptical boundaries mark the previous bounds as in figure \ref{fig:Possible}, while the solid shaded portions show the improved bounds. The intersection of the compatible region and the feasible region is now empty so it is guaranteed that the material has experienced the onset of nonlinearities.}
\label{fig:Improved}
\end{figure}
\section{Two-dimensional Elasticity}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
In two-dimensional linear elasticity (applicable to plane stress or plane strain problems) with isotropic constituents the constitutive equation takes the form
\begin{equation} \bfm\tau={\bf C}\nabla{\bf u}=\mu[\nabla{\bf u}+(\nabla{\bf u})^T]+(\kappa-\mu)\mathop{\rm Tr}\nolimits(\nabla{\bf u}){\bf I},
\eeq{5.1}
where $\bfm\tau({\bf x})$ is the $2\times 2$ symmetric matrix valued stress, ${\bf C}({\bf x})$ is the elasticity tensor,
$\nabla{\bf u}({\bf x})$ is the $2\times 2$ matrix valued displacement field gradient, and $\mu({\bf x})$ and $\kappa({\bf x})$ are the local shear and bulk moduli. On the space of $2\times 2$ matrices it is convenient to introduce the basis
\begin{equation} B=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}(\begin{bmatrix} 0 & 1 \\ -1 & 0 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} 1 & 0 \\ 0 & -1 \end{bmatrix}, \begin{bmatrix} 0 & 1 \\ 1 & 0 \end{bmatrix}). \eeq{5.11}
In this basis the stress $\bfm\tau({\bf x})$ is represented by the vector field
\begin{equation}\bfm\tau = ( 0, \tau_{1}, \tau_{2}, \tau_{3}), \eeq{5.12}
where the first element is zero because the stress matrix is symmetric. The displacement field gradient is represented by the vector field
\begin{equation} \nabla {\bf u}=(F_{0},\epsilon_{1},\epsilon_{2},\epsilon_{3}), \eeq{5.15}
where $F_{0}$ is proportional to the antisymmetric part of $\nabla{\bf u}$, corresponding to the local rotation, and $\epsilon_{1}$, $\epsilon_{2}$, and $\epsilon_{3}$ just depend on the
symmetric part of $\nabla{\bf u}$, which is the strain $\bfm\epsilon({\bf x})=[\nabla{\bf u}+(\nabla{\bf u})^T]/2$.
If the stress is too large, then nonlinear effects may become important. In particular if the stress is sufficiently large the material may undergo plastic yielding. For simplicity
we assume the response of the material is linear until it undergoes plastic yielding and we seek to determine boundary values of the displacement ${\bf u}$ and traction
$\bfm\tau{\bf n}$ which if observed would necessarily imply that the material inside the body had yielded. (Without this assumption these boundary values would imply that the material is no
longer correctly modelled by the linear elasticity equations).
There are multiple yield criteria that have proven to be useful. In three dimensional elasticity these
criteria depend on the three eigenvalues $\sigma_1$, $\sigma_2$ and $\sigma_3$ of the $3\times 3$ symmetric matrix valued stress: if these eigenvalues lie
inside the yield surface the material will not have yielded, otherwise it will have yielded, or is at the threshold of yielding.
Among the simplest models for the yield surface are the Von Mises Yield surface
\begin{equation} (\sigma_{1}-\sigma_{2})^{2}+(\sigma_{2}-\sigma_{3})^{2}+(\sigma_{3}-\sigma_{1})^{2}={\rm constant}, \eeq{5.3}
and the Tresca Yield Surface
\begin{equation} \max\{|\sigma_{1}-\sigma_{2}|,|\sigma_{2}-\sigma_{3}|,|\sigma_{3}-\sigma_{1}|\}={\rm constant}. \eeq{5.4}
We only consider two dimensional elasticity, so \eq{5.3} and \eq{5.4} reduce to
\begin{equation} |\sigma_{1}-\sigma_{2}|={\rm constant}, \eeq{5.5}
where $\sigma_1$ and $\sigma_2$ are the eigenvalues of the $2\times 2$ symmetric matrix valued stress $\bfm\tau$.
By rotating the stress matrix $\bfm\tau$ at a given point so it is diagonal and takes the form
\begin{eqnarray} \bfm\tau & = & \begin{bmatrix} \sigma_{1} & 0 \\ 0 & \sigma_{2} \end{bmatrix} \nonumber \\
& = & \frac{\sigma_{1}+\sigma_{2}}{2} \begin{bmatrix} 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 \end{bmatrix} + \frac{\sigma_{1}-\sigma_{2}}{2} \begin{bmatrix} 1 & 0 \\ 0 & -1 \end{bmatrix}, \eeqa{5.13}
we see that (since $\tau_{3}=0$)
\begin{equation} \frac{(\sigma_{1}-\sigma_{2})^{2}}{2}=\tau_{2}^{2}+\tau_{3}^{2}. \eeq{5.14}
As the right hand side remains invariant as the matrix $\bfm\tau$ is rotated this expression is valid even if $\bfm\tau$ is not diagonal
and so the Von Mises-Tresca criterion becomes
\begin{equation} \tau_{2}^{2}+\tau_{3}^{2}={\rm constant}. \eeq{5.14a}
To determine conditions which necessarily imply yield has occurred, we will use the splitting method used by Milton and Nguyen
\cite{Milton:2011:BVF}. They note that the quantities
\begin{equation} E = \langle \bfm\tau \cdot \nabla {\bf u} \rangle,\quad \bfm\tau_{0}=\langle \bfm\tau \rangle, \quad \langle \nabla {\bf u} \rangle, \quad a=\langle \det \bfm\tau \rangle, \quad
b=\langle \det \nabla {\bf u} \rangle, \eeq{5.10}
can all be evaluated from boundary measurements, using integration by parts. In the basis \eq{5.11} the expressions for $a$ and $b$ become
\begin{equation} a=\frac{1}{2}\langle \tau_{1}^{2}-\tau_{2}^{2}-\tau_{3}^{2} \rangle,\quad b=\frac{1}{2}\langle F_{0}^{2}+\epsilon_{1}^{2}-\epsilon_{2}^{2}-\epsilon_{3}^{2}\rangle. \eeq{5.16}
Since not much can be said about $\langle F_{0}^{2}\rangle$ other than it being not less than $\langle F_{0}\rangle^2$, it is useful to introduce the additional
quantity
\begin{eqnarray} c\equiv b-\frac{1}{2}\langle F_{0} \rangle ^{2} \geq b-\frac{1}{2}\langle F_{0}^{2} \rangle=\frac{1}{2}\langle \epsilon_{1}^{2}-\epsilon_{2}^{2}-\epsilon_{3}^{2}\rangle, \eeqa{5.17}
which can also be determined from boundary measurements.
The inequality here becomes an equality if and only if $F_{0}$ is constant everywhere.
The total elastic energy $E$ can be subdivided into separate quantities for each phase and according to whether it is a bulk or shear energy component:
\begin{eqnarray} E_{1b}=\langle \chi_{1}\tau_{1}\epsilon_{1} \rangle=2\kappa_{1}\langle\chi_{1}\epsilon_{1}^{2}\rangle, \eeqa{5.18}
\begin{eqnarray} E_{2b}=\langle \chi_{2}\tau_{1}\epsilon_{1} \rangle=2\kappa_{2}\langle\chi_{2}\epsilon_{1}^{2}\rangle, \eeqa{5.19}
\begin{eqnarray} E_{1s}=\langle \chi_{1}(\tau_{2}\epsilon_{2}+\tau_{3}\epsilon_{3}) \rangle=2\mu_{1}\langle\chi_{1}(\epsilon_{2}^{2}+\epsilon_{3}^{2})\rangle, \eeqa{5.20}
\begin{eqnarray} E_{2s}=\langle \chi_{2}(\tau_{2}\epsilon_{2}+\tau_{3}\epsilon_{3}) \rangle=2\mu_{2}\langle\chi_{2}(\epsilon_{2}^{2}+\epsilon_{3}^{2})\rangle, \eeqa{5.21}
where $\chi$ is the indicator function for each phase, numbers denote the phase, $b$ denotes bulk component, $s$ denotes the shear component, $\kappa$ is the bulk modulus, and $\mu$ is the shear modulus. These quantities cannot individually be determined from boundary measurements, but Milton and Nguyen \cite{Milton:2011:BVF} correlate them through inequalities.
From \eq{5.18}-\eq{5.21}, we obtain
\begin{equation} E=E_{1b}+E_{2b}+E_{1s}+E_{2s}, \eeq{5.22}
\begin{equation} a=\kappa_{1}E_{1b}+\kappa_{2}E_{2b}-\mu_{1}E_{1s}-\mu_{2}E_{2s}, \eeq{5.23}
\begin{equation} c \geq \frac{E_{1b}}{4\kappa_{1}}+\frac{E_{2b}}{4\kappa_{2}}-\frac{E_{1s}}{4\mu_{1}}-\frac{E_{2s}}{4\mu_{2}}. \eeq{5.24}
Further inequalities can be obtained using positivity of the variances
\begin{equation} \langle(\chi_1 \varepsilon_i - \frac{\chi_1}{f_1}\langle \chi_1\varepsilon_k\rangle)^2\rangle \geq 0,\quad
\langle(\chi_2 \varepsilon_i - \frac{\chi_2}{f_1}\langle \chi_2\varepsilon_k\rangle)^2\rangle \geq 0,
\eeq{5.24a}
which imply
\begin{equation} E_{1b}\geq\frac{A_{1b}}{f_{1}}, \eeq{5.32}
\begin{equation} E_{2b}\geq\frac{A_{2b}}{f_{2}}, \eeq{5.33}
\begin{equation} E_{1s}\geq\frac{A_{1s}}{f_{1}}, \eeq{5.34}
\begin{equation} E_{2s}\geq\frac{A_{2s}}{f_{2}}, \eeq{5.35}
where $f_1$ and $f_2$ are the volume fractions of each phase, and
\begin{equation} A_{1b}=2\kappa_{1}\langle\chi_{1}\epsilon_{1}\rangle^{2}, \eeq{5.27}
\begin{equation} A_{2b}=2\kappa_{2}\langle\chi_{2}\epsilon_{1}\rangle^{2}, \eeq{5.28}
\begin{equation} A_{1s}=2\mu_{1}(\langle\chi_{1}\epsilon_{2}\rangle^2+\langle\chi_{1}\epsilon_{3}\rangle^{2}), \eeq{5.29}
\begin{equation} A_{2s}=2\mu_{2}(\langle\chi_{2}\epsilon_{2}\rangle^{2}+\langle\chi_{2}\epsilon_{3}\rangle^{2}). \eeq{5.30}
These four quantities can be determined from the known values of $\langle \bfm\tau \rangle$ and $\langle \nabla {\bf u} \rangle$
using the relations
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle \chi_1\varepsilon_1\rangle & = & \frac{1}{2(\kappa_2 - \kappa_1)}(2\kappa_2\langle\varepsilon_1\rangle - \langle \sigma_1\rangle), \quad \langle \chi_2\varepsilon_1\rangle = \frac{1}{2(\kappa_1 - \kappa_2)}(2\kappa_1\langle\varepsilon_1\rangle - \langle \sigma_1
\rangle), \nonumber \\
\langle\chi_1 \varepsilon_j\rangle & = & \frac{1}{2(\mu_2 - \mu_1)}(2\mu_2\langle \varepsilon_j\rangle - \langle \sigma_j\rangle), \quad \langle\chi_1 \varepsilon_j\rangle = \frac{1}{2(\mu_2 - \mu_1)}(2\mu_2\langle \varepsilon_j\rangle - \langle \sigma_j\rangle), \quad j = 2, 3. \nonumber \\ &~ &
\eeqa{5.30a}
For this analysis, we focus our view on phase one.
Solving \eq{5.22} and \eq{5.23} for $E_{2b}$ and $E_{2s}$ yields
\begin{equation} E_{2b}=\frac{a+E\mu_{2}-E_{1b}(\kappa_{1}+\mu_{2})+E_{1s}(\mu_{1}-\mu_{2})}{\kappa_{2}+\mu_{2}},\eeq{5.25}
and
\begin{equation} E_{2s}=\frac{(\kappa_1-\kappa_2)E_{1b}-(\mu_1+\kappa_2)E_{1s}-a+E\kappa_{2}}{\kappa_{2}+\mu_{2}}.\eeq{5.26}
Plugging \eq{5.25} and \eq{5.26} into \eq{5.33} and \eq{5.35} gives
\begin{equation}
\frac{a+E\mu_{2}-E_{1b}(\kappa_{1}+\mu_{2})+E_{1s}(\mu_{1}-\mu_{2})}{\kappa_{2}+\mu_{2}}
\geq\frac{A_{2b}}{f_{2}},
\eeq{5.36}
and
\begin{equation} \frac{(\kappa_1-\kappa_2)E_{1b}-(\mu_1+\kappa_2)E_{1s}-a+E\kappa_{2}}{\kappa_{2}+\mu_{2}}
\geq\frac{A_{2s}}{f_{2}}, \eeq{5.37}
and \eq{5.24} becomes
\begin{equation} 4\kappa_{2}\mu_{2}c\geq E(\mu_{2}-\kappa_{2})-\frac{E_{1b}}{\kappa_{1}}(\mu_{2}+\kappa_{1})(\kappa_{1}-\kappa_{2})+\frac{E_{1s}}{\mu_{1}}(\mu_{1}+\kappa_{2})(\mu_{1}-\mu_{2})+a. \eeq{5.38}
So \eq{5.32}, \eq{5.34}, \eq{5.36}, \eq{5.37}, and \eq{5.38} bound a feasible region in the $(E_{1b}, E_{1s})$ plane that, in the case $\mu_1>\mu_2$
and $\kappa_1>\kappa_2$, might resemble Figure 5.
\begin{figure}[htp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.50\textwidth]{f3.pdf}
\caption{The feasible region}
\label{fig:elasticity}
\end{figure}
If the material has not yielded the Von Mises-Tresca criterion \eq{5.14a} implies
\begin{equation} \epsilon_{2}^{2}+\epsilon_{3}^{2}\leq k_1, \eeq{5.38a}
at each point in phase 1, where the threshold $k_1$ depends on the material properties of phase 1. This implies
\begin{equation} E_{1s}\leq 2\mu_1f_1k_1 \eeq{5.38b}
which defines a region in the $(E_{1b}, E_{1s})$ plane that is compatible with the Von Mises-Tresca criterion. Other yield criteria
would yield different compatible regions in the $(E_{1b}, E_{1s})$ plane. If the feasible region does not intersect the compatible region
then the body must have yielded. (One cannot conclude that it is phase 1, rather than phase 2 which has yielded because if either phase
yields, the linear equations of elasticity no longer apply). A similar analysis applies to phase 2, by switching the subscripts 1 and 2.
If we have additional information about the response of the body to slowly oscillating boundary displacement fields then
the feasible region can be reduced down to a point. If the displacement field at the boundary is ${\bf u}_0$ without the oscillations,
let it be the real part of $e^{i\omega t}{\bf u}_0$ with the oscillations, where $t$ is the time and $\omega$ is the frequency, which is small. We can
forget about the factor of $e^{i\omega t}$ since this will factor out of all equations, due to linearity. Thus, mathematically
the boundary displacement can be kept at ${\bf u}_0$ but the internal fields and the moduli will become complex due to viscoelasticity.
If the frequency is low, we can use the quasistatic elasticity equations, and the elasticity tensor will be perturbed from ${\bf C}({\bf x})$ to ${\bf C}({\bf x})+\delta{\bf C}({\bf x})$ while the internal displacement field will be perturbed from ${\bf u}({\bf x})$ to ${\bf u}({\bf x})+\delta{\bf u}({\bf x})$, where $\delta{\bf C}({\bf x})$ and $\delta{\bf u}({\bf x})$ are small and complex. Introducing
the strain $\bfm\epsilon=[\nabla{\bf u}+(\nabla{\bf u})^T]/2$ and its complex perturbation $\delta\bfm\epsilon$, we first note that with the perturbation
$$\int_{\Omega}\bfm\epsilon:{\bf C}\bfm\epsilon \quad {\rm changes~to} \quad \int_{\Omega}(\bfm\epsilon+\delta\bfm\epsilon):({\bf C}+\delta {\bf C})(\bfm\epsilon+ \delta\bfm\epsilon),$$
and both these quantities can be obtained, using integration by parts, from the boundary values of ${\bf u}$ and $\bfm\tau{\bf n}$. To second order in the perturbation we have
\begin{equation} \int_{\Omega}(\bfm\epsilon+\delta\bfm\epsilon):({\bf C}+\delta {\bf C})(\bfm\epsilon+ \delta\bfm\epsilon) \approx \int_{\Omega}\bfm\epsilon:{\bf C}\bfm\epsilon + 2\int_{\Omega}\delta\bfm\epsilon:{\bf C}\bfm\epsilon + \int_{\Omega}\bfm\epsilon:\delta{\bf C}\bfm\epsilon, \eeq{5.39}
and
\begin{eqnarray} \int_{\Omega}\delta\bfm\epsilon:{\bf C}\bfm\epsilon= \int_{\delta\Omega}\delta {\bf u}\cdot(\bfm\tau{\bf n})dS = 0, \eeqa{5.40}
since $\delta {\bf u} = 0$ on $\partial\Omega$. So the quantity
\begin{eqnarray} \delta E=\frac{1}{\mid\Omega\mid}\int\epsilon\delta C\epsilon & = & 2\delta\kappa_{1}\langle\chi_{1}\epsilon_{1}^{2}\rangle+2\delta\mu_{1}\langle\chi_{2}(\epsilon_{2}^{2}+\epsilon_{3}^{2})\rangle+2\delta\kappa_{2}\langle\chi_{2}\epsilon_{1}^{2}\rangle+2\delta\mu_{2}\langle\chi_{2}(\epsilon_{2}^{2}+\epsilon_{3}^{2})\rangle \nonumber \\
&=& 2\frac{\delta\kappa_{1}}{\kappa_{1}}E_{1b}+2\frac{\delta\mu_{1}}{\mu_{1}}E_{1s}+2\frac{\delta\kappa_{2}}{\kappa_{2}}E_{2b}+2\frac{\delta\mu_{2}}{\mu_{2}}E_{2s} \eeqa{5.41}
can be approximately determined from boundary measurements. If $\delta\kappa_{1}$, $\delta\mu_{1}$, $\delta\kappa_{2}$, $\delta\mu_{2}$ are complex, then
\begin{equation} \mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits\delta E=2\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\frac{\delta\kappa_{1}}{\kappa_{1}})E_{1b}+2\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\frac{\delta\mu_{1}}{\mu_{1}})E_{1s}+2\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\frac{\delta\kappa_{2}}{\kappa_{2}})E_{2b}+2\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\frac{\delta\mu_{2}}{\mu_{2}})E_{2s}, \eeq{5.42}
and
\begin{equation} \mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits\delta E=2\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\frac{\delta\kappa_{1}}{\kappa_{1}})E_{1b}+2\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\frac{\delta\mu_{1}}{\mu_{1}})E_{1s}+2\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\frac{\delta\kappa_{2}}{\kappa_{2}})E_{2b}+2\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\frac{\delta\mu_{2}}{\mu_{2}})E_{2s}, \eeq{5.43}
are approximately known.
In the generic case, where there is no degeneracy, the four equations \eq{5.22}, \eq{5.23}, \eq{5.42} and \eq{5.43}, can be solved for $E_{1b}, E_{1s}, E_{2b}$ and $E_{2s}$.
If the point $(E_{1b}, E_{1s})$ lies outside the compatible region for phase 1 or if $(E_{2b}, E_{2s})$ lies outside the compatible region for phase 2, then the body must
have yielded.
\section{$E_\Omega$ Inclusions}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
In this section we give a brief overview of the method of Kang, Kim and Milton \cite{Kang:2011:SBV} for finding optimal $E_\Omega$ inclusions in two-dimensions. These are
defined as an inclusion of phase $1$ inside the body $\Omega$ such that for appropriate boundary conditions the field inside the inclusion is constant.
These inclusions are of interest to us because for $E_\Omega$ inclusions, with the appropriate boundary conditions on the fields, many of the previously discussed bounds are optimal. We assume the inclusion is simply connected
and lying strictly within the simply connected body $\Omega$.
Coordinates are chosen so the $x$-axis is aligned with the field inside the inclusion, and so the projection of the inclusion onto the $y$-axis is the interval $[-1,1]$.
Then the constancy of the field
is formulated as $V(x,y) = x$ in $E_\Omega$. The potential satisfies the standard conductivity equations
\begin{equation}
{\bf J}(x,y)=\sigma(x,y) {\bf E}(x,y), \quad {\bf E}(x,y)=-\nabla V(x,y),\quad \nabla \times [{\bf R}_\perp {\bf J}(x,y)]=0,
\eeq{6.1}
where ${\bf R}_\perp$ is the rotation matrix \eq{2.18} for a $90^\circ$ degree rotation. Considering the divergence of ${\bf J}$ as the curl of the rotated ${\bf J}$ field allows us to define a potental W such that:
\begin{equation}
{\bf R}_\perp {\bf J}(x,y)=\nabla W.
\eeq{6.5}
So in phase 2, which without loss of generality we assume to have conductivity $\sigma_2=1$, we have that $ {\bf R}_\perp \nabla W=\nabla V$. Equivalently $W$ and $V$ satisfy the Cauchy-Riemann equations and thus $V+iW$ is an analytic function of $x+iy$ in phase 2. In phase 1, ${\bf R}_\perp \nabla W=\sigma_1\nabla V=\sigma_1\nabla x$, and since the potentials
$V$ and $W$ are continuous across the boundary we have that
\begin{equation}
V=x, \quad W = \sigma_1 y, \quad {\rm on} ~
\partial E_\Omega.
\eeq{6.6}
Next define the potential:
\begin{equation}
v+iw=\frac{i(V+iW-z)}{1-\sigma_1},
\eeq{6.7}
which is an analytic function of $z=x+iy$
in $\Omega\setminus E_\Omega$ and we see that on $\partial E_\Omega$
\begin{equation}
v=y, \quad w=0.
\eeq{6.8}
As is often useful for solving two dimensional free boundary problems involving the Laplace equation, Kang, Kim, and Milton \cite{Kang:2011:SBV} use a hodograph transform. To do this, assume that $v+iw$ is a univalent function of $x+iy$ outside of $E_\Omega$ and thus $z=x+iy$ is an analytic function of $h=v+iw$. Then the image of $E_\Omega$
is a slit on the $v$ axis (where $w=0$) from $v=-1$ to $v=1$. We want to find functions $x+iy$ of $h=v+iw$ such that $y=v$ on the slit. It is helpful to consider the function $\bar z=\bar x+i\bar y=z-ih=x+iy-iv+w$ which on the slit has $\bar y=y-v=0$. Now make the fractional linear transformation
\begin{equation} s=\frac{1-h}{1+h}=\frac{1-[v+iw]}{v+iw+1},
\eeq{6.10} which maps $ h=1$ to $s=0$ and $h=-1$ to $s=\infty$. So in the $s$-plane the slit becomes the positive real axis. Next, the square root transformation is used to map the positive real axis to the entire real axis, namely $t=\sqrt s$ where $\sqrt s$ is chosen with a branch cut on the positive real axis. Thus $\bar y=0$ on the entire real $t$
axis. This is satisfied by taking $\bar z=f(t)$ where $f(t)$ satisfies $f(t^*)=(f(t))^*$ and $a^*$ is the complex conjugate of $a$. To satisfy this we could set
\begin{equation} f(t)=\sum_{\alpha=1}^n [\frac{ b_\alpha}{t-t_\alpha}+\frac{b_\alpha^*}{t-t_\alpha^*}]+c,
\eeq{6.11}
where the $t_\alpha$ are complex with nonzero imaginary components (to ensure $f(t)$ has no poles on the real axis), the $b_\alpha$ are real or complex, and $c$ is real.
Tracing back the formulae,
we see that
\begin{equation} z=z(h)=ih+f\left(\sqrt{\frac{1-h}{1+h}}\right), \eeq{6.11a}
and since $h=y$ on the slit, the boundary of the $E_\Omega$ inclusion is given by the formula
\begin{equation} x=f\left(\pm\sqrt{\frac{1-y}{1+y}}\right). \eeq{6.11b}
To avoid self intersections it is required that $f(t) \neq f(-t)$ for all real $t\ne 0$. Additionally, to ensure the univalence of $z(h)$ in the neighbourhood of the slit ends
$h=-1$ and $h=1$ it is required that the derivative $f'(0)$ is nonzero and $f(t)$ has the asymptotic expansion
\begin{equation} f(t)=\beta_0+\beta_1/t+\mathcal{O}(|t|^{-2})\quad {\rm as}~|t|\to\infty, \eeq{6.11c}
where $\beta_1$ is real and positive.
Kang, Kim and Milton \cite{Kang:2011:SBV} gave some numerical examples illustrating $E_\Omega$ inclusions. Figure 6 shows a further example of an $E_\Omega$ inclusion
and the function which generates it. By taking functions $f(t)$ of the form \eq{6.11} with $n\leq 5$ and real or complex residues and their conjugates
one can generate a wide variety of $E_\Omega$ inclusion shapes, as shown in Figure 7.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{patrick2.pdf}
\caption{An example of an $E_\Omega$ inclusion is shown in (a) given by the blue outline, with a possible boundary of $\Omega$ marked by the dashed red line.
Shown in (b) is the function $f(t)$ which generates this inclusion. Shown in (c) are blue and dashed red curves in the $r=(t-i)/(t+i)$ plane the images of which
under the mapping $z(h(t(r)))$ with $h(t)=(1-t^2)/(1+t^2)$ and $t(r)=i(1+r)/(1-r)$ give the blue and dashed red curves in figure (a). Shown in (d) are the poles
and zeros of the function $dz(h(t))/dt$. At these zeros in the upper half $t$-plane the map $z(h(t))$ is not conformal and as a consequence these zeros
map to points in the $z$-plane where $v+iw$ is not a univalent function of $x+iy$. Such a point is indicated by the small black circle in (a): the boundary
of $\Omega$ must pass between it and the boundary of the $E_\Omega$ inclusion. }
\label{fig:Patrick2}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{patrick1.pdf}
\caption{Examples showing the wide variety of $E_\Omega$ inclusion shapes that can be generated from the formula \eq{6.11} with $n\leq 5$. Each $E_\Omega$
inclusion is outlined in blue, and the surrounding red dashed line represents one of many possible boundaries for $\Omega$.}
\label{fig:Patrick1}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Shearing and stretching of $E_\Omega$ inclusions}
In two-dimensions periodic microstructures having the property that the field is uniform in phase can be transformed to other geometries having the same property:
see section 23.9 of \cite{Milton:2002:TOC}. In this transformation the shape of each inclusion undergoes an affine transformation, which is different to the affine transformation that the unit cell of periodicity undergoes. Here we apply a similar analysis to
show that our $E_\Omega$ inclusions remain $E_\Omega$ inclusions after appropriate shears and stretches.
Again suppose that $z=x+iy$ is an analytic function of $h=v+iw$ in the neighborhood of the slit $w=0$, $-1\leq v \leq 1$, and $y=v$ on the slit. Now observe that $z'=x'+iy'=\gamma_1(x+iy)+\gamma_2(v+iw)$ is still an analytic function of $v+iw$ for all choices of $\gamma_1$ and $\gamma_2$. If we choose $\gamma_1$ to be real then $y'$ will not depend on $x$ and will be
proportional to $y$ along the slit. Along the slit $w=0$, and we have
\begin{equation}
y'=\gamma_1y+\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\gamma_2)v=(\gamma_1+\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\gamma_2))y ,\quad x'=\gamma_1x+\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\gamma_2)v=\gamma_1x+\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\gamma_2)y.
\eeq{6.12}
So if we choose $\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\gamma_2)=1-\gamma_1$ we ensure that $y'=y=v$ along the slit. In other words the function $z'(h)$ satisfies the same desired properties as $z(h)$, and
associated with it there is an inclusion having a constant field inside, with boundary
\begin{equation}
x'=\gamma_1x+\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\gamma_2)y, \quad y'=y\quad {\rm where} ~ (x,y)\in \partial E_\Omega.
\eeq{6.13}
When $\gamma_1=1$ and $\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\gamma_2)\ne 0$ this corresponds to a shear of the inclusion, and when $\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\gamma_2)=0$ and $\gamma_1\ne 1$ it corresponds to a stretch of the inclusion in the $x$-direction: more generally it is a
combination of the two transformations.
\subsection{An additional field supported by the $E_\Omega$ inclusion}
As shown in \cite{Kang:2011:SBV} the $E_\Omega$ inclusion can also support a field which is constant and aligned with the $y$-axis. To review this, let $V'$ and $W'$ be the associated potentials, with
fields ${\bf E}(x,y)=-\nabla V'$ and ${\bf J}(x,y)=-{\bf R}_\perp \nabla W'$. If inside the inclusion $V'=y$, then ${\bf R}_\perp \nabla W'=\sigma_1\nabla V'=\sigma_1\nabla y$ implying
$W'=-\sigma_1x$. Since these potentials are continuous across the inclusion boundary we have that $V'=y, W'=-\sigma_1y$ on $\partial E_\Omega$. Outside the inclusion
(assuming $\sigma_2=1$) $V'+iW'$ must be an analytic function of $z=x+iy$.
We look for a solution with
\begin{equation}
V'+iW'=\alpha(V+iW)+\beta z,
\eeq{6.15}
where $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are complex constants. Using the boundary values of $V$ and $W$ we have
\begin{equation}
V'+iW'=\alpha(x+i\sigma_1y)+\beta(x+iy) \quad {\rm on} ~ \partial E_\Omega.
\eeq{6.15a}
The complex constants $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are chosen so $V'$ and $W'$ satisfy the boundary conditions which gives
\begin{eqnarray}
V'& = & \mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\alpha)x-\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\alpha)\sigma_1y+\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\beta)x-\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\beta)y=y, \nonumber \\
W'& = &\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\alpha)x+\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\alpha)\sigma_1y+\mathop{\rm Im}\nolimits(\beta)x+\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits(\beta)y=-\sigma_1x.
\eeqa{6.16}
These are satisfied if $\alpha$ and $\beta$ take the purely imaginary values
\begin{equation} \alpha=i,\quad \beta=-i(1+\sigma_1).
\eeq{6.17}
Thus the inclusion can also support a constant field in this orthogonal direction, and by superposition in any direction.
\subsection{Elastic $E_\Omega$ Inclusions}
It was recognized that isotropic composites of two isotropic phases which achieve the Hashin-Shtrikman bounds on the effective conductivity
also necessarily achieve the Hashin-Shtrikman bounds on the effective bulk modulus \cite{Berryman:1988:MRC, Milton:1984:CEE}
(see also \cite{Gibiansky:1996:CBC} and references therein). The condition that these
bounds be achieved is that the field is uniform in one phase: thus uniformity of the electric and current fields in a phase, implies uniformity
of the stress and strain fields within that phase, and vice-versa. A deeper reason for this connection was found by \cite{Grabovsky:1996:BEM}, who
discovered that in these geometries, fields solving the conductivity equations can be mapped to fields solving the elasticity equations and vice-versa.
One would expect a similar mapping to hold for $E_\Omega$ inclusions and we will now directly see this is the case.
We will now use the potentials $V$, $W$, $V'$ and $W'$ to construct stress and strain fields which solve the elasticity equations, with the fields being uniform and hydrostatic in the $E_\Omega$ inclusion and with the materials being isotropic in both phases.
Consider
\begin{equation}
\bfm\varepsilon= \begin{bmatrix}
{\partial V}/{\partial x} & {\partial V'}/{\partial x} \\
{\partial V}/{\partial y} & {\partial V'}/{\partial y}
\end{bmatrix},
\eeq{6.18}
which we will interpret as a strain field, associated with the displacement ${\bf u}=(V,V')$. In the $E_\Omega$ inclusion,
since $V=x$ and $V'=y$, we have $\bfm\varepsilon={\bf I}$.
Let us establish that outside the inclusion $\bfm\varepsilon$ is symmetric and $\mathop{\rm Tr}\nolimits(\bfm\varepsilon)$ is constant. From \eq{6.15a} and \eq{6.17} we see that
\begin{equation}
V'=-W+(1+\sigma_1)y, \quad W'=V-(1+\sigma_1)x,
\eeq{6.18a}
which implies
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{\partial V'}{\partial x}& =& -\frac{\partial W}{\partial x}= \frac{\partial V}{\partial y}, \nonumber \\
\frac{\partial V'}{\partial y}& = & -\frac{\partial W}{\partial y}+1+\sigma_1=-\frac{\partial V}{\partial x}+1+\sigma_1,
\eeqa{6.18b}
where we have used the fact that $V$ and $W$ satisfy the Cauchy Riemann equations.
Thus $\bfm\varepsilon$ is symmetric, which implies $\bfm\varepsilon$ is the symmetrized gradient of the displacement ${\bf u}=(V,V')$, and $\mathop{\rm Tr}\nolimits(\bfm\varepsilon)$ is constant.
To construct solutions to the elasticity problem we want to choose $\sigma_1$ such that $\bfm\varepsilon$ satisfies the elasticity equations,
\begin{equation}
\bfm\tau=\lambda(x,y)(\mathop{\rm Tr}\nolimits(\bfm\varepsilon))I+2\mu(x,y)\bfm\varepsilon, \quad \nabla \cdot \bfm\tau = 0.
\eeq{6.21}
Then the stress in the inclusion
\begin{equation} \bfm\tau=2(\lambda_1+\mu_1){\bf I} \eeq{6.21a}
is clearly divergence free, and the stress in the matrix
\begin{equation} \bfm\tau=\lambda_2(1+\sigma_1){\bf I}+2\mu_2\bfm\varepsilon \eeq{6.21b}
is also divergence free because $V$ and $V'$ are harmonic functions.
We also require the tractions to be continuous across $\partial E_\Omega$. As $V$ and $V'$ both solve the conductivity equations it follows that
$$ \sigma {\bf n}^T\begin{bmatrix} {\partial V}/{\partial x}\cr {\partial V}/{\partial y}\end{bmatrix},\quad
\sigma {\bf n}^T\begin{bmatrix} {\partial V'}/{\partial x}\cr {\partial V}/{\partial y}\end{bmatrix} $$
are both continuous across $\partial E_\Omega$, where ${\bf n}$ is the outward normal to the interface. Recalling that $\sigma_2=1$, this implies
\begin{eqnarray}
{\bf n}^T\begin{bmatrix} {\partial V}/{\partial x}\\ {\partial V}/{\partial y}\end{bmatrix} = \sigma_1 {\bf n}^T\begin{bmatrix} 1\\ 0 \end{bmatrix}, \\
{\bf n}^T\begin{bmatrix} {\partial V'}/{\partial x}\\ {\partial V'}/{\partial y}\end{bmatrix} = \sigma_1 {\bf n}^T\begin{bmatrix} 0\\ 1 \end{bmatrix},
\eeqa {6.22}
where on the left $V$ and $V'$ are the potentials just outside the $E_\Omega$ inclusion. Hence we deduce that
\begin{equation} {\bf n}^T\bfm\varepsilon=\sigma_1{\bf n}^T \eeq{6.23}
where on the left $\bfm\varepsilon$ is the field just outside the $E_\Omega$ inclusion.
On the other hand, from \eq{6.21a} and \eq{6.21b}, the continuity of ${\bf n}^T\bfm\tau$ (which is equivalent to continuity of the
traction $\bfm\tau{\bf n}$) requires that
\begin{equation}
2(\lambda_1+\mu_1){\bf n}^T=\lambda_2(1+\sigma_1){\bf n}^T+2\mu_2{\bf n}^T\bfm\varepsilon=[\lambda_2+\sigma_1(\lambda_2+2\mu_2)]{\bf n}^T,
\eeq{6.23a}
where we have used \eq{6.23} to eliminate $\bfm\varepsilon$, the field just outside the $E_\Omega$ inclusion.
So the traction is continuous, and the elasticity equations are satisfied, if we choose
\begin{equation}
\sigma_1=\frac{2(\lambda_1+\mu_1)-\lambda_2}{\lambda_2+2\mu_2}.
\eeq{6.26}
Thus there is a close connection between the $E_\Omega$ inclusions for the conductivity and elasticity cases. We have not explored the question as to the shapes of
elastic $E_\Omega$ inclusion for which the stress field inside the inclusion is constant, but not hydrostatic. Are such inclusions necessarily elliptical in shape
(or ellipsoidal in three dimensions)?
\section*{Acknowledgements}
G.W. Milton thanks the National Science Foundation for support through grant DMS-1211359, and all authors thank the University of Utah for helping support this research, through the Math 4800 undergraduate class. Andrew Boyles is thanked
for his participation in the work and for helping with the section on two-dimensional elasticity.
| {
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{"url":"http:\/\/szhorvat.net\/teaching\/phys205\/ed\/p2\/xhtml\/p2.xhtml","text":"3rd of September, 2008\n\n1. A suspension of tiny charged particles in water is called a colloid. The repulsion between the electrically charged particles keeps them from coagulating into large lumps.\n\nIf some salt is added to the water, it will dissociate into positive and negative ions. Negative ions will gather around positively charged colloidal particles while positive ions will be repelled. This way the electric field of the colloidal particle will be screened. If enough salt is added, the colloid will precipitate out. (This is called salting out a colloid.)\n\nFind the electric potential around a colloidal particle! Consider the concentration of positive and negative ions to be the same ${n}_{0}$ far away from the particle. You will need the formula for the Boltzmann-distribution: particles in a potential are distributed in such a way that the number of particles having potential energy $E$ is proportional to ${e}^{-E\u2215kT}$. For this calculation consider the case when $kT\\gg E$.\n\n2. An electric dipole ($\\stackrel{\\to }{p}$) is situated at distance $s$ from an infinite conducting sheet. The angle between $\\stackrel{\\to }{p}$ and the sheet\u2019s normal is $\\phi$. Find the torque acting on the dipole! What orientation will the dipole adopt if it is allowed to rotate freely, but its distance from the sheet is kept constant?\n\n3. In a vacuum diode, electrons are boiled off a hot cathode, at potential zero, and accelerated across a gap to the anode, which is held at positive potential ${V}_{0}$. The cloud of moving electrons within the gap (called space charge) quickly builds up to the point where it reduces the field at the surface of the cathode to zero. From then on a steady current $I$ flows between the plates.\n\nSuppose the plates are large relative to the separation, so that edge effects can be neglected. Then $V$, $\\rho$, and $v$ (the speed of electrons) are all functions of $x$ alone.\n\n1. Find $V,\\rho$, and $v$ as a functions of $x$.\n2. Show that $I=K{V}_{0}^{3\u22152}$, and find the constant $K$. This equation is called the Child\u2013Langmuir law. It holds for other geometries as well, whenever space-charge limits the current. Notice that the space-charge limited diode does not obey Ohm\u2019s law!\n\nIf you need hints, you will find the detailed steps to reach the solution in the book by Griffihts, problem 2.48.\n\nBack to the main page","date":"2022-01-23 21:17:27","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 19, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8474972248077393, \"perplexity\": 421.33431150987263}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2022-05\/segments\/1642320304309.59\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20220123202547-20220123232547-00674.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
(Video) When a fan asked Jon Jones to choke him out
Luthfi Prawiro July 30, 2022 July 30, 2022
For most athletes a sizeable portion of their income comes from fan meet and greets.
One such event had the pleasure of hosting UFC GOAT and now Hall of famer – Jon Jones. One fan was so excited to meet his favorite athlete and passed out. Literally.
Back at the height of his career, former UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones was loved by a huge fanbase. And when he visited Cologne, Germany, a young man at the meet and greet requested his idol choke him.
While that was one strange request to make, 'Bones' still duly obliged. Before getting into the choking position, he told him to keep his hands up so he'll know whether the fan was still conscious or not.
He then slowly put in the squeeze for a couple of seconds before the young fan lost his consciousness and started twitching.
Jones–apparently already knew how to handle the situation–quickly rose the fan's legs above his head to re-circulate the blood and that appeared to snap the fan out of his daze.
It didn't take long for the fan to wake up and although he still looked dizzy, he was ecstatic by the rare interaction. He rose to his feet in no time and embraced the man that just potentially endangered his life a little while ago. While looking wholesome, this is still one of the strangest recorded fan interactions with an athlete.
Getting choked by Jones itself isn't nice at all. Big-time UFC athletes like 'Rampage' Jackson, Lyoto Machida, and Ryan Bader were all victims of Jones' chokes.
Jones vacated his light heavyweight belt not long after to prepare for his move up to heavyweight. After winning a razor-sharp decision against Dominick Reyes in early 2020, he set his sights on the heavyweight division.
In a recent social media posts, Jones can be seen with a lot of extra weight and weighing in at least 270 pounds. He is rumored to be facing former champion Stipe Miocic next, possibly for an interim title as the reigning champion Francis Ngannou is still recovering from his knee surgery.
Posted inLatest Posts Mixed Martial Arts | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 1,527 |
Pasco FL
Pasco News
Created on May 12, 1887 by the Florida Legislature, Pasco County was born. Before this, it was part of Hernando County. The name comes from U.S. Senator Samuel Pasco.
The area is believed to be lived in by humans as early as 9000 B.C. When the Spanish first came to the area, it was inhabited by Indians who spoke Muskegon. In the early 1700's southern Creek Indians (better known as Seminoles) moved into the area. Evenly they were joined by groups of escaped slaves. In the first half of the nineteenth century they where forced to move to Oklahoma or driven south to Everglades.
The principle communities are Dade City, Zephyrhills, New Port Richey, Port Richey, and San Antonio. Dade City was known as Fort Dade until 1881 when the Fort Dade Postmaster's Commission was transferred to Fort Dade community a few miles west. Zephyrhills was established in 1911 as a retirement center for veterans of the Union Army. New Port Richey was founded in 1915 adjacent to the older town of Port Richey, established by Captain Aaron Richey in the 1880's. San Antonio was developed as the center of the "Catholic Colony" by Judge Edwin Dunne in 1881. Holiday appeared as part of the extension development of the county's west coast in the 1960's.
In the era of the Second World War, the development of Pasco Packing Company (now Lykes-Pasco) and later of Evens Packing Company in Dade City gave the county two of the largest citrus packing plants in the world. The procedure for making orange juice concentrate was, to a large degree, developed at Pasco Packing Company.
The coastal portion of the county was largely undeveloped until the second half of the twentieth century when it became favored as a retirement area. In recent years, huge residential developments have appeared around U.S. Highway 19, causing the county's population center to shift to the west coast.
East Pasco Newspapers Cease Operations, Could Restructure
The publisher of the Dade City News and Zephyrhills Free Press announced on Facebook Thursday that the newspapers have ceased operations.
Pasco Commissioner Attends China Trade Deal Signing
Pasco County Commissioner Kathryn Starkey attended this week's signing of phase one of the China trade deal at the White House.
Longtime Pasco Resident Celebrates 105th Birthday
A longtime Pasco County resident is celebrating a major birthday today: 105 years old!
Pressure: 30.2"Hg
Weather forecast New Port Richey, Florida ▸
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"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,945 |
J.F. Smith - DRUIDS, CELTS AND ROMANS: THE FOUNDERS OF EUROPE (The Irish-American Story) - Paperback
James Francis Smith, MBA from Pacific Lutheran
"Author James Francis Smith Smith's 350-page narrative-history illustrates the Celts deference of women as leaders and warriors to that exhibited by Rome. Set in Europe, Druids, Celts, and Romans pit the Celtic civilizations, family life, and beliefs against that of the Romans. Celtic awareness of Rome's existence begins with the murder of a Druid in the exotic forest of Helvetia (ancient Switzerland). This act compelled Ragenos, champion of the Mayri tribe, to leave his oppidum (hill fort), and become a mercenary guarding the Druid's gold, during which he befriends Danous the Bard of the Parisii. Meanwhile triplets, Una, a female, and two males, Mick and Hugh, born to Conel and Meva, are fated by the Goddess Sulis to save the Celtic race. That very night, a female is born to the Julian family of Rome. Time passes before the haughty Julia is betrayed, sold into slavery, and purchased by Conel's Mayri tribe. As their servant, she teaches the Mayri triplets about Rome in exchange for her freedom. While crossing the Alps to return Julia to her family, Una is injured in an avalanche, left behind, betrayed, and sold to Etruscans. The male triplets and Danous the Bard take off to free Una. Once back in Rome, Julia enslaves Conel. Turkos, the Mayri trader, returns with this news. Knowledge of her husband's capture incites forces Meva to recruit a Celtic army, which crosses the Alps to rescue Conel, who escapes on his own. Ragenos and the triplets, lead the Celts in defeating the Romans at Allia, invade their city and earn forever—their eternal hatred. The Romans criticized the Celtic weights. Adding his sword to the Celtic weights, Ragenos said, "Vae victis"(Woe to the conquered.) The Romans provided additional gold to complete the ransom and the Celts headed for home. But not before Una marries a Celtic Warrior. Danous offers her a poem for his gift before taking up the lonely life of a wandering poet. Mick leaves to become a mercenary and Hugh a Druid. A tale based on the very first encounter between these ancient peoples. Readers Comments: "He took pearls from history and culture of the past and strung them into a spell-binding story" "It was a history that I'd been totally unaware of, but found fascinating. I also really enjoyed the characters." -Amazon.com | {
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} | 4,371 |
Q: latex error Missing $ inserted I'm trying to use LaTeX to write my math notes. But I have some problems.
The error is written:
LaTeX error Missing $ inserted
And it doesn't compile correctly:
\documentclass[french,12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[french]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\author{
Alexandre Monterroso\\
Université de Fribourg\\
}
\newtheorem{de}{Définition}[subsection]
\newtheorem{theo}{Théorème}[section]
\newtheorem{prop}[theo]{Proposition}
\begin{document}
\section{Combinatoris}
\subsection{Ordered choices}
\begin{itemize}
\item With repetition
\end{itemize}
\begin{theo}
The number of lists (a_{1}, ..., a_{k}) of k not necessarly distincts objects elements (ie. with repetition) from a set n elements is a^{k} (n, k \epsilon N).
\end{theo}
\end{document}
A: You need to specify math-related content in math mode. So, use
The number of lists ($a_1, \dots, a_k$) of~$k$ not necessarily dist ...
$...$ initiated and closes in-line math mode, while \[...\] initiates and closes display math mode.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 6,711 |
Q: Is there a case where the perimeter of a convex poly is greater than the perimeter of its bounding box? I know that the area of the polygon is always smaller than the area of its bounding box, but can it have a greater perimeter than the perimeter of its bounding box?
A: In general, if A and B are convex polygons and A is a subset of B, then the perimeter of A is less than or equal to the perimeter of B.
A: First of all, the area of the polygon may equal that of the bounding box, so I'd say "no larger" instead of "smaller".
The answer to your question is "No":
A convex polygon is the intersection of a finite number of half planes, with the additional requirement that the result is compact. So you can obtain every convex polygon by taking its bounding box and cutting away half planes. Each time you cut away a part, you take away two sides of a triangle and replace them by the third. Due to the triangle inequality, this will never increase the perimeter.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 3,948 |
Posted on August 10, 2022 August 10, 2022 by Bob Ballard
Today in 1971, a summit meeting of past and present stars of country music took place at Woodland Studios in Nashville as recording began on "Will The Circle Be Unbroken," a triple album released in 1972 by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Legends on the album included "Mother" Maybelle Carter, Earl Scruggs, Roy Acuff and Merle Travis.
Today in 1977, Kenny Rogers' self-titled album was certified gold.
Today in 1990, Mark Chesnutt began his first concert tour in Highland, Texas.
Today in 1991, Vince Gill became a member of the Grand Ole Opry.
Today in 1994, Alan Jackson's "Here In The Real World" album was certified double platinum.
Today in 1998, George Strait's album, "Carryin' Your Love With Me," was certified triple platinum while his "Lead On" album was certified double platinum.
Today in 1998, Reba McEntire's "Greatest Hits Volume II" was certified for sales of 5-million.
Today in 1998, the "Souvenirs" album by Vince Gill was certified double platinum.
Today in 1998, "The Patsy Cline Collection" was certified platinum.
Today in 1999, Kenny Chesney's "I Will Stand" album was certified platinum.
Today in 2000, there were two only country acts to appear on the 2nd annual Family Television Awards. Reba McEntire hosted the festivities, and Billy Gilman performed.
Today in 2000, then-Vice President Al Gore personally asked Mary Chapin Carpenter to perform at the Democratic National Convention. Mary Chapin was asked to perform a song from her "Stones In The Road" album called "Why Walk, When You Can Fly."
Today in 2000, Jo Dee Messina hit another milestone in her career as it was announced that her album, "Burn," had debuted on Billboard's Country Album chart at #1.
Today in 2001, Cyndi Thomson made her Grand Ole Opry debut.
Today in 2001, Martie Seidel became Martie Maguire when she married hubby Gareth in a supersecret ceremony in Hawaii. The happy couple was able to keep their news quiet until late-September, when the Dixie Chicks performed on the "Tribute to Heroes" special – Martie was seen wearing what looked to be a wedding ring, and she soon admitted through reps that she and Gareth had indeed exchanged vows. The couple split in 2013 and share three daughters.
Today in 2001, Oak Ridge Boy William Lee Golden and his wife, Brenda, welcomed their new son, William Solomon Golden, into the world at 11:04am local time at Baptist Hospital in Nashville. And even though little William arrived 12 days early, he weighed in at a healthy 6-pounds, 13 ¾-ounces.
Today in 2001, Clint Black hosted the Family Television Awards. He and wife Lisa Hartman Black performed their chart-topping hit, "When I Said I Do," on the show. Interestingly, the program, which honors the best in family-oriented viewing, was the couple's first televised appearance since the birth of their daughter, Lily Pearl, that May.
Today in 2001, one of the biggest stars on the planet became of the brightest in the sky as members of Shania Twain's announced they had paid to have a star registered in Shania's name – it's in the constellation Virgo.
Today in 2002, for the first time since their 1998 Grand Ole Opry debut, Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robison – aka the Dixie Chicks – made their follow-up performance on the legendary stage of the Grand Ole Opry.
Today in 2006, Kenny Chesney's nine-minute "You Save Me" video aired on CMT for the first time.
Today in 2009, Lady Antebellum's single, "Need You Now," hit the airwaves.
Today in 2009, Brooks & Dunn announced in a short note that they would be ending their partnership after one last tour. The message? "It's time to call it a day." And while the pair – aka Ronnie Dunn and Kix Brooks – have continued recording solo music, they have since offered a reunion of sorts through a series of shows in Las Vegas with Reba McEntire.
Today in 2012, Jason Aldean's "Take A Little Ride" video premiered on CMT.
Today in 2014, Cole Swindell wrote his future hit, "You Should Be Here," with songwriter Ashley Gorley at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. All this while he was prepping to open for Luke Bryan.
Today in 2016, Eric Church earned a gold single from the RIAA for "Record Year."
Today in 2017, Taylor Swift took the stand in Denver as she insisted a former local disc jockey groped her inappropriately backstage in 2013: "He did not touch my arm. He did not touch my rib," she said. "He did not touch my hand. He grabbed my bare ass."
Today in 2018, the Lady A single, "Need You Now," was certified nine-times platinum by the RIAA.
Today in 2019, Chely Wright performed "Shut Up And Drive" and "Single White Female" at the Grand Ole Opry. It was her first appearance at the Mother Church since she came out in May 2010.
Today in 2019, Rodney Crowell, Jeannie C. Riley and Claude Gray joined the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame.
Trump says FBI searched estate in major escalation of probe
Kelsea Ballerini Talks Taking Ballet To Get Ready For Tour | {
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} | 6,922 |
\section{Introduction}
The task of 6D pose estimation is now grabbing more and more attention because of its significance in robotics, virtual reality and augmented reality. Recently, the CNN-based methods \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR, Rad2017BB8AS, tekin18, 7298758, xiang2018posecnn} are providing terrific results in 6D pose estimation area without relying on rich texture information. Since the depth cameras are vulnerable in the wild or on specular objects and they consume too much power being an active sensor on mobile devices, some recent literature \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR, Rad2017BB8AS, tekin18} proposes to estimate 6D pose directly from a single RGB image without using depth information. Methods proposed in \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR, Rad2017BB8AS} can get convincing results which are competitive with those leveraging RGB-D data. Yet they both rely on an effective but time-consuming refinement procedure in order to achieve accurate pose estimation. \cite{tekin18} proposes to eliminate the refinement to obtain a huge speed gain. However, they yield worse accuracy results in terms of ADD metric \cite{Hinterstoisser:2012:MBT:2481913.2481959}.
In this paper we argue for a fast and accurate approach. We reckon that recovering 6D pose from estimating surface keypoints is more natural and easier than from predicting the viewpoints because the surface keypoints are more directly and closely associated with features of the target object. Another benefit of predicting a number of surface keypoints is the robustness against occlusion since even if some keypoints are invisible due to partial occlusion, three remaining ones are sufficient to estimating 6D pose by Perspective-n-point (PnP) algorithm \cite{Lepetit2008EPnPAA}. Therefore we propose to predict 6D pose from localizing surface keypoints.
We first select $k$ 3D keypoints in the model offline by 3D SIFT algorithm \cite{Scovanner:2007:SDA:1291233.1291311} and generate a dataset with bounding boxes and keypoints annotated. After that, we separately train the object detector YOLOv3 \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1804-02767} and a keypoint detector (KPD). As shown in human pose estimation literature, localizing keypoints by predicting heatmaps \cite{Newell2016StackedHN, tompson2014joint, wei2016convolutional} is better at regressing keypoints coordinates directly \cite{toshev2014deeppose}. Therefore in our KPD we adopt a heatmap localization strategy to estimate the locations of keypoints.
During testing stage, the target object is detected by YOLOv3 and then its 2D keypoints are localized by the KPD. Thanks to the Perspective-n-point (PnP) \cite{Lepetit2008EPnPAA}, we can estimate the object's 6d pose via the 2D-3D correspondences of keypoints. In order to deal with partial occlusion, we propose to select the most confident keypoints before running PnP algorithm. Figure \ref{fig:pipeline} illustrates our proposed pipeline.
We evaluate our architecture on two benchmark datasets: LineMod \cite{Hinterstoisser:2012:MBT:2481913.2481959} and Occlusion \cite{10.1007/978-3-319-10605-2_35}. Concerning accuracy, we not only outperform the state-of-the-art not-using-refinement method \cite{tekin18} by a large margin (30\% relatively) but also achieve competitive results with using-refinement methods. Meanwhile, we are much faster than using-refinement techniques due to the elimination of the time-consuming refinement procedure.
Our key contribution is that we present a novel method of 6D pose estimation based on localizing designated surface keypoints. We show the great potential of RGB-only methods without refinement by achieving state-of-the-art results. Moreover, we conduct several ablation studies to verify the effectiveness of key components in our architecture.
\begin{figure*}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{Figures/pipeline.png}
\end{center}
\caption{Visualization of our proposed pipeline. We first (a) detect bounding box then (b) localize the designated keypoints using keypoint detector (KPD). Finally (c) we use a PnP algorithm to recover the 6D pose.}
\label{fig:pipeline}
\end{figure*}
\section{Related Work}
There is a large number of literature on 6D pose estimation. We first review them from different perspectives and then have a short glance at human pose estimation work where we get inspiration.
\paragraph{Classical Feature Mapping Methods} Many classical approaches aim to find suitable feature descriptors and predicting pose by feature matching. Scale-invariant approaches\cite{10.1007/978-3-319-10605-2_35, 7780759, Kehl2016DeepLO, tejani2014latent} use depth information to extract or learn features which are robust to different lighting conditions and even partial occlusions. Other approaches \cite{5540108, Yi2016LIFTLI, 10.1007/978-3-642-15558-1_26} attempt to find local keypoints and then vote for the orientations. They either require certain object textural property or are not robust enough for handling occlusion.
\paragraph{CNN-based Methods} Deep learning in 6D pose estimation have demonstrated its great power and potential. \cite{7298758} points out that one can recover 6D pose from figures by estimating viewpoints or keypoints. The viewpoint based method \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR} extends SSD \cite{10.1007/978-3-319-46448-0_2} and constructs an end-to-end architecture outputting viewpoints and inplane-rotations. Then it uses the projection relationship to lift the object and further refine estimated poses. \cite{Sundermeyer_2018_ECCV} creatively learns implicit orientation by Augmented Autoencoder. The keypoints based methods \cite{Rad2017BB8AS, tekin18} attempt to predict corner points of the bounding boxes and then use PnP algorithm to estimate 6D pose. \cite{pavlakos17object3d} estimates locations of semantic keypoints instead. Other methods \cite{Kendall2015PoseNetAC, xiang2018posecnn} make an effort to train translation and rotation predictors then combine them to get the 6D pose.
\paragraph{RGB Only Without Refinement} Since it is not always possible to use the depth cameras which consume much power on mobile devices and are easy to fail in the open air, methods only using RGB images to recover 6D pose have been demonstrated to be competitive \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR, Mousavian20173DBB, Poirson2016FastSS} with a natural advantage of cheap data requirement. Furthermore, our baseline \cite{tekin18} eliminates the refinement procedure which is time-consuming and thus not suitable for real-time applications such as virtual reality and robots grasping. Moreover, the Iterative Closest Points (ICP) refinement needs tricky tuning procedures to work well, especially when only RGB images are given. Therefore, we also take an RGB-only method and not use the post-processing procedure.
\paragraph{Person Pose Estimation} Deep learning methods have dominated person pose estimation tasks in recent years, not only in single person pose estimation \cite{Jain2013LearningHP, Ouyang2014MultisourceDL, 6909610} but also in multiple person pose estimation \cite{cao2017realtime, fang2017rmpe, He2017MaskR}. \cite{fang2017rmpe} proposes a two-step accurate and fast framework for multiple pose estimation. Given input images, they first use a human detector to draw bounding boxes and then utilize a single person pose estimator (SPPE) to predict keypoints. We are inspired by them and adopt their two-step techniques followed by the PnP algorithm to get the final 6D pose.
\section{Methodology}
We can transform the 6D pose estimation problem into detecting 2D image coordinates of keypoints whose 3D coordinates in model space are previously known by us. Given the 2D coordinate predictions and their associated 3D coordinates in model space, we can recover 6D pose via a Perspective-n-point (PnP) \cite{Lepetit2008EPnPAA}. Different from \cite{Rad2017BB8AS, tekin18}, our keypoints are designated by us on the model surface via a 3D SIFT \cite{Scovanner:2007:SDA:1291233.1291311} algorithm. We now present our pipeline and describe the critical procedures in detail.
\subsection{Our Pipeline}
\label{sec:pipeline}
As shown in Figure \ref{fig:pipeline}, the input to our architecture is an RGB image $I$. Our goal is to estimate 6D pose $\mathbf{P} = \big[\mathbf{R}\big|\mathbf{t}\big]$ of the target object, where $\mathbf{R}$ is the rotation matrix and $\mathbf{t}$ is the translation matrix.
Utilizing the accurate and efficient detector YOLOv3 \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1804-02767}, our first stage aims at detecting bounding box of the target object. Then the image $I$ is cropped by this bounding box and then resized to a new image $I^{*}$ with only one proposed object. Then $I^{*}$ is sent to the keypoint detector (KPD).
In the second stage, the KPD is designed for localizing 2D keypoints which are previously designated in 3D model space. (Keypoint designation will be discussed in Section \ref{sec:Synthetic_dataset}.) We use ResNet-101 \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/HeZRS15} as the backbone of Keypoint Detector. The KPD takes $I^{*}$ as input and outputs $k$ heatmaps corresponding to $k$ 2D points. For the $p$-th keypoint, we consider the pixel with the maximum value in the $p$-th heatmap as its estimated location. That is,
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:max_in_heatmap}
\mathcal{H}_{x,y}^{p} = \max_{i}(\max_{j} \mathcal{H}_{i,j}^{p})
\end{equation}
where $(x,y)$ is the estimated coordinates of the $p$-th keypoint in $I^{*}$. We futher denote $\mathcal{H}_{x,y}^{p}$ as the confidence of the $p$-th estimated keypoint. With detected bounding box, we can derive the estimated location of this $p$-th keypoint in the original image $I$. In this way, we store 2D coordinates of all keypoints in matrix $M_{k2D}$.
In cases where the objects are under occlusion, the keypoints are ranked by their confidence values and only the $l$ most confident keypoints are preserved and utilized in the third stage because they are normally more accurate. Theoretically, $l\geqslant 3$ is sufficient to estimate 3D pose while $l$ can be larger than three in practice to boost the predicting precision. Our further experiment (See Section \ref{sec:choosing_most_conf}) shows that this selecting procedure is effective when handling occlusion.
During the third stage, we use the Perspective-n-point (PnP) \cite{Lepetit2008EPnPAA} algorithm to recover 6D pose via the relationship between 2D and 3D keypoints. Let $M_{k2D}$ and $M_{k3D}$ be the 2D and 3D coordintes of keypoints in image space and model space respectively, the transformation relationship is:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:transformation}
M_{k2D} = K\big[\mathbf{R}\big|\mathbf{t}\big]M_{k3D}
\end{equation}
where both $M_{k3D}$ and $M_{k2D}$ are represented in homogeneous form, and $K$ is the known camera intrinsic matrix. Given $M_{k3D}$ and $M_{k2D}$, the PnP algorithm can figure out the rotation matrix $\mathbf{R}$ and translation matrix $\mathbf{t}$ through the rigid relationship of target object. Mathmatically, the PnP algorithm solve the matrix $[\mathbf{R}\big|\mathbf{t}\big]$ by simple least square optimaztion.
\begin{figure*}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.8\linewidth]{Figures/Training_KPD.jpg}
\end{center}
\caption{Generating dataset with keypoints annotations and training KPD to localize them. Upper row: We render the model and paste it onto RGB image. PGPG can augment input data dealing with inaccurate bounding box \cite{fang2017rmpe}. The followed ResNet101 is trained to generate heatmaps corresponding to $k$ designated keypoints. Lower row: We designate keypoints from 3D model and transfer them into RGB images via equation \ref{eq:transformation}. Then $k$ ground truth heatmaps are generated according to the 2D locations of $k$ keypoints via a Gaussian Function. We train the KPD by minimizing the MSE Loss between predicted and ground truth heatmaps. More examples of designated keypoints can be found in supplementary.}
\label{fig:training_kpd}
\end{figure*}
\subsection{Keypoint Designation and Annotation}
\label{sec:Synthetic_dataset}
Formally, let $M_{3D}$ be the point cloud of the object model, keypoint designation means that we select a set of points in model space as the keypoints $M_{k3D}$. In our proposed pipeline, neither the number nor the type of keypoints is restricted, but it would be better to designate keypoints with strong representative ability. We reckon that surface points are a better choice than the vertices alongside bounding boxes because the surface points are closely related with the model features. Since 3D Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm \cite{Scovanner:2007:SDA:1291233.1291311} can extract local features which are invariant to rotation, scale and robust to different illumination conditions, we adopt SIFT keypoints as our designated keypoints.
We need to annotate those designated keypoints in images for training keypoint detector (KPD). The designated 3D keypoints are projected to image space applying Equation \ref{eq:transformation}, deriving the ground truth coordinates of $k$ keypoints in image space. During generating synthetic images via rendering and pasting as used in \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR,Sundermeyer_2018_ECCV,Rad2017BB8AS}, we can obtain the virtual camera intrinsic matrix $K$ and assigned rotation-translation matrix $\big[\mathbf{R}\big|\mathbf{t}\big]$ which are needed by Equation \ref{eq:transformation}. As for the dataset with real pose annotated, $K$, $\mathbf{R}$ and $\mathbf{t}$ are given directly.
Since human pose estimation literature has shown that localizing keypoints by predicting heatmaps \cite{Newell2016StackedHN, tompson2014joint, wei2016convolutional} is better at regressing keypoints coordinates directly \cite{toshev2014deeppose}, we employ the Gaussian function on the 2D coordinates and generate $k$ ground truth heatmaps for the $k$ keypoints. Formally, let $\mathbf{x}^{p}$ be the ground truth location of $p$-th keypoint and its corresponding heatmap is $\mathcal{H}^{p}$. The value at location $\mathbf{p} \in \mathbb{R}^{2}$ in $\mathcal{H}^{p}$ is defined as
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:gaussian}
\mathcal{H}^{p}( \mathbf { p } ) = \exp \left( - \frac { \left\| \mathbf { p } - \mathbf{x}^{p} \right\| ^ { 2 } } { \sigma ^ { 2 } } \right)
\end{equation}
where $\sigma$ is a parameter controlling the spread of the peak. The ground truth heatmaps are used for training KPD.
\subsection{Training and Testing}
Different from the end-to-end training in \cite{tekin18}, we train the YOLO detector and the KPD separately. Training in two stages can help decouple the problem of object detection and keypoint localization so that we can address them one by one, leading to better overall results.
Feeding our annotated dataset, we train YOLOv3 using common settings as described in \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1804-02767} and KPD by minimizing the MSE loss between the ground truth and predicted heatmaps. Moreover, to deal with the bias in bounding box detection which would draw to an error in keypoint localization, we use the developed Pose-guided Proposal Generator (PGPG) proposed by \cite{fang2017rmpe} to augment the training data. The whole procedure of generating dataset and training KPD is shown in Figure \ref{fig:training_kpd}.
During testing, we load the trained weights of both YOLO and KPD to the overall architecture. As described in Section \ref{sec:pipeline}, our pipeline first detects the bounding box, then localizes the keypoints. Finally, the PnP algorithm will help recover the 6D pose.
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/mirror_symmetry_final.png}
\includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/eggbox_symmetry.png}
\end{center}
\caption{Dealing with symmetry. Top: Our pipeline can handle two ducks in mirror symmetry without special care. Lower Left: the $\pi$-rotational ($\alpha = \pi$) symmetric object eggbox has pairs of indistinguishable keypoints in 3D space. (One pair in green and the other in yellow.) Lower Right: We can handle the $\pi$-rotational symmetry by restricting training images in half of the 3D space, just as if we only look at the eggbox from the front.}
\label{fig:symmetry_explain}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Handle Symmetry Cases}
Estimating a keypoint $p_0$ located on a symmetric object may run into problem for there may be several points appearing the same as $p_0$. We need to handle different types of symmetry carefully (See Figure \ref{fig:symmetry_explain}).
\paragraph{Mirror Symmetry} A pair of points with mirror symmetry are in fact distinguishable for one of them is on the left and the other is on the right. Our KPD can learn to distinguish the left side from the right natually from end-to-end training and thus the mirror symmetry can be handled without special care which is verified by our experiments.
\paragraph{$\alpha$-rotational Symmetry} We consider that an object has $\alpha$-rotational symmetry if it looks the same after $\alpha$ angle rotation. For a designated keypoint $p$ on an object with $\alpha$-rotation symmetry, there are one or more points in symmetry with $p$ and they can be mistaken as $p$, resulting in divergence in training. To address such ambiguity, the training images should be projected from the 3D space that is within the range $[0,\alpha]$ in cylindrical coordinates system around the symmetric axis (see lower part of Figure \ref{fig:symmetry_explain}). On the other side, as used in \cite{7780735,Hinterstoisser:2012:MBT:2481913.2481959,tekin18}, we take symmetry into account when evaluating the results. Specifically, our predicted pose of an $\alpha$-rotational object may vary due to the rotational symmetry, but the various poses should all be considered as correct as long as they are symmetric with ground truth pose.
\section{Experiments}
We evaluate our proposed pipeline in two challenging benchmark datasets: LineMod \cite{Hinterstoisser:2012:MBT:2481913.2481959} and Occlusion \cite{10.1007/978-3-319-10605-2_35}. We first describe two datasets and evaluation metrics in short and give the implementation details. Then both qualitative and quantitative results are presented.
\begin{table*}[t]
\centering
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{1.3mm}{
\begin{tabular}{ll|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c}
& & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Ape} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Bvise} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Cam} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Can} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Cat} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Drill} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Duck} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Box} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Glue} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Holep} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Iron} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Lamp} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{Phone} & \multicolumn{1}{l}{Avg} \\ \hline
\multicolumn{1}{c|}{\multirow{4}{*}{w/o}} & BB8\cite{Rad2017BB8AS} & 27.9 & 62.0 & 40.1 & 48.1 & 45.2 & 58.6 & 32.8 & 40.0 & 27.0 & 42.4 & 67.0 & 39.9 & 35.2 & 43.6 \\
\multicolumn{1}{c|}{} & SSD-6D \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR} & 0 & 0.2 & 0.4 & 1.4 & 0.5 & 2.6 & 0 & 8.9 & 0 & 0.3 & 8.9 & 8.2 & 0.2 & 2.4 \\
\multicolumn{1}{c|}{} & Tekin \cite{tekin18} & 21.6 & 81.8 & 36.6 & 68.8 & 41.8 & 63.5 & 27.2 & 69.6 & \textit{\textbf{80.0}} & 42.6 & 75.0 & 71.1 & 47.7 & 56.0 \\
\multicolumn{1}{c|}{} & OURS & \textit{\textbf{41.2} } & \textit{\textbf{85.7} } & \textbf{78.9} & \textit{\textbf{85.2}} & \textbf{73.9} & \textbf{77.0} & \textit{\textbf{42.7}} & \textit{\textbf{78.9}} & 72.5 & \textit{\textbf{63.9}} & \textbf{94.4} & \textbf{98.1} & \textit{\textbf{51.0}} & \textbf{\textit{72.6}} \\ \hline
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{\multirow{3}{*}{w/Ref.}} & Brachmann \cite{7780735}& 33.2 & 64.8 & 38.4 & 62.9 & 42.7 & 61.9 & 30.2 & 49.9 & 31.2 & 52.8 & 80.0 & 67.0 & 38.1 & 50.2 \\
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{} & BB8 \cite{Rad2017BB8AS} & 40.4 & \textbf{91.8} & 55.7 & 64.1 & 62.6 & 74.4 & 44.3 & 57.8 & 41.2 & \textbf{67.2} & 84.7 & 76.5 & 54.0 & 62.7 \\
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{} & SSD-6D \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR} & \textbf{65} & 80 & 78 & \textbf{86} & 70 & 73 & \textbf{66} & \textbf{100} & \textbf{100} & 49 & 78 & 73 & \textbf{79} & \textbf{79}
\end{tabular}}
\caption{Accuracy comparison of methods with refinement or without refinement in terms of ADD metric on the LineMod dataset. The overall best numbers are represented in \textbf{bold} and the best numbers in methods without refinement are represented in \textbf{\textit{bold and italic}}.}
\label{tb:ADD}
\end{table*}
\subsection{Benchmark Datasets}
\paragraph{LineMod \cite{Hinterstoisser:2012:MBT:2481913.2481959}} is a standard benchmark dataset for 6D pose estimation. The LineMod dataset contains 18273 test images for 15 objects. The central object in the RGB image is considered as the target object whose bounding box, rotation and translation matrices are annotated. The 3D models with surface color are also provided and thus we can generate synthetic images for training. As others, we will skip the third and seventh objects which lack a meshed model.
\paragraph{Occlusion \cite{10.1007/978-3-319-10605-2_35}}
is a dataset for multi-object detection and 6D pose estimation. It is created from LineMod dataset by denoting extra bounding boxes and poses of all the seven kinds of other objects appearing in the Benchvise sequence. As its name implies, most objects in the Occlusion dataset are under partial occlusion, making the multi-object detection and pose recovery quite difficult.
\subsection{Evaluation Metrics}
We use two metrics to evaluate the 6D pose estimation results. The \textbf{2D reprojection error} \cite{7780735} is the mean distance between the 2D projection of the object's 3D mesh vertices applying the predicted and the ground truth pose, and the predicted pose is correct if the error is less than 5 pixels. It mainly measures if the estimated pose is visually acceptable, so they are suitable for applications in virtual or augmented reality. The \textbf{ADD error} \cite{Hinterstoisser:2012:MBT:2481913.2481959} is the mean 3D distance between model vertices transformed by the ground truth pose and by the predicted pose. Formally,
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:add_error}
\Delta_{ADD} = \frac { 1 } { |M | } \sum _ { x \in M } \left\| ( \mathbf { R } \mathbf { x } + \mathbf { t } ) - ( \hat { \mathbf { R } } \mathbf {x} + \hat { \mathbf { t } }) \right\|
\end{equation}
where $M$ is the set of model vertices, $\mathbf{R}$ and $\mathbf{t}$ are the predicted rotation and translation matrices while $\hat { \mathbf { R }}$ and $\hat { \mathbf { t } }$ are the ground truth ones. The estimated pose is considered to be correct if the ADD error is smaller than 10\% of the object's diameter. The ADD metric is stricter because it requires the predicted pose to be accurate enough to limit the ADD error within around $1 \sim 2$ cm. We use the terminologies 2D reprojection accuracy and ADD accuracy to represent the percentage of correct poses among all predicted poses using the above two metrics correspondingly.
For evaluating the symmetric objects, the 2D reprojection error can naturally accept symmetric poses as long as the objects with pose applied are visualized the same in image space. However, the ADD metric must be changed slightly to deal with symmetry cases. As in \cite{7780735,Hinterstoisser:2012:MBT:2481913.2481959,tekin18}, we change Equation \ref{eq:add_error} to
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:sym_add_error}
\Delta_{ADD}' = \frac { 1 } { |M | } \sum _ { x_1 \in M } \min_{ x_2 \in M}\left\| ( \mathbf { R } \mathbf { x_1 } + \mathbf { t } ) - ( \hat { \mathbf { R } } \mathbf {x_2} + \hat { \mathbf { t } }) \right\|
\end{equation}
which is looser than the normal form. We only use this form when the object has rotational symmetry such as the eggbox in LineMod.
\subsection{Implementation Details}
The overall architecture is implemented with PyTroch 0.4.1 and run on an i9-7900X CPU @3.30GHz with an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080Ti.
\paragraph{Generating Training Dataset} Besides the training images provided by \cite{tekin18}, we also render about 30000 synthetic images using OpenGL and annotate keypoints on them for training as aforementioned in Section \ref{sec:Synthetic_dataset}. We tune the parameters of SIFT to set the total number of designated keypoints to be 50 for all objects except for the eggbox where we choose 17 unsymmetric keypoints.
\paragraph{Training Setting} For the first stage, we train YOLO using stochastic gradient descent for optimization, with learning rate initially set as 0.001 and divided by 10 at every 100 epochs. We randomly change the hue, saturation and exposure of images by up to a factor of 1.5 while we also randomly scale the image by up to a factor of 20\% of the image size. For the second stage, we train the KPD using the Adam optimizer \cite{Kingma2014AdamAM} and the learning rate is set as a constant 0.001. To increase the inference speed, we use multi-process during training and testing.
\subsection{Accuracy and Speed on LineMod Dataset}
2D reprojection accuracy results are shown in table \ref{tb:reprojection_accuracy}. Our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The state-of-the-art not-using-refinement method \cite{tekin18} has achieved a slightly better results than the using-refinement methods \cite{7780735, Rad2017BB8AS}. We take a step forward and show the advantage of not-using-refinement methods in terms of 2D reprojection accuracy.
ADD accuracy results are shown in table \ref{tb:ADD}. We not only overtake the state-of-the-art not-using-refinement methods by a large margin (30\% relatively) but also break the domination of using-refinement methods by achieving competitive results. We can see those using-refinement methods work poorly if the refinement procedure is eliminated. For objects which have rich information in their outline (such as Benchvise, Iron and Lamp) or objects whose surface curvature varies greatly (such as Cat and Camera), our method performs very well. Nevertheless, our method is not that satisfactory when dealing with symmetric objects (such as eggbox) or objects which have little surface information (such as phone and glue) in comparison with \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR}, the state-of-the-art using-refinement method. In general, we beat \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR} at 6 out of 13 sequences, showing the great potential of not-using-refinement methods. Some qualitative results can be found in Figure \ref{fig:visualize_all}.
\begin{table}[t]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
& Method & Average \\ \hline
\multirow{3}{*}{w/o} & BB8 \cite{Rad2017BB8AS} & 83.9 \\ \cline{2-3}
& Tekin \cite{tekin18} & 90.4 \\ \cline{2-3}
& OURS & \textbf{94.5} \\ \hline
\multirow{2}{*}{w/Ref.} & Brachmann \cite{7780735} & 73.7 \\ \cline{2-3}
& BB8 \cite{Rad2017BB8AS} & 89.3 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Comparison of 2D reprojection Accuracy on LineMod. The pixel threshold is 5.}
\label{tb:reprojection_accuracy}
\end{table}
Our speed results are shown in table \ref{tb:speed}. We can see the post-refinement procedures are time-consuming. Since we can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy even without refinement, we can feel free to eliminate the refinement procedure. \cite{tekin18} is faster than us because they use a one-shot design.
\begin{table}[]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{c|c|c}
\hline
Method & Speed (fps) & Ref. Time (ms)\\ \hline
Branchmann \cite{7780735} & 2 &100 \\
BB8 \cite{Rad2017BB8AS} & 3 &21 \\
SSD-6D \cite{Kehl2017SSD6DMR} & 10 &24 \\
Tekin \cite{tekin18} & \textbf{45} &- \\
OURS & 25 &- \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Speed results of state-of-the-art methods. \cite{tekin18} and OURS don't use the refinement procedure. (We retest the speed of \cite{tekin18} using their published codes on our server for a fair comparison.)}
\label{tb:speed}
\end{table}
\subsection{Results on the Occlusion Dataset}
\label{sec:occlusionresult}
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{occlusion_result.jpg}
\includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/15_30_px.png}
\end{center}
\caption{Results on the Occlusion dataset. Top: Percentage of correctly estimated poses as a function of the pixel threshold in 2D reprojection accuracy. We can correctly estimate about 65\% frames for a 15px threshold and about 80 \% frames for a 30 px threshold on average. Bottom: Two frames with a 15px and 30px error respectively. The green and blue rendered bounding boxes denote the ground truth and predicted pose respectively.}
\label{fig:occlusion_result}
\end{figure}
For experiments on the LineMod dataset, we use all the predicted keypoints to estimate 6D pose and do not abandon any predicted keypoints. But when on the Occlusion dataset we only keep $l=10$ most confident keypoints and abandon other low-confident keypoints. The results are shown in Figure \ref{fig:occlusion_result}. The state-of-the-art not-using-refinement method \cite{tekin18} chooses 183 images in the Occlusion dataset to train and others to test so there are very similar occlusions between the training and testing images. We follow the strict experiment condition with \cite{Rad2017BB8AS} that we do not use any images in the test sequence. Although the training process is more difficult, we still achieve much better results than \cite{tekin18}. For a 15px threshold in 2D reprojection accuracy, \cite{tekin18} can estimate about 50\% frames correctly while we can estimate around 65\% frames correctly, closer to 80\% in state-of-the-art using-refinement method \cite{Rad2017BB8AS}. Some qualitative results are in Figure \ref{fig:visualize_all}.
\begin{figure*}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.90\linewidth]{Figures/visual_all.png}
\end{center}
\caption{Qualitative results on LineMod and Occlusion datasets. First two rows: Results on the LineMod dataset, our method can estimate 6D pose correctly in challenging scenes with extreme lighting conditions, heavy clutter and motion blur. Third row: Result on the Occlusion dataset. We can still recover pose correctly when partial occlusion exists. Last row: Failure cases on the Occlusion dataset due to severe blur or overly deficient feature information.}
\label{fig:visualize_all}
\end{figure*}
\section{Analysis and Ablation Study}
\subsection{Inferring Invisible Back-face Keypoints}
When estimating surface keypoints from a single RGB image, some keypoints can be invisible because they are on the back of the 3D object. However, this seemingly frustrating problem can be handled naturally by our architecture. Since the investigated objects are rigid with 6 degrees of freedom (DoF), our CNN can learn to infer back-face keypoints from end-to-end training without special treatment. In other words, although only a few keypoints on the front of the 3D object can be seen directly from the RGB image, our trained pipeline can still predict all the designated keypoints including invisible ones at high enough accuracy (See Figure \ref{fig:infer_backpoints}). This portrait is worth noticing and very beneficial for estimating 6D pose from localizing surface keypoints.
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{Figures/infer_backpoints.png}
\end{center}
\caption{Infering back-face points. Our pipeline can predict keypoints not only on the front (a) but also on the back (b) of the model. The keypoints are all estimated precisely without distinction. (c)}
\label{fig:infer_backpoints}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Selecting Most Confident Keypoints}
\label{sec:choosing_most_conf}
In theory, the PnP algorithm needs at least three pairs of keypoints to recover an object's 6D pose. We can designate much more than three keypoints and thus being free to select the most confident keypoints to overcome occlusion. As we mentioned in Section \ref{sec:occlusionresult}, among $50$ keypoints, we select top-$10$ confident estimated keypoints and sacrifice others. We visualize this procedure in Figure \ref{fig:filter10}. We also conduct a quantitative experiment to show the relation between the pose estimation accuracy and the number of selected most confident keypoints. The results are in Figure \ref{fig:number_of_selected_keypoints}. We can see that selecting the top-10 confident keypoints can lead to prominently more accurate poses in comparison with preserving all 50 predicted keypoints. Generally selecting fewer most-confident keypoints can lead to better 6D pose estimation because the selected keypoints are relatively more accurate. However, few selected keypoints would do harm to the effectiveness of the PnP algorithm.
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.85\linewidth]{Figures/filter10.png}
\end{center}
\caption{Visualize the selecting procedure. Left: The ground truth keypoints (yellow) and predicted keypoints (blue). The top-10 confident points are plotted with crosses while others are randomly sampled and plotted with dots. We can see that the top-10 confident points are predicted accurately, but those unselected unconfident keypoints are often biased due to occlusion. Right: Ground truth poses (green) and predicted poses (blue).}
\label{fig:filter10}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{Figures/number_of_selected_points.png}
\end{center}
\caption{The relation between 2D reprojection accuracy of predicted poses and number of selected most confident keypoints which are used in PnP algorithm.}
\label{fig:number_of_selected_keypoints}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Surface Keypoints Designation}
\label{sec:choosing keypoints}
We designate the 3D SIFT surface points as keypoints instead of using 8 corners and the center of 3D bounding boxes as \cite{Rad2017BB8AS,tekin18} do. And we conduct a comparative experiment to validate that SIFT keypoints are better than corners points. We only change $M_{k3D}$, the set of keypoints to conduct all the comparative experiments based on our pipeline. (Note that in our pipeline design, points in $M_{k3D}$ aren't necessary to be on the model surface.) For the sake of fairness, we restrict the number of keypoints to 9, and we keep all the training settings the same. We train each of them for enough epochs to ensure they both converge well.
The overall results are in Figure \ref{fig:diff_ways}. We can see that choosing surface points as keypoints works much better than corners and the center of the 3D bounding box. This is unsurprising because the surface keypoints are more related to the features of the target results than the bounding box vertices in the air and thus the network can estimate the keypoints more accurately. This comparison can partially explain why our pipeline achieves better results on LineMod than \cite{Rad2017BB8AS,tekin18}.
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{kp_type_result.jpg}
\end{center}
\caption{Comparison between two ways of keypoint designation: SIFT points and the corners plus center of bounding boxes. We test on three objects on LineMod dataset in terms of 2D projection accuracy.}
\label{fig:diff_ways}
\end{figure}
\section{Conclusion}
We have proposed a novel and natural method to estimate 6D pose mainly by localizing the designated surface keypoints. Several experiments are conducted to validate the accuracy, speed and robustness of our method. Concerning accuracy, our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art not-using-refinement method by a large margin and is competitive with the state-of-art using-refinement method. Meanwhile, our method is much faster than using-refinement methods. Additionally, our approach can handle symmetry naturally and is robust to occlusion. We are looking forward to future work about better ways of keypoint designation to recover 6D pose more accurately.
{\small
\bibliographystyle{ieee}
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The 2016–17 season was Feyenoord's 109th season of play, it marked its 61st season in the Eredivisie and its 95th consecutive season in the top flight of Dutch football. It was the second season with manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst, a former player who played seven seasons for Feyenoord and who played 106 times for Dutch national team. Feyenoord entered the KNVB Cup in the first round and the Europa League in the group stage.
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\section{Introduction}
\noindent {\bf 1. Introduction.}
A remarkable conclusion from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) experiments \cite{rhic} is that the quark-gluon plasma does not behave as a weakly coupled gas of quarks and gluons, but rather as a strongly coupled fluid \cite{fluid}. This makes the study of the plasma a challenging task.
Experimentally, valuable information is obtained by analyzing the energy loss of energetic partons created in hard initial collisions. In order to use this information to learn about the plasma, a theoretical, quantitative understanding of the different mechanisms of parton energy loss is needed. Several such mechanisms have been previously studied, both in QCD itself \cite{radiative} and in the context of the gauge/gravity duality \cite{strong}.
In this letter we will uncover a new mechanism whereby a sufficiently fast heavy quark traversing a strongly coupled plasma loses energy by Cherenkov-radiating in-medium mesons. We will first show that this takes place in all strongly coupled, large-$N_\mt{c}$ theories with a gravity dual. Next we will calculate the energy loss in a simple example. Finally, we will discuss possible implications for heavy-ion collision experiments.
\noindent
{\bf 2. Universality of the mechanism.}
This follows from two universal properties of the gauge/gravity duality (in the limit $N_\mt{c}, \lambda \rightarrow \infty$): (i) the fact that the gauge theory deconfined phase is described by a black hole (BH) geometry \cite{Witten}, and (ii) the fact that a finite number of quark flavours $N_\mt{f}$ is described by $N_\mt{f}$ D-brane probes \cite{Karch-Randall} -- see fig.~\ref{cherenkov-with-quark}.
In addition to the gauge theory directions, the gravity description always includes a radial direction which is dual to the gauge theory energy scale. The radial position of the horizon is proportional to the plasma temperature $T$. The D-branes extend in the radial direction down to a minimum value proportional to the (constituent) quark mass $\mq$.
For sufficiently large $\mq/T$, the D-branes sit outside the horizon \cite{MMT,dpdq, dpdqdqbar}. In this phase, low-spin gauge theory mesons are described by small, normalizable fluctuations of scalar and vector fields propagating on the branes,
whose spectrum is discrete and gapped. In particular, this means that sufficiently heavy mesons survive deconfinement, in agreement with lattice and potential model predictions for real-world QCD \cite{quarkonium}.
Let $\omega(q)$ be the in-medium dispersion relation (DR) for these mesons.
As an illustrative example, the DR for vector mesons in the D3/D7 system is depicted in fig.~\ref{dispersion}.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[scale=.42]{cherenkov-with-quark.eps}
\caption{D-branes and open string in a BH geometry.}
\label{cherenkov-with-quark}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[scale=.55]{dispersion1.eps}
\caption{DR for the transverse (black, continuous curve) and longitudinal (red, dashed curve) modes of a heavy vector meson with $v_\mt{lim} = 0.35$ in the D3/D7 system. The blue, continuous straight line corresponds to $\omega = v q$ with $v_\mt{lim}<v<1$.}
\label{dispersion}
\end{figure}
As $q \rightarrow \infty$, the DR becomes linear: $\omega(q) \sim v_\mt{lim} q$, with $v_\mt{lim} < 1$. This subluminal limiting velocity, which is the same for all mesons, is easy to understand in the gravitational description \cite{limiting}. Since highly energetic mesons are strongly attracted by the BH, their wave-function is very concentrated at the bottom of the branes. Consequently, their velocity is limited by the local speed of light $v_\mt{lim}$ at this point (see fig.~\ref{cherenkov-with-quark}). Because of the BH redshift, $v_\mt{lim}$ is lower than the speed of light at infinity. In the gauge theory this translates into the statement that $v_\mt{lim}$ is lower than the speed of light in the vacuum \cite{MMT2}.
Consider now a heavy quark in the plasma. In the gravitational picture, this is described by a string that starts on the D-branes and falls through the horizon -- see fig.~\ref{cherenkov-with-quark}.
In order to model a highly energetic quark we consider a string whose endpoint moves with an arbitrary velocity $v$ at an arbitrary radial position $r_0$, where $r_0$ is inversely proportional to the size of the gluon cloud that dresses the quark \cite{size}.
Two simple observations now lead to the effect that we are interested in. The first one is that the string endpoint is charged under the scalar and vector fields on the branes. In the gauge theory, this corresponds to an effective quark-meson coupling (see fig. 3) of order $\sim 1/\sqrt{N_\mt{c}}$.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[scale=.30]{quark-meson-coupling.eps}
\caption{Effective quark-meson coupling.}
\label{quark-meson-coupling}
\end{figure}
The dynamics of the branes+string endpoint system is thus (a generalization of) that of classical electrodynamics in a medium in the presence of a fast-moving charge. The second observation is that the velocity of the quark may exceed the limiting velocity of the mesons, since the redshift at the position of the string endpoint is smaller than at the bottom of the branes. As in ordinary electrodynamics, if this happens then the string endpoint loses energy by Cherenkov-radiating into the fields on the brane. In the gauge theory, this translates into the quark losing energy by Cherenkov-radiating scalar and vector mesons. The rate of energy loss is set by the square of the coupling, and is therefore of order $1/N_\mt{c}$.
\noindent
{\bf 3. A quantitative example.}
In this section we will calculate the rate of energy loss in four-dimensional, $SU(N_\mt{c})$,
${\cal N}=4$ super Yang-Mills (SYM) theory coupled to one quark flavour (but the result is valid for arbitrary $N_\mt{f}$, see sec.~5). The dual description consists of a D7-brane probe in the supergravity background of $N_\mt{c}$ black D3-branes. Following \cite{MMT2} we write the induced metric on the D7-brane worldvolume as $ds^2 = L^2 ds^2 (g)$ with
\begin{equation}
ds^2 (g) = \frac{\rho^2}{2} \left[-\frac{f^2}{\tilde f} d t^2 + {\tilde f} dx_i^2\right]
+ \frac{(1+\dot R ^2)}{\rho^2} dr^2+ \frac{r^2}{\rho^2} d \Omega^2_3 \,,
\label{g}
\end{equation}
where $\rho^2 = R^2 + r^2$, $f = 1 - 1/\rho^4$, $\tilde{f} = 1 + 1/\rho^4$, $\dot{R}=dR/dr$, and
$x^\mu=\{t, x^i\}$ are the four gauge theory directions. $R(r)$ describes the D7-brane embedding, with $R(\infty)=2\mq/\sqrt{\lambda}T$. The dimensionless coordinates above are related to their dimensionful counterparts (denoted with tildes) through $x^\mu = \pi T \, \tilde{x}^\mu$,
$\{r, R, \rho \} = \{\tilde{r}, \tilde{R}, \tilde{\rho} \}/\pi L^2 T$.
The terms in the brane+string action relevant to our calculation are
\begin{equation}
S= - \int d^8 \sigma \sqrt{-g}\, \frac{1}{4} F^{ab}F_{ab}
- e \int d\tau A_a \frac{d\sigma^a}{d\tau} \,,
\label{8action}
\end{equation}
where $F_{ab}=\partial_{[a} A_{b]}$ and $\sigma^a=\{ x^\mu, r, \Omega_3 \}$. The first term comes from expanding the Dirac-Born-Infeld part of the D7-brane action to quadratic order in the gauge field. The metric $g$ that enters this term is that in eqn.~\eqn{g}, which contains no factors of $L$; these have been absorbed in the definition of $e$ in eqn.~\eqn{e}. The Wess-Zumino part of the D7-brane action will not contribute to our calculation. The second term in \eqn{8action} is the minimal coupling of the endpoint of an open string, whose worldline is parametrised by
$\sigma^a(\tau)$, to the gauge field on the branes. We have omitted a similar coupling to the scalar fields, which will be considered in \cite{cherenkov}. The coupling constant in \eqn{8action} is
\begin{equation}
e^2= \frac{1}{T_\mt{D7} \left(2 \pi l^2_s\right)^2 L^4} = \frac{8 \pi^4}{N_\mt{c}} \,,
\label{e}
\end{equation}
where $T_\mt{D7} = 1/g_s (2\pi)^7 \ell_s^8$ is the D7-brane tension. As expected, $e$ is of order $1/\sqrt{N_\mt{c}}$, which justifies our neglect of terms of order higher than quadratic in the action.
The second term in \eqn{8action} may be written as $-e \int d^8\sigma A_a J^a$. For simplicity, we will assume that the quark moves with constant velocity along a straight line at constant radial and angular positions, so we write
\begin{equation}
J^a = \delta^{(3)}( \vec{x} - \vec{v} t ) \, \delta (r - r_0) \, \delta^{(3)}( \Omega - \Omega_0 ) \times (1, \vec{v}, 0, \vec{0} )\,.
\end{equation}
In reality, $r_0$ and $v$ will of course decrease with time because of the BH gravitational pull and the energy loss. However, for simplicity we will concentrate on the initial part of the trajectory (which is long provided the initial quark energy is large) for which $r_0$ and $v$ are approximately constant \cite{trajectory}
-- see fig.~\ref{cherenkov-with-quark}.
The rate of quark energy loss is given by minus the work per unit time done by the gauge field:
\begin{equation}
\frac{dE}{dt} = -e \int d^3 x dr d\Omega_3 \, F_{0a} J^a
= - e v^i F_{0i}(t, \vec{v} t, r_0, \Omega_0) \,.
\label{loss}
\end{equation}
Since real-world QCD has no internal $S^3$, we focus on modes with no angular momentum on the $S^3$. These take the form $A_\mu(x^\nu, r), A_r(x^\nu, r), A_\Omega=0$. We set $A_r=0$ by a gauge choice. Further, we work with the Fourier-space components $A_\mu(\omega,q,r)$ and choose $\vec{q}=(q,0,0)$, $\vec{v}=v(\cos\theta, v\sin \theta, 0)$. After integrating over the $S^3$, the relevant Fourier-space components of the current are
\begin{equation}
J^\mu = 2\pi \delta( \omega - q v \cos \theta ) \, \delta (r - r_0) \times (1,\cos \theta, \sin \theta, 0) \,.
\label{J}
\end{equation}
With this choice the only transverse mode of the gauge field excited by the source is
${\cal A} = A_2$. The equation of motion for this mode is
\begin{equation}
\partial_r \left( \frac{f r^3 \, \partial_r {\cal A}}{2\sqrt{1+ \dot R ^2}} \right)
+ \sqrt{1+\dot R^2} \frac{r^3}{\rho^4} \left(\frac{\omega^2 \tilde{f}}{f}
- \frac{q^2 f}{\tilde{f}} \right) {\cal A} = {\tilde e} {\cal J} \,,
\label{trans}
\end{equation}
where ${\cal J} = J^2$, $\tilde{e} = e/\Omega_3$ and $\Omega_3=2\pi^2$ is the volume of a unit $S^3$. We solve \eqn{trans} by expanding ${\cal A}$ as
\begin{equation}
{\cal A} (\omega, q, r) = \sum_n {\cal A}_n (\omega, q) \, \xi_n (q,r)
\label{expansion}
\end{equation}
in terms of a basis of normalizable eigen-functions $\{ \xi_n (q,r) \}$ in the radial direction. These are solutions of eqn.~\eqn{trans} with ${\cal J}=0$ with $q$-dependent eigen-values $\omega=\omega_n(q)$, and satisfy the orthonormality relations
\begin{equation}
\int_0^\infty dr \frac{\tilde{f} r^3}{f \rho^4} \, \sqrt{1+\dot R^2} \, \xi_m \xi_n
=\delta_{mn} \,.
\end{equation}
Inserting the expansion \eqn{expansion} in \eqn{trans}, and using the eigen-state equation and the orthonormality relations, we find
\begin{equation}
\left[ \omega^2 - \omega_n^2(q) \right] {\cal A}_n(\omega,q)
= {\tilde e} {\cal J}_n (\omega, q)\,,
\label{fourdim}
\end{equation}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
{\cal J}_n (\omega, q) &=& \int dr {\cal J}(\omega, q) \xi_n (q,r) \nonumber \\
&=& 2\pi \delta\left(\omega- q v \cos\theta \right) v \sin \theta \, \xi_n (q,r_0) \,.
\label{Jn}
\end{eqnarray}
Through the expansion \eqn{expansion} we have `Kaluza-Klein' reduced the five-dimensional gauge field to a discrete, infinite tower of independent four-dimensional gauge fields
$\{ {\cal A}_n(\omega,q)\}$. Each of these fields is characterized by a $q$-dependent radial `wave-function' $\xi_n (q,r)$, as well as by a DR $\omega=\omega_n(q)$, and couples to the quark with an effective strength $e_\mt{eff}(q,r_0)=e \xi_n (q,r_0)$.
With retarded boundary conditions, as appropriate for the reaction to the quark's passage, eqn.~\eqn{fourdim} yields
\begin{equation}
{\cal A}_n(\omega,q) =
\frac{\tilde{e} {\cal J}_n (\omega, q)}{\left( \omega + i\epsilon \right)^2 - \omega_n^2(q)} \,.
\end{equation}
We now evaluate \eqn{loss} to obtain the energy deposited on the $n$-th transverse mode. We first express $F_{02}(t, \vec{v} t, r_0, \Omega_0)$ as an integral over its Fourier components. We then integrate over frequencies trivially because of the delta-function in \eqn{Jn}. Finally, we set $d^3 q= 2\pi q^2 dq ds$, where $s=\cos \theta$, to arrive at
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{dE_{n}}{dt} &=& -\frac{e^2 v}{\Omega_3} \int_0^\infty \frac{dq}{2\pi} \,
q \xi_n^2 (q,r_0) \int_{-1}^1 \frac{ds}{2\pi i}
\frac{s(1-s^2)}{(s+i\epsilon)^2 - s_n^2(q)} \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{e^2 v}{2\Omega_3} \int_0^\infty \frac{dq}{2\pi} \,
q \xi_n^2 (q,r_0) (1 - s_n^2(q)) \Theta (1 - s_n^2(q)) \,, \nonumber \\
\label{losstrans}
\end{eqnarray}
where $s_n = v_n/v$ and $v_n (q) = \omega_n (q)/q$ is the phase velocity of the mode. The Heaviside function confirms the expected result: The quark only radiates into modes with phase velocity lower than $v$ -- those to the right of the dashed, vertical line in fig.~\ref{dispersion}.
The numerical result for $n=0$ is plotted in fig.~\ref{result}.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[scale=.36]{result1.eps}
\caption{Energy loss into ${\cal A}_{(n=0)}$ for an embedding with $R(\infty)=1.32$. The continuous curves correspond to $r_0=0.86, 0.97, 1.10, 1.25, 1.45$. The dotted curve is defined by the endpoints of the constant-$r_0$ curves.}
\label{result}
\end{figure}
For fixed $r_0$, the energy loss increases monotonically with $v$ up to the maximum allowed value of $v$ -- the local speed of light at $r_0$. As $r_0$ decreases, the characteristic momentum $q_\mt{char}$ of the modes contributing to the integral increases.
As $r_0 \rightarrow 0$ these modes become increasingly peaked at small $r$, and $e_\mt{eff}(q_\mt{char},r_0)$ and the energy loss diverge \cite{cherenkov}. However, this mathematical divergence is removed by physical effects we have not taken into account. For example, for sufficiently large $q$ the radial profile of the mesons becomes of order the string length and stringy effects become important \cite{mit}. Also, mesons acquire widths $\Gamma \propto q^2$ at large $q$ \cite{width} and can no longer be treated as well defined quasiparticles. Finally,
the approximation of a constant-$v$, constant-$r_0$ trajectory ceases to be valid whenever the energy loss rate becomes large.
\noindent
{\bf 4. Phenomenology.}
The Cherenkov radiation of mesons by quarks depends only on the qualitative features of the DR of fig.~\ref{dispersion}, which are universal for all gauge theory plasmas with a dual gravity description \cite{implications}. Moreover, it is conceivable that they may also hold for QCD mesons such as the $J/\psi$ or the $\Upsilon$ (see {\it e.g.} the discussion in \cite{peak}). Here we will examine some qualitative consequences of this assumption for HIC experiments.
The energy lost into mesons would be reflected in a reduction of the heavy quark nuclear modification factor $R_\mt{AA}$ \cite{light}. This would only occur for high enough quark velocities, thus yielding a very particular behaviour of $R_\mt{AA}$. Note that the minimum quark velocity at which the reduction starts to occur may actually be higher than $v_\mt{lim}$, since the quark energy must be larger than the mass of the radiated meson. For example, for a charm quark to radiate a $J/\psi$ meson this condition yields $v > 0.87$. In fact, our calculation applies strictly only in the limit of infinite quark energy, which suggests that it should be more relevant to HIC experiments at the Large Hadron Collider than at RHIC.
The radiated mesons would be preferentially emitted at a characteristic Cherenkov angle
$\cos \theta_\mt{c}=v_\mt{lim}/v$. Taking the gravity result as guidance, $v_\mt{lim}$ could be as low as $v_\mt{lim}=0.35$ at the meson dissociation temperature \cite{MMT2}, corresponding to an angle as large as
$\theta_\mt{c} \approx 1.21$ rad. This emission pattern is similar to the emission of sound waves by an energetic parton \cite{mach} in that both effects lead to a non-trivial angular structure. One important difference, however, is that the radiated heavy mesons would not thermalize and hence would not be part of a hydrodynamic shock wave. As in the Mach cone case, the meson emission pattern could be reflected in azimuthal dihadron correlations triggered by a high-$p_\mt{T}$ hadron. Due to surface bias, the energetic parton in the triggered direction is hardly modified, while the one propagating in the opposite direction moves through a significant amount of medium, emitting heavy mesons. Thus, under the above assumptions, the dihadron distribution with an associated $J/\psi$ would have a ring-like structure peaked at an angle
$\theta \approx \pi-\theta_\mt{c}$.
\noindent
{\bf 5. Discussion.}
Cherenkov emission of gluons in the context of heavy ion collisions has been considered in \cite{gluon}, where the in-medium gluons are assumed to have space-like DR. Although some of the underlying physics is similar, the mechanism we have discussed is different in two respects. First, the radiated particles are colourless mesons, not gluons. Second, the gauge/gravity duality provides a large class of completely explicit and calculable examples in which this mechanism is realized.
We have focused on the transverse modes of the gauge field. Since the vector mesons are massive, there is a similar energy loss into the longitudinal modes \cite{cherenkov}.
We calculated the energy deposited on the branes by the string endpoint. Since the branes sit outside the BH, this energy must stay on the branes (in the limit $N_\mt{c}, \lambda \rightarrow \infty$). Because total conserved charges must agree, this energy is the same as the energy lost by the quark in the gauge theory. The Cherenkov angle $\theta_\mt{c}$ is also the same, since it is determined by kinematics alone. In contrast, extracting unintegrated gauge theory quantities ({\it e.g.} the differential power spectrum) would require computing the boundary stress-energy tensor as in \cite{boundary}.
The validity of our results requires not just large $N_\mt{c}$, but also strong coupling. In this regime the holographic mesons behave as elementary excitations, as opposed to composite bound states, up to energies of order $\sqrt{\lambda} T \gg T$ \cite{MMT,MMT2}. Despite the strong coupling requirement, our results might apply to asymptotically free theories as long as: (i) they are sufficiently strongly coupled at the scale $T$, so that the in-medium meson DR shares the qualitative features of that in fig.~\ref{dispersion}, and (ii) there is a non-zero quark-meson coupling in the medium.
The energy loss is $N_\mt{f}$-independent because (at leading order) the string endpoint couples directly to the gauge field on only one of the $N_\mt{f}$ D-branes. The $1/N_\mt{c}$ scaling of the energy loss does not necessarily imply that the analogous effect (if present) is small in $N_\mt{c}=3$ real-world QCD, in particular at high quark velocities. Furthermore, its characteristic geometry and velocity dependence may make it easily identifiable.
We close with a comment on the energy loss of heavy mesons. At $N_\mt{c} \rightarrow \infty$, these mesons experience no drag \cite{no-drag, MMT2}.
At finite $N_\mt{c}$, pointlike heavy mesons experience a drag of order ${\cal O}(1/N_\mt{c}^2)$ \cite{pointlike}. Cherenkov radiation implies an ${\cal O}(1/N_\mt{c})$ drag for fast excited mesons describable as a long string with both endpoints on the D-branes \cite{higher}, since each endpoint may radiate as an individual quark.
\noindent
{\bf Acknowledgments.} We thank M.\ Chernicoff, R.~Emparan, B.~Fiol, A.~Guijosa, C.\ Manuel, A.~Paredes, L.~Pati\~{n}o and P.~Townsend for discussions. We are supported by a Marie Curie
PIEF-GA-2008-220207 (JCS) and 2009SGR168, MEC FPA 2007-66665-C02 and CPAN CSD2007-00042 Consolider-Ingenio 2010 (DF, DM).
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 381 |
Gmina Kuryłówka is a rural gmina (administrative district) in Leżajsk County, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, in south-eastern Poland. Its seat is the village of Kuryłówka, which lies approximately northeast of Leżajsk and north-east of the regional capital Rzeszów.
The gmina covers an area of , and as of 2006 its total population is 5,663 (5,733 in 2011).
Villages
Gmina Kuryłówka contains the villages and settlements of Brzyska Wola, Dąbrowica, Jastrzębiec, Kolonia Polska, Kulno, Kuryłówka, Ożanna, Słoboda, Tarnawiec and Wólka Łamana.
Neighbouring gminas
Gmina Kuryłówka is bordered by the town of Leżajsk and by the gminas of Adamówka, Biszcza, Krzeszów, Leżajsk, Potok Górny and Tarnogród.
Notable persons
Moe Drabowsky, American major league baseball pitcher
References
Polish official population figures 2006
Kurylowka
Leżajsk County | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 5,601 |
Q: TimeZone Clarification - LINUX env One of my current jobs(oozie coordinator) is set at 2018-03-26T14:08Z UTC. This runs every day 10PM IST.
Would you please explain the FORMAT it's showing. I want to reset the job to 4PM IST.
Thanks.
A: The format is described in this W3 Note: Date and Time Formats.
Specifically, your string 2018-03-26T14:08Z is Mon, 26 Mar 2018 14:08:00 +0000, according to:
Complete date plus hours and minutes:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD
Where:
*
*YYYY = four-digit year
*MM = two-digit month (01=January, etc.)
*DD = two-digit day of month (01 through 31)
*hh = two digits of hour (00 through 23) (am/pm NOT allowed)
*mm = two digits of minute (00 through 59)
*TZD = time zone designator (Z or +hh:mm or -hh:mm)
To set it to 4PM IST, use 2018-03-26T10:30Z, because, according to Google:
Indian Standard Time is 5 hours and 30 minutes ahead of Coordinated Universal Time.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,339 |
After a year of thinking, questioning, debating, I have decided that it's time for Holl & Lane Magazine to close … sort of. You see, the actual physical magazine is going away (more details below), but the brand, the community, the stories, those are still very much sticking around.
We, as women, can overcome and become better, even after hardships. Read our REDEMPTION issue today.
The holidays are upon us and the three of us here on the H&L team cannot wait. Though the time leading up to it is crazy (fulfilling orders, making sure our upcoming issue is ready), it's something we look forward to each year. And each year, we're working hard all the way through the holidays.
How do we know what sort of impact we're making on the world? Read our IMPACT issue today.
HLW is a community of people who love the written word. It's a monthly membership filled with tools to help our writers continue to do what they do best - write. And we're there to cheer them on every step of the way.
Transformation is a word that I'm fond of. Whether it's my hair, my style, the rug in the living room, or even an episode of Fixer Upper, I love a good transformation. But in this issue, we're talking about change on a new level. A change that begins to bubble up deep down within your soul until it explodes out of you, rocking the world you thought you knew.
Find out why we started an Indiegogo campaign and how YOU can help.
We have launched a monthly membership specifically for writers called H&L Writes. There will be writing prompts, writing exercises, and more!
We don't give ourselves enough credit for what we did yesterday let alone the last decade. We spend way too much time wondering why we don't have the energy or talent or discipline to do the things we want to do, or thinking that what we're already doing isn't enough, which is exhausting.
Life is complicated. It's not just any one thing and doesn't always fit neatly into a theme. There are layers of emotions and events and circumstances and choices all woven into every moment - past and present.
The bonds of friendship aren't forged in blood. They are created from a sharing of the soul, a belonging like no other. When you have a friend, you have a seat at the table that has your name on it.
From the beginning, we've strived to start honest conversations about our shared experiences as women. Because the more we open up and share, the more we let others know that they are not alone in what they're feeling and experiencing. There's no room for shame or judgement around these parts. Even so, there are still topics that people consider off-limits, often holding back from sharing their hearts because of fear. Well, we're here to tell you that we're not afraid, and this is a safe space. Always.
August is "Educate" month at Holl & Lane, and we'll be featuring stories here on the blog that relate to this theme in some way. Maybe it's the time of year, since many people are gearing up to go back to school themselves, or sending their kids back. Maybe it's the thought that no matter what stage of life we're in, we never stop learning. Either way, we're feeling the pull of knowledge and learning. So, let's fully embrace the opportunity to expand our horizons. It's how we continue to grow and develop mentally and emotionally.
We are so excited to announce that our newest issue is now available in our shop. Featuring the theme, The Mind, this new issue takes you on a journey through stories of mental health and mental awareness.
One thing that is so important to us on the Holl & Lane team is giving back. While we're not able to give much, I've made it a goal to donate to a new charity with each of our last few issues. $1 from each sale of our issues goes to a charity based on the theme of each issue.
1) HOW CAN I PUBLISH MY WRITING IN A MAGAZINE?
2) HOW CAN I PUBLISH MY PHOTOS IN A MAGAZINE?
2016 was an interesting year for me. I entered it feeling lost and I'm leaving it feeling lost but somewhere in the middle I found some things that were really important. Running a magazine is really hard. I've talked about it on Instagram but I wanted to share a bit more with you about what life has actually looked like on this side of the screen for the year. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 7,750 |
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Preparing for New Minnesota Science Standards
John Olson, Minnesota Department of Education Science Specialist and colleagues are writing a series of articles for the MnSTA newsletter in preparation for the review of the science standards in 2018-19. They are including ideas about science learning and teaching that have come from research and teaching experience, which will influence the writing and implementation of our next science standards.
The tentative sequence is:
When will we get new standards? Will we adopt national standards? (December 2016)
What are science teachers saying about our current science standards? (March 2017)
What new ideas about science learning might guide our next science standards? (May 2017)
What new ideas about science instruction might guide our next science standards? (September 2017)
What new ideas about science assessment might support our next science standards? (December 2017)
How can I influence the next science standards? (March 2018)
How can I use my summer to get ready for upcoming science standards? (June 2018)
Standards Review Progress: What is Happening with the Science Standards Review? (Sept 2018)
After the first draft of the Science Standards, what are the next steps? (Dec 2018)
Current Status of the MN Science Standards for 2019 - March 27, 2019 (March 2019)
How do we prepare to implement the new Science Standards? (May 2019)
For further information see the MN Dept. of Education standards webpage or contact john.c.olson@state.mn.us
MDE Quick Links
MDE Science Page (standards, awards, misc.)
MDE Statewide Testing (MCA resources)
Frameworks for the Minnesota Science & Mathematics Standards
Articles (most recent articles listed first):
11. How do we prepare to implement the new Science Standards?
10. Current Status of the MN Science Standards for 2019 - March 27, 2019
9. After the first draft of the Science Standards, what are the next steps?
8. Standards Review Progress: What is Happening with the Science Standards Review?
7. How can I use my summer to get ready for upcoming science standards?
6. How can I influence the next science standards?
5. What new ideas about science assessment might support our next science standards?
4. What new ideas about science instruction might guide our next science standards?
3. What new ideas about science learning might guide our next science standards?
2. Getting Ready for New Science Standards
1. When will we get new science standards? Will we adopt national standards?
How do we prepare to implement the new Science Standards? - May 2019
As of the writing of this article in late May, the science standards committee has completed its work and submitted the recommended standards and benchmarks to the commissioner of education. The next step is for the commissioner to give her approval and submit the standards to Minnesota's Rulemaking process to make them legally binding. However at this point the commissioner's approval is being delayed.
To help districts and teachers start planning, the recommendations of the committee are posted at the MDE science webpage (at the bottom of the page). After the commissioner has approved the standards, the final draft will be published and MDE will develop an implementation plan.
The committee and the commissioner are recommending to rulemaking that the full implementation year be 2023-2024. By that year schools should use the new standards for all grades and courses and that is the year the MCA will be based on the new standards. (MCA IV in '24)
Based on that schedule, districts may consider this implementation timeline:
2019-20 – professional development focusing on using the science and engineering practices in current instruction.
'20-21 – curriculum (e.g. unit plans) and assessment development and continued professional development focusing on phenomena-based instruction and developing storylines.
'21-22 – teach the new standards in K, 3, 6, and a ninth grade class
'22-23 – add 1, 4, 7, and another HS class
'23-24 – add 2, 5, 8 and biology (to line up with the grades that are tested on the MCA)
Here are a few ideas to keep in mind as you start planning to implement the new standards:
MDE will prepare a document that provides suggestions for implementation activities over the span of the five year period.
As you plan courses and any changes in teacher placement, notice that the previous 9-12 physical science standards have moved to 8th grade and that there has been an increase in high school earth and space science standards. As a result most high schools should consider requiring a year-long earth science course. However this may not be needed until 2023-24.
MDE will have discussions with the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) about adjustment to license requirements to support the new standards.
Some professional development organizations are planning to provide professional development to support the new standards and content knowledge that teachers may need.
The MDE Academic Standards division is developing a website called the Standards Portal which will provide resources for districts and schools in implementing standards-based education. The website will include tools for districts in supporting effective instructional practices and designing curriculum. The Portal will be unveiled at a Standards Mini-Conference on August 9 at MDE. There will also be a breakout session on the shifts in the new science standards. The agenda and registration will be at the MDE website.
Current Status of the MN Science Standards for 2019 - March 27, 2019
The second draft of the 2019 Minnesota Science Standards was published February 14th. There were about 470 responses on the feedback survey (1/4th of them from groups) and about 50 emailed comments. There was a wide range of ideas that participants presented with the largest issues of concern being the sequence of benchmarks in middle and high school, inclusion of contributions of American Indian communities, and the wording of benchmarks and examples. Thank you to all the persons who took time to complete the survey and elaborate on their ideas.
On March 20th, the Science Standards Committee analyzed the data from the feedback in light of the goals the committee had set for the standards. They considered four options for the sequence of benchmarks for the third draft and used a deliberate process for decision-making. The result was a strong consensus for continuing the sequence of the second draft with benchmarks in the following categories:
- 6th grade – Earth and Space Science
- 7th grade – Life Science
- 8th grade – Physical Science
- High School – Chemistry, Earth & Space Science, Life Science, and Physics
Committee meetings are scheduled in April and May with smaller writing and editing groups working between meetings. In particular they will be editing and rearranging benchmarks based on suggestions from the feedback with a concern for achieving greater consistency.
The final draft should be available in late May, which people can start using for planning. The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) will begin conversations with the Board for Professional Educator Standards and Licensing (PELSB) concerning adaptations in licenses and standards to support the final standards. MDE plans to develop resources for instruction, professional development, and district implementation.
The standards become law through the state's rulemaking process. During that process, the date is set for the full implementation of the standards and the new version of the MCA exam. This time period is likely to be in the range of four or five years. Hence there could be time for one or two years of planning and professional development before schools might start phasing-in changes of instruction to reflect the new standards. We plan to develop resources for instruction, professional development, and district implementation.
This summer the MDE assessment division will start the first steps toward designing the new MCA exam to reflect the new standards. They will train a group of teachers to be writers of test items to assess the three dimensions included in the new standards. That information will also be valuable for designing classroom assessments. Teachers and leaders are also needed to design the test specification. If you are interested in being involved in either activity, contact Jim.Wood@state.mn.us or Judi.Iverson@state.mn.us
The second draft of the science standards and information about the standards revision process is at the MDE Science webpage. A series of articles on the science standards development is at the Minnesota Science Teachers Association standards page.
After the first draft of the Science Standards, what are the next steps?
A big step has been completed on the way to new science standards. The first draft of the 2019 Academic Standards in Science was published November 9th and was open for feedback by online and in-person meetings. There were 231 responses to the survey, 73 attendees at the Minn. Dept. of Education Open Houses and 156 participants at MnSTA meetings or sessions at the fall conference. Thank you to everyone who reviewed the draft and put energy into providing thoughtful feedback. This is an important component of the standards development process.
The Standards Review Committee at their December meeting read all the comments and analyzed the patterns in the responses. As expected, there was a wide range of responses. The majority of the responses favored the major organization of having standards based on Science and Engineering Practices and having Benchmarks as three dimensional statements that combine Practices, Core Ideas and Crosscutting Concepts. The committee affirmed this direction, but wants to make some adjustments for the second draft.
The Review Committee assigned writing teams to look carefully at some of the following items:
Improving clarity of statements and potential inclusion of examples
Making equity more visible
Format of the standards and benchmarks that makes the progression of core ideas (content concepts) easier to track.
Assignment of core ideas in elementary grades to provide continuity to current topics whenever possible and yet preserve learning progressions.
Addition of chemistry and physics standards to support the graduation requirements.
The second draft will be published February 14th and available for feedback until February 28th. Watch for announcements of feedback meetings and the online survey at http://bit.ly/MNSciStds . The final draft will be available in May and there will likely be a three or four year period to phase-in the standards and benchmarks.
Additional comment: Many comments about the first draft noted the frequent use of the practice of model development. Some also indicated an incomplete understanding of that practice as it is being used in the standards draft. I suggest that you look at this quick video, introduction to model development by Paul Anderson of Montana, who was a keynote presenter at one of our recent MnSTA conferences, and this NSTA Article on Modeling
Standards Review Progress: What is happening with the science standards review?
The science standards review is off and running. The review committee of 36 representing various stakeholders started with a three-day retreat in early August. They shared their vision for science learning, delved into research about science education, compared our current standards to other states, and determined desired attributes for the next standards.
The committee has already identified a few issues that will require attention:
How standards should be sequenced for a continuous progression of learning in both elementary and middle school
How to affirm cultural contributions and equity without tokenism
How to have standards reflect the research in A Framework for K-12 Science Education, the committee's primary research document
How to have standards support the variety of school and teacher contexts, along with graduation requirements and college/career readiness
In September they looked at data on our current standards and their implementation using information from an online feedback survey in August. They will started to organize to write the first draft by early November.
During October the determined the starting point and organization of the first draft and smaller writing teams started to write standards and benchmarks. The first draft will be published Nov. 8 in time for the MnSTA conference and will be posted on the MDE Science page. The draft will have major changes from the current standards. Several ideas will intentionally be tried out to get reactions from teachers and other stakeholder.
Feedback for the first draft will be collected through sessions at the MnSTA conference, at town hall meetings across the state, regional meetings hosted by MnSTA regional directors, and an online survey. Those dates are later in this newsletter. There will be a second draft in February and the final draft in May.
I hope that you will add your ideas for making the standards effective for student learning during the ten year span of the next standards. Go to the MDE Science page for more information about the committee membership, process, timeline and especially the Assumptions that are guiding the standards review and revision.
How can I use my summer to get ready for upcoming science standards?
Summer is a great time to think beyond the daily preparation of lessons and gain some perspective on the longer term future. With new science standards coming next spring, the vacation period is a good opportunity to reflect on the changes in science instruction that are likely occur.
First, some news. The science standards review committee has been chosen. You can see the list of names and affiliations at the MDE Science page (look at the bottom of the page). About 200 people submitted applications, hence it was difficult narrow the list down to 37. The committee must represent a variety of stakeholders with consideration for content expertise, large and small schools, geographic distribution, community representation, scientists, ethnic diversity, and experience with ELL, special education, and advanced placement
The committee will begin their work August 1 with a three day workshop and then meet monthly through the year. Writing teams of content areas and grade levels will work between meetings to draft standards language.
The work of the committee is guided by a set of Assumptions that members of the committee agreed to with their application. One significant assumption is:
The standards will be informed by A Framework for K-12 Science Education and include the dimensions of the scientific and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas.
This document from the National Research Council was the research base for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). However several Minnesota Statutes make it impossible for us to adopt NGSS as written, including the requirement for standards and benchmarks. The whole list of assumptions are at the MDE Science page.
It would be good to use the summer months to become familiar with the Framework. It explains the dimensions that are described in the Assumptions. You can get a free download of A Framework for K-12 Science Education at www.nap.edu. A good overview of the Framework is in the articles I wrote earlier about the standards process at the MnSTA Standards site.
Many great resource about the Framework (and NGSS) are available at
http://www.nsta.org/store/ books and journal articles
http://ngss.nsta.org/ NGSS hub for many resources, including videos
www.teachertube.com – search for NGSS videos
www.nextgenscience.org – especially look at the appendices and the resources
This would be a good year for a membership in NSTA, which provides access to the many great resources, and the nation convention in St. Louis next spring.
How can I influence the next science standards?
The beginning stages of the review and possible revision of the Minnesota science standards are starting now and the process will continue through the next school year. With the importance of these standards for the future of science teaching and learning, you maybe be wondering how you may be able to influence the standards. An overview of the standards development process was outlined in an article in the MnSTA newsletter in December 2016. That article is archived at the MnSTA Science Standards page along with articles about ideas that will likely be included in potential standards. Here are some specific ways you can be involved.
Who will be on the Standards Review Committee and what is the time commitment?
Most of the work of reviewing the current standards and making any revision is conducted by the Science Standards Review Committee. The members of this committee will include teachers, administrators, professors, scientists, business people and community members. They will represent geographic distribution and racial diversity. The application to be on the committee should be available March 26 and due April 13 at the MDE Science page. In addition to considering your participation, you should encourage others, especially scientists and community members who understand the skills and knowledge needed for future careers of our students
The tentative plans call for the committee to have monthly full-day meetings in Roseville from August until April. There will likely be a three day initial meeting in August. Depending on funding, there will be coverage for substitute and travel/lodging expenses for those outside the metropolitan area. Committee members must commit to participation in all committee meetings. There will be additional online meetings of technical writing teams between meetings. So you should expect to have a commitment of 12 days of whole committee meetings plus additional reading, writing and online discussions.
The committee will be guided by a set of assumptions that define the format, requirements and foundational documents that will guide the committee work and the standards document. These assumptions and the timeline will be posted with the application documents.
How can I contribute my ideas if I am not on the committee?
The committee will develop three drafts of the standards and there will be several opportunities for your input and feedback:
Feedback on the implementation of current standards: During the 2016-17 school year science staff from MDE visited regional gatherings of MnSTA member to discuss the standards development and gather input. The participants completed an online survey on how well the current standard are being implemented in schools. If you did not get a chance to participate, please complete this survey.
Online feedback about the current standards: This spring you will be invited to comment on general aspects of the standards and specific standards and benchmarks.
Feedback on the first draft: This draft is likely to be available in early November in time for the MnSTA conference. In addition to an online survey, there will be town hall meetings in regional locations across the state. These input opportunities will have a significant impact on the direction of the standards.
Feedback on the second draft: The second draft will be sent to a couple national science education leaders for expert review. In addition there will be will be online feedback and focus group meetings concerning specific aspect of the standards, such as equity, environmental education, and career focus.
The final draft should be published by May so that schools can start using them for planning and curriculum work. Full implementation along with the revisions of the MCA should be scheduled for three or four years later.
If you have questions about any aspects of the standards review process, contact John Olson, (john.c.olson@state.mn.us) Science Content Specialist.
What new ideas about science assessment might support our next science standards?
(This series of articles in preparation for the science standards review in 2018-19 is archived at https://www.mnsta.org/MN_Science_Standards.html)
In previous articles I have described how research on science learning collected in A Framework for K-12 Science Education (Framework) might influence our next Minnesota science standards. Many of its ideas for instruction are great supports for our current Minnesota standards and the assessments that support instruction and learning. So it is wise for teachers to start studying the assessment practices that have been developed by various organizations, which are based on the Framework ideas.
First, a quick aside: You may have expected that this article might focus on changes to the MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment), so let me comment on that briefly. When the next Minnesota science standards are published in their final draft form in spring 2019, the Mn Department of Education (MDE) assessment division will start the process of preparing the MCA IV to assess the new standards. This assessment will likely begin in the spring of 2022.
Most states that have recently adopted new standards are based on the Science and Engineering Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas from the Framework. If those "dimensions" are the basis of the next Minnesota Standards, the MCA will likely contain items that reflect the integration of these dimensions.
Several organizations are developing tasks that integrate the three dimensions in formative assessments within classroom instruction and summative assessments, such as common assessments. Several great resource for formative assessment are included in the STEM Teaching Tools, which are two-page research briefs with links to supporting documents and activity guides. A few that are helpful for designing formative assessments are:
#18 How teachers can develop formative assessments that fit a three-dimensional view of Science Learning
#26 How can assessments be designed to engage students in the range of science and engineering practices?
#29 Steps to Designing a three-dimensional assessment
On a larger scale, Achieve, Inc. had teachers write Classroom Sample Tasks for middle and high school blend content, practices and concepts from science, math and English/Language Arts. For example, a middle school assessment task on antibiotic resistance assesses content related to genetics, natural selection, probability, graphing, constructing arguments and literary research. These tasks have extensive documentation. They are posted at https://nextgenscience.org/classroom-sample-assessment-tasks.
MDE science staff are working with our colleagues from several other states to develop professional development resources related to three-dimensional science formative assessment that we will start to share with district leaders and at conferences.
What new ideas about science instruction might guide our next science standards?
How might "argumentation, model development, phenomena and computational thinking" enter our teaching strategies?
This is the fourth in a series of articles providing background for the review of Minnesota's science standards in 2018-19. The previous articles are archived at the Minn. Dept. of Education page on the MnSTA Website.
When the Minnesota Science Standards Review Committee meets in 2018-19, they will first look at feedback about our current 2009 standards and then look at current research on science education. Research over the past dozen years has provide several new ideas about science instruction that are summarized in a document that was written to lay the foundation for science standards.
A Framework for K-12 Science Education (2012) was prepared by the National Research Council using leaders in science content, learning sciences and science instruction. This document provided the foundation for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and all the state standards that have been adopted within the last three years. The Framework is a free download at the link above. Here are some major ideas about instruction in the Framework.
Science learning and instruction should weave together "Three Dimensions"
The Framework describes a limited number of elements that should be developed across grades K-12. They are organized into three dimensions 1) scientific and engineering practices, 2) crosscutting concepts, and 3) disciplinary core ideas. In our current Minnesota science standards, many of the ideas in dimensions 1 and 2 are in the Nature of Science and Engineering strand and the ideas in dimension 3 are similar to our content strands. However the emphasis of the Framework is that the three dimensions should be woven together in all science instruction. We find that much of the science instruction in Minnesota schools is weak in integrating these ideas throughout science instruction. Let's dive deeper into the three dimensions.
Dimension 1 Scientific and Engineering Practices
This dimension focuses on important practices used by scientists and engineers and for which students should develop proficiency:
Asking questions (for science) and defining problems (for engineering)
Planning and carrying out investigations
Using mathematics and computational thinking
Constructing explanations (for science) and designing solutions (for engineering)
Engaging in argument from evidence
Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information
The practices in blue are well-represented in our current Minnesota science standards and are generally part of our use of "inquiry" and "engineering design." The items in red have some overlap with the Literacy Standards in Science that are in the Minnesota English/Language Arts standards, although the Framework has some additional concepts. The items in green have somewhat different approaches that we have traditionally used in our science instruction. A good description of how several of these practices can play out in the classroom is the short, free, teacher-friendly book Ready, Set, Science! This link Has a video that demonstrates a couple of the practices in action.
Dimension 2: Crosscutting Concepts
These concepts cut across all areas of science and engineering and help students develop a coherent scientific view of the world.
Cause and effect: mechanism and explanation
Energy and matter: flows, cycles, and conservation
These concepts should be reinforced by repeated use in instruction across the disciplines.
Dimension 3: Disciplinary Core Ideas
These are the major concepts that we in Minnesota often call content standards. They are organized into familiar groupings: 1) Physical Sciences, 2) Life Sciences, 3) Earth and Space Sciences, and 4) Engineering, Technology and the Applications of Science. The Framework selected core ideas that are key organizing concepts in a discipline, have broad importance across disciplines and relate to interests and life experiences of students. Hence many ideas in Minnesota standards are not in the Framework and the Framework core ideas are often assigned to earlier grades than in Minnesota.
Bringing the dimensions together in instruction
The Framework provides learning progressions for each of the ideas in the three dimensions. For example, for the practice of argumentation (7) in early grades student learn to link claims with evidence, in middle grades they focus on the reasoning to support or refute explanations, and in upper grades they construct counter-arguments using data analysis.
Many instructional models can be used in helping students learn in a three-dimensional style. One model gaining interest is to plan a series of phenomena that students explore and then develop explanations. As they move from one phenomena to the next their mental models of what is occurring in nature gains in sophistication. A good resource for examining many facets of instruction are the STEM Teaching Tools Practice Briefs.
The Next Generation Science Standards has prepared a model of standards (called performance expectations) that bring together the three dimensions. While the format does not meet the Minnesota statutes that require standards and benchmarks, the ideas and structure from the NGSS will be examined by the Science Standards Review Committee.
Look for sessions on the standards revision process and teaching practices at the MnSTA Conference on Science Education in St. Cloud Nov. 10. For questions, contact john.c.olson@state.mn.us.
What new ideas about science learning might guide our next science standards?
This is the third in a series of articles providing background for the review of Minnesota's science standards in 2018-19. The previous articles are archived at the Minn. Dept. of Education page on the MnSTA Website.
When the Minnesota Science Standards Review Committee meets in 2018-19, they will first look at feedback about our current 2009 standards and then look at current research on science learning and science standards before starting on any revisions. Research over the past dozen years has provide several new ideas about science learning that were summarized in a document that was written to lay the foundation for national science standards.
A Framework for K-12 Science Education (2012) was prepared by the National Research Council using leaders in science content, learning sciences and science instruction. This document provided the foundation for nearly all the states that have adopted new standards the last three years and the Next Generation Science Standards. Here are some of it's major findings about student learning.
Children are born investigators
Children starting school are surprisingly competent. They already have substantial knowledge of the world. They are not concrete and simplistic thinkers and can use a wide range of reasoning processes that form scientific thinking. It is important to build on and refine prior concepts to develop increasingly more sophisticated explanations of natural phenomena.
Focusing on core ideas and Practices
There should be a focus on a limited set of core ideas and an avoidance of a coverage of multiple disconnected topics. The core ideas provide structure for adding new understandings over time.
Understanding develops over time
Learning difficult ideas takes time and often comes together as students work on a sequence of tasks that encourage them to synthesize ideas. We should focus on important core ideas and develop learning sequences (called learning progressions) that build the learning from simple ideas to more broad explanations over several years.
Science and engineering require both knowledge and skills
Science is both a body of knowledge about the world and the set of practices that develop that knowledge. Scientists and engineers use a variety of methods and sequences in their work. Our students should develop practices that include investigating, designing solutions, analyzing evidence and constructing arguments.
Connecting to students' interests and experiences
A rich science education captures the students' curiosity about the world and their interest in learning science. Instruction should be relevant to their daily lives and also prepare them for later education and careers.
Promoting Equity
Students must have equitable access to quality instruction, materials, time for learning and teachers. Instruction should recognize the diverse customs and orientations of different cultural communities as an asset for science learning and should value multiple modes of expression.
I recommend studying the Framework and starting to use its ideas as supports for improving instruction for our current Minnesota science standards and as a preparation for possible changes in the standards in 2019. The Framework and several reports on which it was based are available as free downloads at www.nap.edu. I also recommend How Students Learn Science in the Classroom (2005) and Taking Science to School (2007) from the same site for a deeper look at ideas about science learning.
Getting Ready for New Science Standards
With this edition of the MnSTA newsletter, we are following-up the winter edition and developing a series of articles about preparations for the next Minnesota science standards. My colleagues at MDE and I plan to share ideas about science learning and teaching that have come from research and teaching experience, which might influence the writing and implementation of our next science standards.
When will we get new standards and will we adopt national standards? (winter 2016)
What are science teachers saying about our current science standards? (spring 2017)
What new ideas about science assessment might guide our next science standards?
What are science teachers saying about our current science standards?
During the 2015-16 school year, MnSTA held regional meetings where teachers came together to give feedback about the current (2009) Minnesota science standards. Minn. Dept. of Education science staff (John Olson, Doug Paulson, Jim Wood and Dawn Cameron) facilitated at least 10 sessions. The 525 participants completed an online survey in which they gave their impressions of how the current science standards are being implemented.
If did not attend one of the meetings, we invite you to complete the survey. Now would be a good time to take 10 minutes to complete the survey at this link before reading the rest of the article.
As we look at the data from the survey we must realize that the responses are from teachers that chose to come to a regional meeting of science teachers. They are probably not representative of the whole science teaching population, but they are valuable for comparison purposes. A section of the survey asks the participants to state the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with a statement. Notice that the participants are giving their perception of what other teachers are doing.
It is encouraging to see that the participants perceive that possibly 90% of teachers are paying close attention to content standards (physical science, life science and earth/space science). However only about 60% pay close attention to the Nature of Science and Engineering standards (NSE). The writers of the 2009 science standards intended that the NSE strand should be of equal importance to the content strands. In the discussions among teachers about factors that influence that practice, they mention that textbooks often emphasize the content concepts and knowledge. NSE concepts are often difficult to assess, especially in written tests, and hence are not as prominent on the MCA.
The standards writers also intended that the Nature of Science and Engineering standards should be integrated with instruction in the content areas. The survey indicates that possibly less than half of teachers are implementing this practice. The participants cited the structure of textbooks that often have an initial chapter on science methods, and traditional teaching practices that do not integrate inquiry and engineering design into content instruction.
Another area of interest is the perception that about three-fourths of teachers are aware of the learning by their students before and after their grade. This is especially important with the gaps between grades for concepts in our standards. For example after astronomy is taught in third grade it does not reappear until 8th grade.
There were many other questions in the survey and the small group discussions at the meetings. This data will be disaggregated and given to the committee that will review the science standards in 2018-19 and make recommendations for the next set of standards. Encourage your colleagues to participate in the survey and feel free to send your comments and questions to me. John.c.olson@state.mn.us
"When will we get new science standards? Will we adopt national standards?
Many people are asking these questions to us at the Department of Education (MDE) and the answer is often different than what is expected. Even though Minnesota was a lead state for the writing of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), it is not a given that we will adopt those standards. There is a process for revising standards that is directed by state statutes. Here is an of overview of how Minnesota will revise science standards.
Why Standards?
Content Standards are foremost a means to provide equitable education. They provide the learning goals for all students so that children across the state and student population have the opportunity to achieve a solid education. This is important for the high mobility of students as they move between schools. The standards provide an coherent progression of learning as students advance through the grades. This is especially important in science where new concepts and skills must build on previous learning.
Minnesota Statute 120B.021 sets the process and schedule for standards review. The science standards will be reviewed during the 2018-19 school year. This is a change that the legislature made last year from the previous schedule of 2017-18 in order to accommodate the writing of health and physical education standards this year.
What are the requirements for standards?
The standards must be formatted with standards that proved broad ideas and benchmarks that specify indicators of learning at each grade K-8 and the band of 9-12. They must include contributions of Native American communities and reflect standards on information technology.
How will they be chosen?
A Review Committee of 20-40 people representing a variety of stakeholders will be formed through an application process.
The Committee will receive input through on-line surveys, town meetings, focus groups and expert reviewers.
The Committee will study current research on effective science education and will evaluate current models for science standards.
The recommendations of the Committee will go to the Commissioner of Education. They could recommend to keep the current standards, make revisions or adopt another set of standards.
The Department of Education will publish the "final draft" of the standards probably in spring 2019. This will be usable by schools to start planning for implementation and for MDE to begin writing the next version of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA). Full implementation of the standards will likely be three to four years later.
The standards become law through Minnesota's Rulemaking process. They do not go to the legislature for approval.
More details of the standards review process are available at the MDE Standards Page.
Minnesota science teachers should know about:
The NGSS
MN STEM Network
SciMathMN
Minnesota Compass
getSTEM
Be Connected!
MnSTA Regions
MnSTA Disciplines
Visit Our Neighbors!
All NSTA affiliates
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<h3 class="section">10.10 Certain Changes We Don't Want to Make</h3>
<p>This section lists changes that people frequently request, but which
we do not make because we think GCC is better without them.
<ul>
<li>Checking the number and type of arguments to a function which has an
old-fashioned definition and no prototype.
<p>Such a feature would work only occasionally—only for calls that appear
in the same file as the called function, following the definition. The
only way to check all calls reliably is to add a prototype for the
function. But adding a prototype eliminates the motivation for this
feature. So the feature is not worthwhile.
<li>Warning about using an expression whose type is signed as a shift count.
<p>Shift count operands are probably signed more often than unsigned.
Warning about this would cause far more annoyance than good.
<li>Warning about assigning a signed value to an unsigned variable.
<p>Such assignments must be very common; warning about them would cause
more annoyance than good.
<li>Warning when a non-void function value is ignored.
<p>C contains many standard functions that return a value that most
programs choose to ignore. One obvious example is <code>printf</code>.
Warning about this practice only leads the defensive programmer to
clutter programs with dozens of casts to <code>void</code>. Such casts are
required so frequently that they become visual noise. Writing those
casts becomes so automatic that they no longer convey useful
information about the intentions of the programmer. For functions
where the return value should never be ignored, use the
<code>warn_unused_result</code> function attribute (see <a href="Function-Attributes.html#Function-Attributes">Function Attributes</a>).
<li><a name="index-fshort_002denums-2913"></a>Making <span class="option">-fshort-enums</span> the default.
<p>This would cause storage layout to be incompatible with most other C
compilers. And it doesn't seem very important, given that you can get
the same result in other ways. The case where it matters most is when
the enumeration-valued object is inside a structure, and in that case
you can specify a field width explicitly.
<li>Making bit-fields unsigned by default on particular machines where “the
ABI standard” says to do so.
<p>The ISO C standard leaves it up to the implementation whether a bit-field
declared plain <code>int</code> is signed or not. This in effect creates two
alternative dialects of C.
<p><a name="index-fsigned_002dbitfields-2914"></a><a name="index-funsigned_002dbitfields-2915"></a>The GNU C compiler supports both dialects; you can specify the signed
dialect with <span class="option">-fsigned-bitfields</span> and the unsigned dialect with
<span class="option">-funsigned-bitfields</span>. However, this leaves open the question of
which dialect to use by default.
<p>Currently, the preferred dialect makes plain bit-fields signed, because
this is simplest. Since <code>int</code> is the same as <code>signed int</code> in
every other context, it is cleanest for them to be the same in bit-fields
as well.
<p>Some computer manufacturers have published Application Binary Interface
standards which specify that plain bit-fields should be unsigned. It is
a mistake, however, to say anything about this issue in an ABI. This is
because the handling of plain bit-fields distinguishes two dialects of C.
Both dialects are meaningful on every type of machine. Whether a
particular object file was compiled using signed bit-fields or unsigned
is of no concern to other object files, even if they access the same
bit-fields in the same data structures.
<p>A given program is written in one or the other of these two dialects.
The program stands a chance to work on most any machine if it is
compiled with the proper dialect. It is unlikely to work at all if
compiled with the wrong dialect.
<p>Many users appreciate the GNU C compiler because it provides an
environment that is uniform across machines. These users would be
inconvenienced if the compiler treated plain bit-fields differently on
certain machines.
<p>Occasionally users write programs intended only for a particular machine
type. On these occasions, the users would benefit if the GNU C compiler
were to support by default the same dialect as the other compilers on
that machine. But such applications are rare. And users writing a
program to run on more than one type of machine cannot possibly benefit
from this kind of compatibility.
<p>This is why GCC does and will treat plain bit-fields in the same
fashion on all types of machines (by default).
<p>There are some arguments for making bit-fields unsigned by default on all
machines. If, for example, this becomes a universal de facto standard,
it would make sense for GCC to go along with it. This is something
to be considered in the future.
<p>(Of course, users strongly concerned about portability should indicate
explicitly in each bit-field whether it is signed or not. In this way,
they write programs which have the same meaning in both C dialects.)
<li><a name="index-ansi-2916"></a><a name="index-std-2917"></a>Undefining <code>__STDC__</code> when <span class="option">-ansi</span> is not used.
<p>Currently, GCC defines <code>__STDC__</code> unconditionally. This provides
good results in practice.
<p>Programmers normally use conditionals on <code>__STDC__</code> to ask whether
it is safe to use certain features of ISO C, such as function
prototypes or ISO token concatenation. Since plain <span class="command">gcc</span> supports
all the features of ISO C, the correct answer to these questions is
“yes”.
<p>Some users try to use <code>__STDC__</code> to check for the availability of
certain library facilities. This is actually incorrect usage in an ISO
C program, because the ISO C standard says that a conforming
freestanding implementation should define <code>__STDC__</code> even though it
does not have the library facilities. <span class="samp">gcc -ansi -pedantic</span> is a
conforming freestanding implementation, and it is therefore required to
define <code>__STDC__</code>, even though it does not come with an ISO C
library.
<p>Sometimes people say that defining <code>__STDC__</code> in a compiler that
does not completely conform to the ISO C standard somehow violates the
standard. This is illogical. The standard is a standard for compilers
that claim to support ISO C, such as <span class="samp">gcc -ansi</span>—not for other
compilers such as plain <span class="command">gcc</span>. Whatever the ISO C standard says
is relevant to the design of plain <span class="command">gcc</span> without <span class="option">-ansi</span> only
for pragmatic reasons, not as a requirement.
<p>GCC normally defines <code>__STDC__</code> to be 1, and in addition
defines <code>__STRICT_ANSI__</code> if you specify the <span class="option">-ansi</span> option,
or a <span class="option">-std</span> option for strict conformance to some version of ISO C.
On some hosts, system include files use a different convention, where
<code>__STDC__</code> is normally 0, but is 1 if the user specifies strict
conformance to the C Standard. GCC follows the host convention when
processing system include files, but when processing user files it follows
the usual GNU C convention.
<li>Undefining <code>__STDC__</code> in C++.
<p>Programs written to compile with C++-to-C translators get the
value of <code>__STDC__</code> that goes with the C compiler that is
subsequently used. These programs must test <code>__STDC__</code>
to determine what kind of C preprocessor that compiler uses:
whether they should concatenate tokens in the ISO C fashion
or in the traditional fashion.
<p>These programs work properly with GNU C++ if <code>__STDC__</code> is defined.
They would not work otherwise.
<p>In addition, many header files are written to provide prototypes in ISO
C but not in traditional C. Many of these header files can work without
change in C++ provided <code>__STDC__</code> is defined. If <code>__STDC__</code>
is not defined, they will all fail, and will all need to be changed to
test explicitly for C++ as well.
<li>Deleting “empty” loops.
<p>Historically, GCC has not deleted “empty” loops under the
assumption that the most likely reason you would put one in a program is
to have a delay, so deleting them will not make real programs run any
faster.
<p>However, the rationale here is that optimization of a nonempty loop
cannot produce an empty one. This held for carefully written C compiled
with less powerful optimizers but is not always the case for carefully
written C++ or with more powerful optimizers.
Thus GCC will remove operations from loops whenever it can determine
those operations are not externally visible (apart from the time taken
to execute them, of course). In case the loop can be proved to be finite,
GCC will also remove the loop itself.
<p>Be aware of this when performing timing tests, for instance the
following loop can be completely removed, provided
<code>some_expression</code> can provably not change any global state.
<pre class="smallexample"> {
int sum = 0;
int ix;
for (ix = 0; ix != 10000; ix++)
sum += some_expression;
}
</pre>
<p>Even though <code>sum</code> is accumulated in the loop, no use is made of
that summation, so the accumulation can be removed.
<li>Making side effects happen in the same order as in some other compiler.
<p><a name="index-side-effects_002c-order-of-evaluation-2918"></a><a name="index-order-of-evaluation_002c-side-effects-2919"></a>It is never safe to depend on the order of evaluation of side effects.
For example, a function call like this may very well behave differently
from one compiler to another:
<pre class="smallexample"> void func (int, int);
int i = 2;
func (i++, i++);
</pre>
<p>There is no guarantee (in either the C or the C++ standard language
definitions) that the increments will be evaluated in any particular
order. Either increment might happen first. <code>func</code> might get the
arguments <span class="samp">2, 3</span>, or it might get <span class="samp">3, 2</span>, or even <span class="samp">2, 2</span>.
<li>Making certain warnings into errors by default.
<p>Some ISO C testsuites report failure when the compiler does not produce
an error message for a certain program.
<p><a name="index-pedantic_002derrors-2920"></a>ISO C requires a “diagnostic” message for certain kinds of invalid
programs, but a warning is defined by GCC to count as a diagnostic. If
GCC produces a warning but not an error, that is correct ISO C support.
If testsuites call this “failure”, they should be run with the GCC
option <span class="option">-pedantic-errors</span>, which will turn these warnings into
errors.
</ul>
</body></html>
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 4,467 |
\section{Introduction}
Let $\mathbb{Z}_p$ and $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$ be the ring of integers modulo $p$ and $p^2$, respectively, where $p$ is a prime. Let $\mathbb{Z}_p^n$ and $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^n$ denote the set of all $n$-tuples over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ and $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$, respectively. In this paper,
the elements of $\mathbb{Z}_p^n$ and $\mathbb{Z}^n_{p^2}$ will be called vectors of length $n$.
The order of a vector $\mathbf u$ over $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$, denoted by $o(\mathbf{u})$, is the smallest positive integer $m$ such that $m \mathbf{u} =(0,\ldots,0)$.
A code over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ of length $n$ is a nonempty subset of $\mathbb{Z}_p^n$,
and it is linear if it is a subspace of $\mathbb{Z}_{p}^n$. Similarly, a nonempty
subset of $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^n$ is a $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive if it is a subgroup of $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^n$. A $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code is a subgroup of $\mathbb{Z}_p^{\alpha_1} \times \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_2}$.
Note that a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code is a linear code over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ when $\alpha_2=0$, a $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code when $\alpha_1=0$, or a $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-additive code when $p=2$.
The Hamming weight of a vector $\textbf{u}\in\mathbb{Z}_{p}^n$, denoted by ${\rm wt}_H(\textbf{u})$, is
the number of nonzero coordinates of $\textbf{u}$. The Hamming distance of two
vectors $\textbf{u},\textbf{v}\in\mathbb{Z}_{p}^n$, denoted by $d_H(\textbf{u},\textbf{v})$, is the number of
coordinates in which they differ. Note that $d_H(\textbf{u},\textbf{v})={\rm wt}_H(\textbf{u}-\textbf{v})$. The minimum distance of a code $C$ over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ is $d(C)=\min \{ d_H(\textbf{u},\textbf{v}) : \textbf{u},\textbf{v} \in C, \textbf{u} \not = \textbf{v} \}$.
In \cite{Sole}, a Gray map from $\mathbb{Z}_4$ to $\mathbb{Z}_2^2$ is defined as
$\phi(0)=(0,0)$, $\phi(1)=(0,1)$, $\phi(2)=(1,1)$ and $\phi(3)=(1,0)$. There exist different generalizations of this Gray map, which go from $\mathbb{Z}_{2^s}$ to
$\mathbb{Z}_2^{2^{s-1}}$ \cite{Carlet,Codes2k,dougherty,Nechaev,Krotov:2007}.
The one given in \cite{Nechaev} can be defined in terms of the elements of a Hadamard code \cite{Krotov:2007}, and Carlet's Gray map \cite{Carlet} is a particular case of the one given in \cite{Krotov:2007}
satisfying $\sum \lambda_i \phi(2^i) =\phi(\sum \lambda_i 2^i)$ \cite{KernelZ2s}.
In this paper, we focus on a generalization of Carlet's Gray map, from $\mathbb{Z}_{p^s}$ to $\mathbb{Z}_p^{p^{s-1}}$, which is also a particular case of the one given in \cite{ShiKrotov2019}. Specifically,
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}\label{eq:GrayMapCarlet}
\phi: & \ \mathbb{Z}_{p^2} \longrightarrow \mathbb{Z}_p^p \\
& \ u \mapsto (u_0,u_1)M,
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where $u\in\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$; $[u_0,u_1]_p$ is the $p$-ary expansion of $u$, that is $u=u_0 + u_1p$ with $u_0, u_1 \in \mathbb{Z}_p$; and $M$ is the following matrix of size $2 \times p$:
$$\left(\begin{array}{ccccc}
0 & 1 & 2 &\cdots & p-1 \\
1 & 1 & 1 &\cdots & 1 \\
\end{array}\right).$$
Let $\Phi:\mathbb{Z}_p^{\alpha_1} \times \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_2} \rightarrow\mathbb{Z}_p^n$, where $n=\alpha_1+p\alpha_2$, be an extension of the Gray map $\phi$ given by
$$
\Phi(\mathbf{x}\mid \mathbf{y})=(\mathbf{x}, \phi(y_1), \dots, \phi(y_{\alpha_2})),
$$
for any $\mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{Z}_p^{\alpha_1}$ and $\mathbf{y}=(y_1,\dots,y_{\alpha_2}) \in \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_2}$.
Let ${\cal C}$ be a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code over $\mathbb{Z}_p^{\alpha_1} \times \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_2}$. We say that its Gray map image
$C=\Phi({\cal C})$ is a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear code of length $\alpha_1 +p\alpha_2$.
Since ${\cal C}$ is isomorphic to a subgroup of
$\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_1+\alpha_2}$, it is also isomorphic to an abelian structure
$\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{t_1}\times\mathbb{Z}_p^{t_2}$, and we say that ${\cal C}$, or equivalently
$C=\Phi({\cal C})$, is of type $(\alpha_1, \alpha_2 ;t_1,t_{2})$.
Note that $|{\cal C}|=p^{2t_1+t_2}$. Unlike linear codes over finite fields, linear codes over rings do not have a basis, but there exists a generator matrix for these codes having minimum number of rows, that is, $t_1+t_2$ rows.
A generalized Hadamard $(GH)$ matrix $H(p,\lambda) = (h_{i j})$ of order $n = p\lambda$ over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ is a $p\lambda \times p\lambda$ matrix with entries from $\mathbb{Z}_p$ with the property that for every $i, j$, $1 \leq i < j \leq p\lambda,$ each of the multisets $\{h_{is}- h_{js} : 1 \leq s \leq p\lambda\}$ contains every element of $\mathbb{Z}_p$ exactly $\lambda$ times \cite{jungnickel1979}.
An ordinary Hadamard matrix of order $4\mu$ corresponds to a $GH$ matrix $H(2,\lambda)$ over $\mathbb{Z}_2$, where $\lambda = 2\mu$ \cite{Key}.
Two $GH$ matrices $H_1$ and $H_2$ of order $n$ are said to be equivalent if one can be obtained from the other by a permutation of the rows and columns and adding the same element of $\mathbb{Z}_p$ to all the coordinates in a row or in a column.
We can always change the first row and column of a $GH$ matrix into zeros and we obtain an equivalent $GH$ matrix which is called normalized. From a normalized GH matrix $H$, we denote by $F_H$ the code consisting of the rows of $H$, and $C_H= \bigcup_{\alpha \in\mathbb{Z}_p} (F_H + \alpha \textbf{1})$,
where $F_H + \alpha \textbf{1} = \{\textbf{h} + \alpha \textbf{1} : \textbf{h} \in F_H\}$ and $\textbf{1}$ denotes the
all-one vector. The code $C_H$ over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ is called generalized
Hadamard $(GH)$ code \cite{dougherty2015ranks}. Note that $C_H$ is generally a non-linear code over $\mathbb{Z}_p$. Moreover, if it is of length $N$, it has $pN$ codewords and minimum distance $N(p-1)/p$.
The $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive codes such that after the Gray map $\Phi$ give
GH codes are called $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH codes and the
corresponding images are called $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes. The classification of $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear GH codes of length $2^t$ with $\alpha_1=0$ and $\alpha_1\not =0$ is given in \cite{Kro:2001:Z4_Had_Perf,PRV06}, showing that there are $\lfloor
(t-1)/2\rfloor$ and $\lfloor
t/2\rfloor$ such non-equivalent codes, respectively.
Moreover, in \cite{KV2015}, it is shown that each $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear GH code with $\alpha_1 =0$ is equivalent to a $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear GH code with $\alpha_1 \not =0$, so indeed there are only $\lfloor
t/2\rfloor$ non-equivalent $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear GH codes of length $2^t$.
Later, in \cite{KernelZ2s,HadamardZps,fernandez2019mathbb,EquivZ2s}, an iterative construction for $\mathbb{Z}_{p^s}$-linear GH codes is described, the linearity is established, and a partial classification
is obtained,
giving the exact amount of non-equivalent non-linear such codes for some parameters.
This paper is focused on $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes with $\alpha_1\not =0$ and $p\geq 3$ prime, generalizing some results given for $p=2$ in \cite{PRV06,RSV08} related to the construction and linearity of such codes. For $p=3$ and $2\leq t\leq 8$, these codes are compared with the $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes of length $p^t$ with $\alpha_1=0$ studied in \cite{HadamardZps}.
This paper is organized as follows.
In Section \ref{Sec:GrayMap}, we recall the definition of the Gray map considered in this paper and some of its properties.
In Section \ref{Sec:construction}, we describe the construction of $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes of type $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2;t_1,t_2)$ with $\alpha_1\not =0$.
In Section \ref{Sec:Linearity}, we establish for which types these codes are linear.
Finally, in Section \ref{Sec:Conclusions}, we show some computational results for $p=3$ and $p=5$, which point out that, unlike $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear GH codes, when $p\geq 3$ prime, the $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes are not included in the family of $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes with $\alpha_1\not =0$. Moreover, we also observe that they are not equivalent to any of the $\mathbb{Z}_{p^s}$-linear GH codes considered in \cite{KernelZ2s,HadamardZps} by using the same Gray map.
\section{Preliminary results}\label{Sec:GrayMap}
In this section, we give the definition of the Gray map considered in this paper for elements of $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$. We also include some of its properties used in the paper.
We consider the following Gray map $\phi$, given in \cite{Carlet,GrayIsometry}, for $s=2$:
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}\label{eq:GrayMapCarlet2}
\phi: & \ \mathbb{Z}_{p^2} \longrightarrow \mathbb{Z}_p^p \\
& \ u \mapsto (u_0,u_1)M,
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where $u\in\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$; $[u_0,u_1]_p$ is the $p$-ary expansion of $u$, that is, $u=u_0 + u_1p$ with $u_0, u_1 \in \mathbb{Z}_p$; and $M$ is the following matrix of size $2 \times p$:
$$\left(\begin{array}{ccccc}
0 & 1 & 2 &\cdots & p-1 \\
1 & 1 & 1 &\cdots & 1 \\
\end{array}\right).$$
Let $u,v\in\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$ and $[u_0,u_1]_p$, $[v_0,v_1]_p$ be the
$p$-ary expansions of $u$ and $v$, respectively, i.e. $u=u_0+u_1p$ and $v=v_0+v_1p$. We define the operation ``$\odot_p$'' between elements in $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$ as $u\odot_p v=t_0+t_1p$, where
$$
t_i=\left\lbrace\begin{array}{ll}
1, & \textrm{if } \quad u_i+v_i \geq p,\\
0, & \textrm{otherwise}.\\
\end{array}\right.
$$
Note that the $p$-ary expansion of $u\odot_p v$ is $[t_0,t_1]_p$, where $t_0, t_1 \in \{0,1\}$.
We denote in the same way, ``$\odot_p$'', the component-wise operation. For $\mathbf{u}=(u\mid u'), \mathbf{v}=(v\mid v') \in \mathbb{Z}_p^{\alpha_1} \times \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_2}$, we denote $\mathbf{u} \odot_p \mathbf{v}=({\mathbf{0}} \mid u' \odot_p v')$.
From \cite{HadamardZps}, we have the following results:
\begin{lemma}\cite{HadamardZps}\label{lemma1}
Let $u \in \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$ and $\lambda \in \mathbb{Z}_p$. Then,
$\phi(u+\lambda p)= \phi(u)+ (\lambda, \lambda ,\dots,\lambda)$.
\end{lemma}
\begin{corollary}\cite{HadamardZps}\label{coro4}
Let $\lambda, \mu \in \mathbb{Z}_p$. Then, $\phi(\lambda \mu p)= \lambda \phi(\mu p)=\lambda \mu \phi(p)$.
\end{corollary}
\begin{corollary} \cite{HadamardZps}\label{coro1}
Let $u, v$ $\in \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$. Then, $\phi (u) + \phi (v) = \phi (u+v-p(u\odot_p v))$.
\end{corollary}
\begin{corollary} \cite{HadamardZps}\label{lemma2}
Let $u, v$ $\in \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$. Then, $\phi(pu+v)= \phi(pu)+\phi(v)$.
\end{corollary}
\begin{corollary}\cite{HadamardZps}\label{coroNew}
For $u, v$ $\in \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$, $\phi (u+v)= \phi (u) + \phi (v) + (t_0,t_0,\dots,t_0)$, where $t_0= 1$ if $u_0+v_0 \geq p$ and $0$ otherwise.
\end{corollary}
\begin{proposition} \cite{HadamardZps}\label{GHpro}
Let $u,v\in\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$ be two distinct elements. Then, $\phi(u) -\phi(v)=\phi(u-v)=(\lambda, \ldots, \lambda)$ if $u-v=\lambda p \in p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$, and $\phi(u) -\phi(v)$ contains every element of $\mathbb{Z}_p$ exactly once if $u-v \in \mathbb{Z}_{p^2} \setminus p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$.
\end{proposition}
\begin{proposition} \cite{HadamardZps}\label{disweight}
Let $u,v\in\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$. Then, $d_H(\phi(u),\phi(v))={\rm wt}_H(\phi(u-v))$.
\end{proposition}
From \cite{Constantinescu}, the homogeneous weight of
an element $u\in\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$ is defined by
\begin{equation}\label{weight}
{\rm wt}^*(u)=\left\lbrace\begin{array}{ll}
0 & \textrm{if} \quad u=0, \\
p & \textrm{if} \quad u \in p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}\setminus \{0\},\\
p-1 & \textrm{otherwise},\\
\end{array}\right.
\end{equation}
and the homogeneous weight of a vector $\mathbf{u}=(u_1,\dots,u_n) \in \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^n$ is ${\rm wt}^*(\mathbf{u})=\sum_{i=1}^{n}{\rm wt}^*(u_i)$.
The corresponding homogeneous distance of $\mathbf{u}=(u_1,\dots,u_n)$ and $\mathbf{v}=(v_1,\dots,v_n) \in \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^n$ is defined as follows:
\begin{equation}\label{LeeDistance}
d^*(\mathbf{u}, \mathbf{v})= \sum_{i=1}^n {\rm wt}^*(u_i-v_i).
\end{equation}
The Gray map $\Phi$ over $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^n$ is an isometry which transforms homogeneous
distances defined in $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^n$ to Hamming distances defined in $\mathbb{Z}_p^{np}$ \cite{GrayIsometry}.
Then, we define the homogeneous weight of $\mathbf{u}=(u\mid u')=(u_1,\dots,u_{\alpha_1}\mid u'_1,\dots,u'_{\alpha_2}) \in \mathbb{Z}_p^{\alpha_1} \times \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_2} $ as
${\rm wt}^*(\mathbf{u})={\rm wt}_H(u)+ {\rm wt}^*(u')$.
From (\ref{LeeDistance}), the corresponding homogeneous distance of $\mathbf{u}=(u\mid u')=(u_1,\dots,u_{\alpha_1}\mid u'_1,\dots,u'_{\alpha_2})$ and $\mathbf{v}=(v\mid v')=(v_1,\dots,v_{\alpha_1}\mid v'_1, \dots,v'_{\alpha_2}) \in \mathbb{Z}_p^{\alpha_1} \times \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_2}$ is defined as follows:
\begin{equation}\label{distance}
d^*(\mathbf{u}, \mathbf{v})= {\rm wt}_H(u-v)+ {\rm wt}^*(u'-v').
\end{equation}
Note that the extension of the Gray map $\Phi$ over $\mathbb{Z}_p^{\alpha_1} \times \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_2}$
is also an isometry by using this homogeneous metric, that is, $d^*(\mathbf{u}, \mathbf{v})=d_H(\Phi(\mathbf{u}), \Phi(\mathbf{v}))$ for all $\mathbf{u}, \mathbf{v}\in \mathbb{Z}_p^{\alpha_1} \times \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_2}$. Moreover, the $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear codes obtained from this Gray map $\Phi$ are distance invariant by Proposition \ref{disweight}.
\section{Construction of $\mathbb{Z}_p \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH codes}\label{Sec:construction}
The description of a generator matrix having minimum number of rows for
$\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-additive GH codes with $\alpha_1\not =0$, as long as an iterative construction of these matrices, are given in \cite{PRV06,RSV08}. In this section, we generalize these results for $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH codes with $\alpha_1\not =0$ and any $p\geq 3$ prime. Specifically, we define an iterative construction for the generator matrices and establish that they generate $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH codes. The proof that the codes are GH is completely different from the binary case.
Let $\mathbf{0}, \mathbf{1},\mathbf{2},\ldots, \mathbf{p^{2}-1}$ be the vectors having the elements $0, 1, 2, \ldots, p^2-1$ repeated in each coordinate, respectively. Let
\begin{equation}\label{eq:recGenMatrix0}
A_p^{1,1}=
\left(\begin{array}{cccc|ccccc}
1 & 1 &\cdots & 1 &p &p &\cdots &p \\
0 & 1 & \cdots & p-1 &1 &2 &\cdots &p-1 \\
\end{array}\right).
\end{equation}
Any matrix $A_p^{t_1,t_2}$ with $t_1\geq 1, t_2 \geq 2$ or $t_1\geq 2, t_2 \geq 1$ can be obtained by applying the
following iterative construction. First, if $A$ is a generator matrix of a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code, that is, a subgroup of $\mathbb{Z}_p^{\alpha_1} \times \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{\alpha_2}$, then we denote by $A_1$ the submatrix of $A$ with the first $\alpha_1$ columns over $\mathbb{Z}_p$, and $A_2$ the submatrix with the last $\alpha_2$ columns over $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$. We start with $A_p^{1,1}$. Then, if we have a matrix $A=A_p^{t_1,t_2}$,
we may construct the matrices
\begin{equation}\label{eq:ZpZp2recGenMatrix2}
A_p^{t_1,t_2+1}=
\left(\begin{array}{cccc|cccc}
A_1 & A_1 &\cdots & A_1 &A_2 &A_2 &\cdots &A_2 \\
\mathbf{0} & \mathbf{1} &\cdots & \mathbf{p-1} &p\cdot \mathbf{0} &p\cdot \mathbf{1} &\cdots &p\cdot \mathbf{(p-1)} \\
\end{array}\right)
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}\label{eq:ZpZp2recGenMatrix1}
\footnotesize
A_p^{t_1+1,t_2}=
\left(\begin{array}{cccc|ccccccc}
A_1 & A_1 &\cdots & A_1 &pA_1 &\cdots &pA_1 & A_2 &A_2&\cdots &A_2 \\
\mathbf{0} & \mathbf{1} &\cdots & \mathbf{p-1} &\mathbf{1} &\cdots &\mathbf{p-1} & \mathbf{0} &\mathbf{1}&\cdots &\mathbf{p^2-1} \\
\end{array}\right).
\end{equation}
\begin{example}\label{Ex:11}
Let
$$
A_3^{1,1}=
\left(\begin{array}{ccc|cc}
1 & 1 & 1 &3 &3 \\
0 & 1 & 2 &1 &2 \\
\end{array}\right
$$
be the matrix described in (\ref{eq:recGenMatrix0}) for $p=3$. By using the constructions described in (\ref{eq:ZpZp2recGenMatrix2}) and (\ref{eq:ZpZp2recGenMatrix1}), we obtain $A_3^{1,2}$ and $A_3^{2,1}$, respectively, as follows:
$$
A_3^{1,2}=
\left(\begin{array}{ccccccccc|cccccc}
1 &1 &1 &1 &1 &1 &1 &1 &1 &3 &3 &3 &3 &3 &3 \\
0 &1 &2 &0 &1 &2 &0 &1 &2 &1 &2 &1 &2 &1 &2 \\
0 &0 &0 &1 &1 &1 &2 &2 &2 &0 &0 &3 &3 &6 &6\\
\end{array}\right)
$$
$$
\footnotesize
A_3^{2,1}=
\left(\begin{array}{ccccccccc|ccccccccccccc}
1 &1 &1 &1 &1 &1 &1 &1 &1 &3 &3 &3 &3 &3 &3 &3 &3 &3 &3 &\cdots &3 &3\\
0 &1 &2 &0 &1 &2 &0 &1 &2 &0 &3 &6 &0 &3 &6 &1 &2 &1 &2 &\cdots &1 &2\\
0 &0 &0 &1 &1 &1 &2 &2 &2 &1 &1 &1 &2 &2 &2 &0 &0 &1 &1 &\cdots &8 &8\\
\end{array}\right).
$$
\end{example}
In this paper,
we consider that the matrices $A_p^{t_1,t_2}$ are constructed recursively starting from $A_p^{1,1}$ in the following way. First, we add $t_1-1$ rows of order $p^2$, up to obtain $A_p^{t_1,1}$; and then
we add $t_2-1$ rows of order $p$ up to achieve $A_p^{t_1,t_2}$. Note that in the first row there is always the row $({\mathbf{1}} \mid {\mathbf{p}})$.
The $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code generated by $A_p^{t_1,t_2}$ is denoted by ${{\cal H}}_p^{t_1,t_2}$, and the corresponding $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear code $\Phi( {{\cal H}}_p^{t_1,t_2})$ by $H_p^{t_1,t_2}$. We also write $A^{t_1,t_2}$, ${{\cal H}}^{t_1,t_2}$, and $H^{t_1,t_2}$ instead of $A_p^{t_1,t_2}$, ${{\cal H}}_p^{t_1,t_2}$, and $H_p^{t_1,t_2}$, respectively, when the value of $p$ is clear by the context.
\begin{proposition} \label{lemm:length}
Let $t_1,t_2\geq1$ and $p$ prime.
Then, ${{\cal H}}_p^{t_1,t_2}$ is a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code of type \begin{equation}\label{eq:type} (p^{t_1+t_2-1}, (p-1)\displaystyle\sum_{i=1}^{t_1}p^{t_1+t_2+i-3};t_1,t_2).
\end{equation}
\end{proposition}
\medskip
\begin{theorem}\label{Th:GH11}
The $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code ${{\cal H}}_p^{1,1}$ generated by the matrix
$$
A_p^{1,1}=
\left(\begin{array}{cccc|ccccc}
1 & 1 &\cdots & 1 &p &p &\cdots &p \\
0 & 1 & \cdots & p-1 &1 &2 &\cdots &p-1 \\
\end{array}\right)
$$
is a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH code of type $(p,p-1;1,1)$.
\end{theorem}
\begin{example}\label{Ex3_11}
The $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_{9}$-additive code ${{\cal H}}_3^{1,1}$ generated by the matrix $A_3^{1,1}$, given in Example \ref{Ex:11},
is a $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_9$-additive GH code of type $(3,2;1,1)$. Indeed, we have that $H_3^{1,1}=\Phi({{\cal H}}_3^{1,1} )= \bigcup_{\lambda \in\mathbb{Z}_3} (\Phi(A_0) + \lambda \textbf{1})$, where $A_0=\{\lambda(0,1,2\mid 1,2): \lambda \in \mathbb{Z}_9\}$, and then $\Phi(A_0)$ consists of all the rows of the GH matrix
\begin{equation}
H(3,3)=
\left(\begin{array}{ccccccccc}
0 &0 &0 &0 &0 &0 &0 &0 &0 \\
0 &1 &2 &0 &1 &2 &0 &2 &1 \\
0 &2 &1 &0 &2 &1 &1 &2 &0 \\
0 &0 &0 &1 &1 &1 &2 &2 &2\\
0 &1 &2 &1 &2 &0 &2 &1 &0\\
0 &2 &1 &1 &0 &2 &0 &1 &2\\
0 &0 &0 &2 &2 &2 &1 &1 &1\\
0 &1 &2 &2 &0 &1 &1 &0 &2\\
0 &2 &1 &2 &1 &0 &2 &0 &1\\
\end{array}\right).
\end{equation}
The $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_{9}$-linear code $H_3^{1,1}$ has length $N=9$, $pN=3 \cdot 9=27$ codewords and minimum distance $N(p-1)/p=9(3-1)/3=6$.
\end{example}
\begin{theorem}\label{Th:GH}
The $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code $\mathcal{H}_p^{t_1,t_2}$ generated by the matrix $A_p^{t_1,t_2}$, with $t_1, t_2\geq 1$ and $p$ prime, is a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH code.
\end{theorem}
\begin{proposition}
Let $\mathcal{H}_p^{t_1,t_2}$ be a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH code of type $(\alpha_1, \alpha_2; t_1,t_2)$ with $t_1, t_2 \geq 1$ and $p$ prime. Let $H_p^{t_1,t_2}$ be the corresponding $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH code of length $p^t$, with $t\geq 2$. Then, $\alpha_1=p^{t-t_1}$, $\alpha_ 2=p^{t-1}-p^{t-t_1-1}$ and $t=2t_1+t_2-1$.
\end{proposition}
\begin{example}
Let ${{\cal H}}_3^{1,2}$ be the $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_{9}$-additive code generated by the matrix $A_3^{1,2}$ given in Example \ref{Ex:11}. By Theorem \ref{Th:GH}, $H_3^{1,2}=\Phi({{\cal H}}_3^{1,2} )$ is a $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_{9}$-linear GH code of type $(9,6;1,2)$. Actually, we can write
$H_3^{1,2}= \cup_{\lambda \in\mathbb{Z}_3} (F_H + \lambda \textbf{1})$, where $F_H$ consists of all the rows of a GH matrix $H(3,9)$. Also, note that $H_3^{1,2}$ has length $N=27$, $pN=3 \cdot 27=81$ codewords and minimum distance $N(p-1)/p=27(3-1)/3=18$.
\end{example}
\begin{example}
Let ${{\cal H}}_3^{2,1}$ be the $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_{9}$-additive code generated by the matrix $A_3^{2,1}$ given in Example \ref{Ex:11}. By Theorem \ref{Th:GH}, $H_3^{2,1}=\Phi({{\cal H}}_3^{2,1} )$ is a $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_{9}$-linear GH code of type $(9,24;2,1)$, which has length $N=81$, $pN=3 \cdot 81=243$ codewords and minimum distance $N(p-1)/p=81(3-1)/3=54$.
\end{example}
\medskip
Let $\mathcal{H}$ be a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code of type $(\alpha_1, \alpha_2; t_1,t_2)$ with $p$ prime.
Let $\mathcal{H}_1$ (respectively, $\mathcal{H}_2$) be the punctured code of $\mathcal{H}$ by deleting the last $\alpha_2$ coordinates over $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$ (respectively, the first $\alpha_1$ coordinates over $\mathbb{Z}_p$). Let $H_2=\Phi(\mathcal{H}_2 )$.
\begin{remark}\label{remark2}
Let $\mathcal{H}=\mathcal{H}_p^{t_1,t_2}$ be a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH code of type $(\alpha_1, \alpha_2; t_1,t_2)$ with $t_1, t_2 \geq 1$ and $p$ prime. Let $H=\Phi(\mathcal{H}_p^{t_1,t_2})$ be the corresponding $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH code of length $\alpha_1+p\alpha_2$. Then, since $H$ is a GH code, its minimum distance is $$\frac{(p-1)(\alpha_1+p\alpha_2 )}{p}.$$ Note that, by construction, $\mathcal{H}_1$ is a GH code over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ of length $\alpha_1$ and minimum distance $(p-1)\alpha_1/p$. Therefore, $H_{2}=\Phi(\mathcal{H}_{2})$ has minimum distance $(p-1)\alpha_2$.
\end{remark}
\begin{remark} \label{Remark:MinDistH-1-1}
Since the length of the $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH code $\Phi(\mathcal{H}_p^{1,1})$ is $p^2$, its minimum distance is $(p-1)p^2/p=p(p-1)$ by Remark \ref{remark2}.
\end{remark}
\begin{remark} \label{Remark:Alpha2NonZero}
The above constructions (\ref{eq:ZpZp2recGenMatrix2}) and (\ref{eq:ZpZp2recGenMatrix1}) give always $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes with $\alpha_2\not =0$ since the starting matrix $A_p^{1,1}$ has $\alpha_2\not = 0$. If $\alpha_2=0$, the $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes coincide with the codes obtained from a Sylvester GH matrix, so they are always linear and of type $(p^{t_2-1},0;0,t_2)$ \cite{dougherty2015ranks}. Therefore, we only focus on the ones with $\alpha_2\not =0$ to study whether they are linear or not.
\end{remark}
\section{Other equivalent $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes}
In this section, we see that if we consider other starting matrices, instead of the matrix $A_p^{1,1}$ given in (\ref{eq:recGenMatrix0}), and apply the same recursive constructions $(\ref{eq:ZpZp2recGenMatrix2})$ and $(\ref{eq:ZpZp2recGenMatrix1})$, we also obtain $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH codes with $\alpha_2\not =0$. Indeed, the corresponding $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes, after applying the Gray map $\Phi$, are permutation equivalent to the codes $\Phi(\mathcal{H}_p^{t_1,t_2})$ constructed in Section \ref{Sec:construction}.
Let ${\cal S}_n$ be the symmetric group of permutations on the set $\{1,\dots,n\}$. A permutation $\pi \in {\cal S}_n$ acts linearly on vectors $(c_1,\ldots,c_n)\in \mathbb{Z}_p^n$ by permuting their coordinates as follows: $\pi(c_1,\ldots,c_n)=(c_{\pi^{-1}(1)}, \ldots, c_{\pi^{-1}(n)} )$. Given two permutations $\pi_1 \in {\cal S}_{n}$ and $\pi_2 \in {\cal S}_{m}$, we define $(\pi_1 | \pi_2) \in {\cal S}_{n+m}$, where $\pi_1$ acts on the coordinates $\{1, \dots, n\}$ and $\pi_2$ on $\{n+1, \dots, n+m\}$.
Two codes $C_1$ and $C_2$ over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ of length $n$ are said to be monomially equivalent (or just equivalent) provided there is a monomial matrix $M$ such that $C_2=\{ \textbf{c} M : \textbf{c} \in C_1 \}$. Recall that a monomial matrix is a square matrix with exactly one nonzero entry in each row and column. They are said to be permutation equivalent if there is a permutation matrix $P$ such that $C_2=\{ \textbf{c}P : \textbf{c} \in C_1\}$. Recall that a permutation matrix is a square matrix with exactly one 1 in each row and column and $0$s elsewhere. A permutation matrix represents a permutation of coordinates, so we can also say that they are permutation equivalent if there is a permutation of coordinates $\pi\in {\cal S}_n$ such that $C_2=\{ \pi(\textbf{c}) : \textbf{c} \in C_1 \}$.
We denote by $N_p$ the set $\{0,1,\dots,p-1\}\subset \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$ and $N_p^-=N_p\setminus\{0\}$. When including all the elements in those sets as coordinates of a vector, we place them in increasing order. For example, $N_3=\{0,1,2\}\subset \mathbb{Z}_9$, $N_3^-=\{1,2\}\subset \mathbb{Z}_9$.
\begin{proposition} \label{prop:case11}
Let $a=(a_1,\ldots,a_{p-1})\in \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{p-1}$ such that $\{pa_1, pa_2,$ $\dots,$ $pa_{p-1}\}=p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2} \setminus \{0\}$.
Consider the matrix
\begin{equation}\label{eq:recGenMatrix00}
A_{p,a}^{1,1}=
\left(\begin{array}{cccc|ccccc}
1 & 1 &\cdots & 1 &p &p &\cdots &p \\
0 & 1 & \cdots & p-1 &a_1 &a_2 &\cdots &a_{p-1} \\
\end{array}\right).
\end{equation}
The code generated by $A_{p,a}^{1,1}$, denoted by $\mathcal{H}_{p,a}^{1,1}$, is a $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH code of type $(p,p-1;1,1)$.
Moreover, the corresponding $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear code after the Gray map is permutation equivalent to $\Phi(\mathcal{H}_p^{1,1})=\Phi( \mathcal{H}_{p,N_p^-}^{1,1})$.
\end{proposition}
\begin{theorem}
Let $a=(a_1,\ldots,a_{p-1})\in \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}^{p-1}$ such that $\{pa_1, pa_2,$ $\dots,$ $pa_{p-1}\}=p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2} \setminus \{0\}$. Let $A_{p,a}^{t_1,t_2}$ be the matrix obtained by using constructions $(\ref{eq:ZpZp2recGenMatrix2})$ and $(\ref{eq:ZpZp2recGenMatrix1})$, starting with the following matrix
\begin{equation}\label{eq:recGenMatrix01}
A_{p,a}^{1,1}=
\left(\begin{array}{cccc|ccccc}
1 & 1 &\cdots & 1 &p &p &\cdots &p \\
0 & 1 & \cdots & p-1 &a_1 &a_2 &\cdots &a_{p-1} \\
\end{array}\right),
\end{equation}
instead of $A_p^{1,1}$. Then, the codes generated by $A_{p,a}^{t_1,t_2}$, denoted by $\mathcal{H}_{p,a}^{t_1,t_2}$, are $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH codes of type $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2;t_1,t_2)$.
Moreover, the corresponding $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear codes after the Gray map are permutation equivalent to $\Phi(\mathcal{H}_p^{t_1,t_2})=\Phi( \mathcal{H}_{p,N_p^-}^{t_1,t_2})$.
\end{theorem}
\begin{example}
Let $p=3$. Let $S=\{(a_1,a_2): (3a_1,3a_2)=(3,6)= 3\mathbb{Z}_9\setminus \{0\}\}$. Note that $S=\{(1,2),(1,5),(1,8),(4,2),(4,5),(4,8),(7,2),(7,5),(7,8)\}$ and it can also be written as $\{(1+3x, 2+3y) : x,y \in N_3\}$. Therefore, in this case, there are $9$ different starting matrices
\begin{equation*}
A_{3,a}^{1,1}=
\left(\begin{array}{ccc|cc}
1 & 1 & 1 &3 &3 \\
0 & 1 & 2 &a_1 &a_2 \\
\end{array}\right),
\end{equation*}
where $a=(a_1,a_2)\in S$. If $a=(1,2)$, we obtain the matrix $A_3^{1,1}$ given in Example \ref{Ex:11}. These $9$ matrices generate $9$ different $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_{9}$-additive codes $\mathcal{H}_{3,a}^{1,1}$ whose corresponding $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_9$-linear codes, $\Phi(\mathcal{H}_{3,a}^{1,1})$, are permutation equivalent to each other. Moreover, note that if we permute the coordinates of $a$, we also obtain $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_{9}$-linear codes which are permutation equivalent to the previous ones.
\end{example}
\section{Linearity of $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes}\label{Sec:Linearity}
In \cite{PRV06}, it is shown that the $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear GH codes of type $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2;1,t_2)$ are the only ones which are linear, when $\alpha_1\not =0$. The next result shows that there are no $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes of type $(\alpha_1, \alpha_2; t_1,t_2)$, with $\alpha_1\not =0$, $t_1,t_2\geq 1$ and $p\geq 3$ prime, which are linear. Note that this result for $p\geq 3$ does not coincide with the known result for $p=2$ if $t_1=1$. As it is mentioned in Remark \ref{Remark:Alpha2NonZero}, we only need to focus on codes with $\alpha_2\not =0$.
\begin{theorem}\label{th:linear}
Let $\mathcal{H}_p^{t_1,t_2}$ be the $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive GH code of type $(\alpha_1, \alpha_2; t_1,t_2)$ with $\alpha_1\not =0$, $t_1,t_2\geq 1$ and $p\geq 3$ prime. Then, $H_p^{t_1,t_2}=\Phi(\mathcal{H}_p^{t_1,t_2})$ is non-linear.
\end{theorem}
\begin{example}z
Let ${\cal H}_3^{1,1}$ be the $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_{9}$-additive GH code of type $(3,2;1,1)$ considered in Example \ref{Ex3_11}. For example, we have that $\Phi(0,1,2 \mid 1,2) +\Phi(0,2,1 \mid 2,4)=(0,1,2,0,1,2,0,2,1)+(0,2,1,0,2,1,1,2,0)=(0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1) \notin \Phi({\cal H}_3^{1,1})$, so $H_3^{1,1}=\Phi({\cal H}_3^{1,1} )$ is a non-linear code.
\end{example}
\begin{example}
Considering all the integer solutions with $t_1, t_2\geq 1$ of the equation
$5=2t_1+t_2-1$, we have that
the $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes with $\alpha_1\not =0$ of length $p^5$, $p\geq 3$ prime, are the following: $H_p^{1,4}$ and $H_p^{2,2}$. By Theorem \ref{th:linear}, we have that $H_p^{1,4}$ and $H_p^{2,2}$ are non-linear.
\end{example}
\begin{example}
Considering all the integer solutions with $t_1, t_2\geq 1$ of the equation
$6=2t_1+t_2-1$, we have that
the $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes with $\alpha_1\not =0$ of length $p^6$, $p\geq 3$ prime, are the following: $H_p^{1,5}$, $H_p^{2,3}$ and $H_p^{3,1}$. By Theorem \ref{th:linear}, we have that $H_p^{1,5}$, $H_p^{2,3}$ and $H_p^{3,1}$ are non-linear.
\end{example}
\section{Conclusions}
\label{Sec:Conclusions}
Two structural properties of codes over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ are the rank and
dimension of the kernel. The rank of a code $C$ over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ is simply the
dimension of the linear span, $\langle C \rangle$, of $C$.
The kernel of a code $C$ over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ is defined as
$\mathrm{K}(C)=\{\textbf{x}\in \mathbb{Z}_p^n : \textbf{x}+C=C \}$ \cite{BGH83,pKernel}. If the all-zero vector belongs to $C$,
then $\mathrm{K}(C)$ is a linear subcode of $C$.
Note also that if $C$ is linear, then $K(C)=C=\langle C \rangle$.
We denote the rank of $C$ as $r$ and the dimension of the kernel as $k$.
The parameters $(r,k)$ can be used to distinguish between non-equivalent codes, since equivalent ones have the same value of rank and dimension of the kernel.
In \cite{Kro:2001:Z4_Had_Perf,PRV06}, the rank and dimension of the kernel are used to classify $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear Hadamard codes with $\alpha_1=0$ and $\alpha_1 \not =0$, respectively. Moreover, it is also known that the family of $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear Hadamard codes with $\alpha_1\not =0$ includes the family of $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear Hadamard codes with $\alpha_1=0$ \cite{KV2015}, since each $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear Hadamard code with $\alpha_1 =0$ is equivalent to a $\mathbb{Z}_2\mathbb{Z}_4$-linear Hadamard code with $\alpha_1 \not =0$. The rank and dimension of the kernel have also been used to classify $\mathbb{Z}_{p^s}$-linear GH codes of length $p^t$, with $p$ prime \cite{KernelZ2s,fernandez2019mathbb,EquivZ2s,HadamardZps}.
Table \ref{table:TypesP3} shows the type $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2; t_1,t_2)$ and parameters $(r,k)$ for all $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_9$-linear GH codes of length $3^t$, with $\alpha_1\not =0$ and $2\leq t\leq 8$, considered in this paper. It also includes the type $(0,\alpha_2;t_1,t_2)$ and parameters $(r,k)$ for all $\mathbb{Z}_9$-linear GH codes of the same length.
By looking at Table \ref{table:TypesP3}, we have that all $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_9$-linear GH codes of length $3^t$, with $\alpha_1\not =0$ and $2\leq t\leq 8$, are pairwise non-equivalent since all of them have a different value of the kernel. This means that there are at least $\lfloor t/2 \rfloor +1$ such codes for $2\leq t\leq 8$. Moreover, we can see that these non-linear codes are also non-equivalent to any $\mathbb{Z}_9$-linear GH code of the same length. Similar results can be obtained computationally for $p=5$ and $p=7$. This means that, unlike for $p=2$, in general, for $p\geq 3$ prime, the $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes are not included in the family of $\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear GH codes with $\alpha_1\not =0$. Finally, we can also observe that the $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_9$-linear GH codes with $\alpha_1\not =0$ are not equivalent to any $\mathbb{Z}_{3^s}$-linear code of the same length, by comparing the values of $(r,k)$ given in Table \ref{table:TypesP3} with the ones given in \cite[Tables 4 and 5]{HadamardZps}.
\begin{table}[ht!]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|c|c||cc|cc|}
\cline{1-6}
$p$ & $t$& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{$\mathbb{Z}_{9}$}& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{$\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_{9}$}\\
\cline{3-6}
&& $(0,\alpha_2;t_1,t_2)$ & $(r,k)$ & $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2; t_1,t_2)$ & $(r,k)$\\[0.2em]
\hline
$3$ & $2$ & (0,3;1,1) &(3,3) &(9,0;0,3) &$(3,3)$\\&&& &(3,2;1,1) & $(4,2)$\\
\cline{2-6}
&$3$ & $(0,9;1,2)$ & (4,4) &$(27,0;0,4)$ &(4,4) \\
&& $(0,9;2,0)$ & (5,2) &$(9,6;1,2)$ &(5,3) \\[0.2em]
\cline{2-6}
&$4$ & $(0,27;1,3)$ & (5,5) &$(81,0;0,5)$ &(5,5)\\
&& $(0,27;2,1)$ & (6,3) &$(27,18;1,3)$ &(6,4)\\
&&& &$(9,24;2,1)$ &(10,3) \\[0.2em]
\cline{2-6}
&$5$ & $(0,81;1,4)$ & (6,6) &$(243,0;0,6)$ &(6,6) \\
&& $(0,81;2,2)$ & (7,4) &$(81,54;1,4)$ &(7,5) \\
&& $(0,81;3,0)$ & (11,3) &$(27,72;2,2)$ &(11,4)\\[0.2em]
\cline{2-6}
&$6$ & $(0,243;1,5)$ & (7,7) &$(729,0;0,7)$ &(7,7) \\
&& $(0,243;2,3)$ & (8,5) &$(243,162;1,5)$ &(8,6) \\
&& $(0,243;3,1)$ & (12,4) &$(81,216;2,3)$ &(12,5)\\
&&& &$(27,234;3,1)$ &(20,4)\\[0.2em]
\cline{2-6}
&$7$ & $(0,729;1,6)$ & (8,8) &$(2187,0;0,8)$ &(8,8) \\
&& $(0,729;2,4)$ & (9,6) &$(729,486;1,6)$ &(9,7) \\
&& $(0,729;3,2)$ & (13,5) &$(243,648;2,4)$ &(13,6) \\
&& $(0,729;4,0)$ & (21,4) &$(81,702;3,2)$ &(21,5)\\[0.2em]
\cline{2-6}
&$8$ & $(0,2187;1,7)$ & (9,9) &$(6561,0;0,9)$ &(9,9) \\
&& $(0,2187;2,5)$ & (10,7) &$(2187,1458;1,7)$ &(10,8) \\
&& $(0,2187;3,3)$ & (14,6) &$(729,1944;2,5)$ &(14,7) \\
&& $(0,2187;4,1)$ & (22,5) &$(243,2106;3,3)$ &(22,6) \\
&&& &$(81,2160;4,1)$ &(35,5)\\[0.2em]
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Type and parameters $(r,k)$ of $\mathbb{Z}_{9}$-linear and $\mathbb{Z}_3\mathbb{Z}_9$-linear GH codes.}
\label{table:TypesP3}
\end{table}
\vspace{3truecm}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 9,700 |
namespace g{
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| {
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} | 1,084 |
Epictia melanurus est une espèce de serpents de la famille des Leptotyphlopidae.
Répartition
Cette espèce est endémique de la région de La Libertad au Pérou.
Description
L'holotype de Epictia melanura mesure dont pour la queue et dont le diamètre à la moitié du corps est d'environ .
Publication originale
Schmidt & Walker, 1943 : Snakes of the Peruvian coastal region. Zoological Series of Field Museum of Natural History, , (texte intégral).
Liens externes
Notes et références
Serpent (nom scientifique)
Epictinae
Faune endémique du Pérou | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 9,808 |
# YUFA!
A Practical Guide to Mandarin Chinese Grammar
_Yufa! A Practical Guide to Mandarin Chinese Grammar_ takes a unique approach to explaining the major topics of Mandarin Chinese grammar. The book is presented in two sections:
the core structures of Chinese grammar, and the practical use of the Chinese language.
Key features include:
* Chinese characters, pinyin and English translations;
* Realistic scenarios to provide you with an interesting context in which to learn grammar;
* Varied and imaginative exercises so you can review your progress easily.
With straightforward descriptions, numerous exercises, and examples that are rooted in realistic situations, the author shows you how grammar is used in everyday life.
This new second edition has been fully revised and updated throughout and continues to be one of the clearest and most comprehensive pedagogical grammars available.
**Wen-Hua Teng** is Senior Lecturer, Department of Asian Studies, at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.
### Routledge Concise Grammars series
**¡Exacto! Second Edition**
_Ane Ortega, Tita Beaven, Cecilia Garrido, Sean Scrivener_
**Da! A Practical Guide to Russian Grammar**
_Tatiana Filosofova and Marion Sporing_
**Soluzioni: A Practical Grammar of Contemporary Italian**
_Denise De Rôme_
# YUFA!
A Practical Guide to Mandarin Chinese Grammar
_Second edition_
Wen-Hua Teng
Second edition published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
_Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business_
© 2017 Wen-Hua Teng
The right of Wen-Hua Teng to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
_Trademark notice_ : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Hodder Education 2011
_British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data_
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
_Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data_
Names: Teng, Wen-Hua, 1956- author.
Title: Yufa! : a practical guide to Mandarin Chinese grammar / By Wen-Hua Teng.
Description: Second edition. | Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2016] |
Series: Routledge Concise Grammars series | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016019445| ISBN 9781138651128 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138651142 (pbk.) |
ISBN 9781315624914 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Chinese language–Grammar. | Mandarin dialects–Grammar. | Mandarin dialects–Grammar.
Classification: LCC PL1107 .T46 2016 | DDC 495.1/5–dc23
LC record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019445>
ISBN: 978-1-138-65112-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-65114-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-62491-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Minion
by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong
**Visit the companion website:www.routledge.com/cw/teng**
# Contents
1. Cover
2. Title
3. Copyright
4. Contents
5. **How to use this book**
6. **Glossary**
7. **_Section 1: The core structures_**
1. **1** The basic formation of a Chinese sentence
2. **2** The eleven types of question in Chinese
3. **3** The use of 是, 在 and 有 and the definiteness of nouns
4. **4** The functions of 的, relative clauses and noun clauses
5. **5** Position words
6. **6** Prepositional constructions
7. **7** Imperative sentences and the use of 别
8. **8** Chinese verbs
9. **9** The progressive aspect and the continuous aspect
10. **10** The use of 了 (the perfective aspect particle and modal particle)
11. **11** The use of 过 (the experiential aspect particle)
12. **12** Modal verbs
13. **13** The complement of state and the complement of degree
14. **14** The complement of duration
15. **15** The complement of quantity
16. **16** The complement of direction
17. **17** The complement of result
18. **18** The complement of potential
19. **19** The adverbial modifier with 地
20. **20** The 是......的 structure
21. **21** Subjectless sentences and existential sentences
22. **22** The 把 structure
23. **23** Passive structures
24. **24** Making comparisons (1)
25. **25** Making comparisons (2)
8. **_Section 2: The contexts_**
1. **26** Measure words
2. **27** Verb reduplication and adjective reduplication
3. **28** The use of 以前, 以后 and 时候
4. **29** Modal particles
5. **30** Conjunctive pairs
6. **31** Conjunctions used in context
7. **32** The use of 才 and 就
8. **33** The use of adverbs in contracted sentences
9. **34** The use of interrogative pronouns
10. **35** Rhetorical questions
9. **Key to exercises**
10. **Index**
# How to use this book!
YUFA! aims to provide a practical guide to Mandarin Chinese grammar in a way that benefits both teachers and learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Also, YUFA! aims not only to present how Mandarin Chinese is structured, but also to show how the language is actually used in real life. In other words, equal emphases are placed upon forms and uses. In particular, there are three major components:
1. The first section focuses on the core structures of Chinese.
2. The second section emphasizes the importance of contexts in which Chinese is used.
3. Exercises to assess knowledge of each specific structure or usage.
The following special features are designed to make this book user-friendly:
* Simple and straightforward statements are used to give you a clear understanding of structures and usages, avoiding linguistic jargon wherever possible.
* Realistic situations are created to show you how grammar can be an effective tool for communication and not simply a set of rules to be learned and never used.
* Tables are provided when necessary to provide you with a clear view of grammar concepts or rules.
* A glossary of terms specifically relevant to Chinese grammar will help you to grasp the meaning of often complex concepts of grammar.
* Each grammar structure or usage is supported by examples given in simplified Chinese characters, pinyin and English translation so you can see at a glance what is needed in all three language systems.
* Mechanical drills are avoided within the exercises; instead, various types of exercise are provided to help you absorb grammar knowledge painlessly.
* Level indicators, both in grammar and usage explanations and in exercises, are adopted to indicate levels of difficulty to help you evaluate your own progress.
* Related grammar points are cross-referenced by using the icon ☞. Using these you will be able to acquire an in-depth understanding of the grammar points that are cross-referenced.
* Grammar points that may be of special difficulty for speakers of English are indicated by the icon so you may gauge your own progress.
* An index that helps you to locate grammar points quickly and to navigate the book easily.
Chinese language textbooks that focus on the development of learners' communicative skills often do not offer comprehensive and systematic explanations of grammar concepts. YUFA! is an ideal reference book that can complement any textbook. Its easy-to-understand explanations, user-friendly designs and realistic scenarios are created with the goal of making learning Mandarin Chinese grammar a painless experience. We hope that you will enjoy what this book offers and reach the proficiency level that is your own ultimate goal.
# Glossary
Affirmative–negative question | A question that is seeking an answer of either yes or no.
---|---
Aspect | There are no tenses in Chinese; instead, there are aspects, which indicate the stages of an event, such as progression, continuation and completion.
Attributive | A constituent in a sentence that appears before the noun to modify it. For example, in the sentence 王先生有一个漂亮的女朋友 (Wáng xiānsheng yǒu yí ge piàoliàng de nǚ péngyǒu: 'Mr Wang has a pretty girlfriend'), 漂亮 is an adjective that is used attributively, and it is the attributive.
Comment | See topic–comment structure.
Complement | (In Chinese) A word that appears after a verb or an adjective to complete or expand the meaning of the verb or adjective.
Complex sentence | A complex sentence includes a subordinate (dependent) clause and the main (independent) clause. In Chinese, the subordinate clause appears before the main clause.
Definiteness | A noun or noun phrase that has been mentioned before or whose existence/identity is known to people engaged in the communication is considered to be 'definite'. See also indefiniteness.
Degree adverb | An adverb that specifies the intensity (or degree) of an adjective or another adverb; for example, 很 (hěn: 'very'), 非常 (fēicháng: 'extremely'), 相当 (xiāngdāng: 'quite').
Dependent clause | See subordinate clause.
Direct object | Certain verbs such as 给 (gěi: 'to give'), 告诉 (gàosù: 'to tell'), 教 (jiāo: 'to teach') can have two objects, a 'person' and a 'thing'. The 'thing' is the direct object and the 'person' is the indirect object. In Chinese, the indirect object follows the verb and the direct object follows the indirect object.
Disyllabic | A two-character word is disyllabic. See also monosyllabic.
Indefiniteness | A noun or noun phrase is 'indefinite' when no one engaged in the communication knows about its identity or when only the speaker knows about its identity. See also definiteness.
Independent clause | See main clause.
Indirect object | See direct object.
Interlocutor | A participant in a conversation or communication.
Interrogative pronoun | Interrogative pronouns in Chinese are similar to the wh-words in English. In Chinese, besides being used to ask questions, interrogative pronouns can be used to make statements as well.
Main clause or main sentence | The clause in a complex sentence that is complete in meaning. It can function independently without a subordinate clause. See also subordinate clause.
Measure word | A word that appears after a number, 这 (zhè: 'this'), 那 (nà: 'that'), 哪 (nǎ: 'which'), 几 (jǐ: 'how many'), 每 (měi: 'every'), 上 (shàng: 'last') or 下 (xià: 'next') and before a noun. With rare exceptions, the use of the measure word is not optional.
Modal particle | A particle that is used at the end of a sentence to express certain moods. Also called a sentential particle since it appears at the end of a sentence.
Modal verb | A modal verb is generally used to indicate volition, obligation, necessity, possibility, ability, permission, etc.
Monosyllabic | In Chinese, each character has one syllable. A one-character word is monosyllabic.
Non-subject–predicate | A sentence that does not have either a subject or
construction | a predicate.
Object pre-position | When the object in a sentence is definite, it can be placed at the beginning of the sentence or before the verb. Such an object is called a pre-posed object.
Particle | A character with grammatical or pragmatic functions but without a clear definition; for example: 吗 (ma) is a modal particle; 了 (le) is both a perfective aspect particle and a modal particle.
Passive structure | A grammatical construction in which the subject is the recipient of the action indicated by the verb, not the performer of the action.
Placement verb | A verb that is not used to indicate an action but is used to indicate someone or something being in a state of rest as the result of that action. For example, 写 indicates an action in 他在纸上写了三个字 (Tā zài zhǐ shàng xiě le sān ge zì: 'He wrote three characters on the paper'), but is used as a placement verb in 纸上写着三个字 (Zhǐ shàng xiě zhe sān ge zì: 'Three characters were written on the paper').
Predicate | What is being said about the subject of the sentence.It should be noted that it is possible for a Chinese sentence not to have a subject or a predicate.
Pre-existent in the context | A noun or a situation whose existence is known by the people engaged in the conversation or communication is considered to be 'pre-existent in the context'.
Relative clause | A sentence or a phrase (containing a verb) that is used to modify a noun. In Chinese, a relative clause appears before the noun it modifies.
Sentential particle | See modal particle.
Sentential subject | The subject of a sentence that is itself a complete sentence.
Subject | What or whom a sentence is about.
Subject–predicate construction | A sentence that is composed of a subject and a predicate that follows the subject.
Subordinate clause | Also called a dependent clause. It is part of a complex sentence and is not complete in meaning. Therefore, it cannot function independently. In Chinese, a subordinate clause appears before the main clause.
Time phrase | A word or phrase that indicates when an action occurs.
Topic–comment structure | A sentence of which the predicate is one or more complete sentences. The subject in such a sentence is referred to as the topic, and the predicate is the comment.
# [Section 1
The core structures](content.xhtml#bck_part101)
# [1
The basic formation of a Chinese sentence](content.xhtml#bck_Ch01)
A Chinese sentence can typically be classified as either a subject–predicate construction or a non-subject–predicate construction. Another structure generally referred to as the 'topic–comment' structure is also common in Chinese.
## Level 1/2/3 1.1 The subject
The following are some of the key grammatical features of the subject in a Chinese sentence.
### (a) Definite subjects
The subject of a sentence is generally of a definite nature; i.e. it is a specific entity that is known to both the speaker and the listener.
☞ See Chapter 3 for more information on the definiteness of nouns.
昨天王老师来我家。 (王老师 is definite.)
Zuótiān Wáng lǎoshī lái wǒ jiā.
Yesterday Teacher Wang came to my house.
Improper: 昨天一个客人来我家。 (一个客人 is indefinite.)
Correct: 昨天我家来了一个客人。
Zuótiān wǒ jiā lái le yí ge kèrén.
Yesterday a guest came to my house.
☞ See 21.8 for word-order rules.
### (b) Non-definite, generic subjects
An entity of non-definite nature that is generic in meaning can also serve as the subject.
菠菜很有营养。 (菠菜 is generic.)
Bōcài hěn yǒu yíngyǎng.
Spinach is nutritious.
熊猫真可爱。 (熊猫 is generic.)
Xióngmāo zhēn kě'ài.
Pandas are really cute.
### (c) What can be a subject?
Words and phrases that function as nouns, pronouns, proper nouns, numerals, adjectives or verbs can serve as the subject.
王老师:你的学生真聪明。 (你的学生 is a noun phrase.)
Wáng lǎoshī: Nǐde xuéshēng zhēn cōngmíng.
张老师:聪明没有用,努力最重要。 (聪明 and 努力 are adjectives.)
Zhāng lǎoshī: Cōngmíng méiyǒu yòng, nǔlì zuì zhòngyào.
Teacher Wang: Your students are really smart.
Teacher Zhang: Being smart is of no use; being hard-working is most important.
### (d) Sentential subjects
A complete sentence can serve as the subject without any particular marker. It should be noted that a comma can be used after a sentential subject, especially when the subject is long.
在中国,丈夫做家务, 是一件很平常的事。 (丈夫做家务 is the subject.)
Zài Zhōngguó, zhàngfū zuò jiāwù, shì yí jiàn hěn píngcháng de shì.
In China, husbands doing housework is a very common thing.
Expletive 'it' in English has no counterpart in Chinese. This means that a sentence with a sentential subject may have different word orders in English and Chinese.
儿子不听她的话, 让她很难过。
Érzi bù tīng tāde huà, ràng tā hěn nánguò.
It saddens her (= makes her sad) that her son does not listen to her.
In English, a sentential subject is frequently introduced by the phrase '(the fact) that...'. Note that such a phrase is not used in Chinese. The phrase 'the fact that' does not have a counterpart in Chinese.
王先生喜欢李小姐不表示李小姐也喜欢王先生。
Wáng xiānsheng xǐhuān Lǐ xiǎojiě bù biǎoshì Lǐ xiǎojiě yě xǐhuān Wáng xiānsheng.
The fact that Mr Wang likes Miss Li does not mean that Miss Li likes Mr Wang, too.
### (e) Subjects in passive sentences
The subject is not always the performer of the action; it is sometimes the receiver of the action.
☞ See 23.3 for unmarked passive.
我的车修好了。(车 does not perform the action of 修.)
Wǒde chē xiū hǎo le.
My car has been fixed.
## Level 1/2/3 1.2 The predicate
The predicate in a Chinese sentence can be any of the following:
### (a) Simple verbs, compound verbs or verbal phrases
It should be noted that a sentence with a simple verb as its predicate rarely appears without at least one other element, such as a particle or a time phrase. When it does appear without another element, it is usually in context.
(Situation: Wang is throwing a party. Li and Zhang are talking about it.)
李: 你们去吗?
Lǐ: Nǐmen qù ma?
张: 我去; 我女朋友不去。
Zhāng: Wǒ qù; wǒ nǚ péngyǒu bú qù.
Li: Are you (plural) going?
Zhang: I am going; my girlfriend is not.
妈妈: 昨天的晚会, 你跟妹妹表演了什么节目?
Māma: Zuótiān de wǎnhuì nǐ gēn mèimei biǎoyǎn le shénme jiémù?
儿子: 我唱歌, 她跳舞。 (唱歌 and 跳舞 are both compound verbs.)
Érzi: Wǒ chànggē, tā tiàowǔ.
Mother: What did you and your younger sister perform at yesterday's evening party?
Son: I sang; she danced.
我喜欢李小姐; 李小姐不喜欢我。 (喜欢李小姐 and 不喜欢我 are verbal phrases.)
Wǒ xǐhuān Lǐ xiǎojiě; Lǐ xiǎojiě bù xǐhuān wǒ.
I like Miss Li; Miss Li does not like me.
### (b) Adjectives
It should be noted that 是 is not used in this case.
In a simple positive descriptive statement, a degree adverb or a complement of degree should be used. When the degree adverb 很 is used, it does not literally mean 'very', but is only used to fulfil this basic grammar requirement.
我爸爸在大使馆工作, 他很忙。 (Do not say 他忙 or 他是忙; 很 does not have a literal meaning of 'very' in this sentence.)
Wǒ bàba zài dàshǐguǎn gōngzuò, tā hěn máng.
My father works at the embassy. He is busy.
我累得要命。 (要命 is a complement of degree; therefore, there is no degree adverb before 累.)
Wǒ lèi de yàomìng.
I am extremely tired. (= I am tired to death.)
When the adjective appears alone, a comparison is implied.
我有弟弟, 也有妹妹。弟弟大, 妹妹小。
Wǒ yǒu dìdi, yě yǒu mèimei. Dìdi dà, mèimei xiǎo.
I have a younger brother and I also have a younger sister. My younger brother is older (than my younger sister).
王: 你们学校, 男老师多还是女老师多?
Wáng: Nǐmen xuéxiào, nán lǎoshī duō háishì nǚ lǎoshī duō?
丁: 女老师多。
Dīng: Nǚ lǎoshī duō.
Wang: At your school, are there more male teachers or more female teachers?
Ding: There are more female teachers.
☞ See 8.3 for information on adjectival verbs.
Some adjectives are not associated with a matter of degree but are used to indicate a fact. The predicate in such a sentence is 是 \+ adjective + 的.
☞ See 20.11 for more information.
这件大衣是蓝的。
Zhè jiàn dàyī shì lán de.
This coat is blue. (This is to indicate a fact.)
这件大衣很好看。
Zhè jiàn dàyī hěn hǎokàn.
This coat is pretty. (This is to indicate an opinion.)
王老师是男的还是女的? (男 and 女 are adjectives, and it is improper to refer to individuals as 男人 or 女人.)
Wáng lǎoshī shì nán de háishì nǚ de?
Is Teacher Wang a man or a woman?
### (c) Nouns
Such a predicate is frequently used to indicate age, time, day, date, year, amount of money, etc. It should be noted that such a sentence is usually a simple positive statement or a question with an interrogative pronoun.
王先生三十五岁, 王太太三十(岁)。
Wáng xiānsheng sānshí wǔ suì, Wáng tàitai sānshí (suì).
Mr Wang is 35 years old; Mrs Wang is 30.
现在几点?
Xiànzài jǐ diǎn?
What time is it now?
这本书多少钱?
Zhè běn shū duōshǎo qián?
How much is this book?
In a negative sentence or an affirmative–negative question, a noun alone cannot be the predicate. A verb must be used; thus the predicate would be a verbal phrase.
王: 今天是不是星期三?
Wáng: Jīntiān shì bú shì xīngqī sān?
张: 今天不是星期三,是星期四。
Zhāng: Jīntiān búshì xīngqī sān, shì xīngqī sì.
Wang: Is today Wednesday?
Zhang: Today isn't Wednesday; it's Thursday.
### (d) Complete sentences
This is an example of the topic–comment structure, in which the subject is considered the topic, and the complete sentence is the comment. A topic can have more than one comment.
☞ See 1.4.
王先生 | 心脏不好, 血压也很高。
---|---
Wáng xiānsheng | xīnzàng bù hǎo, xuěyā yě hěn gāo.
↓ | ↓
Subject | Predicate: 心脏不好 and 血压很高 are complete sentences.
(Topic) | (Two comments)
Mr Wang's heart is not good and his blood pressure is also high.
## Level 2/3 1.3 Non-subject–predicate constructions
A non-subject–predicate construction is a sentence whose initial constituent is not the subject but is the predicate, or a sentence whose constituent is neither a clear-cut subject nor a predicate.
The following are typical non-subject–predicate constructions.
### (a) Subjectless sentences
A subjectless sentence starts with a verbal phrase, although the verbal phrase can be preceded by a time phrase or a location.
☞ See Chapter 21 for more on subjectless sentences.
### (b) Imperative sentences
An imperative sentence is used to give orders and commands or make strong suggestions and requests, etc. The subject 你 or 你们 is implied.
☞ See Chapter 7 for more on imperative sentences.
### (c) Elliptical sentences
An elliptical sentence is typically used when the context is clear and the meaning can be understood without both the subject and the predicate being present.
The subject of a sentence is omitted when it is the same as the subject of the previous sentence.
丁: 你的车是蓝色的还是绿色的?
Dīng: Nǐde chē shì lánsè de háishì lǜ sè de?
李: 蓝色的。(Both the subject 我的车 and the verb 是 are omitted.)
Lǐ: Lánsè de.
Ding: Is your car blue or green?
Li: Blue.
The predicate of a sentence can be omitted if what is omitted is clear in meaning.
张: 谁自愿来唱个歌?
Zhāng: Shéi zìyuàn lái chàng ge gē?
王: 我!
Wáng: Wǒ!
Zhang: Who wants to volunteer to sing a song?
Wang: Me! (I volunteer.)
## Level 3 1.4 The topic–comment structure
The Chinese language is viewed by many as topic prominent. The topic must be a noun or noun phrase that is definite and has been mentioned in the conversation or is pre-existent in the context.
### (a) When the comment is a complete sentence
Usually the comment is a complete sentence used to elaborate on the topic.
这家饭馆, | 服务很好。
---|---
Zhè jiā fànguǎn, | fúwù hěn hǎo.
↓ | ↓
Topic | Comment (服务很好 is a complete sentence.)
Service at this restaurant is good.
### (b) When the comment is another topic–comment structure
Sometimes, a comment itself can be a topic–comment structure. There is frequently a comma between the topic and the comment.
(Situation: Wang knew that Zhang had taken two tests yesterday, and Wang wanted to find out how Zhang had done on the tests.)
## Level 2/3 1.5 Basic Chinese word order
### (a) Subject + verb + object
Subject + verb + object (S + V + O) is generally considered the basic word order in a Chinese sentence of the subject–predicate construction. However, many variations exist, most notably the 把 structure.
☞ See Chapter 22 for the 把 structure.
我 | 认识 | 王小姐。
---|---|---
Wǒ | rènshì | Wáng xiǎojiě.
S | V | O
I know Miss Wang.
### (b) Object pre-position
When the object is definite, such an object is, more often than not, moved to the beginning of the sentence (O + S + V) or moved before the verb (S + O + V).
☞ See Chapter 3 for more on the definiteness of nouns.
O + S + V and S + O + V are regarded by some as topic–comment structures.
In the O + S + V sentence, a comma may be, and frequently is, used after the object.
Do not pre-pose a non-definite object.
我认识一个中国学生。 (一个中国学生 is non-definite; it cannot be pre-posed.)
Wǒ rènshì yí ge Zhōngguó xuéshēng.
I know a Chinese student.
(Situation: Zhang and Wang are looking at a photograph. Zhang points at two people in the photo and asks Wang a question. Wang points at each of them when answering.)
张: 你认识这两个人吗? (or 这两个人, 你认识吗?)
Zhāng: Nǐ rènshì zhè liǎng ge rén ma?
王: 这个(,)我认识; 这个(,)我不认识。
Wáng: Zhè ge(,) wǒ rènshì; zhè ge(,) wǒ bú rènshì.
Zhang: Do you know these two people?
Wang: I know this one; I don't know this one.
Although an object may be definite, it is not usually pre-posed if it is not pre-existent in the context.
张: 昨天你在小王的生日舞会上, 看见了哪些人?
Zhāng: Zuótiān nǐ zài Xiǎo Wáng de shēngrì wǔhuì shàng, kànjiàn le nǎ xiē rén?
李: 我看见了小丁跟小陈。(Improper: 小丁跟小陈, 我看见了。)
Lǐ: Wǒ kànjiàn le Xiǎo Dīng gēn Xiǎo Chén.
Zhang: Whom did you see at Xiao Wang's birthday party yesterday?
Li: I saw Xiao Ding and Xiao Chen. (Although Xiao Ding and Xiao Chen can be considered definite, they should not be pre-posed because they are not pre-existent in the context.)
张: 昨天你看见小丁跟小陈没有?
Zhāng: Zuótiān nǐ kànjiàn Xiǎo Dīng gēn Xiǎo Chén méiyǒu?
李: 小丁, 我看见了; 小陈, 我没有看见。
Lǐ: Xiǎo Dīng, wǒ kànjiàn le; Xiǎo Chén, wǒ méiyǒu kànjiàn.
Zhang: Did you see Xiao Ding or Xiao Chen yesterday?
Li: I saw Xiao Ding; I didn't see Xiao Chen. (Ding and Chen have been mentioned by Zhang; therefore, they can be pre-posed by Li.)
When the adverb 都 is used with a verb (都 \+ V) to refer to the object, object pre-position is no longer an option but a must.
这两个人, 我都不认识。 (Incorrect: 我都不认识这两个人。)
Zhè liǎng ge rén, wǒ dōu bú rènshì.
I don't know either of these two people.
李: 你喜欢喝茶还是(喜欢喝)咖啡?
Lǐ: Nǐ xǐhuān hē chá háishì (xǐhuān hē) kāfēi?
丁:(茶跟咖啡,)我都喜欢。 (Incorrect: 我都喜欢茶跟咖啡。)
Dīng: (Chá gēn kāfēi,) wǒ dōu xǐhuān.
Li: Do you like to drink tea or coffee?
Ding: I like both (tea and coffee).
When 都 is used to refer to the subject, object pre-position becomes optional.
我和我妹妹都认识那个人。(= 那个人, 我和我妹妹都认识。)
Wǒ hé wǒ mèimei dōu rènshì nà ge rén.
Both my younger sister and I know that person.
### (c) Location of prepositional phrases
A prepositional phrase (preposition + object) usually appears before the verb. 'Prepositional phrase + verb' is the verbal phrase of the sentence.
☞ See Chapter 6 for more on prepositions.
In English, a prepositional phrase typically appears after the verb.
张: 你爸爸在哪里工作? (在哪里 is the prepositional phrase; 在哪里工作 is the verbal phrase.)
Zhāng: Nǐ bàba zài nǎlǐ gōngzuò?
李: 他现在没有工作; 他在家写书。 (在家 is the prepositional phrase; 在家写书 is the verbal phrase.)
Lǐ: Tā xiànzài méiyǒu gōngzuò; tā zài jiā xiě shū.
Zhang: Where does your father work?
Li: He does not have a job now; he is writing a book at home.
我去花店为我女朋友买了一束花。
Wǒ qù huādiàn wèi wǒ nǚ péngyǒu mǎi le yí shù huā.
I went to the flower shop to buy a bunch of flowers for my girlfriend.
### (d) Location of time phrases
A time phrase (indicating when an action takes/took place) can appear at the beginning of the sentence or before the verbal phrase although the connotations might be slightly different. 几点 (jǐ diǎn: 'what time') is an exception; it is unusual for 几点 to appear at the beginning of the sentence.
昨天晚上小明在家写信。(= 小明昨天晚上在家写信。)
Zuótiān wǎnshàng Xiǎomíng zài jiā xiě xìn.
Xiaoming was writing letters at home yesterday evening.
(Incorrect: 小明在家昨天晚上写信。(在家写信 is the verbal phrase.))
你几点要去上课? (Unusual: 几点你要去上课?)
Nǐ jǐ diǎn yào qù shàng kè?
What time are you going to class?
### (e) Location of adverbs
Adverbs appear before the verbal phrase or the adjective.
When more than one adverb is used in a sentence, the order in which these adverbs appear is based on the general rule that the modifiers precede the word being modified.
我觉得这个电影也很好看。
Wǒ juéde zhè ge diànyǐng yě hěn hǎokàn.
I think that this movie was also good. (Possibility: One person, more than one movie.)
我也觉得这个电影很好看。
Wǒ yě juéde zhè ge diànyǐng hěn hǎokàn.
I also think that this movie was good. (Possibility: One movie, more than one person.)
In rare cases when several common adverbs appear in one sentence, the following is the most acceptable word order (although note that this is not the only acceptable order):
也 \+ 都 \+ 常(常) \+ 只 \+ 一起 (常 and 只 can be switched depending on the actual situation.)
王老师: 我的学生都很聪明。
Wáng lǎoshī: Wǒde xuéshēng dōu hěn cōngmíng.
李老师: 我的学生也都很聪明。 (Improper: 我的学生都也很聪明。)
Lǐ lǎoshī: Wǒde xuéshēng yě dōu hěn cōngmíng.
Teacher Wang: All my students are smart.
Teacher Li: All my students are also smart.
小王常常只喝汤, 不吃饭。
Xiǎo Wáng chángcháng zhǐ hē tāng, bù chī fàn.
Xiao Wang often only has soup, but no rice.
小张和小丁也都常常只喝汤, 不吃饭。
Xiǎo Zhāng hé Xiǎo Dīng yě dōu chángcháng zhǐ hē tāng, bù chī fàn.
Both Xiao Zhang and Xiao Li also often only have soup, but no rice.
张: 我爸妈常一起去看电影。
Zhāng: Wǒ bàmā cháng yìqǐ qù kàn diànyǐng.
丁: 我爸妈也常一起去看电影。
Dīng: Wǒ bàmā yě cháng yìqǐ qù kàn diànyǐng.
Zhang: My parents often go to see a movie together.
Ding: My parents also often go to see a movie together.
Negative adverb 不: As a general rule, 不 appears before the word it negates. Therefore, the word order of a negative sentence affects its meaning.
我爸爸妈妈都不是老师。
Wǒ bàba māma dōu bú shì lǎoshī.
Neither of my parents are teachers.
Compare: 我爸爸妈妈不都是老师。
Wǒ bàba māma bù dōu shì lǎoshī.
My parents are not both teachers. (One is; the other isn't.)
你身体不好,不可以喝酒。
Nǐ shēntǐ bù hǎo, bù kěyǐ hē jiǔ.
Your health is not good; you cannot drink (= you are not allowed to drink).
Compare: 你酒量不好,可以不喝酒。
Nǐ jiǔliàng bù hǎo, kěyǐ bù hē jiǔ.
You get drunk easily; you don't have to drink (= it's OK if you don't drink).
我的法文老师是日本人, 他的法文不太好。
Wǒde Fǎwén lǎoshī shì Rìběn rén, tāde Fǎwén bú tài hǎo.
My French teacher is Japanese; his French is not very good (literally: not too good).
Compare: 我的英文老师是中国人, 他的英文很不好。
Wǒde Yīngwén lǎoshī shì Zhōngguó rén, tāde Yīngwén hěn bù hǎo.
My English teacher is Chinese; his English is very bad.
Do not place an adverb immediately before a noun/noun phrase, pronoun, proper noun or time phrase.
English:Both Xiao Wang and Xiao Li are my good friends.
Chinese: 小王和小李都是我的好朋友。
Xiǎo Wáng hé Xiǎo Lǐ dōu shì wǒde hǎo péngyǒu.
(Incorrect: 都小王和小李是我的好朋友。)
English:Mrs Wang has only one son.
Chinese: 王太太只有一个儿子。
Wáng tàitai zhǐ yǒu yí ge érzi.
(Incorrect: 王太太有只一个儿子。)
### (f) Location of direct objects and indirect objects
Some verbs can take two objects: one is the direct object and the other, the indirect object. The indirect object, which is usually a person, immediately follows the verb. The direct object, which is usually a non-person, follows the indirect object.
Such verbs in Chinese are limited and the most common ones are: 给 (gěi: 'to give'), 送 (sòng: 'to give something as a gift'), 借 (jiè: 'to lend'), 还 (huán: 'to return something'), 教 (jiāo: 'to teach'), 问 (wèn: 'to ask questions'), 告诉 (gàosù: 'to tell information'), 通知 (tōngzhī: 'to notify').
上星期我借小王三本词典, 这星期他还我一本。 (小王 and 我 are the indirect objects.)
Shàng xīngqī wǒ jiè Xiǎo Wáng sān běn cídiǎn, zhè xīngqī tā huán wǒ yì běn.
Last week I lent Xiao Wang three dictionaries; this week, he returned one to me.
王老师教我们语法, 他每天都问我们很多问题。 (我们 is the indirect object.)
Wáng lǎoshī jiāo wǒmen yǔfǎ, tā měi tiān dōu wèn wǒmen hěn duō wèntí.
Teacher Wang teaches us grammar; every day, he asks us many questions.
It should be noted that the direct object in the 'V + indirect O + direct O' structure tends to be non-definite. When the direct object is definite, it is frequently pre-posed or the 把 structure is preferred.
☞ See Chapter 22 for the 把 structure.
他送了我一辆自行车。 (一辆自行车 is non-definite.)
Tā sòng le wǒ yí liàng zìxíngchē.
He gave me a bicycle (as a gift).
那辆自行车, 他送我了。= 他把那辆自行车送我了。 (那辆自行车 is definite. 他送了我那辆自行车 may sound odd.)
Nà liàng zìxíngchē, tā sòng wǒ le.
He gave me that bicycle (as a gift).
In English, the indirect object of an action can be expressed with a prepositional phrase using 'to' or 'for'. In Chinese, such an option does not exist.
English:I bought a dictionary for my sister. = I bought my sister a dictionary.
Chinese: 我给妹妹买了一本词典。
Wǒ gěi mèimei mǎi le yì běn cídiǎn.
(Incorrect: 我买妹妹一本词典。)
English:I wrote a letter to my mother. = I wrote my mother a letter.
Chinese: 我给妈妈写了一封信。
Wǒ gěi māma xiě le yì fēng xìn.
(Incorrect: 我写妈妈一封信。)
### (g) Subordinate clauses and main clauses
In a complex sentence, the subordinate clause (the dependent clause) should appear before the main clause (the independent clause).
When the subordinate clause is......的时候 (when),......以前 (before) or......以后 (after), it must always appear before the main clause. In English, the order is flexible.
☞ See Chapter 28 for more information on 以前, 以后 and 时候.
English: | I had a glass of wine when I ate dinner yesterday.
---|---
| = When I ate dinner yesterday, I had a glass of wine.
Chinese: | 昨天我吃晚饭的时候, | 喝了一杯酒。
| ↓ | ↓
| Subordinate clause | Main clause
| Zuótiān wǒ chī wǎnfàn de shíhòu, hē le yì bēi jiǔ.
(Incorrect: | 昨天我喝了一杯酒, 吃晚饭的时候。)
When the subordinate clause and the main clause are connected by a conjunctive pair, which indicates the relationship between the two clauses, such as 因为......, 所以......; 虽然......, 但是......; and 不但......, 而且......, it is important to recognize the main clause since the first word in the conjunctive pair is sometimes omissible.
☞ See Chapter 30 for more information on conjunctive pairs.
English: | Although the weather is nice, I don't feel like going out.
---|---
| = I don't feel like going out although the weather is nice.
Chinese: | (虽然)今天天气不错, | 可是我不想出去。
| ↓ | ↓
| Subordinate clause | Main clause
| (Suīrán) jīntiān tiānqì búcuò, kěshì wǒ bù xiǎng chūqù.
(Incorrect: | 我不想出去, 虽然今天天气不错。)
## Exercises
Rearrange the words or phrases given to form complete sentences.
* Level 1 1 Neither Mr Wang nor his girlfriend likes to go to movies.
不 喜欢 女朋友 看电影 王先生 他 都 跟
* 2 Mr Ding also teaches English in China.
中国 英文 丁先生 在 教 也
* 3 My sons are both studying Chinese in China right now.
中国 中文 都 学 在 我儿子 现在
* 4 I often go to the flower shop to buy flowers for my mother.
妈妈 去 买 花店 我 花 常 为
* 5 He went to China in March (and) he went to Beijing from Shanghai in June.
三月 去中国 去北京 六月 他 从上海
* Level 2 6 It is not a secret that Mr Wang likes Miss Li.
李小姐 不 王先生 是 喜欢 秘密
* 7 I always watch TV at home when the weather is bad.
看电视 我 不好 在家 的时候 天气 总是
* 8 The kitchen of this house is too small; also, its price is too expensive.
(topic–comment structure)
厨房 这个 价钱 房子 也 小 贵 太 (twice)
* 9 Not all my friends are Chinese. I also have Japanese friends.
中国人 日本朋友 都 我的 也 是 有 朋友 不 我
* 10 Yesterday Xiao Wang lent two books to Miss Li; today she only returned one to him.
今天 昨天 小王 (twice) 李小姐 借 还 两本书 一本 只 她
* 11 My mother's job is to babysit (watch children) for other people at home.
给 在家 别人 小孩 我妈妈 的 是 工作 看
* 12 It is too expensive to treat three people to dinner.
吃 太贵了 三个人 请 晚饭
* 13 I like to eat neither Chinese food nor American food; I like to eat Japanese food only.
吃 (twice) 喜欢 (twice) 中国菜 不 日本菜 只 美国菜 我 (twice) 都
* 14 All of my parents' cars are Japanese cars because both of them think Japanese cars are good.
他们 好 因为 车 都 (twice) 的 日本车 (twice) 很 觉得 我爸妈 是
* 15 Neither of my parents often eat at home.
饭 都 吃 常 不 爸妈 我 在家
* 16 It is not good to eat snacks before eating dinner.
以前 不好 吃 (twice) 点心 晚饭
# [2
The eleven types of question in Chinese](content.xhtml#bck_Ch02)
Questions can be converted from statements without a change of word order. Basically, a question can be formed by (i) adding a modal particle at the end of the statement, or (ii) replacing the part that indicates the answer in the statement with an interrogative pronoun. Based on these two rules, as well as another type of question termed the 'alternative question' using 还是 (háishì), eleven types of question can be formed in Chinese.
Question type | Example
---|---
* * *
* 1 Questions with the modal particle 吗
| 你是中国人吗?
Nǐ shì Zhōngguó rén ma?
Are you Chinese?
* 2 Questions with the modal particle 呢 | * 1 我是中国人, 你呢?
Wǒ shì Zhōngguó rén, nǐ ne?
I am Chinese. How about you?
* 2 我的书呢?
Wǒde shū ne?
Where is (what happened to) my book?
* 3 Questions with the modal particle 吧
| 你也是中国人吧?
Nǐ yě shì Zhōngguó rén ba?
You must also be Chinese, aren't you?
* 4 Questions with the modal particle 了
| 你们都姓李, 那你们是姐妹了?
Nǐmen dōu xìng Lǐ, nà nǐmen shì jiěmèi le?
Both of you have the same last name, Li, then you must be sisters, aren't you?
* 5 Affirmative–negative questions
| 你是不是中国人?
Nǐ shì bú shì Zhōngguó rén?
Are you (or are you not) Chinese?
* 6 Affirmative–negative questions: verb (or verbal phrase) + (了) \+ 没有
| 你吃饭了没有?
Nǐ chī fàn le méiyǒu?
Have you eaten (lunch/dinner)?
* 7 Alternative questions (using 还是)
| 你想喝茶还是喝咖啡?
Nǐ xiǎng hē chá háishì hē kāfēi?
Do you want to drink tea or coffee?
* 8 Questions with interrogative pronouns
| 你叫什么名字?
Nǐ jiào shénme míngzì?
What is your name?
* 9 Tag questions
| 你是中国人, 对不对?
Nǐ shì Zhōngguó rén, duì bú duì?
You are Chinese, right?
* 10 Rhetorical questions
| 我这么忙, 怎么有时间出去玩?
Wǒ zhème máng, zěnme yǒu shíjiān chū qù wán?
I am so busy, how do I have time to go out and have fun?
* 11 Unmarked questions
| 你才写了五分钟, 就写完了?
Nǐ cái xiě le wǔ fēnzhōng, jiù xiě wán le?
You only spent five minutes writing it, and you are done?
## Level 1 2.1 Questions with the modal particle 吗
Without a specific context, this type of question is used to elicit a yes-or-no answer.
☞ See 29.2 for more information.
张: 你是老师吗?
Zhāng: Nǐ shì lǎoshī ma?
王: 我不是老师, 是学生。
Wáng: Wǒ bú shì lǎoshī, shì xuéshēng.
Zhang: Are you a teacher?
Wang: I am not a teacher; I am a student.
老师: 你们有问题吗?
Lǎoshī: Nǐmen yǒu wèntí ma?
丁: 我有。
Dīng: Wǒ yǒu.
李: 我没有。
Lǐ: Wǒ méiyǒu.
Teacher: Do you (plural) have questions?
Ding: I do.
Li: I don't.
### (a) Positive questions
Frequently 吗 is used (instead of an affirmative–negative question ☞ See 2.5 and 2.6 for affirmative–negative questions) when the person asking the question expects the answer to be 'yes'.
(Situation: Seeing a friend getting out of a new car, you ask him if he has just bought a new car.)
你买新车了吗?(An affirmative–negative question 你买新车了没有? would not be proper in this context since there is a strong indication that he did.)
Nǐ mǎi xīn chē le ma?
Did you buy a new car? (You bought a new car?)
### (b) Negative questions
When the person asking the question expects the answer to be 'no', 吗 is used at the end of a negative statement to make it a negative question.
(Situation: Seeing Wang refusing to eat spinach, Li has the impression that Wang does not like spinach.)
李: 你不喜欢吃菠菜吗?
Lǐ: Nǐ bù xǐhuān chī bōcài ma?
王:(对,)(我)不喜欢。
Wáng: (Duì,) (wǒ) bù xǐhuān.
Li: You don't like spinach?
Wang: (That's right,) I don't like it.
## Level 1 2.2 Questions with the modal particle 呢
呢 does not only appear in questions. When it does appear in questions, it usually follows an elliptical sentence with the part that is understood being omitted. Therefore, it is only used in context.
☞ See 29.3 for more information.
### (a) Asking the same question without repeating it
王: 你在哪里工作?
Wáng: Nǐ zài nǎlǐ gōngzuò?
李: 在中国银行。你呢?(= 你在哪里工作?)
Lǐ: Zài Zhōngguó Yínháng. Nǐ ne?
Wang: Where do you work?
Li: At the Bank of China. How about you? (Meaning: Where do you work?)
### (b) Asking a question in context
The predicate can be omitted from a question if it is understood.
八的一半是四, 六的一半呢?(= 六的一半是多少?)
Bā de yí bàn shì sì, liù de yí bàn ne? (= Liù de yí bàn shì duōshǎo?)
Half of eight is four; what about half of six? (Meaning: What is half of six?)
老师: 这个问题, 李明、 张力都会回答。王安, 你呢?(= 你会不会回答?)
Lǎoshī: Zhè ge wèntí, Lǐ Míng, Zhāng Lì dōu huì huídá. Wáng Ān, nǐ ne? (= Nǐ huì bú huì huídá?)
Teacher: Both Li Ming and Zhang Li can answer this question. Wang An, how about you? (Meaning: Wang An, can you answer it?)
### (c) Asking about 'whereabouts'
When one does not see who or what one is expecting to see, 呢 is used to ask 'what happened to...?' or 'where did... go?'
It should be noted that sometimes this question is translated as 'where is...?' However, it is different from......在哪里? which is a question about the 'location' of something or someone, not their 'whereabouts'.
(Situation: Mei Ying and her boyfriend are always seen together. But today you have bumped into her in the cinema and her boyfriend is not with her.)
梅英, 你一个人来看电影吗? 你男朋友呢?
Méi Yīng, nǐ yí ge rén lái kàn diànyǐng ma? Nǐ nán péngyǒu ne?
Mei Ying, you came to see the movie by yourself? Where is your boyfriend? (= What happened to him?)
(Situation: You are back in a town you left years ago. You are standing in front of a shop which used to be your favorite coffee shop, but now it's something else.)
咦, 咖啡馆呢? (咦 is an interjection, indicating curiosity or puzzlement.)
Yí, kāfēiguǎn ne?
Hey, where is the coffee shop? (What happened to the coffee shop? Where did the coffee shop go?)
To ask the physical location of someone or something, use 在哪里?
(Situation: You are new in town and you ask someone where the post office is.)
请问, 邮局在哪里?
Qǐng wèn, yóujú zài nǎlǐ?
Excuse me. Where is the post office?
## Level 2 2.3 Questions with the modal particle 吧
A question with 吧 indicates that the speaker is almost certain of the situation, but not 100% sure. Frequently, adverbs such as 一定 (yídìng: 'definitely') and 大概 (dàgài: 'probably') can be used in such a question, but 吧 alone can serve the function of indicating near certainty.
### (a) 吧! or 吧?
It is acceptable to use an exclamation mark instead of a question mark after 吧.
你工作了一整天,(一定)累了吧!
Nǐ gōngzuò le yì zhěngtiān, (yídìng) lèi le ba!
You worked all day; you must be tired, aren't you?
这本书上写着你的名字, 是你的吧?
Zhè běn shū shàng xiě zhe nǐde míngzì, shì nǐde ba?
This book has your name written in it. It must be yours, isn't it?
### (b) 吗 or 吧?
Although questions with 吧 and 吗 both indicate that the speaker has made an assumption of the situation and has an expectation as to what the answer will be, 吧 shows a stronger assumption or expectation than 吗.
(Situation: Someone has bought several French textbooks and two French dictionaries at a bookshop. The cashier could ask any of the following:)
你是学法文的吧?
Nǐ shì xué Fǎwén de ba? (Near certainty.)
You must be studying French, aren't you?
你是学法文的吗?
Nǐ shì xué Fǎwén de ma? (Expecting 'yes' to be the answer.)
Are you studying French?
你是不是学法文的?
Nǐ shì bú shì xué Fǎwén de? (No assumption.)
Are you (or are you not) studying French?
## Level 2 2.4 Questions with the modal particle 了
了 in this type of question is sometimes represented by other characters with similar pronunciations, such as 咯 (lo) or 啰 (lo). Such a question is used to make inferences about a situation; therefore, an optional 那/那么 (nà/nàme: 'in that case') is frequently used.
☞ See 29.5(f) for more examples.
李: 那个女孩跟你很像, 她是谁?
Lǐ: Nà ge nǚhái gēn nǐ hěn xiàng, tā shì shéi?
王: 我跟她同姓, 可是她不是我姐姐。
Wáng: Wǒ gēn tā tóng xìng, kěshì tā bú shì wǒ jiějie.
李: 那她是你妹妹了?
Lǐ: Nà tā shì nǐ mèimei le?
Li: That girl looks very much like you. Who is she?
Wang: We have the same last name, but she is not my older sister.
Li: Then (in that case) she must be your younger sister, isn't she?
## Level 1 2.5 Affirmative–negative questions: 'verb 不 verb' or 'adjective 不 adjective'
This type of question is used to elicit an answer of either yes or no. It should be noted that a modal verb (☞ see Chapter 12) can be used this way as well.
### (a) Monosyllabic verbs/adjectives/modal verbs
When the verb, the adjective or the modal verb contains only one character:
王: 你们明天去不去他家?
Wáng: Nǐmen míngtiān qù bú qù tā jiā?
张: 我去, 我太太不去。
Zhāng: Wǒ qù, wǒ tàitai bú qù.
Wang: Are you (plural) going to his house tomorrow?
Zhang: I am going; my wife is not.
丁: 你累不累?
Dīng: Nǐ lèi bú lèi?
陈: 不太累。
Chén: Bú tài lèi.
Ding: Are you tired?
Chen: I am not too tired.
李: 明天会不会下雨?
Lǐ: Míngtiān huì bú huì xiàyǔ?
张: 不会。
Zhāng: Bú huì.
Li: Will it rain tomorrow?
Zhang: It won't.
### (b) Disyllabic verbs/adjectives/modal verbs
When the verb, the adjective or the modal verb contains two characters, the second character of the affirmative part is optional, especially in casual speech.
李: 你高(兴)不高兴?
Lǐ: Nǐ gāo(xìng) bù gāoxìng?
张: 我很高兴。
Zhāng: Wǒ hěn gāoxìng.
Li: Are you happy?
Zhang: I am happy.
王: 那件事, 我们应(该)不应该告诉他?
Wáng: Nà jiàn shì, wǒmen yīng(gāi) bù yīnggāi gàosù tā?
丁: 不应该。
Dīng: Bù yīnggāi.
Wang: Should we tell him about that matter?
Ding: We should not.
### (c) The verb 有
When the verb is 有, the affirmative–negative question is 有没有.
李: 你今天有没有空?
Lǐ: Nǐ jīntiān yǒu méiyǒu kòng?
王: 我下午有空, 晚上没有。
Wáng: Wǒ xiàwǔ yǒu kòng, wǎnshàng méiyǒu.
Li: Are you free today? (= Do you have free time today?)
Wang: I am free in the afternoon; I am not free in the evening.
## Level 2 2.6 Affirmative–negative questions: verb (or verbal phrase) + (了) + 没有?
This type of affirmative–negative question can be interchangeable with 'verb (or verbal phrase) + 了 \+ 吗?'
☞ See 10.9 for more on this type of question.
### (a) When 了 is optional
When 没有 is used to ask the affirmative–negative question, 了 is optional if the verb has two characters or has an object following it.
你吃饭(了)没有?(= 你吃饭了吗?)
Nǐ chī fàn (le) méiyǒu?
Have you eaten?
你爸爸退休(了)没有?(= 你爸爸退休了吗?) (退休 is a disyllabic verb.)
Nǐ bàba tuìxiū (le) méiyǒu?
Has your father retired?
### (b) When 了 is necessary
了 is necessary if the verb is monosyllabic and does not have an object following it.
小李做的菜, 你吃了没有?(= 小李做的菜, 你吃了吗?)
Xiǎo Lǐ zuò de cài, nǐ chī le méiyǒu?
Have you eaten the food Xiao Li made?
(Do not say 小李做的菜, 你吃没有? since the object of 吃 has been pre-posed.)
## Level 1 2.7 Alternative questions
还是 is used to offer choices and it should be thought of as '(whether)... or...'.
主人: 我们有咖啡, 也有茶; 你想喝咖啡还是(喝)茶?
Zhǔrén: Wǒmen yǒu kāfēi, yě yǒu chá; nǐ xiǎng hē kāfēi háishì (hē) chá?
客人: 我想喝茶。
Kèrén: Wǒ xiǎng hē chá.
Host: We have coffee and we also have tea. Would you like to drink coffee or tea?
Guest: I would like to drink tea.
### (a) More than two options
Sometimes, more than two options are offered; 还是 is used between the last two options.
你喜欢日本车﹑ 美国车还是德国车?
Nǐ xǐhuān Rìběn chē, Měiguó chē háishì Déguó chē?
Do you like Japanese cars, American cars or German cars?
### (b) Choosing both/neither
When no choice is made, the options are either omitted or pre-posed, and 都 is used.
Learners who are English speakers should pay special attention to this word-order rule.
李: 你们喜欢吃中国菜还是法国菜?
Lǐ: Nǐmen xǐhuān chī Zhōngguó cài háishì Fǎguó cài?
丁:(中国菜跟法国菜,)我都喜欢吃。
Dīng: (Zhōngguó cài gēn Fǎguó cài,) wǒ dōu xǐhuān chī.
王:(中国菜跟法国菜,)我都不喜欢吃。 (Incorrect: 我都喜欢吃中国菜跟法国菜 or 我都不喜欢吃中国菜跟法国菜。)
Wáng: (Zhōngguó cài gēn Fǎguó cài,) wǒ dōu bù xǐhuān chī.
Li: Do you like to eat Chinese food or French food?
Ding: I like both.
Wang: I like neither.
### (c) 还是 or 或者?
Do not confuse 还是 with 或者 (huòzhě: 'either... or...'). 或者 is used in a statement.
Since both 还是 and 或者 can be translated as 'or' in English, learners who are English speakers should pay special attention to the distinction between these two words.
请你给我一杯茶或者咖啡。
Qǐng nǐ gěi wǒ yì bēi chá huòzhě kāfēi.
Please give me (either) a cup of tea or a cup of coffee.
* When 或者 is used in a question, it is an affirmative–negative question or a question with the modal particle 吗
王: 我很渴, 想喝一点饮料。有没有茶或者汽水?(= 有茶或者汽水吗?)
Wáng: Wǒ hěn kě, xiǎng hē yìdiǎn yǐnliào. Yǒu méiyǒu chá huòzhě qìshuǐ?
李: 有。要汽水还是要茶? (This is an alternative question offering choices.)
Lǐ: Yǒu. Yào qìshuǐ háishì yào chá?
Wang: I am thirsty; I want to drink something. Is there tea or soda?
Li: Yes. Do you want soda or tea?
## Level 1 2.8 Questions with interrogative pronouns
Interrogative pronouns are similar to wh-question words in English. They are 谁 (shéi: 'who/whom'), 哪 (nǎ: 'which'), 什么 (shénme: 'what'), 哪里/哪儿 (nǎlǐ/nǎr: 'where'), 怎么 (zěnme: 'how; how come'), 怎么样 (zěnmeyàng: 'how'), 为什么 (wèishénme: 'why'), 多 (duō: 'how (+ adjective)'), 多少 (duōshǎo: 'how many/how much'), 几 (jǐ: 'how many (+ measure word)'), 干嘛 (gànmá: 'what for'). It should be noted that 'when' is 什么时候 (shénme shíhòu), and 'what time' is 几点 (jǐ diǎn).
This type of question can be converted from a statement by replacing the part that indicates the answer with an interrogative pronoun; that is, there is no change in word order.
☞ See Chapter 34 for detailed discussions on the use of interrogative pronouns.
## Level 1 2.9 Tag questions
After a statement is made, a tag question can be attached. Such a question is used to seek confirmation/agreement/approval or to make a suggestion.
### (a) Confirming a statement
对不对/对吗?is used to confirm a statement. It is similar to a question with the modal particle 吧.
那个人跟你很像; 他是你哥哥,对不对?(= 他是你哥哥吧?)
Nà ge rén gēn nǐ hěn xiàng; tā shì nǐ gēge, duì bú duì?
That person looks very much like you. He is your brother, right?
### (b) Making a suggestion
好不好/好吗?or 怎么样?is used to make a suggestion.
李: 下课以后, 我们一起去吃饭、 看电影,好不好?
Lǐ: Xià kè yǐhòu, wǒmen yìqǐ qù chī fàn, kàn diànyǐng, hǎo bù hǎo?
丁: 好啊! 电影票, 你买; 吃午饭, 我请客,怎么样?
Dīng: Hǎo a! Diànyǐng piào, nǐ mǎi; chī wǔfàn, wǒ qǐngkè, zěnmeyàng?
Li: Let's go have lunch and see a movie together after class, OK?
Ding: Sure! How about you pay for the movie tickets and I'll treat you to lunch?
### (c) Seeking approval/permission
可(以)不可以/可以吗?or 行不行/行吗?is used to seek approval/permission.
儿子: 妈, 我想跟朋友去游泳,行不行?
Érzi: Mā, wǒ xiǎng gēn péngyǒu qù yóuyǒng, xíng bù xíng?
Son: Mother, I want to go swimming with my friends; is it OK?
## Level 3 2.10 Rhetorical questions
A rhetorical question is used not to seek an answer or reply but to make a statement. Generally, a positive question denotes a negative statement, whereas a negative question denotes a positive statement. Rhetorical questions with interrogative pronouns may have specific meanings.
☞ See Chapter 35 for detailed discussions on rhetorical questions.
## Level 1 2.11 Unmarked questions
Structurally, this type of question is identical to a statement. In speech, the sentence ends with a raised pitch. In writing, the sentence ends with a question mark. This type of question is used either to indicate doubt or to convey mild surprise.
儿子: 妈, 我功课写完了, 我要跟朋友出去玩。
Érzi: Mā, wǒ gōngkè xiě wán le, wǒ yào gēn péngyǒu chūqù wán.
妈妈: 你功课写完了? 你才写了十分钟, 就写完了?
Māma: Nǐ gōngkè xiě wán le? Nǐ cái xiě le shí fēnzhōng, jiù xiě wán le?
Son: Mother, I have finished my homework; I want to go out with my friends.
Mother: You have finished your homework? You only spent ten minutes writing (= doing your homework) and you already finished?
## Level 2 2.12 Direct questions and indirect questions
Since the word order in a question and in a statement is basically the same, there is no distinction between a direct question and an indirect question in Chinese.
Learners who are English speakers should pay special attention to the following.
### (a) Question mark used with an indirect question
English: Go ask Xiao Li if he has eaten.
你去问一下小李, 吃饭了没有? (This is an indirect question with a question mark.)
Nǐ qù wèn yíxià Xiǎo Lǐ, chī fàn le méiyǒu?
### (b) Common mistake
An indirect affirmative-negative question is often translated into English with the word 'if'. Learners who are English speakers should avoid the common mistake of actually translating 'if' into words such as 要是 or 如果.
李: 他跟你说了些什么?
Lǐ: Tā gēn nǐ shuō le xiē shénme?
张: 他问我能不能帮他一个忙? (This is an indirect question, but a question mark is correct. Also, do not say 他问我要是我能帮他一个忙.)
Zhāng: Tā wèn wǒ néng bù néng bāng tā yí ge máng?
Li: What did he say to you?
Zhang: He asked if I could help him.
## Exercises
Form proper questions based on the given situations.
* Level 1 1 You want to introduce a woman you know to a friend. But first you want to find out from him whether he already has a girlfriend.
* 2 Observing your roommate leaving the house with an umbrella, you ask her if this means it will rain today.
* 3 A man is taking his girlfriend out for dinner. They usually eat either Chinese or French food. He asks her which she feels like (eating) today.
* 4 A host asks her guest if he feels like (drinking) a cup of tea or coffee. (And the guest replies, 'Sure.')
* 5 After explaining the class policy to the students, the teacher asks if anyone has any questions.
* 6 You have an appointment to see Teacher Li, but you have forgotten to ask him where his office is located. So you ask a classmate if she knows where Teacher Li's office is.
* Level 2 7 Xiaoming and his younger sister arrive at the same class together every day. But today he arrives alone. The teacher asks what has happened to his sister (meaning: her whereabouts).
* 8 You are cleaning a messy desk and see a French book which does not belong to you. You are pretty sure it belongs to your roommate since he is studying French. What question would you ask him to ascertain this fact?
* 9
* (a) After announcing to his wife that he has been promoted, Mr Wang asks if she is happy.
* (b) Mrs Wang begins to cry upon hearing this good news and cannot immediately answer. Puzzled, Mr Wang asks if she is not happy about it.
* 10 A mother reminds her son that he should take out the trash, but he says he has done it. The mother is incredulous. She points at the trash and sarcastically asks what it is. (Ask two questions. The first one is to show her incredulity, and the second one is to show her sarcasm.)
* 11
* (a) Mr Wang is interested in purchasing a new car. The car salesman asks him whether he prefers a Japanese car or an American car.
* (b) Mr Wang replies that he likes neither American cars nor Japanese cars. He goes on to ask the salesman if they have German cars or English cars. (And the salesman says 'yes'.)
* 12
* (a) A classmate asks you if you would like to go see a movie together.
* b And you suggest that the two of you go to see 'Superman'. (Use a tag question to make the suggestion.)
* 13 You are talking with a co-worker about the upcoming annual party given by the company's executive, Mr Li. You want to find out if Mr Li has invited her. How would you ask this question?
* 14 A tourist wants to find out where the local library is. After a local person gives her the information, she also wants to find out where the train station is. How would she ask the second question without sounding repetitive?
* 15 Your roommate is interested in your girlfriend's older sister.
* (a) He asks you if you know his girlfriend's older sister's name.
* (b) You tell him that she has two older sisters, and ask him whether he wants to know the name of her eldest sister or the second elder sister. How would you ask him?
# [3
The use of 是, 在 and 有 and the definiteness of nouns](content.xhtml#bck_Ch03)
Each of the three words 是, 在 and 有 has more than one usage in Chinese. In this chapter, the focus is on sentences with these three words whose English counterparts all involve the copula verb 'be'. Because of this similarity in English, it is important to examine and compare these three types of sentence in Chinese.
## Level 2 3.1 The basic functions of 是, 在 and 有
是 (shì) | Identification | 我爸爸是老师。
Wǒ bàba shì lǎoshī.
My father is a teacher.
---|---|---
* * *
在 (zài) | Location | 你家在哪里?
Nǐ jiā zài nǎlǐ?
Where is your house?
* * *
有 (yǒu) |
* 1 Possession
* 2 Existence | * 1 我有一辆自行车。
Wǒ yǒu yí liàng zìxíngchē.
I have a bicycle.
* 2 桌上有一本书。
Zhuō shàng yǒu yì běn shū.
There is a book on the desk.
### (a) 是 (identification)
是 is used to identify the subject.
昨天是我的生日。
Zuótiān shì wǒde shēngrì.
Yesterday was my birthday.
### (b) 在 (location)
在 is used to indicate where the subject is located. What follows 在 is a word or phrase indicating a location.
我家在学校对面。
Wǒ jiā zài xuéxiào duìmiàn.
My house is across from the school.
### (c) 有 (possession/existence)
有 is used to indicate possession (to have; to own) or existence (there is/are).
Possession: 我有自行车, 他没有。
Wǒ yǒu zìxíngchē, tā méiyǒu.
I have a bicycle; he does not (have one).
Existence: 教室(里)有三十把椅子。
Jiàoshì lǐ yǒu sānshí bǎ yǐzi.
There are 30 chairs in the classroom.
## Level 3 3.2 The definiteness of nouns
In order to make effective comparisons between 是, 在 and 有 sentences and their counterparts in English, it is necessary to first clarify the concept of 'definiteness' in Chinese grammar.
### (a) Definite nouns
A noun or noun phrase is definite when the interlocutors both know about its existence/identity or it has been mentioned in their exchanges.
A proper noun such as 王先生 (Wáng xiānsheng: 'Mr Wang'), 天安门 (Tiān'ānmén) or 上海 (Shànghǎi); a pronoun such as 他 (tā: 'he'), 我们 (wǒmen: 'we') or 你 (nǐ: 'you'); a noun phrase with 这 or 那, such as 这些 (zhèxiē: 'these'), 那个 (nà ge: 'that') or 那三个 (nà sān ge: 'those three'); as well as what follows the possessive case of the above three forms, such as 王先生的家 (Wáng xiānsheng de jiā: 'Mr Wang's home'), 上海的居民 (Shànghǎi de jūmín: 'residents of Shanghai'), 你的书 (nǐde shū: 'your book') and 那个人的车 (nà ge rén de chē: 'that person's car'), are considered 'definite'.
### (b) Indefinite nouns
A noun phrase is indefinite when neither of the interlocutors knows its identity or when only the speaker knows about its existence. Such a noun phrase is either 'unnamed' or can be thought of as '(a) certain + noun' in English.
我认识很多中国人。
Wǒ rènshì hěnduō Zhōngguó rén.
I know many Chinese people. (很多中国人 is 'unnamed'.)
我认识一个姓白的中国人。
Wǒ rènshì yí ge xìng Bái de Zhōngguó rén.
I know a (certain) Chinese person whose last name is Bai.
### (c) When indefinite nouns become definite
An indefinite noun phrase usually becomes definite after it has been mentioned once. The second time it is mentioned, it is definite.
我认识一个姓白的中国人,他是我的中文老师。 (他 is definite.)
Wǒ rènshì yí ge xìng Bái de Zhōngguó rén, tā shì wǒde Zhōngwén lǎoshī.
I know a Chinese person whose last name is Bai; he is my Chinese (language) teacher.
### (d) Subjects
As a general rule, in the Chinese language, the subject in a sentence should be definite. However, an indefinite noun that is generic can serve as the subject as well.
一个人不能没有良心。 (一个人 means 'any man', not 'a certain man'. It is 'generic' and can serve as the subject.)
Yí ge rén bù néng méiyǒu liángxīn.
A man cannot be without conscience.
(Incorrect: 一个人在等你。)
Correct: 有一个人在等你。 (一个人 means 'a certain man'. It is indefinite; therefore, it cannot serve as the subject.)
Yǒu yí ge rén zài děng nǐ.
A man is waiting for you.
☞ See 21.7 for more information.
学生应该用功。 (学生 is generic.)
Xuéshēng yīnggāi yònggōng.
Students should be diligent.
那个学生很用功。 (那个学生 is definite.)
Nà ge xuéshēng hěn yònggōng.
That student is diligent.
熊猫很可爱。 (熊猫 is generic.)
Xióngmāo hěn kě'ài.
Pandas are cute.
### (e) Noun phrases with numbers
Generally, a noun phrase with a number but without 这 or 那 is considered indefinite. However, note that such a noun phrase, when in context, can actually be definite.
桌上有两本书; 一本是我的,一本是他的。
Zhuō shàng yǒu liǎng běn shū, yì běn shì wǒde, yì běn shì tāde.
There are two books on the table; one (of them) is mine; one (of them) is his.
(两本书 is indefinite. In this context, 一本 is definite and, therefore, can serve as the subject of the sentence 一本是我的.)
## Level 1/2/3 3.3 是, 在 and 有 sentences and the definiteness of nouns
### (a) 是 sentences
In a 是 sentence, the subject is either definite or generic. The subject complement (what follows 是) can be definite or non-definite (indefinite or generic).
人是感情的动物。 (人 and 感情的动物 are both generic.)
Rén shì gǎnqíng de dòngwù.
Human beings are creatures of emotions.
那个人是个冷血动物。 (那个人 is definite; 一个冷血动物 is indefinite.)
Nà ge rén shì ge lěngxuě dòngwù.
That man is a cold-blooded creature.
那个人是我的英文老师。 (那个人 and 我的英文老师 are both definite.)
Nà ge rén shì wǒde Yīngwén lǎoshī.
That man is my English teacher.
### (b) 在 sentences
In a 在 sentence, the subject is definite. The word or phrase indicating the location can be either definite or indefinite.
English: A book is on the table.
Chinese: 桌上有一本书。
Zhuō shàng yǒu yì běn shū.
(Incorrect: 一本书在桌上。 (一本書 is indefinite; it cannot be the subject.))
(This sentence is not to indicate 'location', but to indicate 'existence'. Therefore, it is not a 在 sentence in Chinese.)
我的车在那棵树下。
Wǒde chē zài nà kē shù xià.
My car is under that tree.
我的车在一棵树下。
Wǒde chē zài yì kē shù xià.
My car is under a tree (a certain tree).
English:A car is under the tree.
Chinese: 那棵树下有一辆车。
Nà kē shù xià yǒu yí liàng chē.
(Incorrect: 一辆车在那棵树下。)
(我的车 and 那棵树 are both definite; 一棵树 and 一辆车 are both indefinite.)
### (c) 有 sentences
In a 有 sentence, the subject is definite or generic; what follows 有, whether 有 is indicating possession or existence, must be non-definite (indefinite or generic).
人应该有良心。 (人 and 良心 are generic.)
Rén yīnggāi yǒu liángxīn.
Man should have a conscience.
我有三本英文詞典, 没有中文词典。
Wǒ yǒu sān běn Yīngwén cídiǎn, méiyǒu Zhōngwén cídiǎn.
I have three English dictionaries; I don't have any Chinese dictionaries.
It should be noted that, in English, a definite noun or noun phrase can follow the verb 'to have/to own'. Such an English sentence should not be translated literally into Chinese since its Chinese counterpart would not be a 有 sentence.
(Situation: Li is looking for his dictionary. He wants to know where his dictionary is, not in terms of its physical location, but in terms of its temporary possession.)
Li: Who has my dictionary? Please return it to me.
Zhang: I have it. I am still using it.
李: 我的词典在谁那儿? 请还我。
Lǐ: Wǒde cídiǎn zài shéi nàr? Qǐng huán wǒ.
张:(你的词典)在我这儿。我还在用呢。
Zhāng: (Nǐde cídiǎn) zài wǒ zhèr. Wǒ hái zài yòng ne.
(It is incorrect to say 谁有我的词典 or 我有你的词典. 我的 (or 你的) 词典 is definite; it cannot follow 有. Since 有 indicates 'possession', it would be illogical to say 'I own your dictionary'.)
When the subject is a definite person and the verb is 有, what follows 有 in the Chinese sentence must be of indefinite nature regardless of how the English sentence is worded.
(Situation: Wang was in a bookshop. He saw a book and wanted to point out that he owned a copy of that particular book.)
English:I have that book. (Meaning: I have a copy of that book.)
Chinese: 那本书, 我也有一本。 (一本 is indefinite and can follow 有.)
Nà běn shū, wǒ yě yǒu yì běn.
(Incorrect: 我有那本书。 (那本书 is definite; it cannot follow 有.))
(Situation: Ding bought a nice car from Chen.)
English:I own this car now.
Chinese: 这辆车是我的了。
Zhè liàng chē shì wǒde le.
(Incorrect: 我有这辆车了。 (这辆车 is definite; it cannot follow 有.))
When 有 indicates existence, the sentence generally starts with a definite location. What follows 有 must be indefinite.
☞ See 21.9 for similar structures.
我家前面有一个很大的院子, 院子里有很多漂亮的花。
Wǒ jiā qiánmiàn yǒu yí ge hěn dà de yuànzi, yuànzi lǐ yǒu hěn duō piàoliàng de huā.
There is a big garden in front of my house; there are many pretty flowers in the garden.
(Situation: A tourist feels like eating French food but does not have a specific French restaurant in mind, so he asks the hotel receptionist where he can find a French restaurant.)
请问,哪里有法国餐馆? (法国餐馆 is indefinite in this sentence.)
Qǐng wèn, nǎlǐ yǒu Fǎguó cānguǎn?
Excuse me, where is there a French restaurant? (Meaning: where can I find a French restaurant?)
(Situation: You know the hotel you are staying at has a French restaurant, but you cannot locate it, so you ask the hotel receptionist.)
请问, 法国餐馆在哪里? (法国餐馆 is definite in this sentence.)
Qǐng wèn, Fǎguó cānguǎn zài nǎlǐ?
Excuse me, where is the French restaurant?
### (d) Many
When an English sentence includes 'to have/there be' and 'many', its Chinese counterpart usually does not use 有; instead, 很多/不少 is used as the predicate. This is particularly the case when the sentence is negative since 没有 and 很多/不少 together can make the sentence sound awkward or incorrect.
English:There are many study-abroad students at this school.
Chinese: 这个学校有很多留学生。
Zhè ge xuéxiào yǒu hěn duō liúxuéshēng.
= 这个学校(的)留学生很多。
Zhè ge xuéxiào (de) liúxuéshēng hěnduō.
English:I don't have many Chinese friends.
Chinese: 我的中国朋友不多。
Wǒde Zhōngguó péngyǒu bù duō.
(Awkward: 我没有很多中国朋友。)
(Incorrect: 我没有不少中国朋友。)
### (e) Combining existence and identification
It is possible to combine existence and identification in one sentence. The word order indicates existence since the sentence starts with a location, whereas the verb used is 是. What follows 是 can be either indefinite or definite.
我家前面是一条大马路, 后面是一个小树林。 (一条大马路 and 一个小树林 are indefinite.)
Wǒ jiā qiánmiàn shì yì tiáo dà mǎlù, hòumiàn shì yí ge xiǎo shùlín.
(What's) in front of my house is a big street; (what's) at the back is a small wooded area.
(Situation: Wang is showing her family's new house to a friend.)
王: 这是厨房; 厨房左边是我的房间, 右边是我爸妈的房间。(我的房间 and 我爸妈的房间 are definite.)
Wáng: Zhè shì chúfáng; chúfáng zuǒbiān shì wǒde fángjiān, yòubiān shì wǒ bàmā de fángjiān.
Wang: This is the kitchen. On the left of the kitchen is my room; on the right is my parents' room.
## Level 2 3.4 Summary of the use of 是, 在 and 有
The following is a summary of the use of 是, 在 and 有 and the definiteness of nouns.
Definite | 是 | Definite | 王小英是我的女朋友。
Wáng Xiǎoyīng shì wǒde nǚ péngyǒu.
Wang Xiaoying is my girlfriend.
---|---|---|---
* * *
Definite | 是 | Indefinite | 这是一个没有用的东西。
Zhè shì yí ge méiyǒu yòng de dōngxi.
This is a useless thing.
* * *
Generic | 是 | Generic | 人是理性的动物。
Rén shì lǐxìng de dòngwù.
Humans are creatures of rationality.
* * *
Definite | 在 | Definite | 你的书在那张桌子上。
Nǐde shū zài nà zhāng zhuōzi shàng.
Your book is on that desk.
* * *
Definite | 在 | Indefinite | 我家在一条大马路旁边。
Wǒ jiā zài yì tiáo dà mǎlù pángbiān.
My house is on a big street.
* * *
Definite | 有 | Indefinite | 那棵树下有一辆车。
Nà kē shù xià yǒu yí liàng chē.
There is a car under that tree.
我有三本语法书。
Wǒ yǒu sān běn yǔfǎ shū.
I have three grammar books.
* * *
Generic | 有 | Generic | 人都有理性跟良心。
Rén dōu yǒu lǐxìng gēn liángxīn.
All humans have rationality and conscience.
## Exercises
Translate the following sentences into Chinese. Be precise about the use of 是, 在 and 有.
* Level 1 1 There are five people in my family. These five people are my parents, my older brother, my younger sister and me.
* 2 There are two books on the table. One is mine; one is my younger brother's.
* 3 My boyfriend is Chinese. He is in the UK right now.
* 4 Wang: Where is your Chinese dictionary? May I borrow it?
Zhang: I don't have a Chinese dictionary.
* 5 Wang: Is this Japanese car yours?
Li: I have two cars; one is an American car and one is a German car. I don't have a Japanese car.
* Level 2 6 Li: There is a car under the tree. Is it yours?
Zhang: It is not. My car is in the garage.
* 7 Ding: Where is my Chinese dictionary? Do you have my dictionary, Wang Zhong?
Wang: No, Li Ming has it now.
* 8 Wang: There is a computer here. Whose is it? Is it yours?
Ding: No, my computer is in my dormitory. Li Ming, is it yours?
Li: It's not mine, either. I don't have a computer.
* 9 New student: Excuse me, where is the toilet?
Teacher: It's on the fifth floor. There isn't one on this floor.
New student: Isn't this the fifth floor?
Teacher: No, we are on the fourth floor right now.
* 10 Wang: There are two grammar books here. Which is yours?
Li: Neither is mine. I don't have any grammar books.
# [4
The functions of 的, relative clauses and noun clauses](content.xhtml#bck_Ch04)
A basic rule to remember about the use of 的 (de) is that a 的 phrase, in most cases, is used attributively. This means that it appears before a noun or noun phrase, even though the noun or noun phrase sometimes is omitted from the sentence.
## Level 1 4.1 Possessive 的
的 can be used to indicate possession.
王先生的新房子很大。
Wáng xiānsheng de xīn fángzi hěn dà.
Mr Wang's new house is big.
我的车坏了。
Wǒde chē huài le.
My car has broken down.
这是谁的书?
Zhè shì shéi de shū?
Whose book is this?
### (a) When possessive 的 can be omitted
After a personal pronoun (你, 我, 他/她, etc.), 的 is frequently omitted, especially in casual speech, when what follows is a family member. This rule can also apply to nouns such as 家 (jiā) and 男朋友 (nán péngyǒu)/女朋友 (nǚ péngyǒu).
我家有三个卧室; 我爸妈的卧室最大,我弟弟的最小。
Wǒ jiā yǒu sān ge wòshì; wǒ bàmā de wòshì zuì dà, wǒ dìdi de zuì xiǎo.
My house has three bedrooms; my parents' room is the biggest; my younger brother's is the smallest.
我女朋友的哥哥是我妹妹的男朋友。
Wǒ nǚ péngyǒu de gēge shì wǒ mèimei de nán péngyǒu.
My girlfriend's older brother is my younger sister's boyfriend.
### (b) English vs. Chinese word order
In English, the word 'of' is sometimes used in a sentence whose Chinese counterpart uses 的. It is important to note the difference in word order between English and Chinese in such sentences. The basic rule is: A of B in English is B 的 A in Chinese.
English:The color of this skirt is ugly.
Chinese: 这条裙子的颜色不好看。
Zhè tiáo qúnzi de yánsè bù hǎokàn.
English:The author of this book is a good friend of mine.
Chinese: 这本书的作者是我的好朋友。
Zhè běn shū de zuòzhě shì wǒde hǎo péngyǒu.
我妹妹的男朋友是大学生。
Wǒ mèimei de nán péngyǒu shì dàxuéshēng.
The boyfriend of my younger sister is a university student.
我男朋友的妹妹是大学生。
Wǒ nán péngyǒu de mèimei shì dàxuéshēng.
The younger sister of my boyfriend is a university student.
### (c) Location phrases with possessive 的
In English, the phrase 'in/at/on + location' should sometimes be thought of as a 的 phrase in Chinese when such a phrase is used to modify a noun or noun phrase. To translate such an English phrase into a prepositional phrase with 在 (zài) is a common mistake made by learners whose native language is English.
English:Students at Beijing University are all good students.
Chinese: 北京大学的学生都是好学生。
Běijīng dàxué de xuéshēng dōu shì hǎo xuéshēng.
(Incorrect: 学生在北京大学都是好学生。)
English:Wow! The scenery here is really beautiful!
Chinese: 哇! 这里的风景真美啊!
Wà! Zhèlǐ de fēngjǐng zhēn měi a!
(Incorrect: 哇! 风景在这里真美啊!)
### (d) Omission of noun after possessive 的
When the context is clear, the noun after the possessive 的 can be, and frequently is, omitted.
王: 这本书是谁的?
Wáng: Zhè běn shū shì shéi de?
李: 不是我的; 可能是张文的。
Lǐ: Bú shì wǒde; kěnéng shì Zhāng Wén de.
Wang: Whose is this book? (= To whom does this book belong?)
Li: It's not mine; it's probably Zhang Wen's.
## Level 2 4.2 的 with disyllabic (two-character) modifiers
When a disyllabic modifier is used attributively to describe a noun (meaning the modifier appears before a noun or noun phrase), 的 is needed. Three (or more) character modifiers follow the same rule.
李: 你知道吗? 王老师有一个很大的房子呢! (很大 is disyllabic. 的 is necessary.)
Lǐ: Nǐ zhīdào ma? Wáng lǎoshī yǒu yí ge hěn dà de fángzi ne!
张: 是吗? 我不知道呢。可是我知道他有一辆新车。(新 is monosyllabic.)
Zhāng: Shì ma? Wǒ bù zhīdào ne. Kěshì wǒ zhīdào tā yǒu yí liàng xīn chē.
Li: Did you know? Teacher Wang has a very big house!
Zhang: Is that so? I didn't know. But I know he has a new car.
### (a) Exception: 很多/不少
When 很多/不少 appears before a noun or noun phrase, 的 is not used even though each is disyllabic.
他去过很多国家。(= 他去过不少国家。)
Tā qù guo hěn duō guójiā.
He has been to many countries.
In casual speech, however, 的 is acceptable after 很多/不少.
今天他带了很多(的)钱, 所以买了不少(的)好东西。
Jīntiān tā dài le hěn duō (de) qián, suǒyǐ mǎi le bù shǎo (de) hǎo dōngxi.
Today he brought a lot of money, so he bought a lot of good stuff.
### (b) Exception: When monosyllabic modifiers take 的
When a monosyllabic adjective is used attributively for the purpose of making a distinction, 的 is needed. This means there are at least two of the same item in the situation.
家里有两个苹果﹑ 两个桃子。妈妈上午把大的苹果给了我, 所以下午就给我小的桃子。
Jiā lǐ yǒu liǎng ge píngguǒ, liǎng ge táozi. Māma shàngwǔ bǎ dà de píngguǒ gěi le wǒ, suǒyǐ xiàwǔ jiù gěi wǒ xiǎo de táozi.
There were two apples and two peaches at home. My mother gave me the bigger apple in the morning, so she gave me the smaller peach in the afternoon.
(大 and 小 are both monosyllabic; 大的 and 小的 are used because 'big' and 'small' are used to distinguish the two apples and the two peaches.)
(Situation: A photographer is arranging a group of people to be in a photo.)
高的人站后面; 矮的人站前面。
Gāo de rén zhàn hòumiàn; ǎi de rén zhàn qiánmiàn. (高人 and 矮人 would be incorrect.)
Taller people stand at the back; shorter people stand in front.
### (c) Omission of noun after an adjective
When the context is clear, the noun after the adjective can be omitted. In this case, 的 must be attached to the adjective regardless of the number of characters the adjective has.
妈妈: 这里有两条漂亮的裙子; 是谁的?(漂亮 is disyllabic; 的 is necessary.)
Māma: Zhèlǐ yǒu liǎng tiáo piàoliàng de qúnzi, shì shéi de?
女儿:红的是我的; 蓝的是姐姐的。(裙子 is omitted, so 的 after 红 and 蓝 is necessary.)
Nǚ'er: Hóng de shì wǒde; lán de shì jiějie de.
Mother: There are two pretty skirts here. Whose (skirts) are they?
Daughter: The red one is mine; the blue one is (my) older sister's.
## Level 3 4.3 Relative clauses
A relative clause is also called an adjectival clause since it functions as an adjective. A relative clause in Chinese appears before the noun or noun phrase; therefore, 的 is needed even in rare cases where there is only a monosyllabic verb before it.
In Chinese, a relative clause appears before the noun or noun phrase it modifies. In English, a relative clause follows the noun or noun phrase.
### (a) Verbs and verbal phrases
A relative clause can be a verb or a verbal phrase.
李: 昨天我家有一个派对。
Lǐ: Zuótiān wǒ jiā yǒu yí ge pàiduì.
王: 哦, 是吗?来的人多不多?
Wáng: Ó, shì ma? Lái de rén duō bù duō?
Li: Yesterday there was a party at my house.
Wang: Oh, is that so? Were there many people who came (to your party)?
喜欢看中国电影的人应该学中文。
Xǐhuān kàn Zhōngguó diànǐng de rén yīnggāi xué Zhōngwén.
People who like to see Chinese movies should study Chinese.
昨天跟我去看电影的那个女孩子是我妹妹。
Zuótiān gēn wǒ qù kàn diànyǐng de nà ge nǚ háizi shì wǒ mèimei.
The girl who went to see a movie with me yesterday was my younger sister.
### (b) Subject + verb
A relative clause can be 'subject + verb'.
王:我昨天看的那个电影真不错。
Wáng: Wǒ zuótiān kàn de nà ge diànyǐng zhēn búcuò.
张: 是不是上星期李老师给我们介绍的那个电影?
Zhāng: Shì bú shì shàng xīngqī Lǐ lǎoshī gěi wǒmen jièshào de nà ge diànyǐng?
Wang: The movie which I saw yesterday was really good.
Zhang: Was it the movie which Teacher Li recommended last week?
陈: 请告诉我, 这几个字是什么意思?
Chén: Qǐng gàosù wǒ, zhè jǐ ge zì shì shénme yìsi?
丁: 这些都是你学过的字, 你不应该来问我。
Dīng: Zhè xiē dōu shì nǐ xué guo de zì, nǐ bù yīnggāi lái wèn wǒ.
Chen: Please tell me: what are the meanings of these few words?
Ding: All these are words (that) you have learned; you should not ask me.
### (c) Subject + verb + object
A relative clause can be 'subject + verb + object'. The object in this case must be an indirect object and the noun/noun phrase being modified by the relative clause is the direct object.
☞ See 1.5 for more information on direct objects and indirect objects.
你看, 这是我男朋友送我的生日礼物。
Nǐ kàn, zhè shì wǒ nán péngyǒu sòng wǒ de shēngrì lǐwù.
Look! This is the birthday gift (that) my boyfriend gave me.
我把他告诉我的秘密都写在日记里了。
Wǒ bǎ tā gàosù wǒ de mìmì dōu xiě zài rìjì lǐ le.
I wrote all the secrets he told me in my diary.
### (d) Complete sentences
It may sound awkward in Chinese, although deemed acceptable by some, if the relative clause is a complete sentence with a prepositional phrase (subject + prepositional phrase + verb + object); however, its counterpart in English is perfectly acceptable.
English:The girl whom I went to the movie with is Miss Bai.
Awkward but acceptable:我跟她去看电影的那个女孩子是白小姐。
Wǒ gēn tā qù kàn diànyǐng de nà ge nǚ háizi shì Bái xiǎojiě.
Should be:The girl who went to the movie with me is Miss Bai.
跟我去看电影的那个女孩子是白小姐。
Gēn wǒ qù kàn diànyǐng de nà ge nǚ háizi shì Bái xiǎojiě.
English:The person to whom I wrote a letter last week is here.
Awkward but acceptable: 上星期我给他写信的那个人现在来了。
Shàng xīngqī wǒ gěi tā xiě xìn de nà ge rén xiànzài lái le.
### (e) 这/那 \+ measure word
It is useful to know that '那 \+ measure word', which appears before the noun/noun phrase after the relative clause, normally does not literally mean 'that', but is only used to clearly indicate the singular number of the noun.
* Without '那 \+ measure word' in front of the noun, the meaning can be ambiguous.
我上星期提到的那个女孩子今天没有来参加舞会。
Wò shàng xīngqī tídào de nà ge nǚ háizi jīntiān méiyǒu lái cānjiā wǔhuì.
The girl I mentioned last week didn't come to the dance party today.
(Without 那个, it would not be clear how many girls the speaker mentioned last week.)
我昨天买的书在哪里?
Wǒ zuótiān mǎi de shú zài nǎlǐ?
Where is the book I bought yesterday? or Where are the books I bought yesterday?
* When 这/那 appears before the relative clause, it usually literally means 'this/that'.
那个穿绿裙子的女孩就是我昨天提到的那个留学生。
Nà ge chuān lǜ qúnzi de nǚhái jiù shì wǒ zuótiān tídào de nà ge liúxuéshēng.
That girl (over there) who's wearing a green skirt is the exchange student I mentioned yesterday.
(The speaker most likely is pointing at the girl while speaking.)
这件让大家都不愉快的事, 我们忘了吧!
Zhè jiàn ràng dàjiā dōu bù yúkuài de shì, wǒmen wàng le ba.
Let's forget this matter, which has upset everybody.
(Improper: 让大家都不愉快的这件事, 我们忘了吧!)
### (f) Number + measure word
When 'a number + measure word' is used with a relative clause, it tends to appear before the relative clause, not immediately before the noun/noun phrase. It is indefinite and it means '(a) certain'. (When it appears immediately before the noun/noun clause, the sentence is still correct but may have a slightly different implication.)
昨天我收到一个爸爸寄给我的礼物。
Zuótiān wǒ shōudào yí ge bàba jì gěi wǒ de lìwǔ.
Yesterday I received a present that my father sent me.
这是一件大家都已经知道的事, 你不用说了。
Zhè shì yí jiàn dàjiā dōu yǐjīng zhīdào de shì, nǐ búyòng shuō le.
This is a matter (that) everybody already knew about. You don't have to say it anymore.
### (g) Particle 了
了, whether a modal particle or a perfective aspect particle, is rarely included in a relative clause.
☞ See Chapter 10 for more information on the use of 了.
这件事, 大家都已经知道了。
Zhè jiàn shì, dàjiā dōu yǐjīng zhīdǎo le.
Everybody already knew about this matter.
Compare: 这是一件大家都已经知道的事。
(There is no 了 after 知道.)Zhè shì yí jiàn dàjiā dōu yǐjīng zhīdào de shì.
This is a matter that everybody already knew about.
我昨天买了一辆日本车。
Wǒ zuótiān mǎi le yí liàng Rìběn chē.
I bought a Japanese car yesterday.
Compare: 这就是我昨天买的那辆日本车。(There is no 了 after 买.)
Zhè jiù shì wǒ zuótiān mǎi de nà liàng Rìběn chē.
This is the Japanese car that I bought yesterday.
In certain cases where 了 is needed in the relative clause, it must follow the verb.
你是结了婚的人, 怎么还出去交女朋友呢? (结婚的人 or 结婚了的人 would not be correct.) ☞ See 8.4(c) for related information.
Nǐ shì jié le hūn de rén, zěnme hái chūqù jiāo nǚ péngyǒu ne?
You are a married man; how can you still go out and date another woman?
### (h) More formal with use of 所
When the relative clause is 'subject + verb' and the noun which the relative clause modifies is the object of the verb, an optional 所 (suǒ) can be used before the verb in a more formal style of speech.
老师(所)说的话, 你们都懂了吗?
Lǎoshī (suǒ) shuō de huà, nǐmen dōu dǒng le ma?
Did you all understand the words (which) the teacher said?
(话 is the object of the verb 说; therefore, an optional 所 can appear before 说.)
人口太多(所)带来的问题, 是很不容易解决的。
Rénkǒu tài duō (suǒ) dàilái de wèntí, shì hěn bù róngyì jiějué de.
The problem (which) excessive population has brought is very difficult to solve.
(问题 is the object of the verb 带来; therefore, an optional 所 can appear before 带来.)
When the relative clause is 'subject + verb + indirect object', an optional 所 can be used as well.
我(所)告诉你的那个秘密, 请你不要告诉别人。
Wǒ (suǒ) gàosù nǐ de nà ge mìmì, qǐng nǐ bú yào gàosù biérén.
Please do not tell others the secret I told you.
## Level 3 4.4 的 and noun clauses
### (a) Omission of noun
When the context is clear, the noun following the relative clause is often omitted. The 的 phrase, thus, becomes a noun clause.
上个月, 我哥哥﹑ 弟弟各买了一辆新车; 哥哥买的是日本车,弟弟买的是 美国车。
Shàng ge yuè, wǒ gēge, dìdi gè mǎi le yí liàng xīn chē; gēge mǎi de shì Rìběn chē; dìdi mǎi de shì Měiguó chē.
Last month, my older brother and my younger brother each bought a new car; what my older brother bought was a Japanese car; what my younger brother bought was an American car.
王: 你的中文老师姓什么?
Wáng: Nǐde Zhōngwén lǎoshī xìng shénme?
李: 我有两个中文老师; 教语法的姓白,教会话的姓丁。
Lǐ: Wǒ yǒu liǎng ge Zhōngwén lǎoshī; jiāo yǔfǎ de xìng Bái; jiāo huìhuà de xìng Dīng.
Wang: What is the last name of your Chinese teacher?
Li: I have two Chinese teachers. The one who teaches grammar is (last name is) Bai; the one who teaches conversation is (last name is) Ding.
昨天的舞会, 没有吃的, 没有喝的, 真没有意思。
Zuótiān de wǔhuì, méiyǒu chī de, méiyǒu hē de, zhēn méiyǒu yìsi.
At yesterday's dance party, there was no food and there were no drinks; it was really boring.
### (b) Another type of noun clause
There is another type of noun clause, whose surface structure looks identical to that of a 'relative clause + noun'. However, unlike a relative clause, this type of clause does not function as an adjective, but serves to provide the 'content' of the noun.
In English, the conjunction 'that' is used to connect the clause with the noun.
女人结了婚就应该待在家里的观念早就过时了。
Nǚrén jié le hūn jiù yīnggāi dāi zài jiā lǐ de guānniàn zǎo jiù guòshí le.
The concept that women should stay home once they are married has long been outdated.
李先生马上就要当上总裁的消息还没有正式发布呢。
Lǐ xiānsheng mǎshàng jiùyǎo dāng shàng zǒngcái de xiāoxí hái méiyǒu zhèngshì fābù ne.
The news that Mr Li will soon be promoted to CEO has not been officially announced.
* 的 in a relative clause is not omissible, but 的 in the above-mentioned noun clause can be omitted if '那/这 \+ measure word' is used
女人结了婚就应该待在家里(的)这个观念早就过时了。
Nǚrén jié le hūn jiù yīnggāi dāi zài jiā lǐ (de) zhè ge guānniàn zǎojiù guòshí le.
The concept that woman should stay home once they are married has long been outdated.
Compare: 结了婚的女人还是可以有自己的事业。(的 in 结了婚的女人 is not omissible.)
Jié le hūn de nǚrén háishì kěyǐ yǒu zìjǐ de shìyè.
Married women (women who are married) can still have professional careers.
李先生马上就要当上总裁(的)这个消息还没有正式发布呢。
Lǐ xiānsheng mǎshàng jiùyǎo dāng shàng zǒngcái (de) zhè ge xiāoxí hái méiyǒu zhèngshì fābù ne.
The news that Mr Li will soon be promoted to CEO has not been officially announced.
Compare: 上星期当上总裁的那位先生姓什么?(的 is not omissible.)
Shàng xīngqī dāng shàng zǒngcái de nà wèi xiānsheng xìng shénme?
What is the last name of the gentleman who was promoted to CEO last week?
## Level 2 4.5 When 的 is not used
### (a) 'Belonging' not 'owning'
When one 'belongs to' a group or an organization but does not 'own' it, 的 is not used, and the plural form of a personal pronoun (你们, 我们, 他们) is used, although the possessive case is used in such an expression in English. For example, 我们家 (= 我家), 我们国家, 他们班, 你们学校.
我们国家的足球队又输了。
Wǒmen guójiā de zúqiú duì yòu shū le.
The football team of our country (or my country) lost again.
他们班只有男生, 没有女生。
Tāmen bān zhǐ yǒu nánshēng, méiyǒu nǚshēng.
There are only male students in their class (or his class); there are no female students.
你们学校对面有一家书店, 对不对?
Nǐmen xuéxiào duìmiàn yǒu yì jiā shūdiàn, duì bú duì?
There is a bookshop across from your school; is that right?
### (b) 'Disyllabic adjective + noun' without 的
Certain words may appear to be 'disyllabic adjective + noun' without 的 after the adjective. This is because they are considered to be one word, not two words. Examples: 年轻人 (niánqīng rén: 'youth; young person'), 古典音乐 (gǔdiǎn yīnyuè: 'classical music'); 流行歌曲 (liúxíng gēqǔ: 'pop songs'), etc.
### (c) When attributive is a noun
When the attributive is a noun, 的 frequently is not used. This is because it is considered to be one word, not two words. Examples: 汉英词典 (Hàn Yīng cídiǎn: 'Chinese–English dictionary'), 日本车 (Rìběn chē: 'Japanese car'), 法国菜 (Fǎguó cài: 'French food'), 女权主义 (nǚquán zhǔyì: 'feminism').
### (d) More than one 的
Given the various functions of 的, it is not unusual to find several 的 in one sentence. In this case, one can omit some of them to make the speech flow more smoothly.
Some general rules for this type of omission are: (i) 的 in a relative clause should not be omitted, (ii) 的 after a disyllabic adjective should not be omitted, (iii) 的 indicating possession can be omitted if necessary, and (iv) when more than one 的 is used to connect a series of nouns, the one that is closest to the beginning of the sentence is generally omitted first.
我(的)iii 那个漂亮的ii 同屋是我(的)iv 男朋友(的)iv 弟弟的女朋友。
Wǒ(de) nà ge piàoliàng de tóngwū shì wǒ(de) nán péngyǒu (de) dìdi de nǚ péngyǒu.
That pretty roommate of mine is the girlfriend of my boyfriend's younger brother.
现在在跟王先生跳舞的i 那个漂亮的ii 女孩是李老师(的)iv 妹妹的同屋。
Xiànzài zài gēn Wáng xiānsheng tiàowǔ de nà ge piàoliàng de nǚhái shì Lǐ lǎoshī (de) mèimei de tóngwū.
The pretty girl (who is) dancing with Mr Wang is the roommate of Teacher Li's younger sister.
## Exercises
Insert 的 into the following sentences. The number in parentheses indicates the number of times that 的 will be used. If 的 could be optional, the optional one(s) should be omitted.
Example 我女朋友爸爸有一家很大公司。 (2)
Answer我女朋友的爸爸有一家很大的公司。
Wǒ nǚ péngyǒu de bàba yǒu yì jiā hěn dà de gōngsī.
My girlfriend's father has a very big company.
* Level 1 1 我有很多喜欢听古典音乐朋友。 (1)
I have many friends who like classical music.
* 2 这么可爱小男孩, 是你儿子吗? (1)
Such a cute little boy! Is he your son?
* 3 你看, 这就是我上星期买新车。 (1)
Look! This is the new car I bought last week.
* 4 这是谁日本车? 是新还是二手? (3)
Whose Japanese car is this? Is it new or second-hand?
* 5 今年爸爸送我生日礼物是一辆新车。 (1)
The birthday present my father gave me this year was a new car.
* Level 3 6 我听说那家新开书店有很多从日本来杂志。 (2)
I heard that that newly opened bookstore has many magazines from Japan.
* 7 张: 昨天我去看了一个很好看中国电影。 (1)
李: 是不是老师上星期给我们介绍那个? (1)
Zhang: Yesterday I went to see a very good Chinese movie.
Li: Was is the one that our teacher recommended last week?
* 8 王太太: 昨天我儿子在家办了一个非常大舞会。 (1)
李太太: 哦, 是吗? 来人多不多? (1)
王太太: 相当多。都是他在学校认识年轻人。 (1)
Mrs Wang: Yesterday my son had a very big dance party at home.
Mrs Li: Oh, is that so? Were there many people who came?
Mrs Wang: Quite a lot. They were all young people he knows from school.
* 9 丁: 你看, 我买了一本王老师写语法书。 (1)
李: 我也买了一本王老师书。可是, 我买是他写一本小说。 (3)
Ding: Look! I bought a grammar book by Teacher Wang.
Li: I also bought a book by Teacher Wang. But what I bought was a novel he wrote.
* 10 妹妹昨天买那条裙子颜色不好看。 (1)
The color of the skirt my younger sister bought yesterday is not pretty.
* 11 二十一世纪中国人已经没有"重男轻女"观念了。 (2)
Chinese people of the 21st century do not have the concept of 'valuing boys and thinking little of girls' anymore.
* 12 王: 你昨天买那本书是不是英文? (2)
李: 我昨天买了两本 《老人与海》 。一本是中文, 一本是英文。 (2)
王: 啊! 我知道! 《老人与海》 是海明威写一本有名小说。 (2)
Wang: Is the book you bought yesterday an English book?
Li: I bought two copies of The Old Man and the Sea yesterday. One is in English, and one is in Chinese.
Wang: Ah! I know that The Old Man and the Sea is a famous novel by Hemingway.
* 13 很多人批评中国政府推行"一家一个孩子"人口政策。 (2)
Many people criticize the 'one child per family' population policy promoted by the Chinese government.
* 14 我弟弟女朋友爸爸有一辆很贵德国车。 (2)
My younger brother's girlfriend's father has a very expensive German car.
* 15 小王说他有一个年轻、 漂亮女朋友, 可是没有人见过他这个女朋友。 (1)
Xiao Wang says that he has a young and pretty girlfriend, but no one has met this girlfriend of his.
* 16 老师: 刚才我说话, 谁不懂? 不懂同学, 请现在问我。 (2)
张同学: 您说, 我不懂, 您再说一遍, 好吗? (1)
Teacher: Who does not understand what I said just now? Those students who don't understand, please ask me now.
Student Zhang: I don't understand what you said. Would you please repeat it?
* 17 今天爸爸买了十个苹果。他把最大给我, 给弟弟是最小。 (3)
Today my father bought ten apples. He gave the biggest one to me, and the one he gave to my younger brother was the smallest one.
# [5
Position words](content.xhtml#bck_Ch05)
## Level 1 5.1 Position words
边、 面
(biān, miàn) | 前边、 前面
Front | 后边、 后面
Back | 上边、 上面
Top; above | 下边、 下面
Below, beneath | 里边、 里面
Inside | 外边、 外面
Outside
---|---|---|---|---|---|---
* * *
边 only | 左边
Left side | 右边
Right side | 旁边
Side; around | | |
* * *
Without
边 | 中间
Between; middle | 对面
The other side; across from | | | |
* In casual speech, 头 (tóu) can replace 边/面 in 前/后/上/下/里/外.
## Level 2 5.2 The use of 在, 有, 是 and position words
☞ See Chapter 3 for more information on the use of 在, 有 and 是.
* 在: location
我家在银行和花店(的)中间。
Wǒ jiā zài yínháng hé huādiàn (de) zhōngjiān.
My house is (located) between the bank and the flower shop.
* 有: existence
卧室(的)里边有一张床、 一张书桌, 没有椅子。
Wòshì (de) lǐbiān yǒu yì zhāng chuáng, yì zhāng shūzhuō, méiyǒu yǐzi.
There is a bed and a desk inside the bedroom; there is no chair.
* 是: identification
客厅(的)旁边是不是厨房?
Kètīng (de) pángbiān shì bú shì chúfáng?
Is it the kitchen next to the living room?
## Level 3 5.3 Word order
The following explains the relationship in terms of word order between position words and nouns/pronouns.
### (a) Focus on the position word
When the focus is the position word, the noun/pronoun appears first. The 的 between the noun/pronoun and the position word is optional, and is, in fact, frequently omitted.
我家 ( 的 ) | 前边 | 是一个小花园, | 花园 ( 的 ) | 里边 | 有很多花。
---|---|---|---|---|---
Wǒ jiā (de) | qiánbiān | shì yí ge xiǎo huāyuán, | huāyuán (de) | lǐbiān | yǒu hěn duō huā.
| ↓ | | | ↓ |
| focus | | | focus |
In front of my house is a small garden; there are many flowers in(side) the garden.
我的卧室在书房 ( 的 ) | 左边, | 卧室 ( 的 ) 里边 | 有一张大书桌,
---|---|---|---
Wǒde wòshì zài shūfáng (de) | zuǒbiān, | wòshì (de) lǐbiān | yǒu yì zhāng dà shūzhuō,
| ↓ | | ↓
| focus | | focus
书桌 ( 的 ) | 上边 | 总是有几本书。
---|---|---
shūzhuō (de) | shàngbiān | zǒngshì yǒu jǐ běn shū.
| ↓ |
| focus |
My bedroom is to the left of the study; inside the bedroom, there is a big desk; there are always a few books on top of the desk.
### (b) Focus on the noun
When the focus is the noun, the position word appears first. The 的 between the noun and the position word is not optional. A pronoun (你, 我, 他, 这儿, 那儿, etc.) rarely follows a position word.
王: 我们去对面的 | 咖啡馆 | 喝咖啡, 怎么样?
---|---|---
Wáng: Wǒmen qù duìmiàn de | kāfēiguǎn | hē kāfēi, zěnmeyàng?
| ↓ |
| focus |
李: 对面有两家店, 都有咖啡; 我们去哪家?
Lǐ: Duìmiàn yǒu liǎng jiā diàn, dōu yǒu kāfēi; wǒmen qù nǎ jiā?
王:
---
左边的 | 茶馆 | 有茶, 也有咖啡; | 右边的 | 咖啡馆 | 有咖啡, 也有啤酒。
Wáng:
Zuǒbiān de | cháguǎn | yǒu chá, yě yǒu kāfēi; | yòubiān de | kāfēiguǎn | yǒu kāfēi, yě yǒu píjiǔ.
| ↓ | | | ↓ |
| focus | | | focus |
李: 太好了! 今天我想喝啤酒。我们去右边的那家吧。
Lǐ: Tài hǎo le! Jīntiān wǒ xiǎng hē píjiǔ. Wǒmen qù yòubiān de nà jiā ba.
Wang: How about going to the coffee shop across from here to have some coffee?
Li: There are two shops across from here; both have coffee. Which one shall we go to?
Wang: The tea shop on the left has tea and they also have coffee; the coffee shop on the right has coffee and they also have beer.
Li: Great! I feel like drinking beer today. Let's go to the one on the right.
### (c) Focus on '这/那 \+ noun'
When the focus is the noun and 这 or 那 precedes the noun, the 的 between the position word and the noun becomes optional.
银行(的)对面有两家花店; 左边(的)那家花多, 右边(的)那家价钱便宜, 所以 两家的顾客都很多。
Yínháng (de) duìmiàn yǒu liǎng jiā huādiàn; zuǒbiān (de) nà jiā huā duō, yòubiān (de) nà jiā jiàqián piányí, suǒyǐ liǎng jiā de gùkè dōu hěn duō.
There are two flower shops across from the bank; the one on the left has more flowers; the one on the right has cheaper prices; therefore, both shops have many customers.
### (d) General rule: Focus comes last
It is not unusual to have 'noun/pronoun + position word + 的 \+ noun'. The general rule is: The expression starts with the information that is furthest away and the focus comes last. Therefore, the Chinese word order is a reverse of the English word order.
Example: the French restaurant on the left side of the bank
(The French restaurant is the focus; the bank is the information that is furthest away.)
银行旁边的 | 法国餐馆 | or | 银行旁边 | 那家法国餐馆
---|---|---|---|---
yínháng pángbiān de | Fǎguó cānguǎn | or | yínháng pángbiān | nà jiā Fǎguó cānguǎn
| ↓ | | | ↓
| focus | | | focus
### (e) Omission of the noun
The noun after 的 can be omitted if the context is clear.
房间里面有三张床; 左边的是哥哥的,右边的是弟弟的,中间的是我的。
Fángjiān lǐmiàn yǒu sān zhāng chuáng; zuǒbiān de shì gēge de, yòubiān de shì dìdi de, zhōngjiān de shì wǒde.
There are three beds in(side) the bedroom. The one on the left is my older brother's; the one on the right is my younger brother's; the one in the middle is mine.
### (f) When 边/面/头 is optional
When the position word 前边, 后边, 上边, 下边, 里边, 外边 or 旁边 is the focus, the character 边/面/头 can be optional. In this case, what precedes the position word must be a regular noun, not a pronoun or a measure word. Also, 的 must be omitted.
桌子(的)上边 = 桌子上 = 桌上
zhuōzi (de) shàngbiān = zhuōzi shàng = zhuō shàng
on (top of) the table
厨房(的)里边 = 厨房里
chúfáng (de) lǐbiān = chúfáng lǐ
in(side) the kitchen
教室(的)旁边 = 教室旁
jiàoshì (de) pángbiān = jiàoshì páng
next to the classroom
他(的)旁边有一张桌子。
Tā(de) pángbiān yǒu yì zhāng zhuōzi.
There is a table next to him.
(他旁有一张桌子 would be incorrect since 他 is a pronoun.)
那个图书馆里有一间杂志阅览室, 这个里边也有一间。
Nà ge túshūguǎn lǐ yǒu yì jiān zázhì yuèlǎnshì, zhè ge lǐbiān yě yǒu yì jiān.
There is a magazine room inside that library; there is also one inside this (library).
(这个里也有一间 would be incorrect since 个 is a measure word.)
### (g) Compass points
There is another group of position words (东, 西, 南, 北) whose meanings vary depending on the suffixes. The suffixes can be either 边, 方 or 部.
太阳每天从东边出来, 从西边下去。
Tàiyáng měi tiān cóng dōngbiān chūlái, cóng xībiān xiàqù.
The sun rises (comes out) in the east every day and sets (goes down) in the west.
美国(的)东边是大西洋, 西边是太平洋。
Měiguó (de) dōngbiān shì Dàxīyáng, xībiān shì Tàipíngyáng.
To the east of the USA is the Atlantic Ocean; to the west is the Pacific Ocean.
张先生是南方人, 李先生是北方人; 所以他们的口音不一样。
Zhāng xiānsheng shì nánfāng rén, Lǐ xiānsheng shì běifāng rén; suǒyǐ tāmen de kǒuyīn bù yíyàng.
Mr Zhang is a southerner; Mr Li is a northerner; therefore, their accents are different.
东方人跟西方人(的)文化﹑ 思想都很不一样。
Dōngfāng rén gēn Xīfāng rén (de) wénhuà, sīxiǎng dōu hěn bù yíyàng.
Oriental people and Occidental (Western) people are different in culture and thought.
这个国家东部是海岸, 西部是高山。
Zhè ge guójiā dōngbù shì hǎi'àn, xībù shì gāoshān.
The eastern part of the country is coast; the western part is high mountains.
### (h) When 里 is not used
A proper noun indicating a place does not need 里 in a sentence with 在. Other nouns indicating a place may or may not need 里 in such a sentence, depending on whether the place has a well-defined boundary or not. (Normally 里 is used when there is a clear boundary.)
他现在在中国学中文。
Tā xiànzài zài Zhōngguó xué Zhōngwén.
He is studying Chinese in China now.
(Incorrect: 他现在在中国里学中文。)
我女儿在北京工作。
Wǒ nǚ'ér zài Běijīng gōngzuò.
My daughter works in Beijing.
(Incorrect: 我女儿在北京里工作。)
我妈妈现在没有工作, 她在家(里)给人看孩子。
Wǒ māma xiànzài méiyǒu gōngzuò, tā zài jiā (lǐ) gěi rén kān háizi.
My mother does not have a job now. She babysits for people at home.
妈妈在厨房(里)做饭, 爸爸在客厅(里)看电视, 弟弟在房间(里)写功课。
Māma zài chúfáng (lǐ) zuòfàn, bàba zài kètīng (lǐ) kàn diànshì, dìdi zài fángjiān (lǐ) xiě gōngke.
My mother is cooking in the kitchen; my father is watching TV in the living room; my younger brother is doing homework in the bedroom.
妈妈: 爸爸跟弟弟回家了吗?
Māma: Bàba gēn dìdi huí jiā le ma?
女儿: 没有, 爸爸还在办公室, 弟弟还在学校呢!
Nǚ'er: Méiyǒu, bàba hái zài bàngōngshì, dìdi hái zài xuéxiào ne!
Mother: Have your father and younger brother come home?
Daughter: No. Father is still at the office, and younger brother is still at school.
## Exercises
Rearrange the words or phrases to form complete sentences.
* Level 1 1 There is a bank between the coffee shop and the flower shop.
有 银行 一家 中间 咖啡馆 花店 跟
* 2 There are three houses on this road. The one in the middle is my home.
这条路 中间 我家 上 有 是 那个 房子 三个
* 3 The student dormitory is between the library and the bookshop.
学生 中间 跟 图书馆 宿舍 的 在 书店
* 4 There are two books on the table. The one on top is mine.
桌子 两本 上 有 书 上面 我的 是 那本
* 5
* (a) There are two coffee shops across from the student dormitory.
两家 宿舍 咖啡馆 有 对面 学生
* (b) I work at the one on the right.
工作 我 那家 在 右边
* Level 2 6
* (a) There are three bedrooms in my house. Two are on the second floor.
卧房 二楼 有 在 我家 三个 两个
* (b) The one on the first floor is mine.
那个 的 在 一楼 我的 是
* (c) Next to my bedroom is a small kitchen. There is a dining table in the middle of the kitchen.
小厨房 中间 厨房 卧房 我的 一张 一个 旁边 是 有 饭桌
* 7 On the left side of my house is a flower shop; on the right is a bank.
右边 左边 我家 花店 银行 是 (twice) 一家 (twice)
* 8 The building next to the library is the student dormitory.
是 图书馆 大楼 的 宿舍 旁边 学生
* 9 There is a coffee shop inside the bookshop across from here.
里 对面 一个 那家 书店 咖啡馆 有
* 10 The coffee shop inside this bookshop also has tea.
茶 的 咖啡馆 有 书店 里面 也 这家
# [6
Prepositional constructions](content.xhtml#bck_Ch06)
Many prepositions in Chinese share similarities with verbs or can be used as verbs; therefore, learners should pay special attention to the word order of a sentence with a preposition that is also a verb. The majority of prepositions are monosyllabic; but there are also some disyllabic ones.
A preposition together with the object (a noun or a pronoun) that follows it forms a prepositional phrase. The following shows the basic word-order rules of a sentence with a preposition.
In modern Chinese, a prepositional phrase is used before the verb.
In English, a prepositional phrase normally appears after the verb. | 我儿子在北京学中文。
Wǒ érzi zài Běijīng xué Zhōngwén.
My son studied Chinese in Beijing.
他从图书馆走路回家。
Tā cóng túshūguǎn zǒulù huí jiā.
He walked home from the library.
---|---
* * *
In formal usage, some prepositional phrases can appear after the verb. | 我父母来自农村。
Wǒ fùmǔ lái zì nóngcūn.
My parents come from farming villages.
* * *
Many prepositional phrases with disyllabic prepositions appear at the beginning of the sentence. | 根据天气预报, 明天会下雨。
Gēnjù tiānqì yùbào, míngtiān huì xià yǔ.
According to the weather forecast, it will rain tomorrow.
* * *
Some prepositions can be used as the complement of result; these prepositions appear after the verb. | 这封信, 请你交给他。
Zhè fēng xìn, qǐng nǐ jiāo gěi tā.
Please hand this letter to him.
## Level 1 6.1 Indicating location, direction, space, etc.
### (a) 在 \+ location + verb
张: 他爸爸妈妈在哪里工作?
Zhāng: Tā bàba māma zài nǎlǐ gōngzuò?
王: 他爸爸在银行工作; 他妈妈没有工作, 她在家看孩子。
Wáng: Tā bàba zài yínháng gōngzuò; tā māma méiyǒu gōngzuò, tā zài jiā kān háizi.
Zhang: Where do his parents work?
Wang: His father works at a bank; his mother does not have a job; she cares for the children at home.
李: 王先生的孩子都在外国留学吗?
Lǐ: Wáng xiānsheng de háizi dōu zài wàiguó liúxué ma?
丁: 对, 他儿子现在在中国学中文; 女儿在法国学设计。
Dīng: Duì, Tā érzi xiànzài zài Zhōngguó xué Zhōngwén; nǚ'er zài Fǎguó xué shèjì.
Li: Are both Mr Wang's children studying in foreign countries?
Ding: That's right. His son is studying Chinese in China right now; his daughter is studying design in France.
A prepositional phrase in English with the preposition 'at' or 'in' may not be a 在 phrase in Chinese. When the verb of the sentence does not show an activity, but is 是 or when the predicate is an adjective, a prepositional phrase is not used in Chinese.
English: My mother is an English teacher at this school.
Chinese: 我妈妈是这个学校的英文老师。(是 is a verb that does not show an activity.)
Wǒ māma shì zhè ge xuéxiào de Yīngwén lǎoshī.
Or: 我妈妈在这个学校当英文老师。(当 is a verb that shows an activity.)
Wǒ māma zài zhè ge xuéxiào dāng Yīngwén lǎoshī.
English: Business at this restaurant is good.
Chinese: 这家餐馆的生意很好。
Zhè jiā cānguǎn de shēngyì hěn hǎo.
(Incorrect: 生意在这家餐馆很好。)
### (b) 从 \+ location + verb
Note that 由 can replace 从 in more formal situations.
从我家骑车去图书馆只要十分钟。
Cóng wǒ jiā qí chē qù túshūguǎn zhǐ yào shí fēnzhōng.
It only takes ten minutes from my house to the library by bicycle.
他下个月要从北京搬到上海。
Tā xià ge yuè yào cóng Běijīng bān dào Shànghǎi.
He is going to move to Shanghai from Beijing next month.
### (c) Forming location words
In English, a non-location word can follow the preposition 'at' or 'from'; however, only words indicating locations can follow 在 or 从 in modern Chinese. Therefore, it is necessary to convert the non-location word into a location word to meet this grammar requirement.
The word 这儿/这里 or 那儿/那里 can be attached to a person to convert the person into a location. It should be noted that 的 is not used.
我们从王老师那儿学到了很多宝贵的知识。
Wǒmen cóng Wáng lǎoshī nàr xué dào le hěn duō bǎoguì de zhīshí.
We learned a lot of precious knowledge from Teacher Wang.
王: 下星期的会, 在谁那儿开? (Compare: 下星期的会在哪儿开?)
Wáng: Xià xīngqī de huì, zài shéi nàr kāi?
李: 在我们这儿开吧。
Lǐ: Zài wǒmen zhèr kāi ba.
Wang: At whose place will the meeting be held next week? (Where will the meeting be held next week?)
Li: Why don't we have it at our place?
The word 身上 is frequently used to convert a person into a location. 的 is optional in this case.
王立的爸妈在他(的)身上放了很多责任跟压力。
Wáng Lì de bàmā zài tā(de) shēnshàng fàng le hěn duō zérèn gēn yālì.
Wang Li's parents placed a lot of responsibility and pressure on him.
### (d) 往/向 \+ direction + verb
Note that 往 can be pronounced wǎng or wàng. 向 and 往 are often interchangeable.
外地人: 请问, 去邮局怎么走?
Wàidì rén: Qǐng wèn, qù yóujú zěnme zǒu?
本地人: 你先往前走两、 三分钟, 再往右拐, 就到了。
Běndì rén: Nǐ xiān wǎng qián zǒu liǎng, sān fēnzhōng, zài wǎng yòu guǎi, jiù dào le.
Out-of-towner: Excuse me, how do I get to the post office?
Local person: Go straight ahead for two or three minutes, turn right, and you will be there.
他往屋子里看了半天, 没看到一个人。
Tā wǎng wūzi lǐ kàn le bàntiān, méi kàndào yí ge rén.
He looked (towards) inside the house for quite a while and didn't see anybody.
### (e) 朝 \+ direction + verb
The direction used in this structure is usually 东, 西, 南, 北, 上 or 下.
他朝南走了半个小时才发现方向错了, 所以又回头朝北走。
Tā cháo nán zǒu le bàn ge xiǎoshí cái fāxiàn fāngxiàng cuò le, suǒyǐ yòu huítóu cháo běi zǒu.
He walked (towards) south for half an hour and finally realized the direction was wrong, so he turned back and walk (towards) north.
### (f) Verb + 自 \+ location
This structure is more formal, and the verb appears before the prepositional phrase. 自 means 'from' and the verb is frequently 来, 出 or 发.
今天我想说几句发自(or 出自)内心的话。
Jīntiān wǒ xiǎng shuō jǐ jù fā zì (chū zì) nèixīn de huà.
Today I want to say a few words that come from deep in my heart.
我爸妈都来自农村, 没有受过教育。
Wǒ bàmā dōu lái zì nóngcūn, méiyǒu shòu guo jiàoyù.
My parents both come from agricultural villages; they never had any education.
## Level 1 6.2 Indicating time
### (a) 从 \+ time + verb
Note that 自 sometimes replaces 从 in more formal situations.
他每天从早忙到晚, 很少休息。
Tā měi tiān cóng zǎo máng dào wǎn, hěnshǎo xiūxí.
Every day, he is busy from morning until night; he rarely takes a break.
这个电影从两点演到五点, 真太长了。
Zhè ge diànyǐng cóng liǎng diǎn yǎn dào wǔ diǎn, zhēn tài cháng le.
This movie runs from 2 o'clock until 5 o'clock; it's really too long.
小王跟小李从小(= 自小)一起长大。
Xiǎo Wáng gēn Xiǎo Lǐ cóng xiǎo (= zì xiǎo) yìqǐ zhǎngdà.
Xiao Wang and Xiao Li grew up together since childhood.
### (b) 在 \+ time + verb
It is usually not necessary to have 在 before a time phrase; however, 在 is used when a word such as 要, 想, 会 or 将 precedes the time phrase. 要, 想, 会 or 将 is used to indicate that the event or action will take place in the future.
Note that 于 (yú) can replace 在 in more formal situations.
我下星期五要在法院结婚; 我们将在星期六请客。 (Because of 将, 在 is used before 星期六.)
Wǒ xià xīngqī wǔ yào zài fǎyuàn jiéhūn; wǒmen jiāng zài xīngqī liù qǐngkè.
I am getting married next Friday at the court house; we will have a reception on Saturday.
(Compare: 我们下星期五结婚, 星期六请客。)
老师会在明天上课的时候告诉我们下次考试的重点。
Lǎoshī huì zài míngtiān shàng kè de shíhòu gàosù wǒmen xià cì kǎoshì de zhòngdiǎn.
The teacher will tell us the focus of the next test during class time tomorrow.
(Compare: 明天上课的时候, 老师会告诉我们下次考试的重点。)
## Level 2 6.3 Indicating target, object or interaction
### (a) 跟 \+ person + verb
彼得很喜欢跟他的中国朋友练习说中文。
Bǐdé hěn xǐhuān gēn tāde Zhōngguó péngyǒu liànxí shuō Zhōngwén.
Peter likes to practise speaking Chinese with his Chinese friends.
王: 请问会议室在哪里?
Wáng: Qǐng wèn huìyìshì zài nǎlǐ?
张: 请跟我来。
Zhāng: Qǐng gēn wǒ lái.
Wang: Excuse me, where is the meeting room?
Zhang: Please come with me.
### (b) 给 \+ person/object + verb
* Meaning 'for', indicating the action is a service or an act of kindness (为 can replace 给 in a more formal situation)
小王来了, 你快去给他开门。
Xiǎo Wáng lái le, nǐ kuài qù gěi tā kāimén.
Xiao Wang is here. Hurry and go open the door for him.
我要去书店给我妹妹买两本书。
Wǒ yào qù shūdiàn gěi wǒ mèimei mǎi liǎng běn shū.
I am going to the bookshop to buy two books for my younger sister. (This can either mean an act of service – going to the bookshop for her, or an act of kindness – buying the books as gifts for her.)
如果你们选我当市长, 我一定努力地为你们服务。
Rúguǒ nǐmen xuǎn wǒ dāng shìzhǎng, wǒ yídìng nǔlì de wèi nǐmen fúwù.
If you elect me to be mayor, I will definitely serve you (work for you) diligently.
* Meaning 'to', indicating the person is the target or recipient of the action (为 cannot be used to replace 给.)
我常给家人发短信, 但是不常给他们打电话。
Wǒ cháng gěi jiā rén fā duǎnxìn, dànshì bù cháng gěi tāmen dǎ diànhuà.
I often send text messages to my family, but I don't often call them (literally, make phones to them.).
### (c) 对 \+ person/object + verb/adjective
你对历史、 文学有没有兴趣?
Nǐ duì lìshǐ, wénxué yǒu méiyǒu xìngqù?
Are you interested in history or literature?
他对朋友很大方。
Tā duì péngyǒu hěn dàfāng.
He is generous to his friends.
他对你说了些什么? 快告诉我。
Tā duì nǐ shuō le xiē shénme? Kuài gàosù wǒ.
What did he say to you? Tell me immediately.
### (d) 为 \+ noun/pronoun + verb
* Meaning 'for/for the sake of' (为 can be replaced by 为了)
妈妈为(了)我们牺牲了她的一辈子。
Māma wèi(le) wǒmen xīshēng le tāde yíbèizi.
Mother has sacrificed her whole life for us.
弟弟功课不好, 爸妈为他的将来担心得要命。
Dìdi gōngkè bù hǎo, bàmā wèi tāde jiānglái dānxīn de yàomìng.
My younger brother's grades in school are bad; my parents worry about his future a lot.
* In rare cases where a verb follows the preposition, only 为了 'in order to' can be used.
他为了赚零用钱, 去餐厅找了一份洗碗的工作。 (赚 is a verb; 为赚零用钱 would be improper.)
Tā wèile zhuàn língyòngqián, qù cāntīng zhǎo le yí fèn xǐ wǎn de gōngzuò.
He went to a restaurant to get a dishwasher's job in order to make some pocket money.
* Meaning 'on behalf of/in place of' (can be replaced by 替 or 帮 in less formal situations)
别担心, 该办的手续, 他都为你办好了。
Bié dānxīn, gāi bàn de shǒuxù, tā dōu wèi nǐ bàn hǎo le.
Don't worry. He has taken care of all the necessary paperwork for you.
### (e) 替 \+ noun/pronoun + verb
替 can be replaced by 帮 in very casual speech.
为什么我跟她吵架的时候, 你总是替她(or 帮她)说话?
Wèishénme wǒ gēn tā chǎojià de shíhòu, nǐ zǒngshì tì tā (bāng tā) shuōhuà?
Why do you always speak for her (meaning: take her side) when I argue with her?
今天我没空, 你替我(or 帮我)去邮局拿包裹, 好不好?
Jīntiān wǒ méi kòng, nǐ tì wǒ (bāng wǒ) qù yóujú ná bāoguǒ, hǎo bù hǎo?
I don't have time today. Could you go to the post office to pick up the parcel for me?
## Level 2 6.4 Other commonly used prepositions
### (a) 用 \+ noun/pronoun (indicating a tool) + verb
中国人用筷子吃饭。
Zhōngguó rén yòng kuàizi chī fàn.
Chinese people eat with chopsticks.
上中文课的时候, 老师常常用中文问我们问题。
Shàng Zhōngwén kè de shíhòu, lǎoshī chángcháng yòng Zhōngwén wèn wǒmen wèntí.
Our teacher often asks us questions in Chinese during class.
### (b) 依, 照, 按 \+ noun (indicating a rule/policy/advice) + verb
不按规定办事的人会被处罚。
Bú àn guīdìng bànshì de rén huì bèi chǔfá.
People who do not handle business according to regulations will be punished.
### (c) 靠 \+ noun (indicating resources/support) + verb
我们学校每年都有很多靠奖学金来留学的外国学生。
Wǒmen xuéxiào měi nián dōu yǒu hěn duō kào jiǎngxuéjīn lái liúxué de wàiguó xuéshēng.
Every year, there are many foreign students who come to study at our school on scholarships.
## Level 2 6.5 Disyllabic prepositions
### (a) Compared to monosyllabic counterparts
Although they are similar in meaning and usage to their monosyllabic counterparts, disyllabic prepositions frequently appear at the beginning of a sentence. In this case, a comma often follows the prepositional phrase.
* 对于 and 对
我对(于)你的建议不感兴趣。 or 对于你的建议, 我不感兴趣。
Wǒ duìyú nǐde jiànyì bù gǎn xìngqù.
I am not interested in your suggestions.
* 为了 and 为
他为(了)儿女操劳了一辈子。 or 为了儿女, 他操劳了一辈子。
Tā wèile érnǚ cāoláo le yíbèizi.
For the sake of his children, he has worked exhaustedly all his life.
* 跟着 and 跟
我们跟(着)王老师访问了不少农村。 or 跟着王老师, 我们访问了不少农村。
Wǒmen gēnzhe Wáng lǎoshī fǎngwèn le bùshǎo nóngcūn.
We visited many agricultural villages with Teacher Wang.
* 根据 and 据: 'according to; based on'
根据天气预报, 今天应该不会下雨。
Gēnjù tiānqì yùbào, jīntiān yīnggāi bú huì xiàyǔ.
According to yesterday's weather forecast, it should not rain today.
那位作家根据历史事实写了一部小说。
Nà wèi zuòjiā gēnjù lìshǐ shìshí xiě le yí bù xiǎoshuō.
The author wrote a novel according to historical facts.
* 按照 and 按: 'according to' (regulations, rules, policy)
守法的老百姓每年都按(照)政府规定缴税。
Shǒufǎ de lǎobǎixìng měi nián dōu àn (zhào) zhèngfǔ guīdìng jiǎoshuì.
Law-abiding citizens pay taxes every year according to government regulations.
### (b) The use of disyllabic prepositions
These disyllabic prepositions normally appear at the beginning of a sentence. Their functions are similar to those of conjunctions or to serve as transitions in communication. The following is a list of such disyllabic prepositions that are commonly used.
* 关于: to bring up a new topic
关于我们上次讨论的那件事, 我已经做了决定了。
Guānyú wǒmen shàngcì tǎolùn de nà jiàn shì, wǒ yǐjīng zuò le juédìng le.
Regarding the matter we discussed last time, I have already made a decision.
* 至于: to bring up another topic (that already exists in context)
你说的那两件事, 第一件, 我赞成; 至于第二件, 我还要考虑一下。
Nǐ shuō de nà liǎng jiàn shì, dì yī jiàn, wǒ zànchéng; zhìyú dì èr jiàn, wǒ hái yào kǎolǜ yíxià.
About those two matters you mentioned, I support the first one; as to the second, I still need to think about it.
* 由于: to introduce a reason
Since 由于 is similar in meaning and usage to 因为, it can be followed by a complete sentence. In this case, it functions as a conjunction, not a preposition.
☞ See Chapter 30 for more on conjunctive pairs.
由于各种因素, 原来的计划取消了。(由于 is a preposition.)
Yóuyú gèzhǒng yīnsù, yuánlái de jìhuà qǔxiāo le.
Due to all kinds of factors, the original plan has been cancelled.
由于老师病了,因此我们今天没有上课。(由于 and 因此 are a conjunctive pair.)
Yóuyú lǎoshī bìng le, yīncǐ wǒmen jīntiān méiyǒu shàngkè.
Because the teacher was sick, we didn't have class today.
## Level 2 6.6 Complements of result
A prepositional phrase that appears after a verb is a complement of the verb.
☞ See 22.5 for more on prepositions used after the verb.
### (a) Verb + 在 \+ location
他把我的书放在桌子上。
Tā bǎ wǒde shū fàng zài zhuōzi shàng.
He put my book on the table.
我的车, 你停在哪里了?
Wǒde chē, nǐ tíng zài nǎlǐ le?
Where did you park my car?
### (b) Verb + 往 \+ location (destination)
这班飞机是飞往伦敦的。
Zhè bān fēijī shì fēi wǎng Lúndūn de.
This flight is bound for London.
### (c) Verb + 给 \+ person
请把这封信交给他。
Qǐng bǎ zhè fēng xìn jiāo gěi tā.
Please hand this letter to him.
那辆日本车, 他已经卖给我了。
Nà liàng Rìběn chē, tā yǐjīng mài gěi wǒ le.
He already sold that Japanese car to me.
## Level 2 6.7 More than one prepositional phrase: Word order
It is not unusual to have more than one prepositional phrase in a sentence. The general rule is that a prepositional phrase indicating time precedes one indicating location.
王英从小就在家跟爸妈说中文, 所以她中文说得不错。
Wáng Yīng cóngxiǎo jiù zài jiā gēn bàmā shuō Zhōngwén, suǒyǐ tā Zhōngwén shuō de búcuò.
Wang Ying has been speaking Chinese with her parents at home since childhood, so she speaks Chinese quite well.
王先生跟李小姐将于下星期五在法院结婚, 他们并且会在那天晚上在饭馆请客。
Wáng xiānsheng gēn Lǐ xiǎojiě jiāng yú xià xīngqī wǔ zài fǎyuàn jiéhūn, tāmen bìngqiě huì zài nà tiān wǎnshàng zài fànguǎn qǐngkè.
Mr Wang and Miss Li will get married at the court house next Friday; they will also have a dinner celebration at a restaurant that evening.
## Exercises
I Fill in the blanks using the most appropriate preposition (在, 给, 从, 用 or 跟).
English translations are not provided so as to avoid giving direct information about the answers. For English translations, see the 'key to exercises' section.
* Level 1 1 今天晚上我没空, 我要 _____ 家 _____ 我爸妈写信。
* 2 _____ 我家走路去图书馆要十五分钟。
* 3 彼得常常 _____ 他的中国朋友练习说中文。
* 4 我男朋友现在 _____ 中国学中文, 昨天他 _____ 北京寄来几张照片。
* 5 那个人不是中国人吗? 为什么我 _____ 中文 _____ 他说话, 他不懂呢?
* 6 张: 小王, 你要去哪里?
王: 去 _____ 我女朋友买生日礼物; 明天是她的生日。
* 7 我来中国以后, 每天都 _____ 筷子吃饭, 现在我已经习惯了。
* Level 2 8 我们 _____ 王老师那里学到很多有用的知识。
* 9 小王上课的时候常常 _____ 手机给他的朋友发短信。
* 10 上午我男朋友 _____ 我打电话, 请我 _____ 他去公园玩, 可是我告诉他, 今天天气不好, 我想 _____ 家看电视。
* 11 我 _____ 法国学中文, 所以没有中国人 _____ 我练习说中文。昨天我的中文 老师说, 她下星期会 _____ 我介绍一个中国朋友, 以后我可以常常 _____ 中文说话。
* 12 李明 _____ 咖啡馆工作。他每天下课以后, 就 _____ 教室走路去咖啡馆工作。
II Fill in each blank, choosing the most appropriate preposition from those given in parentheses.
* Level 3 1 外地人: 请问火车站在哪里?
本地人: 你 _____ 前走, 差不多五分钟就到了。(跟, 对, 往)
* 2 我 _____ 学习外语非常有兴趣, 所以我会说日文跟法文。(对, 为, 向)
* 3 他 _____ 亲戚朋友借他的钱念完了大学。(按, 靠, 替)
* 4 我 _____ 他做了这么多事, 他居然也没有说一声"谢谢", 真气人! (为, 对, 靠)
* 5 老王很不诚实, 他 _____ 我说的话, 我完全不相信。(为, 对, 替)
* 6 _____ 赚一些零用钱, 我去一家中国餐馆当服务员。(对于, 为了, 根据)
* 7 _____ 你上次开会提出的问题, 我们已经想到了一个解决的办法。(根据, 关于, 按照)
* 8 那位作家 _____ 他自己亲身的经历写了一篇很有名的短篇小说。(关于, 根据, 为了)
* 9 今天有人请我和我先生吃晚饭, 所以我要去问邻居王阿姨晚上可不可以来 _______ 我们看孩子。 (帮, 对, 跟)
* 10 ______ 堵车, 我今天晚了半小时才到学校。 (关于, 至于, 由于)
# [7
Imperative sentences and the use of 别](content.xhtml#bck_Ch07)
An imperative sentence is used to express a command, order or request, or to give a warning, suggestion or advice.
## Level 1 7.1 Imperative sentences with/without 你/你们
An imperative sentence in English rarely starts with the subject 'you' unless the speaker wants to adopt an emphatic tone. In Chinese, the omission of the subject 你 or 你们 is optional. The presence or absence of 你 or 你们 has no effect on the tone adopted by the speaker.
你看! 车来了。快跑。
Nǐ kàn! Chē lái le. Kuài pǎo.
Look! The bus is coming. Hurry and run.
听! 好像有人在敲门。你去看看是谁。
Tīng! Hǎoxiàng yǒu rén zài qiāo mén. Nǐ qù kàn kàn shì shéi.
Listen! It sounds like someone is knocking on the door. Go take a look to see who it is.
When one gives different commands to more than one person, 你 is used in each command.
老王,你扫地; 小张,你擦窗户; 小李,你抹桌子。
Lǎo Wáng, nǐ sǎodì; Xiǎo Zhāng, nǐ cā chuānghù; Xiǎo Lǐ, nǐ mǒ zhuōzi.
Lao Wang, you sweep the floor; Xiao Zhang, you clean the windows; Xiao Li, you wipe the tables.
## Level 1 7.2 Imperative sentences with 请
请 (qǐng) can be used at the beginning of an imperative sentence to soften the tone of a command and make the speaker sound more polite or courteous.
Note that, in English, 'please' can appear at the end of the imperative sentence, whereas 请 cannot.
English:Come in, please. Have a seat, please. Have some tea, please.
Chinese: 请进。请坐。请喝茶。
Qǐng jìn. Qǐng zuò. Qǐng hē chá.
(Incorrect: 进, 请。坐, 请。喝茶, 请。)
### (a) 请你 vs. 你请
请 is also a verb, meaning 'to invite, to politely request'. When both 请 and 你 are used in an imperative sentence, '请你 \+ action' may have a different connotation from '你请 \+ action'.
你请 or 请你 can imply an invitation:
啊, 王老师, 您好! 您请进来坐。......请您喝杯茶。
À, Wáng lǎoshī, nín hǎo! Nín qǐng jìnlái zuò....... Qǐng nín hē bēi chá.
Ah, Teacher Wang, how are you! Please come in and have a seat.... Please have some tea.
When a command (but not an invitation) is given in a polite way, 你请 is not appropriate. Only 请你 is proper in this context:
王:请你给我去邮局买几张邮票。
Wáng: Qǐng nǐ gěi wǒ qù yóujú mǎi jǐ zhāng yóupiào.
丁: 好, 不过请你先把买邮票的钱给我。
Dīng: Hǎo, búguò qǐng nǐ xiān bǎ mǎi yóupiào de qián gěi wǒ.
Wang: Please go to the post office and buy some stamps for me.
Ding: OK. But please give me the money for the stamps first.
### (b) 请你Š=Š麻烦你
When a command is given in a polite way, 麻烦你 can be used to replace 请你. 你 is not optional.
麻烦你给我拿杯水来。
Máfán nǐ gěi wǒ ná bēi shuǐ lái.
Would you please fetch a glass of water for me?
## Level 1 7.3 Imperative sentences with 吧
The modal particle 吧 can be used at the end of an imperative sentence to express a suggestion. An exclamation mark is frequently used.
饭做好了, 来吃饭吧!
Fàn zuò hǎo le, lái chī fàn ba!
The meal is ready. Come and eat!
你有意见吗? 现在就提出来吧!
Nǐ yǒu yìjiàn ma? Xiànzài jiù tí chūlái ba!
You have some opinions? Why don't you raise them now!
吧 can also be used to soften the tone of a command while making the sentence sound more casual than an imperative sentence with 请.
啊! 老王, 是你! 好久不见! 进来吧!
À! Lǎo Wáng, shì nǐ! Hǎo jiǔ bú jiàn! Jìn lái ba!
Ah, Lao Wang, it's you! Long time no see! Come in!
## Level 1 7.4 Suggestions with 吧
An imperative sentence in English can begin with 'let's + verb'; its counterpart in Chinese does not, however, start with 让 (ràng: 'to let'). Instead, it is a suggestion with the modal particle 吧. 我们/咱们 is the subject of the sentence, which can be omitted if the context is clear.
老师来了! 咱们进教室吧!
Lǎoshī lái le! Zánmen jìn jiàoshì ba!
The teacher is here. Let's go into the classroom.
明天星期六, 一起去看场电影吧!
Míngtiān xīngqī liù, yìqǐ qù kàn chǎng diànyǐng ba!
Tomorrow is Saturday. Let's go see a movie together.
## Level 1 7.5 Suggestions or requests with 怎么样?/好不好?
An imperative sentence used to express a request or a suggestion is frequently followed by a tag question such as 怎么样? or 好不好?
你去邮局帮我寄封信,好不好? (Request)
Nǐ qù yóujú bāng wǒ jì fēng xìn, hǎo bù hǎo?
Go to the post office and mail a letter for me, OK?
晚上你有空吗? 一起去看场电影,怎么样? (Suggestion)
Wǎnshàng nǐ yǒu kòng ma? Yìqǐ qù kàn chǎng diànyǐng, zěnmeyàng?
Are you free this evening? Let's go to a movie together, how's that?
## Level 1 7.6 Negative imperative sentences
别 is used in a negative imperative sentence to express 'don't'. 别 and 不要 are interchangeable in this case. In this chapter, only 别 will be used.
请别把我的秘密告诉别人。
Qǐng bié bǎ wǒde mìmì gàosù biérén.
Please don't tell others my secret.
老王不是好人; 别跟他交朋友。
Lǎo Wáng bú shì hǎo rén; bié gēn tā jiāo péngyǒu.
Lao Wang is not a good person; don't be friends with him.
### (a) Negative imperative sentences with/without 你/你们
If 你/你们 is used in a negative imperative sentence, it always appears before 别.
你们别相信他说的话; 他常说谎。
Nǐmen bié xiāngxìn tā shuō de huà; tā cháng shuōhuǎng.
Don't believe what he says; he often lies.
你别光在那里坐着, 过来帮忙。
Nǐ bié guāng zài nàlǐ zuò zhe, guòlái bāngmáng.
Don't just sit over there. Come over here and help.
### (b) Negative imperative sentences with 你/你们 and 请
If 请 and 你/你们 are both used in a negative imperative sentence, 请 normally appears before 你/你们.
请你们别说话, 别人在看书呢。
Qǐng nǐmen bié shuō huà, biérén zài kànshū ne.
Please don't talk. Other people are reading.
## Level 2 7.7 Adjectives and imperative sentences
### (a) Adjectives in negative imperative sentences
An adjective/adjectival phrase can appear after 别.
别难过, 他不是在批评你。
Bié nánguò, tā bú shì zài pīpíng nǐ.
Don't be (so) sad. He wasn't criticizing you.
别那么高兴, 比赛还没有结束呢!
Bié nàme gāoxìng, bǐsài hái méiyǒu jiéshù ne!
Don't be so happy. The game is not over yet.
### (b) Lone adjectives in positive imperative sentences
An adjective alone rarely appears in a positive imperative sentence unless it is used to issue a warning. In this case, an exclamation mark is necessary:
* Seeing that someone is about to step in front of a moving car, you say: 小心! (Xiǎoxīn: 'Careful!')
* To sternly quiet down a noisy group, one might loudly say: 安静! (Ānjìng: 'Quiet!')
### (c) 'Adjective + 一点' in positive imperative sentences
'Adjective + 一点' can form a positive imperative sentence. Such an imperative sentence is usually used to urge the listener to make changes or improve.
快一点, 大家都在等你一个人呢!
Kuài yìdiǎn, dàjiā dōu zài děng nǐ yí ge rén ne!
Hurry up. Everybody's waiting for you.
马虎一点吧! 不必那么严格。
Mǎhū yìdiǎn ba! Búbì nàme yángé.
Be a little bit sloppier. There is no need to be so strict.
### (d) '不 \+ adjective' in negative imperative sentences
'不 \+ adjective' can be in a negative imperative sentence, but not in a positive one.
别不识相, 他不欢迎咱们, 咱们走吧!
Bié bú shíxiàng, tā bù huānyíng zánmen, zánmen zǒu ba!
Don't be clueless. We are not welcome here. Let's go.
别不好意思, 上来表演一下吧!
Bié bù hǎo yìsi, shànglái biǎoyǎn yíxià ba!
Don't be shy. Come up here and perform (a song, a dance, etc.)!
## Level 2 7.8 别......了
In this pattern, 了 has two different meanings.
### (a) Indicating a change of situation
Used to urge or order the listener(s) to stop doing something, 了 indicates a change of situation.
他已经向你道歉了; 别哭了。 (The listener is crying.)
Tā yǐjīng xiàng nǐ dàoqiàn le; bié kū le.
He already apologized to you; don't cry anymore.
我要告诉你一个坏消息; 你听了以后,别哭。 (The listener is not crying.)
Wǒ yào gàosù nǐ yí ge huài xiāoxí; nǐ tīng le yǐhòu, bié kū.
I am going to tell you some bad news. Don't cry after you hear it.
### (b) Indicating the result of an action
了 can also indicate the result of an action. In this case, the imperative sentence can be a positive one as well.
别忘了把这封信交给他。 (了 does not indicate a change of situation; it is the result of 忘.)
Bié wàng le bǎ zhè fēng xìn jiāo gěi tā.
Don't forget to hand this letter to him.
Compare: 忘了他吧! 像他这种人, 不值得你爱。
Wàng le tā ba! Xiàng tā zhè zhǒng rén, bù zhíde nǐ ài.
Forget him! Someone like him does not deserve your love.
儿子: 这么多空瓶子, 怎么办?
Érzi: Zhème duō kōng píngzi, zěnme bàn?
妈妈:丢了,别留那种没有用的东西。
Māma: Diū le. Bié liú nà zhǒng méiyǒu yòng de dōngxi.
Son: So many empty bottles. What are we going to do with them?
Mother: Throw them away. Don't keep those kinds of useless things.
Compare: 这样东西很重要, 拿好,别丢了。
Zhè yàng dōngxi hěn zhòngyào, ná hǎo, bié diū le.
This is something very important; hold on to it; don't lose it.
## Level 2 7.9 Indirect imperative sentences
### (a) Indirect imperative sentences with 叫, 请, 让 and 要
A command/suggestion/piece of advice conveyed through a third person is an indirect imperative sentence. Words such as 叫, 请, 让 and 要 are used.
老师: 王小明, 站起来。
Lǎoshī: Wáng Xiǎomíng, zhàn qǐlái.
王: 小丁, 老师说什么?
Wáng: Xiǎo Dīng, lǎoshī shuō shénme?
丁: 他叫你站起来。
Dīng: Tā jiào nǐ zhàn qǐlái.
Teacher: Wang Xiaoming, stand up.
Wang: Xiao Ding, what did the teacher say?
Ding: He told you to stand up.
### (b) Indirect imperative sentences with 劝 and 希望
A command/suggestion/advice can be conveyed indirectly when the speaker urges the listener to follow his/her command/suggestion/advice with verbs such as 劝 and 希望.
这么重要的事, 我劝你再考虑考虑。
Zhème zhòngyào de shì, wǒ quàn nǐ zài kǎolǜ kǎolǜ.
This is such an important matter. I urge you to think more about it.
### (c) Negative indirect imperative sentences
Do not use 不 in a negative indirect imperative sentence; instead, use 别.
Using 不 in a negative indirect imperative sentence is a mistake frequently made by learners who are English speakers.
妈妈叫你别看电视, 你为什么还在看?
Māma jiào nǐ bié kàn diànshì, nǐ wèishénme hái zài kàn?
Mother has told you not to watch TV; why are you still watching?
小王不是好人, 我劝你别跟他交往。
Xiǎo Wáng bú shì hǎo rén, wǒ quàn nǐ bié gēn tā jiāowǎng.
Xiao Wang is not a good person. I urge you not to be friends with him.
你这次考得不好没关系, 可是我希望你下次别又不及格。
Nǐ zhè cì kǎo de bù hǎo méi guānxi, kěshì wǒ xīwàng nǐ xià cì bié yòu bù jígé.
It's all right if you didn't do well this time; but I hope that you won't fail again next time.
## Level 2 7.10 Other uses of 别
Although 别 is generally regarded as the negative word in a negative imperative sentence, in which 你/你们 before 别 is optional, there is another type of '别 \+ verb' sentence that does not imply an omitted subject 你/你们.
### (a) Expressing a wish or hope with 别
Such a sentence starts with 别 and can be used to express the speaker's wish or hope. The speaker hopes that an undesirable situation will not turn out to be true. The expression is usually 别是 or 别是......吧.
(Situation: You just got rid of Xiao Wang five minutes ago and someone is knocking at the door now. You hope it's not Xiao Wang again.)
哎哟! 怎么又有人敲门?别又是小王! (= 我希望不是小王。)
Āiyō! Zěnme yòu yǒu rén qiāo mén? Bié yòu shì Xiǎo Wáng.
Hey! How come someone is at the door again? Don't let it be Xiao Wang again!
(Situation: You go on a blind date and see a very unattractive person who might be your date.)
糟糕! 别是这个人吧。
Zāogāo! Bié shì zhè ge rén ba.
Oh, no! Don't let it be this person.
### (b) Expressing an assumption with 别
A similar structure can be used to express one's assumption, which is an undesirable situation. But because the speaker is not personally involved in the situation, such an expression does not carry the connotation of the speaker's hope or wish.
(Situation: You observe someone you don't know acting extremely strangely.)
这么奇怪。别是疯了吧!
Zhème qíguài. Bié shì fēng le ba.
So strange. Could it be that he's crazy?
### (c) Expressing a wish or hope with 别 and 希望 or 但愿
希望 or 但愿 can be used with 别 to express one's hope or wish that an undesirable event won't happen.
但愿明天别下雨, 否则, 运动会就会被取消。
Dànyuàn míngtiān bié xiàyǔ, fǒuzé, yùndòng huì jiù huì bèi qǔxiāo.
I hope it won't rain tomorrow; otherwise, the sports competition will be called off.
昨天没准备功课,希望今天老师别叫我回答问题。
Zuótiān méi zhǔnbèi gōngkè, xīwàng jīntiān lǎoshī bié jiào wǒ huídá wèntí.
I didn't do the preparation homework yesterday. I hope the teacher won't ask me to answer questions today.
## Level 1 7.11 Negative imperative sentences without 别
There are also negative imperative sentences that do not start with 别. When the listener is forbidden to do something, the imperative sentence can start with 不许, 不准 or 不可以. Such a sentence is stronger in tone than one that starts with 别.
不许说话! 同学们都在看书呢!
Bùxǔ shuōhuà! Tóngxuémen dōu zài kànshū ne!
Don't talk! Other students are reading.
不准插嘴! 大人在说话呢!
Bùzhǔn chāzuǐ! Dàrén zài shuōhuà ne!
Don't interrupt! Grown-ups are talking!
## Level 2 7.12 Imperative sentences, subjectless sentences and elliptical sentences compared
These three types of sentence share similarities on the surface in the sense that each may appear to be without a subject.
### (a) Imperative sentences
An imperative sentence may not always start with a verb since the object of the verb may be pre-posed or the sentence may be in the 把 structure. In addition, it is possible for an imperative sentence to start with a prepositional phrase.
妈妈: 把眼睛闭上,睡觉。
Māma: Bǎ yǎnjīng bì shàng, shuìjiào.
女儿: 好, 你出去的时候, 把灯关了。
Nǚ'er: Hǎo, nǐ chūqù de shíhòu, bǎ dēng guān le.
Mother: Close your eyes. Go to sleep.
Daughter: OK. Turn off the light when you leave.
妈妈: 小明,你看, 妹妹哭了。跟她说"对不起"。
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ kàn, mèimei kū le. Gēn tā shuō 'duìbùqǐ'.
小明: 妹妹, 对不起,别哭了。
Xiǎomíng: Mèimei, duìbùqǐ, bié kū le.
Mother: Xiaoming, look, your sister is crying. Say 'sorry' to her.
Xiaoming: Sorry, little sister. Don't cry anymore.
### (b) Subjectless sentences
A subjectless sentence may begin with a verb since no subject is used in such a sentence.
☞ See Chapter 21 for more information on the subjectless sentence.
下雨了! 真讨厌!
Xià yǔ le! Zhēn tǎoyàn!
It's raining. How annoying!
### (c) Elliptical sentences
The subject of an elliptical sentence is omitted because the context is clear and the meaning can be understood without the subject being present.
王: 小张呢?
Wáng: Xiǎo Zhāng ne?
丁:走了。(= 他走了。)
Dīng: Zǒu le.
Wang: Where is Xiao Zhang?
Ding: He left.
## Exercises
Fill in the blanks with 别 or 不.
* Level 1 1 这件事虽然 _____ 是秘密, 但是请你 _____ 告诉任何人。
Although this matter is not a secret, please don't tell anybody.
* 2 王: 我要告诉你一个秘密, 但是请你 _____ 告诉小张。
李: 好, 我 _____ 告诉他, 请快告诉我这个秘密。
Wang: I am going to tell you a secret, but please don't tell Xiao Zhang.
Li: OK, I won't tell him. Please tell me this secret now.
* 3 老师: 彼得, 这是中文课,_____ 可以说英文。
彼得: 安娜, 老师说什么?
安娜: 他叫你 _____ 说英文。
Teacher: Peter, this is a Chinese class. You must not speak English.
Peter: Anna, what did the teacher say?
Anna: He told you not to speak English.
* 4 妈妈: 我叫你 _____ 跟小王交朋友, 你为什么 _____ 听?
儿子: 你 _____ 管我跟谁交朋友。
妈妈: 我是你妈妈, 我 _____ 管你, 谁管你?
Mother: I have told you not to be friends with Xiao Wang. Why wouldn't you listen?
Son: Don't control who I am friends with.
Mother: I am your mother. If I don't take care of you, who will?
* Level 2 5 王先生: 奇怪, 汽车怎么发动不了了?_____ 是坏了。
王太太: 我看 _____ 是坏了, 是没油了。
Mr Wang: Strange! How come the car won't start? I hope this doesn't mean that it's broken down.
Mrs Wang: I don't think it's broken down. It's out of petrol.
* 6 女儿: 希望明天 _____ 下雨, 如果下雨, 我跟小王就不能去野餐了。
妈妈:不管明天下不下雨, 我都 _____ 希望你跟小王出去。
女儿: 我已经不是小孩了, 我希望你 _____ 管我的事。
Daughter: I hope it won't rain tomorrow. If it rains, Xiao Wang and I won't be able to go on a picnic.
Mother: Whether it rains or not tomorrow, I don't want you to go out with Xiao Wang.
Daughter: I am not a child anymore. I wish you'd keep out of my business (= I hope that you will not mind my business).
* 7 王: 下班以后, 我们一起去啤酒馆喝啤酒, 好不好?
李: 医生叫我 _____ 喝酒, 我 _____ 去。
丁: 我太太 _____ 让我喝酒, 我也 _____ 去。
王:_____ 告诉你太太, 我也 _____ 告诉她。你跟我去, 好吗?
Wang: Let's go to a pub to have some beer after work, OK?
Li: My doctor has told me not to drink. I am not going.
Ding: My wife does not allow me to drink. I am not going, either.
Wang: Don't tell your wife and I won't tell her, either. You go with me, OK?
* 8 李太太: 今天这么冷, 咱们 _____ 去公园了。一起在家看电视, 好不好?
李先生: 你 _____ 去, 没关系, 可是,_____ 叫我也 _____ 去。
Mrs Li: It's so cold today. Let's not go to the park anymore. Let's watch TV together at home, OK?
Mr Li: It's OK if you don't go. But don't ask me to not go, either.
* 9 安娜: 小兰, 王中说, 你告诉他, 你喜欢彼得, 是吗?
小兰:_____ 听王中胡说。彼得是谁? 我 _____ 认识他。你要给我们介绍吗?
安娜: 你 _____ 认识彼得? 太好了! 彼得 _____ 是好人, 他有很多女朋友,_____ 叫我给你们介绍。
小兰: 呜?. 安娜, 我告诉你, 其实我认识彼得, 也喜欢他。我叫王中 _____ 告诉你, 他为什么 _____ 听?
Anna: Xiaolan, Wang Zhong said that you had told him that you liked Peter. Is that so?
Xiaolan: Don't listen to Wang Zhong's nonsense. Who is Peter? I don't know him. Are you going to introduce us?
Anna: You don't know Peter? That's wonderful! Peter is not a good person; he has many girlfriends. Don't ask me to introduce you.
Xiaolan: Sob... Anna, let me tell you something. Actually I know Peter and I like him. I asked Wang Zhong not to tell you; why wouldn't he listen?
# [8
Chinese verbs](content.xhtml#bck_Ch08)
Chinese verbs have unique grammatical features that can have significant impact on the structure of a sentence. The proper and accurate use of a verb in a sentence often depends on the form and the type of the verb.
## Level 2 8.1 Compound verbs
A Chinese verb typically has one or two (and occasionally more) characters. A two (or more)-character verb can actually consist of a 'verb + noun', e.g., 做菜 (zuòcài: to cook, literally to make food); such a verb is referred to as a compound verb or a separable verb. Grammatically, a compound verb is similar to a verb followed by an object, e.g., 看电影 (kàn diànyǐng: to see a movie) and 说中文 (shuō Zhōngwén: to speak Chinese).
When translated into English, a large number of Chinese compound verbs do not clearly show an object (the noun after the verb) in their English counterparts, e.g. 聊天 (liáotiān: to chat) and 毕业 (bìyè: to graduate). Thus, to correctly identify a verb as a compound verb is an important task for learners.
The proper usage of a compound verb needs special attention since aspect particles (such as 了, 过 and 着), as well as complements typically follow the verb, not the noun.
### (a) No object after a compound verb
Compound verbs whose counterparts in English do not include a noun are often a source of confusion or mistake to learners who are English speakers. For example, verbs such as 'to meet (someone)', 'to marry (someone)' and 'to divorce (someone)' can have an object following them; however, their Chinese counterparts 见面 (jiànmiàn: to meet), 结婚 (jiéhūn: to marry), 离婚 (líhūn: to divorce) are compound verbs (面 means 'face'; 婚 means 'marriage'), and thus cannot have an object.
高: 李中明天要去跟他女朋友的爸妈见面, 所以他现在很紧张。(见面她爸妈 is incorrect.)
Gāo: Lǐ Zhōng míngtiān yào qù gēn tā nǚ péngyǒu de bàmā jiànmiàn, suǒyǐ tā xiànzài hěn jǐnzhāng.
陈: 什么? 我以为李中是王兰的丈夫。
Chén: Shénme? Wǒ yǐwéi Lǐ Zhōng shì Wáng Lán de zhàngfū.
高: 李中跟王兰已经离婚了; 他想明年跟现在这个女朋友结婚。
Gāo: Lǐ Zhōng gēn Wáng Lán yǐjīng líhūn le; tā xiǎng míngnián gēn xiànzài zhè ge nǚ péngyǒu jiéhūn. (李中已经离婚王兰了 or 他想结婚他女朋友 is incorrect.)
Gao: Li Zhong is going to meet his girlfriend's parents tomorrow, so he is nervous now.
Chen: What? I thought Li Zhong was Wang Lan's husband.
Gao: Li Zhong divorced Wang Lan already. He plans to marry his current girlfriend next year.
女: 你今天怎么没有给我打电话, 也没有给我发短信?(Do not say 打电话我 or 发短信我.)
Nǚ: Nǐ jīntiān zěnme méiyǒu gěi wǒ dǎ diànhuà, yě méiyǒu gěi wǒ fā duǎnxìn?
男: 对不起, 昨天忘了给手机充电, 所以今天手机没电了。 (电 means 'power' or 'electricity'. Do not say 充电手机.)
Nán: Duì bù qǐ, zuótiān wàng le gěi shǒujī chōngdiàn. Suǒyǐ jīntiān shǒujī méi diàn le.
Female: Why did you not call me or text me today?
Male: Sorry. Yesterday I forgot to charge my cell phone, so my cell phone was out of power today.
### (b) Aspect particle after the verb in a compound verb
Perfective aspect particle 了, experiential aspect particle 过, and continuous aspect particle 着 should follow the verb, not the noun, in a compound verb.
Note that modal particle 了 does not follow this rule since 了 as a modal particle appears at the end of a sentence.
☞ See Chapter 9, Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 for details about the use of 着, 了 and 过.
李: 你认识小张的同屋吗?
Lǐ: Nǐ rènshì Xiǎo Zhāng de tóngwū ma?
高: 我和他在他们的屋子里聊过天; 可是他可能不记得我了。(Do not say 聊天过since 天 is a noun.)
Gāo: Wǒ hé tā zài tāmen de wūzi lǐ liáo guo tiān; kěshì tā kěnéng bú jìde wǒ le.
Li: Do you know Xiao Zhang's roommate?
Gao: He and I have chatted in their room; but he probably does not remember me.
大家正高兴地跳着舞, 屋顶忽然塌下来了。(舞 is a noun; 跳舞着 would be incorrect.)
Dàjiā zhèng gāoxìng de tiào zhe wǔ, wūdǐng hūrán tā xiàlái le.
Everybody was dancing happily, and the roof suddenly collapsed.
(Situation: Wang calls Li on phone.)
王: 老李, 你什么时候可以过来一起看球赛?
Wáng: Lǎo Lǐ, nǐ shénme shíhòu kěyǐ guò lái yīqǐ kàn qiúsài?
李: 我吃了饭就出门。(吃饭 is a compound verb.)
Lǐ: Wǒ chī le fàn jiù chūmén.
李太太: 不行, 你还得给儿子洗澡。儿子洗了澡你才可以去。(澡 is a noun. Do not say 洗澡儿子.)
Lǐ tàitai: Bù xíng, nǐ hái děi gěi érzi xǐzǎo; érzi xǐ le zǎo nǐ cái kěyǐ qù.
Wang: Old Li, when can you come over to watch the ball game together?
Li: I will leave the house right after I have eaten (my meal).
Mrs Li: No, you can't. You have to bathe our son. You cannot go until after our son has taken his bath.
### (c) Complement after the verb in a compound verb
Complements of state, duration, quantity, result and potential should follow the verb in a compound verb, not the noun.
☞ See Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 17 and Chapter 18 for details about complements.
王: 小李游泳游得怎么样?(游泳 is a compound verb; 泳 is a noun. Do not say 游泳得怎么样.)
Wáng: Xiǎo Lǐ yóuyǒng yóu de zěnme yàng?
张: 我也不知道, 不过听说他昨天游了四个小时。(Do not say 游泳了四个小时.)
Zhāng: Wǒ yě bù zhīdào, búguò tīngshuō tā zuótiān yóu le sì ge xiǎoshí.
Wang: How well does Xiao Li swim?
Zhang: I don't know, either. But I heard that he swam for four hours yesterday.
女儿: 我要跟文中离婚。(Do not say 离婚文中.)
Nǚ'ér: Wǒ yào gēn Wén Zhōng líhūn.
妈妈: 你已经离过两次婚了; 我为了你, 晚上常常睡不好。(Do not say 离婚过两次 or 睡觉不好. Both 婚 and 觉 are nouns.)
Māma: Nǐ yǐjīng lí guo liǎng cì hūn le. Wǒ wèile nǐ, wǎnshàng chángcháng shuì bù hǎo.
Daughter: I want to divorce Wen Zhong.
Mother: You have already divorced twice. I often cannot sleep well at night for the sake of you (= because of you).
### (d) Compound verbs whose English counterparts do not need objects
Certain verbs in English do not explicitly need an object since the verbs themselves already make the meanings clear; examples for such verbs are to teach, to eat (a meal), to drink (alcohol), to cook, to read, to drive, to smoke, and so on. However, their counterparts in Chinese are compound verbs: 教书 (jiāo shū), 吃饭 (chī fàn), 喝酒 (hē jiǔ), 做菜/煮饭 (zuò cài/zhǔ fàn), 看书 (kàn shū), 开车 (kāi chē), 吸烟 (xī yān). Learners who are English speakers must pay special attention to the use of these words.
English: You are only 17 years old, so you cannot drink yet.
Chinese: 你才十七岁, 所以你还不可以喝酒。(Do not simply say 你还不可以喝.)
Nǐ cái shíqī suì, suǒyǐ nǐ hái bù kěyǐ hē jiǔ.
English: Li: What are your hobbies? Gao: I like reading and drawing.
Chinese: 李: 你有什么爱好? 高: 我喜欢看书、 画画儿。
(书 and 画儿 are necessary.)
Lǐ: Nǐ yǒu shénme àihào? Gāo: Wǒ xǐhuān kàn shū, huà huà'ér.
English: Li: What (work) does he do? Gao: He teaches. (Meaning: He is a teacher.)
Chinese: 李: 他是做什么的? 高: 他是教书的。(书 is not optional.)
Lǐ: Tā shì zuò shénme de? Gāo: Tā shì jiāo shū de.
English: Chinese eat with chopsticks.
Chinese: 中国人用筷子吃饭。(Do not say 中国人用筷子吃.)
Zhōngguó rén yòng kuàizi chī fàn.
### (e) Omitting the noun in a compound verb in context
In communication, once a compound verb has been used, the subsequent mentioning of the same action normally does not include the noun in the compound verb.
丈夫: 今天天气好, 咱们开车出去兜风 (literally: to catch the wind) 吧!
Zhàngfū: Jīntiān tiānqì hǎo; zánmen kāi chē chūqù dōu fēng ba!
妻子: 好啊! 你开还是我开?(车 is omitted.) 打算兜多久?(风 is omitted.)
Qīzi: Hǎo a! Nǐ kāi háishì wǒ kāi? Dǎsuàn dōu duō jiǔ?
Husband: Today's weather is nice; let's go for a drive (literally: drive the car out and go for a ride.)
Wife: OK! Will you drive or should I drive? How long are we going to be out (for the ride)?
王: 昨天下雨了没有?
Wáng: Zuótiān xià yǔ le méiyǒu?
张:下了; 而且是球赛进行到一半的时候开始下的, 真气人! (雨 is omitted.)
Zhāng: Xià le; érqiě shì qiú sài jìnxíng dào yí bàn de shíhòu kāishǐ xià de, zhēn qì rén!
Wang: Did it rain yesterday?
Zhang: It did; (It rained;) and it started to rain when the ball game was going on. It was really upsetting.
## Level 2 8.2 Action verbs vs. Non-action verbs
An action verb indicates an activity the subject of the sentence can do. A non-action verb, on the other hand, shows the state or condition of the subject of the sentence.
Based on their grammatical usages, non-action verbs can be further grouped into two types: those with the quality of adjectives and those without such a quality.
Non-action verbs that have the quality of adjectives typically describe one's mental or psychological state; examples for this type of non-action verb include 爱 (ài: to love), 恨 (hèn: to hate), 喜欢 (xǐhuān: to like), 讨厌 (tǎoyàn: to dislike), 懂 (dǒng: to understand), 了解 (liǎojiě: to understand), 希望 (xīwàng: to hope), 想 (xiǎng: to miss), 同情 (tóngqíng: to sympathize with) and so on.
### (a) Degree adverb and non-action verb
A degree adverb, e.g., 很 (hěn: very), 非常 (fēicháng: extremely), 真 (zhēn: really), 特别 (tèbié: particularly), etc., can precede a non-action verb with the quality of an adjective.
Learners who are English speakers should avoid the common mistake of using 很多 (literally 'very much') or 很好 (literally 'very well') after such a non-action verb to emphasize the degree. Instead, 很 or another degree adverb should be used.
(Situation: Anna and Lili lived in China before, and both love Chinese food.)
安娜: 你喜欢不喜欢吃中国菜?
Ānnà: Nǐ xǐhuān bù xǐhuān chī Zhōngguó cài?
丽丽:很喜欢; 我特别爱吃四川菜。我真希望自己还住在中国; 我好怀念道地的 中国菜。(好 in 好怀念 is a degree adverb, similar to 很 in meaning.)
Lìlì: Hěn xǐhuān, wǒ tèbié ài chī Sìchuān cài. Wǒ zhēn xīwàng zìjǐ hái zhù zài
Zhōngguó; wǒ hǎo huáiniàn dàodì de Zhōngguó cài.
安娜: 我非常了解你的想法。有时候我很同情住在小乡镇的人, 因为小乡镇没有好的中国饭馆。
Ānnà: Wǒ fēicháng liǎojiě nǐ de xiǎngfǎ. Yǒu shíhòu wǒ hěn tóngqíng zhù zài xiǎo xiāngzhèn de rén, yīnwèi xiǎo xiāngzhèn méiyǒu hǎo de Zhōngguó fànguǎn.
Anna: Do you like to eat Chinese food?
Lili: I like it very much; I particularly love Sichuan food. I really wish I still lived in China. I miss authentic Chinese food so much.
Anna: I understand your thought very well. Sometimes I very much sympathize with people living in small towns because there are no good Chinese restaurants in small towns.
### (b) Negative forms for action verbs in past time frame
Although '没有 \+ verb' is generally considered the negative form for an action verb when the utterance refers to an event of a past time frame, in certain context, 不 is the more appropriate choice of the negative word. 没有 indicates that the subject of the sentence 'did not' perform an action, whereas 不 shows that the subject 'would not' perform an action.
王: 我的同屋没有问我就把我买的巧克力吃了, 而且还不道歉, 气死我了!
Wáng: Wǒ de tóngwū méiyǒu wèn wǒ jiù bǎ wǒ mǎi de qiǎokèlì chī le, érqiě hái bú dàoqiàn, qì sǐ wǒ le!
李: 什么? 他没有道歉!
Lǐ: Shénmé? Tā méiyǒu dàoqiàn?
Wang: My roommate did not ask me before he ate the chocolate I bought; furthermore, he would not apologize to me. I am truly angry! (I am angry to death!)
Li: What? He did not apologize!
张: 我年轻的时候,不吃肉, 现在什么都吃。 (没有吃肉 would be inappropriate in this context.)
Zhāng: Wǒ niánqīng de shíhòu, bù chī ròu, xiànzài shénme dōu chī.
高: 那为什么昨天小王做的牛肉面, 你没有吃呢?
Gāo: Nà wèi shénme zuótiān Xiǎo Wáng zuò de niúròu miàn, nǐ méiyǒu chī ne?
张: 因为他做的牛肉面太辣了。
Zhāng: Yīnwèi tā zuò de niúròu miàn tài là le.
Zhang: When I was young, I did not (would not) eat meat; now I eat anything.
Gao: Then why did you not eat the beef noodles that Little Wang made yesterday?
Zhang: Because his beef noodles were too spicy hot.
### (c) Negative forms for non-action verbs
* Regardless of the time frames, the negative form for a non-action verb is typically '不 \+ verb'.
李: 哇! 我不知道你家这么大!
Lǐ: Wà! Wǒ bù zhīdào nǐ jiā zhème dà!
陈: 以前我也不喜欢住大房子, 可是因为我太太不觉得这个房子太大, 所以她坚持要买。不过她那时候还不是我太太, 只是我的未婚妻。
Chén: Yǐqián wǒ yě bù xǐhuān zhù dà fángzi, kěshì yīnwèi wǒ tàitai bù juéde zhè ge fángzi tài da, suǒyǐ tā jiānchí yào mǎi. Búguò tā nà shíhòu hái bú shì wǒ tàitai, zhǐ shì wǒde wèihūn qī.
Li: Wow! I did not know that your house was so big!
Chen: I did not use to like to live in a big house, either. But because my wife did not think this house was too big, she insisted that we should buy it. But she was not my wife then; she was only my fiancée.
老师: 李明, 昨天你不懂 (Do not say 没有懂) 这个问题, 现在你懂了吗?
Lǎoshī: Lǐ Míng, zuótiān nǐ bù dǒng zhè ge wèntí, xiànzài nǐ dǒng le ma?
李: 我还是不懂。
Lǐ: Wǒ háishì bù dǒng.
Teacher: Li Ming, yesterday you did not understand this question. Do you understand it now?
Li: I still do not understand it.
* However, in certain contexts, the '没有 \+ verb + 过' pattern can be applied to non-action verbs with the quality of an adjective.
(Situation: A wife informs her husband that she is divorcing him.)Š
丈夫: 我知道我们结婚以前你妈妈不喜欢我, 难道你为了这个原因要跟我离婚?
Zhàngfū: Wǒ zhīdào wǒmen jiéhūn yǐqián nǐ māma bù xǐhuān wǒ, nándào nǐ wèile zhè ge yuányīn yào gēn wǒ líhūn?
妻子: 你错了! 其实我妈妈没有讨厌过你; 真正的原因是, 我发现自己根本没有爱过你。
Qīzi: Nǐ cuò le! Qíshí wǒ māma méiyǒu tǎoyàn guo nǐ, zhēnzhèng de yuányīn shì wǒ fāxiàn zìjǐ méiyǒu ài guo nǐ.
丈夫: 什么? 你不爱我? 好! 我们离婚!
Zhàngfū: Shénme? Nǐ bú ài wǒ? Hǎo! Wǒmen líhūn.
Husband: I know that your mother did not like me before we got married. Do you mean to say that you are divorcing me for this reason?
Wife: You were wrong! Actually, my mother never disliked you; the real reason is I have realized that I have never loved you.
Husband: What? You didn't love me? Fine! Let's divorce!
### (d) Certain verbs can be both action verbs and non-action verbs
Certain verbs can be used as both action verbs and non-action verbs. It is the context that decides the meaning of the verb in a sentence and its proper usage.
王: 我本来不认识 (non-action) 任何日本人; 可是昨天在咖啡馆认识了(action) 一个, 所以她是我的第一个日本朋友。你有几个日本朋友?
Wáng: Wǒ běnlái bú rènshì rènhé Rìběn rén, kěshì zuótiān zài kāfēiguǎn rènshì le yī ge, suǒyǐ tā shì wǒde dì yī ge Rìběn péngyǒu. Nǐ you jǐ ge Rìběn péngyǒu?
张: 我没有日本朋友, 因为我不认识 (non-action) 任何日本人。
Zhāng: Wǒ méiyǒu Rìběn péngyǒu, yīnwèi wǒ bú rènshì rènhé Rìběn rén.
王: 什么? 你来日本五年了, 还没有认识 (action) 任何日本人?
Wáng: Shénme? Nǐ lái Rìběn wǔ nián le, hái méiyǒu rènshì rènhé Rǐběn rén?
Wang: I did not know (was not acquainted with) any Japanese; but I met one at the coffee shop yesterday, so she is my first Japanese friend. How many Japanese friends do you have?
Zhang: I don't have Japanese friends because I do not know (am not acquainted with) any Japanese.
Wang: What? You have been in Japan for five years, and you have not met any Japanese?
(Situation: Anna is chatting with her Chinese friend who is an exchange student.)
安娜: 你来美国半年了, 我想 (action) 你一定很想 (non-action) 家吧!
Ānnà: Nǐ lái Měiguó bàn nián le, wǒ xiǎng nǐ yīdìng hěn xiǎng jiā ba!
中国朋友: 对! 我也非常想 (non-action) 我妈妈做的菜。
Zhōngguó péngyǒu: Duì! Wǒ yě fēicháng xiǎng wǒ māma zuò de cài.
安娜: 你毕业以后想 (modal verb) 做什么?
Ānnà: Nǐ bìyè yǐhòu xiǎng zuò shénme?
中国朋友: 这个问题我还没有想 (action) 过。
Zhōngguó péngyǒu: Zhè ge wèntí, wǒ hái méiyǒu xiǎng guo.
Anna: You have been in the U.S. for half a year. I think you must be very homesick.
Chinese friend: That's right! I also miss my mother's cooking very, very much.
Anna: What would you like to do after graduation?
Chinese friend: I have not thought about this issue.
## Level 2 8.3 Adjectival verbs
When an adjective is used as the predicate of a sentence (subject + adjective), the adjective is often referred to as an adjectival verb. An adjectival verb shares certain grammatical features with verbs, particularly non-action verbs with the quality of an adjective. Learners who are English speakers should avoid the mistake of using 是 (before the adjective) as the verb in such a sentence.
### (a) Use of degree adverbs
A degree adverb should precede an adjectival verb in a simple declarative sentence that is positive.
王: 今天我很高兴。(今天我高兴 without 很 would be inappropriate. 今天我是高兴 is incorrect.)
Wáng: Jīntiān wǒ hěn gāoxìng.
张: 是吗? 为什么?
Zhāng: Shì ma? Wèi shénme?
王: 因为我儿子这次考试成绩(相当)不错。(相当 is a degree adverb and is optional because of 不.)
Wáng: Yīnwèi wǒ érzi zhè cì kǎoshì chéngjī (xiāngdāng) búcuò.
张: 我真羡慕你。(羡慕 is a non-action verb with the quality of an adjective.)
Zhāng: Wǒ zhēn xiànmù nǐ.
王: 你羡慕我? 为什么?
Wáng: Nǐ xiànmù wǒ? Wèi shénme?
张: 因为我儿子很懒, 而且也不聪明; 他考试 (考试 is a compound verb.) 总是考得很差。(or 考得不好 – 很 is necessary before 差, but not necessary before 不好.)
Zhāng: Yīnwèi wǒ érzi hěn lǎn, érqiě yě bù cōngmíng; tā kǎoshì zǒngshì kǎo de hěn chà.
Wang: I am happy today.
Zhang: Is that so? Why?
Wang: Because my son's test score this time was quite good.
Zhang: I really envy you.
Wang: You envy me? Why?
Zhang: Because my son is lazy, and he is not smart; he always does poorly on tests.
☞ See 1.2 for more information.
### (b) Use of modal particle 了
Adjectival verbs can be followed by a modal particle 了 to indicate a change of situation or the emergence of a new situation. 很 or another degree adverb is no longer necessary. Note that the English translations for such sentences frequently are the same as a simple declarative sentence. For example, both 我累 (lèi: tired) 了 and 我很累 can be translated as 'I am tired'.
女儿: 妈妈, 我饿了, 有没有点心?(饿 is an adjective.)
Nǚ'ér: Māma, wǒ è le, yǒu méiyǒu diǎnxīn?
儿子: 妹妹, 你最近又胖了, 别吃那么多点心吧! (胖 is an adjective.)
Érzi: Mèimei, nǐ zuìjìn yòu pàng le, bié chī nàme duō diǎnxīn ba.
妈妈: 你看, 妹妹不高兴了! 快跟她说"对不起"。(不高兴 is an adjective.)
Māma: Nǐ kàn, mèimei bù gāoxìng le, kuài gēn tā shuō "duìbùqǐ".
Daughter: Mother, I am hungry. Are there any snacks?
Son: Sister, you have gained weight again lately. Don't eat so many snacks.
Mother: Look! Your sister is upset. Hurry and say 'sorry' to her.
### (c) Negative forms for adjectival verbs
* Although 不 is normally used before an adjectival verb regardless of the time frame, 沒有 is used before an adjectival verb that is already in its negative form, or to indicate that no change has taken place.
张: 小李, 你今天怎么没有来上课? 你不舒服吗?
Zhāng: Xiǎo Lǐ, nǐ jīntiān zěnme méiyǒu lái shàng kè? Nǐ bù shūfú ma?
李: 我没有不舒服; 因为昨天晚上我没有写功课, 所以今天不敢去上课。老师一定很不高兴吧!
Lǐ: Wǒ méiyǒu bù shūfú; yīnwèi zuótiān wǎnshàng wǒ méiyǒu xiě gōngkè, suǒyǐ jīntiān bù gǎn qù shàng kè. Lǎoshī yīdìng hěn bù gāoxìng ba!
张: 她没有不高兴, 因为她以为你不舒服。
Zhāng: Tā méiyǒu bù gāoxìng, yīnwèi tā yǐwéi nǐ bù shūfú.
Zhang: Xiao Li, how come you did not come to class today? Were you not feeling well? (Were you sick?)
Li: I wasn't sick. I dared not go to class today because I did not do homework yesterday evening. The teacher must have been unhappy (angry).
Zhang: She wasn't angry because she thought you were not feeling well.
王先生跟李先生吃一样的药。王先生三天就好了; 李先生吃了一个月还没有好。
Wáng xiānsheng gēn Lǐ xiānsheng chī yīyàng de yào. Wáng xiānsheng sān tiān jiù hǎo le, Lǐ xiānsheng chī le yī ge yuè hái méiyǒu hǎo.
Mr Wang and Mr Li took the same medicine. Mr Wang was well (recovered) after only three days; Mr Li is still not well after taking the medicine for a month.
* The pattern '没有 \+ adjectival verb + 过' can be used to imply 'never'. This is similar to non-action verbs with the quality of an adjective.
小李从小没有胖过, 可是因为他太太很会做菜, 所以他结婚以后, 竟然胖了。
Xiǎo Lǐ cóngxiǎo méiyǒu pàng guo, kěshì yīnwèi tā tàitai hěn huì zuò cài, suǒyǐ tā jiéhūn yǐhòu, jìngrán pàng le.
Xiao Li was never overweight when growing up; but because his wife is a very good cook (very good at cooking), he has unexpectedly gained weight since he got married.
## Level 2/3 8.4 Instantaneous verbs
An instantaneous verb can be an action verb (e.g., 去 qù: to go; 进 jìn: to enter), a non-action verb (e.g., 死 sǐ: to die; 醒 xǐng: to wake up) or an adjectival verb (e.g., 病 bìng: to be sick, 疯 fēng: to be crazy); it can also be a compound verb (e.g. 毕业 bìyè: to graduate; 起床 qǐchuáng: to get up) or a non-compound verb (e.g. 开始 kāishǐ: to begin; 发现 fāxiàn: to discover).
The action or state indicated by an instantaneous verb shows an instant (and possibly irreversible) change, instead of a process (i.e., duration of time). Therefore, an instantaneous verb indicates a dividing line that clearly marks the 'before' and 'after' stages of an event. This means the action cannot continue or last. A verb indicating an action that can last is referred to as a durative verb. For example, 上课 (shàngkè: to be in class) is a durative verb, whereas 下课 (xiàkè: class is dismissed) is an instantaneous verb.
### (a) An instantaneous action in the process of happening
An action in the process of happening has not, in fact, happened yet. While a progressive aspect may be used for such an action in English, '(正) 在 \+ verb' cannot be used in Chinese when the verb indicates an instantaneous event. This is because an instantaneous action cannot last. Instead, structures that show impending events are used.
王大中的病情十分严重, 听说他快死了。(Do not say 他正在死.)
Wáng Dàzhōng de bìnqqíng shífēn yánzhòng, tīngshuō tā kuài sǐ le.
Wang Dazhong's condition is very serious; it is said that he is dying. (= He is going to die very soon.)
老师正要进教室的时候, 火警的警铃响了。(Do not say 老师正在进教室的时候.)
Lǎoshī zhèng yào jìn jiàoshì de shíhòu, huǒjǐng de jǐnglíng xiǎng le.
Just when the teacher was entering the room, the fire alarm went off.
(Situation: A woman receives a phone call from her former boyfriend.)
女: 我要结婚了; 请你以后不要再给我打电话。
Nǚ: Wǒ yào jiéhūn le; qǐng nǐ yǐhòu bú yào zài gěi wǒ dǎ diànhuà.
男: 恭喜你! 我打电话来告诉你, 我正在办签证, 下个月就要去美国了。
Nán: Gōngxǐ nǐ! Wǒ dǎ diànhuà lái gàosù nǐ, wǒ zhèng zài bàn qiānzhèng, xià ge yuè jiù yào qù Měiguó le.
Woman: I am getting married. Please don't call me anymore.
Man: Congratulations! I call to tell you that I am applying for my visa, and I am going to the U.S. next month.
☞ See 10.11 for more information on impending events.
### (b) The 'before' and 'after' stages of an instantaneous event
Once an event indicated by an instantaneous action has taken place (i.e., the dividing line has been crossed), a change has occurred as well. Therefore, a modal particle 了 should be used at the end of the sentence to indicate the 'after' stage of the event. On the other hand, the 'before' stage is indicated by 没有, 还没有.
了 in such a sentence often indicates a current situation; thus, if the time of speech and the situation are concurrent, the sentence is often in the present tense in English. In addition, the English counterparts for certain instantaneous verbs can be, and often are, adjectives.
张: 王小兰今天没有来上班, 她说她病了。(病 is an adjectival instantaneous verb.)
Zhāng: Wáng Xiǎolán jīntiān méiyǒu lái shàng bān, tā shuō tā bìng le.
李: 她大概感冒了。(感冒 is an instantaneous verb.)
Lǐ: Tā dàgài gǎnmào le.
陈: 她没有感冒。昨天她家请客, 她喝了很多酒, 所以醉了, 今天早上她头疼。 (醉 is an instantaneous verb; 疼 is not. 了 is used after 醉, but not used after 疼.)
Chén: Tā méiyǒu gǎnmào. Zuótiān tā jiā qǐngkè, tā hē le hěn duō jiǔ, suǒyǐ zuì le; jīntiān zǎoshàng tā tóu téng.
李: 王小兰怀孕了, 她实在不应该喝酒。(怀孕 is an instantaneous compound verb.)
Lǐ: Wáng Xiǎolán huáiyùn le, tā shízài bù yīnggāi hē jiǔ.
Zhang: Wang Xiaolan did not come to work today; she says she is sick.
Li: She probably has a cold. (She probably caught a cold.)
Chen: She does not have a cold. (She did not catch a cold.) Yesterday she had guests over for dinner at her house; she drank a lot of alcohol, so she was drunk. This morning she has a headache (her head aches).
Li: Wang Xiaolan is pregnant. She really should not have had any alcohol.
妈妈: 你听, 宝宝在哭, 他醒了! 你快去看看。(醒 is an instantaneous verb.)
Māma: Nǐ tīng! Bǎobao zài kū, tā xǐng le! Nǐ kuài qù kàn kàn.
爸爸: 放心, 他还没有醒呢! 是电视里的宝宝在哭。
Bàba: Fàngxīn, tā hái méiyǒu xǐng ne! Shì diànshì lǐ de bǎobao zài kū.
Mother: Listen! The baby is crying. He is awake. (He woke up.) Hurry and go take a look.
Father: Don't worry! He is not awake yet. (He has not woken up yet.) It's the baby in the TV that is crying.
### (c) Instantaneous adjectival verb and complement of degree
Adjectival verbs that are also instantaneous verbs should not be modified by a degree adverb, such as 很, 非常, etc. However, a complement of degree with 得 can be used. 病 (bìng: to be sick), 醉 (zuì: to be drunk), and 疯 (fēng: to be crazy) are three common words to illustrate this rule. For example, 很病 is not correct, but 病得很重 (bìng de hěn zhòng: seriously ill) is; 很醉 is not correct, but one can say 醉得很厉害 (zuì de hěn lìhài: heavily drunk); 很疯 is not correct, and one normally simply says 他疯了.
☞ See 13.5 for complement of degree.
### (d) Use of 了 with an instantaneous compound verb
When the instantaneous verb is a compound verb, the use of 了 needs attention since a modal particle 了 and a perfective aspect particle 了 (that follows the verb, not the noun) have different grammar implications.
When a perfective aspect particle 了 is used with an instantaneous compound verb, it is not in a complete sentence yet. For example, 她结婚了 is considered a complete sentence ('She is married.'), whereas 她结了婚 is not a complete sentence yet, and is used to imply 'after she got/gets married'.
李: 王小兰结了婚就辞职了。(It is inappropriate to say 王小兰结婚了就辞职了.)
Lǐ: Wáng Xiǎolán jié le hūn jiù cízhí le.
张: 什么! 王小兰辞职了! (It is incorrect to say 王小兰辞了职 in this sentence.)
Zhāng: Shénme! Wáng Xiǎolán cízhí le!
陈: 什么! 王小兰结婚了! (It is incorrect to say 王小兰结了婚 in this sentence.)
Chén: Shénme! Wáng Xiǎolán jiéhūn le!
高: 现在很多结了婚的, 甚至生了孩子的女人还继续工作呢; 所以将来我结了婚也不会辞职。(It is incorrect to say 结婚的女人, 结婚了的女人, 生孩子的女人 or 生孩子了的女人 in this situation since these expressions are not complete sentences.)
Gāo: Xiànzài hěn duō jié le hūn de, shènzhì shēng le háizi de nǚrén hái jìxù gōngzuò ne; suǒyǐ jiānglái wǒ jié le hūn yě bú huì cízhí.
Li: Wang Xiaolan quit her job right after she got married.
Zhang: What! Wang Xiaolan has quit?
Chen: What! Wang Xiaolan is married?
Gao: Nowadays, many married women or even women who have (have given birth to) children continue to work. Therefore, in the future when I am married, I will not quit my job.
### (e) Complement of duration and instantaneous compound verb
In general, a complement of duration follows the verb in a sentence. However, since an instantaneous verb indicates an action that does not last, a complement of duration actually follows the noun when the instantaneous verb is a compound verb, or has an object.
王: 你到中国半年了, 现在中国话说得怎么样?(Do not say 到了两年中国 since 到 is an instantaneous verb.)
Wáng: Nǐ dào Zhōngguó bàn nián le, xiànzài Zhōngguó huà shuō de zěnme yàng?
张: 我上大学的时候,学了三学期中文, 可是毕业三年了, 差不多都忘了; 所以虽然来北京半年了, 还是说得不好。(Do not say 学了中文三学期 since 学 is a durative verb. Also, do not say 毕了三年业 since 毕业 is an instantaneous verb.)
Zhāng: Wǒ shàng dàxué de shíhòu, xué le sān xuéqī Zhōngwén, kěshì bìyè sān nián le, chàbùduō dōu wàng le; suǒyǐ suīrán lái Běijīng bàn nián le, háishì shuō de bù hǎo.
Wang: You have been in China for half a year already (= it's been a half year since you arrived in China); how well do you speak Chinese now?
Zhang: When I was in college, I studied Chinese for three semesters. But it has been three years since I graduated, and I have almost forgotten everything. Therefore, although I have been in Beijing for half a year (= it has been a half year since I came to Beijing), I still don't speak Chinese well.
妈妈: 小明, 你起床一个小时了, 為什麼还穿着睡衣?(Do not say 起了一个小时床 since 起床 is an instantaneous verb.)
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ qǐchuáng yī ge xiǎoshí le, wèi shénme hái chuān zhe shuìyī?
爸爸: 他起了床就开始看电视。小明, 你已经看了一个小时的电视了, 别看了! (Do not say 看电视了一个小时 since 看 is a durative verb.)
Bàba: Tā qǐ le chuáng jiù kāishǐ kàn diànshì. Xiǎomíng, nǐ yǐjīng kàn le yī xiǎoshí de diànshì le, bié kàn le.
Mother: Xiaoming, you have been up for an hour; why are you still wearing your pajama?
Father: He started to watch TV right after he got up. Xiaoming, you have already been watching TV for an hour. Don't watch anymore.
☞ See Chapter 14 for detailed information on the complement of duration.
## Level 3 8.5 Placement verbs
Although a placement verb is an action verb, it is not used in a sentence to indicate an activity; instead, it is used to show that someone or something is in a state of rest at a certain location as the result of the action. Since a place (a location) is directly mentioned or implied in the sentence, such a verb is termed a placement verb.
For example, the sentence 'Mr Li is sitting in the living room (李先生坐在客厅里: Lǐ xiānsheng zuò zài kètīng lǐ)' shows a state of rest, but the sentence 'Mr Li is crying in the living room (李先生在客厅里哭: Lǐ xiānsheng zài kètīng lǐ kū)' shows an activity. Thus, 哭 is not a placement verb, whereas 坐 is used as a placement verb in the sentence. The two sentences have different word orders in Chinese due to the different nature of the verbs.
Placement verbs in Chinese have unique grammar features. The accurate word order of a sentence with a placement verb in it is closely related to the definiteness or indefiniteness of the noun. Thus, to accurately identify a verb as a placement verb is an important task for learners.
☞ See Section B of Chapter 21 for detailed information on the use of placement verbs.
## Exercises
Choose the sentence that is grammatically correct.
* Level 2 1 I have not met my girlfriend's parents.
* (a) 我还没有见面过我女朋友的爸妈。
* (b) 我跟我女朋友的爸妈还没有见过面。
* (c) 我跟我女朋友的爸妈还没有见面过。
* 2 Yesterday I cooked five dishes, but my guest did not come.
* (a) 昨天我做菜了五个, 可是客人没有来。
* (b) 昨天我做菜了五个菜, 可是客人没有来。
* (c) 昨天我做了五个菜, 可是客人没有来。
* 3 It's been three years since my son graduated, but he still does not have a job.
* (a) 我儿子毕业三年了, 可是还没有工作。
* (b) 我儿子毕了三年业, 可是还没有工作。
* (c) 我儿子三年毕业了, 可是还没有工作。
* 4 My father is a Chinese teacher.
* (a) 我爸爸是教书中文的。
* (b) 我爸爸是教中文书的。
* (c) 我爸爸是教中文的。
* 5 I didn't like the food my mother made, so I did not eat.
* (a) 我不喜欢妈妈做的菜, 所以我没有吃。
* (b) 我没有喜欢做的菜, 所以我没有吃。
* (c) 我不喜欢了妈妈做的菜, 所以我不吃了。
* 6 Mrs Wang wants to divorce her husband.
* (a) 王太太想跟她丈夫离婚。
* (b) 王太太想离婚她丈夫。
* (c) 王太太想离她丈夫婚。
* 7A Li: Did you know that Dazhong Wang is dying?
* (a) 李: 你们知道吗? 王大中在死呢!
* (b) 李: 你们知道吗? 王大中快死了!
* (c) 李: 你们知道吗? 王大中死着呢!
* 7B Zhang: What? Dazhong Wang is sick?
* (a) 张: 什么? 王大中在病?
* (b) 张: 什么? 王大中很病?
* (c) 张: 什么? 王大中病了?
* 7C Chen: I didn't know about this, either.
* (a) 陈: 我也没有知道这件事。
* (b) 陈: 我也不知道这件事。
* (c) 陈: 我也不知道这件事了。
* 8A Lili: Xiaolan has gained weight lately.
* (a) 丽丽: 小兰最近很胖。
* (b) 丽丽: 小兰最近很多胖。
* (c) 丽丽: 小兰最近胖了。
* 8B Anna: That is because she is pregnant.
* (a) 安娜: 那是因为她怀孕了。
* (b) 安娜: 那是因为她怀孕。
* (c) 安娜: 那是因为她是怀孕的。
* 8C Meiying: What? Xiaolan is married?
* (a) 美英: 什么? 小兰已经结婚?
* (b) 美英: 什么? 小兰是结婚的?
* (c) 美英: 什么? 小兰结婚了?
* 9 I chatted with him for two hours and still didn't know his name.
* (a) 我跟他聊天了两个小时, 还没有知道他的名字。
* (b) 我跟他聊了两个小时天, 还不知道他的名字。
* (c) 我跟他两个小时聊天了, 还不知道他的名字。
* 10 Modern women should not quit their jobs as soon as they are married.
* (a) 现代女性不应该结婚了就辞职了。
* (b) 现代女性不应该结了婚就辞了职。
* (c) 现代女性不应该结了婚就辞职。
# [9
The progressive aspect and the continuous aspect](content.xhtml#bck_Ch09)
The Chinese language does not employ tenses to indicate the time (present, past or future) of an event's happening; instead, there are aspects, which indicate the stages of the event. For example, an event can be viewed as being in progress, in continuation or as having been completed.
## A. The progressive aspect
The first part of this chapter focuses on the use of the progressive aspect, which indicates an action in progress. Since there are no tenses in Chinese, an action in progress might be happening in the past, at present or in the future. The actual time of the event's happening is indicated by a time phrase, a dependent clause or is not mentioned at all if it is understood in the context.
### Level 1 9.1 Basic form of the progressive aspect
There are three basic ways to show an action in progress:
正 | 在 | Verb | 呢 | Example
---|---|---|---|---
* * *
✓ | | ✓ | Optional | 下午我正睡觉(呢), 他就打电话来了。
Xiàwǔ wǒ zhèng shuìjiào (ne), tā jiù dǎ diànhuà lái le.
In the afternoon, I was sleeping and he called. |
* * *
| ✓ | ✓ | Optional | 爸爸在睡觉(呢), 别去吵他。
Bàba zài shuìjiào (ne), bié qù chǎo tā.
Your father is sleeping. Don't go and disturb him.
* * *
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Optional | 大地震发生的时候, 我正在吃晚饭(呢)。
Dà dìzhèn fāshēng de shíhòu, wǒ zhèng zài chī wǎnfàn (ne).
When the big earthquake occurred, I was eating dinner.
#### (a) 正 \+ verb + (呢)
A sentence using '正 \+ verb + (呢)' normally does not stand alone; therefore, its usage is quite limited. It is most frequently used to express the time when another action takes/took place. It is also used with an instantaneous verb for an action that does not last (see (f) below for more on this).
今天下午我正看电视呢, 他就来了。
Jīntiān xiàwǔ wǒ zhèng kàn diànshì ne, tā jiù lái le.
This afternoon he arrived when I was watching TV.
昨天我到他家的时候, 他正从家里出来(呢)。 (出来 is an action that does not last.)
Zuótiān wǒ dào tā jiā de shíhòu, tā zhèng cóng jiā lǐ chūlái (ne).
Yesterday when I arrived at his home, he was coming out from his house.
#### (b) When 呢 is used
When the optional 呢 is used, the speech sounds more casual.
(Situation: Zhang and Wang are chatting over the phone. It's a very informal situation.)
张: 你在做什么?
Zhāng: Nǐ zài zuò shénme?
王: 我(正)在看电视(呢)。
Wáng: Wǒ (zhèng) zài kàn diànshì (ne).
Zhang: What are you doing?
Wang: I am watching TV.
#### (c) When 呢 is not used (1)
Since 呢 is a modal particle that appears at the end of a sentence, it should not be used mid-sentence.
李: 你们在做什么?
Lǐ: Nǐmen zài zuò shénme?
王: 我在吃水果, 他在写功课(呢)。
Wáng: Wǒ zài chī shuǐguǒ, tā zài xiě gōngkè (ne).
Li: What are you (plural) doing?
Wang: I am eating fruit; he is doing homework.
(Improper: 我在吃水果呢, 他在写功课呢。)
#### (d) When 呢 is not used (2)
Likewise, 呢 is never used when the action in progress is in a relative clause.
(正)在跟王老师说话的那个人是谁?
(Zhèng) zài gēn Wáng lǎoshī shuōhuà de nà ge rén shì shéi?
Who is the person that is talking to Teacher Wang?
(Improper: (正)在跟王老师说话呢的那个人是谁?)
#### (e) 正在/在 \+ verb + (呢)
Although '正在 \+ verb + (呢)' and '在 \+ verb + (呢)' are generally viewed as being interchangeable, '正在 \+ verb + (呢)' carries a more emphatic tone than '在 \+ verb + (呢)'. Therefore, when the speaker mentions a specific moment of time, 正在 tends to be used.
昨天下午他来我家的时候, 我正在洗澡; 给他开门的人是我妹妹。
Zuótiān xiàwǔ tā lái wǒ jiā de shíhòu, wǒ zhèng zài xǐzǎo; gěi tā kāimén de rén shì wǒ mèimei.
When he came to my house yesterday afternoon, I was taking a bath. The person who opened the door for him was my younger sister.
张: 你在想什么? (你正在想什么?would be less common since no specific time is mentioned.)
Zhāng: Nǐ zài xiǎng shénme?
王:在想王老师要我们回答的那个问题。
Wáng: Zài xiǎng Wáng lǎoshī yào wǒmen huídá de nà ge wèntí.
Zhang: What are you thinking about?
Wang: (I am) thinking about the question Teacher Wang wanted us to answer.
昨天老师叫到我的时候, 我正在做白日梦(呢)。
Zuótiān lǎoshī jiào dào wǒ de shíhòu, wǒ zhèng zài zuò báirì mèng ne.
Yesterday when the teacher called on me, I was daydreaming.
#### (f) Actions that do not last (instantaneous verbs)
Verbs in the '正在 \+ verb + (呢)' and '在 \+ verb + (呢)' structures must indicate actions that can last. For actions that do not last, use 正 \+ verb + (呢) to emphasize that the action is in progress.
老师正进教室的时候, 火警的警铃响起来了。 (进 is an instantaneous verb and the action does not last.)
Lǎoshī zhèng jìn jiàoshì de shíhòu, huǒjǐng de jǐnglíng xiǎng qǐlái le.
When the teacher was entering the classroom, the fire alarm went off.
老师正在骂学生的时候, 下课的铃声响了。(骂 is an action that can last.)
Lǎoshī zhèng zài mà xuéshēng de shíhòu, xià kè de líng shēng xiǎng le.
When the teacher was scolding her students, the bell for the end of class rang.
### Level 1 9.2 Yes–no questions in the progressive aspect
To form a yes–no question about an action in progress, use '(正) 在 \+ verb 吗?' or '是不是 (正) 在?' 呢 should not appear in a yes–no question. Use 对 to confirm and use 没有 or 不是 to give a short answer 'no'.
妈妈: 你听! 他们的房间里有音乐; 他们(正)在跳舞吗?
Māma: Nǐ tīng! Tāmen de fángjiān lǐ yǒu yīnyuè; tāmen (zhèng) zài tiàowǔ ma?
爸爸: 我去看看。......对, 他们(正)在唱歌、 跳舞(呢)。
Bàba: Wǒ qù kàn kàn.... Duì, tāman (zhèng) zài chànggē, tiàowǔ (ne).
Mother: Listen! There is music in their room. Are they dancing?
Father: I'll go take a look.... That's right. They are singing and dancing.
妈妈: 小明, 你又在上网吗? (With 又, 正 should not be used.)
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ yòu zài shàngwǎng ma?
小明:没有, 我在写功课; 今天的功课是要用电脑写的。
Xiǎomíng: Méiyǒu, wǒ zài xiě gōngkè; jīntiān de gōngkè shì yào yòng diànnǎo xǐe de.
Mother: Xiaoming, are you surfing the Internet again?
Xiaoming: No, I'm not. I am doing homework. We have to use the computer for today's homework.
王: 你在看房屋出售的广告; 你是不是在找房子?
Wáng: Nǐ zài kàn fángwū chūshòu de guǎnggào? Nǐ shì búshì zài zhǎo fángzi?
张:不是, 我在研究房屋的市价。
Zhāng: Búshì, wǒ zài yánjiū fángwū de shìjià.
Wang: You are looking at ads for houses for sale; are you looking for a house (to buy)?
Zhang: No, I'm not. I am researching market prices for houses.
### Level 1 9.3 Negative sentences in the progressive aspect
To form a negative sentence, use '没 (有) 在 \+ verb' or '不是在 \+ verb'.
妈妈: 小明, 你在洗澡间里做什么?在洗澡吗?
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ zài xǐzǎojiān lǐ zuò shénme? Zài xǐzǎo ma?
小明: 我不是在洗澡, 我在上厕所。
Xiǎomíng: Wǒ bú shì zài xǐzǎo, wǒ zài shàng cèsuǒ.
Mother: Xiaoming, what are you doing in the bathroom? Are you taking a bath?
Xiaoming: I'm not taking a bath. I am using the toilet.
王: 老张, 真对不起, 这么晚给你打电话。你在睡觉吗?
Wáng: Lǎo Zhāng, zhēn duìbùqǐ, zhème wǎn gěi nǐ dǎ diànhuà. Nǐ zài shuìjiào ma?
张: 没关系, 我没有在睡觉, 我在看电视呢。
Zhāng: Méi guānxi, wǒ méiyǒu zài shuìjiào, wǒ zài kàn diànshì ne.
Wang: Lao Zhang, terribly sorry to call you so late. Were you sleeping?
Zhang: It's all right. I wasn't sleeping; I was watching TV.
### Level 1 9.4 Locations in the progressive aspect
When a location is combined with an action in progress, 在 can appear only once. If 正在 is used, it appears before the location.
昨天发生大地震的时候, 我正在家睡觉。 (Do not say 我在家正睡觉.)
Zuótiān fāshēng dà dìzhèn de shíhòu, wǒ zhèng zài jiā shuìjiào.
Yesterday when the earthquake occurred, I was sleeping at home.
### Level 1 9.5 从 prepositional phrases in the progressive aspect
When a prepositional phrase with 从 is used, 正 appears before the prepositional phrase. Neither 正在 nor 在 is proper in this case.
我到他家的时候, 他正从家里出来。
Wǒ dào tā jiā de shíhòu, tā zhèng cóng jiā lǐ chūlái.
When I reached his house, he was just coming out from inside the house.
### Level 1 9.6 Other prepositional phrases in the progressive aspect
Prepositional phrases (other than a 从 phrase) can appear after either 正在 or 在.
昨天他打电话来的时候, 我正在给他写信。
Zuótiān tā dǎ diànhuà lái de shíhòu, wǒ zhèngzài gěi tā xiěxìn.
Yesterday when he called me, I was (just in the middle of) writing him a letter.
别插嘴, 我在跟王老师说话呢。
Bié chāzuǐ, wǒ zài gēn Wáng lǎoshī shuōhuà ne.
Don't interrupt. I am talking to Teacher Wang.
### Level 1 9.7 现在 in the progressive aspect
When 现在 is used, 在 appears twice. Simply using 现在 would be incorrect.
张: 你知不知道王老师在哪里? 我想问他一个问题。
Zhāng: Nǐ zhī bù zhīdào Wáng lǎoshī zài nǎlǐ? Wǒ xiǎng wèn tā yī ge wèntí.
李: 他现在在开会呢。 (Do not say 他现在开会 in this situation.)
Lǐ: Tā xìanzài zài kāihuì ne.
Zhang: Do you know where Teacher Wang is? I want to ask him a question.
Li: He is in a meeting right now.
### Level 1 9.8 Adjectives in the progressive aspect
It is possible to have an adjective after 正在 or 在 if such an adjective can indicate a temporary psychological state or feeling. Adjectives such as 高 (gāo: 'tall'), 聪明 (cōngmíng: 'clever'), 冷 (lěng: cold), etc. that indicate a permanent state or a physical feeling cannot be used with the progressive aspect.
(Situation: An international soccer tournament.)
观众以为美国队一定会赢,正在高兴的时候, 德国队踢进了两球, 美国队输了。
Guānzhòng yǐwéi Měiguó duì yídìng huì yíng, zhèngzài gāoxìng de shíhòu, Déguó duì tī jìn le liǎng qiú, Měiguó duì shū le.
The audience thought that the US team definitely would win. (Just) when they were (feeling) happy, the German team scored two points. The US team lost.
有人说她儿子死了; 她正在难过的时候, 儿子回家了。
Yǒu rén shuō tā érzi sǐ le; tā zhèng zài nánguò de shíhòu, érzi huí jiā le.
Someone said that her son had died. While she was grieving, her son came home.
### Level 2 9.9 Actions about to happen
'正要/正想 \+ verb' (but not 正在要/正在想) does not indicate an action in progress; it indicates an action that is just about to happen. The expression can also be 正打算/正准备.
妈妈: 小明, 你在做什么? 去洗碗!
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ zài zuò shénme? Qù xǐ wǎn!
小明: 我正在准备明天上课要作的口头报告呢。让爸爸去洗吧, 好吗?
Xiǎomíng: Wǒ zhèng zài zhǔnbèi míngtiān shàng kè yào zuò de kǒutóu bàogào ne. Ràng bàba qù xǐ ba, hǎo ma?
妈妈: 我和爸爸正准备出门去看电影呢。(正在准备 and 正准备 have different meanings. 呢 is optional.)
Māma:Wǒ hé bàba zhèng zhǔnbèi chū mén qù kàn diànyǐng ne.
Mother: Xiaoming, what are you doing? Go do the dishes.
Xiaoming: I am preparing an oral presentation for tomorrow's class. Ask Father to do it, OK?
Mother: Your father and I are just about to go out and see a movie.
张: 小王, 你要去哪里?
Zhāng: Xiǎo Wáng, nǐ yào qù nǎlǐ?
王: 啊! 老张, 是你! 我正要 (or 正想/正打算)去找你呢。
Wáng: À! Lǎo Zhāng, shì nǐ! Wǒ zhèng yào (or zhèng xiǎng/zhèng dǎsuàn) qù zhǎo nǐ ne.
Zhang: Xiao Wang, where are you going?
Wang: Ah! Lao Zhang, it's you! I was just about to go and see you.
## B. The continuous aspect
While an action in progress and an action in continuation share some similarities, a progressive aspect (正在/正) is used when the verbs or adjectives indicate activities or an active state, whereas the continuous aspect of an action refers to a static/inactive situation.
### Level 2 9.10 Basic form of the continuous aspect
The aspect particle 着, which can only appear immediately after a verb, is used to indicate the continuous aspect of an action. An optional 呢 can appear at the end of the sentence.
你看, 邮局的门开着呢。邮局还在营业, 我要去买几张邮票。
Nǐ kàn, yóujú de mén kāi zhe ne. Yóujú hái zài yíngyè, wǒ yào qù mǎi jǐ zhāng yóupiào.
Look, the door of the post office is open. The post office is still doing business. I am going to buy a few stamps.
(开着 shows an inactive situation, whereas 在营业 shows an active activity.)
小王的眼睛闭着, 我想他大概在睡觉, 所以没有跟他打招呼。
Xiǎo Wáng de yǎnjīng bì zhe, wǒ xiǎng tā dàgài zài shuìjiào, suǒyǐ méiyǒu gēn tā dǎ zhāohū.
Xiao Wang's eyes were closed. I thought he might be sleeping, so I didn't greet him. (Eyes being closed is an inactive state, whereas sleeping is an activity.)
### Level 2 9.11 Simultaneous actions
When two actions happen at the same time, the main verb appears after the secondary verb. 着 should follow the secondary verb.
#### (a) Indicating manner
The secondary verb indicates the manner in which the main verb is performed.
老师笑着说: "你们这次都考得很好。"
Lǎoshī xiào zhe shuō: 'Nǐmen zhè cì dōu kǎo de hěn hǎo.'
The teacher said with a smile (= said while smiling): 'All of you did well on the test this time.'
(说 is the main verb; 笑 is the secondary verb.)
妹妹每天晚上都抱着娃娃睡觉。
Mèimei měi tiān wǎnshàng dōu bào zhe wáwa shuìjiào.
Every night, my little sister sleeps while holding her doll.
(睡觉 is the main verb; 抱 is the secondary verb.)
#### (b) Indicating purpose
The main verb indicates the purpose for the action of the secondary verb.
丁: 那些人在那里做什么?
Dīng: Nàxiē rén zài nàlǐ zuò shénme?
王: 他们都在等着买火车票呢。(买火车票 is the purpose of 等.)
Wáng: Tāmen dōu zài děng zhe mǎi huǒchē piào ne.
Ding: What are those people doing over there?
Wang: They are all waiting to buy train tickets.
### Level 3 9.12 The use of placement verbs and 着
There is a group of verbs that will be termed as 'placement verbs' in this book. The use of placement verbs frequently involves the use of 着.
☞ See 21.10 and 21.11 for more information on this.
## Exercises
Translate the following sentences into Chinese. Pay special attention to the use of the progressive and continuous aspects.
* Level 1 1 Wang: What are those people doing?
Li: They are waiting for the bus.
* 2 Li: Wang Zhong, sorry to call you at this time. Were you sleeping?
Wang: It's OK, I wasn't sleeping; I was doing homework. Were you also doing homework?
Li: No, I was watching TV.
* 3 Wang: Are you watching TV right now?
Li: No. I am surfing the Internet.
Wang: Hurry and turn on the TV. Teacher Wang is singing. (Teacher Wang is performing on TV.)
* 4 When I returned home, the TV was on, but everybody at home was sleeping; nobody was watching TV.
* 5 Every day when I return home, my mother is always cooking dinner. Sometimes, my father is reading the newspaper, and sometimes he is watching TV.
* Level 2 6 Zhang: Why are there so many people over there? What are they doing?Li: All of them are waiting to buy movie tickets.
* 7 Pointing at the photos on the wall, the teacher said, 'Now please answer my questions while looking at these photos.'
* 8 Wang: Are you reading the newspaper? Is there any big news?
Li: I don't know. I am not reading news; I am looking for jobs.
Wang: You are looking for a job? 'The Great Wall' Chinese restaurant is looking for a waiter.
Li: I know, but they are looking for someone who has experience.
* 9 Manager: All employees please come to my office.
Mr Wang: Manager, some people are in a meeting right now.
Manager: All those who are not in a meeting, please come to my office immediately.
* 10 When I was about to enter the lift, I saw that all four people in the lift were talking on their phones. So I decided to wait for the next lift.
# [10
The use of 了 (the perfective aspect particle and modal particle)](content.xhtml#bck_Ch010)
As stated in the previous chapter, the Chinese language does not have tenses; instead, there are aspects, which indicate the stages of an event. The focus of the first part of this chapter will be on the perfective aspect, which is indicated with the perfective aspect particle 了 (le) immediately following the verb.
Since 了 can also function as a modal particle, which appears at the end of a sentence, the use of 了 as a modal particle will be the focus of the second part of this chapter.
## A. The perfective aspect particle 了
The perfective aspect is used to indicate the completion of an action; it is, however, not equivalent to the past tense in English. The completion of an action may have occurred in the past, but it may occur in the future as well. Also, a past event may or may not need a perfective aspect particle 了.
English: Yesterday was my boyfriend's birthday; so I treated him to a movie. (Past event)
Chinese: 昨天是我男朋友的生日, 所以我请他去看(了一场)电影。
Zuótiān shì wǒ nán péngyǒu de shēngrì, suǒyǐ wǒ qǐng tā qù kàn (le yì chǎng) dìanyǐng.
English: After you have arrived in China, you must write to me often. (Future event)
Chinese: 你到了中国(以后), 一定要常常给我写信。
Nǐ dào le Zhōngguó (yǐhòu), yídìng yào chángcháng gěi wǒ xiě xìn.
English: After he arrived in China, he immediately found a job. (Past event)
Chinese: 他到了中国(以后), 马上找了一份工作。
Tā dào le Zhōngguó (yǐhòu), mǎshàng zhǎo le yí fèn gōngzuò.
## Level 1 10.1 Habitual past events
A past event that is habitual does not take the perfective particle 了.
我小时候每天早上都喝一杯牛奶。
Wǒ xiǎo shíhòu měi tiān zǎoshàng dōu hē yì bēi niúnǎi.
When I was very young, I drank a glass of milk every morning.
我在中国的时候,每星期都去看(一场)中国电影。
Wǒ zài Zhōngguó de shíhòu, měi xīngqī dōu qù kàn (yì chǎng) Zhōngguó diànyǐng.
When I was in China, I went to a Chinese movie every week.
## Level 2 10.2 Quantified past events
A quantified past event (i.e., the object of the verb includes either a number or 很多/不少) usually takes the perfective particle 了.
昨天我跟妈妈去外面吃饭。我们叫了一条鱼跟一只烤鸭。
Zuótiān wǒ gēn māma qù wàimiàn chī fàn. Wǒmen jiào le yì tiáo yú gēn yì zhī kǎoyā.
Yesterday my mother and I went out to eat. We ordered a fish and a roast duck.
我在中国留学的时候, 认识了不少中国朋友。
Wǒ zài Zhōngguó liúxué de shíhòu, rènshì le bùshǎo Zhōngguó péngyǒu.
When I was studying in China, I made many Chinese friends.
## Level 2 10.3 Definite or specific past events
A definite or specific past event usually takes the perfective particle 了.
### (a) When the object of the verb has a modifier
老师接受了我们的建议, 取消了今天的考试。
Lǎoshī jiēshòu le wǒmen de jiànyì, qǔxiāo le jīntiān de kǎoshì.
The teacher accepted our suggestions and cancelled today's test.
张: 你怎么知道今天会下雨?
Zhāng: Nǐ zěnme zhīdào jīntiān huì xiàyǔ?
王: 因为我昨晚看了天气预报。
Wáng: Yīnwèi wǒ zuówǎn kàn le tiānqì yùbào.
Zhang: How did you know it would rain today?
Wang: Because I watched the weather forecast yesterday evening.
### (b) When the object of the verb is a proper noun or pronoun
李: 昨天我在路上遇见了老王。
Lǐ: Zuótiān wǒ zài lù shàng yùjiàn le Lǎo Wáng.
张: 真巧! 我今天也在路上遇见了他。
Zhāng: Zhēn qiǎo! Wǒ jīntiān yě zài lù shàng yùjiàn le tā.
Li: I ran into Lao Wang on the street yesterday.
Zhang: What a coincidence! I also ran into him on the street today.
### (c) When the object of the verb is 什么/哪 (shénme/nǎ) or the answer to a question with 什么/哪
王: 下午我去你家找你, 你妈说你去超级市场买东西(了)。你买了什么?
Wáng: Xiàwǔ wǒ qù nǐ jiā zhǎo nǐ, nǐ mā shuō nǐ qù chāojíshìchǎng mǎi dōngxi (le). Nǐ mǎi le shénme?
李: 买了水果、 面包跟牛奶。
Lǐ: Mǎi le shuǐguǒ, miànbāo gēn niúnǎi.
Wang: In the afternoon I went to your house to see you; your mother said you had gone shopping at the supermarket. What did you buy?
Li: I bought fruit, bread and milk.
## Level 3 10.4 Two verbs: One action after another
When a situation includes two actions, and the second action takes place immediately after the completion of the first, the aspect particle 了 is used to indicate the completion of the first action even if the object of the verb is not quantified or does not have a modifier. These two actions may or may not be past events.
### (a) The use of 就
It should be noted that 就 (jiù, implying 'immediately') or another adverb is frequently used to link the two actions. Without such an adverb, the sentence may not sound correct.
我爸爸每天吃了饭就吃胃药。 (吃胃药 is a habitual event. 就 is necessary.)
Wǒ bàba měi tiān chī le fàn jiù chī wèiyào.
My father takes acid-reducing medicine right after dinner every day.
小王跟客人说了再见就把门关上了。 (把门关上了 is a past event. 就 is necessary.)
Xiǎo Wáng gēn kèrén shuō le zàijiàn jiù bǎ mén guān shàng le.
Xiao Wang closed the door right after saying goodbye to his guests.
明天咱们下了课一起去看场电影, 怎么样? (看电影 is a future event.)
Míngtiān zánmen xià le kè yìqǐ qù kàn chǎng diànyǐng, zěnmeyàng?
How about if we go to a movie after class tomorrow?
### (b) Modal particle 了 instead of perfective aspect particle 了
In a simple sentence, the perfective aspect particle了is not used if the object of the verb is not quantified or does not have a modifier; instead, modal particle 了 is used at the end of the sentence.
☞ See 10.3(b) and (c) above for exceptions.
English: Mr Wang bought a car。(This is a simple sentence.)
Chinese #1: 王先生买车了。 (了 is a modal particle since it appears at the end of the sentence.)
Wáng xiānsheng mǎi chē le.
Chinese #2: 王先生买了一辆车。 (了 is the perfective aspect particle since it follows the verb. 车 is modified by 一辆.)
Wáng xiānsheng mǎi le yí liàng chē.
(Incomplete: 王先生买了车 or 王先生买一辆车了.)
王先生买了车就跟王太太去兜风了。(This is a complex sentence.)
Wáng xiānsheng mǎi le chē jiù gēn Wáng tàitai qù dōufēng le.
Mr Wang and Mrs Wang went for a ride right after he bought the car (bought a car).
An optional perfective aspect particle 了 and a necessary modal particle 了 can be used together in a simple sentence.
王先生买了车了。(= 王先生买车了。)
Wáng xiānsheng mǎi le chē le.
(Incorrect: 王先生买了车。)
(Situation: Wang's roommate Zhang asks Wang to join him for a late-night snack.)
张: 我要吃宵夜, 你要不要吃一些?
Zhāng: Wǒ yào chī xiāoyè, nǐ yào bú yào chī yì xiē?
王: 谢谢, 我不吃, 我刷了牙了。
Wáng: Xièxiè, wǒ bù chī, wǒ shuā le yá le.
Zhang: I am going to have a late-night snack. Would you like some?
Wang: No, thanks. I already brushed my teeth.
## Level 2 10.5 Two verbs: One indicating purpose
When a simple sentence has two verbs and the second verb indicates the purpose of the first verb, such as 来 (lái), 去 (qù) and 用 (yòng), the perfective aspect particle 了 follows the second verb if it is a past event.
下午我去超级市场买了一些水果和面包。
Xiàwǔ wǒ qù chāojíshìchǎng mǎi le yìxiē shuǐguǒ hé miànbāo.
I went to the supermarket to buy some fruit and bread in the afternoon.
(Incorrect: 下午我去了超级市场买一些水果和面包。)
我用手机给我妈妈发了一个短信, 告诉她我不能回家吃饭。
Wǒ yòng shǒujī gěi wǒ māma fā le yí ge duǎnxìn, gàosù tā wǒ bù néng huí jiā chī fàn.
I used my mobile phone to send my mother a text message, telling her I would not be home for dinner.
(Incorrect: 我用了手机给我妈妈发一个短信, 告诉她我不能回家吃饭。)
## B. The modal particle 了
A modal particle appears at the end of a sentence. As a modal particle, 了 does not indicate the completion of an action, it indicates the emergence of a new situation or a change of situation. It can also be used to imply 'already'.
## Level 3 10.6 When the meaning of sentence-ending 了 is ambiguous
When a sentence ends with a verb that does not have an object, 了 following the verb (aspect particle) can be viewed as appearing at the end of the sentence (modal particle) as well, rendering the meaning of 了 ambiguous. In this case, the context in which the sentence is uttered decides the meaning of 了.
(Situation: At a party Zhang is throwing, Zhang wants to know if Wang Ming has arrived.)
张: 王明来了没有?
Zhāng: Wáng Míng lái le méiyǒu?
丁:(他)来了。
Dīng: (Tā) lái le.
Zhang: Has Wang Ming arrived? (Meaning: Is Wang Ming here?)
Ding: He has arrived. (Meaning: He is here.)
(Situation: Li and Ding are discussing the party they threw the night before. Since it was a big party, Li did not see Wang Ming among the guests. He asks Ding if Wang Ming was there.)
张: 王明来了没有?
Zhāng: Wáng Míng lái le méiyǒu?
丁:(他)来了。
Dīng: (Tā) lái le.
Zhang: Did Wang Ming come? (Meaning: Was Wang Ming here?)
Ding: He came. (Meaning: He was here.)
(Situation: You have been waiting for the bus. When you see the bus approaching the bus stop from a distance, you say:)
啊! 车来了!
À! Chē lái le.
Ah! Here comes the bus. (了 indicates the 'emergence' of the bus.)
(Situation: You and your friend are walking toward the bus stop. Before you arrive at the stop, the bus is already there picking up passengers. You say to your friend:)
啊! 车来了! 快跑!
À! Chē lái le. Kuài pǎo!
Ah! The bus is (already) here. Hurry and run! (了 indicates the 'completion' of the action and it can imply 'already' as well.)
## Level 2 10.7 Indicating a new situation or change of situation
The modal particle 了 is typically used to indicate the emergence of a new situation or a change of situation although the line between the two can be blurred.
### (a) Indicating the emergence of a new situation
春天到了, 花都开了。
Chūntiān dào le, huā dōu kāi le.
Spring is here. Flowers are blooming.
你看, 外面下雨了。
Nǐ kàn, wàimiàn xià yǔ le.
Look, it's raining outside. (Note: This implies it wasn't raining earlier.)
### (b) Indicating a change of situation
天黑了, 风也大了, 我们回家吧。
Tiān hēi le, fēng yě dà le, wǒmen huí jiā ba.
It's dark now and the wind is stronger. Let's go home.
秋天了, 枫叶都红了。咱们可以去城外看红叶了。
Qiūtiān le, fēng yè dōu hóng le. Zánmen kěyǐ qù chéngwài kàn hóng yè le.
It's autumn now, all the maple leaves have turned red. Now we can go outside the city to see red leaves. (Note: 'Now' in the English sentences implies this is a new situation, which is indicated by 了 in Chinese.)
下雨了, 咱们不能去公园了。
Xià yǔ le, zánmen bù néng qù gōngyuán le.
It's raining now. We cannot go to the park (as we originally planned).
### (c) 不/别......了: 'not... anymore'
In this pattern, 了 indicates a change of situation.
昨天我跟老王吵了一架, 我决定以后不跟他说话了。
Zuótiān wǒ gēn Lǎo Wáng chǎo le yí jià, wǒ juédìng yǐhòu bù gēn tā shuōhuà le.
I had a fight with Lao Wang yesterday. I have decided that I will not talk to him anymore.
对不起, 我向你道歉,别哭了。
Duìbùqǐ, wǒ xiàng nǐ dàoqiàn, bié kū le.
Sorry. I apologize. Don't cry anymore (= stop crying).
Compare: 我要告诉你一个坏消息, 你听了以后请别哭。
Wǒ yào gàosù nǐ yī ge huài xiāoxí, nǐ tīng le yǐhòu qǐng bié kū.
I am going to tell you some bad news. Please don't cry when you hear it.
## Level 2 10.8 Implying 'already'
### (a) With 已经 or 都
A sentence with the adverb 已经 (yǐjīng) or 都 (dōu, when 都 means 'already') should have 了 at the end of the sentence. When 都 implies 'already', the expression usually has a number.
都十点了, 小明怎么还在睡觉? (都 can be 已经.)
Dōu shí diǎn le, Xiǎomíng zěnme hái zài shuìjiào?
It's already ten o'clock. How come Xiaoming is still sleeping?
安娜来北京已经半年了, 可是只认识了一、 两个中国朋友。(已经 can be 都.)
Ānna lái Běijīng yǐjīng bàn nián le, kěshì zhǐ rènshì le yī, liǎng ge Zhōngguó péngyǒu.
Anna has already been in Beijing for half a year; but she has only met one or two Chinese people.
Compare: 安娜来北京才半年, 可是中国话已经说得非常流利了。(都 is not proper.)
Ānnà lái Běijīng cái bàn nián, kěshì Zhōngguóhuà yǐjīng shuō de fēicháng liúlì le.
Anna has only been in Beijing for half a year, but she already speaks Chinese fluently.
### (b) Without 已经 or 都
Since 了 at the end of the sentence can imply 'already', 已经 or 都 can be omitted without affecting the meaning of the sentence.
下课二十分钟了, 老师还在不停地说话呢。
Xià kè èrshí fēnzhōng le, lǎoshī hái zài bùtíng de shuōhuà ne.
Class has been over for 20 minutes already, but the teacher is still talking non-stop.
Compare: 下课还不到一分钟, 同学们就都走了。
Xià kè hái bú dào yī fēnzhōng, tóngxué men jiù dōu zǒu le.
Class has not been over for more than one minute and all the students are gone.
王: 你爸爸多大年纪?
Wáng: Nǐ bàba duō dà niánjì?
张: 他七十多了, 已经退休了。你爸爸呢?
Zhāng: Tā qīshí duō le, yǐjīng tuìxiū le. Nǐ bàba ne?
王: 五十出头, 还在工作呢。
Wáng: Wǔshí chūtóu, hái zài gōngzuò ne.
Wang: How old is your father?
Zhang: He's (already) in his 70s and he has already retired. How about your father?
Wang: A little over 50; he is still working.
## Level 2 10.9 Forming questions
To form a yes–no question or an affirmative–negative question, use '......了吗?' or '......了 没有?'
### (a) Compound verbs or verbs with objects
If the verb has an object, the object usually is not quantified or does not have a modifier.
妈妈: 你吃晚饭了没有?(你吃晚饭了吗?)
Māma: Nǐ chī wǎnfàn le méiyǒu? (Nǐ chī wǎnfàn le ma?)
儿子: 吃了。
Érzi: Chī le.
Mother: Did you eat dinner? (The translation could also be: Have you eaten dinner?)
Son: Yes, I did. (Yes, I have.)
谢: 你买车了没有? Or 你买车了吗?(This implies that Wang previously did not own a car.)
Xiè: Nǐ mǎi chē le méiyǒu?
王: 买了一辆二手车。
Wáng: Mǎi le yí liàng èrshǒu chē.
Xie:Have you bought a car?
Wang: I have bought a second-hand car.
### (b) Pre-posing the object
If the object has a longish modifier, it is better to pre-pose the object.
爸爸: 妈妈作的鱼汤, 你喝了没有?(= 你喝了妈妈作的鱼汤没有?)
Bàba: Māma zuò de yú tāng, nǐ hē le méiyǒu?
小明: 喝了三碗(了)。
Xiǎomíng: Hē le sān wǎn le.
Father: Did you have any of the fish soup your mother made?
Xiaoming: I had three bowls (already).
### (c) When to use 了 with 没有/吗
没有 can be used at the end of a question with or without 了 if the verb has an object or is a disyllabic word. When 吗 is used, 了 must always be used.
☞ See 2.6 for more on these types of question.
妈妈: 你洗澡 (了) 没有?or 你洗澡了吗?(But it is incorrect to say 你洗澡吗?)
Māma: Nǐ xǐzǎo (le) méiyǒu? Or Nǐ xǐzǎo le ma?
小明: 洗了。(洗澡 is a compound verb; 澡 should be omitted.)
Xiǎomíng: Xǐ le.
Mother: Have you taken a shower?
Xiaoming: I have.
今天的考试, 你准备 (了) 没有?or 你准备了吗?(你准备吗?would be incorrect.)
Jīntiān de kǎoshì, nǐ zhǔnbèi (le) méiyǒu? Or nǐ zhǔnbèi le ma?
Did you study for today's test?
他借你的钱, 你还了没有?(= 你还了吗?or 你还他没有?) (But 你还没有? is incorrect.)
Tā jiè nǐ de qián, nǐ huán le méiyǒu?
Did you return the money he lent you?
## Level 2 10.10 Negative sentences
To make a negative sentence, use 没(有) before the verb without 了.
### (a) Short negative answers
A short negative answer can simply be 没有.
爸爸: 妈妈今天做了很多菜, 你吃了没有?(= 你吃了吗?)
Bàba: Māma jīntiān zuò le hěn duō cài, nǐ chī le méiyǒu?
儿子: 我吃了青菜,没(有)吃肉。
Érzi: Wǒ chī le qīngcài, méiyǒu chī ròu.
Father: Your mother made lots of dishes today. Did you eat any?
Son: I had vegetables; I didn't have the meat dishes.
张: 你给王先生打电话(了)没有?(= 你给王先生打电话了吗?)
Zhāng: Nǐ gěi Wáng xiānsheng dǎ diànhuà (le) méiyǒu?
丁:没有。
Dīng: Méiyǒu.
Zhang: Did you call Mr Wang? (Have you called Mr Wang?)
Ding: No. (I didn't call him.)
### (b) Negative answers with 还
Another negative answer can be 还没有 (+ verb) 呢! 呢 is frequently used, but is, in fact, optional. When 还 is used, it implies 'not yet'.
王: 老师叫我们看的那本书, 你看了没有?(= 你看了吗?)
Wáng: Lǎoshī jiào wǒmen kàn de nà běn shū, nǐ kàn le méiyǒu?
李:还没有(呢)!
Lǐ: Hái méiyǒu (ne)!
Wang: Have you read the book the teacher asked us to read?
Li: Not yet! (I have not read it yet.)
### (c) 了 and 没有 in the same sentence
When 了 and 没有 appear in the same sentence, 了 indicates a change of situation. 没有 in this case is usually used to indicate 'non-existence' or the negative progressive aspect.
王: 我想喝杯咖啡, 有没有咖啡?
Wáng: Wǒ xiǎng hē bēi kāfēi, yǒu méiyǒu kāfēi?
李:没有咖啡了, 喝杯茶, 好不好?
Lǐ: Méiyǒu kāfēi le, hē bēi chá, hǎo bu hǎo?
Wang: I want to have a cup of coffee. Is there any coffee?
Li: There is no more coffee. (We ran out of coffee.) Have a cup of tea, OK?
妈妈: 小明, 你还在看电视吗?
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ hái zài kàn diànshì ma?
小明: 没有, 我没有在看了。
Xiǎomíng: Méiyǒu, wǒ méiyǒu zài kàn le.
Mother: Xiaoming, are you still watching TV?
Xiaoming: No, I'm not watching anymore. (I have stopped.)
## Level 2 10.11 Impending events
The following patterns are used to indicate that an event is going to happen very soon.
### (a) The patterns
There are four patterns for an impending event; they are considered interchangeable.
就 | 快 | 要 | ......了 |
---|---|---|---|---
* * *
| | ✓ | ✓ | 要下雨了,咱们回家吧!
Yào xià yǔ le, zánmen huíjiā ba!
It's about to rain. Let's go home.
* * *
| ✓ | | ✓ | 我女儿快两岁了。
Wǒ nǚ'ér kuài liǎng suì le.
My daughter is almost two years old.
* * *
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 快要下课了。
Kuài yào xià kè le.
The class is going to be over soon.
* * *
✓ | | ✓ | ✓ | 我下个月就要毕业了。
Wǒ xià ge yuè jiù yào bìyè le.
I am (soon) going to graduate next month.
### (b) A specific moment
When a specific moment is mentioned; only 就要......了 can be used.
你六月就要毕业了, 为什么还没有开始找工作呢?
Nǐ liùyuè jiù yào bìyè le, wèishénme hái méiyǒu kāishǐ zhǎo gōngzuò ne?
You are about to graduate in June; why haven't you started to look for a job?
还有两个星期就要考期末考了, 你开始准备了没有?
Hái yǒu liǎng ge xīngqī jiù yào kǎo qímòkǎo le, nǐ kāishǐ zhǔnbèi le méiyǒu?
Final exams are coming (soon) in only two weeks; have you started to prepare?
### (c) Implying 'already'
When 'already' is implied in an impending action, 都 is used more often than 已经; also, 快......了, 要......了 or 快要......了 is used with 都; 就要......了 is rarely used in this situation.
王先生都快四十了, 怎么还没有结婚呢?
Wáng xiānsheng dōu kuài sìshí le, zěnme hái méiyǒu jiéhūn ne?
Mr Wang is already close to 40 years old; how come he is not married yet?
咱们亏了这么多钱, 我都快要哭了, 你怎么还在笑?
Zánmen kuī le zhème duō qián, wǒ dōu kuài yào kū le, nǐ zěnme hái zài xiào?
We lost so much money; I am already about to cry; how come you are still laughing?
### (d) A specific point in time about to be reached
When a specific point in time is about to be reached, and usually the expression involves a number, 快......了 or 快要......了 is the best choice of the four.
王太太的儿子快(要)两岁了。
Wáng tàitai de érzi kuài (yào) liǎng suì le.
Mrs Wang's son is going to be two years old soon.
妈妈: 快十二点了, 你怎么还不上床睡觉?
Māma: Kuài shí'èr diǎn le, nǐ zěnme hái bú shàng chuáng shuìjiào?
儿子: 我还在学习呢。大考就要到了。
Érzi: Wǒ hái zài xuéxí ne. Dà kǎo jiùyào dào le.
Mother: It's almost 12 o'clock; how come you are not in bed yet?
Son: I am still studying. The big exam is coming soon.
### (e) Relative clauses or expressions before nouns
When the impending event is in a relative clause or is an expression before a noun, 了 is not used. This sometimes results in confusion on the part of the learner, especially when 快 is used in the expression since 快 has several other meanings.
李: 音乐会的票你买到没有?
Lǐ: Yīnyuèhuì de piào, nǐ mǎi dào méiyǒu?
王: 真倒霉! 我排了快两小时的队,快轮到我的时候, 票就卖完了。
Wáng: Zhēn dǎoméi! Wǒ pái le kuài liǎng xiǎoshí de duì, kuài lún dào wǒ de shíhòu, piào jiù mài wán le.
Li: Did you get the tickets for the concert?
Wang: Really bad luck. I was in line for almost two hours. When it was about to be my turn, the tickets sold out.
李老师教了快四十年书, 他一共教过快三千个学生。
Lǐ lǎoshī jiāo le kuài sìshí nián shū, tā yígòng jiāo guò kuài sān qiān ge xuéshēng.
Teacher Li has taught for almost 40 years. He has taught almost 3,000 students.
## Level 1 10.12 Quoting direct or indirect speech
It should be noted that when one quotes either directly or indirectly something someone said, 了 should not be used after words such as 说, 告诉 and 问.
我带小王参观了我的新房子以后,他说: "哇! 你家真大!"
Wǒ dǎi Xiǎo Wáng cānguān le wǒde xīn fángzi yǐhòu, tā shuō, 'Wà, nǐ jiā zhēn dà!'
After I had shown Xiao Wang my new house, he said, 'Wow, your house is really big!'
昨天我去检查身体, 医生告诉我, 我的心脏跳得太快, 血压也太高,他说我不 应该吸烟、 喝酒。
Zuótiān wǒ qù jiǎnchá shēntǐ, yīshēng gàosù wǒ, wǒde xīnzàng tiào de tài kuài, xuěyā yě tài gāo, tā shuō wǒ bù yīnggāi xī yān, hē jiǔ.
Yesterday I went to have a physical check-up. The doctor told me that my heart beats too fast and that my blood pressure is also too high; he said I should not smoke or drink (alcohol).
## Exercises
Decide which of the sentences is correct.
* Level 1 1 Yesterday Mr Wang invited me to eat.
* (a) 昨天王先生请我吃饭。
* (b) 昨天王先生请我吃了饭。
* (c) 昨天王先生请了我吃饭。
* 2 In the past, I often drank coffee. I drank two or three cups every day.
* (a) 以前我常喝咖啡, 每天都喝两、 三杯了。
* (b) 以前我常喝咖啡, 每天都喝了两、 三杯。
* (c) 以前我常喝咖啡, 每天都喝两、 三杯。
* 3 Did you read the books the teachers wanted us to read?
* (a)老师要我们看的那些书, 你看了吗?
* (b) 老师要我们看的那些书, 你看没有?
* (c) 老师要我们看的那些书, 你看没有看?
* 4 Why did you do so poorly in this test? Did you study (prepare)?
* (a) 这次考试, 你为什么考得这么差, 你准备没有?
* (b) 这次考试, 你为什么考得这么差, 你准备吗?
* (c) 这次考试, 你为什么考得这么差, 你准备不准备?
* 5 I did not sleep last night because I was doing homework the entire night.
* (a) 昨天晚上我不睡觉了, 因为我整个晚上都在写功课。
* (b) 昨天晚上我没有睡觉, 因为我整个晚上都在写功课。
* (c) 昨天晚上我没有睡觉了, 因为我整个晚上都在写功课。
* 6 I went to the book shop this afternoon and bought three Chinese novels.
* (a) 今天下午我去书店买三本中文小说了。
* (b) 今天下午我去了书店买三本中文小说了。
* (c) 今天下午我去书店买了三本中文小说。
* 7 Today is my birthday, so my mother made many dishes.
* (a) 今天是我的生日, 所以妈妈做了很多菜。
* (b) 今天是我的生日, 所以妈妈做很多菜了。
* (c) 今天是我的生日, 所以妈妈做了很多菜了。
* Level 2 8 Mr Zhang took his girlfriend for a ride right after he bought a car.
* (a) 张先生买车了就带他女朋友去兜风了。
* (b) 张先生买了车就带他女朋友去兜风了。
* (c) 张先生买车就带他女朋友去兜风了。
* 9 How about if we go to a movie tomorrow after class?
* (a) 我们明天下课了一起去看电影, 好不好?
* (b) 我们明天下了课一起去看电影, 好不好?
* (c) 我们明天下课一起去看电影, 好不好?
* 10 Anna goes to the library to study right after she eats lunch every day.
* (a) 安娜每天吃午饭就去图书馆学习。
* (b) 安娜每天吃午饭了就去图书馆学习。
* (c) 安娜每天吃了午饭就去图书馆学习。
* 11 I am (soon) going to Beijing to study Chinese next month.
* (a) 我下个月快去北京学中文了。
* (b) 我下个月就要去北京学中文了。
* (c) 我下个月快要去北京学中文了。
* 12 You are almost 20 years old; why are you still like a child?
* (a) 你快二十岁, 怎么还像小孩一样?
* (b) 你都二十岁了, 怎么还像小孩一样?
* (c) 你都快二十岁了, 怎么还像小孩一样?
* 13 Stop crying. You have been crying for almost twenty minutes.
* (a) 别哭, 你哭了快二十分钟了。
* (b) 别哭了, 你哭了快二十分钟了。
* (c) 别哭了, 你哭了快二十分钟。
* 14 After I bought the coat, I didn't have any more money, so I did not buy a skirt.
* (a) 我买了大衣, 就没有钱了, 所以没有买裙子。
* (b) 我买大衣了, 就没有钱了, 所以不买裙子。
* (c) 我买了大衣, 就没有钱, 所以没有买裙子了。
* 15 Yesterday Xaio Wang invited people for dinner. He made many dishes, but did not make any dessert.
* (a) 昨天小王请客了; 他做很多菜了, 可是没有做甜点。
* (b) 昨天小王请客; 他做了很多菜, 可是没有做甜点。
* (c) 昨天小王请了客; 他做了很多菜, 可是不做甜点了。
# [11
The use of 过 (the experiential aspect particle)](content.xhtml#bck_Ch011)
This chapter will focus on the use of 过 (guo), which is sometimes referred to as the experiential aspect particle. It is used to indicate an action that took place in the past or has taken place before. Its function in a sentence is to indicate experience, influence, impact/effect, etc. from a past action.
## Level 1 11.1 Verb + 过
过 must immediately follow a verb in a sentence.
Experience | 王: 你去过哪些国家?
Wáng: Nǐ qù guo nǎ xiē guójiā?
李: 我去过英国跟法国。
Lǐ: Wǒ qù guo Yīngguó gēn Fǎguó.
Wang: Which countries have you been to?
Li: I have been to the UK and France.
---|---
* * *
Influence/effect | 我跟你说过他不是好人, 你为什么还跟他交朋友?
Wǒ gēn nǐ shuō guo tā bú shì hǎo rén, nǐ wèishénme hái gēn tā jiāo péngyǒu?
I have told you he is not a good person. Why are you still friends with him?
* * *
Impact/result | 妈妈: 小明, 来吃晚饭。
Māma: Xiǎomíng, lái chī wǎnfàn.
小明: 我在外面吃过了。
Xiǎomíng: Wǒ zài wàimiàn chī guo le.
Mother: Xiaoming, come and eat dinner.
Xiaoming: I have eaten outside (when I was out).
## Level 1 11.2 Adjective + 过
It is possible for 过 to follow an adjective in a sentence.
上星期我们全家打扫屋子, 我家干净过几天, 现在又脏了。
Shàng xīngqī wǒmen quánjiā dǎsǎo wūzi, wǒjiā gānjìng guo jǐ tiān, xiànzài yòu zāng le.
Last week our whole family cleaned up our house, so our house was clean for a couple of days, but now it's dirty again.
## Level 1 11.3 Forming questions and answers
### (a) Affirmative–negative questions
To form an affirmative–negative/yes–no question, use 'verb + 过 (+ object) 没有/吗?'
你们吃过北京烤鸭没有?(= 你们吃过北京烤鸭吗?)
Nǐmen chī guo Běijīng kǎo yā méiyǒu?
Have you had (eaten) Beijing duck?
### (b) Short answers
To give a short positive answer, use 'verb + 过'. To give a short negative answer, use '没有 \+ verb + 过' or simply '没有'.
李: 你们看过 《哈利波特》 吗?
Lǐ: Nǐmen kàn guo 'Hālì Bōtè' ma?
张: 我没有看过。
Zhāng: Wǒ méiyǒu kàn guo.
丁: 我也没有。
Dīng: Wǒ yě méiyǒu.
Li: Have you read Harry Potter?
Zhang: I have not read it.
Ding: I have not, either.
## Level 2 11.4 Two verbs with 过
When there are two verbs in a simple sentence, 过 should follow the second verb. In this case, the second verb usually indicates the purpose of the first verb. So the first verb is most likely to be 来, 去, 用, etc.
☞ See 10.5 for a similar use of 了.
张: 你去过王先生的家吗?
Zhāng: Nǐ qù guo Wáng xiānsheng de jiā ma?
李:去过。我去他家吃过两次饭。
Lǐ: Qù guo. Wǒ qù tā jiā chī guo liǎng cì fàn.
Zhang: Have you been to Mr Wang's house?
Li: Yes, I have. I have been there twice to eat.
(Situation: At a dinner party where Chinese food is being served.)
主人: 你们要用筷子还是刀叉?
Zhǔrén: Nǐmen yào yòng kuàizi háishì dāochā?
客人甲: 我用刀叉吧。我没有用筷子吃过饭。
Kèrén jiǎ: Wǒ yòng dāochā ba. Wǒ méiyǒu yòng kuàizi chī guo fàn.
客人乙: 咱们都用筷子吧。我也没有用过筷子, 一起试试, 好吗?
Kèrén yǐ: Zánmen dōu yòng kuàizi ba. Wǒ yě méiyǒu yòng guo kuàizi, yìqǐ shì shì, hǎoma?
Host: Would you like to use chopsticks or a knife and fork?
Guest A: Let me use a knife and fork. I've never used chopsticks to eat.
Guest B: Let's use chopsticks. I have never used chopsticks, either. Let's try together, OK?
## Level 3 11.5 Adverbial time phrases with 过
A sentence with 过 can have an adverbial phrase indicating a past time.
### (a) Specific time phrases
It should be noted that while a sentence with 过 is frequently translated into the perfect tense in English to indicate one's experiences, it could also be translated into the past tense on many occasions, especially when the specific time of the action is mentioned.
王: 你去过长城吗?
Wáng: Nǐ qù guo Chángchéng ma?
张: 去过, 你呢?
Zhāng: Qù guo, nǐ ne?
王:去年去过一次,今年还没去过。
Wáng: Qùnián qù guo yí cì, jīnnián hái méi qù guo.
Wang: Have you been to the Great Wall?
Zhang: Yes, I have. How about you?
Wang: I went there once last year. I haven't been there this year.
(Situation: A doctor inquires about a patient's medical history.)
医生: 你得过什麼病?
Yīshēng: Nǐ dé guo shénme bìng?
病人:小时候得过两次肺炎, 上中学以后,没有得过大病。
Bìngrén: Xiǎo shíhòu dé guo liǎng cì fèiyán, shàng zhōngxué yǐhòu, méiyǒu dé guo dà bìng.
Doctor: What illnesses have you had (before)?
Patient: I had pneumonia twice when I was little. I have not had anything serious since I entered middle school.
### (b) Negative 过 sentences with 以前
When an optional 以前 (yǐqián: 'in the past; before') is used in a negative sentence with 过, the sentence implies that although the speaker has not had a certain experience before, he/she is experiencing it or is about to experience it for the first time.
我没有坐过飞机, 我很希望以后能有机会坐坐看。 (以前 cannot be used.)
Wǒ méiyǒu zuò guo fēijī, wǒ hěn xīwàng yǐhòu néng yǒu jīhuì zuò zuò kàn.
I have never flown. I hope I will have the opportunity to try it in the future.
我(以前)没有坐过飞机, 这是我第一次, 所以现在我很兴奋。
Wǒ (yǐqián) méiyǒu zùo guo fēijī, zhè shì wǒ dì yí cì, suǒyǐ xiànzài wǒ hěn xīngfèn.
I have never flown before; this is my first time; so I am very excited now.
## Level 2 11.6 还没有 \+ verb + 过 \+ (呢): 'not yet'
'还没有 \+ verb + 过 \+ (呢)' indicates 'not yet'; it can be used to imply that an action is likely to happen at a future time. 呢 is optional but is frequently used in conversation.
(Situation: Both Wang and Zhang are currently in Beijing.)
王: 你来北京以后,去过长城没有?
Wáng: Nǐ lái Běijīng yǐhòu, qù guo Chángchéng méiyǒu?
张: 我还没有去过呢。 (or 还没有呢。)
Zhāng: Wǒ hái méiyǒu qù guo ne.
Wang: Have you been to the Great Wall since you came to Beijing?
Zhang: I have not been there yet. (Implied: But I probably will sometime in the future.)
(Situation: Zhang is currently not in Beijing; therefore, he would not say 还没有去过. Note that the way Wang asks the 过 question in both situations is the same.)
王: 你住在北京的时候,去过长城没有?
Wáng: Nǐ zhù zài Běijīng de shíhòu, qù guo Chángchéng méiyǒu?
张: 我没有去过。(or 没有。)
Zhāng: Wǒ méiyǒu qù guo.
Wang: When you lived in Beijing, did you ever go to the Great Wall?
Zhang: I never did.
## Level 3 11.7 从来没有 \+ verb + 过
'从来没有 \+ verb + 过' is stronger in tone than '没有 \+ verb + 过' and they are similar in meaning.
我从来没有听过这么奇怪的事。
Wǒ cónglái méiyǒu tīng guo zhème qíguài de shì.
I have never heard anything so strange.
小王去了北京以后, 给我打过两次电话, 可是他从来没有给我写过信。
Xiǎo Wáng qù le Běijīng yǐhòu, gěi wǒ dǎ guo liǎng cì diànhuà, kěshì tā cónglái méiyǒu gěi wǒ xiě guo xìn.
Ever since Xiao Wang went to Beijing, he has called me twice, but he has never written to me.
Learners who are English speakers frequently associate '从来没有 \+ verb + 过' with the present perfect tense or past perfect tense in English. Actually, the context will decide which English tense '从来没有 \+ verb + 过' is equal to. It can even simply be past tense.
(Situation: The narrator is currently in China.)
我来中国以前,从来没有迷过路, 因为我的方向感很好; 可是来中国以后, 常常迷路, 因为我不认识中国字, 看不懂路标。
Wǒ lái Zhōngguó yǐqián, cónglái méiyǒu mí guo lù, yīnwèi wǒde fāngxiàng gǎn hěn hǎo; kěshì lái Zhōngguó yǐhòu, chángcháng mílù, yīnwèi wǒ bú rènshì Zhōngguó zì, kàn bù dǒng lùbiāo.
Before I came to China, I had never got lost because I had a good sense of direction. But since I came to China, I have often got lost because I don't know Chinese characters and so I cannot understand street signs.
(Situation: The narrator is currently not in China.)
我在中国的时候,从来没有迷过路, 因为我找不到路的时候, 中国人总是热情地帮助我。
Wǒ zài Zhōngguó de shíhòu, cónglái méiyǒu mí guo lù, yīnwèi wǒ zhǎo bú dào lù de shíhòu, Zhōngguó rén zǒngshì rèqíng de bāngzhù wǒ.
When I was in China, I never got lost because Chinese people always helped me warmly when I could not find my way.
## Level 1 11.8 过 with modal particle 了
A sentence with 过 can have modal particle 了 at the end to emphasize 'already'.
王: 明天我们一起去看 《北京和纽约》 吧。
Wáng: Míngtiān wǒmen yīqǐ qù kàn 'Běijīng hé Niǔyuē' ba.
李: 那个电影, 我看过了。(= 我已经看过了。)
Lǐ: Nà ge diànyǐng, wǒ kàn guo le. (= wǒ yǐjīng kàn guo le.)
Wang: Shall we go see Beijing and New York together tomorrow?
Li: I have already seen that movie.
## Level 2 11.9 过 with 曾经
An optional word, 曾经 (céngjīng), can be used with 过 to make the speech sound more formal. 曾经 can be shortened to 曾. The negative form is '不曾/未曾 \+ verb + 过'.
王先生曾(经)出过两本诗集, 现在他改写小说了。
Wáng xiānsheng céngjīng chū guo liǎng běn shījí, xiànzài tā gǎi xiě xiǎoshuō le.
Mr Wang published two collections of poetry; now he has switched to writing fiction.
我不曾(= 未曾 = 没有)见过像王小姐这么美貌的女子。(美貌的女子 is more formal than 漂亮的女孩.)
Wǒ bù céng (= wèi céng = méiyǒu) jiàn guo xiàng Wáng xiǎojiě zhème měimào de nǚzi.
I have not met a lady as beautiful as Miss Wang.
## Level 3 11.10 Comparing the use of 过 and 了
### (a) Different emphases
Sometimes, 过 and 了 can be interchangeable, but the sentences may have slightly different emphases.
English: I lived in England for two years when I was little.
Chinese #1: 我小时候在英国住了两年。
Wǒ xiǎo shíhòu zài Yīngguó zhù le liǎng nián.
This is to state the fact about a past event.
Chinese #2: 我小时候在英国住过两年。
Wǒ xiǎo shíhòu zài Yīngguó zhù guo liǎng nián.
This is to indicate the experience of living abroad.
### (b) Stating fact vs. indicating impact
To state the fact about a past event, use 了. To indicate the impact of a past event, use 过.
王: 老师叫我们看的那本书, 你们看了没有?
Wáng: Lǎoshī jiào wǒmen kàn de nà běn shū, nǐmen kàn le méiyǒu?
张: 我看了。
Zhāng: Wǒ kàn le.
丁: 那本书, 我小时候就看过了。
Dīng: Nà běn shū, wǒ xiǎo shíhòu jiù kàn guo le.
Wang: Did you read (or: have you read) the book the teacher assigned us to read?
Zhang: I did. (or: I have.)
Ding: I had already read that book before (when I was a young child.) (丁 implies that he had no need to read the book again since he had read it before. 过 is used to indicate the impact of a previous action.)
王: 你今年夏天去了哪些地方?
Wáng: Nǐ jīnnián xiàtiān qù le nǎ xiē dìfāng?
张: 我去了两趟北京。
Zhāng: Wǒ qù le liǎng tàng Běijīng.
Wang: Where did you go this past summer?
Zhang: I went to Beijing twice. (Stating what he did in summer.)
王: 下个月咱们一起去北京玩玩, 怎么样?
Wáng: Xià ge yuè, zánmen yìqǐ qù Běijīng wán wán, zěnmeyàng?
张: 我不想去, 因为我今年夏天去过两趟北京。
Zhāng: Wǒ bù xiǎng qù, yīnwèi wǒ jīnnián xiàtiān qù guo liǎng tàng Běijīng.
Wang: How about if we go to Beijing for a holiday next month?
Zhang: I don't want to go because I went there twice this past summer. (Emphasizing the impact of having been to Beijing earlier – he does not want to go again next month.)
### (c) Indicating completion vs. emphasizing experience
了 indicates the completion of an action at a specific moment; 过 emphasizes previous experience, impact, effect, etc.
李: 昨天我去你家的时候, 你不在, 你去哪里了?
Lǐ: Zuótiān wǒ qù nǐ jiā de shíhòu, nǐ bú zài, nǐ qù nǎlǐ le?
丁: 我跟朋友去看电影了。
Dīng: Wǒ gēn péngyǒu qù kàn diànyǐng le.
Li: Yesterday when I went to your house, you weren't in. Where did you go? (or: Where had you gone?)
Ding: I went to a movie with a friend. (or: I had gone to a movie.)
昨天我去看病。医生説, 我得了肺炎。我小时候也得过两次肺炎。
Zuótiān wǒ qù kàn bìng. Yīshēng shuō, wǒ dé le fèiyán. Wǒ xiǎo shíhòu yě dé guo liǎng cì fèiyán.
I went to see the doctor yesterday. The doctor said that I have pneumonia. I had pneumonia twice when I was young.
### (d) Past vs. current events
Since 了 indicates the completion of an action, it may or may not be about a past event. 过 basically indicates that the action took place in the past.
病人的妈妈: 医生, 请告诉我, 我儿子得了什么病?
Bìngrén de māma: Yīshēng, qǐng gàosù wǒ, wǒ érzi dé le shénme bìng?
医生: 他得了肺炎。他以前得过肺炎吗?
Yīshēng: Tā dé le fèiyán. Tā yǐqián dé guo fèiyán ma?
病人的妈妈:小时候得过两次。
Bìngrén de māma: Xiǎo shíhòu dé guo liǎng cì.
Patient's mother: Doctor, please tell me what illness my son has? (What illness did he get?)
Doctor: He has pneumonia. Has he had pneumonia before?
Patient's mother: He had it twice when he was little.
王: 丁先生在哪里? 他来了吗?
Wáng: Dīng xiānsheng zài nǎlǐ? Tā lái le ma?
张: 他来了,正在客厅里等你呢。
Zhāng: Tā lái le, zhèng zài kètīng lǐ děng nǐ ne.
Wang: Where is Mr Ding? Is he here? (Has he come?)
Zhang: He is here. (He has come.) He is waiting for you in the living room.
丁: 王先生在哪里? 他来了吗?
Dīng: Wáng xiānsheng zài nǎlǐ? Tā lái le ma?
李: 他来过了, 可是十分钟以前走了。
Lǐ: Tā lái guo le, kěshì shí fēnzhōng yǐqián zǒu le.
Ding: Where is Mr Wang? Is he here?
Li: He was here, but he left ten minutes ago.
### (e) Negative sentences
In a negative sentence, 了 is not used, but 过 should be used if the verb is said.
王:上星期你去李老师家了吗?
Wáng: Shàng xīngqī nǐ qù Lǐ lǎoshī jiā le ma?
张: 我没有去。(or 没有。) (Incorrect: 我没有去了。)
Zhāng: Wǒ méiyǒu qù.
Wang: Did you go to Teacher Li's house last week?
Zhang: I didn't.
丁: 你去过李老师家吗?
Dīng: Nǐ qù guo Lǐ lǎoshī jiā ma?
王:没有去过。(or 没有。) (Incorrect: 我没有去。)
Wáng: Méiyǒu qù guo.
Ding: Have you been to Teacher Li's house?
Wang: I haven't.
### (f) Same meaning
Occasionally, a sentence with 过 (+ object) and a sentence with 了 share the same meaning, especially when one asks if someone has eaten (a traditional way to greet someone around meal time).
王: 你们吃过饭了吗?(= 你们吃饭了吗?)
Wáng: Nǐmen chī guo fàn le ma?
张:吃过了。(= 吃了。)
Zhāng: Chī guo le.
丁: 我还没吃。(But rarely 我还没吃过。)
Dīng: Wǒ hái méi chī.
Wang: Have you eaten (lunch/dinner)?
Zhang: I have.
Ding: I haven't (yet).
## Level 2 11.11 Related information
### (a) 没有 or 没?
没有 can be shortened to 没, especially when a verb follows. However, when giving a short negative answer without a verb or an adverb, 没有 is more frequently used than simply 没.
李: 谁去过长城?
Lǐ: Shéi qù guo Chángchéng?
王: 我没去过。小张, 你呢?
Wáng: Wǒ méi qù guo. Xiǎo Zhāng, nǐ ne?
张: 也还没, 不过我打算下星期去。
Zhāng: Yě hái méi, búguò wǒ dǎsuàn xià xīngqī qù.
Li: Who has been to the Great Wall?
Wang: I haven't. Xiao Zhang, what about you?
Zhang: I have not yet been there, either. But I plan to go next week.
### (b) 过: guo or guò?
过 as an experiential aspect particle is normally pronounced in the neutral tone. However, when the emphasis is on the effect or impact of an action, 过 can be pronounced in the fourth tone. Therefore, in this chapter, 过 in many sentences can be pronounced in the fourth tone.
妈妈: 小明, 你才吃过午饭, 现在不可以吃点心。 (过 is used to emphasize the effect of 吃.)
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ cái chī guò wǔfàn, xiànzài bù kěyǐ chī diǎnxīn.
Mother: Xiaoming, you just ate lunch; you are not allowed to eat any snacks now.
王: 你吃过印度菜没有? 想不想一起去吃? (过 indicates experience; it is in the neutral tone)
Wáng: Nǐ chī guo Yìndù cài méiyǒu? Xiǎng bù xiǎng yìqǐ qù chī?
李: 我昨天刚跟朋友去吃过, 今天吃中国菜吧! (过 indicates impact; it is in the fourth tone.)
Lǐ: Wǒ zuótiān gāng gēn péngyǒu qù chī guò, jīntiān chī Zhōngguó cài ba!
Wang: Have you had Indian food before? Would you like to go get some (Indian food) together?
Li: I just had Indian food with some friends yesterday. How about if we have Chinese food today?
## Exercises
Fill in the blanks using 了, 过 or nothing. (Answers in some of the blanks can be flexible.)
* Level 1 1 那本书我已经看 _____ 两遍 _____, 我不想再看 _____。
I have already read that book twice. I don't want to read it anymore.
* 2 王: 你以前用 _____ 筷子吗?
Wang: Have you used chopsticks before? 李: 我没用 _____。
Li: I have not.
* 3 老师: 你用 _____ 毛笔写 _____ 字吗?
Teacher: Have you ever used brush pen to write characters?
学生: 没有 _____。
Student: No.
* 4 他们来 _____ 北京一个多星期 _____, 参观 _____ 很多地方。
They have been in Beijing for more than a week and have visited many places.
* 5 我十岁的时候, 去 _____ 英国, 在那里住 _____ 三个月 _____。
When I was ten years old, I went to England and I lived there for three months.
* 6 昨天我去 _____ 医院看医生的时候, 医生说, 我得 _____ 肺炎。他问我以前得 _____ 肺炎没有, 我告诉 _____ 他, 我小时候也得 _____ 一次。
When I went to the hospital to see a doctor yesterday, the doctor said that I had pneumonia. He asked me if I had had pneumonia before and I told him that I had had it once when I was young.
* 7 妈妈: 今天的功课, 你写 _____ 没有?
Mother: Have you done today's homework?
儿子: 我写 _____, 可是弟弟没有写 _____。
Son: I have, but little brother hasn't.
* Level 2 8 昨天我在王先生家吃 _____ 饭的时候, 用 _____ 一下儿筷子。用 _____ 筷子吃 _____ 饭真有意思, 我从来没有用 _____ 筷子吃 _____ 饭。
When I ate at Mr Wang's house yesterday, I used chopsticks. Eating with chopsticks (using chopsticks to eat) was really fun. I had never eaten with chopsticks before.
* 9 我小时候身体不好, 得 _____ 两次肺炎。上中学的时候, 没有得 _____ 大病; 可是上个月我又得 _____ 一次肺炎, 到现在还没有好 _____。
When I was young, I was not healthy and I had pneumonia twice. When I was in middle school, I never had any serious illnesses. But last month, I once again got pneumonia and I have not yet recovered so far.
* 10 客人: 你爸爸去哪里 _____?
Guest: Where did your father go?
男孩: 他去日本 _____。
Boy: He went to Japan.
客人: 他以前去 _____ 日本吗?
Guest: Has he been to Japan before?
男孩: 没有 _____。但是他去 _____ 很多别的国家。
Boy: He has not. But he has been to many other countries.
* 11 王: 我没有来 _____ 你们学校, 请你带我参观一下儿, 好不好?
Wang: I have never been to your school. Would you please show me around?
张: 我们等一下儿吧。李先生也没有来 _____, 可是他现在还没来 _____, 他来 _____ 我就带你们一起参观。
Zhang: Let's wait for a while. Mr Li has never been here, either. But he is not here yet. As soon as he arrives, I will show the two of you around together.
# [12
Modal verbs](content.xhtml#bck_Ch012)
Modal verbs in Chinese are similar to auxiliary verbs in English to a certain extent. A modal verb is generally used to indicate volition, obligation, necessity, possibility, ability, permission, etc.
The following table shows the most common modal verbs and their functions. Some of the modal verbs can have more than one meaning and some of them share similar meanings; therefore, it is important to take into consideration the context when deciding which modal verb is the proper one to use in a situation.
Volition, intention | 要 (yào), 想 (xiǎng)
---|---
* * *
Willingness | 愿意 (yuànyì), 肯 (kěn)
* * *
Obligation (social/moral), duty | 要, 得 (děi), 应该 (yīnggāi), 应当 (yīngdāng), 应, 该
* * *
Assumption, estimation | 应该
* * *
Necessity, requirement | 要, 必须 (bìxū), 得, 不必 (búbì), 不用 (búyòng)
* * *
Ability | 能 (néng), 能够 (nénggòu), 会 (huì), 可以 (kěyǐ)
* * *
Possibility | 会, 能, (可能 (kěnéng))
* * *
Permission | 能, 可以, 行 (xíng)
A modal verb should be followed by a regular verb unless it is a short answer to a question. Only 应该 can be followed by another modal verb. ☞ See 12.9 for details.
不, not 没有, is used before the modal verb as the negative form. When 不 appears after the modal verb, it is used to negate the main verb. The two patterns have different meanings.
不 \+ modal verb + main verb ≠ modal verb + 不 \+ main verb
## Level 1/2 12.1 Volition or intention (要, 想)
要 is stronger in meaning than 想. Therefore, 要 is similar to 'will, to be going to', whereas 想 is similar to 'would like' or 'to feel like'. 要 indicates one's strong will to make something happen; 想 indicates one's wish, plan, etc.
### (a) The negative form of 要 and 想
Normally, the negative form for both 要 and 想 is 不想. Although 不要 can also be the negative form for 要, it carries a very strong negative tone and is used less frequently.
王: 今年八月我要去中国。
Wáng: Jīnnián bāyuè wǒ yào qù Zhōngguó.
张: 太好了! 以后我也想去中国学中文。
Zhāng: Tài hǎo le! Yǐhòu wǒ yě xiǎng qù Zhōngguó xué Zhōngwén.
Wang: I am going to China in August this year.
Zhang: That's great! In the future, I would like to go to China to study Chinese, too.
李: 明天晚上小张家有一个舞会, 你要不要去?
Lǐ: Míngtiān wǎnshàng Xiǎo Zhāng jiā yǒu yí ge wǔhuì, nǐ yào bú yào qù?
丁: 我不想去, 我不喜欢跳舞。
Dīng: Wǒ bù xiǎng qù, wǒ bù xǐhuān tiàowǔ.
Li: There will be a dance party at Xiao Zhang's house tomorrow evening; will you go?
Ding: I don't feel like going. I don't like to dance.
张: 桌上有很多点心, 你吃一点吧!
Zhāng: Zhuō shàng yǒu hěn duō diǎnxīn, nǐ chī yìdiǎn ba.
李: 我不要吃那种会让我发胖的东西。
Lǐ: Wǒ bú yào chī nà zhǒng huì ràng wǒ fāpàng de dōngxī.
Zhang: There are lots of snacks on the table; why don't you have some?
Li: I will not eat that kind of fattening food.
### (b) Degree adverbs
Adverbs indicating degree, such as 很, 真 and 非常 can only appear before 想, not 要. However, 一定 can only go with 要, not 想.
我很想(or 非常想)学中文, 可是一直没有时间; 明年我一定要开始学。
Wǒ hěn xiǎng (or fēicháng xiǎng) xué Zhōngwén, kěshì yìzhí méiyǒu shíjiān; míngnián wǒ yídìng yào kāishǐ xué.
I would like to learn Chinese very much, but I have not had the time; I will definitely begin to take Chinese lessons next year.
### (c) 要 and 想 as regular verbs
Both 要 and 想 can be used as regular verbs. As regular verbs, 要 means 'to want', and 想 means 'to think about' or 'to miss'. Furthermore, 不要 is interchangeable with 别 in a negative imperative sentence.
老师要我们回家去想一想这两个问题。
Lǎoshī yào wǒmen huí jiā qù xiǎng yì xiǎng zhè liǎng ge wèntí.
The teacher wanted us to go home and think about these two questions.
妈妈要我到了中国以后不要(= 别)太想家。
Māma yào wǒ dào le Zhōngguó yǐhòu búyào (= bié) tài xiǎng jiā.
My mother wants me to not miss home too much after I go to China.
## Level 1 12.2 Willingness (愿意, 肯)
小李很倔强, 从来不肯让步, 所以没有人愿意跟他合作。
Xiǎo Lǐ hěn juéjiàng, cónglái bù kěn ràngbù, suǒyǐ méiyǒu rén yuànyì gēn tā hézuò.
Xiao Li is stubborn; he is never willing to back down, so nobody is willing to work with him.
## Level 1/2 12.3 Obligation or duty (要, 得, 应该, 应当, 应, 该)
### (a) 要 and 得
要 and 得 both mean 'must, to have to'; 得 is pronounced děi and is more casual than 要.
明天有考试, 今晚我得准备考试。
Míngtiān yǒu kǎoshì, jīn wǎn wǒ děi zhǔnbèi kǎoshì.
There will be a test tomorrow. This evening I have to study for the test.
(Situation: Two parents give advice to their children. 要 can be replaced by 得 to make the tone more casual. 要 can also be replaced by 应该/应当/应/该 to mean 'should' instead of 'must'.)
爸爸: 做人要诚实, 做事要负责, 学习要认真。
Bàba: Zuòrén yào chéngshí, zuòshì yào fùzé, xuéxí yào rènzhēn.
妈妈: 对, 而且还要爱护弟妹, 帮助朋友。
Māma: Duì, érqiě hái yào àihù dìmèi, bāngzhù péngyǒu.
Father: You must be honest in dealing with people, you must be responsible in dealing with work and you must be conscientious in studying.
Mother: That's right. Also, you must take care of your younger siblings and help your friends.
### (b) 应该, 应当, 应 and 该
应该, 应当, 应 and 该 all mean 'should, ought to' and are interchangeable, but 应 is more formal than 应该/应当, whereas 该 is more casual. Neither 应 nor 该 should be used to give a short answer without the verb following. In giving a short answer, use 应该 or 不应该.
王: 我们应不应该把这件事告诉他?
Wáng: Wǒmen yīng bù yīnggāi bǎ zhè jiàn shì gàosù ta?
李:不应该。(我们不该告诉他。)
Lǐ: Bù yīnggāi.
Wang: Should we tell him about this matter?
Li: We should not. (or We should not tell him.)
### (c) The negative forms of 要 and 得
The negative forms of 要 and 得 are not 不要 and 不得; they are 不用 or 不必, meaning 'no need to'. Furthermore, 得 cannot be used in asking an affirmative–negative question; i.e. 得不得 is incorrect.
王: 今天我没有去上课。请告诉我, 今天要不要作语法练习?
Wáng: Jintiān wǒ méiyǒu qù shàng kè. Qǐng gàosù wǒ, jīntiān yào bú yào zuò yǔfǎ liànxí?
李: 老师说, 今天不用(= 不必)作语法练习, 但是得念课文。
Lǐ: Lǎoshī shuō, jīntiān búyòng (= búbì) zuò yǔfǎ liànxí, dànshì děi niàn kèwén.
Wang: I didn't go to class today. Please tell me: do we have to do grammar exercises today?
Li: The teacher said we don't have to do grammar exercises today, but we have to read the text.
## Level 2 12.4 Assumption or estimation (应该)
The assumption/estimation in these sentences is based on reason or experience, not random guesses.
### (a) The negative form (1)
When 应该 indicates assumption, its negative form is 应该不, not 不应该.
我家只有我爸懂英文, 这本英文书应该是他的。
Wǒ jiā zhǐ yǒu wǒ bà dǒng Yīngwén, zhè běn Yīngwén shū yīnggāi shì tāde.
In my family only my father knows English; this English book should be his.
王明不懂英文, 这本英文书应该不是他的。
Wáng Míng bù dǒng Yīngwén, zhè běn Yīngwén shū yīnggāi bú shì tāde.
Wang Míng does not know English; this English book shouldn't be his.
张: 王小兰不应该说别人坏话。 (不应该说: moral duty)
Zhāng: Wáng Xiǎolán bù yīnggāi shuō biérén huàihuà.
李: 我很了解王小兰, 她应该不是那种人。 (应该不是: assumption/estimation)
Lǐ: Wǒ hěn liǎojiě Wáng Xiǎolán, tā yīnggāi bú shì nà zhǒng rén.
Zhang: Wang Xiaolan should not have said bad things about other people.
Li: I know Wang Xiaolan very well. She shouldn't be that type of person.
### (b) The negative form (2)
When 应该 indicates assumption, its negative form can also be 应该没有 for a past event. But when it indicates obligation, it is never 没有应该 and is always 不应该.
(Situation: Two teachers are talking about a student's attendance.)
张老师: 昨天王中来上课了没有?
Zhāng lǎoshī: Zuótiān Wáng Zhōng lái shàng kè le méiyǒu?
李老师:应该没有, 因为出席表上没有他的签名。
Lǐ lǎoshī: Yīnggāi méiyǒu, yīnwèi chūxí biǎo shàng méiyǒu tāde qiānmíng.
张老师: 他昨天不应该缺席, 因为医生说他的病已经好了。
Zhāng lǎoshī: Tā zuótiān bù yīnggāi xuēxí, yīnwèi yīshēng shuō tāde bìng yǐjīng hǎo le.
Teacher Zhang: Did Wang Zhong come to class yesterday?
Teacher Li: I gathered that he did not because his signature was not on the attendance sheet.
Teacher Zhang: He should not have been absent yesterday because the doctor said that he had recovered from his illness already.
## Level 1/2 12.5 Necessity (要, 必须, 得)
This includes requirements, needs, etc. 得 is casual.
(Situation: Two parents are giving their children advice on safety.)
妈妈: 过马路的时候,要记得先看看两边有没有车。
Māma: Guò mǎlù de shíhòu, yào jìde xiān kàn kàn liǎng biān yǒu méiyǒu chē.
爸爸: 对, 而且还要等绿灯亮了才过去。
Bàba: Duì, érqiě hái yào děng lǜdēng liàng le cái guòqù.
Mother: When you are about to cross the street, you have to remember to look if there are cars coming from either side.
Father: That's right. Also, you have to wait for the green light (to be on) before crossing.
这个学校的学生毕业以前必须学两年的外语课。
Zhè ge xuéxiào de xuéshēng bìyè yǐqián bìxū xué liǎng nián de wàiyǔ kè.
Students at this school must (= are required to) study a foreign language for two years before graduating.
The negative form is 不必 or 不用 'no need to', not 不必须 or 不得. 不要 means 别 ('don't' in a negative imperative sentence); therefore, it is not considered to be in the form of a modal verb.
张: 小王, 你得帮帮我, 这几个问题, 我都不懂。
Zhāng: Xiǎo Wáng, nǐ děi bāng bāng wǒ, zhè jǐ ge wèntí, wǒ dōu bù dǒng.
王:不必着急, 我现在就来帮你。
Wáng: Búbì zháojí, wǒ xiànzài jiù lái bāng nǐ.
Zhang: Xiao Wang, you have to help me. I don't understand any of these questions.
Wang: No need to be anxious. I'll come and help you right now.
## Level 2/3 12.6 Ability (能, 能够, 会, 可以)
The ability can be either one's competence or one's ability to do something afforded by the situation.
### (a) 能, 能够 and 可以
能 and 能够 are interchangeable, but 能 is used more frequently than 能够.
王: 李明的腿摔伤了, 明天的比赛, 他能(够)跑吗?(= 可以跑吗?)
Wáng: Lǐ Míng de tuǐ shuāi shāng le, míngtiān de bǐsài, tā néng(gòu) pǎo ma?
张: 他说他的伤不严重, 他能(= 可以)跑。
Zhāng: Tā shuō tāde shāng bù yánzhòng, tā néng (= kěyǐ) pǎo.
Wang: Li Ming has injured his leg. Can he run in tomorrow's race?
Zhang: He says that his injury is not serious and that he can run.
李英能唱,能跳, 请她表演一下吧。
Lǐ Yīng néng chàng, néng tiào, qǐng tā biǎoyǎn yíxià ba.
Li Ying can sing and can dance. Let's ask her to perform.
### (b) The negative form of 能/能够/可以
The negative form of 能/能够/可以 is 不能, not 不可以. 不可以 means 'mustn't; to be forbidden'.
今晚我的家人要一起去看电影, 可是明天我有个考试, 所以我不能跟他们去。
Jīnwǎn wǒde jiā rén yào yìqǐ qù kàn diànyǐng, kěshì míngtiān wǒ yǒu ge kǎoshì, suǒyǐ wǒ bù néng gēn tāmen qù.
My family is going to see a movie this evening, but I have an exam tomorrow, so I can't go with them.
### (c) 会: acquired skill
会 indicates having an acquired skill. It is frequently translated as 'to know how to'.
我妹妹才一岁, 还不会走路。
Wǒ mèimei cái yī suì, hái bú huì zǒulù.
My younger sister is only one year old; she can't (= hasn't learned how to) walk yet.
Compare: 小王的腿摔伤了, 他现在暂时不能走路。
Xiǎo Wáng de tuǐ shuāi shāng le, tā xiànzài zhànshí bù néng zǒulù.
Xiao Wang has injured his leg. He cannot walk for the time being.
老师: 李明, 这个问题你会不会回答? 你来回答一下, 好不好?
Lǎoshī: Lǐ Míng, zhè ge wèntí, nǐ huì bú huì huídá? Nǐ lái huídá yíxià, hǎo bù hǎo?
丁: 老师, 李明喉咙痛, 他今天不能说话。
Dīng: Lǎoshī, Lǐ Míng hóulóng tòng, tā jīntiān bù néng shuōhuà.
Teacher: Li Ming, can you (= do you know how to) answer this question? Why don't you answer it?
Ding: Sir, Li Ming has a sore throat. He cannot talk today.
### (d) 会: 'good at'
会 can mean 'good at', especially when it is modified by degree adverbs such as 很, 真 or 非常.
我妈妈非常会做菜; 可是她不太会做家事。
Wǒ māma fēicháng huì zuò cài, kěshì tā bú tài huì zuò jiāshì.
My mother is very good at cooking; but she is not too good at doing housework.
王: 听说你很会唱歌, 你教我唱中国民歌 《茉莉花》, 好不好? (很会: 'good at')
Wáng: Tīngshuō nǐ hěn huì chànggē, nǐ jiāo wǒ chàng Zhōngguó míngē 'Mòlì huā', hǎo bù hǎo?
李: 我不会唱 《茉莉花》, 我教你唱 《康定情歌》 吧! (不会: 'don't know how')
Lǐ: Wǒ bú huì chàng 'Mòlì huā', wǒ jiāo nǐ chàng 'Kāngdìng qínggē' ba!
Wang: I heard that you are good at singing. Would you teach me how to sing the Chinese folk song Jasmine Flowers?
Li: I don't know how to sing Jasmine Flowers. Let me teach you Kangding Love Song.
## Level 2 12.7 Possibility (会, 能, 可能)
Some grammarians consider 可能 an adverb, which means 'probably, perhaps'. From this perspective, 可能 can appear before another modal verb.
### (a) Future event with 会
会 indicates the possibility of something happening more or less naturally without anyone consciously exercising control to make it happen.
天气预报说, 明天不会下雨, 但是可能会很冷。
Tiānqì yùbào shuō, míngtiān bú huì xiàyǔ, dànshì kěnéng huì hěn lěng.
The weather forecast says that it will not rain tomorrow, but it might be very cold.
(Situation: A dialogue between a man and his girlfriend.)
男: 明天是我第一次跟你爸妈见面, 他们会不会不喜欢我?
Nán: Míngtiān shì wǒ dì yí cì gēn nǐ bàmā jiànmiàn, tāmen huì bú huì bù xǐhuān wǒ?
女: 你放心, 他们一定会很喜欢你的。
Nǚ: Nǐ fàngxīn, tāmen yídìng huì hěn xǐhuān nǐ de.
Male: Tomorrow will be the first time I meet your parents. Will they dislike me?
Female: Don't worry. They will definitely like you very much.
### (b) 会 vs. 要 for future event
As modal verbs, both 会 and 要 are frequently translated as 'to be going to' or 'will'. When the main verb indicates a future action that cannot be controlled by a person's will, such as 下雨 'to rain', or when the speaker does not want to emphasize a person's will to control it, 会 is used.
王: 明天会是个好天气, 我要去公园走走, 你想不想去?
Wáng: Míngtiān huì shì ge hǎo tiānqì, wǒ yào qù gōngyuán zǒu zǒu, nǐ xiǎng bù xiǎng qù?
李: 明天我会很忙, 我不能去。
Lǐ: Míngtiān wǒ huì hěn máng, wǒ bù néng qù.
Wang: Tomorrow will be a nice day. I am going to the park for a walk. Would you like to go?
Li: I will be busy tomorrow. I won't be able to go.
### (c) Indicating 'possibility'
能 indicates the possibility of one's doing something. In this case, 能 is frequently followed by 不. Also, 不能不 means 'must, to have to'.
李: 对不起, 晚上不能来你家吃饭了。我得去王先生家给他看孩子。
Lǐ: Duìbùqǐ, wǎnshàng bù néng lái nǐ jiā chī fàn le. Wǒ děi qù Wáng xiānsheng jiā gěi tā kān háizi.
张: 你能不去吗? (or 你能不能不去?)
Zhāng: Nǐ néng bú qù ma?
李: 老板叫我做的事, 我不能不做。
Lǐ: Lǎobǎn jiào wǒ zùo de shì, wǒ bù néng bú zuò.
Li: Sorry, I can't come to your house for dinner (as I promised I would). I have to go to Mr Wang's house to babysit.
Zhang: Can you not go? (Is it possible for you not to go?)
Li: It is not possible for me to not do what my boss asks me to do. (= I have to do what my boss asks me to do.)
## Level 2 12.8 Permission (能, 可以, 行)
The distinction between ability and permission can be vague. Both can be 能 or 可以, and both of those are translated as 'can, to be able to'. 行 is more casual or conversational than 能/可以. Also, 行 is not normally used to express ability.
不可以/不行 is used to indicate 'to not be allowed/permitted; to be forbidden'.
李: 我想学游泳, 你可不可以教我? (When asking a favor, 可以 is better than 能.)
Lǐ: Wǒ xiǎng xué yóuyǒng, nǐ kě bù kěyǐ jiāo wǒ?
张: 对不起, 我不能教你, 因为我也不会游泳。(不能: inability)
Zhāng: Duìbùqǐ, wǒ bù néng jiāo nǐ, yīnwèi wǒ yě bú huì yóuyǒng.
Li:I would like to learn swimming. Can you teach me?
Zhang: Sorry, I can't teach you. I don't know how to swim, either.
儿子: 我可(以)不可以跟朋友去河边玩?
Érzi: Wǒ kě(yǐ) bù kěyǐ gēn péngyǒu qù hébiān wán?
妈妈:不行, 你还不会游泳, 你不可以去。
Māma: Bù xíng, nǐ hái bú huì yóuyǒng, nǐ bù kěyǐ qù.
Son: Can I go with my friends to the river(side) and have some fun?
Mother: No, you can't. You don't know how to swim yet. You are not allowed to go.
## Level 3 12.9 Related information
### (a) 应该 \+ another modal verb
应该 is the only modal verb that can appear before another modal verb (unless 可能 is considered a modal verb). When it appears before another modal verb, its meaning is 'assumption' or 'estimation', not 'duty' or 'obligation'. Therefore, its negative form is 应该不, not 不应该.
张: 明天晚上的饭局, 你会不会去?
Zhāng: Míngtiān wǎnshàng de fànjú, nǐ huì bú huì qù?
李:应该会, 明天我没有事。你呢? (应该会: estimation)
Lǐ: Yīnggāi huì, míngtiān wǒ méiyǒu shì. Nǐ ne?
张: 我应该不能去, 我太太出国了, 我得在家照顾孩子。 (应该不能: estimation)
Zhāng: Wǒ yīnggāi bù néng qù, wǒ tàitai chūguó le, wǒ děi zài jiā zhàogù háizi.
李: 你应该找人来帮你看孩子。明天是老板的生日, 咱们都应该去。
(应该: social obligation)
Lǐ: Nǐ yīnggāi zhǎo rén lái bāng nǐ kān háizi. Míngtiān shì lǎobǎn de shēngrì, zánmen dōu yīnggāi qù.
Zhang: Will you be at tomorrow evening's dinner party?
Li: I should be there (I estimate that I will be there). I am free tomorrow. How about you?
Zhang: I estimate that I won't be able to go. My wife is out of the country; I have to stay home and take care of the kids.
Li: You should get someone to babysit. Tomorrow is our boss's birthday; we should all go.
### (b) 该不会......吧/该不是......吧
In casual speech, 该不会......吧 (but usually not 应该不) or 该不是......吧 indicates the speaker's assumption of an undesirable situation. The subject before 该不 is not the person making the assumption.
(Situation: Mr Wang has a date with Miss Li. He has been waiting for more than half an hour, but she has not shown up.)
李小姐该不会改变主意了吧!
Lǐ xiǎojiě gāi bú huì gǎibiàn zhǔyì le ba!
Could it be that Miss Li has changed her mind?
(Situation: Ding Xiaolan has never missed a class, but today she is absent. Her teacher thinks this probably means she is sick.)
老师: 丁小兰今天怎么没来上课? 她该不是病了吧!
Lǎoshī: Dīng Xiǎolán jīntiān zěnme méi lái shàng kè? Tā gāi bú shì bìng le ba!
Teacher: How come Ding Xiaolan didn't come to class today? Could it be that she is sick?
### (c) 不能不 and 不得不
不能不 and 不得不 both mean 'to have to'. 得 in 不得不 is pronounced dé.
下雨了, 所以我们不得不改变去野餐的计划, 而留在家里看电视。
Xià yǔ le, suǒyǐ wǒmen bù dé bù gǎibiàn qù yěcān de jìhuà, ér liú zài jiā lǐ kàn diànshì.
It was raining. So we had to change our plan to go for a picnic and stayed home to watch TV.
王: 明天晚上的饭局, 你去不去?
Wáng: Míngtiān wǎnshàng de fànjú, nǐ qù bú qù?
李: 我不想去, 可是老板过生日, 所以不能不去。
Lǐ: Wǒ bù xiǎng qù, kěshì lǎobǎn guò shēngrì, suǒyǐ bù néng bú qù.
Wang: Are you going to tomorrow evening's dinner party?
Li: I don't feel like going, but it's our boss's birthday, so I have to go (I cannot not go).
## Exercises
Choose the proper modal verb for each of the blanks and decide whether the modal verb should be in the positive, negative or interrogative form.
* Level 1 1 丁: 图书馆里 ______ (可以, 得, 必须)吸烟。
张: 好, 我不吸烟。______ (可以, 应该, 能够)喝水呢?
丁: 我想 ______ (应该, 愿意, 能够) ______ (要, 必须, 可以)喝水。
* 2 张: 今天下午, 我和小李 ______ (要, 应该, 肯)去河边玩, 你 _____ (想, 会, 应该)一起去?
王: 我很 ______ (要, 想, 能)去, 可是我想我不 ______ (能, 要, 得)去, 因为我妈妈说, 我还不 ______ (能, 可以, 会)游泳, 所以 ______ (可以, 愿意, 必须)去河边玩。
* 3 李: 小王, 你妹妹真漂亮, 你 ______ (可以, 要, 会)给我们介绍一下?
王: 你 ______ (想, 愿意, 能)认识我妹妹吗? 没问题, 我给你们介绍。 可是, 我妹妹不 ______ (可以, 能, 会)说中文, 你只 ______ (会, 能, 要)跟她说英文。
* 4 王: 老师今天问的那个问题, 你 ________ (会, 得, 肯)回答?
李: 那个问题很容易, 我 ______ (会, 要, 行)回答。
* 5 张: 我家有咖啡, 也有矿泉水, 你 ______ (想, 能, 应)喝哪个?
丁: 我 ______ (想, 肯, 应)喝酒, 有没有啤酒?
张: 医生说, 你身体不好,_______ (该, 肯, 想)喝 酒。你忘了吗?
* Level 2 6 丁: 桌上有咖啡, 你 ______ (要, 可以, 必须)喝杯咖啡?
王: 有没有牛奶? 我不 ______ (肯, 必, 想)喝没有牛奶的咖啡。
丁:______ (应该, 愿意, 必须)有。你去厨房找一找。
* 7 丁: 你知道不知道王老师在哪里?
李: 现在两点半, 我想他现在 _______ (愿意, 必须, 应该)在教室里教书。
丁: 我 ______ (想, 能, 会)问他一个问题; 你想, 我 ______ (可以, 必须, 愿意)现在进教室问他?
李: 我想, 别人正在上课的时候, 我们 ______ (应当, 想, 必须)进他们的 教室。
* 8 张: 朋友请我跟他们一起去游泳的时候, 我总是不 ______ (能, 该, 得)去, 因为我 ______ (要, 会, 行) 游泳。我真 ______ (要, 想, 能)学, 你 ______ (可以, 要, 应该)教我?
王: 对不起, 我很 ______ (要, 愿意, 可以)教你, 可是我 ______ (可以, 能, 应该)教你, 因为我太忙了。小丁, 你 ______ (应该, 能, 会) 教小张?
丁: 我也 ______ (该 会, 能)教他, 因为我也 ______ (该, 会, 能) 游泳。
* 9 张: 老王很 ______ (会, 可以, 肯)作菜, 他作的法国菜特别好吃。
李: 那我 _______ (应该, 能够, 愿意)请他教我作几道他的拿手菜, 因为我正想学作菜呢。
* 10 奇怪, 车怎么 ______ (能, 必, 可以)动了,_____ (该, 会, 能)不是坏 了吧!
# [13
The complement of state and the complement of degree](content.xhtml#bck_Ch013)
A complement is generally defined as a word or phrase that follows a verb or adjective to complete or expand the meaning of that verb or adjective.
Some grammarians do not make the distinction between the complement of degree and the complement of state; they use only the term 'complement of degree'. This is because both are used to indicate the extent to which an action (a verb) is/was/has been performed or the status an adjective has reached.
For those who care to make the distinction, this is how this book distinguishes between the two: a complement of state generally follows a verb; a complement of degree generally follows an adjective (or a verb with the qualities of an adjective).
## A. The complement of state
The complement of state is used to describe (i) one's performance (outcome) in a task or activity, or (ii) how one regularly (habitually) performs an action. Therefore, 怎么样 is used to ask an open-ended question.
得 (de) must immediately follow the verb, and the complement that follows 得 is frequently an adjective. In a simple positive statement, a degree adverb such as 很 (hěn), 真 (zhēn), 非常 (fēicháng), 太 (tài), 最 (zuì) or 更 (gèng) should precede the adjective. In a negative statement, a degree adverb is optional.
## Level 2 13.1 The basic pattern
When the verb is a single word that does not need an object, the word order is: verb + 得 \+ complement. This is the basic pattern.
张: 昨天的百米比赛, 王中跑得怎么样? (怎么样: asking about the outcome)
Zhāng: Zuótiān de bǎimǐ bǐsài, Wáng Zhōng pǎo de zěnmeyàng?
李: 他跑得非常快, 所以他是第一名。
Lǐ: Tā pǎo de fēicháng kuài, suǒyǐ tā shì dì yī míng.
Zhang: How (well) did Wang Zhong perform in yesterday's 100 m race?
Li: He ran extremely fast; therefore, he came first.
老师: 这个问题, 你回答得不对, 你再想一下。 (回答 is a disyllabic word.)
Lǎoshī: Zhè ge wèntí, nǐ huídá de bú duì, nǐ zài xiǎng yíxià.
学生: 对不起, 我昨天晚上睡得(很)不好, 现在我的脑子不清楚。
Xuéshēng: Duìbùqǐ, wǒ zuótiān wǎnshàng shuì de (hěn) bù hǎo, xiànzài wǒde nǎozi bù qīngchǔ.
Teacher: You answered this question incorrectly. Think again.
Student: Sorry, I slept badly last night. Right now, my brain is not clear. (I can't think clearly.)
## Level 2 13.2 When the verb takes an object
When the verb is a compound verb or has an object, the complement should not follow the object (a noun), but should still follow the verb. There are four different patterns. All four patterns show that 得 is immediately after the verb.
### (a) The verb-repetition pattern
The verb-repetition pattern is: subject + verb \+ object + verb \+ 得 \+ complement.
王老师说话说得太快, 所以我总是不懂他在说什么。
Wáng lǎoshī shuōhuà shuō de tài kuài, suǒyǐ wǒ zǒngshì bù dǒng tā zài shuō shénme.
Teacher Wang speaks too fast, so I never understand what he is saying.
小李游泳游得非常好, 想学游泳的人, 去找他。
Xiǎo Lǐ yóuyǒng yóu de fēicháng hǎo, xiǎng xué yóuyǒng de rén, qù zhǎo tā.
Xiao Li swims extremely well. Those who want to take swimming lessons, go see him.
### (b) The verb-omission pattern
The verb-omission pattern is: subject + object \+ verb \+ 得 \+ complement.
Because the verb must appear before 得, it can be omitted before it is repeated. Therefore, it would seem as though the object appears before the verb when this pattern is used.
王明(学)语法学得很认真,(写)字写得很好看; 真是个好学生。
Wáng Míng (xué) yǔfǎ xué de hěn rènzhēn, (xiě) zì xiě de hěn hǎokàn; zhēn shì ge hǎo xuéshēng.
Wang Ming studies grammar conscientiously and he writes characters well (his handwriting is pretty). He really is a good student.
李: 小丁(唱)歌唱得不错,(跳)舞也跳得很好; 他真有才华。
Lǐ: Xiǎo Dīng (chàng) gē chàng de búcuò, (tiào) wǔ yě tiào de hěn hǎo; tā zhēn yǒu cáihuá.
王: 你知道吗? 他(打)网球也打得相当好呢。
Wáng: Nǐ zhīdào ma? Tā (dǎ) wǎngqiú yě dǎ de xiāngdāng hǎo ne.
Li: Xiao Ding sings (songs) well and he dances well, also. He is really talented.
Wang: Did you know? He also plays tennis quite well.
### (c) The 的-insertion pattern
The 的-insertion pattern is: subject + (的) object \+ verb \+ 得 \+ complement. This pattern is used when the verb is omitted. The inserted 的 is optional.
小李学过日文跟法文。他(的)日文说得很不错, 可是他(的)法文说得不太好。
Xiǎo Lǐ xué guo Rìwén gēn Fǎwén. Tā(de) Rìwén shuō de hěn búcuò, kěshì tā(de) Fǎwén shuō de bú tài hǎo.
Xiao Li has studied Japanese and French. He speaks Japanese quite well; but he does not speak French very well.
我妈妈(的)中国菜作得非常好,她(的)法国点心作得更好。
Wǒ māma (de) Zhōngguó cài zuò de fēicháng hǎo, tā(de) Fǎguó diǎnxīn zuò de gèng hǎo.
My mother makes Chinese food very well; she makes French pastries even better. (Meaning: My mother makes good Chinese food; she makes even better French pastries.)
### (d) The pre-position pattern
In the pre-position pattern, the object is moved to the beginning of the sentence (pre-posed). This leaves 得 immediately after the verb. The pattern is: object + subject + verb + 得 \+ complement.
The pre-position pattern is normally used to emphasize the prominence of the object or to show a contrast between two objects. It is not unusual to have a comma after the pre-posed object.
中文, 李明说得好; 法文, 王中说得好。 (Both a contrast and a comparison are implied.)
Zhōngwén, Lǐ Míng shuō de hǎo; Fǎwén, Wáng Zhōng shuō de hǎo.
Li Ming speaks Chinese better (than Wang Zhong); Wang Zhong speaks French better (than Li Ming).
* When the object is considered long (such as when a relative clause is used), the pre-position pattern is preferred
老师问的问题, 你回答得十分好。 (老师问的问题 is the object of 回答.)
Lǎoshī wèn de wèntí, nǐ huídá de shífēn hǎo.
You answered the question that the teacher asked extremely well.
### (e) Summary of patterns: Complement of state
The following table is a summary of these patterns.
## Level 2/3 13.3 Related information
### (a) The negative form
The negativity of a sentence in English and the negativity of a sentence with the complement of state in Chinese are expressed differently. In English, the negative word 'not' goes with the verb, whereas 不 in a Chinese sentence appears in the complement.
English: Mr Wang does not speak English very fluently.
Chinese: 王先生(的)英文说得不太流利。
Wáng xiānsheng (de) Yīngwén shuō de bú tài liúlì.
(Incorrect: 王先生不说英文说得很流利。)
English: I didn't sleep well last night.
Chinese: 我昨天晚上睡得不好。
Wǒ zuótiān wǎnshàng shuì de bù hǎo.
(Incorrect: 我昨天晚上没有睡得很好。)
### (b) Asking questions
怎么样 is used to asked an open-ended question. A yes–no question (either an affirmative–negative or a 吗 question) can be asked as well. When an affirmative–negative question is asked, it is the complement, not the verb, that has the affirmative and negative parts.
妈妈: 李老师, 请问, 我儿子中文学得怎么样?
Māma: Lǐ lǎoshī, qǐng wèn, wǒ érzi Zhōngwén xué de zěnme yàng?
老师: 他的字写得很漂亮; 日常会话也说得很流利。
Lǎoshī: Tāde zì xiě de hěn piàoliàng; rìcháng huìhuà yě shuǒ de hěn liúlì.
妈妈: 今天的考试, 他考得好不好?(Do not say 他考不考得很好?)
Māma: Jīntiān de kǎoshì, tā kǎo de hǎo bù hǎo?
老师: 他考得不太好, 因为他今天来得太晚了。(Do not say 他不考得很好.)
Lǎoshī: Tā kǎo de bú tài hǎo, yīnwèi tā lái de tài wǎn le.
Mother: Teacher Li, may I please ask: How well does my son learn Chinese? (How is my son doing in the Chinese class?)
Teacher: He writes pretty characters; (his handwriting is pretty). He also speaks daily conversations fluently.
Mother: Did he do well on today's test?
Teacher: He did not do very well, because he arrived late today.
### (c) Location of adverbs
Adverbs (such as 都, 也, 总是, 一定 and 常常) other than degree adverbs (such as 很, 非常, 太 and 真) should appear before the repeated verb or before the complement. Do not put adverbs before the object or before the verb that can be omitted.
English: Both Xiao Wang and Xiao Li play tennis quite well.
Verb-repetition: 小王、 小李(打)网球都打得不错。 (都 is before the repeated verb.)
Xiǎo Wáng, Xiǎo Lǐ dǎ wǎngqiú dōu dǎ de búcuò.
小王、 小李(打)网球打得都不错。 (都 is before the complement.)
Xiǎo Wáng, Xiǎo Lǐ dǎ wǎngqiú dǎ de dōu búcuò.
Incorrect: 小王、 小李都打网球打得不错。 (都 is before the omissible verb.)
Verb-omission: 小王、 小李网球都打得不错。(= 小王, 小李网球打得都不错。)
Incorrect: 小王、 小李都网球打得不错。 (都 is before the object.)
### (d) Implied comparison
When no degree adverb precedes the adjective, a comparison between two situations is implied.
张: 我应该请谁教我游泳? 小王还是小李?
Zhāng: Wǒ yīnggāi qǐng shéi jiāo wǒ yóuyǒng? Xiǎo Wáng háishì Xiǎo Lǐ?
丁: 小李游得快, 请他教你。
Dīng: Xiǎo Lǐ yóu de kuài. Qǐng tā jiāo nǐ.
Zhang: Whom should I ask to be my swimming coach? Xiao Wang or Xiao Li?
Ding: Xiao Li swims faster. Ask him to teach you.
### (e) Relative clauses
A degree adverb is not necessary when the complement of state is in a relative clause unless the meaning of the degree word is necessary.
晚上睡得晚的人往往早上也起得比较晚。 (No need to say 晚上睡得很晚的人.)
Wǎnshàng shuì de wǎn de rén wǎngwǎng zǎoshàng yě qǐ de bǐjiào wǎn.
Those who go to bed late at night usually get up rather late as well.
篮球教练: 我们需要长得高的人来参加篮球队。
Lánqiú jiàoliàn: Wǒmen xūyào zhǎng de gāo de rén lái cānjiā lánqiú duì.
王老师: 我们班的李明长得很高。我去叫他来跟你谈。
Wáng Lǎoshī: Wǒmen bān de Lǐ Míng zhǎng de hěn gāo. Wǒ qù jiào tā lái gēn nǐ tán.
Basketball coach: We need people who are tall (literally: grow tall) to join the basketball team.
Teacher Wang: Li Ming in my class is tall (grows tall). I will ask him to come and talk to you.
## Level 2/3 13.4 Comparing with other structures
### (a) The complement of state vs. the complement of potential
In cases where no degree adverb is present and, at the same time, the sentence does not imply a comparison or does not contain a relative clause, the adjective may be functioning as a complement of potential.
☞ See 18.1 for the basic structure of the complement of potential.
妈妈: 小明, 去洗碗。
Māma: Xiǎomíng, qù xǐ wǎn.
爸爸: 别叫他去洗! 他总是洗得不干净。我洗得干净, 我去洗吧! (洗得不干净 is the complement of state. 洗得干净 is the complement of potential.)
Bàba: Bié jiào tā qù xǐ! Tā zǒngshì xǐ de bù gānjìng. Wǒ xǐ de gānjìng, wǒ qù xǐ ba!
Mother: Xiaoming, go wash the dishes.
Father: Don't ask him to wash the dishes. He never does a good job. (He never gets them clean.) I can do a good job. (I can get them clean.) Let me go do the dishes.
### (b) The complement of state vs. adverbial modifier
The majority of sentences with a complement of state can be translated into English sentences with an adverb; however, not all English sentences with an adverb will be translated into Chinese sentences with a complement of state.
我爷爷岁数大了, 他走路走得很慢。(This is habitual.)
Wǒ yéye suìshù dà le, tā zǒulù zǒu de hěn màn.
My grandfather is old; he walks slowly.
Compare: 别急, 时间还很多, 今天咱们可以慢慢地走。(This is not habitual.)
Bié jí, shíjiān hái hěn duō, jīntiān zánmen kěyǐ mànmàn de zǒu.
Don't be in such a hurry. There is still plenty of time. Today we can walk slowly.
Since a complement of state is used to describe the outcome of an action or a habitual action, the expression 'slowly' in 'today we can walk slowly' is not represented by a complement of state in Chinese. Instead, it is an adverbial modifier.
☞ See 19.5 for detailed explanations and comparisons.
### (c) The complement of state vs. the complement of result
In cases where the adjective follows the verb without 得, the adjective is not functioning as the complement of state and may be functioning as a complement of result. The complement of result should not have a degree adverb such as 很.
☞ See 17.7 for more information on the complement of result.
English: I've heard what he said clearly. You don't have to repeat it.
Chinese #1: 他说的话, 我听得很清楚, 你不必重复。 (很清楚 is the complement of state.)
Tā shuō de huà, wǒ tīng de hěn qīngchǔ, nǐ búbì chóngfù.
(The negative of 听得很清楚 is 听得不清楚.)
Chinese #2: 他说的话, 我听清楚了, 你不必重复。 (清楚 is the complement of result.)
Tā shuō de huà, wǒ tīng qīngchǔ le, nǐ búbì chóngfù.
(The negative of 听清楚了 is 没有听清楚.)
### (d) The use of 多 and 少 after a verb
* When 多 and 少 function as adjectives, they can be used in the complement of state
我今天午饭吃得太多, 所以下午上课的时候, 很想睡觉。
Wǒ jīntiān wǔfàn chī de tài duō, suǒyǐ xiàwǔ shàng kè de shíhòu, hěn xiǎng shuìjiào.
Today I ate too much for lunch, so I was sleepy when I was in class in the afternoon.
* When 多 and 少 function as nouns, 得 is not used after the verb
(Situation: A hostess urges her guest to eat more.)Š
主人: 怎么吃得这么少? 再吃一些吧! (这么少 is the complement of state. 少 is an adjective. 这么 is the degree adverb. Therefore, it is necessary to have 得 after 吃.)
Zhǔrén: Zěnme chī de zhème shǎo? Zài chī yìxiē ba!
客人: 不了, 谢谢, 我已经吃了很多了。 (很多 is functioning as a noun, meaning 很多东西. Therefore, 得 is not used.)
Kèrén: Bù le, xièxie, wǒ yǐjīng chī le hěn duō le.
Hostess: How come you ate so little? Eat some more!
Guest: No, thanks! I already ate a lot (of food).
## B. The complement of degree
The complement of degree is used to describe the extent (or degree) that an emotional or physical status has reached. The emotional and physical status is usually indicated by an adjective (or a verb that has the qualities of an adjective, such as 喜欢). Therefore, the function of the complement of degree is similar to that of a degree adverb, such as 非常, 十分, etc.
## Level 2 13.5 Two patterns
In most cases, 得 precedes the complement of degree. And such a sentence is usually translated into English as 'so + adjective + that + complement'. The complement is usually a complete sentence or a verbal phrase. There are also many fixed expressions with or without 得.
### (a) Some examples of the 'so + adjective + that' expression in English
When the subject of the entire sentence and the subject of the complement of degree are the same, do not repeat the subject in the complement.
王中看到一个老朋友,高兴得跳起来。 (跳起来 is a verbal phrase.)
Wáng Zhōng kàndào yí ge lǎo péngyǒu, gāoxìng de tiào qǐlái.
Wang Zhong saw an old friend; he was so happy that he jumped up.
(Incorrect: 王中看到一个老朋友, 高兴得他跳起来. 他 is 王中; therefore, it can't be used.)
这里的风景美得像一幅画。 (像一幅画 is a verbal phrase.)
Zhèlǐ de fēngjǐng měi de xiàng yì fú huà.
The scenery here is so beautiful that it's like a painting.
(Incorrect: 这里的风景美得它像一幅画. 它 is 风景; therefore, it can't be used.)
公共汽车挤得我简直没办法呼吸。 (我简直没办法呼吸 is a sentence.)
Gōnggòng qìchē jǐ de wǒ jiǎnzhí méi bànfǎ hūxī.
The bus was so crowded that I practically could not breathe.
天气热得大家都没有胃口吃饭。 (大家都没有胃口吃饭 is a sentence.)
Tiānqì rè de dàjiā dōu méiyǒu wèikǒu chī fàn.
The weather is so hot that no one has any appetite.
### (b) Some fixed expressions
There are many fixed expressions with or without 得 that are considered the complements of degree.
* The following are some expressions that are commonly used with 得
我忙得要命, 别来烦我。
Wǒ máng de yàomìng, bié lái fán wǒ.
I am busy to death. Don't bother me.
我整天工作, 现在累得要死。
Wǒ zhěngtiān gōngzuò, xiànzài lèi de yàosǐ.
I worked all day long. Now I am tired to death.
这件大衣还好得很, 你为什么不要了?(好得很 = 很好)
Zhè jiàn dàyī hái hǎo de hěn, nǐ wèishénme bú yào le?
This coat is still good. Why don't you want it anymore?
我听了老王的话以后,气得不得了, 决定以后不再跟他说话。
Wǒ tīng le Lǎo Wáng de huà yǐhòu, qì de bùdeliǎo, juédìng yǐhòu bú zài gēn tā shuōhuà.
After I heard what Lao Wang said, I was angry beyond description. I decided that I won't talk to him anymore.
* The following are some expressions that are commonly used without 得
我饿死了, 咱们找家饭馆吃饭吧!
Wǒ è sǐ le, zánmen zhǎo jiā fànguǎn chī fàn ba.
I am hungry to death (= starving). Let's find a restaurant to eat in.
今天我跑马拉松,累死我了。
Jīntiān wǒ pǎo mǎlāsōng, lèi sǐ wǒ le.
I ran a marathon today. I was tired to death.
老师说, 小明最近进步了很多, 他爸妈听了,高兴极了。
Lǎoshī shuō, Xiǎoming zuìjìn jìnbù le hěn duō, tā bàmā tīng le, gāoxìng jí le.
The teacher said that Xiaoming had improved a lot recently. Hearing this, his parents were extremely happy.
## Exercises
Translate the following sentences into Chinese using the patterns suggested in parentheses.
* Level 1 1 I didn't sleep well last night, so I got up late this morning. (the basic pattern)
* 2 Wang Zhong studies diligently. (the basic pattern) So he always answers the teacher's questions correctly. (the pre-position pattern)
* 3 Both Anna and Wang Zhong dance quite well (= not bad). (the verb-repetition pattern) But I dance even better. (the basic pattern)
* 4 Mrs Li: I heard that both of your children are taking cooking classes (= are learning to cook). Who cooks better? (the 的-insertion pattern)
Mrs Wang: My son cooks French food better and my daughter cooks Chinese food better. (the pre-position pattern)
* 5 My younger brother does not run fast. (the basic pattern) But he swims fast. (the verb-repetition pattern)
* Level 2 6 Wang: Li Ming told me that you speak English fluently. (the verb-omission pattern) Will you teach me (how) to speak English?
Ding: Actually, I speak English poorly. (the 的-insertion pattern) You should go ask someone who speaks fluently to teach you. (the basic pattern)
* 7 Mrs Li: How well does my son learn Chinese? (the verb-omission pattern)
Teacher: He studies conscientiously. (the basic pattern) So, he writes characters beautifully; (the 的-insertion pattern) he also learns grammar well; (the verb-omission pattern); but he still does not speak daily conversation fluently. (the pre-position pattern)
* 8 Mother: You ate too much. (the basic pattern) Don't eat any more. Your father hasn't eaten.
Son: I was hungry to death. You cooked too little food today. (the verb-omission pattern)
* 9 He always drives too fast. (the verb-repetition pattern) His mother told him not to drive too fast; (the basic pattern) he was unhappy.
* 10 He was well-prepared for today's test, (the pre-position pattern) so he did extremely well. (the basic pattern)
* 11 Male: I am so hungry that I could eat an elephant. (complement of degree)
Female: I am also hungry to death. (complement of degree)
* 12 My younger brother did well on today's test (the pre-position pattern), so my parent were extremely happy (complement of degree).
* 13 Teacher: Why did you come so late today? (the basic pattern) Student: Sorry! I did not sleep well (the basic pattern) last night, so I got up too late (the verb-repetition pattern) this morning.
* 14 Father: How did you do on the tests yesterday? (the verb-repetition pattern)
Son: I had two tests yesterday. I did well on the English test, but I did not do well on the Chinese test. (the pre-position pattern)
# [14
The complement of duration](content.xhtml#bck_Ch014)
The complement of duration is used to indicate the period of time or length of time during which an action is/was lasting.
多久 (duō jiǔ) or 多长时间 (duō cháng shíjiān) is used to ask 'how long?' in terms of time, and is frequently used in asking a question with the complement of duration. In addition, 几 (jǐ) can be used to mean 'how many?' as in 几天 (jǐ tiān: 'how many days'), 几年 (jǐ nián: 'how many years'), 几分钟 (jǐ fēnzhōng: 'how many minutes'), 几个钟头 (jǐ ge zhōngtóu: 'how many hours'), etc.
## Level 2 14.1 Word order
There are four patterns and, in all of them, the verb appears before the complement. The verb in this case must indicate an action that can last. The patterns are very similar to those for the complement of state.
☞ See 13.1 and 13.2 for detailed information on the complement of state.
### (a) The basic pattern
The basic pattern is: verb + complement. This pattern is used when the verb does not have an object.
我们每天工作八个小时,休息一个小时。(工作 and 休息 are disyllabic words.)
Wǒmen měi tiān gōngzuò bā ge xiǎoshí, xiūxí yī ge xiǎoshí.
Every day we work for eight hours and we take a break for one hour.
史密斯先生在北京住了十年, 所以他的中国话说得很流利。(住了 can be 住过.)
Shǐmìsī xiānsheng zài Běijīng zhù le shí nián, suǒyǐ tāde Zhōngguóhuà shuō de hěn liúlì.
Mr Smith lived in Beijing for ten years, so he speaks Chinese fluently.
### (b) The verb-repetition pattern
The verb-repetition pattern is: verb \+ object + verb \+ complement. When the verb is a compound verb or has an object, the verb must be repeated before the complement of duration appears.
昨天他跳舞跳了一个晚上, 所以今天早上起得很晚。
Zuótiān tā tiàowǔ tiào le yī ge wǎnshàng, suǒyǐ jīntiān zǎoshàng qǐ de hěn wǎn.
He danced all night last night, so he got up late this morning.
张: 王老师教书教了多长时间了? (To teach is 教书 when the subject matter is not mentioned.)
Zhāng: Wáng lǎoshī jiāoshū jiāo le duō cháng shíjiān le?
李: 他教了快十五年了。 (书 does not have to be mentioned when the situation is in context. This sentence is the basic pattern.)
Lǐ: Tā jiāo le kuài shíwǔ nián le.
Zhang: How long has Teacher Wang been teaching?
Li: He has been teaching for almost 15 years.
### (c) The verb-omission pattern
The verb-omission pattern is: object \+ verb \+ complement.
小李中文学了三年了, 他日文也学了快一年。
Xiǎo Lǐ Zhōngwén xué le sān nián le, tā Rìwén yě xué le kuài yì nián.
Xiao Li has studied Chinese for three years; he has also studied Japanese for almost a year.
我感冒药已经吃了一个星期了, 可是感冒还没好。
Wǒ gǎnmào yào yǐjīng chī le yī ge xīngqī le, kěshì gǎnmào hái méiyǒu hǎo.
I have been taking the cold medicine for a week already, but I have not recovered from my cold yet.
### (d) The insertion pattern
The insertion pattern is: verb \+ complement + (的) \+ object.
* When the verb has an object, the complement of duration can be inserted between the verb and the object. An optional 的 can be used after the complement
妈妈: 小明, 你已经看了两小时(的)电视了, 别再看了。
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ yǐjīng kàn le liǎng xiǎoshí (de) diànshì le, bié zài kàn le.
小明: 让我再看半小时, 好不好?
Xiǎomíng: Ràng wǒ zài kàn bàn xiǎoshí, hǎo bù hǎo?
Mother: Xiaoming, you have already watched TV for two hours; don't watch it anymore.
Xiaoming: Let me watch another half hour, OK?
从美国去中国, 要坐十几个钟头(的)飞机。 (坐飞机: 'to fly')
Cóng Měiguó qù Zhōngguó, yào zuò shí jǐ ge zhōngtóu (de) fēijī.
One will have to fly for over ten hours to get to China from the USA.
* The insertion pattern is used when the object is indefinite or generic. When the object is definite (for example: a word following 这 or 那), it is not proper to use the insertion pattern
English:I waited for that person for ten minutes.
Chinese: 我等那个人等了十分钟。
(Incorrect: 我等了十分钟(的)那个人。)
Wǒ děng nà ge rén děng le shí fēnzhōng.
王明失踪了; 警察找他找了五天, 还是没有找到。(Do not say 警察找了五天的他.)
Wáng Míng shīzōng le; jǐngchá zhǎo tā zhǎo le wǔ tiān, háishì méiyǒu zhǎodào.
Wang Ming had gone missing. The police has been looking for him for five days and they still have not found him.
### (e) The pre-position pattern
In the pre-position pattern, the object of the verb is moved to the beginning of the sentence. After the object has been pre-posed, the remaining part of the sentence is the basic pattern.
老师问的问题, 他想了半天, 还是不会回答。 (老师问的问题 is the object of 想.)
Lǎoshī wèn de wèntí, tā xiǎng le bàntiān, háishì bú huì huídá.
He thought for quite a while about the question that the teacher had asked and he still didn't know how to answer it.
### (f) Summary: Complement of duration
The following table gives a summary of the complement of duration patterns.
## Level 2 14.2 Adjective + complement of duration
The complement of duration can also follow an adjective.
今天这个考试太重要了, 为了这个考试, 我紧张了三个月呢。
Jīntiān zhè ge kǎoshì tài zhòngyào le, wèile zhè ge kǎoshì, wǒ jǐnzhāng le sān ge yuè ne.
Today's exam is too important. I have been nervous about this exam for three months.
## Level 3 14.3 Perfective aspect particle 了 and modal particle 了
The perfective aspect particle 了 can appear after the (repeated) verb to indicate completion; this means the period of time indicated in the complement has elapsed. In addition, a modal particle 了 can appear at the end of the sentence to indicate 'already'. The modal particle 了 also implies a current status.
史密斯先生在北京住了三年了, 所以他会说一点(儿)中国话。
Shǐmìsī xiānsheng zài Běijīng zhù le sān nián le, suǒyǐ tā huì shuō yìdiǎn(er) Zhōngguóhuà.
Mr Smith has been living in Beijing for three years already, so he can speak a little Chinese. (This implies that Mr Smith is currently living in Beijing.)
妈妈: 小明, 你自己说, 你看了几个小时的电视了?
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ zìjǐ shuō, nǐ kàn le jǐ ge xiǎoshí de diànshì le? (The modal particle 了 at the end of the sentence indicates that Xiaoming is watching TV as his mother speaks.)
小明: 我下午念了四小时书, 晚上为什么不能看电视? (There is no 了 after 四小时书 because Xiaoming is not currently studying.)
Xiǎomíng: Wǒ xiàwǔ niàn le sì xiǎoshí shū, wǎnshàng wèishénme bù néng kàn diànshì?
Mother: Xiaoming, you tell me, for how many hours have you been watching TV?
Xiaoming: I studied for four hours in the afternoon; why can't I watch TV in the evening?
## Level 2 14.4 Experiential aspect particle 过
The experiential aspect particle 过 can follow the (repeated) verb. In this case, a modal particle了 is rarely used. This is because 过 indicates past action, whereas the modal particle 了 implies a current situation.
(Situation: Mr Zhang comes back to Beijing, where he lived for several years before.)
张先生以前在北京住过好几年, 所以他对北京的街道很熟。
Zhāng xiānsheng yǐqián zài Běijīng zhù guo hǎo jǐ nián, suǒyǐ tā duì Běijīng de jiēdào hěn shóu.
Mr Zhang lived in Beijing for quite a few years, so he is very familiar with Beijing's streets.
## Level 2 14.5 Perfective aspect particle 了
A perfective aspect particle 了 after the (repeated) verb can imply a past action when no modal particle 了 appears in the sentence.
我上大学的时候,学了一学期法文, 成绩很不好。
Wǒ shàng dàxué de shíhòu, xué le yì xuéqī Fǎwén, chéngjī hěn bù hǎo.
When I was at university, I took French for one term; my grades were very bad.
## Level 2 14.6 Points in time
A length of time (or duration of time) should not be confused with a point in time. A length of time frequently serves as the complement of duration, whereas a point in time serves as a time phrase. The complement of duration appears after the verb; whereas a point in time (time phrase) is either at the beginning of the sentence or before the verbal phrase.
English: Two years ago, I lived in Shanghai for half a year.
Chinese: 两年以前, 我在上海住了(or 住过)半年。
Liǎng nián yǐqián, wǒ zài Shànghǎi zhù le (or zhù guo) bàn nián.
(两年以前 is a time phrase indicating a point in time. 半年 is a complement of duration.)
## Level 2 14.7 Negative sentences
When an action has not happened in a certain length of time or will not happen for a certain length of time, the sentence is no longer one with the complement of duration. In this case, the length of time appears before the verb, not after. This word order is very different from that of an English sentence with a similar meaning.
好久不见!
Hǎo jiǔ bú jiàn!
Long time no see!
为了准备这个重要的考试, 我已经两天没有睡觉了。
Wèile zhǔnbèi zhè ge zhòngyào de kǎoshì, wǒ yǐjīng liǎng tiān méiyǒu shuìjiào le.
In order to study for this important exam, I have not slept in two days.
我决定从今天开始, 我要三天不吃肉。
Wǒ juédìng cóng jīntiān kāishǐ, wǒ yào sān tiān bù chī ròu.
I have decided that, starting today, I won't eat meat for three days.
## Level 3 14.8 When the object is a pronoun or proper noun
There are cases where the complement of duration does not follow the verb. When the object of the verb is a pronoun or a proper noun, the complement of duration follows the object.
请你在这里等我五分钟, 我去跟王老师说几分钟话。 (等五分钟我 is incorrect.)
Qǐng nǐ zài zhèlǐ děng wǒ wǔ fēnzhōng, wǒ qù gēn Wáng lǎoshī shuō jǐ fēnzhōng huà.
Please wait for me here for five minutes. I'm going to talk to Teacher Wang for a few minutes.
我劝了他几个小时, 他还是不肯改变主意。 (我劝了几个小时他 is incorrect.)
Wǒ quàn le tā jǐ ge xiǎoshí, tā háishì bù kěn gǎibiàn zhǔyì.
I tried to persuade him for a couple of hours; he still would not change his mind.
## Level 3 14.9 Instantaneous actions
Certain actions, for example, 来 (lái: 'to come'), 去 (qù: 'to go'), 到 (dào: 'to arrive'), 进 (jìn: 'to enter'), 出 (chū: 'to exit'), 离开 (líkāi: 'to leave'), 下课 (xiàkè: 'class is over'), 结婚 (jiéhūn: 'to get married'), 离婚 (líhūn: 'to divorce'), cannot last. The complement of duration follows the object of the verb if there is an object to the verb. These actions are sometimes referred to as 'instantaneous actions' because they mark clear 'before' and 'after' states.
☞ See 8.4 for information on instantaneous verbs.
了 is not used after these verbs. But a modal particle 了 can be used if 'already' is implied.
下课十分钟了, 你们为什么还坐在教室里? (十分钟 does not follow the verb 下.)
Xiàkè shí fēnzhōng le, nǐmen wèishénme hái zuò zài jiàoshì lǐ?
Class has been over for ten minutes, why are you still sitting in the classroom?
我来北京才三个星期, 有很多有名的地方我还没去过呢。 (三个星期 does not follow 来.)
Wǒ lái Běijīng cái sān ge xīngqī, yǒu hěn duō yǒumíng de dìfāng wǒ hái méi qù guo ne.
I have only been in Beijing for three weeks; there are many famous places I have not been to yet.
王先生跟王太太结婚十年了, 才生第一个孩子。(婚 is a noun. 十年 does not follow 结.)
Wáng xiānsheng gēn Wáng tàitai jiéhūn shí nián le, cài shēng dìyī ge háizi.
Mr and Mrs Wang have been married for ten years already; they just had their first child.
## Level 3 14.10 Verb + complement vs. object + complement
Occasionally, in a sentence with an action that can last, the complement of duration still follows the object, not the verb. In this case, the sentence is interpreted slightly differently.
他学了三年的中文了, 可是只会写几个简单的汉字。
Tā xué le sān nián de Zhōngwén le, kěshì zhǐ huì xiě jǐ ge jiǎndān de Hànzì.
He has studied Chinese for three years, but he only knows how to write a few simple characters.
Compare: 你学中文都三年了, 怎么还不会写自己的中文名字呢?
Nǐ xué Zhōngwén dōu sān nián le, zěnme hái bú huì xiě zìjǐ de Zhōngwén míngzì ne?
It's been three years since you started to study Chinese; how come you still don't know how to write your own name?
## Exercises
Translate the following sentences into Chinese using the patterns suggested in parentheses. Pay attention to the use of 了.
* Level 2 1 Ding: For how many months did you live in Beijing before? (the basic pattern) Li: I never lived in Beijing. But I have been living in Shanghai for eight months now. (the basic pattern)
* 2 Wang: I studied Chinese for four and a half years when I was at university. (the insertion pattern)
Ding: Really? How many years of university did you attend? (the insertion pattern)
Wang: I was at (= attended) university for five years in total. (the basic pattern)
* 3 Wang: I have been thinking about this problem for five hours (the pre-position pattern) and I still don't know how to answer it.
Li: Really? I only thought about it for five minutes before I knew the answer. (the basic pattern)
* 4 Mother: You have been watching TV for almost four hours. (the insertion pattern) Don't watch anymore.
Son: I did homework for the entire afternoon. (the insertion pattern) Please let me watch another half hour. (the basic pattern)
* 5 Chinese: You speak Chinese very well. How long has it been since you came to China?
Foreigner: No, not really. I have been in China for five months. Before coming to China, I studied Chinese for two years. (the insertion pattern)
* Level 3 6 Li: How long will it take to get to school from here by bus (= riding the bus)? (the insertion pattern) Wang: I don't know. I always ride my bicycle to school. I have to ride for 20 minutes every day. (the basic pattern)
* 7 Zhang: I heard that you have studied foreign languages for many years. (the insertion pattern) Is that true?
Li: It's true. I have studied French, Japanese and Spanish. I studied French for ten years. I have studied Japanese for five years and Spanish for three years now. (the pre-position pattern)
* 8 Xiao Wang and his girlfriend have known each other for three years. Lately, they have often fought. His girlfriend has not been talking to him for three weeks.
* 9 It had not been raining for three months. Unexpectedly, it started to rain this week. But once it rained, it rained for three days.
# [15
The complement of quantity](content.xhtml#bck_Ch015)
The complement of quantity can be broken down into two types of complement; each involves a number or an amount. The two types are: the complement of occurrence and the complement of quantitative difference.
It should be noted that (i) some grammarians consider the complement of duration a type of complement of quantity (☞ see Chapter 14 for discussions on the complement of duration) and that (ii) grammarians may use different terminology to refer to the complements of quantity.
## A. The complement of occurrence
The complement of occurrence is used to indicate how many times an action occurs.
## Level 2 15.1 Common words used in the complement of occurrence
次, 遍 and 趟 (cì, biàn, tàng) are the most common words used in the complement of occurrence. All of these words can mean 'time(s)' as in 'twice', 'three times', etc.
### (a) 次 and 遍
次 is usually used for an instantaneous action that does not last, whereas 遍 is used to indicate an action that has an obvious beginning and end. Also, 遍 indicates the same process or experience each time an action is repeated; 次 is used when the process or outcome is not entirely the same.
这本书我已经看了两遍了, 有空的时候, 我想再看一遍。
Zhè běn shū wǒ yǐjīng kàn le liǎng biàn le, yǒu kòng de shíhòu, wǒ xiǎng zài kàn yí biàn.
I have read this book twice already. When I have free time, I want to read it one more time.
李: 你去过几次中国? (去 is an instantaneous action.)
Lǐ: Nǐ qù guo jǐ cì Zhōngguó?
张:去过三次, 我还去过两次香港。
Zhāng: Qù guo sān cì, wǒ hái qù guo liǎng cì Xiānggǎng.
Li: How many times have you been to China?
Zhang: Three times and I have also been to Hong Kong twice.
### (b) 趟
趟 (and 回) is used to indicate the number of trips one makes to a place.
王: 《超人》 这个电影真太好看了, 我已经看过两遍了, 你呢? (看 《超人》 is a specific experience; each time the experience or process is the same since it is the same movie.)
Wáng: 'Chāorén' zhè ge diànyǐng zhēn tài hǎokàn le, wǒ yǐjīng kàn guo liǎng biàn le, nǐ ne?
李: 上星期跑了两趟(两回)电影院, 都没有买到票。
Lǐ: Shàng xīngqī pǎo le liǎng tàng (liǎng huí) diànyǐng yuàn, dōu méiyǒu mǎi dào piào.
Wang: The movie Superman is truly wonderful. I have seen it twice. How about you?
Li: I made two trips to the cinema last week, (but) I didn't get tickets.
## Level 2 15.2 'Bodily movement' words used in the complement of occurrence
A group of words, which are associated with bodily movements, are frequently used in the complement of occurrence. These words are 眼 (yǎn: 'eye', associated with 看/瞪 kàn/dèng: 'to look/to glare'), 脚 (jiǎo: 'foot', associated with 踢 tī: 'to kick'), 拳 (quán: 'fist', associated with 打 dǎ: 'to hit'), 声 (shēng: 'sound, voice', associated with 叫 jiào: 'to call'), 口 (kǒu: 'mouth', associated with 咬 yǎo: 'to bite' or 吃/喝 chī/hē: 'to eat/to drink'), 下 (xià: usually showing a nod or tapping movement), etc.
老张真可恶, 我恨不得踢他一脚,打他两拳。
Lǎo Zhāng zhēn kěwù, wǒ hèn bù dé tī tā yì jiǎo, dǎ tā liǎng quán.
Lao Zhang is really nasty. I really wish I could kick him (once) and hit him with my fist (twice).
我问老师可不可以下课了; 他看了一眼牆上的钟,点了两下头。
Wǒ wèn lǎoshī kě bù kěyǐ xià kè le; tā kàn le yì yǎn qiáng shàng de zhōng, diǎn le liǎng xià tóu.
I asked the teacher if the class could be dismissed; he took a look at the clock on the wall and nodded twice.
## Level 2 15.3 Word order
The word-order rules involving the complement of occurrence are complicated and are dependent on the nature of the object. The following are some basic principles:
### (a) When the object is a pronoun or proper name
When the object of the verb is a pronoun or a proper name, the complement of occurrence follows the pronoun or the proper name. (Note that 这里 (zhèlǐ) and 那里 (nàlǐ) are considered pronouns in Chinese.)
我看了他一眼, 就觉得我不喜欢他。 (他 is a pronoun; 一眼 does not immediately follow 看.)
Wǒ kàn le tā yì yǎn, jiù juéde wǒ bù xǐhuān tā.
I took one look at him and I immediately felt that I didn't like him.
我帮过小明好几次, 可是他只帮过我一次。
Wǒ bāng guo Xiǎomíng hǎo jǐ cì, kěshì tā zhǐ bāng guo wǒ yí cì.
I have helped Xiaoming quite a few times, but he has only helped me once.
### (b) When the object is a place
When the object of the verb indicates a place, it can follow either the verb or the complement of occurrence.
王: 你去过北京几次?(= 你去过几次北京?)
Wáng: Nǐ qù guo Běijīng jǐ cì?
李: 我没去过北京, 可是我去过三次上海。(= 我去过上海三次。)
Lǐ: Wǒ méi qù guo Běijīng, kěshì wǒ qù guo sān cì Shànghǎi.
Wang: How many times have you been to Beijing?
Li: I have not been to Beijing, but I have been to Shanghai three times.
上个月我去了三次长城,两次北京动物园。下星期我想再去动物园一次。
Shàng ge yuè wǒ qù le sān cì Chángchéng, liǎng cì Běijīng dòngwùyuán. Xià xīngqī wǒ xiǎng zài qù dòngwùyuán yí cì.
Last month I went to the Great Wall three times and to Beijing Zoo twice. Next week I want to go to the zoo one more time.
### (c) When the object is definite
When the object of the verb is definite, some flexibility is allowed depending on whether the sentence has a perfect aspect particle 了 or not. Therefore, it is best to pre-pose the definite object when possible, or use the 把 structure.
☞ See Chapter 22 for the 把 structure.
老师: 今天的功课, 你得再写一遍。 (今天的功课 is the pre-posed object.)
Lǎoshī: Jīntiān de gōngkè, nǐ děi zài xiě yí biàn.
学生: 求您别叫我再写一遍这个功课。(= 把这个功课再写一遍。)
Xuéshēng: Qiú nín bié jiào wǒ zài xiě yí biàn zhè ge gōngkè.
Teacher: You have to rewrite today's homework.
Student: I beg you to not make me rewrite this homework.
我看了一眼那张风景明信片(= 我看了那张风景明信片一眼), 就知道我去过那里好几次。 (那里 is a pronoun; therefore, 好几次 does not follow the verb 去.)
Wǒ kàn le yì yǎn nà zhāng fēngjǐng míngxìnpiàn, jiù zhīdào wǒ qù guo nàlǐ hǎo jǐ cì.
I took one look at that scenery postcard and I knew that I had been there several times.
### (d) When the object is indefinite
When the object is indefinite or when the verb is a compound verb, such as 结婚 and 离婚, the complement of occurrence should follow the verb.
王先生结过三次婚, 也离过三次婚; 下个月他又要再结一次。
Wáng xiānsheng jié guo sān cì hūn, yě lí guo sān cì hūn; xià ge yuè tā yòu yào zài jié yí cì.
Mr Wang has been married three times and also divorced three times. Next month, he is going to get married again (one more time).
(Incorrect: 王先生结婚过三次 or 王先生结过婚三次.)
我叫了好几声"救命", 可是没有人来救我。
Wǒ jiào le hǎo jǐ shēng 'Jiù mìng', kěshì méiyǒu rén lái jiù wǒ.
I called out 'Help!' several times, but no one came to rescue me.
## B. The complement of quantitative difference
The complement of quantitative difference is used to indicate the difference after a comparison has been made. It should be noted that English sentences of similar meaning have quite a different word order.
☞ See 24.4 for detailed information on the complement of quantitative difference.
## Level 3 15.4 Precise differences
The difference can be precise and indicated by a number.
我比小李高十公分。
Wǒ bǐ Xiǎo Lǐ gāo shí gōngfēn. (Do not say 我比小李十公分高.)
I am 10 cm taller than Xiao Li.
这栋房子比那栋贵好几倍。
Zhè dòng fángzi bǐ nà dòng guì hǎo jǐ bèi.
This house is several times more expensive than that house.
## Level 3 15.5 Vague differences
The difference can be vague and indicated either by 'a lot/many/much' or 'a little'. The complement of quantitative difference must have at least two characters except when the difference is 一点 or 一些, which can be shortened to 点 or 些.
这本书比那本贵很多(= 贵得多, 贵多了)。
Zhè běn shū bǐ nà běn guì hěn duō (= guì de duō = guì duō le).
This book is much more expensive than that book.
(It is incorrect to say 这本书比那本贵多 since 多 is only one character.)
新宿舍设备比旧宿舍好(一)些, 但价钱贵太多(了), 所以我住旧宿舍。
Xīn sùshè shèbèi bǐ jiù sùshè hǎo (yì) xiē, dàn jiàqián guì tài duō (le), sǔoyǐ wǒ zhù jiù sùshè.
The new dormitory's facilities are a little better than the old dormitory's, but the price is too much more expensive, so I live in the old dormitory.
## Level 3 15.6 多 and 少 as adjectives
Special attention must be paid to comparisons of which the adjective is 多 or 少. Learners are often confused about the juxtaposition of 多 and 少.
我有三百本书, 他只有十几本。我的书比他(的)多得多(= 多很多, 多多了)。
= 他的书比我(的)少得多(= 少很多, 少多了)。
Wǒ yǒu sān bǎi běn shū, tā zhǐ yǒu shí jǐ běn. Wǒde shū bǐ tā(de) duō de duō (= duō hěn duō, duō duō le).
= Tāde shū bǐ wǒ(de) shǎo de duō (= shǎo hěn duō, shǎo duō le).
I have 300 books; he only has 10–20. I have a lot more books than he has.
= He has a lot fewer books than I have.
## Exercises
Translate the following sentences into Chinese.
* Level 1 1 Wang: How many times have you read The Old Man and the Sea?
Li: I have read the English version twice and I have also read the Chinese version once.
* 2 Ding: Have you seen Superman?
Li: I caught (watched) it on TV twice, but each time I didn't finish watching it.
* 3 Yesterday I made two trips to his house, but each time he was not there. Today I will go there one more time.
* 4 Wang Ming was sleeping in class. The teacher called on him twice (meaning: The teacher called his name twice); he didn't hear it. I kicked him twice and he finally woke up.
* 5 Yesterday I wasn't feeling well, and I went to the toilet five or six times.
* 6 Last month, I was ill twice. I went to the hospital to see a doctor five times.
* 7 We asked the teacher to sing that song one more time. He nodded once, took two sips of water and then began to sing.
* 8 I have helped Miss Zhang many times, but she has only thanked me once.
* Level 2 9 Mr and Mrs Wang have been married only half a year, but they have fought ten times already.
* 10 He lied to me a few times, but I have decided to trust him one more time.
* 11 That vendor has cheated tourists quite a few times; therefore, the police have arrested him quite a few times as well.
* 12 Mr Li has been divorced twice. I don't understand why he is planning to marry again (= one more time).
* 13 Husband: I took one bite of the apple and immediately knew it was rotten.
Wife: I only glanced at it (took one look at it) and I already knew.
* 14 Mother: How many times have I told you that smoking is not good for one's health? Now I am going to say it one more time: "Do Not Smoke."
Son: Enough! I have heard these three words hundreds of times.
# [16
The complement of direction](content.xhtml#bck_Ch016)
There are two types of complement of direction: the simple complement of direction and the complex complement of direction. The complement of direction is a word that follows the verb to indicate the direction in which the subject is proceeding.
## A. The simple complements of direction
The simple complements of direction consist of 来 (lái) and 去 (qù). It should be noted that although 来 and 去 can be verbs, as complements, they must follow another verb. The sentence can involve a place or a non-place (person or object/thing).
## Level 2 16.1 With places
When the sentence involves a place, the verb that precedes 来 or 去 is 上 (shàng), 下 (xià), 进 (jìn), 出 (chū), 回 (huí), 过 (guò) or 到 (dào). (The usage of 到 is slightly different from that of the other verbs.) The place can be optional if the context is clear. When it is present, it must appear between the verb and the complement.
上来
to come up | 下来
to come down | 出来
to come out | 进来
to come in | 过来
to come over | 回来
to come back | 到......来
to come
---|---|---|---|---|---|---
* * *
上去
to go up | 下去
to go down | 出去
to go out | 进去
to go in | 过去
to go over | 回去
to go back | 到......去
to go
他们都在楼上, 咱们也上(楼)去吧。 (It is incorrect to say 咱们也上去楼吧.)
Tāmen dōu zài lóushàng, zánmen yě shàng (lóu) qù ba.
They are all upstairs. Let's go up(stairs), too.
李: 老王, 你怎么还不出来? 我在这外面等了十分钟了。
Lǐ: Lǎo Wáng, nǐ zěnme hái bù chū lái? Wǒ zài zhè wàimiàn děng le shí fēnzhōng le.
张: 老王不在这儿, 他已经回(家)去了。 (It is incorrect to say 回去家.)
Zhāng: Lǎo Wáng bú zài zhèr, tā yǐjīng huí (jiā) qù le.
Li: Lao Wang, how come you still haven't come out? I have been waiting here outside for ten minutes already.
Zhang: Lao Wang is not here. He went back (home) already.
### (a) 来 or 去? (Based on the location of the speaker)
Whether to use 来 or 去 depends on where the speaker (我) is located. When the person spoken to is moving towards where the speaker (我) is, 来 should be used. When either the speaker or the person spoken to is moving away from where the speaker is, 去 should be used.
(Situation: Xiao Li and Xiao Zhang are outside the classroom; Xiao Wang is inside.)
王: 小李、 小张, 老师已经进教室来了, 你们也进来吧。
Wáng: Xiǎo Lǐ, Xiǎo Zhāng, lǎoshī yǐjīng jìn jiàoshì lái le, nǐmen yě jìn lái ba.
张: 小李, 小王说, 老师到了, 咱们进教室去吧。
Zhāng: Xiǎo Lǐ, Xiǎo Wáng shuō, lǎoshī dào le, zánmen jìn jiàoshì qù ba.
Wang: Xiao Li, Xiao Zhang, the teacher has come into the classroom. You two come in, too.
Zhang: Xiao Li, Xiao Wang said that the teacher has arrived. Let's go into the classroom.
小丁, 请你过来, 我有话要跟你说。
Xiǎo Dīng, qǐng nǐ guò lái, wǒ yǒu huà yào gēn nǐ shuō.
Xiao Ding, please come over (here). I have something to say to you.
### (b) 来 or 去? (Based on the location of the subject)
When the utterance is made from a third person's point of view, and there is no 我 present in the situation, the use of 来 or 去 is based on where the subject or focus of the sentence is.
小王一看见他女朋友在街对面, 就立刻过(街)去跟她说话。 (小王 is the subject.)
Xiǎo Wáng yí kànjiàn tā nǚ péngyǒu zài jiē duìmiàn, jiù lìkè guò jiē qù gēn tā shuōhuà.
The moment Xiao Wang noticed that his girlfriend was across the street, he immediately went across the street to speak to her.
昨天小明告诉妈妈他今天不会出去, 可是他上午十点起床以后就出(门)去了; 他妈妈买菜回来的时候, 没人给她开门, 她很不高兴。
Zuótiān Xiǎomíng gàosù māma tā jīntiān bú huì chū qù, kěshì tā shàngwǔ shí diǎn qǐ chuáng yǐhòu jiù chū mén qù le; tā māma mǎi cài huí lái de shíhòu, méi rén gěi tā kāi mén, tā hěn bù gāoxìng.
Yesterday Xiaoming had told his mother that he would not go out today. But he got up at 10 o'clock in the morning and then went out (of the door). When his mother came back from grocery shopping, nobody opened the door for her; she was unhappy.
### (c) Exception
When the place in question is the home (or the base) of one of the interlocutors, 来 can be used where 去 normally would be used.
(Situation: Wang is at home and he calls Zhang on the phone.)
王: 小张, 你今天有没有空? 可不可以过来一趟?
Wáng: Xiǎo Zhāng, nǐ jīntiān yǒu méiyǒu kòng? Kě bù kěyǐ guò lái yí tàng?
张: 我晚上有空, 我八点过来, 可以吗?(过去 is also acceptable.)
Zhāng: Wǒ wǎnshàng yǒu kòng, wǒ bā diǎn guò lái, kěyǐ ma?
Wang: Xiao Zhang, do you have time today? Can you come over?
Zhang: I have time in the evening. I'll come over at 8 o'clock, is that OK?
### (d) When the verb is 到
When the verb is 到, a place (the destination in this case) must be inserted between 到 and 来/去. Otherwise, simply use 来 or 去 as the verb without 到.
张: 你什么时候要到中国去?(到中国去 = 去中国)
Zhāng: Nǐ shénme shíhòu yào dào Zhōngguó qù?
李: 我下个月去。欢迎你有空的时候到北京来看我。(到北京来 = 来北京)
Lǐ: Wǒ xià ge yuè qù. Huānyíng nǐ yǒu kòng de shíhòu dào Běijīng lái kàn wǒ.
Zhang: When do you plan to go to China?
Li: I am going next month. You are welcome to come to Beijing to visit me when you have time.
## Level 2 16.2 With non-places
When the sentence involves a person or an object (a thing), verbs frequently used in such a sentence are 拿 (ná: 'to hold'), 带 (dài: 'to carry'), 搬 (bān: 'to move'), 寄 (jì: 'to mail'), 送 (sòng: 'to deliver'), 借 (jiè: 'to borrow'), 打 (电话) (dǎ diànhuà: 'to make phone call'), 开 (车) (kāichē: 'to drive'), 骑 (车/马) (qí chē/mǎ: 'to ride bicycle/horse'), 买 (mǎi: 'to buy'), etc.
### (a) Word order
The following table shows three word-order patterns. The word order is slightly more flexible when the sentence has 了 than when the sentence does not have 了. The person/object tends to be indefinite.
Pattern #1 (with 了) | Verb | 了 | Person/object | 来 or 去
---|---|---|---|---
* * *
Pattern #2 (with 了) | Verb | 来 or 去 | 了 | Person/object
* * *
Pattern #3 (without 了) | Verb | Ø | Person/object | 来 or 去
我一说口渴, 他就给我拿了一杯水来。(= 他就给我拿来了一杯水。)
Wǒ yì shuō kǒu kě, tā jiù gěi wǒ ná le yì bēi shuǐ lái.
As soon as I said I was thirsty, he immediately brought a glass of water to me.
我口渴, 请你给我拿一杯水来, 好不好?(Pattern #3)
Wǒ kǒu kě, qǐng nǐ gěi wǒ ná yì bēi shuǐ lái, hǎo bù hǎo?
I'm thirsty, please bring me a glass of water, OK?
小王请人从法国给我带来了一瓶香水(= 带了一瓶香水来), 所以明天我要给他寄五十块钱去。 (寄五十块钱去 is pattern #3.)
Xiǎo Wáng qǐng rén cóng Fǎguó gěi wǒ dài lái le yì píng xiāngshuǐ, suǒyǐ míngtiān wǒ yào gěi tā jì wǔshí kuài qián qù.
Xiao Wang asked someone to bring me a bottle of perfume from France; so I am going to mail $50 to him tomorrow.
### (b) When the verb is 送
Since 送 has several meanings, it should be noted that when 送 appears before the complement of direction 来/去, it means 'to deliver something' or 'to take someone to a place'.
王先生, 你的司机下午有没有空? 可不可以请他送我去机场?(Pattern #3)
Wáng xiānsheng, nǐde sījī xiàwǔ yǒu méiyǒu kòng? Kě bù kěyǐ qǐng tā sòng wǒ qù jīchǎng?
Mr Wang, is your chauffeur free this afternoon? Can I ask him to take me to the airport?
那家店服务真好, 我打了一个电话去, 他们就送来了我要买的东西。
Nà jiā diàn fúwù zhēn hǎo, wǒ dǎ le yí ge diànhuà qù, tāmen jiù sòng lái le wǒ yào mǎi de dōngxī.
That shop's service was really good. I made a phone call (to them) and they immediately delivered (to me) what I wanted to buy.
### (c) When the verb is 买 or 借
Words such as 买 and 借, which do not carry the meaning of transporting someone or something, can go with 来/去 with the meaning of 'bring' being implied. Two verbs might be necessary in English, the second one being 'bring', but only one is used in Chinese (带, which literally means 'to bring', cannot be used).
妈妈: 你五点就出去了, 为什么现在才回来? 你去哪里了?
Māma: Nǐ wǔ diǎn jiù chū qù le, wèishénme xiànzài cái huí lái? Nǐ qù nǎlǐ le?
儿子: 我到图书馆去了。现在我要上楼去看我借来的漫画书。(借来: to borrow and bring)
Érzi: Wǒ dào túshūguǎn qù le. Xiànzài wǒ yào shàng lóu qù kàn wǒ jiè lái de mànhuà shū.
Mother: You went out at 5 o'clock? Why did you only come back now? Where were you?
Son: I went to the library. Now I am going upstairs to read the comic books that I checked out (and brought back with me).
The following two examples illustrate the difference between 买 and 买来.
张: 我知道你没有词典, 所以我昨天去给你买了一本。
Zhāng: Wǒ zhīdào nǐ méiyǒu cídiǎn, suǒyǐ wǒ zuótiān qù gěi nǐ mǎi le yì běn.
李: 太好了, 谢谢。让我看看。
Lǐ: Tài hǎo le, xièxie. Ràng wǒ kàn kàn.
张: 对不起, 我今天忘了带来。
Zhāng: Duìbùqǐ, wǒ jīntiān wàng le dài lái.
Zhang: I knew you didn't have a dictionary, so I went and bought one for you yesterday.
Li: Great! Thank you. Let me see it.
Zhang: Sorry, I forgot to bring it today.
王英, 我知道你没有汉英词典, 所以我去书店给你买了一本来。
Wáng Yīng, wǒ zhīdào nǐ méiyǒu Hàn Yīng cídiǎn, suǒyǐ wǒ qù shūdiàn gěi nǐ mǎi le yì běn lái.
Wang Ying, I knew you didn't have a Chinese–English dictionary, so I went to the bookshop and bought one for you (and I brought it).
## B. The complex complements of direction
The complex complements of direction are based on the simple complements of direction. There are 13 of them in total.
上来 | 下来 | 进来 | 出来 | 回来 | 过来 | 起来
---|---|---|---|---|---|---
* * *
上去 | 下去 | 进去 | 出去 | 回去 | 过去 | Ø
Since these 13 words are complements, each of them should follow a verb. Similar to the usage of the simple complements of direction, the use of the complex complements of direction can involve a place or a non-place (person/object).
## Level 2/3 16.3 With places
The verbs that are frequently used in such sentences are 走 (zǒu: 'to walk'), 跑 (pǎo: 'to run'), 游 (yóu: 'to swim'), 跳 (tiào: 'to jump'), 穿 (chuān: 'to cross'), 骑 (qí: 'to ride horse or bicycle'), 开 (kāi: 'to drive'), 坐 (zuò: 'to sit; to ride public transportation'), 站 (zhàn: 'to stand'), etc.
* With the use of a verb, a sentence with a complex complement of direction can convey more information than one with a simple complement of direction
(Situation: Wang and Zhang are talking about how late a park is open to the public.)Š
王: 十点以后, 汽车还能进去吗?(进 is the verb; 去 is the simple directional complement.)
Wáng: Shí diǎn yǐhòu, qìchē hái néng jìn qù ma?
张: 车不能开进去了, 不过人还是可以走进去。(开 and 走 are verbs; 进去 is the complement.)
Zhāng: Chē bù néng kāi jìnqù le, búguò rén háishì kěyǐ zǒu jìnqù.
Wang: Can cars go in after 10 o'clock?
Zhang: You cannot drive a car in, but people can still walk in.
* Certain verbs that are used with the complex complement of direction do not convey more meaning than a simple complement of direction. They are just different ways to say the same thing
他一看绿灯亮了, 就立刻穿过马路来跟我说话。(穿过马路来 = 过马路来)
Tā yí kàn lǜ dēng liàng le, jiù lìkè chuān guò mǎlù lái gēn wǒ shuōhuà.
As soon as he noticed that the green light was on (the light was green), he immediately crossed the street to talk to me.
因为这座山不太高, 所以我们就决定爬上山去照相。(爬上山去 = 上山去)
Yīnwèi zhè zuò shān bú tài gāo, suǒyǐ wǒmen jiù juédìng pá shàng shān qù zhàoxiàng.
Because this mountain was not very tall, we decided to climb up to the top to take some photos.
### (a) Word-order
When the place is mentioned, it should appear between the two characters forming the complement.
(Situation: Two friends are on top of a mountain.)
王: 咱们跑下(山)去吧!
Wáng: Zánmen pǎo xià (shān) qù ba!
李: 我光是走上来就累死了, 怎么可能有力气跑?
Lǐ: Wǒ guāngshì zǒu shànglái jiù lèi sǐ le, zěnme kěnéng yǒu lìqì pǎo?
Wang: Let's run down the hill.
Li: Just walking up here, I am already tired to death. How can I possibly have the energy to run?
河上虽然有桥, 可是他决定游过(河)去, 再从桥上走回来。
Hé shàng suīrán yǒu qiáo, kěshì tā juédìng yóu guò (hé) qù, zài cóng qiáo shàng zǒu huílái.
Although there was a bridge on the river, he decided to swim across (to the other side) and to walk back (to this side) on the bridge later.
### (b) 起来 and 上来
起来 does not have a counterpart 起去. Its counterpart is 下去. The difference between 起来 and 上来 lies in the fact that 起来 usually does not indicate an obvious change of altitude, whereas 上来 does.
病人看到医生走进病房来, 就坐起来跟他说话。(The patient had been lying down.)
Bìngrén kàndào yīshēng zǒu jìn bìngfáng lái, jiù zuò qǐlái gēn tā shuōhuà.
The patient saw the doctor enter (walk into) the room, so he sat up and talked to him.
小王一听到这么好的消息, 就高兴得跳起来。
Xiǎo Wáng yì tīngdào zhème hǎo de xiāoxí, jiù gāoxìng de tiào qǐlái.
Once Xiao Wang heard such good news, he was so happy that he jumped up.
Compare: 小兰一看到地上有一只蟑螂, 就吓得跳上椅子去。
Xiǎolán yí kàndào dìshàng yǒu yì zhī zhāngláng, jiù xià de tiào shàng yǐzi qù.
Seeing a cockroach on the floor, Xiaolan was so scared that she jumped onto a chair at once.
### (c) 坐下来 and 坐下去
坐下来 and 坐下去 both mean 'to sit down'. Whether to use 下来 or 下去 depends on whether the speaker is sitting or standing. If the description is given from a third person's point of view, then either 下来 or 下去 can be used.
(Situation: During class, the teacher is standing whereas the students are sitting.)
老师: 王中, 请你站起来回答下一个问题。回答完了, 你就可以坐下去。
Lǎoshī: Wáng Zhōng, qǐng nǐ zhàn qǐlái huídá xià yí ge wèntí. Huídá wán le, nǐ jiù kěyǐ zuò xiàqù.
Teacher: Wang Zhong, please stand up and answer the next question. When you are done answering the question, you can sit down.
(Situation: Wang Zhong has finished answering the question, but he is still standing. Student Li, who is sitting, reminds him that he can sit down.)
李: 王中, 你可以坐下来了。
Lǐ: Wáng Zhōng, nǐ kěyǐ zuò xiàlái le.
Li: Wang Zhong, you can sit down now.
## Level 2/3 16.4 With non-places
When the sentence with the complex complement of direction involves a non-place (person/object), the verbs are the same as those used in the simple complement of direction, e.g. 拿, 带, 搬, 寄, 送, 借, 打 (电话), 开 (车), 骑 (车/马), 买, etc.
### (a) Word order with 了
If 了 is used in the sentence, the word order basically follows the following rules:
**Pattern #1** | Verb | 了 | Person/object | Complement | Ø
---|---|---|---|---|---
* * *
**Pattern #2** | Verb | Complement | 了 | Person/object | Ø
* * *
**Pattern #3** | Verb | First character in the complement | 了 | Person/object | 来 or 去
昨天爸爸下班的时候,请了两个同事回来吃晚饭。 (Pattern #1)
Zuótiān bàba xiàbān de shíhòu, qǐng le liǎng ge tóngshì huílái chī wǎnfàn.
Yesterday when my father got off work, he invited (brought) two co-workers home to eat dinner.
教室里本来只有三把椅子, 刚才小王搬进来了两把, 现在有五把了。 (Pattern #2)
Jiàoshì lǐ běnlái yǒu sān bǎ yǐzi, gāngcái Xiǎo Wáng bān jìlái le liǎng bǎ, xiànzài yǒu wǔ bǎ le.
There were originally three chairs in the classroom; just now, Xiao Wang moved (brought) in two more; so there are five chairs now.
刚才老张忽然说出了一句很奇怪的话来。 (Pattern #3)
Gāngcái Lǎo Zhāng hūrán shuō chū le yí jù hěn qíguài de huà lái.
Lao Zhang suddenly uttered (spoke out) a very strange sentence just now.
### (b) Word order without 了
When the sentence does not need 了, Pattern #2 is not proper. Pattern #1 might be the best choice.
老师: 同学们, 请你们每个人都拿一支笔出来(= 拿出一支笔来)。
Lǎoshī: Tóngxué men, qǐng nǐmen měi ge rén dōu ná yì zhī bǐ chūlái (= ná chū yì zhī bǐ lái).
Teacher: Students, everybody please take a pen out (of your backpack, pencil case, etc.).
### (c) When the object is definite
The three patterns above apply best to indefinite objects. If the object/person is definite, it would be better to pre-pose the object/person or to use the 把 structure.
外面有两张桌子, 园的那张, 请你搬进来, 好吗? (The object is pre-posed.)
Wàimiàn yǒu liǎng zhāng zhuōzi, yuán de nà zhāng, qǐng nǐ bān jìnlái, hǎo ma?
There are two tables outside. Would you please move the round one inside?
医生: 你爷爷可以出院了, 你现在就可以把他带回家去了。
Yīshēng: Nǐ yéye kěyǐ chūyuàn le, nǐ xiànzài jiù kěyǐ bǎ tā dài huí jiā qù le.
Doctor: Your grandfather can leave the hospital. You can take him home now.
## C. Extended or abstract meanings of the complex complement of direction
## Level 2 16.5 Extended or abstract meanings based on the idea of direction
Some of the complex complements of direction have extended or abstract meanings which do not explicitly indicate a direction but are based on the idea of direction.
医生们花了十几个小时, 终于把他的命救回来了。
Yīshēng men huā le shí jǐ ge xiǎoshí, zhōngyú bǎ tāde mìng jiù huílái le.
The doctors spent over ten hours and finally saved him (brought his life back from death).
妈妈叫我把圣诞礼物都包起来。
Māma jiào wǒ bǎ Shèngdàn lǐwù dōu bāo qǐlái.
My mother asked me to wrap up all the Christmas gifts.
## Level 3 16.6 Frequently used complements of direction with extended or abstract meanings
The following are some of the frequently used complex complements of direction that have extended or abstract meanings:
### (a) 起来: beginning something unexpected
起来 can indicate the beginning of an action; the subtle implication is that it is somewhat unexpected for this to happen. The object, if there is one, appears between 起 and 来.
老师话还没有说完, 学生就鼓起掌来。 (鼓掌 is a compound verb; 掌 means 'palms'.)
Lǎoshī huà hái méiyǒu shuō wán, xuéshēng jiù gǔ qǐ zhǎng lái.
The teacher had not finished talking and the students already began to applaud.
王小姐学了二十年芭蕾舞, 最近却跳起现代舞来。
Wáng xiǎojiě xué le èrshí nián bāléwǔ, zuìjìn què tiào qǐ xiàndài wǔ lái.
Miss Wang studied ballet for 20 years; but she has recently started to do modern dance.
### (b) 起来: bringing something to a focused point
起来 can imply bringing things or people to a focused point or a fixed position.
他贪污了一笔钱, 现在被关起来了。
Tā tānwū le yì bǐ qián, xiànzài bèi guān qǐlái le.
He embezzled a large sum of money. Now he's been locked up.
咱们把脑力集中起来, 一定可以想出好办法来。
Zánmen bǎ nǎolì jízhōng qǐlái, yídìng kěyǐ xiǎng chū hǎo bànfǎ lái.
Let's gather together our brain power. We can definitely think up a good solution.
### (c) Verb + 起来 \+ adjective
Verb + 起来 can be followed by an adjective to imply what it's like when the action is being performed. It is possible to have an object between 起 and 来.
爷爷虽然八十岁了, 可是说起话来还很大声,走起路来也很快。
Yéye suīrán bāshí suì le, kěshì shuō qǐ huà lái hái hěn dàshēng, zǒu qǐ lù lái yě hěn kuài.
My grandfather is already 80 years old, but he is loud when speaking and fast when walking.
这件事说起来简单,做起来很不容易。
Zhè jiàn shì shuō qǐlái jiǎndān, zuò qǐlái hěn bù róngyì.
This matter is simple when you talk about it, but is very difficult when you (try to) do it.
### (d) Verb indicating a sense + 起来 \+ adjective
Verbs indicating senses, such as to look (看: kàn), to smell (闻: wén), to taste (尝: cháng), to touch (摸: mō), to listen (听: tīng), can appear before 起来 to form a verbal phrase which will be followed by an adjective.
Learners who are English speakers tend to forget the use of 起来 in such phrases since verbs indicating senses are immediately followed by adjectives in English.
他做的菜,看起来漂亮,闻起来也很香, 可是吃起来不好吃。
Tā zuò de cài, kàn qǐlái piàoliàng, wén qǐlái yě hěn xiāng, kěshì chī qǐlái bù hǎochī.
The food he made looked appealing, smelled good, but tasted bad.
这件大衣,摸起来很软, 可是穿起来不舒服。
Zhè jiàn dàyī, mō qǐlái hěn ruǎn, kěshì chuān qǐlái bù shūfú.
This coat feels soft (when you touch it), but it's not comfortable when you wear it.
### (e) 下去: continuation
下去 can indicate the continuation of a situation or action. In this case, 下去 must immediately follow the verb.
你别插嘴, 让他说下去(= 让他把话说下去)。
Nǐ bié chāzuǐ, ràng tā shuō xiàqù.
Don't interrupt! Let him continue (talking).
只要是一个生命, 就有活下去的权利。
Zhǐyào shì yí ge shēngmìng, jiù yǒu huó xiàqù de quánlì.
As long as it's a life, it has the right to continue living.
### (f) 下来: gradual change from light to dark, etc.
下来 can indicate a change from an earlier status to a current status. The change is usually gradual and from a brighter, higher, faster, etc. status to a darker, lower, slower, etc. status.
过了下午六点, 天就黑下来了。
Guò le xiàwǔ liù diǎn, tiān jiù hēi xiàlái le.
After 6 p.m., the sky (gradually) becomes dark.
火车进了站, 速度就会慢下来。
Huǒchē jìn le zhàn, sùdù jiù huì màn xiàlái.
After the train has entered the station, the speed will slow down.
### (g) 起来: gradual change from dark to light, etc.
If the change goes from a darker, lower, slower, etc. status to a brighter, higher, faster, etc. status, the complement is usually 起来.
我最近太忙, 没空做饭, 天天在外面吃, 所以没多久就胖起来了。
Wo zuìjìn tài máng, méi kòng zuòfàn, tiāntiān zài wàimiàn chī, suǒyǐ méi duō jiǔ jiù pàng qǐlái le.
Recently, I have been too busy. I have no time to cook and eat out every day. So I soon put on weight.
我妈妈一生气, 说话的声音就会大起来。
Wǒ māma yì shēngqì, shuōhuà de shēngyīn jiù huì dà qǐlái.
As soon as my mother gets angry, her voice will become louder.
## Exercises
I Fill in the blanks using a verb and a simple complement of direction (来/去) based on the context provided in the sentence. English translations are not provided so as to avoid directly giving information about the answer. Bold-face expressions provide key information about the answer. For English translations, see the 'key to exercises' section.
Example 你看, 安娜跟王明从山上 下 来 了。
Nǐ kàn, Ānnà gēn Wáng Míng cóng shān shàng xià lái le.
Look, Anna and Wang Ming have come down from the mountain.
* Level 1 1安娜: 你的男朋友在对面叫你, 你为什么不 ____ ____ 呢? 小兰: 他是男的, 应该他 ____ ____。安娜: 要是你不 ____ ____, 他也不 ____ ____, 你们就不能谈话了。
* 2 你看, 他们都在山上, 我们也 ____ ____ 吧!
* 3 (妈妈给小明打电话。)
妈妈: 小明, 大家都在家里等你一起吃饭, 你为什么还不 ____ ____ 呢?
* 4 上星期我的好朋友李中从上海 ____ ____ 了一封信, 他在信上问我什么时候可以 ____ ____ ____ ____(= 去那里)看他。
* 5 我听说你喜欢吃法国点心, 所以我去店里给你 ____ ____ 了一些, 都在厨房里, 你去吃吧!
* 6 上星期我给爸爸 ____ ____ 了一封信, 请他下个月来中国看我的时候, 给我 ____ 一本汉英词典 ____ 。昨天爸爸 ____ 了一个电话 ____, 告诉我他不能 ____ ____ ____ ____(= 来中国)看我了, 所以我要的词典, 他会 ____ ____。(send by mail)
* 7 今天我请几个朋友来我家开派对, 每个朋友都 ____ ____了一个他们在家做的菜, 但是小李去店里 ____ 了一瓶酒 ____。
* 8 汽车已经在外面等我们了, 我们快 ____ ____ 吧。
* 9 我在楼上等了他半个小时, 他还没有 ____ ____, 所以我就 ____ ____找他; 可是他的朋友告诉我他已经 ____ ____ ____ (return home) 了。
* 10 下雨了, 你为什么还站在外面, 快 ____ ____ 吧!
* 11 别的同学都 ____ 教室 ____ 了, 你为什么还站在这里, 你也快 ____ ____吧!
* 12 王先生, 你的司机现在有没有空? 你可不可以叫他开车 ____ 我 ____ 机场?
* 13 (王先生比平常晚一小时回家, 王太太在家等他。)王太太: 你怎么现在才 ____ ____? 你饿了吗? 厨房里有很多菜, 我去给你 ____ ____。王先生: 谢谢你。我想问你, 明天我可不可以 ____ 一个朋友 ____ 吃晚饭?
II Fill in the blanks using a verb and a complex complement of direction, based on the context provided in the sentence. The choice of the verb may be flexible in some cases.
Example 他一看到我在楼下, 就从楼上 走(or 跑)下来 了。
Tā yí kàn dào wǒ zài lóu xià, jiù cóng lóu shàng zǒu ( **or** pǎo)xiàlái le.
As soon as he saw that I was downstairs, he immediately walked (or ran) down (from upstairs).
* Level 2 1 你别站在那里了, 快 ____ ____ ____ 休息休息吧! (说话的人也站着。)
* 2 这家小吃店人太多了, 我不想在这里吃, 我们 ____ 一些小吃 ____ 家 ____ 吃, 好不好?
* 3 这个人从十楼 ____ ____ ____, 所以他很快就死了。(说话的人在大楼外面。)
* 4 十点了, 饭馆里还有很多客人在吃饭,从外面又 ____ ____ ____ 几个人, 今天生意真好!
* 5 我每天下午都 ____ 我的狗 ____ ____ 玩。
* 6 在中国, 老师一进教室, 小学生就会从椅子上 ____ ____ ____ 说"老师好。"
* 7 你看,山上有一个漂亮的亭子, 咱们 ____ ____ 山 ____ 照几张相吧!
* 8 爸爸每次出国, 都会给我 ____ 礼物 ____ ____。
* 9 河上有一条桥, 我打算 ____ (swim) ____ ____, 再从桥上 ____ ____ ____。
* 10 绿灯一亮, 他就很快地 ____ ____ 马路 ____ 跟我说话。
* 11 老师: 你们的功课都在我这里, 下课以后, 别忘了 ____ ________。
* 12 今天我不能跟你们去看电影, 有一个电子邮件, 我今天一定要 ____ ________。
# [17
The complement of result](content.xhtml#bck_Ch017)
In Chinese, there are some disyllabic words that are actually composed of a verb and a complement of result. The verb indicates the effort; the verb and the complement following it together show that the effort has produced a result. The complement of result is generally either another verb or an adjective.
Nothing should be inserted between the verb and the complement of result unless a complement of potential is formed. (☞ See 18.1 for details of the complement of potential.) Should the sentence need an aspect particle 了/过 (le/guo), or if the verb has an object, the 了/过 or the object should appear after the complement of result, not after the verb. Sometimes, the object can be pre-posed.
## Level 2 17.1 Effort vs. effort and result
The difference between an effort and an effort plus its result is frequently indicated by using two different words in English. In Chinese, the difference is indicated by the presence of the complement of result.
王: 你在做什么?
Wáng: Nǐ zài zuò shénme?
张: 我在找我的笔记本。 (找 indicates the effort.)
Zhāng: Wǒ zài zhǎo wǒde bǐjìběn.
(五分钟以后)
(Wǔ fēnzhōng yǐhòu)
王: 笔记本, 你找到了吗? (到 indicates the result.)
Wáng: Bǐjìběn, nǐ zhǎo dào le ma?
张:找到了。
Zhāng: Zhǎodào le.
Wang: What are you doing?
Zhang: I am looking for my notebook.
(Five minutes later)
Wang: Did you find that notebook? (Have you found that notebook?)
Zhang: I found it.
李: 你看, 树上有一只彩色的鸟。 (看 indicates the effort.)
Lǐ: Nǐ kàn, shùshàng yǒu yì zhī cǎisè de niǎo.
丁: 是吗? 我怎么没有看见? (见 indicates the result.)
Dīng: Shìma? Wǒ zěnme méiyǒu kàn jiàn?
Li: Look! There is a multi-colored bird in the tree.
Ding: Is that so? How come I didn't see it?
## Level 1 17.2 The negative form
The negative form of 'verb + result' is normally '没 (有) (méiyǒu) + verb + result'. To ask an affirmative–negative (or yes–no) question, use 'verb + result + (了) 没有?' or 'verb + result + 了吗 (le ma)?'
王小姐上个星期才开始学开车, 她还没有学会呢。 (学 is the effort; 会 is the result.)
Wáng xiǎojiě shàng ge xīngqī cái kāishǐ xué kāichē, tā hái méiyǒu xué huì ne.
Miss Wang only started to take driving lessons last week; she hasn't learned how to drive yet.
李: 老师问的问题, 你答对(了)没有? (答 is the effort; 对 is the result.)
Lǐ: Lǎoshī wèn de wèntí, nǐ dá duì (le) méiyǒu?
张: 唉! 答错了。你呢?(错 is the result.)
Zhāng: Ài! Dá cuò le. Nǐ ne?
李: 我也没有答对。
Lǐ: Wǒ yě méiyǒu dá duì.
Li: Did you correctly answer the question that the teacher asked?
Zhang: Sigh! I answered it wrong. How about you?
Li: I didn't answer it correctly either.
王: 老师说的话, 你听清楚了吗? (听 is the effort; 清楚 is the result.)
Wáng: Lǎoshī shuō de huà, nǐ tīng qīngchǔ le ma?
丁: 他说得太小声了, 我没(有)听清楚。
Dīng: Tā shuō de tài xiǎoshēng le, wǒ méi(yǒu) tīng qīngchǔ.
Wang: Did you hear clearly what the teacher said?
Ding: He spoke too softly; I did not hear it clearly.
## Level 1 17.3 Use of 不 in the negative form
Occasionally, 不 (bù) can be used in the negative form of 'verb + result'. This is usually used to indicate a lack of good effort, which leads to a lack of result.
王: 你在做什么?
Wáng: Nǐ zài zuò shénme?
张: 我在记生词呢。要是我今晚不把这些生词都记住, 明天的考试, 我一定会考得很差。 (记 is the effort of trying to remember; 住 is the result of actually remembering.)
Zhāng: Wǒ zài jì shēngcí ne. Yàoshì wǒ jīnwǎn bù bǎ zhè xiē shēngcí dōu jì zhù, míngtiān de kǎoshì, wǒ yídìng huì kǎo de hěn chà.
Wang: What are you doing?
Zhang: I am trying to memorize vocabulary words. If I don't actually memorize all these words this evening, I will definitely do badly on tomorrow's test.
## Level 2 17.4 Location of objects
The object of the verb should follow the complement of result or be pre-posed. It should not immediately follow the verb.
昨天我收到(了)一封小王寄来的信。
Zuótiān wǒ shōu dào (le) yì fēng Xiǎo Wáng jì lái de xìn.
Yesterday I received a letter from Xiao Wang.
那本畅销书, 我一直没有买到, 因为早就卖完了。
Nà běn chàngxiǎo shū, wǒ yìzhí méiyǒu mǎi dào, yīnwèi zǎo jiù mài wán le.
I have not succeeded in purchasing that best-selling book because it had been long sold out.
## Level 2 17.5 Location of aspect particles
The aspect particle 过/了 (guo/le) follows the complement of result, not the verb. Also, 了 can be optional when the object follows the complement.
法文老师说的故事, 我以前从来没听懂过, 可是他今天说的, 我居然听懂了。
Fǎwén lǎoshī shuō de gùshì, wǒ yǐqián cónglái méiyǒu tīng dǒng guò, kěshì tā jīntiān shuō de, wǒ jūrán tīng dǒng le.
I had never understood the stories my French teacher told. But, surprisingly, I understood the one he told today.
那三个小偷, 警察只抓住(了)两个, 还有一个跑走了。
Nà sān ge xiǎotōu, jǐngchá zhǐ zhuā zhù (le) liǎng ge, háiyǒu yí ge pǎo zǒu le.
The police only caught two of the three thieves; the other one ran away.
## Level 3 17.6 Words commonly used as a complement of result
Verbs and adjectives that can be used to indicate the result of an action are numerous. It is impossible to provide a complete list of such verbs and adjectives. The following are examples of words commonly used as a complement of result.
### (a) 懂 (dǒng)
懂 means 'to understand'. The verbs (effort) associated with 懂 are 看 (kàn) and 听 (tīng).
老师刚才说的话, 你听懂了没有?
Lǎoshī gāngcái shuō de huà, nǐ tīng dǒng le méiyǒu?
Did you understand what the teacher just said?
牌子上那五个字, 我只看懂(了)三个。
Páizi shàng nà wǔ ge zì, wǒ zhǐ kàn dǒng (le) sān ge.
I only understand three of the five characters on that sign.
### (b) 会 (huì)
会 means 'to know how to do something'. The verb (effort) associated with 会 is 学 (xué).
自行车, 我只学了三小时就学会了; 可是我学游泳学了半年了, 还是没有学会。
Zìxíngchē, wǒ zhǐ xué le sān xiǎoshí jiù xué huì le; kěshì wǒ xué yóuyǒng xué le bàn nián le, háishì méiyǒu xué huì.
I learned to ride a bike in only three hours; but I have been taking swimming lessons for half a year already and I still haven't learned how to swim.
### (c) 见 (jiàn)
见 means 'to perceive'. The verbs most frequently associated with 见 are 听 (tīng) and 看 (kàn). 见 can also be the result for 遇 (yù) and 碰 (pèng); 遇见 and 碰见 both mean 'to run into someone'.
张:听, 有人在敲门。
Zhāng: Tīng, yǒu rén zài qiāo mén.
王: 有人在敲门? 我怎么没有听见?
Wáng: Yǒu rén zài qiāo mén? Wǒ zěnme méiyǒu tīng jiàn?
Zhang: Listen, someone is knocking at the door.
Wang: Someone is knocking on the door? How come I didn't hear it?
昨天我在街上遇见(了)一个很久没有看见的老朋友。
Zuótiān wǒ zài jiē shàng yùjiàn (le) yí ge hěn jiǔ méiyǒu kànjiàn de lǎo péngyǒu.
Yesterday I ran into an old friend whom I hadn't seen in a long time.
### (d) 完 (wán)
完 means 'to finish'; it primarily serves as a complement of result and is rarely used as an independent verb. Therefore, expressions such as 'Did you finish?' and 'I am done' in English cannot be directly translated into Chinese. Such an expression in Chinese must contain the verb that indicates the actual action.
(Situation: Mr Wang is complaining that Mrs Wang nags too much.)
王先生: 你到底说完了没有?
Wáng xiānsheng: Nǐ dàodǐ shuō wán le méiyǒu?
王太太: 别插嘴, 我还没说完呢。
Wáng tàitai: Bié chāzuǐ, wǒ hái méi shuō wán ne.
Mr Wang: Are you done (talking) or not?
Mrs Wang: Don't interrupt. I am not done (talking) yet.
完 can also be used to indicate that something is all gone. In this case, 完 is interchangeable with 光 (guāng).
妈妈: 小明, 锅里的汤, 你别喝完, 留一些给爸爸喝。(喝完 = 喝光)
Māma: Xiǎomíng, guō lǐ de tāng, nǐ bié hē wán, liú yìxiē gěi bàba hē.
小明: 你说得太晚了, 我已经把它喝完了。
Xiǎomíng: Nǐ shuō de tài wǎn le, wǒ yǐjīng bǎ tā hē wán le.
Mother: Xiaoming, don't drink all of the soup in the pot. Save some for your father.
Xiaoming: Too late. I already finished it.
要看这个电影的人太多了, 所有的票一小时就卖完了。(卖完 = 卖光)
Yào kàn zhè ge diànyǐng de rén tài duō le, suǒyǒu de piào yì xiǎoshí jiù mài wán le.
Too many people wanted to see this movie. All the tickets were sold out within one hour.
### (e) 到 (dào)
* 到 can indicate 'to reach' a certain point or the availability of something. Verbs showing actions of movement or progress can be associated with 到 to show the point reached. Some of these verbs are 走 (zǒu), 跑 (pǎo), 开 (车) (kāichē), 骑 (qí), 游 (yóu), 说 (shuō), 讲 (jiǎng), 学 (xué), etc.
你往前走,走到红绿灯那里, 往右转, 就会看见火车站了。
Nǐ wàng qián zǒu, zǒu dào hónglǜdēng nàlǐ, wàng yòu zhuǎn, jiù huì kànjiàn huǒchēzhàn le.
Walk ahead until you reach the traffic lights, turn right and you will see the train station.
昨天他写完功课就开始看电视,看到十二点才去睡觉。
Zuótiān tā xiě wán gōngkè jiù kāishǐ kàn diànshì, kàn dào shí'èr diǎn cái qù shuìjiào.
Yesterday he began to watch TV right after he finished writing his homework. He watched until 12 o'clock before he finally went to bed. (It is incorrect to say 他看电视到十二点 because 到 must follow the verb 看.)
这本书有三十课, 但是这学期我们只能学到第二十四课。
Zhè běn shū yǒu sānshí kè, dànshì zhè xuéqī wǒmen zhǐ néng xué dào dì èrshí sì ke.
This book has 30 lessons, but we can only study up to Lesson 24 this term.
* 到 can also indicate the 'availability' or 'presence' of someone or something. Verbs associated with this definition are 找 (zhǎo), 买 (mǎi), 请 (qǐng), 看 (kàn), 听 (tīng), 遇 (yù), 碰 (pèng), 见 (jiàn), etc. Expressions such as 看见, 听见, 遇见 and 碰见 can be 看到, 听到, 遇到 and 碰到 respectively. However, when 到 specifically indicates 'availability/presence', 看到, 听到, 遇到 and 碰到 must be used.
真没想到, 在这么偏僻的法国小镇还能看到最新的中国电影,吃到地道的 中国菜。
Zhēn méi xiǎngdào, zài zhème piānpì de Fǎguó xiǎo zhèn hái néng kàndào zuì xīn de Zhōngguó diànyǐng, chī dào dìdào de Zhōngguó cài.
I really didn't expect that I could actually get to see the newest Chinese movie and get to eat authentic Chinese food in such an out-of-the-way small French town.
昨天我在路上碰到(= 碰见)了一个老朋友, 他说他最近遇到(cannot be 遇见)了 很多困难。
Zuótiān wǒ zài lù shàng pèng dào (= pèng jiàn) le yí ge lǎo péngyǒu, tā shuō tā zuìjìn yùdào le hěn duō kùnnán.
I ran into an old friend yesterday. He said that he had encountered many difficulties lately.
### (f) 住 (zhù)
住 as a complement of result means 'to stay, to stop the movement of something or someone'.
太太: 你留客人了没有?
Tàitai: Nǐ liú kèrén le méiyǒu?
先生:留了, 可是只留住了三个, 另外两个没有留住。 (留 is the effort; 住 is the result.)
Xiānsheng: Liú le, kěshì zhǐ liú zhù le sān ge, lìngwài liǎng ge méiyǒu liú zhù.
Wife: Did you ask our guests to stay?
Husband: I did, but I only succeeded in getting three to stay. I didn't succeed in getting the other two to stay.
那场比赛, 美国队输了, 因为有两个球, 他们没有接住。 (接 is the effort, 住 is the result.)
Nà chǎng bǐsài, Měiguó duì shū le, yīnwèi yǒu liǎng ge qiú, tāmen méiyǒu jiē zhù.
The US team lost the game because they missed (did not catch) two balls.
站住! 我还没说完话, 你怎么可以走?
Zhàn zhù! Wǒ hái méi shuō wán huà, nǐ zěnme kěyǐ zǒu?
Stop walking away and stand still! I have not finished talking; how can you leave?
### (g) 掉 (diào)
掉 means 'to drop or to lose something'. As a complement of result, it indicates that the action causes something to be gone forever. If the expression is followed by 了 (le), 掉 is optional since 了 can serve a similar function.
哥哥: 桌上的巧克力糖去哪里了?
Gēge: Zhuō shàng de qiǎokèlì táng qù nǎlǐ le?
弟弟: 我吃掉了。
Dìdi: Wǒ chī diào le.
Older brother: Where did the chocolate on the table go?
Younger brother: I ate it.
太太: 冰箱里的剩菜呢?
Tàitai: Bīngxiāng lǐ de shèngcài ne?
先生: 那些菜都已经坏掉了, 所以我把它们都倒掉了。
Xiānsheng: Nà xiē cài dōu yǐjīng huài diào le, suǒyǐ wǒ bǎ tāmen dōu dào diào le.
Wife: What happened to the leftovers in the refrigerator?
Husband: Those dishes had all gone bad already, so I threw them out.
### (h) 死 (sǐ)
死 means 'to die'. It is the result of any action or situation that can cause death. It is also often used to indicate an exaggeration.
大家都以为王先生是病死的, 其实他是被人杀死的。
Dàjiā dōu yǐwéi Wáng xiānsheng shì bìng sǐ de, qíshí tā shì bèi rén shā sǐ de.
Everybody mistakenly thinks Mr Wang died of an illness; actually, he was murdered.
先生: 我饿死了, 什么时候吃饭?
Xiānsheng: Wǒ è sǐ le, shénme shíhòu chī fàn?
太太: 我上了一天班,累死了, 哪里有力气做饭?
Tàitai: Wǒ shàng le yì tiān bān, lèi sǐ le, nǎlǐ yǒu lìqì zuòfàn?
Husband: I am hungry to death (= starving). When are we going to eat?
Wife: I worked all day and I am tired to death. How do I have the energy to cook?
### (i) 好 (hǎo)
As a complement of result, 好 can have two meanings; one indicates that the action is done properly, securely or well, and the other indicates the 'completion' of a task.
* Verbs associated with 好 meaning 'properly' or 'securely' are 学 (xué), 坐 (zuò), 放 (fàng), 带 (dài), 拿 (ná), 准备 (zhǔnbèi), etc.
各位旅客, 请在座位上坐好, 并且系好安全带, 飞机就要起飞了。
Gèwèi lǚkè, qǐng zài zuòwèi shàng zuòhǎo, bìngqiě xì hǎo ānquán dài, fěijī jiù yào qǐfēi le.
All passengers, please sit properly (securely) in your own seats and fasten your seatbelts securely. The airplane will take off soon.
大家都准备好了吗? 可以出发了吧? (准备: to prepare; 准备好: ready)
Dàjiā dōu zhǔnbèi hǎo le ma? Kěyǐ chūfā le ba?
Is everybody ready? We can set off now, right?
* When 好 indicates the completion of a task, an assignment or a piece of work, it shares similarities with 完 (wán); therefore, sometimes they can be interchangeable. However, 好 tends to mean the completed work can be shown, whereas 完 indicates that once something is done, it's gone. The verbs associated with this meaning are 作 (zuò: 'to do'), 写 (xiě: 'to write'), 画 (huà: 'to paint'), 修 (xiū: 'to repair'), 洗 (xǐ: 'to wash'), 翻译 (fānyì: 'to translate'), etc.
王老师花了三年才把那本语法书写好。
Wáng lǎoshī huā le sān nián cái bǎ nà běn yǔfǎ shū xiě hǎo.
Teacher Wang spent three years and finally completed the grammar book.
Compare: 今天的功课真多, 我写了三个多小时还没写完。
Jīntiān de gōngkè zhēn duō, wǒ xiě le sān ge duō xiǎoshí hái méi xiě wán.
There is so much homework today. I have worked on it for over three hours but I still have not finished (writing it).
### (j) 对 (duì) and 错 (cuò)
It should be noted that when the verb has an object, 错 is not used to modify the object, but should follow the verb to serve as a complement of result.
糟糕! 咱们坐错车了。
Zāogāo! Zánmen zuò cuò chē le. (咱们坐了错的车 is incorrect.)
Oh no! We got on the wrong bus.
别着急, 你一着急就会说错话。 (Do not say 你会说错的话.)
Bié zháojí, nǐ yì zháojí jiù huì shuō cuò huà.
Don't be anxious. The moment you get anxious, you will say the wrong thing.
这个问题很难,回答对的人不多。
Zhè ge wèntí hěn nán, huídá duì de rén bù duō.
This question is very difficult. Not many people answered it correctly.
### (k) 够 (gòu)
As an adjective, 够, which means 'enough', very rarely appears before a noun. It is used after the verb to serve as the complement of result. If the verb has an object, it should appear after 够 or be pre-posed.
我打算一赚够了钱就退休。
Wǒ dǎsuàn yí zhuàn gòu le qián jiù tuìxiū.
I plan to retire as soon as I have made enough money.
张: 你以前那么喜欢旅行, 这几年怎么很少出门了?
Zhāng: Nǐ yǐqián nàme xǐhuān lǚxíng, zhè jǐ nián zěnme hěn shǎo chūmén le?
王: 这个世界我已经看够了。现在我想在家多休息休息。
Wáng: Zhè ge shìjiè wǒ yǐjīng kàn gòu le. Xiànzài wǒ xiǎng zài jiā duō xiūxí xiūxí.
Zhang: You used to like travelling so much. How come you rarely leave your house now?
Wang: I have seen enough of this world. Now I just want to stay home and rest more.
## Level 3 17.7 Adjectives as the complements of state, result and potential compared
Since an adjective can serve as the complement of result, the complement of state (☞ see Chapter 13) and the complement of potential (☞ see Chapter 18), it is important to note the difference in structures and meanings among the three.
**Types of complement** | **Word order for positive form** | **Word order for negative form**
---|---|---
* * *
Complement of state | Verb + 得 \+ 很 (太, 真, etc.) + adjective | Verb + 得 \+ 不 \+ adjective
* * *
Complement of result | Verb + adjective | 没有/不 \+ verb + adjective
* * *
Complement of potential | Verb + 得 \+ adjective | Verb + 不 \+ adjective
The following table gives some examples.
**Complement** | **Positive form** | **Negative form**
---|---|---
* * *
State | 他说的话, 我听得很清楚。
Tā shuō de huà, wǒ tīng de hěn qīngchǔ.
I heard clearly what he said. | 他说的话, 我听得不清楚。
Tā shuō de huà, wǒ tīng de bù qīngchǔ.
I didn't hear clearly what he said.
* * *
Result | 他说的话, 我听清楚了。
Tā shuō de huà, wǒ tīng qīngchǔ le.
I heard clearly what he said. | 他说的话, 我没有听清楚。
Tā shuō de huà, wǒ méiyǒu tīng qīngchǔ.
I didn't hear clearly what he said.
* * *
Potential | 他说的话, 我听得清楚。
Tā shuō de huà, wǒ tīng de qīngchǔ.
I can hear clearly what he says. | 他说的话, 我听不清楚。
Tā shuō de huà, wǒ tīng bù qīngchǔ.
I cannot hear clearly what he says.
张: 房子打扫干净以前, 咱们都不可以去睡觉。快继续打扫。 (干净 is the complement of result. It follows the verb 打扫.)
Zhāng: Fángzi dǎsǎo gānjìng yǐqián, zánmen dōu bù kěyǐ qù shuìjiào. Kuài jìxù dǎsǎo.
李: 什么? 我打扫了一下午, 已经打扫得这么干净了, 还打扫什么?
Lǐ: Shénme? Wǒ dǎsǎo le yí xiàwǔ, yǐjīng dǎsǎo de zhème gānjìng le, hái dǎsǎo shénme? (这么干净 is the complement of state. 得 is needed after the verb 打扫.)
Zhang: Before (= until) we clean up the house, we can't go to bed. So hurry and continue to clean it.
Li: What? I spent all afternoon cleaning. It's already been cleaned so well. What more is there to do?
(Situation: A teacher is giving a student feedback on his performance of question-answering.)
第一个问题, 你回答得相当对; (相当对: the complement of state)
Dì yī ge wèntí, nǐ huídá de xiāngdāng duì;
You answered the first question quite correctly;
第二个问题, 你也回答得不错; (不错 = 很好: the complement of state)
dì èr ge wèntí, nǐ yě huídá de búcuò;
you also answered the second question quite well;
第三个问题, 你回答错了,(错: the complement of result)
dì sān ge wèntí, nǐ huídá cuò le,
you answered the third question incorrectly,
第四个问题, 你也没有回答对。(对: the complement of result)
dì sì ge wèntí, nǐ yě méiyǒu huídá duì.
you also did not answer the fourth question correctly.
## Exercise
Fill in the blanks using the proper complement of result based on the context provided in the sentence. English translations are not provided so as to avoid directly giving information about the answer. For English translations, see the 'key to exercises' section.
* Level 1 1 王: 墙上有一个牌子, 你看 ____ 了没有?
李: 我看 ____ 了, 可是上面写的字, 我没有看 ____。
* 2 他学游泳只学了两个多小时就学 ____ 了。
* 3 我的车修 ____ 了, 今天我们可以开车出去玩了。
* 4 今天的功课太多了, 我写了两个多小时, 还没有写 ____。
* 5 我告诉他我姓张, 可是他听 ____ 了, 所以他叫我常先生。
* 6 我的英文不好, 所以那个英国人说的话, 我没有听 ____。
* Level 2 7 要买那本畅销书的人太多了, 我去了两趟书店, 都没有买 ____。
* 8 站 ____, 别走! 我是老师, 我还没说 ____ 话呢, 你怎么可以走?
* 9 今天的比赛, 德国队输了, 因为有两个球, 他们没有接 ____。
* 10 妈妈: 这种巧克力糖很贵, 你要慢慢地吃。
儿子: 这么一小块, 我一口就吃 ____了。
* 11 大家都准备 ____ 了吗? 咱们上飞机吧! 自己的行李, 一定要拿 ____!
* 12 今天我收 ____ 一封王小姐去年寄给我的信, 因为她把地址写 ____ 了, 所以过了一年这封信才寄 ____ 我家。
* 13 王: 法文老师今天用法文说的那个故事, 你听 ____ 了没有?
李: 我今天坐 ____ 公共汽车了, 所以我来晚了。我到教室的时候, 他刚说 ____, 所以那个故事, 我没有听 ____。
* 14 今天应该十点十五分下课, 可是老师一直讲 ____ 十点半才让我们下课。
* 15 张先生: 你都七十岁了, 为什么还不退休?
李先生: 我要赚钱啊! 钱还没有赚 ____, 怎么能退休?
* 16 这么高的大楼, 只花了半年就盖 ____ 了, 真快!
# [18
The complement of potential](content.xhtml#bck_Ch018)
The complement of potential is primarily based on the complement of direction and the complement of result. It is used to indicate the possibility or probability of something happening. It can also indicate someone's ability to achieve something. Therefore, it nearly always carries the meaning of 'can/could' or 'cannot/could not' without having to actually use 能/可以 (néng/kěyǐ) or 不能 (bù néng). Because similar structures are not found in English, learners who are speakers of English should pay special attention to this chapter.
## Level 2 18.1 Forming the complement of potential
得 (de) is inserted between the verb and the complement to mean 能; 不 is inserted between the verb and the complement to mean 不能.
Affirmative form | Verb | 得 | Complement
---|---|---|---
* * *
Negative form | Verb | 不 | Complement
王: 那个牌子上的字, 你看得见吗?
Wáng: Nà ge páizi shàng de zì, nǐ kàn de jiàn ma?
李:看得见, 不过那些字太小了, 所以我看不清楚。
Lǐ: Kàn de jiàn, búguò nà xiē zì tài xiǎo le, suǒyǐ wǒ kàn bù qīngchǔ.
Wang: Can you see those words on that sign?
Li: Yes, I can. But those words are too small, so I cannot see them clearly.
张: 今天老师用英文说的那个故事, 你听得懂吗?
Zhāng: Jīntiān lǎoshī yòng Yīngwén shuō de nà ge gùshì, nǐ tīng de dǒng ma?
李: 我应该听得懂, 可是我没注意听, 所以没有听懂。
Lǐ: Wǒ yīnggāi tīng de dǒng, kěshì wǒ méi zhùyì tīng, suǒyǐ méiyǒu tīng dǒng.
Zhang: Were you able to understand the story the teacher told in English today?
Li: I should have been able to understand, but I wasn't paying attention; so I didn't understand it.
那本书, 我找了三天, 还是没有找到, 我想, 可能找不到了。
Nà běn shū, wǒ zhǎo le sān tiān, háishì méiyǒu zhǎodào; wǒ xiǎng kěnéng zhǎo bú dào le.
I have been looking for that book for three days, and still have not found it. I think I probably won't be able to (= can't) find it anymore.
## Level 2 18.2 Forming questions
There are three way to form a yes–no question.
Modal particle 吗 | Verb + 得 \+ complement | 吗 | ?
---|---|---|---
* * *
Affirmative–negative construction | Verb + 得 \+ complement | Verb + 不 \+ complement | ?
* * *
*Alternative affirmative–negative construction | Verb + 不 | Verb + 得 \+ complement | ?
### (a) Questions using modal particle 吗
李: 听说你很会修车, 我这辆旧车, 你修得好吗?
Lǐ: Tīngshuō nǐ hěn huì xiū chē, wǒ zhè liàng jiù chē, nǐ xiū de hǎo ma?
王: 没问题, 我一定修得好。
Wáng: Méi wèntí, wǒ yídìng xiū de hǎo.
Li: I heard that you are good at repairing cars. Can you fix this old car of mine?
Wang: No problem, I can definitely fix it.
你早上六点起得来吗? 如果起不来, 就别买七点的火车票。
Nǐ zǎoshàng liù diǎn qǐ de lái ma? Rúguǒ qǐ bù lái, jiù bié mǎi qī diǎn de huǒchē piào.
Can you get up at 6 o'clock in the morning? If you can't, then don't buy a train ticket for 7 o'clock.
### (b) Questions using the affirmative–negative construction
老师: 我刚才说的话, 你们听得懂听不懂?(= 听得懂吗?)
Lǎoshī: Wǒ gāngcái shuō de huà, nǐmen tīng de dǒng tīng bù dǒng?
学生: 不知道, 您说得太小声了, 我们都听不清楚您在说什么。
Xuéshēng: Bù zhīdào, nín shuō de tài xiǎoshēng le, wǒmen dōu tīng bù qīngchǔ nín zài shuō shénme.
Teacher: Can you understand what I just said?
Student: I don't know. You spoke too softly; we could not hear clearly what you were saying.
### (c) Questions using the alternative affirmative–negative construction
It is acceptable to use 'verb + 不 \+ verb + 得 \+ complement' as an alternative form for the affirmative–negative construction. This alternative form is frequently used in casual speech.
张: 这座山相当高, 你上不上得去?(= 上得去上不去?= 上得去吗?)
Zhāng: Zhè zuò shān xiāngdāng gāo, nǐ shàng bú shàng de qù?
王: 应该上得去。咱们开始往上爬吧。
Wáng: Yīnggāi shàng de qù. Zánmen kāishǐ wǎng shàng pá ba.
Zhang: This mountain is quite high; will you be able to go up?
Wang: I should be able to go up. Let's start climbing up.
丁: 今天的功课, 你八点以前写不写得完?
Dīng: Jīntiān de gōngkè, nǐ bā diǎn yǐqián xiě bù xiě de wán?
李: 太多了, 恐怕写不完呢。
Lǐ: Tài duō le, kǒngpà xiě bù wán ne.
Ding: Can you finish (writing) today's homework by 8 o'clock?
Li: There is too much. I am afraid I won't be able to finish (it by then).
## Level 3 18.3 Word order
得 or 不 in the complement of potential should always follow the verb. This renders the complement of potential based on the simple complement of direction and one based on the complex complement of direction quite different in terms of word order.
☞ See Chapter 16 for more information on the complement of direction.
王: 晚上十点以后, 那个公园, 咱们还进得去吗? (进 is the verb; 去 is the complement.)
Wáng: Wǎnshàng shí diǎn yǐhòu, nà ge gōngyuán, zánmen hái jìn de qù ma?
李: 汽车开不进去, 不过自行车还骑得进去。 (开 and 骑 are verbs; 进去 is the complement. It is incorrect to say 汽车开进不去 or 自行车骑进得去.)
Lǐ: Qìchē kāi bú jìnqù, búguò zìxíngchē hái qí de jìnqù.
Wang: Can we still go into the park after 10 p.m.?
Li: (We) can't drive in, but (we) can ride bikes in.
(Situation: Many people are trying to get on the bus.)
哥哥: 要坐这班车的人太多了, 咱们一定上不去, 还是走路回家吧。
Gēge: Yào zuò zhè bān chē de rén tài duō le, zánmen yídìng shàng bú qù, háishì zǒulù huí jiā ba.
弟弟: 咱们去跟别人挤, 一定挤得上去的。 (It is incorrect to say 一定挤上得去.)
Dìdi: Zánmen qù gēn biérén jǐ, yídìng jǐ de shàngqù de.
Older brother: Too many people want to take this bus. We definitely won't be able to get on. We might as well walk home.
Younger brother: Let's go join the crowd. We definitely can push our way onto the bus.
## Level 2 18.4 Adding modal verbs 能 and 可以
The modal verbs 能 and 可以 can be placed before the affirmative form (but not the negative form) and the meaning of the sentence remains unchanged. However, 不能 cannot be used this way.
老师: 这个教室太大了, 坐在后面的人,(可以)听得见我说的话吗?
Lǎoshī: Zhè ge jiàoshì tài dà le, zuò zài hòumiàn de rén, (kěyǐ) tīng de jiàn wǒ shuō de huà ma?
王同学:(可以)听得见。
Wáng tóngxué: (Kěyǐ) tīng de jiàn.
李同学: 我听不清楚。
Lǐ tóngxué: Wǒ tīng bù qīngchǔ.
(我不能听得清楚 or 我能听不清楚 is incorrect since this is a negative sentence.)
Teacher: This classroom is too big. Can those sitting in the back hear what I'm saying?
Student Wang: I can hear you.
Student Li: I cannot hear you clearly.
你明天八点有课, 现在都十二点了, 你还不去睡觉, 明天早上你(能)起得来吗?
Nǐ míngtiān bā diǎn yǒu kè, xiànzài dōu shí'èr diǎn le, nǐ hái bú qù shuìjiào, míngtiān zǎoshàng nǐ (néng) qǐ de lái ma?
You have a class at 8 o'clock tomorrow. It's already 12 o'clock now and you are still not in bed. Can you get up tomorrow morning?
## Level 2 18.5 When the complement of potential cannot be used
The complement of potential cannot be used to indicate permission or a request.
别人在上课呢, 咱们不可以进去。 (In this situation, it is incorrect to say 咱们进不去.)
Biérén zài shàng kè ne, zánmen bù kěyǐ jìnqù.
Other people are having a class now. We cannot go in.
Compare: 他把门锁上了, 所以咱们都进不去。
Tā bǎ mén suǒ shàng le, suǒyǐ zánmen dōu jìn bú qù.
He locked the door, so we cannot get in.
小王, 你能不能下来? 我在楼下等了你十分钟了。(It is incorrect to say 你下不下得来.)
Xiǎo Wáng, nǐ néng bù néng xiàlái? Wǒ zài lóuxià děng le nǐ shí fēnzhōng le.
Xiao Wang, can you come down? I have been waiting for you downstairs for ten minutes.
## Level 3 18.6 Words commonly used as complements of potential
The following are some of the frequently used complements of potential that are not based on the complement of direction or the complement of result.
### (a) 下 (xià)
下 is used to indicate there is/isn't enough room to accommodate a certain amount/quantity of things/people. Verbs associated with 下 are 放 (fàng: 'to put'), 摆 (bǎi: 'to put'), 坐 (zuò: 'to sit'), 站 (zhàn: 'to stand'), 住 (zhù: 'to live; to stay'), 停 (车) (tíngchē: 'to park'), 挤 (jǐ: 'to squeeze'), 写 (xiě: 'to write'), etc. There is usually a number to indicate the capacity of the space.
王: 这个教室坐得下二十五个学生吗?
Wáng: Zhè ge jiàoshì zuò de xià èrshí wǔ ge xuéshēng ma?
李: 这个教室只放得下二十把椅子, 所以坐不下二十五个学生。
Lǐ: Zhè ge jiàoshì zhǐ fàng de xià èrshí bǎ yǐzi, suǒyǐ zuò bú xià èrshí wǔ ge xuéshēng.
Wang: Can this classroom seat 25 students?
Li: This classroom can only accommodate 20 chairs, so it cannot seat 25 students.
这家电影院坐得下五百个观众, 可是他们的停车场只停得下一百多辆车, 所以 我们找不到停车的地方。
Zhè jiā diànyǐngyuàn zuò de xià wǔ bǎi ge guānzhòng, kěshì tāmen de tíngchēchǎng zhǐ tíng de xià yì bǎi duō liàng chē, suǒyǐ wǒmen zhǎo bú dào tíngchē de dìfāng.
This cinema can seat 500 viewers, but their parking lot can hold only 100 or so cars, so we cannot find a place to park.
下 can also be the complement of potential for the verbs 吃 and 喝. In this case, the space is replaced by a person and a number may not be necessary.
我爷爷虽然八十了, 可是每餐都还吃得下三碗饭呢。
Wǒ yéye suírán bāshí le, kěshì měi cān dōu hái chī de xià sān wǎn fàn ne.
Although my grandfather is already 80 years old, he can still eat three bowls of rice at every meal.
主人: 再吃一点菜吧!
Zhǔrén: Zài chī yìdiǎn cài ba!
客人: 我实在吃不下了。
Kèrén: Wǒ shízài chī bú xià le.
主人: 那你还喝得下一碗汤吗?
Zhǔrén: Nà nǐ hái hē de xià yì wǎn tāng ma?
客人: 汤我也喝不下了。
Kèrén: Tāng wǒ yě hē bú xià le.
Host: Have some more food.
Guest: I truly cannot eat any more. (I have no room for any more food.)
Host: Then can you still have a bowl of soup?
Guest: I cannot have any soup, either. (I have no room for soup, either.)
### (b) 动 (dòng)
动 is used to indicate there is/isn't enough energy/strength to cause movement. The verbs associated with 动 are those that show movements, such as 拿 (ná: 'to hold in one's hand'), 搬 (bān: 'to move'), 走 (zǒu: 'to walk'), 跑 (pǎo: 'to run'), 跳 (tiào: 'to jump, to dance'), 游 (yóu: 'to swim'), 骑 (qí: 'to ride bicycle/horse'), etc.
王: 这个箱子很重, 你拿得动拿不动? 要不要我来帮你一下?
Wáng: Zhè ge xiāngzi hěn zhòng, nǐ ná de dòng ná bú dòng? Yào bú yào wǒ lái bāng nǐ yíxià?
张: 不重, 不重, 我 (可以) 拿得动。
Zhāng: Bú zhòng, bú zhòng, wǒ (kěyǐ) ná de dòng.
Wang: This box is very heavy, can you carry it? (Do you have the strength to carry it?)
Do you want me to help you?
Zhang: No, no, it's not heavy. I can carry it. (I have the strength to carry it.)
李: 咱们跑下山去, 好不好?
Lǐ: Zánmen pǎo xià shān qù, hǎo bù hǎo?
丁: 我走了两小时才走上来, 现在已经走不动了, 你想我怎么还跑得动?
Dīng: Wǒ zǒu le liǎng xiǎoshí cái zǒu shànglái, xiànzài yǐjīng zǒu bú dòng le, nǐ xiǎng wǒ zěnme hái pǎo de dòng?
Li: Let's run down the hill, OK?
Ding: I walked for two hours before I finally came up; now I don't have any energy to walk anymore. How can I have the energy to run?
### (c) 了(liǎo) #1
了 as the complement of potential 了 of complement has two functions. One function of 了 is to indicate one's ability to handle a large amount/quantity all at once. In this case, 多 in the context is the key word.
这么多书, 你一次拿得了吗? 今天拿几本, 明天再拿几本吧。
Zhème duō shū, nǐ yí cì ná de liǎo ma? Jīntiān ná jǐ běn, míngtiān zài ná jǐ běn ba.
There are so many books. Can you take all of them all at once? Why don't you take a few today and take a few more tomorrow?
你买太多了, 我一个人吃不了, 你带一些回家吧。
Nǐ mǎi tài duō le, wǒ yí ge rén chī bù liǎo, nǐ dài yìxiē huíjiā ba.
You bought too much; I can't eat it all by myself. Why don't you take some home with you?
* The difference between 吃不下 and 吃不了can be subtle. 吃不下 is sometimes interpreted as 'having no appetite'; it does not have to do with the amount of food. 吃不了 always implies there is a lot.
这两天我不舒服, 胃口不好, 常常吃不下。
Zhè liǎng tiān wǒ bù shūfú, wèikǒu bù hǎo, chángcháng chī bú xià.
These days I am not feeling well; I have had no appetite and I often cannot eat.
* 吃不了 and 吃不完 may share similarities. Generally, 吃不了 is used before one begins to eat, whereas 吃不完 refers to the portion one cannot finish.
(Situation: At a to-go food counter.)Š
太太: 哎呀! 你买太多了。 咱们两个人怎么吃得了这么多?
Tàitai: Āiyā! Nǐ mǎi tài duō le. Zánmen liǎng ge rén zěnme chī de liǎo zhème duō?
先生: 没关系, 今天吃不完的, 可以明天吃。
Xiānsheng: Méi guānxi, jīntiān chī bù wán de, kěyǐ míngtiān chī.
Wife: Aiya! You ordered too much. How can the two of us eat so much?
Husband: It's OK. Tomorrow we can eat what we cannot finish (the leftover) today.
* When the money or time allocated for an activity is too much for such an activity, the phrase 花不了 or 用不了 is used to describe such a situation. Hence, 用不了 has become an expression to mean 'no need for so much' or 'it won't take so much'
今天的功课不多,用不了(or 花不了)两小时就写得完。
Jīntiān de gōngkè bù duō, yòng bù liǎo (or huā bù liǎo) liǎng xiǎoshí jiù xiě de wán.
There isn't much homework today. It won't take two hours before I can finish (writing it).
这本书很便宜,用不了两块钱就买得到。
Zhè běn shū hěn piányí, yòng bù liǎo liǎng kuài qián jiù mǎi de dào.
This book is inexpensive. You can get it for less than $2 (you won't need $2).
### (d) 了(liǎo) #2
了 also has the function of serving as the complement for verbs that are already 'complete' in meaning; in other words, these verbs do not need a complement to complete their meanings. When such a verb is used in a potential structure, 了 serves as the complement to fulfill the grammatical requirement.
张: 图书馆还有半小时关门, 咱们现在走, 关门以前到得了到不了? (= 能到吗?)
Zhāng: Túshūguǎn hái yǒu bàn xiǎoshí guānmén, zánmen xiànzài zǒu, guānmén yǐqián dào de liǎo dào bù liǎo?
王: 从这里走路去图书馆只要十分钟, 关门以前一定到得了。
Wáng: Cóng zhèlǐ zǒulù qù túshūguǎn zhǐ yào shí fēnzhōng, guānmén yǐqián yídìng dào de liǎo.
Zhang: There is half an hour before the library closes. If we leave now, can we arrive before it closes?
Wang: It takes only ten minutes to walk from here to the library. We can definitely arrive before it closes.
李: 热死了, 真不知道谁受得了这种天气?(受 can mean 'to tolerate'.)
Lǐ: Rè sǐ le, zhēn bù zhīdào shéi shòu de liǎo zhè zhǒng tiānqì?
王: 现在才六月, 你就受不了了, 到了八月你怎么办?
Wáng: Xiànzài cái liùyuè, nǐ jiù shòu bu liǎo le, dào le bāyuè nǐ zěnmebàn?
Li: It's hot to death. I really don't know who can stand this kind of weather.
Wang: It's only June now and you already can't stand it. What are you going to do in August?
### (e) 起 (qǐ)
起 is most frequently used to indicate whether one can afford something financially. The verb 买 is the most common one that is associated with 起. Other verbs that imply paying for it can be used with 起 as well.
(Situation: The property salesperson is about to show Mr Zhang a big house.)
张先生: 这么大的房子, 我恐怕买不起。
Zhāng xiānsheng: Zhème dà de fángzi, wǒ kǒngpà mǎi bù qǐ.
房地产商: 没关系,买不起的人也可以进去看看。
Fángdìchǎn shāng: Méi guānxi, mǎi bù qǐ de rén yě kěyǐ jìn qù kàn kàn.
Mr Zhang: Such a big house, I am afraid that I cannot afford (to buy) it.
Property salesperson: It's OK. Those who cannot afford it can also go in to take a look.
(Situation: Mr and Mrs Li are talking about their vacation plans.)
李太太: 我在一个五星级的饭店订了一个房间。
Lǐ tàitai: Wǒ zài yí ge wǔ xīng jí de fàndiàn dìng le yí ge fángjiān.
李先生: 咱们住得起五星级的饭店吗?
Lǐ xiānsheng: Zánmen zhù de qǐ wǔ xīng jí de fàndiàn ma?
Mrs Li: I made reservation for a room at a five-star hotel.
Mr Li: Can we afford (to stay in) a five-star hotel?
Do not confuse 买得起/买不起 (affordability) with 买得到/买不到 (availability). Therefore, the subject for 买得起/买不起 is a person, whereas the subject for 买得到/买不到 does not have to be a person.
李先生: 这么大的房子, 没有一百万, 一定买不到。
Lǐ xiānsheng: Zhème dà de fángzi, méiyǒu yì bǎiwàn, yídìng mǎi bú dào.
房地产商: 您说得很对! 买得起这个房子的人不多。
Fángdìchǎn shāng: Nín shuō de hěn duì! Mǎi de qǐ zhè ge fángzi de rén bù duō.
Mr Li: Such a big house! It is definitely not available to those without $1 million.
Property salesperson: You said it right! There are not many people who can afford this house.
It should be noted that 起 in the expressions 看得起/看不起 does not imply financial affordability. 看得起 indicates one's high regard for a person, whereas 看不起 indicates one's contempt for a person.
王先生: 李小兰喜欢在朋友背后讨论他们, 我最看不起这种人。
Wáng xiānsheng: Lǐ Xiǎolán xǐhuān zài péngyǒu bèi hòu tǎolùn tāmen, wǒ zuì kàn bù qǐ zhè zhǒng rén.
王太太: 世界上好像没有你看得起的人。
Wáng tàitai: Shìjiè shàng hǎoxiàng méiyǒu nǐ kàn de qǐ de rén.
Mr Wang: Li Xiaolan likes to discuss her friends behind their back. I really despise such people.
Mrs Wang: It seems that there is not anybody in this world that you regard highly.
## Level 3 18.7 The complement of result and the complement of potential compared
The complement of potential indicates whether the result 'can' or 'cannot' be produced; whereas the complement of result only indicates whether or not there is a result.
王: 你昨天下午在找的那本书,找到了没有?
Wáng: Nǐ zuótiān xiàwǔ zài zhǎo de nà běn shū, zhǎodào le méiyǒu?
李: 我找了好几个小时, 还是没有找到。我看大概找不到了。
Lǐ: Wǒ zhǎo le hǎo jǐ ge xiǎoshí, háishì méiyǒu zhǎodào. Wǒ kàn dàgài zhǎo bú dào le.
Wang: Did you find the book you were looking for yesterday afternoon?
Li: I searched several hours and I still did not find it. I think I probably won't be able to find it.
老师: 小王, 你怎么又不把功课写完就交来?
Lǎoshī: Xiǎo Wáng, nǐ zěnme yòu bù bǎ gōngkè xiě wán jiù jiāo lái?
小王: 昨天的功课实在太多了, 我不是不写完, 是写不完。
Xiǎo Wáng: Zuótiān de gōngkè shízài tài duō le, wǒ bú shì bù xiě wán, shì xiě bù wán.
Teacher: Xiao Wang, how come you once again turned in homework without finishing it?
Xiao Wang: There was truly too much homework yesterday. It is not that I would not finish it; it is that I could not finish it.
## Level 3 18.8 Adjectives as the complement of state and the complement of potential compared
☞ See Chapter 13 for more information on the complement of state.
### (a) Affirmative form
Both complements need 得 after the verb in the affirmative form; for the complement of state, a degree adverb such as 很 (hěn), 太 (tài), 真 (zhēn) or 非常 (fēicháng), etc. is needed before the adjective. A degree adverb cannot be used in the complement of potential.
老师说的话, 我听得很清楚。 (很清楚 is the complement of state.)
Lǎoshī shuō de huà, wǒ tīng de hěn qīngchǔ.
I heard clearly what the teacher said.
Compare: 老师说的话, 我听得清楚。 (清楚 is the complement of potential.)
Lǎoshī shuō de huà, wǒ tīng de qīngchǔ.
I could hear clearly what the teacher said.
这件衬衫本来非常脏, 现在洗得真干净。 (真干净 is the complement of state.)
Zhè jiàn chènshān běnlái fēicháng zāng, xiànzài xǐ de zhēn gānjìng.
The shirt originally was extremely dirty, now it's been washed really clean.
Compare: 用这种洗衣粉, 多脏的衣服都洗得干净。 (干净 is the complement of potential.)
Yòng zhè zhǒng xǐyī fěn, duō zāng de yīfú dōu xǐ de gānjìng.
With this laundry powder, no matter how dirty the clothes are, they can be washed clean.
### (b) When a comparison is implied
When a comparison is implied, a degree adverb is not used before the adjective. Therefore, sometimes the context must be taken into consideration in order to decide whether it is a complement of state or a complement of potential.
让小王参加比赛吧, 他跑得快, 我跑得慢。 (Both 快 and 慢 are the complements of state.)
Ràng Xiǎo Wáng cānjiā bǐsài ba, tā pǎo de kuài, wǒ pǎo de màn.
Let Xiao Wang run in the race (instead of me). He runs faster; I run more slowly. (= He runs faster than I do.)
跑得慢的人不能参加比赛。
Pǎo de màn de rén bù néng cānjiā bǐsài.
Those who run slowly (or more slowly than others) cannot run in the race.
(慢 is the complement of state and a comparison is implied even without a clear context. Since the complement of potential is used to indicate one's ability, to run slowly cannot be considered an ability.)
### (c) Negative form
得 and 不 are both needed in the negative form for the complement of state; only 不 is used in the negative form for the complement of potential.
小王不能参加比赛, 因为他跑得不快。 (= 他跑得很慢. 不快 is the complement of state.)
Xiǎo Wáng bù néng cānjiā bǐsài, yīnwèi tā pǎo de bú kuài.
Xiao Wang cannot run in the race because he does not run fast enough (= he runs slowly).
Compare: 我以前跑得很快, 后来腿受伤了, 现在我跑不快了。 (很快 is the complement of state; 不快 is the complement of potential.)
Wǒ yǐqián pǎo de hěn kuài, hòulái tuǐ shòu shāng le, xiànzài wǒ pǎo bú kuài le.
I used to run fast; later on, my leg was injured; now I cannot run fast anymore.
我儿子不用功, 所以考试总是考得不好。 (不好 is the complement of state.)
Wǒ érzi bú yònggōng, suǒyǐ kǎoshì zǒngshì kǎo de bù hǎo.
My son is not hardworking, so he always does poorly on tests.
Compare: 这孩子又笨又懒, 所以考试总是考不好。 (不好 is the complement of potential.)
Zhè háizi yòu bèn yòu lǎn, suǒyǐ kǎoshì zǒngshì kǎo bù hǎo.
This kid is stupid and lazy; therefore, he can never do well on any tests.
## Exercises
Fill in the blanks using the proper complement of potential based on the context provided. You also must decide whether the structure should be in the positive or negative form. English translations are not provided so as to avoid directly giving information about the answer. For English translations, see the 'Key to exercises' section.
Examples 这座山太高了, 我上不去。
Zhè zuò shān tài gāo le, wǒ shàng búqù.
This mountain is too high, I cannot go up.
今天的功课这么多, 半小时怎么写得完?
Jīntiān de gōngkè zhème duō, bàn xiǎoshí zěnme xiě de wán?
There's so much homework today. How am I to finish it in half an hour?
* Level 1 1 这个教室只有二十把椅子, 坐 ____ ____ 三十个人。
* 2 这么重的桌子, 你一个人搬 ____ ____ 吗? 要不要我来帮你一下?
* 3 英文小说我看 ____ ____, 因为我的英文不好。
* 4 听说那本书非常畅销, 想买的人很多, 你快去买吧, 去晚了, 就买 ____ ____ 了。
* 5 老师: 坐在后面的同学, 听 ____ ____ 我说的话吗?
学生: 听 ____ ____, 可是黑板上的字, 我们看 ____ ____。
* 6 主人: 还有很多菜, 再吃一点吧!
客人: 不了, 谢谢, 我吃 ____ ____ 了。
* 7 那本书, 我已经找了三天了, 我想, 可能找 ____ ____ 了。
* Level 2 8 汽车在路上坏了, 飞机起飞以前我到 ____ ____ 机场了。
* 9 王: 昨天我在街对面叫了你五、 六次, 你怎么不过来呢?
张: 因为那时候街上车太多了, 我过 ____ ____。
* 10 香港的房价太高了, 所以我只买 ____ ____ 一个很小的房子。
* 11 我一个人只有两只手, 你想我怎么拿 ____ ____ 这么多东西? 你快过来帮我拿 一些。
* 12 我听说那本书很便宜, 用 ____ ____ 两块钱就买 ____ ____。
* 13 我们学校的宿舍住 ____ ____ 一千多个学生, 可是宿舍的停车场只停 ____ ____ 五百辆车, 所以我常常找 ____ ____ 停车的地方。
* 14 张先生: 今天是你的生日, 咱们叫一只龙虾吧! 张太太: 龙虾? 咱们怎么吃 ____ ____ 龙虾?
* 15 北京离这里不远, 坐飞机用 ____ ____ 三个小时就到 ____ ____。
* 16 我爷爷虽然已经八十岁了, 可是身体很不错, 眼睛还看____ ____, 路也走 ____ ____, 每餐都吃 ____ ____ 三碗饭呢! 不过他的耳朵不好, 我们跟他说话, 他常常听 ____ ____。
* 17 王太太: 这辆跑车一定很贵, 咱们买 ____ ____吗?
王先生: 这种车是古董, 今天不买, 以后就买 ____ ____了。
* 18 老师: 你今天为什么又来晚了?
学生: 对不起, 因为我昨天晚上太晚上床睡觉, 所以今天早上起 ____ ____。
* 19 王: 黑板上的那些英文字, 你看 ____ ____吗?
李: 虽然看 ____ ____, 可是我看 ____ ____那句话的意思, 因为我的英文不好。
* 20 丁: 这辆车只有五个座位, 坐 ____ ____六个人。
张: 没关系, 咱么挤一挤, 应该挤 ____ ____。
* 21 爸爸: 小明今天为什么不吃饭?
妈妈: 他说他不舒服, 所以吃 _____ _____。
* 22 王: 这座山不高, 你为什么觉得自己上 _____ _____呢?
李: 因为我走了一天的路, 我走 _____ _____了。要不然, 比这还高的山, 我也上 _____ _____。
* 23 今天的功课真多, 我写了三个小时还写 _____ _____, 我想我可能还要再写两个小时才写 _____ _____。
* 24 这个箱子不大, 只放 _____ _____ 五、 六件衣服。
# [19
The adverbial modifier with 地](content.xhtml#bck_Ch019)
An adjective followed by the particle 地 (pronounced de) forms an adverbial modifier. An adverbial modifier should appear before the verb or the verbal phrase it modifies. It can also appear before an adjective to modify the adjective. Similar structures in English can have more flexibility in terms of word order.
火车快离站了, 妈妈难过地跟我说再见。
Huǒchē kuài lízhàn le, māma nánguò de gēn wǒ shuō zàijiàn.
The train was about to depart, my mother sadly said goodbye to me.
老王的脾气出名地坏, 没有人喜欢跟他做朋友。
Lǎo Wáng de píqì chūmíng de huài, méiyǒu rén xǐhuān gēn tā zuò péngyǒu.
Lao Wang is notoriously bad-tempered; no one likes to be his friend.
## Level 2 19.1 Structure
At least two characters are needed before 地.
### (a) When the adjective is monosyllabic
If an adjective is monosyllabic, 很 can be added or the adjective can be reduplicated. Whether to repeat the monosyllabic adjective or to add 很 is a matter of fixed expressions, not grammar rules. For example, 慢 (màn) and 好 (hǎo) are frequently reduplicated, whereas 快 (kuài) tends to become 很快.
他一看公共汽车快开了, 就很快地跑去上车。
Tā yí kàn gōnggòng qìchē kuǎi kāi le, jiù hěn kuài de pǎo qù shàng chē.
He noticed that the bus was about to leave the bus stop, so he quickly ran over to get on the bus.
今天咱们时间很多, 可以慢慢地走, 不必急。
Jīntiān zánmen shíjiān hěn duō, kěyǐ màn màn de zǒu, búbì jí.
Today we have lots of time; we can walk slowly. There is no need to hurry.
### (b) Adjectives with more than one character
老王心甘情愿地为李小姐服务。
Lǎo Wáng xīngānqíngyuàn de wèi Lǐ xiǎojiě fúwù.
Lao Wang works willingly for Miss Li.
An adjective with two or more characters can still have a degree adverb (很, 非常, 十分, etc.) in an adverbial modifier.
柜台的服务人员总是很热情地回答访客的问题。
Guìtái de fúwù rényuán zǒngshì hěn rèqíng de huídá fǎngkè de wèntí.
The service personnel at the counter always answer visitors' questions very warmly.
老师非常愤怒地把作弊的学生骂了一顿。
Lǎoshī fēicháng fènnù de bǎ zuòbì de xuéshēng mà le yí dùn.
The teacher scolded the cheating students extremely angrily.
## Level 3 19.2 When 地 can be optional
地 can be optional in the following situations:
### (a) Reduplicated adjectives
When a monosyllabic adjective is repeated or if each of the characters in a disyllabic adjective is reduplicated, 地 becomes optional. (Not all disyllabic adjectives can be repeated.)
放学了, 我慢慢(地)走回家去。
Fàngxué le, wǒ màn màn (de) zǒu huí jiā qù.
After classes were over, I slowly walked home.
我期末考得了一百分, 这大大(地)提高了我这学期的平均分数。
Wǒ qīmòkǎo dé le yì bǎi fēn, zhè dà dà(de) tígāo le wǒ zhè xuéqí de píngjūn fēnshù.
I got 100 on the final exam. This greatly raised my average score for the term.
放学了, 小朋友都高高兴兴(地)回家去。(Do not say 高兴高兴地回家去.)
Fàngxué le. Xiǎo péngyǒu dōu gāo gāo xìng xìng (de) huí jiā qù.
Classes were over. All the school children went home happily.
这件事, 老师清清楚楚(地)说了三遍, 他还是没记住。
Zhè jiàn shì, lǎoshī qīng qīng chǔ chǔ (de) shuō le sān biàn, tā háishì méi jìzhù.
The teacher said it clearly three times, but he still didn't remember.
### (b) Sequential/individual action
When describing an action being performed sequentially or individually, '一 \+ measure word' must be reduplicated. In this case, 地 becomes optional.
别挤, 先排好队, 再一个一个(地)上去。 (Sequentially)
Bié jǐ, xiān pái hǎo duì, zài yī ge yī ge (de) shàngqù.
Don't push each other. Form a line first and then get on (the bus) one by one.
你们每个人都先找好一个练习伙伴, 再一组一组(地)练习。 (Individually)
Nǐmen měi ge rén dōu xiān zhǎo hǎo yī ge liànxí huǒbàn, zài yì zǔ yì zǔ (de) liànxí.
Each of you first find a partner and then practise in groups.
## Level 2 19.3 Adjectives functioning as adverbs
Some adjectives, such as 大声 (dàshēng: 'loud'), 努力 (nǔlì: 'diligent'), 仔细 (zǐxì: 'careful'), 注意 (zhùyì: 'attentive'), 小心 (xiǎoxīn: 'careful'), can function as adverbs. In this case, 地 is optional.
王太太不停地说话, 王先生受不了了,大声(地)叫她闭嘴。
Wáng tàitai bùtíng de shuōhuà, Wáng xiānsheng shòu bù liǎo le, dàshēng (de) jiào tā bì zuǐ.
Mrs Wang talked (constantly) without stopping. Mr Wang could not stand it anymore, so he loudly told her to shut up.
老师问的问题, 你要注意(地)听, 然后大声(地)回答。
Lǎoshī wèn de wèntí, nǐ yào zhùyì (de) tīng, ránhòu dàshēng (de) huídá.
You have to listen attentively to the teacher's question and then answer loudly.
## Level 2 19.4 True adverbs
Some words are adverbs by nature; these words cannot be followed by 地, even though their English counterparts may be 'adjective + ly'. 马上 (mǎshàng: 'immediately'), 立刻 (lìkè: 'immediately'), 显然 (xiǎnrán: 'obviously'), 非常 (fēicháng: 'extremely'), 居然 (jūrán: 'surprisingly') are some of these adverbs.
春天一到, 天气马上就暖和起来了。 (It is incorrect to say 马上地 for 'immediately'.)
Chūntiān yí dào, tiānqì mǎshàng jiù nuǎnhuo qǐlái le.
As soon as spring arrives, the weather immediately begins to warm up.
小明考得很差, 他显然很难过, 所以妈妈决定不骂他。
Xiǎomíng kǎo de hěn chà, tā xiǎnrán hěn nánguò, suǒyǐ māma juédìng bú mà tā.
Xiaoming did poorly on the test; he was obviously sad, so his mother decided not to scold him.
## Level 3 19.5 Adverbial modifier and complement of state compared
Since the complement of state is frequently translated into an adverb in English, it is important to distinguish between the usages of the complement of state and the adverbial modifier.
☞ See Chapter 13 for more information on the complement of state.
### (a) Habitual behavior vs. specific occasion
The complement of state (with 得) is normally used to describe habitual behavior. The adverbial modifier (with 地) is used to describe an action on one specific occasion.
小王写字写得太快, 所以常常写错。 (写得太快 is habitual.)
Xiǎo Wáng xiě zì xiě de tài kuài, suǒyǐ chángcháng xiě cuò.
Xiao Wang writes characters too quickly, so he frequently makes mistakes.
小王很快地在纸上写了几个字就离开了。 (很快地写 is one specific occasion.)
Xiǎo Wáng hěn kuài de zài zhǐ shàng xiě le jǐ ge zì jiù líkāi le.
Xiao Wang quickly wrote a few characters on the paper and then left.
爷爷年纪大了, 走路走得很慢。可是他刚听到孙儿在叫救命, 就很快地跑去救他。 (走得很慢 is habitual. 很快地跑去 is one specific occasion.)
Yéye niánjì dà le, zǒulù zǒu de hěn màn. Kěshì tā gāng tīngdào sūn'ér zài jiào jiùmìng, jiù hěn kuài de pǎo qù jiù tā.
Grandfather is old; he walks slowly. But just now he heard his grandson calling for help, so he quickly ran to help him.
### (b) Outcomes vs. conscious effort
To describe the outcome of an event, use the complement of state (with 得), even though it may not be habitual; therefore, it is an action that is often not intentional or beyond one's control. For an action one can control or can put in conscious effort to achieve, use the adverbial modifier (with 地).
上次的考试, 我考得很差, 因为我没有好好地准备。 (考得很差 refers to the outcome of the test. 好好地准备 refers to conscious effort.)
Shàngcì de kǎoshì, wǒ kǎo de hěn chà, yīnwèi wǒ méiyǒu hǎo hǎo de zhūnbèi.
I did poorly on the last test because I did not do a good job studying for it.
昨天的比赛, 小王跑得最快, 所以他得了第一名。从今天起, 我天天都要认真地练习, 下次我一定要得第一名。 (跑得最快 is the outcome of the race. 认真地练习 refers to conscious effort.)
Zuótiān de bǐsài, Xiǎo Wáng pǎo de zuì kuài, suǒyǐ tā dé le dìyī míng. Cóng jīntiān qǐ, wǒ tiān tiān dōu yào rènzhēn de liànxí, xiàcì wǒ yídìng yào dé dìyī míng.
In yesterday's race, Xiao Wang ran the fastest, so he won first place. From today, I will train conscientiously every day. I will definitely win first place next time.
妈妈着急地说: "小明, 你开得太快了。"(开得太快 describes the outcome of an act.)
Māma zháojí de shuō, 'Xiǎomíng, nǐ kāi de tài kuài le.'
小明很不情愿地说: "好吧, 我慢慢地开。"(慢慢地开 is an act that can be controlled.)
Xiǎomíng hěn bù qíngyuàn de shuō, 'hǎo ba, wǒ màn màn de kāi'.
Mother said anxiously, 'Xiaoming, you are driving too fast.'
Xiaoming very reluctantly said, 'All right, I'll drive slowly.'
最近我忙死了, 下个月我要休假, 跟家人去欧洲好好地玩一玩。 (好好地玩 refers to an act one can make an effort to achieve.)
Zuìjìn wǒ máng sǐ le, xià ge yuè wǒ yào xiūjià, gēn jiārén qù Ōuzhōu hǎo hǎo de wán yì wán.
Recently I have been busy to death. Next month, I am going to take a holiday and go to Europe with my family to really have a good time.
王: 听说上个月你跟家人去欧洲度假,玩得怎么样?(怎么样 is used to ask about the outcome.)
Wáng: Tīngshuō shàng ge yuè nǐ gēn jiārén qù Ōuzhōu dùjià, wán de zěnmeyàng?
李: 大家都玩得十分高兴。
Lǐ: Dàjiā dōu wán de shífēn gāoxìng.
Wang: I heard that you went to Europe with your family for a holiday last month. How did you enjoy yourself? (Did you have a good time?)
Li: Everybody had an extremely good time.
### (c) Use of degree adverbs
Degree adverbs such as 太 (tài), 真 (zhēn), 更 (gèng), 最 (zuì), 这么 (zhème), 那么 (nàme) and 够 (gòu) only go with the complement of state; they rarely appear in the adverbial modifier. (Adverbs indicating various degrees of 'very' such as 很 (hěn), 非常 (fēicháng), 十分 (shífēn) are exceptions; they can be used in adverbial modifiers.)
前天我去找王家三兄弟的时候, 他们都在认真地准备考试。后来, 听说老三准备得最充分, 所以他考得比两个哥哥更好。
Qiántiān wǒ qù zhǎo Wáng jiā sān xiōngdì de shíhòu, tāmen dōu zài rènzhēn de zhǔnbèi kǎoshì. Hòulái, tīngshuō lǎo sān zhǔnbèi de zuì chōngfèn, suǒyǐ tā kǎo de bǐ liǎng ge gēge gèng hǎo.
When I went to see the Wang family's three brothers the day before yesterday, they were all studying conscientiously for the test. Later on, I heard that the youngest was the most fully prepared, so he did even better than his two older brothers.
王: 他开得这么慢, 为什么还被警察拦下来?
Wáng: Tā kāi de zhème màn, wèishénme hái bèi jǐngchá lán xiàlái?
李: 在高速公路上开得太慢也是很危险的。
Lǐ: Zài gāosù gōnglù shàng kāi de tài màn yě shì hěn wéixiǎn de.
Wang: He drove so slowly. Why was he still pulled over by the police?
Li: Driving too slowly on the highway is also very dangerous.
### (d) Action in progress
An adverbial modifier is used to describe an action in progress (over a period of time). The pattern is '在 \+... 地 verb' or '... 地 \+ 在 verb'.
大家都在安静地看书, 小李却大声地在打电话, 他真可惡。
Dàjiā dōu zài ānjìng de kàn shū, Xiǎo Lǐ què dàshēng de zài dǎ diànhuà, tā zhēn kěwù.
Everybody was reading quietly, but Xiao Li was loudly talking on the phone. He was really nasty.
网球选手: 我知道我有很多缺点, 可是我已经慢慢地在改, 请给我一个机会。
Wǎngqiú xuǎnshǒu: Wǒ zhīdào wǒ yǒu hěn duō quēdiǎn, kěshì wǒ yǐjīng màn màn de zài gǎi, qǐng gěi wǒ yī ge jīhuì.
教练: 不行, 你进步得太慢了, 不能参加比赛。(太 is a degree adverb; thus 得.)
Jiàoliàn: Bù xíng, nǐ jìnbù de tài màn le, bù néng cānjiā bǐsài.
Tennis player: I know I have many shortcomings, but I am slowly correcting them already. Please give me a chance.
Coach: No. You progress too slowly; you cannot participate in the competition.
### (e) No significant difference in meaning
Some situations can be described by using either the adverbial modifier (with 地) or the complement of state (with 得) without any significant difference in meaning. These tend to be acts on specific occasions (地) that are not intentionally controlled (得).
他一听到这个坏消息, 就难过地哭了。 (adverbial modifier 地)
Tā yì tīngdào zhè ge huài xiāoxí, jiù nánguò de kū le.
他一听到这个坏消息, 就哭得很难过。 (complement of state)
Tā yì tīngdào zhè ge huài xiāoxí, jiù kū de hěn nánguò.
The moment he heard the bad news, he cried sadly.
Compare: 他一听到这个坏消息, 就难过得哭了。(complement of degree)
Tā yì tīngdào zhè ge huài xiāoxí, jiù nánguò de kū le.
The moment he heard the bad news, he was so sad that he cried.
他一听到这个好消息, 就开心地笑了。 (adverbial modifier 地)
Tā yì tīngdào zhè ge hǎo xiāoxí, jiù kāixīn de xiào le.
他一听到这个好消息, 就笑得很开心。 (complement of state)
Tā yì tīngdào zhè ge hǎo xiāoxí, jiù xiào de hěn kāixīn.
The moment he heard the good news, he smiled happily.
Compare: 他平常很少笑, 可是他刚才听到这个好消息, 就开心得笑了。 (complement of degree)
Tā píngcháng hěn shǎo xiào, kěshì tā gāngcái tīngdào zhè ge hǎo xiāoxí, jiù kāixīn de xiào le.
Ordinarily, he rarely smiles. But when he heard this good news just now, he was so happy that he smiled.
### (f) Summary
As a rule of thumb, an adverbial modifier is similar to an 'adverb of manner' in English, which normally can be placed either before or after the verb (or even at the beginning) of the English sentence. On the other hand, because a complement of state focuses on 'performance', its English counterpart is likely an adverb that is placed after the verb.
主人很客气地请客人简单地介绍一下他自己。
Zhǔrén hěn kèqì de qǐng kèrén jiǎndān de jièshào yīxià tā zìjǐ.
The host politely asked the guest to introduce himself briefly.
The host asked the guest politely to briefly introduce himself.
因为小李英文说得很流利, 所以这次英文辩论比赛, 他表现得很出色。(出色 means outstanding).
Yīnwèi Xiǎo Lǐ Yīngwén shuō de hěn liúlì, suǒyǐ zhè cì Yīngwén biànlùn bǐsài, tā biǎoxiàn de hěn chūsè.
Because Xiao Li speaks English fluently, he performed extremely well in the English debate contest.
The following table provides a summary of the usages of the complement of state and the adverbial modifier.
Habitual action | Complement of state | 我爷爷走路走得很慢。
Wǒ yéye zǒulù zǒu de hěn màn.
My grandfather walks (or walked) slowly.
---|---|---
* * *
Specific incident (Non-habitual)
* * *
Describing outcome or performance | Complement of state | 上次考试, 我考得很差。
Shàng cì kǎoshì, wǒ kǎo de hěn chà.
I did poorly on the last test.
Describing an intentional action | Adverbial modifier | 下课了, 他慢慢地走回家。
Xià kè le, tā màn màn de zǒu huí jiā.
Class was over. He slowly walked home.
Action involving conscious effort | Adverbial modifier | 下次考试, 我会认真地准备。
Xià cì kǎoshì, wǒ huì rènzhēn de zhǔnbèi.
I will study conscientiously for the next test.
Action in progress (在 \+ verb) | Adverbial modifier | 王先生整天都在焦虑地等他儿子的电话。
Wáng xiānsheng zhěngtiān dōu zài jiāolǜ de děng tā érzi de diànhuà.
Mr Wang has been anxiously waiting for his son's phone call all day long.
* * *
Use of degree adverbs
* * *
太, 真, 更, 最, 这么, 那么, 够 | Complement of state | 你开车开得太快了。
Nǐ kāi chē kāi de tài kuài le.
You are driving too fast. (You drive too fast.)
很, 非常, 十分, 不太 | Both | 他跑得非常慢。 (Habitual)
Tā pǎo de fēicháng màn.
He runs extremely slowly.
他很高兴地向我问好。 (Intentional)
Tā hěn gāoxìng de xiàng wǒ wèn hǎo.
He happily said hello to me.
## Exercises
Level 3 Translate the following sentences into Chinese. Be sure to make the distinction between the complement of state (with 得) and the adverbial modifier (with 地).
* 1 Mr Wang is old; therefore, he walks slowly.
* 2 I got up early this morning. So I can walk to school slowly now. (Meaning: I can take my time.)
* 3 Wang Ming studies conscientiously, so he always does well on tests.
* 4 When I was young, I ran fast. Now I can only jog (= run slowly) for half an hour every day because my doctor says that I need exercise.
* 5 Mr Wang gave Miss Li a gift that was wrapped beautifully. Miss Li happily said, 'Thank you.'
* 6 Mrs Li felt that Mr Li was driving too fast, so she said anxiously, 'Don't drive so fast. We have plenty of time. You should drive slowly.'
* 7 Hearing this, Mr Li said unhappily, 'Look! Everybody else is driving even faster than I am.'
* 8 When my older brother and I returned home, our mother was angrily scolding our younger brother. My older brother said nervously, 'I also did badly in today's test. Mother will be so angry that she won't let me watch TV.'
* 9 Beijing's traffic is notoriously bad. When you are driving, you must watch the traffic signs carefully.
* 10 Because Mrs Wang is a good cook (= cooks well), Mr Wang has gradually (= slowly) gained weight (= become fat) since he got married.
* 11 Don't talk so loudly! Didn't you see that other students are reading quietly?
* 12 Mother: How come you did so poorly on the test again?
Father: It must have been because you had not studied hard enough.
Son: I am sorry. I will definitely do a good job studying (= preparing) for the next test.
* 13 This summer, the weather had been unbearably hot (= so hot that it was unbearable). But starting September, the weather gradually (= slowly) cooled down.
* 14 Miss Li rarely smiles. But upon hearing the good news, she smiles delightedly.
# [20
The 是......的 structure](content.xhtml#bck_Ch020)
The 是 (shì)......的 (de) structure has several quite different functions. The element between 是 and 的 can be a sentence, a verbal phrase (which might include a time phrase or a prepositional phrase), an adjective or even a modal verb. When what is between 是 and 的 is a noun or a pronoun, the noun/pronoun and 的 form the possessive, (for example, 这本书是我的 (Zhè běn shū shì wǒ de)), which is not the concern of this chapter.
Since the 是......的 structure is used when an event has taken place, 了cannot be used.
The affirmative–negative question is 是不是......的?(Or 是......的吗?) The negative form is 不是......的.
## A. Providing focus
The 是......的 structure can be used to give information on the 'who, where, how and when' of an event that has already taken place. It is used in context, meaning the fact that the event has taken place must be either mentioned first or it should be a pre-existent situation understood by each of the interlocutors.
Learners who are English speakers should pay special attention to the distinction between the 是......的 structure and a sentence with 了 since sentences with these two different Chinese structures are often translated into the same English sentence.
张: 客人呢?
Zhāng: Kèrén ne?
王: 都走了。
Wáng: Dōu zǒu le.
张: 哦? 他们是几点走的?
Zhāng: Ò? Tāmen shì jǐ diǎn zǒu de?
王: 两个是九点走的, 还有一个是十点才走的。
Wáng: Liǎng ge shì jiǔ diǎn zǒu de, háiyǒu yī ge shì shí diǎn cái zǒu de.
Zhang: Where are the guests?
Wang: They all left.
Zhang: Oh? When (what time) did they leave?
Wang: Two left at 9 o'clock and another one left at 10 o'clock.
The following passage describes the activities, none of which is in context yet. This passage does not focus on giving information on the time when the guests left; therefore, the 是......的 structure is not used.
昨天我家请客, 饭后我们聊天﹑ 打牌, 大家都玩得很高兴, 所以客人半夜才回家。
Zuótiān wǒ jiā qǐngkè, fàn hòu wǒmen liáotiān, dǎ pái, dàjiā dōu wán de hěn gāoxìng, suǒyǐ kèrén bànyè cái huíjiā.
Yesterday I had guests over. We chatted and played cards after dinner; everybody had a good time, so my guests didn't leave until midnight.
## Level 3 20.1 Focus on 'who'
When the focus is on asking about or giving information on 'who', it is possible to start the sentence with 是. This is because the person following 是 is the focus.
王: 听说你昨天跟一个很漂亮的女孩去参加颁奖典礼。
Wáng: Tīngshuō nǐ zuótiān gēn yí ge hěn piàoliàng de nǚhái qù cānjiā bānjiǎng diǎnlǐ.
李: 你听错了, 我是跟我妈妈去的。
Lǐ: Nǐ tīng cuò le. Wǒ shì gēn wǒ māma qù de.
Wang: I heard that you went with a pretty girl to the award ceremony yesterday.
Li: You heard it wrong. I went with my mother.
张: 这件事,是谁告诉你的?(The fact that Ding already knew about this matter is implied in the context.)
Zhāng: Zhè jiàn shì, shì shéi gàosù nǐ de?
丁:是老王告诉我的。 (老王是告诉我的 is ungrammatical.)
Dīng: Shì Lǎo Wáng gàosù wǒ de.
Zhang: Who told you about this matter?
Ding: Lao Wang told me about it.
张: 这个消息, 你是怎么知道的?
Zhāng: Zhè ge xiāoxí, nǐ shì zěnme zhīdào de?
丁:是老王打电话告诉我的。
Dīng: Shì Lǎo Wáng dǎ diànhuà gàosù wǒ de.
(It would be incorrect to say 老王是打电话告诉我的 as the response to this question.)
Zhang: How did you know about this news?
Ding: Lao Wang called and told me.
Compare: 张: 这个消息, 老王是怎么通知你的? (The focus is 'how', not 'who'.)
Zhāng: Zhè ge xiāoxí, Lǎo Wáng shì zěnme tōngzhī nǐ de?
丁: 他是打电话来告诉我的。
Dīng: Tā shì dǎ diànhuà lái gàosù wǒ de.
Zhang: How did Lao Wang notify you of this news?
Ding: He called and told me. (He notified me by phone.)
## Level 3 20.2 Focus on 'where'
When the focus is on 'where', the element between 是 and 的 usually contains a prepositional phrase with 在 (zài) or 从 (cóng).
我爸妈是在中国认识、 结婚的; 但是我是在英国生的。
Wǒ bàmā shì zài Zhōngguó rènshì, jiéhūn de; dànshì wǒ shì zài Yīngguó shēng de.
My parents met and married in China, but I was born in the UK.
这些家具都是从外国进口的, 所以非常贵。
Zhè xiē jiājù dōu shì cóng wàiguó jìnkǒu de, suǒyǐ fēicháng guì.
All the furniture was imported from foreign countries, so it is very expensive.
## Level 3 20.3 Focus on 'how'
When the focus is on giving information on 'how' something happened, two verbs might be necessary, with the first verb being used to indicate the method.
王: 你们是怎么知道这件事的?
Wáng: Nǐmen shì zěnme zhīdào zhè jiàn shì de?
张:是小王打电话告诉我的。
Zhāng: Shì Xiǎo Wáng dǎ diànhuà gàosù wǒ de.
丁: 我是从老李那里听说的。
Dīng: Wǒ shì cóng Lǎo Lǐ nàlǐ tīngshuō de.
Wang: How did you know about this incident?
Zhang: Xiao Wang called and told me.
Ding: I heard it from Lao Li.
李: 下这么大的雨, 你是怎么来学校的?
Lǐ: Xià zhème dà de yǔ, nǐ shì zěnme lái xuéxiào de?
丁: 我是开车来的。 (我是开车的 would be incorrect.)
Dīng: Wǒ shì kāichē lái de.
Li: It rained so hard today. How did you come to school?
Ding: I drove here.
The following passage describes a habitual act; it does not focus on giving information on how a specific event took place; therefore, the 是......的 structure is not used.
不管晴天还是下雨, 我每天都走路去学校。
Bùguǎn qíngtiān háishì xià yǔ, wǒ měi tiān dōu zǒulù qù xuéxiào.
Whether it's sunny or it rains, I walk to school every day.
In the following passage, the 是......的 structure is again not used; therefore, 怎么 has a different meaning.
李: 今天下这么大的雨, 而且又没课, 你怎么来了?
Lǐ: Jīntiān xià zhème dà de yǔ, érqiě yòu méi kè, nǐ zěnme lái le?
王: 上星期跟老师约定了今天见面, 谁知道今天会下大雨?
Wáng: Shàng xīngqī gēn lǎoshī yuēdìng le jīntiān jiànmiàn, shéi zhīdào jīntiān huì xià dà yǔ?
Li: It's raining so hard today; besides, there is no class; how come you are here?
Wang: I made an appointment to meet with the teacher today. Who would have known it would rain so hard today?
## Level 3 20.4 Focus on 'when'
The 是......的 structure may be used to focus on giving information on 'when' (or 'what time'), with the time phrase following 是.
張: 昨天的派对, 你去了吗?
Zhāng: Zuótiān de pàiduì, nǐ qù le ma?
李: 去了。
Lǐ: Qù le.
張: 我怎么没看到你? 你是几点走的?
Zhāng: Wǒ zěnme méi kàndào nǐ? Nǐ shì jǐ diǎn zǒu de?
李: 我是八点半走的。
Lǐ: Wǒ shì bā diǎn bàn zǒu de.
張: 难怪, 我是九点才到的。
Zhāng: Nánguài, wǒ shì jiǔ diǎn cái dào de.
Zhang: Did you go to yesterday's party?
Li: Yes, I did.
Zhang: How come I didn't see you? What time did you leave?
Li: I left at 8:30.
Zhang: No wonder (I didn't see you). I didn't arrive until 9 o'clock.
这座大楼是八十年前盖的, 不过后面的游泳池是去年才加的。
Zhè zuò dàlóu shì bāshí nián qián gài de, búguò hòumiàn de yóuyǒngchí shì qùnián cái jiā de.
This building was built 80 years ago, but the swimming pool behind it was only added last year.
## Level 3 20.5 Focus on 'purpose' of coming or going somewhere
来 (lái) or 去 (qù) can follow 是 to indicate one's purpose of coming/going to a place. The 是来/去......的 structure is usually used to imply that one is/was not here/there for another purpose.
(Situation: Wang and Zhang have recently had a falling-out.)
王: 我又没有请你, 你来做什么?
Wáng: Wǒ yòu méiyǒu qǐng nǐ, nǐ lái zuò shénme?
张: 我是来向你道歉的。 (Implied: 不是来找麻烦的。)
Zhāng: Wǒ shì lái xiàng nǐ dàoqiàn de.
Wang: I did not invite you; why are you here?
Zhang: I am here to apologize to you. (Implied: I am not here to look for trouble.)
去年我去了一趟上海, 大家都以为我是去旅游的, 其实我是去找工作的。
Qùnián wǒ qù le yí tàng Shànghǎi, dàjiā dōu yǐwéi wǒ shì qù lǚyóu de, qíshí wǒ shì qù zhǎo gōngzuò de.
Last year, I made a trip to Shanghai. Everybody thought I went to sightsee; actually, I went there to look for a job.
The 不是来/去......的 structure may have a very different English counterpart.
English: I didn't come to argue with you; I came to apologize to you.
Chinese: 我不是来跟你吵架的,是来向你道歉的。
Wǒ bú shì lái gēn nǐ chǎojià de, shì lái xiàng nǐ dàoqiàn de.
(Situation: A college student has failed all his classes. His father is angry.)
爸爸: 别忘了, 你不是去浪费我的血汗钱的,是去受教育的。
Bàba: Bié wàng le, nǐ bú shì qù làngfèi wǒde xuěhàn qián de, shì qù shòu jiàoyù de.
Father: Don't forget that you didn't go to college to waste my hard-earned money; you went to get an education.
## Level 3 20.6 Location of objects
When the element between 是 and 的 ends with 'verb + object', the object can be moved after 的. However, the object should not be a pronoun.
张: 昨天你妈妈做了哪些菜?
Zhāng: Zuótiān nǐ māma zuò le nǎ xiē cài?
王: 昨天我们是在外面吃的晚饭,(= 昨天我们是在外面吃晚饭的,)不是在家 吃的。
Wáng: Zuótiān wǒmen shì zài wàimiàn chī de wǎnfàn, bú shì zài jiā chī de.
Zhang: What dishes did your mother make yesterday?
Wang: Yesterday we ate dinner out; we didn't eat at home.
丁: 你去邮局的时候, 怎么没把我下午写的那封信也寄了?
Dīng: Nǐ qù yóujú de shíhòu, zěnme méi bǎ wǒ xiàwǔ xiě de nà fēng xìn yě jì le?
李: 我是上午去的邮局。(= 我是上午去邮局的。)
Lǐ: Wǒ shì shàngwǔ qù de yóujú.
Ding: Why didn't you also mail the letter I wrote this afternoon when you went to the post office?
Li: I went to the post office in the morning.
## Level 3 20.7 When 是 is optional
是 is optional in a positive sentence (particularly when the statement starts with 是), but 的 is never optional. Without 是, the sentence may sound more casual.
王: 这个秘密,(是)谁告诉老张的?
Wáng: Zhè ge mìmì, (shì) shéi gàosù Lǎo Zhāng de?
李:(是)老张自己发现的,不是别人告诉他的。
Lǐ: (Shì) Lǎo Zhāng zìjǐ fāxiàn de, bú shì biérén gàosù tā de.
Wang: Who told Lao Zhang this secret?
Li: Lao Zhang discovered it himself; it was not revealed to him by anybody.
张: 今天是你的生日, 对不对? 祝你生日快乐!
Zhāng: Jīntiān shì nǐde shēngrì, duì bú duì? Zhù nǐ shēngrì kuàilè.
李: 对, 谢谢, 可是, 你(是)怎么知道的?
Lǐ: Duì, xièxie, kěshì, nǐ (shì) zěnme zhīdào de?
张:(是)小王告诉我的。
Zhāng: (Shì) Xiǎo Wáng gàosù wǒ de.
Zhang: Today is your birthday, right? Happy birthday!
Li: That's right, thanks. But how did you know?
Zhang: Xiao Wang told me.
## Level 3 20.8 Mysteries and crimes
When there is a mystery or when a crime has occurred, the 'who, where, how and when' are the focus of interest; therefore, 是......的 is used in discussing these situations.
李明的电脑被偷了。他知道是他同屋偷的, 可是他提不出证明。
Lǐ Míng de diànnǎo bèi tōu le. Tā zhīdào shì tā tóngwū tōu de, kěshì tā tí bù chū zhèngmíng.
Li Ming's computer was stolen. He knew his roommate had stolen it, but he could not prove it.
警察已经知道王先生是在这个屋子里被谋杀的, 可是他们不知道他是怎么死的。
Jǐngchá yǐjīng zhīdào Wáng xiānsheng shì zài zhè ge wūzi lǐ bèi móushā de, kěshì tāmen bù zhīdào tā shì zěnme sǐ de.
The police already know Mr Wang was murdered in this room, but they don't know how he died.
张: 没有人知道这件奇怪的事是什么时候发生的。
Zhāng: Méiyǒu rén zhīdào zhè jiàn qíguài de shì shì shénme shíhòu fāshēng de.
王:(是)谁说的? 大家都知道这件事是上个星期发生的。
Wáng: (Shì) shéi shuō de? Dàjiā dōu zhīdào zhè jiàn shì shì shàng ge xīngqī fāshēng de.
Zhang: No one knows when this strange incident happened.
Wang: Who said so? Everybody knows that it happened last week.
## Level 3 20.9 Focus on 'origin'
Sentences with the 是......的 structure can be translated into the passive voice in English when it shows the 'origin' of the subject. A sentence showing 'origin' can also be in the present tense in English since it indicates a fact, not a specific event that has taken place.
张: 豆腐是用什么做的?
Zhāng: Dòufu shì yòng shénme zuò de?
李: 豆腐主要是用黄豆做的。
Lǐ: Dòufu zhǔyào shì yòng huángdòu zuò de.
Zhang: What is tofu made from?
Li: Tofu is made mainly from soya beans.
丁: 你的中文老师是不是从中国来的?
Dīng: Nǐde Zhōngwén lǎoshī shì bú shì cóng Zhōngguó lái de?
王: 不是, 他是在英国生的, 不过他爸妈是从中国来的。
Wáng: Bú shì, tā shì zài Yīngguó shēng de, búguò tā bàmā shì cóng Zhōngguó lái de.
Ding: Is your Chinese teacher from China? (Did your Chinese teacher come from China?)
Wang: No, he was born in the UK. But his parents are from China (= came from China).
张: 这本食谱是你写的吗?
Zhāng: Zhè běn shípǔ shì nǐ xiě de ma?
李: 不是,是我妈妈写的; 不过我最近也写了一本食谱, 还没出版。
Lǐ: Bú shì, shì wǒ māma xiě de, búguò wǒ zuìjìn yě xiě le yì běn shípǔ, hái méi chūbǎn.
Zhang: Was this cookbook written by you? (Did you write this cookbook?)
Li: No, it is by my mother. (It was written by my mother). But I have recently written a cookbook, too; it has not been published yet.
## Level 3 20.10 Subjects in context
In the absence of English structures completely equivalent to the 是......的 structure, it is important to keep in mind that the subject of the 是......的 structure should be 'in context', meaning its existence is known to both or all of the people engaged in the conversation.
English: Who wrote those words on the wall?
Chinese: 墙上的那些字是谁写的?
Qiáng shàng de nà xiē zì shì shéi xiě de?
(It would be incorrect to say 谁写了那些字在墙上?since 那些字 is the 'known information'.)
English: Who moved away my chair?
Chinese: 谁把我的椅子搬走了?
Shéi bǎ wǒde yǐzi bān zǒu le?
(This is not the 是......的 structure since 我的椅子 is not in context yet.)
English: Who moved this chair here?
Chinese: 这把椅子是谁搬来的?
Zhè bǎ yǐzi shì shéi bān lái de?
(这把椅子 is the 'known information' in this sentence, and is considered 'in context'.)
妈妈: 谁把冰箱里的牛奶喝完了?
Māma: Shéi bǎ bīngxiāng lǐ de niúnǎi hē wán le?
(没有人回答。)
(Méiyǒu rén huídá.)
妈妈: 快说, 冰箱里的牛奶是谁喝完的?(The fact that someone drank the milk is now 'in context', and the focus is now on 'who'.)
Māma: Kuài shuō, bīngxiāng lǐ de niúnǎi shì shéi hē wán de?
Mother: Who drank the milk in the refrigerator?
(Nobody answers.)
Mother: Tell me now, who drank the milk in the refrigerator?
## Level 3 B. Identifying people
* The element between 是......的 can be a verbal phrase used to identify a person by the person's profession/job, academic specialty or native place.
王先生跟李先生都是司机, 王先生是开公共汽车的, 李先生是开出租汽车的。
Wáng xiānsheng gēn Lǐ xiānsheng dōu shì sījī, Wáng xiānsheng shì kāi gōngòng qìchē de, Lǐ xiānsheng shì kāi chūzū qìchē de.
Both Mr Wang and Mr Li are drivers. Mr Wang drives buses (= is a bus driver); Mr Li drives a taxi (= is a taxi driver).
张: 你爸爸是做什么的? (It would be improper to say 你爸爸做什么?)
Zhāng: Nǐ bàba shì zuò shénme de?
王: 他是教英文的。你爸爸呢?
Wáng: Tā shì jiāo Yīngwén de. Nǐ bàba ne?
张: 他也是教书的。
Zhāng: Tā yě shì jiāoshū de.
Zhang: What (kind of work) does your father do?
Wang: He teaches English. (= He is an English teacher.) How about your father?
Zhang: He also teaches. (= He is also a teacher.)
* The element between 是......的 can also be a noun to identify a person based on that person's affiliation within a large organization.
王中和李明都是北京大学的学生; 王中是学历史的, 李明是学数学的。(王中是历史系的; 李明是数学系的。)
Wáng Zhōng hé Lǐ Míng dōu shì Běijīng Dàxué de xuéshēng, Wáng Zhōng shì xué lìshǐ de, Lǐ Míng shì xué shùxué de. (Wáng Zhōng shì lìshǐ xì de, Lǐ Míng shì shùxué xì de.)
Both Wang Zhong and Li Ming are students at Beijing University. Wang Zhong is a history student; Li Ming is a mathematics student. (Wang Zhong is from the history department; Li Ming is from the mathematics department.)
(Situation: Two people meet for the first time at a company event.)Š
王: 你是哪个单位的?
Wáng: Nǐ shì nǎ ge dānwèi de?
李: 我是人事部的。你呢?
Lǐ: Wǒ shì rénshì bù de. Nǐ ne?
王: 我是会计部的。
Wáng: Wǒ shì kuàijì bù de.
Wang: Which division are you from?
Li: I am from the personnel division. How about you?
Wang: I am from the accounting division.
## Level 3 C. Stating facts
The element between 是......的 can be an adjective. Such an adjective is used to indicate a fact, not an opinion, and therefore, does not follow a degree adverb. For example, 这件大衣很贵 (Zhè jiàn dàyī hěn guì: 'This coat is expensive') is an opinion, whereas 这件大衣是蓝的 (Zhè jiàn dàyī shì lán de: 'This coat is blue') is a fact.
(Situation: A mother and her daughter are shopping for a coat for the daughter.)
妈妈: 你不是说想买红色的大衣吗? 这件是红的, 就买这件吧!
Māma: Nǐ bú shì shuō xiǎng mǎi hóngsè de dàyī ma? Zhè jiàn shì hóng de, jiù mǎi zhè jiàn ba!
女儿: 这件太红了, 我不喜欢。
Nǚ'ér: Zhè jiàn tài hóng le, wǒ bù xǐhuān.
(这件大衣是红的 is a fact; 这件太红了 is an opinion.)
Mother: Didn't you say you wanted to buy a red coat? This one is red; buy this one!
Daughter: This one is too red. I don't like it.
## Level 3 20.11 Using mutually exclusive adjectives
The adjective in the 是......的 structure is frequently one of two adjectives whose meanings are mutually exclusive.
贿赂是非法的, 但是送礼是合法的, 所以你可以送礼, 不可以贿赂。
(It is incorrect to say 贿赂很非法, 送礼很合法. 非法 and 合法 are mutually exclusive.)
Huìlù shì fēifǎ de, dànshì sònglǐ shì héfǎ de, suǒyǐ nǐ kěyǐ sònglǐ, bù kěyǐ huìlù.
Bribery is illegal, but giving gifts is legal; so you can give gifts, (but you) cannot bribe.
我们学校老师跟学生的地址﹑ 电话号码都是公开的,(不是秘密的)。
Wǒmen xuéxiào lǎoshī gēn xuéshēng de dìzhǐ, diànhuà hàomǎ dōu shì gōngkāi de, (bú shì mìmì de.)
At our school, teachers' and students' addresses and telephone numbers are open to the public (not confidential).
妈妈: 你的中文老师是男的还是女的? (It is rude to call an individual 男人 or 女人.)
Māma: Nǐde Zhōngwén lǎoshī shì nán de háishì nǚ de?
儿子: 我们有两个中文老师, 一个是男的, 一个是女的。
Érzi: Wǒmen yǒu liǎng ge Zhōngwén lǎoshī, yí ge shì nán de, yí ge shì nǚ de.
Mother: Is your Chinese teacher male or female?
Son: We have two Chinese teachers; one is male; one is female.
## Level 3 20.12 Using modal verbs
Some modal verbs can be placed between 是 and 的. 应该 (yīnggāi)/不应该, 可以 (kěyǐ) 不可以 and 不行 (bù xíng) can be used this way. Modal verbs in English are rarely used this way (as the predicate in a sentence).
(Situation: Xiao Wang gave his seat to an old man on the bus. The old man said, 'Thank you.')
小王: 哪里, 这是应该的。
Xiǎo Wáng: Nǎlǐ, zhè shì yīnggāi de.
Xiao Wang: Don't mention it. This is the way it should be.
学外语的时候, 只记生词、 不学语法,是不行的。
Xué wàiyǔ de shíhòu, zhǐ jì shēngcí, bù xué yǔfǎ, shì bùxíng de.
When one studies a foreign language, only memorizing vocabulary without studying grammar won't do. (It won't do to only memorize vocabulary without studying grammar.)
## D. Emphatic expressions
The 是......的 structure can be optional when used in an emphatic expression.
## Level 2 20.13 Emphasizing a point
The element between 是 and 的 can be an adjective with a degree adverb such as 很 (hěn) or 非常 (fēicháng) to emphasize the point. In this case, 是......的 is an emphatic expression and it is optional.
李明: 老师, 请问, 这两个句子, 哪一句是错的? (错 is an adjective that cannot go with a degree adverb such as 很; therefore, 是......的 is not optional.)
Lǐ Míng: Lǎoshī, qǐng wèn, zhè liǎng ge jùzi, nǎ yí jù shì cuò de?
老师: 同学们, 李明的这个问题,(是)十分值得讨论(的)。
Lǎoshī: Tóngxuémen, Lǐ Míng de zhè ge wèntí (shì) shífēn zhíde tǎolùn (de).
Li Ming: Sir, would you please tell me which of these two sentences is incorrect?
Teacher: Everyone, Li Ming's question is very much worth discussing.
学生: 我认为, 多学一种外语对将来找工作(是)很有帮助(的)。
Xuéshēng: Wǒ rènwéi, duō xué yì zhǒng wàiyǔ duì jiānglái zhǎo gōngzuò (shì) hěn yǒu bāngzhù (de).
老师: 你的这个看法(是)相当正确(的)。
Lǎoshī: Nǐde zhè ge kànfǎ (shì) xiāngdāng zhèngquè (de).
Student: I think that to learn one more foreign language is helpful for getting a job in the future.
Teacher: This viewpoint of yours is quite accurate.
## Level 2 20.14 Emphasizing one's confidence/certainty
An optional 是......的 can be used to emphasize one's confidence about a prediction or the certainty of the happening of a future event; in this case, the element between 是 and 的 should include words such as 会 (huì), 要 (yào) and 可能 (kěnéng), and an optional 一定 (yídìng) is often used to make the point even stronger. In addition, 是 is optional, but 的 is not.
这件事这么重要, 我想, 他(是)(一定)不会忘记的。(= 他一定不会忘记。)
Zhè jiàn shì zhème zhòngyào, wǒ xiǎng, tā shì (yídìng) bú huì wàngjì de.
This matter is so important; I think he definitely won't forget.
小王犯了这么大的错, 他(是)(一定)要负责的。(= 他一定要负责。)
Xiǎo Wáng fàn le zhème dà de cuò, tā shì (yídìng) yào fùzé de.
Xiao Wang made such a big mistake; he definitely will have to be responsible for it.
## Level 2 20.15 Emphasizing the negative
It should be noted that when 是......的 is used for the purpose of emphasis and what is being emphasized is negative, the structure is 是不......的, not 不是......的.
李明非常诚实, 他是不可能说谎的。 (Do not say 他不是可能说谎的.)
Lǐ Míng fēicháng chéngshí, tā shì bù kěnéng shuōhuǎng de.
Li Ming is extremely honest. It is not possible that he would lie.
## E. Summary of the functions of 是......的
Functions | Examples
---|---
* * *
Focus
* * *
Who | 这件事是谁告诉你的?
Zhè jiàn shì shì shéi gàosù nǐ de?
Who told you about this matter?
* * *
Where | 我爸妈是在法国认识的。
Wǒ bàmā shì zài Fǎguó rènshì de.
My parents met in France.
* * *
How | 今天我是走路来的。
Jīntiān wǒ shì zǒulù lái de.
Today I walked here.
* * *
When | 昨天晚上客人是几点走的?
Zuótiān wǎnshàng kèrén shì jǐ diǎn zǒu de?
What time did the guests leave last night?
* * *
Purpose (of coming or going to a place) | 我是来问问题的, 不是来聊天的。
Wǒ shì lái wèn wèntí de, bú shì lái liáotiān de.
I came to ask questions, not to chat.
* * *
Origin (often passive voice in English) | 这本书是我妈妈写的。
Zhè běn shū shì wǒ māma xiě de.
My mother wrote this book. (= This book was written by my mother.)
* * *
Identification and fact
* * *
Verb | 王先生是开公共汽车的。
Wáng xiānsheng shì kāi gōnggòng qìchē de.
Mr Wang is a bus driver.
* * *
Adjective | 贿赂是非法的。
Huìlù shì fēifǎ de.
Bribery is illegal.
* * *
Emphatic expression
* * *
Adjective | 多运动对身体是很有好处的。
Duō yùndòng duì shēntǐ shì hěn yǒu hǎochù de.
Exercising more is beneficial to one's health.
* * *
会, 要, 可能 | 这么重要的事, 我是不会忘记的。
Zhème zhòngyào de shì, wǒ shì bú huì wàngjì de.
I won't forget such an important matter.
## Exercises
Choose the correct sentence based on the scenario.
* Level 2 1 Mr Zhang tells Mr Smith that he is a native of Beijing, not Shanghai.
* (a) 是从北京我来的, 不是上海。
* (b) 我是从北京来的, 不是上海。
* (c) 从北京我是来的, 不是上海。
* 2 Miss Zhang and Miss Wang ran into each other after many years. Miss Wang asked Miss Zhang what she had been doing. Miss Zhang told her that she had written a novel. Miss Zhang would say:
* (a) 一本小说是我写的。
* (b) 我是写了一本小说的。
* (c) 我写了一本小说。
* 3 Mr Ding says 'Happy Birthday' to Anna and Anna asks him how he found out it was her birthday. What would Mr Ding say?
* (a) 你的男朋友告诉我的。
* (b) 你的男朋友告诉我了。
* (c) 你的男朋友是告诉我的。
* 4 Miss Li tells Mr Wang that she had a party at her house yesterday and that her guests went home late. And Mr Wang asks her what time they left. Mr. Wang would say:
* (a) 哦, 是吗? 他们是几点走的?
* (b) 哦, 是吗? 他们几点走了?
* (c) 哦, 是吗? 他们是几点走了?
* 5 Mrs Li tells a friend that she and her husband were in China when they married.
* (a) 我跟我先生是在中国结的婚。
* (b) 是我跟我先生在中国结婚的。
* (c) 我跟我先生在中国是结婚的。
* 6 Pointing at a book on her bookshelf, Miss Chen tells a visitor that her mother is the author of that book.
* (a) 我妈妈写了这本书。
* (b) 是我妈妈写这本书的。
* (c) 这本书是我妈妈写的。
* 7 How would you ask someone what her father's line of work was before his retirement?
* (a) 你爸爸退休以前, 是做了什么?
* (b) 你爸爸退休以前, 是做什么的?
* (c) 你爸爸退休以前, 做什么工作了?
* 8 You have just learned that Wang Zhong knows a secret of yours and you want to know how he has come to know it.
* (a) 是谁把我的秘密告诉你的?
* (b) 谁是把我的秘密告诉你的?
* (c) 我的秘密是谁告诉的你?
* 9 At a department store, you saw a coat that you really liked, but you didn't buy it because you felt that it was too expensive. Your friend has asked you why you didn't buy it. How would you tell her the reason?
* (a) 因为那件大衣是太贵的, 我买不起。
* (b) 因为那件大衣太贵了, 我买不起。
* (c) 因为那件大衣是贵的, 我买不起。
* 10 On the first day of school, Wang Ming tells his teacher his birth year and birth place.
* (a) 我一九九六年在中国是生的。
* (b) 我一九九六年是在中国生的。
* (c) 我是一九九六年在中国生的。
* 11 Mr Wang is found dead in his house. But nobody knows how he died.
* (a) 没有人知道王先生怎么死了。
* (b) 王先生是怎么死的, 没有人知道。
* (c) 王先生是死的, 可是没有人知道怎么。
* 12 Wang Zhong has been hospitalized. He is surprised when Zhang Ming shows up to visit him. What would Wang Zhong say when he sees Zhang Ming?
* (a) 张明, 是你! 你怎么来了?
* (b) 张明, 是你! 你是怎么来的?
* (c) 张明, 是你! 你是怎么来了?
* 13 Wang Zhong also asks Zhang Ming if he drove there because he knows that Zhang Ming lives in another town. Zhang Ming tells him that he rode the train. Zhang Ming says:
* (a) 我来是坐火车的。
* (b) 我是来坐火车的。
* (c) 我是坐火车来的。
* 14 Xiaoming's mother asks him how he found out that he will soon have a sibling because she has not told him about her pregnancy. Xiaoming says that his father told him about it.
* (a) 爸爸告诉我的。
* (b) 我是爸爸告诉的。
* (c) 爸爸是告诉我的。
* 15 Anna and her boyfriend broke up a couple of days ago. Today she goes to his place to return some presents from him. But upon seeing her, he mistakenly thinks that she comes to apologize. What would Anna say to tell him that it is not the purpose of her visit?
* (a) 我不是来道歉的, 是来还你东西的。
* (b) 我是不来道歉的, 是来还你东西的。
* (c) 我是来不道歉的, 是来还你东西的。
* 16 How would you ask someone what he is going to do after his retirement?
* (a) 您退休以后, 是做什么的?
* (b) 您退休以后, 是要做什么的?
* (c) 您退休以后, 要做什么?
* 17 Anna and Xiaolan see a car of an unusual color, and they are debating whether it is green or blue. Anna thinks it is blue, not green, but Xiaolan thinks otherwise. What would Xiaolan say?
* (a) 我觉得这辆车是绿, 不是蓝。
* (b) 我觉得这辆车很绿, 不蓝。
* (c) 我觉得这辆车是绿的, 不是蓝的。
* 18 Anna and Xiaolan agree that, regardless of the color, that kind of car definitely won't be cheap. They say:
* (a) 我相信, 这种车不是便宜的。
* (b) 我相信, 这种车是不会便宜的。
* (c) 我相信, 这种车是贵的。
* 19 There was supposed to be a party at Mr Wang's house, but he had been delayed in the traffic. When he got home, he didn't see any guests, and he wondered where they were. (He said: 客人呢?) and his wife answered:
* (a) 客人九点就走了。
* (b) 客人是九点走的。
* (c) 客人是九点走了。
* 20 Although Anna has been looking for a red skirt, she rejects a nice-looking one that has been on sale. Her mother asks her why she is going to give up a good deal, and she replies by telling her that the shade of the red color is too bright for her taste.
* (a) 那条裙子是太红的。
* (b) 那条裙子太红了。
* (c) 那条裙子太红的。
# [21
Subjectless sentences and existential sentences](content.xhtml#bck_Ch021)
Both subjectless sentences and existential sentences are unique grammatical structures in Chinese. These two types of sentence share similar grammatical features. The unique features and the similarities will be the focus of this chapter.
In addition, a group of verbs termed 'placement verbs' in this book will be introduced in this chapter. The use of placement verbs and existential sentences are closely related. Another unique sentence type which will be termed as sentences with the subject 'hidden' will be discussed, although it should not be confused with a subjectless sentence.
Both subjectless sentences and existential sentences are used to indicate the emergence of a new situation. Also, what emerges in the situation should be of an indefinite nature.
Since the definiteness of a noun does not play an important role in English, what is discussed in this chapter merits special attention for learners who are English speakers.
☞ See 3.2 for more information on the definiteness of nouns.
## A. Subjectless sentences
As the term indicates, a subjectless sentence is a sentence without an obvious subject. Therefore, a subjectless sentence frequently starts with a verb. However, elliptical sentences or imperative sentences are not considered subjectless sentences.
☞ See Chapter 7 for more information on the imperative sentence and 1.3 for elliptical sentences.
张:告诉我, 你想吃什么? (告诉我 is an imperative sentence.)
Zhāng: Gàosù wǒ, nǐ xiǎng chī shénme?
王:想吃牛肉面。 (想吃牛肉面 is an elliptical sentence, meaning 我想吃牛肉面.)
Wáng: Xiǎng chī niúròu miàn.
Zhang: Tell me, what do you want to eat?
Wang: I want to eat beef noodles.
### Level 3 21.1 The emergence of meteorological or natural phenomena
A subjectless sentence is used to indicate the emergence of a meteorological or natural phenomenon, that is, phenomena that are related to the weather or seasons. It is important to note that, when a subjectless sentence is used, it is usually the first observation or the first mentioning of the phenomenon.
你看,下雨了。咱们不能去公园了。
Nǐ kàn, xià yǔ le. Zánmen bù néng qù gōngyuán le.
Look, it's raining. We can't go to the park anymore.
('It's raining' is being mentioned for the first time. Both occurrences of 了 indicate a new situation.)
冬天了, 所以天天刮风、 下雪。
Dōngtiān le, suǒyǐ tiāntiān guā fēng, xià xuě.
It's winter now. So the wind blows and it snows every day.
(冬天了 can be considered a subjectless sentence since 冬天 in this sentence is not the subject.)
### Level 3 21.2 Indefinite nouns
In a subjectless sentence, what is being mentioned must be an indefinite noun.
早上下大雨, 现在出大太阳, 这种天气真奇怪。
Zǎoshàng xià dà yǔ, xiànzài chū dà tàiyáng, zhè zhǒng tiānqì zhēn qíguài.
It was raining hard this morning, and there is strong sunlight now. Such weather is really strange.
(太阳 in this sentence does not mean 'the sun'; it means 'sunlight'. Therefore, it is indefinite.)
Compare: 太阳每天从东边出来。
Tàiyáng měi tiān cóng dōngbiān chūlái.
The sun rises from the east every day.
(太阳 in this sentence refers to 'the sun'; it is definite. Therefore, a subjectless sentence should not be used in this case. It is incorrect to say 每天早上出来太阳.)
张: 昨天天气怎么样?
Zhāng: Zuótiān tiānqì zěnmeyàng?
李:下了一场大雨,下雨的时候, 还闪电、 打雷呢。
(一场大雨 and 电/雷 are indefinite; therefore, it would be incorrect to say 一场大雨下了, 电闪 or 雷打.)
Lǐ: Xià le yì chǎng dà yǔ; xià yǔ de shíhòu, hái shǎn diàn, dǎ léi ne.
Zhang: How was the weather yesterday?
Li: There was a bout of heavy rain. When it was raining, there was also thunder and lightning.
### Level 3 21.3 Meteorological phenomenon as definite noun
Not all meteorological or natural phenomena should be in subjectless sentences. When the phenomenon has been mentioned (and thus has become definite) or already exists in the context, the sentence should have a subject.
张: 昨天又下了一场雨, 恐怕要闹水灾了。 (一场雨 and 水灾 are indefinite.)
Zhāng: Zuótiān yòu xià le yì chǎng yǔ, kǒngpà yào nào shuǐzāi le.
李: 你放心, 那场雨下得不大, 不会闹水灾的。 (那场雨 is definite.)
Lǐ: Nǐ fàngxīn, nà chǎng yǔ xià de bú dà, bú huì nào shuǐzāi de.
Zhang: It rained (There was rain) again yesterday. I am afraid there will soon be a flood.
Li: Don't worry. Yesterday's rain was not heavy; there won't be any flood.
王: 真气人! 又下雪了, 咱们不能去公园了。 (又下雪了 is a subjectless sentence.)
Wáng: Zhēn qìrén! Yòu xià xuě le, zánmen bù néng qù gōngyuán le.
李: 这场雪大概不会下太久,雪一停咱们就走。 (雪 is the subject in these sentences.)
Lǐ: Zhè chǎng xuě dàgài bú huì xià tài jiǔ, xuě yì tíng zánmen jiù zǒu.
Wang: How annoying! It's snowing again. We can't go to the park anymore.
Li: The snow probably won't last for too long. As soon as it stops, we will go.
### Level 3 21.4 Activities on fixed schedules
A phenomenon or an event that happens regularly according to a fixed schedule can be described by using the subjectless sentence. The schedule can be natural or man-made; also, the event should be indefinite or being mentioned for the first time.
#### (a) School-related activities
Regular school-related activities which follow a fixed schedule are frequently described by using the subjectless sentence.
王: 快期中考了, 咱们应该多学习﹑ 少玩。 (快期中考了 is a subjectless sentence.)
Wáng: Kuài qīzhōngkǎo le, zánmen yīnggāi duō xuéxí, shǎo wán.
李: 什么? 刚开学怎么就要期中考了呢? (开学 is a subjectless sentence.)
Lǐ: Shénme? Gāng kāixué zěnme jiù yào qīzhōngkǎo le ne?
Wang: Mid-term exams are going to be here soon. We should study more and have less fun.
Li: What? How come school has just started and mid-term exams are coming already?
我女儿说一放寒假她就会回家; 现在寒假都快放完了, 她还没回来。
(放寒假 is subjectless; 寒假 is the subject in 寒假快放完了.)
Wǒ nǚ'ér shuō, yí fàng hánjià tā jiù huì huí jiā; xiànzài hánjià dōu kuài fàng wán le, tā hái méi huí lái.
My daughter said that she would come home as soon as the winter holidays started. But now the winter holidays are about to end and she has not come back yet.
#### (b) Seasons and seasonal activities
Seasons and seasonal activities or events can be described by using subjectless sentences.
到了夏天, 总是会出现很多苍蝇﹑ 蚂蚁, 真讨厌! (夏天 and 苍蝇, 蚂蚁 are indefinite; therefore, both sentences are subjectless. 出现 means 'to emerge'.)
Dào le xiàtiān, zǒngshì huì chūxiàn hěnduō cāngyíng, mǎyǐ, zhēn tǎoyàn!
When summer comes, there will always be lots of flies and ants. How annoying!
Compare: 夏天到了, 苍蝇﹑ 蚂蚁也多起来了, 真讨厌!
(夏天 in this sentence is definite since the sentence is uttered during summer.)
Xiàtiān dào le, cāngyíng, mǎyǐ yě duō qǐlái le, zhēn tǎoyàn.
Summer is here. Flies and ants have begun to gather. How annoying!
### Level 3 21.5 The emergence of a situation
As a general rule, when the verb of the sentence indicates the emergence of a situation and what emerges is an indefinite noun, the sentence is a subjectless sentence.
你开车的时候, 一定要小心, 否则会出事。 (出事 is subjectless.)
Nǐ kāichē de shíhòu, yídìng yào xiǎoxīn, fǒuzé huì chū shì.
When you drive, you must be careful; otherwise, there might be accidents.
Compare: 现在事发了, 大家都有责任。 (事 is definite and is the subject in 事发了.)
Xiànzài shì fā le, dàjiā dōu yǒu zérèn.
Now the incident has occurred, everybody will bear some responsibility.
昨天晚上我正在看电视的时候, 忽然停电了。半小时以后,电来了, 可是我在看的那个节目已经演完了。 (停电 is subjectless; 电 in 电来了 is the subject.)
Zuótiān wǎnshàng wǒ zhèng zài kàn diànshì de shíhòu, hūrán tíng diàn le. Bàn xiǎoshí yǐhòu, diàn lái le, kěshì wǒ zài kàn de nà ge jiémù yǐjīng yǎn wán le.
Yesterday evening when I was watching TV, there was suddenly a blackout. Half an hour later, the electricity came back, but the show I had been watching was already finished.
(Situation: A restaurant owner inquires about how business is going.)
老板: 昨天生意怎么样?
Lǎobǎn: Zuótiān shēngyì zěnmeyàng?
经理: 很差, 只来了三位客人。不过,那三位客人今天又来了。 (三位客人 is indefinite; 那三位客人 becomes definite.)
Jīnglǐ: Hěn chà, zhǐ lái le sān wèi kèrén. Búguò, nà sān wèi kèrén jīntiān yòu lái le.
Owner: How was business yesterday?
Manager: Not good. Only three customers came. But, those three customers came again today.
### Level 3 21.6 Time and location
It should be noted that a subjectless sentence does not always start with a verb. A time phrase or a location can appear before the verb. A phrase indicating time or location is not considered the subject of the sentence.
张: 这里每年夏天都会刮几场颱风。 (这里 is the location; 每年夏天 is the time phrase.)
Zhāng: Zhèlǐ měi nián xiàtiān dōu huì guā jǐ chǎng táifēng.
李: 是啊! 上个月刚刮了一场, 听说下个星期还会刮一场呢!
Lǐ: Shì a! Shàng ge yuè gāng guā le yì chǎng, tīngshuō xià ge xīngqī hái huì guā yì chǎng ne!
Zhang: Every year in the summer there are several typhoons here.
Li: That's right! There was one just last month. I heard that there will be another one next week!
你看,外面在下冰雹, 咱么别去了吧。 (外面 is the location.)
Nǐ kàn, wàimiàn zai xià bīngbào, zánmen bié qù le ba.
Look, it's hailing outside. Let's not go anymore.
### Level 3 21.7 有/有些 \+ indefinite noun
A sentence can begin with 有 or 有些 followed by an indefinite noun. Since an English sentence can start with an indefinite noun, 有 should not be thought of as 'there be'; instead, it should be though of as 'some; certain' to indicate the indefinite nature of the subject.
有人在唱歌, 你听见了没有?
Yǒu rén zài chàng gē, nǐ tīngjiàn le méiyǒu?
Someone is (or Some people are) singing; did you hear it?
有一个姓白的人下午打了一个电话来, 你要不要给他回个电话?
Yǒu yí ge xìng Bái de rén xiàwǔ dǎ le yí ge diànhuà lái, nǐ yào bú yào gěi tā huí ge diànhuà?
Someone whose last name is Bai called you this afternoon. Do you want to call him back?
有些人以为中文很难, 所以他们不敢学。 (Do not interpret 有些 as 'a few'.)
Yǒu xiē rén yǐwéi Zhōngwén hěn nán, suǒyǐ tāmen bù gǎn xué.
Some people think that Chinese is difficult, so they dare not study it.
(Situation: Two teachers are discussing students' test results.)
王老师: 这次考试, 你们班有没有人不及格?
Wáng lǎoshī: Zhè cì kǎoshì, nǐmen bān yǒu méiyǒu rén bù jígé?
李老师:没有人不及格,有两个得到满分。
Lǐ lǎoshī: Méiyǒu rén bù jígé, yǒu liǎng ge rén dédào mǎn fēn.
Teacher Wang: Is there anyone in your class who failed the test?
Teacher Li: No one failed. Two got perfect scores.
## B. Existential sentences
Existential sentences include two types of sentence. One type indicates the emergence or disappearance of a situation (and what emerges/disappears is of an indefinite nature); the other indicates the existence of something or someone, which is also of an indefinite nature. The first type is very similar to the subjectless sentence discussed earlier.
### Level 3 21.8 The emergence or disappearance of a situation
This sentence pattern is very similar to that of the subjectless sentence. A minor difference between an existential sentence and a subjectless sentence is the fact that an existential sentence frequently starts with a location or a time phrase, whereas a subjectless sentence can begin directly with a verb.
There are three basic elements for an existential sentence indicating emergence/disappearance, and the word order for these three elements is: Location/time + verb + indefinite noun.
It should be noted that (i) the preposition 在 usually does not appear before the location/time, (ii) the verb must be one that indicates the emergence or disappearance of the noun and (iii) the noun that follows the verb must be indefinite.
我们班这学期转走了三个学生,转来了两个, 所以这学期少了一个学生。 (转走 indicates disappearance; 转来 indicates emergence.)
Wǒmen bān zhè xuéqī zhuǎn zǒu le sān ge xuéshēng, zhuǎn lái le liǎng ge, suǒyǐ zhè xuéqī shǎo le yí ge xuéshēng.
This term, three students transferred out of our class and two transferred into our class. So there is one fewer student this term.
昨天我家来了三位客人, 妈妈说,明天还会来三个。 (来 indicates emergence.)
Zuótiān wǒ jiā lái le sān wèi kèrén, māma shuō, míngtiān hái huì lái sān ge.
Yesterday three guests came to our house. My mother said that three more will come tomorrow.
这个地区常常发生战争; 一打仗就会死很多老百姓。 (发生 indicates emergence; 死 indicates disappearance.)
Zhè ge dìqū chángcháng fāshēng zhànzhēng; yì dǎzhàng jiù huì sǐ hěn duō lǎobǎixìng.
Wars frequently occur in this area. Once a war breaks out, many civilians will die.
我家对面开了一家中国餐馆。 (开了 indicates emergence.)
Wǒ jiā duìmiàn kāi le yì jiā Zhōngguó cānguǎn.
A Chinese restaurant opened across from my house.
Compare:
(Incorrect: 桥对面开了一辆日本车。) (开 does not indicate emergence.)
Correct: 桥对面开来了一辆日本车。 (开来 indicates emergence.)
Qiáo duìmiàn kāilái le yí liàng Rìběn chē.
A Japanese car came over from the other side of the bridge.
### Level 3 21.9 The existence of a situation
There are four basic elements in this pattern. The word order for these four elements is:
Location | Placement verb | 了 or 着 | Indefinite noun
---|---|---|---
When the verb is 有, it is not necessary to have the particle 了or 着. For practical purposes, 了 and 着 can be considered interchangeable in the existential sentence.
我家后边有一个菜园, 菜园里种了各种蔬菜。
Wǒ jiā hòubiān yǒu yí ge càiyuán, càiyuán lǐ zhòng le gè zhǒng shūcài.
There is a vegetable garden behind my house; all kinds of vegetable are planted in the garden.
门口停着一辆汽车, 车上坐着两个人。
Ménkǒu tíng zhe yí liàng chē, chēshàng zuò zhe liǎng ge rén.
A car is parked outside the door; two people are sitting in the car.
### Level 3 21.10 Placement verbs
A placement verb indicates that someone or something is not actively engaged in an action, but is in a state of rest at a certain location as the result of that action. Frequently used placement verbs are 放 (fàng: 'to put'), 摆 (bǎi: 'to put'), 挂 (guà: 'to hang'), 贴 (tiē: 'to paste'), 坐 (zuò: 'to sit'), 站 (zhàn: 'to stand'), 躺 (tǎng: 'to lie'), 住 (zhù: 'to live'), 写 (xiě: 'to write'), 画 (huà: 'to paint; to draw'), 种 (zhòng: 'to plant'), 装 (zhuāng: 'to hold'), 停 (tíng: 'to park'), etc. Note that these verbs are action verbs. But when they are used as placement verbs, there are specific word orders and grammar rules.
In an existential sentence, the placement verb + 着/了 can be replaced by 有 without seriously affecting the meaning of the sentence.
门上贴着一张纸, 纸上写着四个我不认识的字。
Mén shàng tiē zhe yì zhāng zhǐ, zhǐ shàng xiě zhe sì ge wǒ bú rènshì de zì.
A piece of paper is pasted on the door; four characters that I don't recognize are written on the paper. (= There is a piece of paper on the door; there are four characters on the paper.)
墙上挂了一幅画, 画上除了画着山水以外, 还写着一首古诗。
Qiáng shàng guà le yì fú huà, huà shàng chúle huà zhe shānshuǐ yǐwài, hái xiě zhe yì shǒu gǔshī.
A painting is hanging on the wall; in addition to the landscapes painted on the painting, an ancient poem is written on it.
#### (a) Non-placement verb + indefinite subject ≠ existential sentence
A sentence with a verb that is not a placement verb cannot be used in an existential sentence, even if the subject (in its English counterpart) is indefinite.
English: A boy is standing under the tree. (This is an existential sentence.)
Chinese: 树下站着一个小男孩。
Shùxià zhàn zhe yí ge xiǎo nánhái.
English: A boy is crying under the tree. ('To cry' is not a placement verb.)
Chinese: 有一个小男孩在树下哭。(It is incorrect to say 树下哭着一个小男孩.)
Yǒu yí ge xiǎo nánhái zài shùxià kū.
#### (b) Placement verb + definite subject ≠ existential sentence
A sentence with a placement verb but a definite noun should not be in an existential sentence.
English: A man is sitting behind the table. (This is an existential sentence.)
Chinese: 桌子后面坐着一个人。
Zhuōzi hòumiàn zuò zhe yí ge rén.
English: Mr Wang is sitting behind the table. ('Mr Wang' is definite.)
Chinese #1: 王先生在桌子后面坐着。
Wáng xiānsheng zài zhuōzi hòumiàn zuò zhe.
Chinese #2:王先生坐在桌子后面。
Wáng xiānsheng zuò zài zhuōzi hòumiàn.
(Incorrect: 桌子后面坐着王先生。)
#### (c) Unknown information
Occasionally, it is possible for a sentence with a definite noun and a placement verb to be an existential sentence if the definite noun is something/someone that the speaker did not expect to encounter when uttering the sentence. In other words, it is 'unknown information'.
王小姐给了我一张条子, 我打开一看, 上面写着她的电话号码。
Wáng xiǎojiě gěi le wǒ yì zhāng tiáozi, wǒ dǎkāi yí kàn, shàngmiàn xiě zhe tāde diànhuà hàomǎ.
Miss Wang handed me a note. I opened it and saw that her phone number was written on it.
Compare: 李: 王小姐的电话号码写在哪里?
Lǐ: Wáng xiǎojiě de diànhuà hàomǎ xiě zài nǎlǐ?
张: 她的手机号码就写在这张纸上; 我没有她家的号码。
Zhāng: Tāde shǒujī hàomǎ jiù xiě zài zhè zhāng zhǐ shàng; wǒ méiyǒu tā jiā de hàomǎ.
Li: Where is Miss Wang's phone number written?
Zhang: Her mobile phone number is written right on this piece of paper. I don't have her home phone number.
### Level 3 21.11 Forming sentences with definite/indefinite nouns and placement verbs
There are four scenarios when forming these kinds of sentence.
#### (a) Placement verb + indefinite noun
The sentence has a placement verb and an indefinite noun: Such a sentence should be an existential sentence.
墙上贴了两张小学生画的画; 一张上面画着马, 一张上面画着房子。
Qiáng shàng tiē le liǎng zhāng xiǎo xuéshēng huà de huà; yì zhāng shàngmiàn huà zhe mǎ, yì zhāng shàngmiàn huà zhe fángzi.
On the wall were pasted two drawings by school pupils; one had a horse drawn on it; the other had a house drawn on it.
#### (b) Placement verb + definite noun
The sentence has a placement verb and a definite noun. There are two ways to construct such a sentence: the location can appear before the verb, or it can appear after the verb.
Definite noun | 在 \+ location | Placement verb | 着 | Example: 我的车在树下停着。
Wǒ de chē zài shù xià tíng zhe.
---|---|---|---|---
* * *
Definite noun | | Placement verb | 在 \+ location | Example: 我的车停在树下。
Wǒ de chē tíng zài shù xià.
* When the location appears before the verb, 着 must follow the placement verb
我们新买的沙发就在客厅里摆着,爸爸却在地板上坐着, 真奇怪!
Wǒmen xīnmǎi de shāfā jiù zài kètīng lǐ bǎi zhe, bàba què zài dìbǎn shàng zuò zhe, zhēn qíguài!
The newly purchased couch is placed right there in the living room, but my father is sitting on the floor. This is really strange.
* When the location appears after the verb, 着 should not be used
李家的两个儿子都还住在家里; 老大跟他太太住在二楼,老二睡在客房里。
Lǐ jiā de liǎng ge érzi dōu hái zhù zài jiā lǐ; lǎodà gēn tā tàitai zhù zài èrlóu, lǎo'èr shuì zài kèfáng lǐ.
Both sons of the Li family still live at home. The elder son and his wife live on the second floor; the younger son sleeps in the guest room.
#### (c) Subject, placement verb + indefinite noun
The sentence has a placement verb, an indefinite noun and a subject that performs the action of the placement verb. This would be considered a regular sentence and the placement verb would not play a special role in arranging the word order.
English: Mr Wang wrote many characters on this piece of paper. (写 is a placement verb.)
Chinese: 王先生在这张纸上写了很多字。
Wáng xiānsheng zài zhè zhāng zhǐ shàng xiě le hěn duō zì.
Compare: Mr Wang made many Chinese friends in the USA. (认识 is not a placement verb.)
王先生在美国认识了很多中国朋友。
Wáng xiānsheng zài Měiguó rènshì le hěn duō Zhōngguó péngyǒu.
#### (d) Subject, placement verb + definite noun
The sentence has a placement verb, a definite noun and a subject that performs the action of the placement verb. Either the 把 structure (☞ see Chapter 22) can be used or the definite noun should be pre-posed.
王: 我昨天买的那两本词典, 你们放在哪里了?
Wáng: Wǒ zuótiān mǎi de nà liǎng běn cídiǎn, nǐmen fàng zài nǎlǐ le?
张: 我把那本中文的放在你的书房里; 他把英文的放在这个书架上。
Zhāng: Wǒ bǎ nà běn Zhōngwén de fàng zài nǐde shūfáng lǐ; tā bǎ Yīngwén de fàng zài zhè ge shūjià shàng. (Do not say 我放那本中文的在你的书房里/他放那本英文的在书架上.)
Wang: Where did you (plural) put the two dictionaries that I bought yesterday?
Zhang: I put the Chinese one in your study; he put the English one on this bookshelf.
王: 你把张小姐的电话号码写在哪里?
Wáng: Nǐ bǎ Zhāng xiǎojiě de diànhuà hàomǎ xiě zài nǎlǐ?
李: 她的手机号码, 我写在这张纸上; 她家的号码, 我写在电话本子里了。
Lǐ: Tāde shǒujī hàomǎ, wǒ xiě zài zhè zhāng zhǐ shàng; tā jiā de hàomǎ, wǒ xiě zài diànhuà běnzi lǐ le.
Wang: Where did you write down Miss Zhang's phone number?
Li: I wrote her mobile phone number on this piece of paper and her home number in the phonebook.
#### (e) Summary
The following table gives a summary of the four placement verb scenarios.
**Two major components** | **Word orders and examples**
---|---
* * *
* 1 Placement verb + indefinite noun
| Location + verb + 着/了 \+ indefinite noun
树下停着 (or 停了)一辆车。
Shù xià tíng zhe (or tíng le) yí liàng chē.
A car is parked under the tree.
* * *
* 2 Placement verb + definite noun | * (a) Definite noun + verb + 在 \+ location
我的车停在树下。
Wǒde chē tíng zài shù xià.
My car is parked under the tree.
* (b) Definite noun + 在 \+ location + verb + 着
我的车在树下停着。
Wǒde chē zài shù xià tíng zhe.
My car is parked under the tree.
* * *
Three major components |
* * *
* 3 Subject, placement verb + indefinite noun
| Subject + 在 \+ location + verb
他在花园里种了很多花。
Tā zài huāyuán lǐ zhòng le hěn duō huā.
He planted many flowers in the garden.
* * *
* 4 Subject, placement verb + definite noun | * (a) Definite noun + subject + verb + 在 \+ location
那本书, 他放在书架上了。
Nà běn shū, tā fàng zài shūjià shàng le.
He put that book on the bookshelf.
* (b) Subject + 把 \+ definite noun + verb + 在 \+ location
他把那本书放在书架上了。
Tā bǎ nà běn shū fàng zài shūjià shàng le.
He put that book on the bookshelf.
## Level 3 C. Sentences with the subject 'hidden'
In a sentence with the subject 'hidden', the subject can be identified but is not used. In a subjectless sentence, no obvious subject can be identified. Also, a sentence with the subject 'hidden' does not involve any special word order.
When the subject is the 'generic public' or the 'general public' (meaning: 'everyone') and the predicate has a modal verb indicating 'can, must, need' or a potential structure (☞ see Chapter 18), the subject is usually 'hidden'. In English, the subject is frequently 'you' or 'one', referring to the 'generic public'.
王: 请问, 这里可不可以停车? (The 'hidden' subject is the general public.)
Wáng: Qǐng wèn, zhèlǐ kě bù kěyǐ tíngchē?
停车场管理员:你不可以在这里停, 因为你没有停车证。 (The subject 你 is not 'hidden' since it is specifically about Wang.)
Tíngchē chǎng guǎnlǐ yuán: Nǐ bù kěyǐ zài zhèlǐ tíng, yīnwèi nǐ méiyǒu tíngchē zhèng.
Wang: Excuse me, can one park here? (Is parking allowed here?)
Parking attendant: You cannot park here because you don't have a parking permit.
张: 这里可以不可以游泳?
Zhāng: Zhèlǐ kěyǐ bù kěyǐ yóuyǒng?
李: 水太深了, 这里不可以游泳。
Lǐ: Shuǐ tài shēn le, zhèlǐ bù kěyǐ yóuyǒng.
(There are no subjects for these sentences since the 'hidden' subject is the general public.)
Zhang: Can I swim here? (Meaning: Can anyone swim here?)
Li: The water is too deep. You cannot swim here. (Meaning: No one is allowed to swim here.)
(一个人)只要多听、 多读、 多说, 就能学好外语。 (一个人 is optional since it is generic.)
(Yí ge rén) zhǐyào duō tīng, duō dú, duō shuō, jiù néng xuéhǎo wàiyǔ.
As long as one listens more, reads more and speaks more, one can master a foreign language.
在中国,大家都喜欢熊猫。
Zài Zhōngguó, dàjiā dōu xǐhuān xióngmāo.
(大家 is not 'hidden' since there is no modal verb indicating 'can, must, need, etc.')
In China, everybody likes pandas.
Compare: 在中国, 去动物园就看得到熊猫。
Zài Zhōngguó, qù dòngwùyuán jiù kàn de dào xióngmāo.
(The subject is 'hidden' since there is a potential phrase 看得到.)
In China, one can see pandas as long as one goes to the zoo.
## D. Summary: Subjectless sentences and existential sentences
The following tables show the word orders and grammatical requirements for, and some examples of, subjectless and existential sentences.
**Structure** | **Location/time** | **Verb** | **Third element** | **Noun**
---|---|---|---|---
**Subjectless** | | | |
* * *
Meteorological or natural phenomena | Optional | Yes | Optional | Indefinite
* * *
Event on regular, fixed schedule | Optional | Yes | Optional | Indefinite
* * *
有/没有 | Optional | 有/没有 | No | Indefinite
* * *
Existential | | | |
Emergence (or disappearance) | Yes (can be skipped in context) | Showing emergence or disappearance | Yes (if verb does not show emergence or disappearance) | Indefinite
* * *
Existence | Yes (can be skipped in context) | Placement verb | 了 or 着 | Indefinite
Structure | Example
---|---
* * *
**Subjectless** |
* * *
Meteorological or natural phenomena |
* 1 昨天下了一场雨。
Zuótiān xià le yì chǎng yǔ.
It rained yesterday.
* 2 这个地区常常下雨。
Zhè ge dìqū chángcháng xià yǔ.
It often rains here.
* * *
Event on regular, fixed schedule |
* 1 到了夏天, 蚊虫会很多。
Dào le xiàtiān, wénchóng huì hěn duō.
When summer comes, there will be many insects.
* 2 下个星期就要开学了。
Xià ge xīngqī jiù yào kāi xué le.
School will open next week. (The term will start next week.)
* * *
有/没有 |
* 1 这个教室里有三十把椅子。
Zhè ge jiàoshì lǐ yǒu sānshí bǎ yǐzi.
There are 30 chairs in this classroom.
* 2 没有人会回答这个问题。
Méiyǒu rén huì huídá zhè ge wèntí.
No one knows how to answer this question.
* * *
Existential |
* * *
Emergence (or disappearance) |
* 1 昨天来了三个客人, 明天还会来三个。
Zuótiān lái le sān ge kèrén, míngtiān hái huì lái sān ge.
Three guests came yesterday; three more will come tomorrow.
* 2 我家门口开来一辆车, 车上下来几个人。
Wǒ jiā ménkǒu kāi lái yí liàng chē, chē shàng xià lái jǐ ge rén.
A car came to my front door; a couple of people emerged from the car.
* * *
Existence | 墙上贴了一张纸, 纸上写着几个字。
Qiáng shàng tiē le yì zhāng zhǐ, zhǐ shàng xiě zhe jǐ ge zì.
A piece of paper is pasted on the wall, some characters are written on it.
## Exercises
Write sentences in Chinese based on the given situations. Use subjectless sentences or existential sentences whenever possible.
* Level 3 1 Only three customers came to a newly opened restaurant yesterday; but the same three customers came again today. The restaurant owner asks the manager how business is. How would the manager describe the situation to him?
* 2 Anna moved to a new town during winter, where there was strong wind every day and it sometimes snowed as well. How would she describe the winter in a letter to a friend?
* 3 In a subsequent letter, Anna tells her friend that it's spring time now and that although it rains sometimes, it is rarely windy. How would she describe this situation?
* 4 On a rainy day, Miss Wang calls Li Ming to cancel their date because it is raining too heavily and she does not like going out when it's pouring. How would she use two sentences to explain this to Li Ming?
* 5 Mr Wang asks his wife where she has written down Mr Zhang's mobile phone number. His wife tells him that two numbers are written on the calendar, but she does not know which one is Mr Zhang's. Create a short dialogue between Mr and Mrs Wang.
* 6 Mrs Li had been taking a nap in the bedroom upstairs. Her young son woke her up and informed her that two strangers had just arrived and were downstairs. What would the little boy have said to his mother?
* 7 Upon seeing bird droppings on her new car, Mrs Zhang angrily asks her son why he parked her car under the tree again. Her son explains that there were several huge boxes stored (= placed) in their garage when he came home and that he could not park the car in the garage. Create a short dialogue between Mrs Zhang and her son.
* 8 Mr Zhang met a young woman at a party yesterday evening. She wrote something (a few words) on a piece of paper before she left the party and put that note into Mr Zhang's pocket. Upon unfolding (opening) the piece of paper, Mr Zhang realized that she had written her name and phone number on it. How would Mr Zhang describe this to his roommate?
* 9 Wang Ming comes to visit Li Zhong at his house. He sees an expensive car outside Li Zhong's house. He remembers having heard that Li Zhong has just bought an expensive car. When he enters Li Zhong's house, he says that an expensive car is parked right outside and asks if it is his new car. But Li Zhong says that his car is parked in his garage now and that he would not park his new car on the street. Create a dialogue between Wang Ming and Li Zhong.
* 10 Anna has just moved into a new building. She has recently met an old man whose last name is Zhang and he and his wife live on the third floor. Mr Zhang has told her that two Americans are living above her on the second floor and that altogether five families live in the building. How would Anna describe her building to a friend?
# [22
The 把 structure](content.xhtml#bck_Ch022)
The 把 (bǎ) structure is a structure unique to Chinese; it requires the object of the verb to be placed before the verb. In terms of word order, there is no equivalent in English; learners who are English speakers should pay special attention to this structure. The following is the basic word order:
**Subject** | 把 | Object (definite or generic noun) | Verb | Other element
---|---|---|---|---
## Level 2/3 22.1 The three basic rules when forming a 把 sentence
The following three rules must be kept in mind before constructing a 把 sentence.
### (a) Verb restrictions
Not all verbs can be used in a 把 sentence. In general, only action verbs can be used. However, action verbs that indicate going to places, such as 来, 去, 回, 进, 到, etc., cannot be used in a 把 sentence.
☞ See 8.2 for more information on action verbs.
王小姐喜欢小张,讨厌小李。(喜欢 and 讨厌 are non-action verbs.)
Wáng xiǎojiě xǐhuān Xiǎo Zhāng, tǎoyàn Xiǎo Lǐ.
Miss Wang likes Xiao Zhang and dislikes Xiao Li.
(Incorrect: 王小姐把小张喜欢了, 把小李讨厌了。)
上个月我去了一趟北京。
Shàng ge yuè wǒ qù le yí tàng Běijīng.
I made a trip to Beijing last month.
(Incorrect: 上个月我把北京去了一趟。)
### (b) Definite or generic objects
The object after 把 should not be indefinite.
王老师写了一本语法书。 (一本语法书 is indefinite. It cannot be used in a 把 sentence.)
Wáng lǎoshī xiě le yì běn yǔfǎ shū.
Teacher Wang wrote a grammar book.
(Incorrect: 王老师把一本语法书写了。)
那位作家把人性描写得非常透彻。(人性 is generic.)
That writer depicts human nature clearly and thoroughly.
### (c) Need 'other element' after verb
A 把 sentence should not end with a verb. Another element must follow the verb. (☞ See 22.3 for elaboration.)
妈妈: 小明, 来, 吃药。
Māma: Xiǎo Míng, lái, chī yào.
= 小明, 来, 把药吃了。 (It would be incorrect to say 把药吃 since 吃 is a verb.)
= Xiǎoming, lái, bǎ yào chī le.
Mother: Xiaoming, come and take the medicine.
老师: 哪位同学愿意回答这个问题?
Lǎoshī: Nǎ wèi tóngxué yuànyì huídá zhè ge wèntí?
= 哪位同学愿意把这个问题回答一下? (Do not say 把这个问题回答.)
= Nǎ wèi tóngxué yuànyì bǎ zhè ge wèntí huídá yíxià?
Teacher: Which of you is willing to answer this question?
## Level 2/3 22.2 The 把 structure vs. S + V + O/O + S + V structures
In many instances, a sentence with 把 can be considered interchangeable with a regular (subject + verb + definite object) sentence or a sentence with a pre-posed object (pre-posed object + subject + verb).
### (a) Nuanced differences
In the actual use of the language, the three structures may have nuanced differences and thus be used in difference contexts/situations.
张: 昨天是星期天, 你做了些什么?
Zhāng: Zuótiān shì xīngqī tiān, nǐ zuò le xiē shénme?
王: 下午洗衣服, 晚上看书, 没有做别的事。
Wáng: Xiàwǔ xǐ yīfú, wǎnshàng kàn shū, méiyǒu zuò biéde shì.
(洗衣服 and 看书 are considered two activities with no emphasis on either 衣服 or 书.)
Zhang: Yesterday was Sunday; what did you do?
Wang: I did the laundry (= I washed my clothes) in the afternoon and I read in the evening. I didn't do anything else.
妈妈: 咦? 房间里的脏衣服、 脏床单呢?
Māma: Yí? Fángjiān lǐ de zāng yīfú, zāng chuángdān ne?
儿子: 我把衣服洗了, 爸爸把床单送到干洗店了。(把 is used to show what happened to the two items previously mentioned. 衣服 and 床单 can be pre-posed as well.)
Érzi: Wǒ bǎ yīfú xǐ le, bàba bǎ chuángdān sòng dào gānxǐ diàn le.
Mother: Hey? What happened to those dirty clothes and dirty bed sheets that were in the bedroom?
Son: I washed the clothes and Father took the bed sheets to the dry cleaner.
妈妈: 小明, 交待你洗的那两样东西, 你都洗了吗?
Māma: Xiǎomíng, jiāodài nǐ xǐ de nà liǎng yàng dōngxi, nǐ dōu xǐ le ma?
小明: 衣服我洗了, 碗还没洗。
Xiǎomíng: Yīfú wǒ xǐ le, wǎn hái méi xǐ.
(In this situation, 衣服 and 碗 are pre-posed to show the contrast between the two.)
Mother: Xiaoming, did you wash those two things I asked you to wash?
Xiaoming: I washed the clothes, but I haven't washed the dishes.
### (b) No distinction necessary
When the object of the verb is in context, it may not be necessary to make the distinction between a 把 sentence and a sentence with the pre-posed object. In spontaneous speeches, the choice between the two by a native speaker of Chinese may not be a conscious one.
妈妈: 咦? 房间里的脏衣服﹑ 脏床单呢?
Māma: Yí? Fángjiān lǐ de zāng yīfú, zāng chuángdān ne?
儿子: 衣服, 我洗了; 床单, 爸爸送到干洗店了。
Érzi: Yīfú, wǒ xǐ le; chuángdān, bàba sòng dào gānxǐ diàn le.
Mother: Hey? What happened to those dirty clothes and dirty bed sheets that were in the bedroom?
Son: I washed the clothes and Father took the bed sheets to the dry cleaner.
## Level 3 22.3 The 'other element'
A 把 sentence cannot end with a verb, but must end with something other than a verb. The 'other element' that appears after the verb can be one of the following.
### (a) A complement
A complement (of state, direction, quantity or result) is the most frequently used element that follows the verb in a 把 sentence.
☞ See Chapter 13 for the complement of state, Chapter 15 for the complement of quantity, Chapter 16 for the complement of direction and Chapter 17 for the complement of result.
上床以前, 别忘了把窗户关起来, 把门锁好。
Shàngchuáng yǐqián, bié wàng le bǎ chuānghù guān qǐlái, bǎ mén suǒ hǎo.
Before going to bed, don't forget to close the windows and lock the door.
(起来 is the complement of direction; 好 is the complement of result.)
妈妈: 小明, 你先把碗洗干净, 再把垃圾拿出去。
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ xiān bǎ wǎn xǐ gānjìng, zài bǎ lājī ná chūqù.
小明: 我在写功课呢。 让我先把功课写完。
Xiǎomíng: Wǒ zài xiě gōngkè ne. Ràng wǒ xiān bǎ gōngkè xiě wán.
(干净 and 完 are the complements of result; 出去 is the complement of direction.)
Mother: Xiaoming, first wash the dishes (clean) and then take out the garbage.
Xiaoming: I am doing homework. Let me finish doing homework first.
他把送女朋友的生日礼物包得非常漂亮, 可是他女朋友竟然把这个礼物退回来了。
Tā bǎ sòng nǚ péngyǒu de shēngrì lǐwù bāo de fēicháng piàoliàng, kěshì tā nǚ péngyǒu jìngrán bǎ zhè ge lǐwù tuì huílái le.
He wrapped up his birthday gift for his girlfriend beautifully, but surprisingly his girlfriend returned this gift (to him).
(非常漂亮 is the complement of state; 回来 is the complex complement of direction.)
你先把这篇文章看几遍, 再把你的看法写下来。
Nǐ xiān bǎ zhè piān wénzhāng kàn jǐ biàn, zài bǎ nǐde kànfǎ xiě xiàlái.
Read this article a few times and then write down your opinions.
(几遍 is the complement of quantity; 下来 is the complex complement of direction.)
昨天妈妈把小明骂了一顿, 因为他没有把功课写完就出去玩了。
Zuótiān māma bǎ Xiǎomíng mà le yí dùn, yīnwèi tā méiyǒu bǎ gōngkè xiě wán jiù chūqù wán le.
Yesterday Xiaoming's mother scolded him because he went out to play without finishing doing his homework.
(一顿 is the complement of quantity; 完 is the complement of result.)
It should be noted that a verb plus the complement of result frequently forms only one word in English. Such a combination should not be mistaken for one verb.
English: I must break Xiao Wang's record today.
Chinese: 我今天一定要把小王的记录打破。 (打 is the verb; 破 is the complement of result.)
Wǒ jīntiān yídìng yào bǎ Xiǎo Wáng de jìlù dǎ pò.
English: You must answer this question today.
Chinese: 你今天一定要把这个问题回答一下。 (回答 is the verb. 回 and 答 cannot be separated. 一下 is the other element.)
Nǐ jīntiān yídìng yào bǎ zhè ge wèntí huídá yíxià.
今天你不把这件事解释一下, 就不准你回家。
Jīntiān nǐ bù bǎ zhè jiàn shì jiěshì yíxià, jiù bù zhǔn nǐ huíjiā.
If you don't explain this matter today, I won't allow you to go home.
(解释 is the verb; 解 and 释 cannot be separated.)
Compare: 今天你不把那本书找到, 就不准你吃饭。
Jīntiān nǐ bù bǎ nà běn shū zhǎodào, jiù bù zhǔn nǐ chīfàn.
If you don't find that book today, I won't allow you to eat.
(找 is the verb 'to look'; 到 is the complement of result; 找到 means 'to find'.)
The complement of potential cannot be used in a 把 sentence.
☞ See Chapter 18 for more information on the complement of potential.
你八点以前能不能把这件事做完?
Nǐ bā diǎn yǐqián néng bù néng bǎ zhè jiàn shì zuò wán?
Can you finish doing this thing by 8 o'clock?
(It is incorrect to say 你八点以前把这件事做得完做不完?)
### (b) 了
If the verb does not need a complement to complete its meaning, 了 can be used after the verb.
When the action has taken place, 了 can be used as the other element following the verb.
他把妈妈的劝告全忘了, 离开家没多久, 就把钱都花了。
Tā bǎ māma de quàngào quán wàng le, líkāi jiā méi duō jiǔ, jiù bǎ qián dōu huā le.
He forgot his mother's advice. Soon after he left home, he spent all the money.
王先生本来欠了不少钱; 上个月他把房子卖了, 所以把欠的债都还了。
Wáng xiānsheng běnlái qiàn le bùshǎo qián; shàng ge yuè tā bǎ fángzi mài le, suǒyǐ bǎ qiàn de zhài dōu huán le.
Originally Mr Wang owed a lot of money; he sold his house last month and so he has settled all his debt (returned all the money he owed).
Even if the action has not taken place, 了 can still be used to indicate that, as the result of the action, something will be gone or reach the finale. In this case, 了 has a function similar to the complement of result.
把电视关了, 不许再看了。
Bǎ diànshì guān le, bù xǔ zài kàn le.
Turn off the TV. You are not allowed to watch anymore.
快把瓶子里的水喝了, 喝完以后, 就可以把瓶子扔了。
Kuài bǎ píngzi lǐ de shuǐ hē le, hē wán yǐhòu, jiù kěyǐ bǎ píngzi rēng le.
Hurry and finish the water in the bottle. After you are done, you can throw away the bottle.
### (c) A reduplicated verb or 'verb + 一下(儿)'
If neither a complement nor 了 can be used in the sentence, the verb can be reduplicated or 一下(儿) can be used after the verb. ☞ See Chapter 27 for more on verb reduplication.
老师: 请大家回家去把这个问题的答案想(一)想。
Lǎoshī: Qǐng dàjiā huí jiā qù bǎ zhè ge wèntí de dá'àn xiǎng (yì) xiǎng.
学生: 您可不可以把这个问题先说明一下(儿)。 (说明 is a two-character word.)
Xuéshēng: Nín kě bù kěyǐ bǎ zhè ge wèntí xiān shuōmíng yíxià(r).
Teacher: Everybody please go home to think (for a while) about the answer to this question.
Student: Could you first explain the question a little bit?
你先把这个报告看一下(儿), 看完以后, 再把你的意见说一说。
Nǐ xiān bǎ zhè ge bàogào kàn yíxià(r), kàn wán yǐhòu, zài bǎ nǐde yìjiàn shuō yì shuō.
First you read this report. State your opinions after you are done reading it.
### (d) An indirect object
When the verb has two objects (a direct object and an indirect object), the direct object appears after 把 and the indirect object appears after the verb as the other element. Normally, a person would be the indirect object.
☞ See 1.5 for more information on direct objects and indirect objects.
王: 你打算什么时候把这本书还他?
Wáng: Nǐ dǎsuàn shénme shíhòu bǎ zhè běn shū huán tā?
李: 他已经把这本书送我了, 所以我不用还他。
Lǐ: Tā yǐjīng bǎ zhè běn shū sòng wǒ le, suǒyǐ wǒ búyòng huán tā.
Wang: When do you plan to return this book to him?
Li: He has already given this book to me; so I don't have to return it to him.
丁: 老张, 我上星期去面谈的那家公司已经把结果通知我了, 他们录取我了。
Dīng: Lǎo Zhāng, wǒ shàng xīngqī qù miàntán de nà jiā gōngsī yǐjīng bǎ jiéguǒ tōngzhī wǒ le, tāmen lùqǔ wǒ le.
张: 哦, 是吗? 太好了! 你打算什么时候把现在的工作辞了?
Zhāng: Ò, shìma? Tài hǎo le. Nǐ dǎsuàn shénme shíhòu bǎ xiànzài de gōngzuò cí le?
丁: 还没决定, 所以请你暂时别把这件事告诉别人。
Dīng: Hái méi juédìng. Suǒyǐ qǐng nǐ zànshí bié bǎ zhè jiàn shì gàosù biérén.
Ding: Lao Zhang, the company I went to have an interview with already notified me of the result; they have decided to hire me.
Zhang: Oh, is that so? Great! When do you plan to quit your current job?
Ding: I have not decided yet. So, for the time being, please don't tell anybody about this matter.
## Level 3 22.4 Exception: When 把 sentences can end with a verb
In rare situations, it is possible to end a 把 sentence with a verb.
### (a) Prepositional phrase + verb
Occasionally a verb following a prepositional phrase can end a 把 sentence.
小王叫我不要把他的秘密跟任何人说。
Xiǎo Wáng jiào wǒ bú yào bǎ tāde mìmì gēn rènhé rén shuō.
Xiao Wang asked me not to tell anybody his secrets.
小明, 你真可恶! 你怎么可以把香蕉皮往我身上扔?
Xiǎomíng, nǐ zhēn kěwù! Nǐ zěnme kěyǐ bǎ xiāngjiāo pí wǎng wǒ shēnshàng rēng?
Xiaoming, you are really nasty! How can you throw the banana peel at me?
### (b) 一 \+ verb
Sometimes a verb with 一 before it can end a 把 sentence. 一 implies that the action is done with determination or strong force.
你只要把这个按钮用力一按, 抽屉就会自动打开。
Nǐ zhǐyào bǎ zhè ge ànniǔ yònglì yí àn, chōutì jiù huì zìdòng dǎkāi.
As long as you push this button hard once, the drawer will open automatically.
老王每次看到让他不舒服的事, 就把眼睛一闭, 假装没有看到。
Lǎo Wáng měi cì kàndào ràng tā bù shūfú de shì, jiù bǎ yǎnjīng yí bì, jiǎzhuāng méiyǒu kàndào.
Every time Lao Wang sees something that annoys him, he closes his eyes and pretends not to have seen it.
## Level 3 22.5 Some special 把 sentences
Five types of special 把 sentence will be discussed in the following section. Each of these kinds of 把 sentence cannot be converted into a regular S + V + O sentence. However, the object can be pre-posed if 把 is not used.
### (a) 在 \+ a location
In this kind of sentence, the other element is 在 \+ a location and the verb indicates an action that causes something (of a definite nature) to be fixed in the location. Such a verb is a placement verb and can include 放 (fàng: 'to put'), 挂 (guà: 'to hang'), 写 (xiě: 'to write'), 画 (huà: 'to paint'), 停 (车) (tíngchē: 'to park cars'), 拿 (ná: 'to hold'), 忘 (wàng: 'to forget'), 留 (liú: 'to leave behind'), 种 (zhòng: 'to plant'), 藏 (cáng: 'to hide'), etc.
☞ See 21.10 for more information on the use of placement verbs.
王太太: 我叫你别把我的车停在树下, 你为什么不听? (Do not say 别停我的车 在树下.)
Wáng tàitai: Wǒ jiào nǐ bié bǎ wǒde chē tíng zài shù xià, nǐ wèishénme bù tīng?
王先生: 你把旧家具都放在车库里, 车库已经满了, 要是我不把车停在树下, 还有什么地方可以停呢? (Do not say 你放旧家具在车库里.)
Wáng xiānsheng: Nǐ bǎ jiù jiājù dōu fàng zài chēkù lǐ, chēkù yǐjīng mǎn le, yàoshì wǒ bù bǎ chē tíng zài shù xià, hái yǒu shénme dìfāng kěyǐ tíng ne?
Mrs Wang: I told you not to park my car under the tree; why wouldn't you listen?
Mr Wang: You put all the old furniture in the garage; the garage is already full. If I don't park the car under the tree, where else can I park?
老师: 我把出席表摆在这张桌子上; 别忘了来把自己的名字写在出席表上。
Lǎoshī: Wǒ bǎ chūxíbiǎo bǎi zài zhè zhāng zhuōzi shàng; bié wàng le lái bǎ zìjǐ de míngzi xiě zài chūxíbiǎo shàng.
(Do not say 我摆出席表在这张桌子上/写自己的名字在出席表上.)
学生: 老师, 你不是已经把今天的出席表贴在墙上了吗?
Xuéshēng: Lǎoshī, nǐ bú shì yǐjīng bǎ jīntiān de chūxíbiǎo tiē zài qiáng shàng le ma?
(Do not say 你已经贴今天的出席表在墙上了.)
Teacher: I'll put the attendance form on this desk. Don't forget to write your own names on the attendance form before leaving the classroom.
Student: Sir, didn't you already paste today's attendance form on the wall?
### (b) 到 \+ a location
In this type of sentence, the other element is 到 \+ a location and the verb indicates the action of shifting something or someone (of a definite nature) from one location to another. Such verbs include 搬 (bān: 'to move'), 拿 (ná: 'to hold'), 带 (dài: 'to carry'), 送 (sòng: 'to deliver'), 寄 (jì: 'to mail'), 开 (车) (kāichē: 'to drive'), 骑 (qí: 'to ride bicycle/horse'), 放 (fàng: 'to put'), etc. Such an expression is the same in meaning as when the other element is a complement of direction.
请把这张桌子搬到楼上。
Qǐng bǎ zhè zhāng zhuōzi bān dào lóushàng.
Please move this table upstairs.
那个地方不能停车, 你快去把你的车开到收费停车场去吧!
Nà ge dìfāng bù néng tíngchē, nǐ kuài qù bǎ nǐde chē kāi dào shōufèi tíngchēchǎng qù ba!
That place is a no-parking zone. Hurry and go move (drive) your car to the pay car park.
小明忽然昏倒了, 老师立刻叫来救护车把他送到医院去。(= 把他送去医院)
Xiǎomíng hūrán hūndǎo le, lǎoshī lìkè jiào lái jiùhùchē bǎ tā sòng dào yīyuàn qù.
Xiaoming suddenly passed out. The teacher immediately called for an ambulance to take him to hospital.
### (c) 给 \+ a person
In these sentences, the other element is 给 \+ a person and the verb indicates an action that causes something (of a definite nature) to change hands or certain information (of a definite nature) to be conveyed. Such verbs include 带 (dài: 'to carry'), 拿 (ná: 'to hold'), 寄 (jì: 'to mail'), 交 (jiāo: 'to hand'), 送 (sòng: 'to give a present'), 借 (jiè: 'to lend'), 还 (huán: 'to return'), 留 (liú: 'to leave behind'), 介绍 (jièshào: 'to introduce'), etc.
请你帮我把这封信交给王小姐, 好不好?
Qǐng nǐ bāng wǒ bǎ zhè fēng xìn jiāo gěi Wáng xiǎojiě, hǎo bù hǎo?
Could you please hand this letter to Miss Wang for me?
张先生打算把遗产全部都留给他女儿。
Zhāng xiānsheng dǎsuàn bǎ yíchǎn quánbù dōu liú gěi tā nǚ'ér.
Mr Zhang plans to leave all his estate to his daughter.
小王没有女朋友, 所以我想把我妹妹介绍给他。
Xiǎo Wáng méiyǒu nǚ péngyǒu, suǒyǐ wǒ xiǎng bǎ wǒ mèimei jièshào gěi tā.
Xiao Wang does not have a girlfriend; so I am thinking of introducing my younger sister to him.
### (d) 成 \+ a noun
When the other element is 成 \+ a noun, there are two implications:
* The action of the verb results in the transformation or creation of something
小李把他妈妈的一生写成了一本小说。
Xiǎo Lǐ bǎ tā māma de yìshēng xiě chéng le yì běn xiǎoshuō.
Xiao Li wrote his mother's life into a novel. (= Xiao Li wrote a novel based on his mother's life.)
我打算把这本英文书翻译成中文。
Wǒ dǎsuàn bǎ zhè běn Yīngwén shū fānyì chéng Zhōngwén.
I plan to translate this English book into Chinese.
今天的语法练习是把肯定句改成问句。
Jīntiān de yǔfǎ liànxí shì bǎ kěndìng jù gǎi chéng wèn jù.
Today's grammar exercise is to change (to convert) positive sentences into questions.
* 成 can imply that the action of the verb results in a mistake. Verbs frequently used in this situation are 看 (kàn: 'to look'), 说 (shuō: 'to say'), 叫 (jiào: 'to call'), 想 (xiǎng: 'to think'), 想像 (xiǎngxiàng: 'to imagine'), 当 (dāng: 'to treat'), 写 (xiě: 'to write'), etc.
昨天我把小王看成了小张, 今天又把他的名字叫成小黄, 我觉得很不好意思。
Zuótiān wǒ bǎ Xiǎo Wáng kàn chéng le Xiǎo Zhāng, jīntiān yòu bǎ tāde míngzì jiào chéng Xiǎo Huáng, wǒ juéde hěn bù haǒyìsi.
Yesterday I mistook Xiao Wang for Xiao Zhang; today I (made a mistake and) called him by the name Xiao Huang; I feel embarrassed.
他不但把"太"字念成"大", 而且还把它写成了"犬"字。
Tā búdàn bǎ 'tài' zì niàn chéng 'dà', érqiě hái bǎ tā xiě chéng le 'quǎn' zì.
Not only did he pronounce the character tài like dà but he also wrote it like the character quǎn.
### (e) 作 \+ a noun
When the other element is 作 \+ a noun and the verb indicates an action that causes transformation, a 把 sentence should be used. However, unlike 成, 作 does not imply a mistake since the transformation is the result of an intentional act to equate the two. Verbs frequently used in this situation are 看 (kàn: 'to look'), 叫 (jiào: 'to call'), 念 (niàn: 'to read'), 当 (dāng: 'to treat'), 选 (xuǎn: 'to elect'), 留 (liú: 'to keep'), 用 (yòng: 'to use'), etc.
请别把那些照片扔了, 我想把它们留作纪念。
Qǐng bié bǎ nàxiē zhàopiàn rēng le, wǒ xiǎng bǎ tāmen liú zuò jìniàn.
Please don't throw away those photos. I want to keep them as mementos.
王太太把小李看作(or 当作)自己的儿子。
Wáng tàitai bǎ Xiǎo Lǐ kàn zuò (or dāng zuò) zìjǐ de érzi.
Mrs Wang views (or treats) Xiao Li like her own son.
(It is also acceptable to say 王太太把小李看成自己的儿子. In this case, 成 does not imply a mistake, but shows some type of transformation.)
李小姐很喜欢小王, 可是小王已经有女朋友了, 所以他只把李小姐看作他妹妹。昨天他没戴眼镜, 把李小姐看成了他女朋友, 所以对李小姐说: "我爱你。" 后来他觉得很不好意思。
Lǐ xiǎojiě hěn xǐhuān XiǎoWáng, kěshì Xiǎo Wáng yǐjīng yǒu nǚ péngyǒu le, suǒyǐ tā zhǐ bǎ Lǐ xiǎojiě kàn zuò tā mèimei. Zuótiān tā méi dài yǎnjìng, bǎ Lǐ xiǎojiě kàn chéng le tā nǚ péngyǒu, suǒyǐ duì Lǐ xiǎojiě shuō: 'Wǒ ài nǐ.' Hòulái tā juéde hěn bùhǎo yìsi.
Miss Li likes Xiao Wang (romantically), but Xiao Wang already has a girlfriend, so he only views Miss Li as his sister. Yesterday he did not wear his glasses, so he mistook Miss Li for his girlfriend and so he said 'I love you' to her. Later, he felt embarrassed.
### (f) Summary
The following table gives a summary of the five special types of 把 sentence.
**The other element** | **Verb** | **Example**
---|---|---
* * *
* 1 在 \+ location
| 放, 挂, 写, 画, 停 (车), 拿, 忘, 留, 种, 藏, etc. | 你把我的车停在哪里?
Nǐ bǎ wǒde chē tíng zài nǎlǐ?
Where did you park my car?
* * *
* 2 到 \+ location
| 搬, 拿, 带, 送, 寄, 开 (车), 骑, 放, etc. | 请把这张桌子搬到外面。
Qǐng bǎ zhè zhāng zhuōzi bān dào wàimiàn.
Please move this table outside.
* * *
* 3 给 \+ person
| 带, 拿, 寄, 交, 送, 借, 还, 留, 介绍, etc. | 王先生要我把这封信交给你。
Wáng xiānsheng yào wǒ bǎ zhè fēng xìn jiāo gěi nǐ.
Mr Wang wanted me to hand this letter to you.
* * *
* 4 成 \+ noun
| |
* * *
Transformation or creation | 设计, 发展, 翻译, 换, 改, 做, 当, etc. | 我要把这篇文章翻译成英文。
Wǒ yào bǎ zhè piān wénzhāng fānyì chéng Yīngwén.
I will translate this article into English.
* * *
Implying a mistake | 看, 说, 叫, 想, 想像, 当, 写, etc. | 昨天我把小王看成了小张。
Zuótiān wǒ bǎ Xiǎo Wáng kàn chéng le Xiǎo Zhāng.
Yesterday I mistook Xiao Wang for Xiao Zhang.
* * *
* 5 作 \+ noun (intentional act to equate two)
| 看, 叫, 念, 当, 选, 留, 用, etc. | 他把出差当作旅游的机会。
Tā bǎ chūchāi dāng zuò lǚyóu de jīhuì.
He regards business trips as opportunities to travel.
### (g) 成 vs. 作
In some situations, 成 and 作 are considered the same. These usually involve verbs such as 看 (kàn) and 当 (dāng). 成 in these cases is not used to implied a mistake, but to indicate a transformation.
王家的人对我非常好, 他们简直把我当作(or 当成)家人.
Wáng jiā de rén duì wǒ fēicháng hǎo, tāmen jiǎnzhí bǎ wǒ dāng zuò (or dāng chéng) jiā rén.
The Wang family is very nice to me; they practically treat me like (as if I were) family.
### (h) Pre-posing the object
When the other element is 在 \+ a location, 到 \+ a location + or 给 \+ a person(s), the object after 把 can be pre-posed. However, when the other element is 作/成 \+ noun, the 把 structure is considered the best choice. The noun after 把 is usually not pre-posed.
他把那封信藏在床垫中间,(= 那封信, 他藏在床垫中间,)没有人找得到。
Tā bǎ nà fēng xìn cáng zài chuángdiàn zhōngjiān, méiyǒu rén zhǎo de dào.
He hid that letter between the mattresses; nobody could find it.
你快把我的书放到书架上去吧! 你可以把你自己的留在桌子上。(= 我的书, 你快放到书架上去吧! 你自己的, 你可以留在桌子上。)
Nǐ kuài bǎ wǒde shū fàng dào shūjià shàng qù ba! Nǐ kěyǐ bǎ nǐ zìjǐ de liú zài zhuōzi shàng.
Hurry and put my book on the bookshelf. You can leave your own on the table.
王: 你可不可以把昨天买的那本词典借给我?
Wáng: Nǐ kě bù kěyǐ bǎ zuótiān mǎi de nà běn cídiǎn jiè gěi wo?
李: 对不起, 那本词典, 我已经借给小张了。(= 我已经把那本词典借给 小张了。)
Lǐ: Duìbùqǐ, nà běn cídiǎn, wǒ yǐjīng jiè gěi Xiǎo Zhāng le.
Wang: Can you lend me the dictionary you bought yesterday?
Li: Sorry, I already lent that dictionary to Xiao Zhang.
## Level 2 22.6 The negative form
A negative word, 不, 没有 or 别, should appear before 把, not before the verb.
李: 他把欠你的钱还你没有?
Lǐ: Tā bǎ qiàn nǐ de qián huán nǐ méiyǒu?
王: 他没有把钱还我, 不过他把向我借的书还我了。
Wáng: Tā méiyǒu bǎ qián huán wǒ, búguò tā bǎ xiàng wǒ jiè de shū huán wǒ le.
Li: Did he return to you the money he owed you?
Wang: He didn't return the money to me, but he returned to me the book he borrowed from me.
要是你不把这些生词记住, 明天的考试你一定会考得很差。
Yàoshì nǐ bù bǎ zhèxiē shēngcí jì zhù, míngtiān de kǎoshì nǐ yídìng huì kǎo de hěn chà.
If you don't memorize these vocabulary words, you will definitely do poorly in tomorrow's test.
别把车停在这里, 这里不可以停车。
Bié bǎ chē tíng zài zhèlǐ, zhèlǐ bù kěyǐ tíngchē.
Don't park your car here. This is a no-parking zone.
## Level 2 22.7 Location of time phrases
A time phrase should appear before 把.
请你明天把这封信送到王先生家去。
Qǐng nǐ míngtiān bǎ zhè fēng xìn sòng dào Wáng xiānsheng jiā qù.
Please deliver this letter to Mr Wang's house tomorrow.
(It would not be proper to say 请你把这封信明天送到王先生家去.)
我下午三点就把今天的功课写完了。
Wǒ xiàwǔ sān diǎn jiù bǎ jīntiān de gōngkè xiě wán le.
I finished writing today's homework at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
(It would not be proper to say 我把今天的功课下午三点就写完了.)
## Level 2 22.8 Formal: 将
把 can be replaced by 将 (jiāng) when the style is formal.
现在我们请王先生将这个问题解说一下。
Xiànzài wǒmen qǐng Wáng xiānsheng jiāng zhè ge wèntí jiěshuō yíxià.
Now we will ask Mr Wang to explain this issue.
## Level 2 22.9 Use of 它/它们
它 (tā) or 它们 can follow 把 even though 它 is normally not used (when it is not a 把 sentence) unless it is referring to an animal.
桌上有一碗芝麻糊, 你把它喝了吧。
Zhuōshàng yǒu yì wǎn zhīmáhú, nǐ bǎ tā hē le ba.
There is a bowl of sesame drink on the table; why don't you drink it?
(你把它喝了吧 can be 你喝了吧, but it would not be proper to say 你喝了它吧.)
小明: 冰箱里的那几个剩菜呢?
Xiǎomíng: Bīngxiāng lǐ de nà jǐ ge shèngcài ne?
妈妈: 早就坏了, 我昨天就把它们都扔了。
Māma: Zǎo jiù huài le, wǒ zuótiān jiù bǎ tāmen dōu rēng le.
Xiaoming: What happened to those leftover dishes in the refrigerator?
Mother: They were long bad. I threw them away yesterday.
(It would be improper to say 它们早就坏了, 我昨天就扔了它们了.)
## Level 3 22.10 Casual: 给 \+ verb
An optional 给 (gěi) can appear before the verb in a 把 sentence. It should be noted that 给 does not have a meaning and should not be interpreted as 'to give'. When 给 is used, the sentence sounds casual.
你怎么把我的眼镜(给)打破了?
Nǐ zěnme bǎ wǒde yǎnjìng (gěi) dǎpò le?
How come you broke my glasses?
他一出门就把妈妈对他说的话全都(给)忘了。
Tā yì chūmén jiù bǎ māma shuō de huà quán dōu (gěi) wàng le.
As soon as he left the house, he immediately forgot everything his mother had said to him.
请你小声一点, 要不然, 你会把我爸爸(给)吵醒。
Qǐng nǐ xiǎoshēng yìdiǎn, yàobùrán, nǐ huì bǎ wǒ bàba (gěi) chǎo xǐng.
Please quiet down a little bit; otherwise, you will wake up my father.
## Exercises
Convert the following sentences into the 把 structure if possible.
* Level 2 1 王: 那封信你给丁小姐了没有?
李: 还没有呢, 因为昨天我没有看到她。
Wang: Did you give that letter to Miss Ding?
Li: Not yet because I didn't see her yesterday.
* 2 现在我要去图书馆借一本小说。
I am going to the library to check out a novel.
* 3 王: 请记住我说的话。
李: 请放心, 那些话, 我已经写在一个本子上了。
Wang: Please remember those words I said.
Li: Please don't worry. I already wrote those words in a notebook.
* 4 明天别忘了带一个照相机来。Don't forget to bring a camera tomorrow.
* 5 丁: 我说的话, 你不可以告诉小王。
李: 我根本不认识小王。
Ding: You cannot tell Xiao Wang what I said.
Li: I don't know Xiao Wang at all.
* Level 3 6 小明: 你包了太多饺子了, 我一个人吃不了一百个饺子。
妈妈: 你吃不完的, 我们可以留到明天吃。
Xiaoming: You made too many dumplings. I cannot eat 100 dumplings by myself.
Mother: We can save those you cannot finish until tomorrow and eat them then.
* 7 我听说王老师住院了; 我想去医院看他。
I heard that Teacher Wang has been hospitalized. I want to go to the hospital to visit him.
* 8 你说的话, 我听不清楚。那些话, 你可不可以再说一遍?
I cannot hear clearly what you said. Can you repeat it?
* 9 我忘了新秘书的名字, 所以我请李先生再告诉我一次她的名字。
I had forgotten our new secretary's name, so I asked Mr Li to tell me her name one more time.
* 10 王: 你弟弟病了三天了, 你怎么还不送他去医院?
李: 昨天送去了, 可是医生说他只是感冒, 所以叫我带他回家来休息。
Wang: Your younger brother has been sick for three days. How come you have not taken him to the hospital?
Li: I did yesterday. But the doctor said that he only had a cold, so he told me to bring him home and let him rest.
* 11 他去那家新开的百货公司给他女朋友买了一个很贵的礼物。
He went to that newly opened department store to buy a very expensive gift for his girlfriend.
* 12 出门的时候, 一定要穿上你的大衣, 还要锁好门。
When you leave the house, you must put on your coat; also, you must lock the door securely.
* 13 王小姐的电话号码, 你写在哪里?
Where did you write down Miss Wang's phone number?
# [23
Passive structures](content.xhtml#bck_Ch023)
In a passive sentence, the subject does not perform the action indicated by the verb, but is the 'receiver' of the action. The passive voice in English can be represented by several different ways in Chinese depending on the nature of the sentence. The focus of this chapter is on the distinction between these different passive structures in Chinese.
## Level 2 23.1 Passive in English, but not in Chinese
A sentence in the passive voice in English may not be a passive sentence in Chinese. For example, the English expression 'I was told that...' would not be a passive structure when translated into Chinese; instead, it would be 有人告诉我...... (Yǒu rén gàosu wǒ...: 'Someone told me that...'). The following are some English fixed expressions in the passive voice whose counterparts in Chinese are not passive sentences.
English: I was impressed.
Chinese: 我觉得......很不错(非常好, 很了不起, etc.)。
Wǒ juéde... hěn búcuò (fēicháng hǎo, hěn liǎobùqǐ, etc.).
English: I was interested.
Chinese: 我很感兴趣。 (or 我有兴趣。)
Wǒ hěn gǎn xìngqù. (or Wǒ yǒu xìngqù.)
English: I was surprised.
Chinese: 我感到很意外。 (or 我没想到。)
Wǒ gǎndào hěn yìwài. (or Wǒ méi xiǎngdào.)
## Level 3 23.2 The 是......的 structure
Although the 是......的 structure is not considered a passive structure in Chinese, its counterpart in English oftentimes is a sentence in the passive voice. Therefore, it is important to know that when such an English sentence is used to indicate the origin of someone or something, its counterpart in Chinese should be in the 是......的 structure.
☞ See 20.9 for more information.
English: I was born in Shanghai.
Chinese: 我是在上海生的。
Wǒ shì zài Shànghǎi shēng de.
English: This book is written by my mother.
Chinese: 这本书是我妈妈写的。
Zhè běn shū shì wǒ māma xiě de.
English: Tofu is made from soya beans.
Chinese: 豆腐是用黄豆做的。
Dòufǔ shì yòng huángdòu zuò de.
## Level 2 23.3 The unmarked passive
A passive sentence can be 'unmarked'; that is, the sentence is passive in 'notion', but not in structure. An unmarked passive sentence is sometimes referred to as a 'notional' passive sentence.
In an unmarked passive sentence, the subject is not the 'performer' of the action indicated by the verb, but is the 'receiver'. Such a sentence is understood as passive since it is obvious that the subject is not able to perform the action indicated by the verb.
The performer is not mentioned either because who the performer is is understood or unknown or because it is not necessary to mention the performer.
电影票都卖完了。
Diǎnyǐng piào dōu mài wán le.
All the movie tickets are sold out. (电影票 is unable to perform the action of 'selling'.)
这篇文章写得真好,翻译成外文没有?
Zhè piān wénzhāng xiě de zhēn hǎo, fānyì chéng wàiwén méiyǒu?
This article is really well-written. Has it been translated into foreign languages?
儿子: 我的自行车送去修了没有?
Érzi: Wǒde zìxíngchē sòngqù xiū le méiyǒu?
妈妈: 送去了, 可是还没有修好, 所以你走路去吧。
Māma: Sòngqù le, kěshì hái méiyǒu xiū hǎo, suǒyǐ nǐ zǒulù qù ba.
Son: Has my bicycle been sent for repairing?
Mother: It has been sent, but it has not been fixed yet, so why don't you walk.
王太太: 菜都吃光了, 可是客人还没吃饱, 怎么办?
Wáng tàitai: Cài dōu chī guāng le, kěshì kèrén hái méi chī bǎo, zěnme bàn?
王先生: 打电话去叫几个披萨。披萨送来以后, 问题就解决了。
Wáng xiānsheng: Dǎ diànhuà qù jiào jǐ ge pīsà. Pīsà sòng lái yǐhòu, wèntí jiù jiějué le.
Mrs Wang: The dishes are all gone (have been eaten), but our guests are not full (have not eaten enough) yet. What are we going to do?
Mr Wang: Call and order a couple of pizzas. After the pizzas are delivered, the problem will be solved.
## Level 3 23.4 The 被 structure
被 (bèi) is sometimes referred to as the passive marker. The word order in a 被 sentence is:
Subject | 被 | Performer (can be optional) | Verb | Other element (can be optional)
---|---|---|---|---
### (a) 把 vs. 被
In terms of word order, the 把 (bǎ) structure and the 被 structure share similarities on the surface. However, the subject of the 把 sentence is the 'performer' of the action, whereas the subject of the 被 sentence is the 'receiver' of the action. What can serve as the 'other element' in both structures is similar as well.
瓶里的水都被我喝光了。(= 我把瓶里的水都喝光了。)
Píng lǐ de shuǐ dōu bèi wǒ hē guāng le. (= Wǒ bǎ píng lǐ de shuǐ dōu hē guāng le.)
All the water in the bottle was consumed (drunk) by me. (= I drank all the water in the bottle.)
王明被我们推举为班长。(= 我们把王明推举为班长。)
Wáng Míng bèi wǒmen tuījǔ wéi bānzhǎng. (= Wǒmen bǎ Wáng Míng tuījǔ wéi bānzhǎng.)
Wang Ming was elected (as) the class leader by us. (= We elected Wang Ming our class leader.)
昨天他在埋怨公司的制度, 没想到他说的话被经理听见了, 所以今天他被经理叫去谈话。
Zuótiān tā zài mányuàn gōngsī de zhìdù, méi xiǎngdào tā shuō de huà bèi jīnglǐ tīngjiàn le, suǒyǐ jīntiān tā bèi jīnglǐ jiào qù tánhuà.
Yesterday he was complaining about the company's system. He would not have thought that his words were heard (overheard) by the manager. So today he was asked by the manager to go have a talk with him.
老师: 小明, 功课交了没有? (Unmarked passive)
Lǎoshī: Xiǎomíng, gōngkè jiāo le méiyǒu?
小明: 没有, 因为功课昨晚被狗吃了。
Xiǎomíng: Méiyǒu, yīnwèi gōngkè zuówǎn bèi gǒu chī le.
Teacher: Xiaoming, has you homework been turned in?
Xiaoming: No, because my homework was eaten by the dog last night.
头发才刚梳好, 一出门就被风吹得乱七八糟。 (头发刚梳好 is unmarked passive.)
Tóufǎ cái gāng shū hǎo, yì chūmén jiù bèi fēng chuī de luànqībāzāo.
My hair had just been combed nicely, but once I got out of the door, it was immediately blown by the wind to the point that it became totally messy.
### (b) When the 'other element' is not necessary
A 被 sentence may not always need the 'other element'; that is, it can end with a verb. Such a sentence usually indicates a habitual situation or a future situation and cannot be converted into a 把 sentence. This is because a 把 sentence, with rare exceptions, does not end with a verb.
☞ See 22.3 for more information on the 'other element' used in a 把 sentence.
老王非常怕太太, 所以他总是被朋友笑。
Lǎo Wáng fēicháng pà tàitai, suǒyǐ tā zǒngshì béi péngyǒu xiào.
Lao Wang is extremely afraid of his wife, so he is always teased (laughed at) by his friends.
小明成绩很差; 每次他考不及格, 不是被爸爸骂, 就是被妈妈打。
Xiǎomíng chéngjī hěn chà; měi cì tā kǎo bù jígé, búshì běi bàba mà, jiùshì bèi māma dǎ.
Xiaoming's performance at school is poor. Every time he fails a test, he is either scolded by his father or hit by his mother.
他的自行车停在户外, 每天被风吹,被日晒,被雨淋, 不久就坏了。
Tāde zìxíngchē tíng zài hùwài, měi tiān bèi fēng chuī, běi rì shài, běi yǔ lín, bùjiǔ jiù huài le.
His bicycle was parked outdoors. Every day, it was blown by the wind, shone on by the sun and rained on by the rain; it soon broke.
### (c) Omitting the 'performer'
When the performer is unknown or when it is not necessary to mention the performer, either 人 can be used as the performer or the performer can be omitted without altering the meaning of the sentence.
我的电脑被(人)偷了。
Wǒde diànnǎo bèi (rén) tōu le.
My computer was stolen (by someone).
王先生被(人)谋杀了。
Wáng xiānshēng bèi (rén) móushā le.
Mr Wang was murdered (by someone).
图书馆的工作人员告诉我, 我想借的那本书已经被(人)借走了。
Túshūguǎn de gōngzuò rényuán gàosù wǒ, wǒ xiǎng jiè de nà běn shū yǐjīng bèi (rén) jiè zǒu le.
The library employee told me the book I wanted to borrow had already been borrowed (by someone else).
In English, when the performer is not mentioned, the preposition 'by' is not used. Learners who are English speakers should pay attention to this difference between English and Chinese.
唉! 这次考试, 又不及格; 回家以后, 大概又会被骂。
Ài! Zhè cì kǎoshì, yòu bù jígé; huí jiā yǐhòu, dàgài yòu huì bèi mà.
Oh no! I failed the test again. After I get home, I will probably be scolded again.
今天上课的时候, 小王又被赞美了; 因为这次考试, 又是他考得最好。
Jīntiān shàngkè de shíhòu, Xiǎo Wáng yòu bèi zànměi le, yīnwèi zhè cì kǎoshì, yòu shì tā kǎo de zuì hǎo.
Today in class, Xiao Wang was praised again because once again he did the best on the test.
### (d) Casual: 叫 or 让
被 can be replaced by 叫 (jiào) or 让 (ràng) when the performer is mentioned. When the performer is not mentioned, neither 叫 nor 让 can be used. The use of 叫 or 让 makes the utterance sound more casual.
观光客到了外国常常被骗。
Guānguāngkè dào le wàiguó chángcháng bèi piàn.
(观光客到了外国常常叫骗/让骗 is incorrect since the performer is not mentioned.)
Tourists are often cheated (ripped off) when they go to foreign countries.
我住在那个国家的时候,被(or 叫/让)当地人骗过好多次。
Wǒ zhù zài nà ge guójiā de shíhòu, bèi (or jiào/ràng) dāngdì rén piàn guò hǎo duō cì.
When I lived in that country, I was cheated by the locals many times.
* Since 叫 and 让 have other definitions, it is important to make the correct interpretation when 叫 or 让 appears in a sentence
妈妈包的饺子都叫弟弟吃完了, 所以妈妈叫我打电话去叫一个披萨。
Māma bāo de jiǎozi dōu jiào dìdi chī wán le, suǒyǐ māma jiào wo dǎ diànhuà qù jiào yí ge pīsà.
All the dumplings that Mother made were eaten by little brother, so Mother asked me to call and order a pizza.
新买的电子游戏, 昨天让弟弟弄坏了。他想再买一个, 妈妈不让他再买, 这让他非常不高兴。
Xīnmǎi de diànzǐ yóuxì, zuótiān ràng dìdi nòng huài le. Tā xiǎng zài mǎi yí ge, māma bú ràng tā zài mǎi, zhè ràng tā fēicháng bù gāoxìng.
The newly purchased video game was broken by little brother yesterday. He wanted to buy another one, but Mother would not let him and this made him very upset.
### (e) Very casual: 给
In very casual speech, 给 (gěi) sometimes is used in place of 被 whether or not the performer is mentioned.
那本畅销书一到图书馆就给(人)借走了。
Nà běn chàngxiāo shū yí dào túshūguǎn jiù gěi (rén) jiè zǒu le.
That best-selling book was borrowed as soon as it arrived at the library.
我上星期才买的电脑, 这星期就给偷了。
Wǒ shàng xīngqī cái mǎi de diànnǎo, zhè xīngqī jiù gěi tōu le.
The computer I bought only last week has already been stolen this week.
### (f) Optional 给
An optional 给 can appear before the verb in a sentence with '被/叫/让 \+ performer'.
我今天一大早就被邻居的狗叫声(给)吵醒了。
Wǒ jīntiān yí dà zǎo jiù bèi línjū de gǒu jiàoshēng (gěi) chǎo xǐng le.
Today, very early in the morning, I was awoken by the barking of my neighbor's dog.
老王的儿子这学期每次考试都不及格, 老王快叫他儿子(给)气死了。
Lǎo Wáng de érzi zhè xuéqī měi cì kǎoshì dōu bù jígé, Lǎo Wáng kuài jiào tā érzi (gěi) qì sǐ le.
Lao Wang's son has failed every test this term. Lao Wang has been highly upset by his son (literally: to the point that he is about to die).
## Level 3 23.5 The use of 受到
When the verb used in a 被 sentence has an identical noun, 被 can be replaced by 受到 (shòudào). In this case, the verb usually does not indicate an active action and has more than one character. For example, 我的电脑被偷了 (Wǒ de diànnǎo bèi tōu le) cannot be converted into a sentence with 受到 because 偷 is a monosyllabic verb.
在男女平等的社会里, 女人不会被歧视。(= 女人不会受到歧视。)
Zài nán nǚ píngděng de shèhuì lǐ, nǚrén bú huì bèi qíshì.
(歧视 is both 'to discriminate' and 'discrimination'. The verb and the noun are identical.)
In a society where men and women are equal, women will not be discriminated again.
我的车坏了, 可是坐公共汽车很方便, 所以生活没有被影响。(= 生活没有受到 影响。)
Wǒde chē huài le, kěshì zuò gōnggòng qìchē hěn fāngbiàn, suǒyǐ shēnghuó méiyǒu bèi yǐngxiǎng.
(影响 is both 'to influence; to affect' and 'the influence'.)
My car had broken down, but riding the bus is convenient, so my life was not affected.
### (a) 受到 \+ performer (的) + noun
When the performer is mentioned in the 被 sentence, the performer and an optional 的 are used before the noun in the 受到 sentence.
小王提出的建议被全班同学反对。(= 小王提出的建议受到全班同学(的)反对。)
Xiǎo Wáng tíchū de jiànyì bèi quán bān tóngxué fǎnduì. (= Xiǎo Wáng tíchū de jiànyì shòudào quán bān tóngxué (de) fǎnduì.)
The suggestion Xiao Wang made was opposed by the entire class.
(反对 is both 'to oppose' and 'opposition'.)
小明在学校里总是被同学欺负。(= 小明在学校里总是受到同学(的)欺负。)
Xiǎomíng zài xuéxiào lǐ zǒngshì bèi tóngxué qīfù. (= Xiǎomíng zài xuéxiào lǐ zǒngshì shòudào tóngxué (de) qīfù.)
Xiaoming is always bullied by his classmates at school.
(欺负 is both a verb and a noun in Chinese.)
### (b) 受到 \+ adjective 的 \+ noun
The complement of degree (with 得) or an adverbial modifier (with 地) in a 被 sentence will be converted into an adjective used attributively (with 的 before the noun) in a corresponding 受到 sentence.
近几年来, 许多大城市的环境都被污染得很严重。 (污染 is 'to pollute' and 'pollution'.)
Jìn jǐ nián lái, xǔduō dà chéngshì de huánjìng dōu bèi wūrǎn de hěn yánzhòng.
(= 近几年来, 许多大城市的环境都受到严重的污染。)
(= Jìn jǐ nián lái, xǔduō dà chéngshì de huánjìng dōu shòudào yánzhòng de wūrǎn.)
In recent years, the environment in many big cities has been polluted severely.
### (c) Undesirable situations
When an undesirable situation is being described, 遭到 (zāodào) or 遭受 (zāoshòu) is frequently used in place of 受到.
在中国的文化大革命期间, 许多无辜的人遭到迫害。(遭到迫害 = 受到迫害)
Zài Zhōngguó de wénhuà dà gémìng qījiān, xǔduō wúgū de rén zāodào pòhài.
During China's Cultural Revolution, many innocent people were persecuted.
小兰才上高中, 就想搬出去住; 她的这个想法,遭到她爸妈强烈的反对。
Xiǎolán cái shàng gāozhōng, jiù xiǎng bān chūqù zhù; tāde zhè ge xiǎngfǎ, zāodào tā bàmā qiángliè de fǎnduì.
Xiaolan is only in high school and she already wants to move out of home. This idea of hers is strongly opposed by her parents.
### (d) Desirable situations
When a desirable situation is being described, 获得 (huòdé) or 得到 (dédào) is frequently used in place of 受到.
最近小明的成绩有很大的进步, 所以他上星期获得老师的夸奖。小明得到了老师的鼓励, 决定要更努力地学习。
Zuìjìn Xiǎomíng de chéngjī yǒu hěn dà de jìnbù, suǒyǐ tā shàng xīngqī huòdé lǎoshī de kuājiāng. Xiǎomíng dédào le lǎoshī de gǔlì, juédìng yào gèng nǔlì de xuéxí.
Recently, Xiaoming has had huge improvement in his schoolwork, so he was praised by the teacher last week. After being encouraged by the teacher, Xiaoming decided that he will study even harder.
小张精心设计的海报获得了老师的赞赏。
Xiǎo Zhāng jīngxīn shèjì de hǎibào huòdé le lǎoshī de zànshǎng.
The poster Xiao Zhang had carefully designed was praised by the teacher.
## Level 3 23.6 No subject
Occasionally, a sentence can start with '被 \+ the performer' without a subject. In this case, the element following the verb is an indefinite noun. This can be considered a type of subjectless sentence that indicates the 'emergence' of something. The meaning of such a sentence remains unchanged even if 被 is not used.
老李当记者的时候,(被他)发掘出一件轰动一时的贪污案。
Lǎo Lǐ dāng jìzhě de shíhòu, (bèi tā) fājué chū yí jiàn hōngdòng yìshí de tānwū àn.
When Lao Li was a journalist, a sensational embezzlement case was uncovered by him.
她的运气真好, 竟然(被她)中了一百万。
Tāde yùnqì zhēn hǎo, jìngrán bèi tā zhòng le yì bǎiwàn.
She was really lucky; she unexpectedly won $1 million.
## Level 3 23.7 Preposition 由
A sentence with the preposition 由 (yóu) can be translated into an English sentence in the passive voice. However, the passivity indicated in a 由 sentence is not strong. Such a sentence emphasizes that the performer will be in charge of or be responsible for the event or action.
The following are the two types of word order involving 由.
### (a) Subject + 由 performer (来/去) + verb
This word order is similar to the word order for a 被 sentence. (Note that the 由 sentence in this word order usually does not have the 'other element'.)
这件事由老张(来)负责, 别人不用管。
Zhè jiàn shì yóu Lǎo Zhāng (lái) fùzé, biérén búyòng guǎn.
This matter will be taken care of by Lao Zhang (meaning: Lao Zhang will be responsible for this matter); others do not have to worry about it.
昨天你请我看电影, 今天这顿饭由我(来)请吧。
Zuótiān nǐ qǐng wǒ kàn diànyǐng, jīntiān zhè dùn fàn yóu wǒ (lái) qǐng ba.
You treated me to a movie yesterday. Today's meal will be paid by me. (Meaning: I will be responsible for paying for this meal.)
### (b) 由 performer (来/去) + verb + subject
The subject of the 由 sentence can be moved to follow the verb without altering the meaning of the sentence. This results in a sentence beginning with 由.
他是我的律师,由他来处理我的法律问题吧!
Tā shì wǒde lǜshī, yóu tā lái chǔlǐ wǒde fǎlǜ wèntí ba!
He is my lawyer. My legal matters will be handled by him. (Meaning: he will be in charge.)
你是这方面的专家,由你来决定问题的解决方法。
Nǐ shì zhè fāngmiàn de zhuānjiā, yóu nǐ lái juédìng wèntí de jiějué fāngfǎ.
You are the expert in this area. The solution to the problem will be decided by you. (Meaning: you will be responsible for deciding on the solution.)
## Level 3 23.8 Formal: Subject + 为 performer + 所 verb
In a formal style, 'subject + 为 (wéi) performer + 所 (suǒ) verb' is used in place of a sentence with 被.
王先生一向为部属所尊重, 没想到他竟做出这种事。
Wáng xiānsheng yíxiàng wéi bùshǔ suǒ zūnzhòng, méi xiǎngdào tā jìng zuò chū zhè zhǒng shì.
Mr Wang had always been respected by his subordinates. No one would have thought that he would have done such a thing.
他写的小说, 生前大多不为人所知, 死后却都成了畅销书。
Tā xiě de xiǎoshuō, shēng qián dàduō bù wéi rén suǒ zhī, sǐ hòu què dōu chéng le chǎngxiāo shū.
Most of the novels he wrote were unknown to people when he was alive; but all his books became best-sellers after he died.
## Level 3 23.9 Summary of passive structures
The following table gives a summary of the passive structures in Chinese.
**Structure** | **Grammatical features** | **Examples**
---|---|---
* * *
* 1 是......的
| Showing origin | 这本书是他写的。
Zhè běn shū shì tā xiě de.
This book was written by him.
* * *
* 2 Unmarked passive
| Subject is receiver of the action
Performer is unknown or unimportant | 我的车修好了没有?
Wǒde chē xiū hǎo le méiyǒu?
Has my car been fixed?
* * *
* 3 被/给 sentence
| |
* * *
Performer is mentioned | Subject + 被 (or 给) performer + verb | 他常被 (or 给)老师骂。
Tā cháng bèi (or gěi) lǎoshī mà.
He is often scolded by the teacher.
* * *
Performer is not mentioned | Subject + 被 (or 给) + verb | 他六点就被 (or 给)吵醒了。
Tā liù diǎn jiù bèi (or gěi) chǎo xǐng le.
He was woken up at 6 o'clock.
* * *
* 4 让/叫 = 被
| Performer must be mentioned | 纸让风吹走了。
Zhǐ ràng fēng chuī zǒu le.
The paper was blown away by the wind.
我叫那个摊贩骗了。
Wǒ jiào nà ge tānfàn piàn le.
I was cheated by that vendor.
* * *
* 5 受到/遭到/获得 \+ noun
| Verb and noun must be identical and have more than one character | 我的建议受到反对。
Wǒde jiànyì shòudào fǎnduì.
My suggestion was opposed.
* * *
* 6 由 sentence
| Subject + 由 performer + verb
Performer is in charge of action | 这件事由他处理吧。
Zhè jiàn shì yóu ta chǔlǐ ba.
This matter will be handled by him.
## Exercises
* Level 2 I Translate the following sentences into Chinese.
* 1 This essay was well-written, so it has been posted (= placed) on our class blog by the teacher.
* 2 This novel was written by a famous Chinese writer.
* 3 Her computer was stolen, so her life has been greatly affected.
* 4 Li: Ever since I came to China, I have been ripped off (= cheated) by street vendors several times.
Zhang: I have been ripped off, too.
Wang: I have never been ripped off.
* 5 This morning my mother was awoken by the music I played. So I was scolded.
* 6 I was bothered by him to the point that I could not do a thing.
* Level 3 II Translate the following sentences into Chinese. Do not use 被 unless there is no other option.
* 1 Those sheets of paper were blown away by the wind.
* 2 Wang Li's father is a doctor. Wang Li has been influenced by him and has decided to be a doctor, too.
* 3 The antique flower vase I bought last week was broken by my son.
* 4 Wang Ming has been elected our class leader.
* 5 Li Zhong's suggestion was opposed by all the classmates in the class.
* 6 Mr Wang is our representative. Your questions will be answered by him.
* 7 Because the water in this river has been polluted severely, the fish from this river are not edible.
* 8 Lately Wang Zhong has been often praised by the teacher.
* 9 When Zhang Ming was criticizing the teacher, his words were heard by the teacher. The teacher was unhappy, so Zhang Ming was scolded by the teacher today.
* 10 Zhang Ming is often teased (= laughed at) by his classmates. Today he was laughed at again. The teacher said that, from now on, those who laugh at him will be punished.
# [24
Making comparisons (1)](content.xhtml#bck_Ch024)
There are basically two types of comparison. One indicates which of the two items is stronger (or weaker) in the feature being compared; the other indicates whether or not two items are similar/identical. Although certain patterns can imply both, the focus of this chapter is on the first type of comparison. The second type is discussed in Chapter 25.
## Level 2 24.1 Simple sentences with contrasting adjectives
One or two simple sentences with adjectives of opposite meanings can be used to imply that a comparison is being made. In this case, the adjectives cannot have 很 (hěn) or other degree adverbs.
我们班, 男生多, 女生少。
Wǒmen bān, nánshēng duō, nǚshēng shǎo.
There are more males students than female students in my class.
哥哥的房间大, 我的房间小; 他的东西多, 所以爸妈把大的房间给了他。
Gēge de fángjiān dà, wǒde fángjiān xiǎo, tāde dōngxī duō, suǒyǐ bàmā bǎ dà de fāngjiān gěi le tā.
My older brother's room is bigger than mine. He has more stuff, so my parents gave him the bigger room.
## Level 2/3 24.2 The use of 比
When 比 (bǐ) is used to make comparisons, only the subjects or time phrases can be compared. In other words, 比 cannot be used to compare the two objects in a sentence. The topic–comment structure is used to compare two objects.
☞ See 1.4 for more information on the topic–comment structure.
English: I like physics more than (I like) chemistry.
('Physics' and 'chemistry' are the two objects of the verb 'like'.)
Chinese: 物理跟化学, 我(比较)喜欢物理。
Wùlǐ gēn huàxué, wǒ (bǐjiào) xǐhuān wùlǐ.
English: I like Mr Wang more than (I like) Mr Zhang.
('Mr Wang' and 'Mr Zhang' are the two objects of the verb 'like'.)
Chinese: 王先生和张先生, 我(比较)喜欢王先生。
Wáng xiānsheng hé Zhāng xiānsheng, wǒ bǐjiào xǐhuān Wáng xiānsheng.
English: I like Mr Wang more than Mr Zhang (likes him.)
('I' and 'Mr Zhang' are the two subjects. Mr Wang is the object.)
Chinese: 我比张先生喜欢王先生。
Wǒ bǐ Zhāng xiānsheng xǐhuān Wáng xiānsheng.
English: I am busier this year than last year.
(This is comparing the two time phrases 'this year' and 'last year'.)
Chinese: 我今年比去年忙。
Wǒ jīnnián bǐ qùnián máng.
## Level 2/3 24.3 Word order of 比 sentences
The basic word order for a 比 sentence is 'A 比 B + feature being compared'. The feature being compared is usually an adjective, a complement of state, a verb (which has the quality of an adjective or which can indicate increase/decrease, etc.) or, occasionally, a modal verb.
### (a) Adjectives
It is important to keep in mind that the feature being compared cannot include 不 (bù), 很 (hěn), 真 (zhēn), 太 (tài), 非常 (fēicháng), etc.
我比我弟弟高。 (高 is an adjective and is the feature being compared.)
Wǒ bǐ wǒ dìdi gāo.
I am taller than my younger brother.
= 我弟弟比我矮。
Wǒ dìdi bǐ wǒ ǎi.
My younger brother is shorter than I.
(Incorrect: 我比我弟弟很高 or 我弟弟比我不高.)
王先生家比李先生家大。 (大 is an adjective and is the feature being compared.)
Wáng xiānsheng jiā bǐ Lǐ xiānsheng jiā dà.
Mr Wang's house is bigger than Mr Li's house.
= 李先生家比王先生家小。
Lǐ xiānsheng jiā bǐ Wáng xiānsheng jiā xiǎo.
Mr Li's house is smaller than Mr Wang's house.
(Incorrect: 王先生家比李先生家很大 or 李先生家比王先生家不大.)
### (b) Complements of state
When the feature being compared is a complement of state, the word order can be slightly flexible.
☞ See Chapter 13 for more information on the complement of state.
小王比小李跑得快。 (跑得快 is a complement of state and is the feature being compared.)
Xiǎo Wáng bǐ Xiǎo Lǐ pǎo de kuài.
= 小王跑得比小李快。
= Xiǎo Wáng pǎo de bǐ Xiǎo Lǐ kuài.
Xiao Wang runs faster than Xiao Li.
= 小李比小王跑得慢。
Xiǎo Lǐ bǐ Xiǎo Wáng pǎo de màn.
= 小李跑得比小王慢。
Xiǎo Lǐ pǎo de bǐ Xiǎo Wáng màn.
Xiao Li runs slower than Xiao Wang.
(Incorrect: 小王比小李跑得很快 or 小李跑得比小王不快.)
### (c) When the verb has an object
When the verb has an object, or is a compound verb, such as 唱歌 and 跳舞, it is not proper to put 比 before the object.
妹妹舞跳得比我好, 可是我歌唱得比她好。
Mèimei wǔ tiào de bǐ wǒ hǎo, kěshì wǒ gē chàng de bǐ tā hǎo.
= 妹妹舞比我跳得好, 可是我歌比她唱得好。
= Mèimei wǔ bǐ wǒ tiào de hǎo, kěshì wǒ gē bǐ tā chàng de hǎo.
My younger sister dances better than I do, but I sing better than she does.
(Do not say 妹妹比我舞跳得好, 可是我比她歌唱得好.)
### (d) Verbs
When the feature being compared is a verb, the verb must have the quality of an adjective; normally, these verbs can take degree adverbs, such as 很, 真 and 非常, before them.
我比小明喜欢数学。 (喜欢 is a verb with the quality of an adjective.)
Wǒ bǐ Xiǎomíng xǐhuān shùxué.
I like mathematics more than Xiaoming does.
妈妈比爸爸爱看小说。 (爱 is a verb with the quality of an adjective.)
Māma bǐ bàba ài kàn xiǎoshuō.
My mother likes to read novels more than my father does.
* Verbs without the quality of an adjective cannot be directly compared
English: I miss home more than my sister does. (= I am more homesick.)
Chinese: 我比姐姐想家。 (想 is a verb with the quality of an adjective.)
Wǒ bǐ jiějie xiǎng jiā.
English: I walk more than you do. (Meaning: I walk more frequently than you do.)
Chinese: 我比你常走路。 (走路 is a verb without the quality of an adjective.)
Wǒ bǐ nǐ cháng zǒulù.
English: I walk more than you do. (Meaning: I walk longer distances than you do.)
Chinese: 我走的路比你走的长。
Wǒ zǒu de lù bǐ nǐ zǒu de cháng.
(It is incorrect to say 我比你走路 in either of the above sentences since 'to walk' is a verb without the quality of an adjective.)
* Verbs that indicate increase/elevation or decrease/decline can be the feature being compared.
我今年的收入比去年增加了。
Wǒ jīnnián de shōurù bǐ qùnián zēngjiā le.
My income this year is more than my income last year.
今年的入学标准比去年降低了。
Jīnnián de rùxué biāozhǔn bǐ qùnián jiàngdī le.
This year's admission standard is lower than last year's.
* Modal verbs such as 想 (xiǎng), 会 (huì) and 愿意 (yuànyì), which can follow degree adverbs such as 很, 真, 非常, can be used in a 比 sentence. 想 in this case means 'would like'; and 会 means 'to be good at'
小李比小王会跳舞。
Xiǎo Lǐ bǐ Xiǎo Wáng huì tiàowǔ.
Xiao Li is better at dancing than Xiao Wang (is).
小丁比小张愿意帮助人。
Xiǎo Dīng bǐ Xiǎo Zhāng yuànyì bāngzhù rén.
Xiao Ding is more willing to help others than Xiao Zhang (is).
我比她想去中国留学。
Wǒ bǐ tā xiǎng qù Zhōngguó liúxué.
I would like to go to China to study more than she would like to.
The verb 有 cannot be used in a 比 sentence unless 有 is part of an adjective.
这本书比那本有意思得多。 (有意思 means 'interesting'.)
Zhè běn shū bǐ nà běn yǒu yǐsi de duō.
This book is much more interesting than that book.
王家比李家有钱。 (有钱 means 'wealthy'.)
Wáng jiā bǐ Lǐ jiā yǒuqián.
The Wang family is wealthier (literally: has more money) than the Li family.
English: I have more books than he does.
Chinese: 我的书比他的多。
Wǒde shū bǐ tāde duō.
(Incorrect: 我有比他多书 or 我比他有多书 or 我比他有书。)
English: Xiao Wang has more friends than Xiao Li.
Chinese: 小王的朋友比小李的多。
Xiǎo Wáng de péngyǒu bǐ Xiǎo Lǐ de duō.
(Incorrect: 小王有比小李很多朋友。)
## Level 3 24.4 Complements of quantitative difference
After making a comparison with 比, a complement of quantity (☞ referred to as 'complement of quantitative difference' in Chapter 15) can follow to indicate the difference.
The word orders for this structure in English and in Chinese are quite dissimilar; therefore, learners who are English speakers should pay special attention to avoid mistakes.
### (a) Forming questions about the difference
多少 or '几 \+ measure word' is used in questions to ask about the difference.
这本书比那本 贵多少(钱)?
Zhè běn shū bǐ nà běn guì duōshǎo (qián)?
How much more expensive is this book than that book?
你们班比他们班多几个人?
Nǐmen bān bǐ tāmen bān duō jǐ ge rén?
How many more people are there in your class than in his class?
你家比他家大多少?
Nǐ jiā bǐ tā jiā dà duōshǎo?
How much bigger is your house than his house?
### (b) Vague differences vs. precise differences
There are two types of difference, a vague difference and a precise difference. At least two characters are necessary to indicate the difference. Only 一些 (yìxiē) or 一点 (yìdiǎn) can be shortened to 些 or 点.
* When a vague difference is indicated, the difference is either 'a lot/much/many' or 'a little'.
English: Xiao Wang is much taller than his younger brother.
Chinese: 小王比他弟弟高很多(= 高得多 = 高多了)。
Xiǎo Wáng bǐ tā dìdi gāo hěn duō (= gāo de duō = gāo duō le).
(Incorrect: 小王比他弟弟高多。) (多 is monosyllabic.)
English: My house is a little smaller than his house.
Chinese: 我家比他家小一些(= 小一点)。
Wǒ jiā bǐ tā jiā xiǎo yìxiē (= xiǎo yìdiǎn).
这次考试, 我考得比王明好(一)些。
Zhè cì kǎoshì, wǒ kǎo de bǐ Wáng Míng hǎo (yì) xiē.
I did a little better than Wang Ming on this test.
* When the adjective being compared is 多 (duō) or 少 (shǎo) and the complement of quantitative difference is 很多/得多/多了, the resulting sentence can be confusing to learners due to the juxtaposition of 多 and 少.
(Situation: Mr Wang has five students; Mr Zhang has eight students; Mr Li has 80 students.)Š
王先生的学生比李先生的少很多(= 少多了 = 少得多)。
Wáng xiānsheng de xuéshēng bǐ Lǐ xiānsheng de shǎo duō le.
= 李先生的学生比王先生的多多了(= 多得多 = 多很多)。
Lǐ xiānsheng de xuéshēng bǐ Wáng xiānsheng de duō duō le.
王先生的学生比张先生的少一点(= 少一些 = 少点 = 少些)。
Wáng xiānsheng de xuéshēng bǐ Zhāng xiānsheng de shǎo yìdiǎn.
= 张先生的学生比王先生的多一些(= 多一点 = 多些 = 多点)。
Zhāng xiānsheng de xuéshēng bǐ Wáng xiānsheng de duō yìxiē.
* The vague difference can be '几 \+ measure word' if what is being compared is countable.
王先生的学生只比张先生的少几个。 ('几个' means 'a few' here.)
Wáng xiānsheng de xuéshēng zhǐ bǐ Zhāng xiānsheng de shǎo jǐ ge.
* The complement of quantitative difference can also indicate a precise difference. The actual difference should have at least two characters, except when it is an arithmetic question.
老师: 十五比十二大多少?
Lǎoshī: Shíwǔ bǐ shí'èr dà duōshǎo?
小学生: 大三。
Xiǎoxuéshēng: Dà sān.
Teacher: How much bigger is 15 than 12?
Pupil: It's bigger by 3.
我今年十五, 我哥哥十八, 弟弟十三。我比哥哥小三岁, 比弟弟大两岁。
Wǒ jīnnián shíwǔ, wǒ gēge shíbā, dìdi shísān. Wǒ bǐ gēge xiǎo sān suì, bǐ dìdi dà liǎng suì.
I am 15 this year; my older brother is 18; my younger brother is 13. I am three years younger than my older brother, two years older than my younger brother.
(三岁 and 两岁 are the precise differences. Although it is acceptable to say 我今年十五 without using 岁, it is incorrect to say 我比哥哥小三, 比弟弟大二.)
我一百八十公分, 他一百六十五公分; 我比他高十五公分。
Wǒ yì bǎi bāshí gōngfēn, tā yì bǎi liùshí wǔ gōngfēn; wǒ bǐ tā gāo shíwǔ gōngfēn.
I am 180 cm tall; he is 165 cm tall. I am 15 cm taller than he is.
## Level 3 24.5 更: 'even more'
更 (gèng) can appear before the feature being compared to indicate 'even more'. The use of 更 must be in proper context, in which B already possesses the feature, but A is even stronger in that feature.
### (a) The use of 更, 还, and 还要
When 比 is used in making the comparison, 还 (hái), 还要 (háiyào) and 更 are interchangeable. When 比 is not used, only 更 can be used.
English: Xiao Wang is tall; Xiao Zhang is even taller (than he is).
Chinese: 小王很高, 小张比他更高。
Xiǎo Wáng hěn gāo, Xiǎo Zhāng bǐ tā gèng gāo.
= 小王很高, 小张比他还(要)高。
= Xiǎo Wáng hěn gāo, Xiǎo Zhāng bǐ tā hái(yào) gāo.
= 小王很高, 小张更高。
Xiǎo Wáng hěn gāo, Xiǎo Zhāng gèng gāo.
(Incorrect: 小王很高, 小张还高。)
昨天的考试, 我考得不错, 可是小李考得(比我)更好。
Zuótiān de kǎoshì, wǒ kǎo de búcuò, kěshì Xiǎo Lǐ kǎo de (bǐ wǒ) gèng hǎo.
I did quite well on yesterday's test, but Xiao Li did even better (than I did).
昨天的考试, 我考得不好, 小李考得比我还(要)差。
Zuótiān de kǎoshì, wǒ kǎo de bù hǎo, Xiǎo Lǐ kǎo de bǐ wǒ hái(yào) chà.
I did not do well on yesterday's test; Xiao Li did even worse than I did.
### (b) Negative sentences with 更
It is acceptable to have '不 \+ the feature being compared' if 更 is used.
上次考试, 我考得非常不好, 没想到这次我考得更不好。
Shàng cì kǎoshì, wǒ kǎo de fēicháng bùhǎo, méi xiǎngdào zhè cì wǒ kǎo de gèng bù hǎo.
I did extremely poorly on the last test; I didn't expect that I would do even more poorly this time.
(Do not say 这次考试我考得比上次不好. One can only say 这次考试我比上次 考得差.)
### (c) 'Much more' vs. 'even more'
Do not confuse 'much more' with 'even more'.
(Situation: Mr Wang is a multi-millionaire. Mr Li is a billionaire.)
王先生非常有钱, 李先生比他更有钱。
Wáng xiānsheng fēicháng yǒuqián, Lǐ xiānsheng bǐ tā gèng yǒuqián.
Mr Wang is very wealthy; Mr. Li is even wealthier than he (is).
(Situation: Teacher Zhang shows you and Mr Ding some homework written by Xiao Li and Xiao Wang and asks you whose handwriting is better. Both of you give him your opinions.)
你: 我觉得小王的字写得马马虎虎, 小李的字写得比他好多了。
Nǐ: Wǒ juéde Xiǎo Wáng de zì xiě de mǎmǎhūhū, Xiǎo Lǐ de zì xiě de bǐ tā hǎo duō le.
丁: 我觉得两个人都写得不错, 不过小李比小王写得更好。
Dīng: Wǒ juéde liǎng ge rén dōu xiě de búcuò, búguò Xiǎo Lǐ bǐ Xiǎo Wáng xiě de gèng hǎo.
You: I feel that Xiao Wang's handwriting is average; Xiao Li's handwriting is much better.
Ding: I feel both of them have good handwriting, but Xiao Li's is even better than Xiao Wang's.
这本书相当有意思, 那本比这本更有意思。
Zhè běn shū xiāngdāng yǒu yìsi, nà běn bǐ zhè běn gèng yǒu yìsi.
This book is quite interesting; that book is even more interesting than this one.
Compare: 这本书不太有意思, 那本比这本有意思得多。
Zhè běn shū bú tài yǒu yìsi, nà běn bǐ zhè běn yǒu yìsi de duō.
This book is not very interesting; that book is much more interesting than this one.
### (d) Adding modal verbs
Some modal verbs, such as 想 (xiǎng), 会 (huì), 应该 (yīnggāi) and 可以 (kěyǐ), can appear in a 比 sentence with 更.
小王不应该喝酒, 你比他更不应该喝。 (你比小王不应该喝酒 is incorrect.)
Xiǎo Wáng bù yīnggāi hē jiǔ, nǐ bǐ tā gèng bù yīnggāi hē.
Xiao Wang is not supposed to drink alcohol; you are even less supposed to drink.
## Level 3 24.6 The differences between 还 (要) and 更
* When the meaning of 'even more' is combined with the quantitative difference, 更 cannot be used to indicate the precise difference, whereas 还要 can be used to indicate either the precise difference or a vague difference. A sentence such as this would be unusual in English; therefore, learners who are English speakers should be aware of such situations in Chinese.
张太太: 苹果一斤三块! 这么贵! 香蕉呢?
Zhāng tàitai: Píngguǒ yì jīn sān kuài, zhème guì! Xiāngjiāo ne?
摊贩: 一斤五块。
Tānfàn: Yì jīn wǔ kuài.
张太太: 什么! 香蕉比苹果还要贵两块! (两块 is the precise difference; 更 cannot be used.)
Zhāng tàitai: Shénme! Xiāngjiāo bǐ píngguǒ háiyào guì liǎng kuài!
Mrs Zhang: Apples are $3 per Chinese pound! So expensive! How about bananas?
Vendor: $5 per Chinese pound.
Mrs Zhang: What! Bananas are even more expensive than apples by $2!
小兰: 这条蓝裙子不好看, 也太贵; 让我看看那条绿的。
Xiǎolán: Zhè tiáo lán qúnzi bù hǎokàn, yě tài guì, ràng wǒ kàn kàn nà tiáo lǜ de.
店员: 可是那条绿的比这条蓝的还要(更)贵一点呢! (一点 is a vague difference.)
Diànyuán: Kěshì nà tiáo lǜ de bǐ zhè tiáo lán de háiyào gèng guì yìdiǎn ne!
Xiaolan: This blue skirt is not pretty and it's too expensive. Let me take a look at that green one.
Sales clerk: But the green one is even a little bit more expensive than the blue one.
* 还 can be used to indicate an unexpected situation, or a situation that is contrary to conventional expectation; 更 usually does not have this implication.
(Situation: A couple and their son went to a restaurant. The man walked in first while the son rushed to open the door for his mother. The mother complained about her husband.)Š
妈妈: 儿子比爸爸还懂事。
Māma: Érzi bǐ bàba hái dǒngshì.
Mother: The son is more mature than the father.
张: 这个问题, 数学老师花了半小时才解答出来; 李中只花了十分钟就解答 出来了。
Zhāng: Zhè ge wèntí, shùxué lǎoshī huā le bàn xiǎoshí cái jiědá chūlái; Lǐ Zhōng zhǐ huā le shí fēnzhōng jiù jiědá chūlái le.
王: 哈哈! 学生比老师还聪明!
Wáng: Hāhā! Xuéshēng bǐ lǎoshī hái cōngmíng.
Zhang: It took the mathematics teacher half an hour to solve the problem; and it took Li Zhong only ten minute to solve it.
Wang: Haha! The student is smarter than the teacher.
## Level 3 24.7 Comparisons with '早/晚/多/少 \+ verb'
When 早 (zǎo), 晚 (wǎn), 多 or 少 appears before a verb, a comparison is being made whether or not the sentence has 比. The difference can be indicated by using a complement of quantitative difference after the comparison has been made.
张: 你比我早走十分钟, 怎么比我晚到五分钟?
Zhāng: Nǐ bǐ wǒ zǎo zǒu shí fēnzhōng, zěnme bǐ wǒ wǎn dào wǔ fēnzhōng?
李: 因为我的自行车比你的旧得多, 所以我骑得比你慢。
Lǐ: Yīnwèi wǒde zìxíngchē bǐ nǐde jiù de duō, suǒyǐ wǒ qí de bǐ nǐ màn.
Zhang: You left ten minutes earlier than I did; how come you arrived five minutes later (than I did)?
Li: Because my bicycle is much older than yours, I rode more slowly than you.
王: 我买了五张票, 可是只有四个人要去, 我多买了一张。
Wáng: Wǒ mǎi le wǔ zhāng piào, kěshì zhǐ yǒu sì ge rén yào qù, wǒ duō mǎi le yì zhāng.
丁: 不对, 你少买了一张, 因为我弟弟跟妹妹也要去。
Dīng: Bú duì, nǐ shǎo mǎi le yì zhāng, yīnwèi wǒ dìdi gēn mèimei yě yào qù.
Wang: I bought five tickets, but only four people are going. I bought one more (than needed).
Ding: Wrong! You bought one ticket fewer (than needed) because my younger brother and younger sister also want to go.
## Level 2 24.8 The use of '先/晚 \+ verb'
先 (xiān) can appear before the verb in a 比 sentence to indicate the first in a sequence of two actions. The opposite of 先 in this situation is usually 晚.
(Situation: Wang and a friend get on the bus and they are about to sit down.)
王: 我会比你先下车, 所以你坐靠窗的座位吧。
Wáng: Wǒ huì bǐ nǐ xiān xiàchē, suǒyǐ nǐ zuò kào chuāng de zuòwèi ba.
I will get off before you, so why don't you sit in the window seat.
李明比他弟弟先进大学, 却比弟弟晚毕业。
Lǐ Míng bǐ tā dìdi xiān jìn dàxué, què bǐ dìdi wǎn bìyè.
Li Ming entered college before his younger brother, but graduated later than his brother.
## Level 2 24.9 Forming yes–no and alternative questions with 比
Use 吗 to ask a yes–no question. Otherwise, use 还是 to ask an alternative question.
你比你弟弟高吗?
Nǐ bǐ nǐ dìdi gāo ma?
(Do not say 你比你弟弟高不高? or 你比不比你弟弟高?)
Are you taller than your younger brother?
你比你弟弟高还是比他矮?
Nǐ bǐ nǐ dìdi gāo háishì bǐ tā ǎi?
Are you taller (or shorter) than your younger brother?
你家比他家大还是他家比你家大? (Do not say 你家比他家大不大?)
Nǐ jiā bǐ tā jiā dà háishì tā jiā bǐ nǐ jiā dà?
Is your house bigger than his house or is his house bigger (than yours)?
## Level 3 24.10 The use of 有 in comparisons
The word order is 'A 有 B (这么/那么) + feature being compared'. When 有 is used in comparison, the status of B is known and is used as a standard to describe whether A has reached that level. Therefore, A and B can be equal or A is possibly stronger in that feature. Since the status of B is already known, 这么/那么 is frequently used before the feature being compared.
去年弟弟比我矮, 今年他有我这么高了。
Qùnián dìdi bǐ wǒ ǎi, jīnnián tā yǒu wǒ zhème gāo le.
Last year, my younger brother was shorter than I am; this year, he is already (at least) as tall as I am.
我家前面的那棵大树有三层楼高。
Wǒ jiā qiánmiàn de nà kē dà shù yǒu sān céng lóu gāo.
The big tree in front of my house is as tall as (and possibly a little taller than) three storeys.
### (a) Forming questions
Use 有没有 or 有......吗 to ask a question only when the status of B is already known.
王: 我跑百米只要十二秒, 你跑得有我快吗?
Wáng: Wǒ pǎo bǎi mǐ zhǐ yào shí'èr miǎo, nǐ pǎo de yǒu wǒ kuài ma?
李: 我跑得当然有你快, 而且我跑得比你更快。我的百米纪录是十一秒。
Lǐ: Wǒ pǎo de dāngrán yǒu nǐ kuài, érqiě wǒ pǎo de bǐ nǐ gèng kuài. Wǒde bǎi mǐ jìlù shì shíyī miǎo.
Wang: It takes me only 12 seconds to run 100 m. Do you run as fast as I do?
Li: Of course I do. And I run even faster than you. My record for 100 m is 11 seconds.
王太太: 我儿子今年八岁, 你儿子有没有我儿子大?
Wáng tàitai: Wǒ érzi jīnnián bā suì, nǐ érzi yǒu méiyǒu wǒ érzi dà?
张太太: 我儿子比你儿子小一岁。
Zhāng tàitai: Wǒ érzi bǐ nǐ érzi xiǎo yī suì.
Mrs Wang: My son is eight years old this year. Is your son as old as my son?
Mrs Zhang: My son is one year younger than your son.
### (b) Adding 那么/这么
那么 or 这么 can appear before the feature being compared when 有 or 没有 is used.
(Situation: Talking about promotions at work.)
张: 我跟王中的学历﹑ 资历都一样, 为什么他升级了, 我没升呢?
Zhāng: Wǒ gēn Wáng Zhōng de xuélì, zīlì dōu yíyàng, wèishénme tā shēngjí le, wǒ méi shēng ne?
经理: 你有王中那么能干吗? (The implication is Wang Zhong's competence is known.)
Jīnglǐ: Nǐ yǒu Wáng Zhōng nàme nénggàn ma?
Zhang: Wang Zhong and I have the same educational background and seniority. Why is it that Wang Zhong has been promoted, but I haven't?
Manager: Are you as competent as Wang Zhong?
## Level 3 24.11 Negative comparisons
The negative comparison can be either a sentence with 不比 or a sentence with 没有. These two types of sentence have different connotations.
### (a) Negative comparisons with 不比
'A 不比 B + the feature being compared' indicates that 'A is not more/less... than B'. For example, 我家不比你家小 means 'My house is not (any) smaller than yours' and the implication is that my house is possibly even bigger or at least the same size.
张: 你出三十块, 我出二十块, 好不好?
Zhāng: Nǐ chū sānshí kuài, wǒ chū èrshí kuài, hǎo bù hǎo?
李: 我不比你有钱, 为什么要比你多出?
Lǐ: Wǒ bù bǐ nǐ yǒuqián, wèishénme yào bǐ nǐ duō chū?
Zhang: You pay $30 and I pay $20, OK?
Li: I am not richer (I don't have more money) than you; why do I have to pay more?
(This implies that Li and Zhang may be equally well-off or Li may be poorer.)
王: 你看, 上次考试我考得不错, 这是老师给我的奖品。
Wáng: Nǐ kàn, shàngcì kǎoshì wǒ kǎo de búcuò, zhè shì lǎoshī gěi wǒ de jiǎngpǐn.
丁: 我考得不比你差, 怎么老师没有给我奖品?
Dīng: Wǒ kǎo de bù bǐ nǐ chà, zěnme lǎoshī méiyǒu gěi wǒ jiǎngpǐn?
Wang: Look! I did quite well on the last test. This is the prize the teacher gave me.
Ding: I didn't do worse than you. How come the teacher didn't give me a prize?
(The implication is that Ding did equally well or possibly even better on the test.)
### (b) Negative comparisons with 没有
'A 没有 B + the feature being compared' indicates 'A is not as... as B'. In other words, 'B is more... than A'. For example, 我没有我弟弟高 (Wǒ méiyǒu wǒ dìdi gāo: 'I am not as tall as my younger brother') means 我弟弟比我高 (Wǒ dìdi bǐ wǒ gāo: 'My younger brother is taller than I am').
我家没有他家大, 可是他家地点没有我家好, 所以房价也没有我家高。
Wǒ jiā méiyǒu tā jiā dà, kěshì tā jiā dìdiǎn méiyǒu wǒ jiā hǎo, suǒyǐ fángjià yě méiyǒu wǒ jiā gāo.
My house is not as big as his house, but the location of his house is not as good as the location of my house; therefore, the price of his house is not as high as the price of my house.
张: 你为什么要搬家?
Zhāng: Nǐ wèishénme yào bān jiā?
王: 因为那里的冬天没有这里冷, 夏天也没有这里热。
Wáng: Yīnwèi nàlǐ de dōngtiān méiyǒu zhèlǐ lěng, xiàtiān yě méiyǒu zhèlǐ rè.
Zhang: Why are you going to move away?
Wang: Because the winter over there is not as cold as it is here and summer there is not as hot as it is here.
### (c) Adding 这么/那么 to a negative comparison with 没有
Sometimes, 这么/那么 can appear before the feature being compared. The implication is that B is already strong in that feature.
我跑得相当快, 可是还是没有小王跑得那么快。 (Implication: Xiao Wang runs really fast.)
Wǒ pǎo de xiāngdāng kuài, kěshì háishì méiyǒu Xiǎo Wáng pǎo de nàme kuài.
I run pretty fast, but I still don't run as fast as Xiao Wang.
妈妈: 这次考试, 你怎么又没有小李考得好?
Māma: Zhè cì kǎoshì, nǐ zěnme yòu méiyǒu Xiǎo Lǐ kǎo de hǎo?
小明: 因为我没有小李那么聪明。 (Implication: Xiao Li is really smart.)
Xiǎomíng: Yīnwèi wǒ méiyǒu Xiǎo Lǐ nàme cōngmíng.
妈妈: 不对, 真正的原因是你没有他那么努力。 (Implication: Xiao Li is really hardworking.)
Māma: Bú duì, zhēnzhèng de yuányīn shì nǐ méiyǒu tā nàme nǔlì.
Mother: How come you once again didn't do as well as Xiao Li did on the test?
Xiao Ming: Because I am not as smart as Xiao Li.
Mother: Wrong! The real reason is you are not as hardworking as he is.
### (d) A common mistake
Do not use 'A 没有比 B + feature being compared'. This is a common mistake made by learners.
English: Yesterday was not colder than today.
Chinese: 昨天不比今天冷。
Zuótiān bù bǐ jīntiān lěng.
(Incorrect: 昨天没有比今天冷。)
English: My younger brother is not as tall as I am, but I am not as fat as he is.
Chinese: 我弟弟没有我高, 可是我没有他胖。
Wǒ dìdi méi yǒu wǒ gāo, kěshì wǒ méi yǒu tā pàng.
(Incorrect: 我弟弟没有比我高, 可是我没有比他胖。) (The meanings are not clear.)
### (e) Negative future comparisons with 不会有 and 不会比
Occasionally, 没有 can be replaced by 不会有 and 不比 can be replaced by 不会比 when the statement is about a future situation or a hypothetical situation.
今天真冷! 听说明天不会有今天这么冷。(future situation)
Jīntiān zhēn lěng! Tīngshuō míngtiān bú huì yǒu jīntiān zhème lěng.
Today is really cold! I heard that tomorrow will not be as cold as today.
昨天真冷, 今天没有昨天(那么)冷, 我想明天也不会比昨天冷。(future situation)
Zuótiān zhēn lěng, jīntiān méiyǒu zuótiān nàme lěng, wǒ xiǎng míngtiān yě bú huì bǐ zuótiān lěng.
Yesterday was really cold; today is not as cold as yesterday. I think tomorrow won't be colder than yesterday either.
小李非常聪明, 就算他不花功夫准备考试, 我的成绩也不会比他的高。 (hypothetical situation)
Xiǎo Lǐ fēicháng cōngmíng, jiùsuàn tā bù huā gōngfū zhǔnbèi kǎoshì, wǒde chéngjī yě bú huì bǐ tāde gāo.
Xiao Li is extremely smart. Even if he didn't spend time preparing for the exam, my score still would not be higher than his.
我没有小李聪明, 就算今天晚上我不睡觉, 明天的考试也不会有他考得好。
Wǒ méiyǒu Xiǎo Lǐ cōngmíng, jiùsuàn wǒ jīntiān wǎnshàng bù shuìjiào, míngtiān de kǎoshì yě bú huì yǒu tā kǎo de hǎo.
I am not as smart as Xiao Li. Even if I don't go to bed tonight, I will not do as well as he will in tomorrow's test.
### (f) Negative comparisons with 不如
When the feature being compared denotes a positive value, 不如 (bùrú) can be used in place of 没有.
王小姐不如李小姐漂亮, 但李小姐不如王小姐聪明。
Wáng xiǎojiě bùrú Lǐ xiǎojiě piàoliàng, dàn Lǐ xiǎojiě bùrú Wáng xiǎojiě cōngmíng.
Miss Wang is not as pretty as Miss Li, but Miss Li is not as smart as Miss Wang.
我英文说得不如小兰流利, 不过她的发音不如我的清楚。
Wǒ Yīngwén shuō de bùrú Xiǎolán liúlì, búguò tāde fāyīn bùrú wǒde qīngchǔ.
I don't speak English as fluently as Xiaolan does, but her pronunciation is not as clear as mine.
* Do not use 不如 when the feature being compared is not considered a 'positive' value
我弟弟不如我高。= 我弟弟没有我高。 (高 is considered a positive value.)
Wǒ dìdi bùrú wǒ gāo. = Wǒ dìdi méiyǒu wǒ gāo.
My younger brother is not as tall as I am.
(Do not say 我不如我弟弟矮 since 矮 is not considered a positive value.)
这个房间不如那个大。= 这个房间没有那个大。 (大 is considered a positive value.)
Zhè ge fángjiān bùrú nà ge dà. = Zhè ge fángjiān méiyǒu nà ge dà.
This room is not as big as that one.
(Do not say 这个房间不如那个小 since 小 is not considered a positive value.)
* When the feature being compared is 好, 好 can be optional when 不如 is used
王先生的儿子在各方面都不如李先生的儿子。
Wáng xiānsheng de érzi zài gè fāngmiàn dōu bùrú Lǐ xiānsheng de érzi.
Mr Wang's son is not as outstanding as Mr Li's son in all respects.
中国人常说: "来得早不如来得巧。"
Zhōngguó rén cháng shuō: 'Lái de zǎo bùrú lái de qiǎo.'
Chinese people often say, 'To arrive early is not as good as to arrive timely.'
## Level 2 24.12 Omitting information
Once full information about A is given, the information about B does not have to be complete as long as the meaning is clear. This frequently results in a topic–comment structure.
这本书(的)作者比那本有名, 所以价钱也比那本贵。(Without 的, 这本书 is the topic.)
Zhè běn shū (de) zuòzhě bǐ nà běn yǒumíng, suǒyǐ jiàqián yě bǐ nà běn guì.
The author of this book is more famous than (the author of) that book, so the price (of this book) is also more expensive than (the price of) that book.
我学习得比他努力, 所以考试成绩也比他高(= 比他的高)。
Wǒ xuéxí de bǐ tā nǔlì, suǒyǐ kǎoshì chéngjī yě bǐ tā gāo (= bǐ tā de gāo).
I study harder (more diligently) than he does, so my test scores are higher than his.
## Level 3 24.13 The need for balance
Both A and B need to be the same type of word or phrase in Chinese.
English: My test score is not as good as I hoped.
Chinese: 我的考试成绩没有我希望的好。 (My test score is not as good as what I hoped for.)
Wǒde kǎoshì chéngjī méiyǒu wǒ xīwàng de hǎo.
(Improper: 我的考试成绩没有我希望好。) (成绩 is a noun and 希望 is a verb.)
他到了那个小镇以后才发现那个地方比他想像中更落后。
Tā dào le nà ge xiǎo zhèn yǐhòu cái fāxiàn nà ge dìfāng bǐ tā xiǎngxiàng zhōng gèng luòhòu.
Only after he arrived at that small town did he discover that that place was even more backward than what he had imagined.
(想像中 can be 想像的, but it is improper to say 那个地方比他想像更落后 since 地方 is a noun and 想像 is a verb.)
## Level 2 24.14 Implied comparisons without 比
A comparison can be implied without using 比.
### (a) Implied comparisons with 比较
When the two items being compared have been mentioned or are existent in the context, 比较 (bǐjiào) is used to imply a comparison.
小王跟小李都很聪明, 但是小李比较用功(= 小李比小王用功)。
Xiǎo Wáng gēn Xiǎo Lǐ dōu hěn cōngmíng, dànshì Xiǎo Lǐ bǐjiào yònggōng.
Both Xiao Wang and Xiao Li are smart, but Xiao Li is more diligent.
张: 明天的讨论会, 应该在你家举行还是在他家举行?
Zhāng: Míngtiān de tǎolùn huì, yīnggāi zài nǐ jiā jǔxíng háishì zài tā tiā jǔxíng?
王: 我家比较大(= 我家比他家大), 在我家吧。
Wáng: Wǒ jiā bǐjiào dà, zài wǒ jiā ba.
Zhang: Should we hold tomorrow's discussion at your house or at his house?
Wang: My house is bigger. Let's do it at my house.
### Level 3 (b) Implied comparisons with (一) 点 and (一) 些
When (一) 点 (diǎn) or (一) 些 (xiē) appears after an adjective, a comparison is implied. This pattern is often used in giving others advice or commands.
那条街车子特别多, 过马路的时候要小心(一)点。
Nà tiáo jiē chēzi tèbié duō, guò mǎlù de shíhòu yào xiǎoxīn (yì) diǎn.
That street has a lot of traffic; you must be a little bit more careful when crossing the street.
你说什么? 我听不清楚,大声一点, 好不好?
Nǐ shuō shénme? Wǒ tīng bù qīngchǔ, dàshēng yìdiǎn, hǎo bù hǎo?
What did you say? I can't hear you clearly. A little louder, OK?
## Level 3 24.15 Summary of the basic comparison structures
The following table summarizes the basic structures in making comparisons.
**Structure** | **Basic word order** | **Basic grammatical features** | **Examples**
---|---|---|---
* * *
比 | A 比 B + feature being compared (FC) |
* 1 FC cannot have 不 or an adverb except 更/还.
* 2 A complement of quantity can follow FC to indicate the difference between A and B. | * 1
我比他高。(他比我不高 is wrong.)
Wǒ bǐ tā gāo.
I am taller than he is.
* 2
我比他高得多。(我比他很高 is incorrect.)
Wǒ bǐ tā gāo de duō.
I am much taller than he is.
* * *
有 | A 有 B + FC |
* 1 The status of B is known.
* 2 An optional 那么/这么 can appear before FC.
| 我儿子八岁, 你儿子有我儿子(这么)大吗?
Wǒ érzi bā suì, nǐ érzi yǒu wǒ érzi (zhème) dà ma?
My son is eight years old. Is your son as old (as my son)?
* * *
没有 | A 没有 B + FC |
* 1 A is not as FC as B (B is more).
* 2 An optional 那么/这么 can appear before FC.
| 我儿子七岁, 他儿子八岁, 我儿子没有他儿子(那么)大。
Wǒ érzi qī suì, tā érzi bā suì, wǒ érzi méiyǒu tā érzi (nàme) dà.
My son is seven; his son is eight. My son as not as old as his son.
* * *
不比 | A 不比 B + FC |
* 1 A is not more FC than B.
* 2 A and B are possibly equal and B could possibly be more FC.
| 他不比我聪明, 可是我的成绩总是不比他的好。
Tā bù bǐ wǒ cōngmíng, kěshì wǒde chéngjī zǒngshì bù bǐ tāde hǎo.
He is not smarter than I am; but my test scores are never better than his.
## Exercises
I Use 比, 不比 or 没有 to make comparisons based on the situations.
Example: I am 1.78 m tall; my younger brother is 1.82 m tall. (Use 没有.)
我没有我弟弟(那么)高。
Wǒ méiyǒu wǒ dìdi (nàme) gāo.
* Level 3 1 I did well on yesterday's test because I got 95. Wang Zhong got 98. (Only one comparison can best describe this situation.)
* 2 Everybody says that Wang Zhong runs fast because he can run 8 km in half an hour. I can run 8 km in about as much time. (Use 不比.)
* 3 My house is 140 m2 and Mr Li's house is 170 m2. But my house is worth 20,000 yuan and his house is worth 15,000 yuan. (Use 没有 and 比 to make two comparisons.)
* 4 Li Ming is the smartest student in our class. (Use 不如.)
* 5 Both my older brother and I are about 1.8 m tall. My brother is 90 kg and I am only 70 kg. (Use 不比 and 比 to make two comparisons.)
* 6 Yesterday's temperature was about 10°C and today's is about 2°C. (Use 没有.)
* 7 I work ten hours a day and Mr Zhang works seven hours a day. He makes 500 yuan a week, but I only make 300 yuan a week. (Use 比 and 没有 to make two comparisons.)
* 8 My house has five bedrooms and Mr Li's house has three bedrooms. Also, I have a huge kitchen and his kitchen is of medium size. (Use 没有 twice to make two comparisons.)
* 9 None of Li Zhong's classmates studies as diligently as he does; therefore, his test scores are always the highest in the class. (Use 比 twice to make two comparisons.)
* 10 Teacher Wang likes to complain that he has too many students. Actually both Teacher Wang and Teacher Li have between 250 and 260 students. But Teacher Li does not like to complain that much. (Use 不比 and 比 to make two comparisons.)
II Decide which of the sentences is the correct one in each of the given situations.
* 1 My son is eight years old. Is your son as old as mine?
* (a) 我儿子八岁, 你儿子有没有我儿子大?
* (b) 我儿子八岁, 你儿子比我儿子更大吗?
* (c) 我儿子八岁, 你儿子比不比我儿子大?
* 2 I like French food better than Chinese food.
* (a) 我比中国菜喜欢吃法国菜。
* (b) 中国菜跟法国菜, 我喜欢吃法国菜。
* (c) 我中国菜没有法国菜喜欢吃。
* 3 I feel that Chinese food is not as delicious as French food.
* (a) 我觉得中国菜不如法国菜好吃。
* (b) 我觉得法国菜没有中国菜好吃。
* (c) 我觉得中国菜不比法国菜好吃。
* 4 'Dream of the Red Chamber' is even more famous than 'Journey to the West'.
* (a) 《红楼梦》 比 《西游记》 有名得多。
* (b) 《红楼梦》 比 《西游记》 更有名。
* (c) 《西游记》 不比 《红楼梦》 那么有名。
* 5 This test is extremely difficult. The teacher has said that the next test will not be as difficult.
* (a) 这次考试非常难, 老师说下次考试没有比这次难。
* (b) 这次考试非常难, 老师说下次考试不会比这次难。
* (c) 这次考试非常难, 老师说下次考试不会有这次难。
* 6 How many more students are there in the English class than in the Chinese class?
* (a) 英文课的学生比中文课的几个多?
* (b) 英文课的学生比中文课的多多少?
* (c) 英文课的学生比中文课的多少多?
* 7 We need five tickets, and you only bought four. You bought one ticket fewer (than necessary).
* (a) 我们需要五张票, 你只买了四张, 你买了一张少。
* (b) 我们需要五张票, 你只买了四张, 你买了少一张。
* (c) 我们需要五张票, 你只买了四张, 你少买了一张。
* 8 Wang Zhong does not run any faster than I do; however, the coach allows him to enter the race, but not me.
* (a) 王中跑得没有我快, 可是教练让他参加比赛, 不让我参加。
* (b) 王中跑得不比我快, 可是教练让他参加比赛, 不让我参加。
* (c) 王中跑得不如我快, 可是教练让他参加比赛, 不让我参加。
* 9 This movie is not as interesting as I thought (it would be).
* (a) 这个电影没有我想的有意思。
* (b) 这个电影不如我想有意思。
* (c) 这个电影比我想没有意思。
* 10 My house is a little bigger than his house, but is much more expensive.
* (a) 我家比他家大些, 可是很多贵。
* (b) 我家比他家一点大, 可是贵很多。
* (c) 我家比他家大点, 可是贵多了。
* 11 Winter in Beijing is even a little colder than winter in Shanghai.
* (a) 北京的冬天比上海多冷一点。
* (b) 北京的冬天比上海冷得多一点。
* (c) 北京的冬天比上海的更冷一点。
# [25
Making comparisons (2)](content.xhtml#bck_Ch025)
The focus of this chapter will be on comparisons indicating whether two items are similar/identical or different.
## Level 2 25.1 Making comparisons using 跟
The basic word order is 'A 跟 B (不) 一样'. There might be more than one way to translate such a comparison into English, but there is only one sentence pattern in Chinese. Also, 不一样 can be replaced by 不同 (bùtóng).
我的做法跟你的一样, 但是(我的)成果跟你的却不一样。
Wǒde zuòfǎ gēn nǐde yíyàng, dànshì (wǒde) chéngguǒ gēn nǐde què bù yíyàng.
#1 My method and yours are the same, but my outcome and yours are not the same.
#2 My method is the same as yours, but my outcome is different from yours.
这条裙子的颜色跟那条一样, 但是价钱跟那条不同。
= 这条裙子跟那条颜色一样, 但是价钱不同。
Zhè tiáo qúnzi de yánsè gēn nà tiáo yíyàng, dànshì jiàqián gēn nà tiáo bù tóng.
The color of this skirt is the same as that one, but the price is not the same.
### (a) Unquantifiable differences
If the difference is not quantifiable, 很 or another degree adverb (非常, 十分, 相当, etc.) can appear before 不一样/不同. But 很 should not appear before 一样.
你跟小李虽然年纪一样, 但是你的个性跟他的很不同。 (年纪 is quantifiable; 个性 is not.)
Nǐ gēn Xiǎo Lǐ suīrán niánjì yíyàng, dànshì nǐ de gèxìng gēn tāde hěn bùtóng.
Although your age and Xiao Li's are the same, your personality is very different from his.
### (b) The 'feature being compared'
The feature being compared in a 跟......一样 sentence is similar to what might be in a 比 (bǐ) sentence. That is, the feature can be an adjective, a complement of state or a verb with the quality of an adjective. Certain modal verbs can also be the feature being compared.
小王跟小李一样高, 他跑得也跟小李一样快。
Xiǎo Wáng gēn Xiǎo Lǐ yíyàng gāo, tā pǎo de yě gēn Xiǎo Lǐ yíyàng kuài.
Xiao Wang is as tall as Xiao Li; he also runs as fast as Xiao Li.
(This means Xiao Wang and Xiao Li are of the same height and they run equally fast.)
小兰跟她姐姐一样会唱歌, 也跟姐姐一样爱跳舞。
Xiǎolan gēn tā jiějie yíyàng huì chànggē, yě gēn jiějie yíyàng ài tiàowǔ.
Xiaolan is as good at singing as her older sister; she also loves dancing as much as her older sister.
### (c) Negative form
When 'A 跟 B 不一样 \+ feature being compared' is used, it only indicates A and B are not equal or not the same, but does not indicate which is stronger (or weaker) in the feature being compared.
这次演讲比赛, 王明跟李中准备得一样认真, 但是他们的表现却不一样好。
Zhè cì yǎnjiǎng bǐsài, Wáng Míng gēn Lǐ Zhōng zhǔnbèi de yíyàng rènzhēn, dànshì tāmen de biǎoxiàn què bù yíyàng hǎo.
Wang Ming prepared as conscientiously as Li Zhong did for the speech contest, but their performances were not equally good. (This does not explicitly indicate whose performance was better.)
这次考试, 我准备的时间跟小李一样多, 但是我的表现没有他的好。
Zhè cì kǎoshì, wǒ zhǔnbèi de shíjiān gēn Xiǎo Lǐ yíyàng duō, dànshì wǒde biǎoxiàn méiyǒu tāde hǎo.
The time I spent studying for the test was as much as the time Xiao Li spent, but my performance was not as good as his. (This indicates Xiao Li's performance was better.)
### (d) When the feature being compared is a noun
When the feature being compared is a noun, the word order can be slightly flexible. The noun can be part of A or part of B; and 的 can be optional.
这件毛衣跟那件(的)颜色不一样, 但是(跟那件)大小一样, 你自己决定想买 哪件。
Zhè jiàn máoyī gēn nà jiàn (de) yánsè bù yíyàng, dànshì (gēn nà jiàn) dàxiǎo yíyàng, nǐ zìjǐ juédìng xiǎng mǎi nǎ jiàn.
= 这件毛衣(的)颜色跟那件不一样, 但是大小跟那件一样, 你自己决定想买哪件。
This sweater's color is different from that one's, but the size is the same as that one's. You yourself decide which one you want to buy.
张: 王先生跟李先生的学历﹑ 经历都一样, 为什么薪水却不一样高呢?
Zhāng: Wáng xiānsheng gēn Lǐ xiānsheng de xuélì, jīnglì dōu yíyàng, wèi shénme xīnshuǐ què bù yíyàng gāo ne?
(= 王先生的学历﹑ 经历都跟李先生一样,......)
丁: 因为王先生的职位跟李先生的不一样。(= 因为王先生跟李先生的职位 不一样。)
Dīng: Yīnwèi Wáng xiānsheng de zhíwèi gēn Lǐ xiānsheng de bù yíyàng.
Zhang: Mr Wang's educational background and experiences are both the same as Mr Li's; why is it that their salaries are not the same (not equally high)?
Ding: Because Mr Wang's position is different from Mr Li's. (= Because Mr Wang's position and Mr Li's are not the same.)
### (e) Using 和 or 与 in place of 跟
和 or 与 can be used in place of 跟. 与 tends to be more formal than 跟 or 和.
小李和他弟弟一样高, 可是(他)却和他哥哥一样胖。
Xiǎo Lǐ hé tā dìdi yíyàng gāo, kěshì (tā) què hé tā gēge yíyàng pàng.
Xiao Li is as tall as his younger brother, but he is as fat as his older brother.
张经理学历﹑ 经验都与陈经理一样, 因此薪资也与陈经理一样。
Zhāng jīnglǐ xuélì, jīngyàn dōu yǔ Chén jīnglǐ yíyàng, yīncǐ xīnzī yě yǔ Chén jīnglǐ yíyàng.
Manager Zhang's education and experiences are both the same as Manager Chen's; therefore, his salary is also the same as Manager Chen's.
## Level 2 25.2 Making comparisons with 差不多 and 差很多
Learners should avoid the common mistake of using 比, (instead of 跟,) in these patterns.
### (a) 差不多: Approximately the same
'A 跟 B 差不多 (chàbùduō) (一样)' or 'A 跟 B 差不多 (一样) + feature being compared' can be used to indicate A and B are approximately the same.
我的意见跟你的差不多。
Wǒde yìjiàn gēn nǐde chàbùduō.
My opinion is about the same as yours.
After 差不多, an adjective can follow. In this case, '一样 \+ adjective' can be used.
王: 你大还是小李大?
Wáng: Nǐ dà háishì Xiǎo Lǐ dà?
张: 我跟他年纪差不多(大), 而且我们也差不多一样高。
Zhāng: Wǒ gēn tā niánjì chàbùduō (dà), érqiě wǒmen yě chàbùduō yíyàng gāo.
Wang: Are you older or is Xiao Li older?
Zhang: He and I are about the same age; we are also about the same height.
### (b) 差很多: Very different
'A 跟 B 差很多' is used to mean there is a big difference between A and B or 'A 跟 B 很不一样'.
这件蓝衬衫跟那件绿的, 质料﹑ 花色都差不多, 可是价钱差很多。
Zhè jiàn lán chènshān gēn nà jiàn lǜ de, zhìliào, huāsè dōu chàbùduō, kěshì jiàqián chà hěn duō.
The fabric and pattern of this blue shirt and that green one are about the same, but there is a big difference in their prices.
小明跟他哥哥的个性差很多(= 很不一样), 可是他们的兴趣﹑ 爱好却差不多。
Xiǎomíng gēn tā gēge de gèxìng chà hěn duō ( = hěn bù yíyàng), kěshì tāmen de xìngqù, àihào què chàbùduō.
Xiaoming's personality is very different from his older brother's, but their interests and hobbies are about the same.
## Level 2/3 25.3 Making comparisons using 像
像 (xiàng) means 'to be like'; it implies a certain kind of resemblance.
### (a) Physical resemblances
When A resembles (or does not resemble) B in features that are obvious in context, the pattern is simply 'A (不) 像 B'.
大家都说小明不像我哥哥, 反而像我弟弟。
Dàjiā dōu shuō Xiǎomíng bú xiàng wǒ gēge, fǎn'ér xiàng wǒ dìdi.
Everyone says that Xiaoming is not like my older brother; instead, he is like my younger brother.
(The obvious context is that Xiaoming is, in fact, my older brother.)
老王很注意保养, 所以不像五十多岁的人。
Lǎo Wáng hěn zhùyì bǎoyǎng, suǒyǐ bú xiàng wǔshí duō suì de rén.
Lao Wang pays attention to maintaining his looks, so he does not look like someone in his 50s.
在王家, 儿子都像妈妈, 女儿都像爸爸; 真有意思。
Zài Wáng jiā, érzi dōu xiàng māma, nǚ'ér dōu xiàng bàba; zhēn yǒu yìsi.
In the Wang family, all the sons resemble their mother; all the daughters resemble their father. This is really interesting.
### (b) Non-physical resemblances
When the resemblance is not about physical features, then 'A 像 B 一样' can be used.
小王像他爸爸一样, 也不喜欢吃鱼。
Xiǎo Wáng xiàng tā bàba yíyàng, yě bù xǐhuān chī yú.
Xiao Wang is like his father; he does not like to eat fish, either.
这个地方的风景真美, 简直像幅画儿一样。
Zhè ge dìfāng de fēngjǐng zhēn měi, jiǎnzhí xiàng fǔ huàr yíyàng.
The scenery here is really beautiful. It's practically like a painting.
### (c) The use of 那么/这么
When it is necessary to mention the feature being compared, B's status must be already known. Therefore, 那么/这么 (nàme/zhème) appears before the feature being compared. The pattern is 'A (不) 像 B 那么/这么 \+ feature being compared'.
这件事派我去做吧, 别叫老张做。我不像老张那么忙(= 我没有老张那么忙)。
Zhè jiàn shì pài wǒ qù zuò ba, bié jiào Lǎo Zhāng zuò. Wǒ bú xiàng Lǎo Zhāng nàme máng.
Why don't you assign me to do this job? Don't assign it to Lao Zhang. I am not as busy as Lao Zhang. (This implies that Lao Zhang is very busy.)
您的体力真好! 如果我像你这么忙, 早就累病了! (Do not say 如果我像你忙......)
Nínde tǐlì zhēn hǎo! Rúguǒ wǒ xiàng nǐ zhème máng, zǎo jiù lèi bìng le!
You are really energetic. If I were as busy as you are, I would have been ill (from exhaustion).
### (d) Adding a 'feature being compared' after 一样
The sentence pattern can also be 'A 像 B 一样 \+ feature being compared'. This pattern usually is not a negative statement.
已经十一月了, 怎么天气还像夏天一样热?
Yījīng shíyī yuè le, zěnme tiānqì hái xiàng xiàtiān yíyàng rè?
It's already November. How come the weather is still as hot as summer?
如果我长得像你一样帅, 那么我的女朋友大概也会像你的一样多。
Rúguǒ wǒ zhǎng de xiàng nǐ yíyàng shuài, nàme wǒde nǚ péngyǒu dàgài yě huì xiàng nǐde yíyàng duō.
If I were as handsome as you are, then I probably would have as many girlfriends as you do.
## Level 2/3 25.4 Comparisons with 跟 vs. comparisons with 像
'A 跟 B 一样 \+ feature being compared' and 'A 像 B 一样 \+ feature being compared' oftentimes can be interchangeable. When 像 is used, the status of B must be already known, but when 跟 is used, the status of B may or may not be already known.
王小姐非常漂亮, 我真希望我能跟她一样漂亮(= 像她一样漂亮)。
Wáng xiǎojiě fēicháng piàoliàng, wǒ zhēn xīwàng wǒ néng gēn tā yíyàng piàoliàng.
Miss Wang is extremely pretty. I really wish I could be as pretty as she is.
李: 小王比较帅还是小张比较帅?
Lǐ: Xiǎo Wáng bǐjiào shuài háishì Xiǎo Zhāng bǐjiào shuài?
丁: 小王跟小张一样帅。
Dīng: Xiǎo Wáng gēn Xiǎo Zhāng yíyàng shuài.
(It is not proper in this case to say 小王像小张一样帅 since 小张's status is unknown.)
Li: Is Xiao Wang more handsome or is Xiao Zhang more handsome?
Ding: Xiao Wang and Xiao Zhang are equally handsome.
## Level 2/3 25.5 Comparisons with 有 vs. comparisons with 像
'A 有 (yǒu) B 这么/那么 \+ feature being compared' and 'A 像 B 这么/那么 \+ feature being compared' are similar in meaning, the status of B must be already known in both patterns. But the use of 有 implies 'A has reached the level of B and may even be higher in level' whereas the use of 像 implies A and B are similar in status.
张: 王小姐非常漂亮, 李小姐有她那么漂亮吗?
Zhāng: Wáng xiǎojiě fēicháng piàoliàng, Lǐ xiǎojiě yǒu tā nàme piàoliàng ma?
丁: 李小姐不但有她(那么)漂亮, 而且比她更漂亮。
Dīng: Lǐ xiǎojiě búdàn yǒu tā (nàme) piàoliàng, érqiě bǐ tā gèng piàoliàng.
Zhang: Miss Wang is very pretty. Is Miss Li as pretty as she is?
Ding: Miss Li is not just as pretty; she is even prettier.
张: 经理, 老王加薪了, 为什么我没加呢?
Zhāng: Jīnglǐ, Lǎo Wáng jiāxīn le, wèishénme wǒ méi jiā ne?
经理: 如果你有他那么能干, 那么你当然也会加。
Jīnglǐ: Rúguǒ nǐ yǒu tā nàme nénggàn, nàme nǐ dāngrán yě huì jiā.
张: 如果我的工作像他的那么轻松, 那么我也会显得很能干。
Zhāng: Rúguǒ wǒde gōngzuò xiàng tāde nàme qīngsōng, nàme wǒ yě huì xiǎnde hěn nénggàn.
Zhang: Manager, Lao Wang got a pay rise, how come I didn't get one?
Manager: If you were as competent as he is (if you could reach his level of competence), then of course you would have had a pay rise, too.
Zhang: If my job was as easy as his, then I would appear to be very competent.
## Level 2 25.6 Negative comparisons with 没有 vs. negative comparisons with 不像
'A 没有 (méiyǒu) B 那么 \+ feature being compared' and 'A 不像 (bú xiàng) B 那么 \+ feature being compared' can be considered interchangeable all the time. Also, when 没有 B is used, 'B' becomes optional if it has previously been mentioned.
我的朋友都说 《北京和纽约》 很好看。可是我去看了以后, 发现这个电影没有(他们说的)那么好看(= 这个电影不像他们说的那么好看)。
Wǒde péngyǒu dōu shuō 'Běijīng hé Niǔyuē' hěn hǎokàn. Kěshì wǒ qù kàn le yǐhòu, fāxiàn zhè ge diànyǐng méiyǒu (tāmen shuō de) nàme hǎokàn (= zhè ge diànyǐng bú xiàng tāmen shuō de nàme hǎokàn).
All my friends said that Beijing and New York was good. But after I went to see it, I found that this movie was not as good as they had said.
昨天真冷, 今天没有昨天那么冷(= 今天没有那么冷 = 今天不像昨天那么冷)。
Zuótiān zhēn lěng, jīntiān méiyǒu zuótiān nàme lěng (= jīntiān méiyǒu nàme lěng = jīntiān bú xiàng zuótiān nàme lěng).
Yesterday was really cold; today is not as cold as yesterday.
## Level 2 25.7 The use of 那么 explained
Although 'A 没有 B 那么 \+ feature being compared' and 'A 没有 B + feature being compared' are similar in meaning, the former implies that the status of B is already known, whereas the latter does not always imply the same.
张: 王先生的房子非常贵, 李先生的没有(王先生的)那么贵。
Zhāng: Wáng xiānsheng de fángzi fēicháng guì, Lǐ xiānsheng de méiyǒu (Wáng xiānsheng de) nàme guì.
陈: 可是听说王先生的房子没有李先生的大。(Whether Mr Li's is a big house or not is not clear from the sentence. Therefore, 那么 is not used.)
Chén: Kěshì tīngshuō Wáng xiānsheng de fángzi méiyǒu Lǐ xiānsheng de dà.
Zhang: Mr Wang's house is very expensive. Mr Li's house is not as expensive (as Mr Wang's).
Chen: But I have heard that Mr Wang's house is not as big as Mr. Li's.
## Level 2 25.8 When the feature being compared is measurable
When the feature being compared is measurable, or A and B are exactly the same or identical, the use of 跟 would be more proper than the use of 像.
### (a) Positive forms
像 implies the two are similar, whereas 跟 implies the two are identical.
我跟我哥哥一样高, 也一样胖。 (Height and weight are measurable.)
Wǒ gēn wǒ gēge yíyàng gāo, yě yíyàng pàng.
My height and the weight are the same as my older brother's.
这条绳子跟那条一样长。 (Length is measurable.)
Zhè tiáo shéngzi gēn nà tiáo yíyàng cháng.
This rope is as long as that one. (This rope is the same length as that one.)
他虽然吃了退烧药, 可是体温还是跟(or 像)吃药以前一样高。
Tā suīrán chī le tuìshāo yào, kěshì tāde tǐwēn háishì gēn (or xiàng) chī yào yǐqián yíyàng gāo.
Although he has taken fever-reducing medicine, his body temperature is still as high as before he took the medicine.
### (b) Negative forms
The negative form for a 像 sentence is 'A 不像 B + 那么/这么 \+ feature being compared', whereas the negative form for a 跟 sentence is 'A 跟 B + 不一样'. Learners should pay special attention to where 不 is located in the two different patterns.
这件红大衣不像那件绿的那么贵, 所以我买了红的。
Zhè jiàn hóng dàyī bú xiàng nà jiàn lǜ de nàme guì, suǒyǐ wǒ mǎi le hóng de.
This red coat is not as expensive as that green one, so I bought the red one.
这件大衣跟那件不一样贵, 你知不知道哪件比较贵?
Zhè jiàn dàyī gēn nà jiàn bù yíyàng guì, nǐ zhī bù zhīdào nà jiàn bǐjiào guì?
This coat and that one are not equally expensive. Do you know which one is more expensive?
## Level 3 25.9 Relative clauses in sentences of comparison
Only B is mentioned. The basic word order is '比 B + feature being compared + 的' or '跟/像 B 一样/那么 \+ feature being compared + 的'.
这条裙子太贵了, 有没有比这条便宜的?
Zhè tiáo qúnzi tài guì le, yǒu méiyǒu bǐ zhè tiáo piányí de?
This skirt is too expensive. Are there any that are cheaper than this one?
我英文说得不够好, 你去请一个说得比我好的人教你吧!
Wǒ Yīngwén shuō de bú gòu hǎo, nǐ qù qǐng yí ge shuō de bǐ wǒ hǎo de rén jiāo nǐ ba!
I don't speak English well enough. Why don't you go ask someone who speaks better than I do to teach you?
小王相当聪明, 可是我们班还有两个比他更聪明的(学生)。
Xiǎo Wáng xiāngdāng cōngmíng, kěshì wǒmen bān háiyǒu liǎng ge bǐ tā gèng cōngmíng de.
Xiao Wang is quite smart, but there are two even smarter students in our class.
我从来没有看过像小兰这么漂亮的女孩子。
Wǒ cónglái méiyǒu kàn guò xiàng Xiǎolán zhème piàoliàng de nǚ háizi.
I have never seen a girl (who is) as pretty as Xiaolan.
我想买一件跟你那件一样的大衣。
Wǒ xiǎng mǎi yí jiàn gēn nǐ nà jiàn yíyàng de dàyī.
I want to buy a coat that is the same as yours.
昨天我认识了一个跟你女朋友一样漂亮的女孩。
Zuótiān wǒ rènshì le yí ge gēn nǐ nǚ péngyǒu yíyàng piàoliàng de nǚhái.
Yesterday I met a girl who is as pretty as your girlfriend.
## Exercises
Translate the following sentences into Chinese. (There may be more than one way to translate some of them.)
* Level 3 1 Teacher Zhang: I have never taught a student as smart as Wang Ming. Teacher Li: I have taught students as smart as him, but I have not taught anyone even smarter than him.
* 2 Li Zhong and his younger brother are the same height, but (Li Zhong) is not as thin as his younger brother.
* 3 These two coats are the same color and style, but the material is not the same, so their prices are very different.
* 4 Li: Mr Zhang's girlfriend is really pretty. Mr Wang's girlfriend is not as pretty as she is.
Ding: But I know she is as kind as Mr Zhang's girlfriend.
Chen: If I knew a girlfriend as pretty as Mr Wang's girlfriend, I would be very happy.
* 5 Li: Today is really cold. If tomorrow is as cold as today, I will stay home.
Wang: Tomorrow is not going to be as cold; it will be even colder.
* 6 Female: When are you coming to visit me?Male: How about next year? Next year I will not be as busy as I am this year. Female: All right, but don't be like last time again. Last time, you cancelled your flight the day before departure.
* 7 The scenery here is as beautiful as a painting.
* 8 Wang: If I were as rich as he is, I could also buy a house as big as his.
Ding: That house is not that big. Although I am not as rich as he is, I already have a house even bigger than his.
* 9 Although Anna is not as smart as Wang Zhong, she is also not as lazy as he is; therefore, their test scores are always about the same.
* 10 Xiaoming is two years younger than his sister, but he is already as tall as she is.
* 11 Yesterday was extremely cold; today is not as cold. I think tomorrow won't be as cold (as yesterday), either.
# [Section 2
The contexts](content.xhtml#bck_part102)
# [26
Measure words](content.xhtml#bck_Ch026)
A measure word appears after a number, 这 (zhè), 那 (nà), 哪 (nǎ), 几 (jǐ) or 每 (měi) and before a noun. (半 (bàn) and 多少 (duōshǎo) can precede a measure word as well.) Although the choice of the measure word for each noun can be associated with the shape, function, form, etc. of the noun, to categorize measure words is not within the scope of this chapter.
To a certain degree, the choice of the measure word is arbitrary. Therefore, when a noun is acquired by the learner as a new vocabulary word, its matching measure word should be learned at the same time. For example, the phrase 'a pair of' can involve different measure words depending on the nouns being described: 'a pair of chopsticks' is 一双筷子 (yì shuāng kuàizi), whereas 'a pair of earrings' is 一付耳环 (yí fù ěrhuán).
There are over 100 words that can be used as measure words. This chapter will not list all these words and their nouns. Instead, the focus will be on the grammar rules concerning the use of measure words.
## Level 1/2 26.1 Nouns that do not need measure words
Only a few nouns do not need measure words. The most common ones are those regarding 'time'; they are 年 (nián: 'year'), 天 (tiān: 'day'), 分钟 (fēnzhōng: 'minute'), 秒钟 (mǐaozhōng: 'second') and 周 (zhōu: 'week').
一年有三百六十五天。 (Do not say 一个年有三百六十五个天.)
Yì nián yǒu sān bǎi liùshí wǔ tiān.
A year has 365 days.
一分钟有六十秒(钟)。 (Do not say 一个分钟有六十个秒钟.)
Yì fēnzhōng yǒu liùshí miǎo(zhōng).
One minute has 60 seconds.
一周有七天。 (Do not say 一个周有七个天.)
Yì zhōu yǒu qī tiān.
A week has seven days.
### (a) 'Time' nouns with optional measure words
Certain nouns regarding 'time' can have an optional measure word (个: ge). These words are 星期 (xīngqī: 'week'), 小时 (xiǎoshí: 'hour'), 学期 (xuéqī: 'term/semester').
一年有五十二(个)星期; 一(个)星期有七天。
Yì nián yǒu wǔshí èr (ge) xīngqī; yì (ge) xīngqī yǒu qī tiān.
A year has 52 weeks; a week has seven days.
这(个)学期功课特别多, 我每天都要花三(个)小时才能把功课写完。
Zhè (ge) xuéqī gōngkè tèbié duō, wǒ měi tiān dōu yào huā sān (ge) xiǎoshí cái néng bǎ gōngkè xiě wán.
This term, I have an inordinate amount of homework. It takes me three hours every day to finally finish doing my homework.
### (b) Special case: 礼拜, 钟头 and 日子
It should be noted that, although 星期 and 礼拜 (lǐbài) share the same meaning, and 小时 and 钟头 (zhōngtóu) also share the same meaning, the measure word (个) for 礼拜 and for 钟头 is not optional. Likewise, 日子 (rìzi) shares a similar meaning to 天, but the measure word (个) for 日子 is not optional.
### (c) Special case: 月
The measure word for 月 (yuè: 'month') is 个 and it is not optional.
一个月有几天?
Yí ge yuè yǒu jǐ tiān?
How many days are there in a month?
Compare: 一月有几天?
Yīyuè yǒu jǐ tiān?
How many days are there in January?
### (d) Other nouns with optional measure words
Other nouns that do not always need measure words tend to be one-character words that indicate some form of organization, such as 班 (bān: 'class'), 家 (jiā: 'family'), 组 (zǔ: 'team'), 队 (duì: 'team'), 州 (zhōu: 'state'), 省 (shěng: 'province'), 国 (guó: 'country'), etc.
* As soon as any of these words is expressed by a two-character word (if possible), the measure word becomes necessary. One-character words that can be expressed in two characters are 班 (班级: bānjí), 家 (家庭: jiātíng), 国 (国家: guójiā), 队 (队伍: duìwǔ), etc. These two-character words must use measure words.
东亚主要有三个国家\--中国、 日本和韩国; 这三国的语言各不相同。
Dōng Yà zhǔyào yǒu sān ge guójiā – Zhōngguó, Rìběn hé Hánguó; zhè sān guó de yǔyán gè bù xiāngtóng.
East Asia mainly has three countries – China, Japan and Korea. The languages of these three countries are different from one another.
* As one-character words, the measure word (个) is optional. (国 and 家 are exceptions to this rule.)
这个学校有六个年级, 每个年级有三(个)班, 所以一共有十八(个)班。
Zhè ge xuéxiào yǒu liù ge niánjí, měi ge niánjí yǒu sān (ge) bān, suǒyǐ yígòng yǒu shíbā (ge) bān.
This school has six grades; each grade has three classes, so altogether there are 18 classes.
这次比赛, 有几(个)队报名参加?
Zhè cì bǐsài, yǒu jǐ (ge) duì bàomíng cānjiā?
How many teams have entered this competition?
在中国,一家(= 一个家庭)只能有一个孩子。(Improper: 一个家)
Zài Zhōngguó, yì jiā (= yí ge jiātíng) zhǐ néng yǒu yí ge háizi.
In China, one family can have only one child.
* Although 国 and 家 are exceptions to the above-mentioned rule, when 家 refers to one's own home, the measure word 个 becomes necessary.
王先生有两个家, 一个在中国, 一个在日本。 (Incorrect: 王先生有两家.)
Wáng xiānsheng yǒu liǎng ge jiā, yí ge zài Zhōngguó, yí ge zài Rìběn.
Mr Wang has two homes; one is in China, one is in Japan.
### (e) Special case: 人
The measure word for 人 is 个 and it is optional. When the number of people is large, 个 is hardly ever used.
老师: 今天我带来的课件不够, 所以两人一张(= 两个人一张)。
Lǎoshī: Jīntiān wǒ dàilái de kèjiàn bú gòu, suǒyǐ liǎng rén yì zhāng (= liǎng ge rén yì zhāng).
学生:两(个)人一张也还是不够, 可能要三(个)人一张。
Xuéshēng: Liǎng (ge) rén yì zhāng yě hái shì bú gòu, kěnéng yào sān (ge) rén yì zhāng.
Teacher: I didn't bring enough handouts today, so one piece for every two people.
Student: It's still not enough even if every two people share one piece. Probably every three people have to share one piece.
## Level 1 26.2 Nouns that can have more than one measure word
Many nouns can have more than one measure word. The choice of measure word may depend on who the speaker is or in what context the speech is uttered. There are many such cases; the following are only a few examples.
一个卧室 = 一间卧室
yí ge wòshì = yì jiān wòshì
one bedroom
一个工作 = 一份工作
yí ge gōngzuò = yí fèn gōngzuò
one job
两辆车 = 两部车 = 两台车
liǎng liàng chē = liǎng bù chē = liǎng tái chē
two cars
两首歌 = 两条歌 = 两只歌
liǎng shǒu gē = liǎng tiáo gē = liǎng zhī gē
two songs
三个房子 = 三栋房子 = 三幢房子
sān ge fángzi = sān dòng fángzi = sān zhuàng fángzi
three houses
三个记者 = 三位记者 = 三名记者
sān ge jìzhě = sān wèi jìzhě = sān míng jìzhě
three reporters
四家书店 = 四个书店
sì jiā shūdiàn = sì ge shūdiàn
four bookshops
四座大楼 = 四栋大楼
sì zuò dà lóu = sì dòng dà lóu
four tall buildings
## Level 1 26.3 The use of measure words with 多少
When 多少 means 'how many', the measure word is optional and is more often than not omitted. When 多少 means 'how much', there is usually no measure word.
你们班有多少(个)学生?多少(个)男的?多少(个)女的?
Nǐmen bān yǒu duōshǎo (ge) xuéshēng? Duōshǎo (ge) nán de? Duōshǎo (ge) nǚ de?
How many students are there in your class? How many male? How many female?
王老师教了二十几年书, 连他自己也不知道教过多少学生。
Wáng lǎoshī jiāo le èrshí jǐ nián shū, lián tā zìjǐ yě bù zhīdào jiāo guo duōshǎo xuéshēng.
Teacher Wang taught for more than 20 years. Even he himself does not know how many students he has taught.
太太: 你喝了多少啤酒?
Tàitai: Nǐ hē le duōshǎo píjiǔ?
先生: 我喝得不多。
Xiānsheng: Wǒ hē de bù duō.
太太: 你到底喝了多少瓶?
Tàitai: Nǐ dàodǐ hē le duōshǎo píng?
Wife: How much beer did you drink?
Husband: I didn't drink much.
Wife: Exactly how many bottles did you drink?
## Level 1 26.4 The use of measure words with 很多
Grammatically, it is not necessary to use a measure word after 很多 (hěn duō). However, it is not unusual to use one in casual speech.
安娜来中国才半年, 可是已经交了很多中国朋友。
Ānnà lái Zhōngguó cái bàn nián, kěshì yǐjīng jiāo le hěn duō Zhōngguó péngyǒu.
Anna has only been in China for half a year, but she has made many Chinese friends.
这学期我们念了很多篇鲁迅写的文章。
Zhè xuéqī wǒmen niàn le hěn duō piān Lǔ Xùn xiě de wénzhāng.
This term, we read many articles written by Lu Xun.
## Level 1 26.5 The use of measure words with 上 and 下
When 上 means 'the previous one' and 下 means 'the next one', each of them should be used with a measure word.
今天我上中文课的时候在准备下节课的考试, 中文老师很不高兴。
Jīntiān wǒ shàng Zhōngwén kè de shíhòu zài zhǔnbèi xià jié kè de kǎoshì, Zhōngwén lǎoshī hěn bù gāoxìng.
Today during the Chinese class I was studying for the test for my next class. The Chinese teacher was angry.
王先生的女朋友都是外国人; 他上个女朋友是日本人, 现在这个是美国人, 谁知道他下个女朋友会是哪国人!
Wáng xiānsheng de nǚ péngyǒu dōu shì wàiguó rén; tā shàng ge nǚ péngyǒu shì Rìběn rén, xiànzài zhè ge shì Měiguó rén. Shéi zhīdào tā xià ge nǚ péngyǒu huì shì nǎ guó rén!
Mr Wang's girlfriends have all been foreigners. His last girlfriend (the previous one) is Japanese, and the current one is American. Who knows which country his next girlfriend will be from!
## Level 1/2 26.6 The use of measure words with 半
半 can appear either before or after the measure word. Different word orders result in different meanings. Learners should avoid using 一半 when a measure word is involved.
史密斯先生在北京住了半年, 在南京也住了半年, 后来又到上海去住了一年半才回国, 所以他一共在中国住了两年半。
Shǐmìsī xiānsheng zài Běijīng zhù le bàn nián, zài Nánjīng yě zhù le bàn nián, hòulái yòu dào Shànghǎi qù zhù le yì nián bàn cái huí guó, suǒyǐ tā yígòng zài Zhōngguó zhù le liǎng nián bàn.
Mr Smith lived in Beijing for half a year and he also lived in Nanjing for half a year. Afterwards, he went to Shanghai and lived there for a year and a half before he finally returned to his own country. So altogether he lived in China for two and a half years.
我天天早上都吃半个苹果, 可是今天觉得特别饿, 就多吃了一个, 所以一共吃了一个半。
Wǒ tiān tiān zǎoshàng dōu chī bàn ge píngguǒ, kěshì jīntiān juéde tèbié è, jiù duō chī le yí ge, suǒyì yígòng chī le yí ge bàn.
I eat half an apple every morning, but today I felt particularly hungry, so I ate one more (apple), eating one and a half apples in total.
## Level 1/2 26.7 The use of 大 and 小 with measure words
An adjective cannot immediately precede a measure word, except 大 (dà) and 小 (xiǎo). In this case, neither 大 nor 小 refers to size; rather, they refer to amount or quantity.
一小群狗 yì xiǎo qún gǒuvs.一群小狗yì qún xiǎo gǒu
a small group of dogsa group of small dogs
他说了一大堆话, 可是我一句也不懂。 (一大堆: 'a huge amount')
Tā shuō le yí dà duī huà, kěshì wǒ yí jù yě bù dǒng.
He said a whole lot of things, but I didn't understand even one sentence.
Compare: 他说了一堆大话, 所以我一句也不信。 (大话: 'exaggerated words')
Tā shuō le yì duī dàhuà, suǒyǐ wǒ yí jù yě bú xìn.
He made a lot of exaggerated statements, so I don't believe even one sentence.
我肚子不太饿, 但是口很渴, 所以只吃了一小碗饭, 不过喝了两大碗汤。
Wǒ dùzi bú tài è, dànshì kǒu hěn kě, suǒyǐ zhǐ chī le yì xiǎo wǎn fàn, búguò hē le liǎng dà wǎn tāng.
I was not very hungry, but I was thirsty. So I only had a small bowl of rice, but I had two full bowls of soup.
(小 and 大 may or may not refer to the size of the bowls, but their main function in the sentence is to tell the amount of rice and soup consumed.)
安娜做了布丁跟蛋糕。布丁不好吃, 蛋糕还不错; 我吃了一小口布丁, 却吃了 一大块蛋糕。
Ānnà zuò le bùdīng gēn dàngāo. Bùdīng bù hǎochī, dàngāo hái búcuò, wǒ chī le yì xiǎo kǒu bùdīng, què chī le yí dà kuài dàngāo.
Anna made pudding and cake. The pudding was not good and the cake is not bad. I had a small bite of the pudding, but I ate a large piece of the cake.
## Level 2 26.8 No 的 after measure words
的 (de) should not be used between a measure word and a noun.
我哪种人都见过, 就是没见过像小王这样的人。 (种 is a measure word; 样 is not.)
Wǒ nǎ zhǒng rén dōu jiàn guò, jiùshi méi jiàn guò xiàng Xiǎo Wáng zhèyàng de rén.
= 我什么样的人都见过, 就是没见过像小王这种人。
= Wǒ shénme yàng de rén dōu jiàn guò, jiùshì méi jiàn guò xiàng Xiǎo Wáng zhè zhǒng rén.
I have seen all kinds of people, but I have not seen a person like Xiao Wang.
## Level 1/2 26.9 Reduplicating measure words
Many measure words can be reduplicated to give the meaning 'every'. Many of the one-character words that do not need measure words can perform the same function if reduplicated.
* These reduplicated measure words can serve as an adverbial phrase or the subject of a sentence
小李天天准时来上课。
Xiǎo Lǐ tiān tiān zhǔnshí lái shàngkè.
Every day, Xiao Li comes to class on time.
停在这个停车场上的车,辆辆都是进口的高级车。
Tíng zài zhè ge tíngchēchǎng shàng de chē, liàng liàng dōu shì jìnkǒu de gāojí chē.
Every car that is parked in this car park is an imported high-class car.
这个社区, 都是有钱人, 所以家家都有昂贵的进口车。
Zhè ge shèqū, dōu shì yǒuqián rén, suǒyǐ jiā jiā dōu yǒu ángguì de jìnkǒu chē.
The people in this community are all rich, so every family has expensive imported cars.
* However, the reduplicated measure words cannot be the object of a verb
王老师: 我的学生,个个都很努力, 所以我要送每个人(cannot be 个个)一本词典。
Wáng lǎoshī: Wǒde xuéshēng, gè gè dōu hěn nǔlì, suǒyǐ wǒ yào sòng měi ge rén yì běn cídiǎn.
李老师: 现在几乎人人都用网络词典了。
Lǐ lǎoshī: Xiǎnzǎi jīhū rén rén dōu yòng wǎngluò cídiǎn le.
Teacher Wang: Every one of my students is diligent, so I want to give each a dictionary.
Teacher Li: Nowadays almost everyone is using dictionaries on the Internet.
* Although 人 is not considered a measure word, 人人 can be used in the same way
在中国,人人都喜欢熊猫。
Zài Zhōngguó, rén rén dōu xǐhuān xióngmāo.
In China, everybody likes pandas.
## Level 1/226.10 Omitting the noun after a measure word
When the noun is omitted from a sentence in order to avoid repetition, the measure word must remain.
(Situation: Two sisters are shopping for clothes. Note that the word 'blouse' only appears once, but its measure word 件 appears every time a blouse is mentioned.)
姐姐: 我打算买两件衬衫, 你呢?
Jiějie: Wǒ dǎsuàn mǎi liǎng jiàn chènshān, nǐ ne?
妹妹: 我只要买一件。你觉得这件好不好看?
Mèimei: Wǒ zhǐ yào mǎi yí jiàn. Nǐ juéde zhè jiàn hǎo bù hǎokàn?
姐姐:这件不好, 那个架子上那几件好像还不错。
Jiějie: Zhè jiàn bù hǎo, nà ge jiàzi shàng nà jǐ jiàn hǎoxiàng hái búcuò.
妹妹: 对,这几件都不错。我们去问问那个店员, 一人每次可以试穿几件?
Mèimei: Duì, zhè jǐ jiàn dōu bú cuò. Wǒmen qù wèn wèn nà ge diànyuán, yì rén měi cì kěyǐ shìchuān jǐ jiàn?
Older sister: I plan to buy two blouses. How about you?
Younger sister: I only want to buy one. Do you think this one is pretty?
Older sister: This one is not good. Those on that rack seem quite nice.
Younger sister: You are right. All these are quite nice. Let's go ask that sales clerk over there how many blouses a person can try on at a time.
## Level 1 26.11 Omitting 一 before a measure word
In casual speech, the 一 before a measure word can usually be omitted as long as it is not at the beginning of the sentence. Once 一 is omitted, the noun after the measure word cannot be omitted. Also, 一 cannot be omitted when it is necessary to put emphasis on 'one'.
张: 我给你介绍个女朋友吧!
Zhāng: Wǒ gěi nǐ jièshào ge nǚ péngyǒu ba!
李: 女朋友越多越好,一个哪里够, 你给我介绍两个吧!
Lǐ: Nǚ péngyǒu yuè duō yuè hǎo, yí ge nǎlǐ goù, nǐ gěi wǒ jièshào liǎng ge ba!
张: 不行, 我只能给你介绍一个, 因为我女朋友只有一个妹妹。 (Neither 一 can be omitted in this sentence since both mean 'one'.)
Zhāng: Bù xíng, wǒ zhǐ néng gěi nǐ jièshào yí ge, yīnwèi wǒ nǚ péngyǒu zhǐ yǒu yí ge mèimei.
Zhang: How about if I introduce a girl (to be your girlfriend) to you?
Li: The more girlfriends, the better. One is not enough. How about if you introduce two to me?
Zhang: No, I can't. I can introduce only one to you because my girlfriend has only one sister.
## Level 1/2 26.12 Words that can be both nouns and measure words
Words indicating containers, such as 杯 (bēi: 'cup; glass'), 碗 (wǎn: 'bowl'), 盘 (pán: 'plate'), 瓶 (píng: 'bottle'), 壶 (hú: 'pot'), 盆 (pén: 'pot') and 罐 (guàn: 'can'), can often be both nouns and measure words. In English, the expressions may sound very similar. As nouns, the measure word for these words is 个.
太太: 你喝了几瓶? (Meaning: 几瓶啤酒. 瓶 is the measure word.)
Tàitai: Nǐ hē le jǐ píng?
先生: 你去看看厨房里有几个瓶子,(个 is the measure word) 就会知道我喝了几瓶。
Xiānsheng: Nǐ qù kàn kàn chúfáng lǐ yǒu jǐ ge píngzi, jiù huì zhīdào wǒ hē le jǐ píng.
Wife: How many bottles (of beer) did you drink?
Husband: If you go take a look to see how many (empty) bottles there are in the kitchen, then you will know how many bottles I drank.
张: 桌上本来有两杯咖啡, 都被你喝了吗?
Zhāng: Zhuōshàng běnlái yǒu liǎng bēi kāfēi, dōu bèi nǐ hē le ma?
李: 我只喝了一杯, 因为我来的时候, 只剩一杯了, 不过我看到一个空杯子。
Lǐ: Wǒ zhǐ hē le yì bēi, yīnwèi wǒ lái de shíhòu, zhǐ shèng yì bēi le, búguò wǒ kàndào yí ge kōng bēizi.
Zhang: There were two cups of coffee on the table. Did you drink both?
Li: I only drank one cup because there was only one cup (of coffee) left when I came. But I saw an empty (coffee) cup.
## Exercises
Correct the mistake in each of the following sentences. For English translations, see the 'key to exercises' section.
* Level 11 这个房子非常大, 有五间卧房、 三半个洗澡间。
* 2 一星期有七个天, 我天天都学习中文。
* 3 我每天都喝三个杯子咖啡。
* 4 桌子上面那本的英文书是谁的?
* 5 我们班每人都有一中文名字。
* 6 这一群小只狗真可爱。
* 7 这件大衣不是我的, 我的件新大衣是黑色的。
* Level 2 8 王明不是个好人, 你怎么会认识这样人?
* 9我在上海住过三星期, 也在北京住过一半年。
* 10 我喜欢蓝色, 所以昨天买了三蓝条裙子。
* 11 桌上有两大个杯子, 我跟弟弟口渴, 所以一人喝了一大杯水。
* 12 你说, 你喝了多少个瓶啤酒?
* 13 你看过哪些本有名的中国小说?
* 14 我的女朋友是日本人, 你的女朋友是哪个国人?
* 15 停在你家前面的日本车是谁的辆?
* 16 我的车太旧了, 下月我想去买辆新车。
* 17 我家前面、 后面都有一小个院子, 前面的个比较大。
* 18 今天我不饿, 所以只吃了一半碗的饭。
* 19 还有半月是我生日, 那个天我想请四、 五朋友来我个家吃饭。
* 20 上考试我考得很差; 这星期我要好好地准备下考试。
# [27
Verb reduplication and adjective reduplication](content.xhtml#bck_Ch027)
Some verbs and adjectives in Chinese can be reduplicated, meaning the verb or adjective can be repeated to have a slightly different connotation from the original word. There are specific formulae for the reduplications.
## A. Verb reduplication
Only durative verbs that indicate activities (action verbs) can be reduplicated. Verbs that indicate mental activities, for example, 想 (to think about), 考虑 (kǎolǜ: to ponder), or 分析 (fēnxī: to analyze), are included.
Instantaneous verbs or non-action verbs cannot be reduplicated. However, adjectival verbs (non-action verbs) that show temporary psychological or physical state sometimes are reduplicated to indicate the state lasts for a short while.
☞ See Chapter 8 for verb types.
### Level 1 27.1 Forming reduplicated verbs
A monosyllabic verb is reduplicated by being repeated once. A disyllabic verb is reduplicated by repeating the entire word once, not character by character. For example, the reduplicated form of 介绍 (jièshào: to introduce) is 介绍介绍, not 介介绍绍.
When the verb is reduplicated, it implies that the action will be performed quickly or briefly and in an informal manner. Therefore, verb reduplication and 'verb + 一下(儿)' frequently share similar meanings. 儿 in 一下(儿) is optional.
(Situation: Li notices that two of her friends are laughing together and looking very happy.)
李: 有什么好事? 告诉我, 让我也高兴高兴 (= 高兴一下)。(高兴 is an adjective showing a temporary psychological state that can last for a short while. Do not say 高高兴兴.)
Lǐ: Yǒu shénme hǎo shì? Gàosù wǒ, ràng wǒ yě gāoxìng gāoxìng.
Li: Is there some kind of happy event? Tell me and let me feel happy, too.
### Level 1 27.2 Inserting 一 within the verb reduplication
一 can be inserted between the verb and the repeated verb without changing the meaning, but only when the original verb is monosyllabic. 一 cannot be inserted if the original verb is disyllabic.
张: 下课了, 一起去吃中饭吧!
Zhāng: Xiàkè le, yìqǐ qù chī zhōngfàn ba.
王: 你在这里等(一)等, 我去厕所洗(一)洗手就来。
Wáng: Nǐ zài zhèlǐ děng (yì) děng, wǒ qù cèsuǒ xǐ (yì) xǐ shǒu jiù lái.
Zhang: Class is over. Let's go have lunch together.
Wang: Wait here for a moment. I'll go to the bathroom to quickly wash my hands and then be right back.
(等等 = 等一等 = 等一下; 洗洗手 = 洗一洗手 = 洗一下手)
(Situation: Televisions are on sale in a shop, but Mr Wang cannot decide whether he should buy a new TV or not.)
售货员: 价钱这么便宜, 您不买太可惜了。
Shòuhuòyuán: Jiàqián zhème piányí, nín bù mǎi tài kěxí le.
王: 我回家去考虑考虑。(考虑考虑 = 考虑一下, but 考虑一考虑 is incorrect.)
Wáng: Wǒ huí jiā qù kǎolǜ kǎolǜ.
售货员: 考虑什么? 今天不买, 明天就不是这个价钱了。
Shòuhuòyuán: Kǎolǜ shénme? Jīntiān bù mǎi, míngtiān jiù bú shì zhè ge jiàqián le.
王: 我得跟我太太商量商量。 (商量商量 = 商量一下, but 商量一商量 is incorrect.)
Wáng: Wǒ děi gēn wǒ tàitai shāngliáng shāngliáng.
Sales clerk: The price is so cheap. It would be a pity if you don't buy one.
Wang: Let me go home to (spend some time and) think about it.
Sales clerk: Think about what? If you don't buy one today, it won't be this price tomorrow.
Wang: I have to (spend some time and) discuss it with my wife.
### Level 1 27.3 Softening the tone
Verb reduplication can soften the tone to make the speaker sound more polite or less blunt. This is particularly relevant when the speaker is making a request or suggestion.
这件事我一个人做不了, 你可不可以来帮帮我? (帮帮我 sounds more polite than帮我.)
Zhè jiàn shì wǒ yí ge rén zuò bù liǎo, nǐ kě bù kěyǐ lái bāng bāng wǒ?
I cannot handle this matter by myself. Can you come and help me?
这么重要的事, 咱们应该先讨论讨论再做决定。 (讨论讨论 sounds less blunt than simply 讨论.)
Zhème zhòngyào de shì, zánmen yīnggāi xiān tǎolùn tǎolùn zài zuò juédìng.
This is such an important matter. We should discuss it first before making a decision.
### Level 1 27.4 Implying 'to give something a try'
Verb reduplication can be used to imply that the action should be performed as a trial.
这是我做的菜, 你尝(一)尝, 然后告诉我好吃不好吃。
Zhè shì wǒ zuò de cài, nǐ cháng (yì) cháng, ránhòu gàosù wǒ hǎochī bù hǎochī.
This dish was made by me. Taste it and then tell me whether it is delicious or not.
我没坐过云霄飞车, 咱们去坐(一)坐, 怎么样?
Wǒ méi zuò guo yúnxiāo fēichē, zánmen qù zuò (yí) zuò, zěnmeyàng?
I have never ridden a rollercoaster before. How about if we go try it?
### Level 1/2 27.5 Use of 了
If 了 is necessary, it can be inserted between the verb and the repeated verb whether the verb is monosyllabic or disyllabic.
When the verb is disyllabic, 了 and 一 cannot be used together. However, it is acceptable to use 了 and 一 together when the verb is monosyllabic.
王先生跟王太太都很喜欢这个新房子, 所以他们只看了看环境, 简单地讨论了 讨论就决定买了。(看了看环境 = 看了一看环境 = 看了一下环境; 讨论了讨论 = 讨论了一下, but 讨论了一讨论 is incorrect since 讨论 is disyllabic.)
Wáng xiānsheng gēn Wáng tàitai dōu hěn xǐhuān zhè ge xīn fángzi, suǒyǐ tāmen zhǐ kàn le kàn huánjìng, jiǎndān de tǎolùn le tǎolùn jiù juédìng mǎi le.
Both Mr and Mrs Wang like this new house very much; so they only took a look at the surroundings and briefly discussed it before they decided to buy it.
### Level 1/2 27.6 Adding 看 after a reduplicated verb
When 看 (kàn) follows a reduplicated verb, it implies 'to try' something, or to see what will happen. In this case, 一 or 了 cannot be used.
If the verb being used is already 看, then a third 看 cannot be used. When the verb is 试 (shì: 'to try'), 看 can follow 试试 without adding more meaning.
李: 张经理在不在? 有一件事, 我要跟他谈(一)谈。
Lǐ: Zhāng jīnglǐ zài bú zài? Yǒu yī jiàn shì, wǒ yào gēn tā tán (yì) tán.
秘书: 您坐坐, 我去看看他电话打完了没有。(坐坐 cannot be 坐坐看 in this sentence.)
Mìshū: Nín zuò zuò, wǒ qù kàn kàn tā diànhuà dǎ wán le méiyǒu.
Li: Is Manager Zhang in? There is something I want to talk to him about (briefly and informally).
Secretary: Have a seat (and sit for a bit). I will go and see if he is finished talking on the phone or not.
(Situation: Two tourists are discussing whether they should go by public transport.)
王: 咱们坐公共汽车去, 好不好?
Wáng: Zánmen zuò gōnggòng qìchē qù, hǎo bù hǎo?
李: 听说这里的公共汽车又挤又乱, 我不想坐。
Lǐ: Tīngshuō zhèlǐ de gōnggòng qìchē yòu jǐ yòu luàn, wǒ bù xiǎng zuò.
王: 不坐坐看怎么知道? (不坐坐 and 不坐坐看 have similar meanings.)
Wáng: Bú zuò zuò kàn zěnme zhīdaò?
李: 好吧, 去试试看吧。 (试试看 = 试试)
Lǐ: Hǎo ba, qù shì shì kàn ba.
Wang: Let's ride the bus, shall we?
Li: I heard that buses here are both crowed and chaotic.
Wang: If we don't try (to ride) it, how will we know?
Li: All right, let's go try it.
### Level 1/2 27.7 Verbs that indicate going to places
Verbs indicating moving in a direction or going to a place, such as 来 (to come), 回 (to return), 进 (to enter) or 出 (to exit), are instantaneous verbs and cannot be reduplicated. However, 去 is an exception. 去 can be reduplicated; both 去去 and 去一下 are correct.
李: 下课了, 一起走路回家吧。
Lǐ: Xià kè le, yìqǐ zǒulù huí jiā ba.
王: 老师叫我下课以后到他的办公室拿功课, 我去去就来。(去去 = 去一去 = 去一下)
Wáng: Lǎoshī jiào wǒ xià kè yǐhòu dào tāde bàngōngshì ná gōngkè, wǒ qù qù jiù lái.
Li: Class is over. How about if we walk home together?
Wang: The teacher asked me to go to his office to pick up my homework. I will quickly go over there and will be right back.
While a reduplicated verb has a similar meaning to 'verb + 一下', 来一下 or 过来一下 is acceptable, but 来来 or 过来过来 would be improper.
张: 小王, 你来一下, 好不好? 有一个问题, 我想问问你。(来一下 cannot be 来来.)
Zhāng: Xiǎo Wáng, nǐ lái yíxià, hǎo bù hǎo? Yǒu yí ge wèntí, wǒ xiǎng wèn wèn nǐ.
王: 你等一下(= 等等), 那里有一个牌子, 我要先过去看一看(= 看一下)牌子上的字。
Wáng: Nǐ děng yíxià (= děng děng), nàlǐ yǒu yí ge páizi, wǒ yào xiān guòqù kàn yí kàn (= kàn yíxià) páizi shàng de zì.
Zhang: Xiao Wang, will you come here for a minute? There is a question I would like to quickly ask you.
Wang: Wait a moment. There is a sign over there. I want to go over there first to take a look at those characters on the sign.
### Level 1/2 27.8 When 一下 is used
Although a reduplicated verb has the same function as 'verb + 一下', when the verb has an object that is a pronoun, the word orders of these two patterns are not the same. The pronoun follows the reduplicated verb or is between the verb and 一下。
妈妈: 要吃饭了, 小中还在房间里写功课, 你去叫他一下(= 叫叫他)。
Māma: Yào chīfàn le, Xiǎozhōng hái zài fángjiān lǐ xiě gōngkè, nǐ qù jiào tā yīxià.
爸爸: 小中, 可以休息休息(= 休息一下)了; 吃了饭, 看看电视(= 看一下电视) 再写功课。
Bàba: Xiǎozhōng, kěyǐ xiūxí xiūxí le; chī le fàn, kàn kàn diànshì zài xiě gōngkè.
小中: 爸爸, 今天的数学功课都很难, 你可不可以教我一下(教教我)?
Xiāozhōng: Bàba, jīntiān de shùxué gōngkè dōu hěn nán, nǐ kě bù kěyǐ jiāo wǒ yīxià?
Mother: We are about to have dinner, and Xiaozhong is still doing homework in his room. Why don't you go quickly call him (give him a holler).
Father: Xiaozhong, you can take a short break now. After dinner, watch TV for a while and then do your homework.
Xiaozhong: Father, today's math homework is hard. Can you teach me (show me how to do it) a bit?
## B. Adjective reduplication
Not all adjectives can be reduplicated. Sentences with reduplicated adjectives tend to sound more informal and perhaps more personal. Sometimes descriptions with reduplicated adjectives may convey a sense of vividness.
### Level 1 27.9 Forming reduplicated adjectives
To reduplicate a disyllabic adjective, each character is repeated before the next. This is different from the reduplication of a disyllabic verb. For example, the reduplicated form of 清楚 (qīngchǔ) is 清清楚楚, not 清楚清楚.
王先生的新家, 是一栋小小的木造房子, 屋顶上有一个高高的烟囱; 屋子里总是收拾得干干净净(的)。
Wáng xiānsheng de xīn jiā, shì yí dòng xiǎoxiǎo de mùzào fángzi, wūdǐng shàng yǒu yí ge gāogāo de yāncōng; wūzi lǐ zǒngshì shōushí de gāngānjìngjìng (de).
Mr Wang's new home is a small wood house; there is a tall chimney on the roof. The rooms are always spotlessly clean.
### Level 1 27.10 No degree adverbs with reduplicated adjectives
When a reduplicated adjective is used attributively (meaning it appears before a noun) or used in a complement of state, a degree adverb (such as 很 (hěn), 太 (tài), 真 (zhēn), 非常 (fēicháng)) cannot be used. 不 cannot be used either.
那个胖胖的小女孩, 有一双大大的眼睛, 一头卷卷的金发, 真可爱, 是谁家的 小孩?
Nà ge pàngpàng de xiǎo nǚhái, yǒu yì shuāng dàdà de yǎnjīng, yì tóu juǎnjuǎn de jīn fǎ, zhēn kě'ài, shì shéi jiā de xiǎohái?
That chubby little girl has a pair of big eyes and a head of curly blonde hair – really cute. Whose daughter is she?
### Level 2 27.11 The use of 的 with reduplicated adjectives
#### (a) Monosyllabic adjectives
When a monosyllabic adjective is reduplicated and used as a predicate or in a complement of state, 的 should follow the reduplicated adjective.
李: 你知不知道小王的女朋友长什么样子?
Lǐ: Nǐ zhī bù zhīdào Xiǎo Wáng de nǚ péngyǒu zhǎng shénme yàngzi?
丁:瘦瘦的, 脸圆圆的, 头发长长的, 皮肤白白的, 非常漂亮。 (Every 的 is necessary.)
Dīng: Shòushòu de, liǎn yuányuán de, tóufǎ chángcháng de, pífū báibái de, fēicháng piàoliàng.
Li: Do you know what Xiao Wang's girlfriend looks like?
Ding: Thin, round face, long hair, fair skin, extremely pretty.
#### (b) Disyllabic adjectives
When a disyllabic adjective is reduplicated and used as a predicate or in a complement of state, 的 is optional.
张小姐对人客客气气(的), 说话的时候, 也总是小小声声(的), 难怪大家都 喜欢她。
Zhāng xiǎojiě duìrén kèkèqìqì (de), shuōhuà de shíhòu, yě zǒngshì xiǎoxiǎoshēngshēng (de), nánguài dàjiā dōu xǐhuān tā.
Miss Zhang is courteous towards people. When she talks, she is always soft spoken. No wonder everybody likes her.
咱们上山去吧。站在山顶上, 整座城都可以看得清清楚楚(的)。
Zánmen shàng shān qù ba. Zhàn zài shāndǐng shàng, zhěng zuò chéng dōu kěyǐ kàn de qīngqīngchǔchǔ de.
Let's go up the mountain. When you stand on top of the mountain, the whole town can be seen clearly.
### Level 1/2 27.12 The use of 地 with reduplicated adjectives
When a reduplicated adjective is followed by 地 (de) to form an adverbial modifier, 地 becomes optional.
☞ See Chapter 19 for more information on adverbial modifiers.
老王一看到小李, 就急急忙忙(地)跑过来向他借钱; 小李听了,慢慢(地)从口袋里拿了二十块钱出来借他。
Lǎo Wáng yí kàn dào Xiǎo Lǐ, jiù jíjímángmáng (de) pǎo guòlái xiàng tā jiè qián. Xiǎo Lǐ tīng le, màn màn (de) cóng kǒudài lǐ ná le èrshí kuài qián chūlái jiè tā.
As soon as Lao Wang saw Xiao Li, he hurriedly ran over to borrow some money from him. After listening to his request, Xiao Li slowly took $20 out from his pocket and lent it to him.
上次考试, 他没有好好(地)准备, 所以不及格。现在他天天都认认真真(地)学习, 希望下次能考得好一点。
Shàng cì kǎoshì, tā méiyǒu hǎo hǎo (de) zhǔnbèi, suǒyǐ bù jígé. Xiànzài tā tiān tiān dōu rènrènzhēnzhēn (de) xuéxí, xīwàng xià cì néng kǎo de hǎo yìdiǎn.
He did not do a good job studying for the previous test; therefore, he failed the test. Now he is studying conscientiously every day and he hopes to do better next time.
### Level 1/2 27.13 Reduplicating an adjectival verb
An adjectival verb that indicates a temporary psychological or physical state can be reduplicated. When such an adjective is a disyllabic word, the entire word is repeated, not the individual characters.
放学了, 小朋友高高兴兴(地)回家去。(高高兴兴地 is an adverbial modifier.)
Fàngxué le, xiǎo péngyǒu gāogāoxìngxìng (de) huí jiā qù.
School was out. The children went home happily.
你快把那个好消息告诉他, 让他高兴高兴。(高兴高兴 is a reduplicated verb.)
Nǐ kuaì bǎ nà ge hǎo xiāoxí gàosù tā, ràng tā gāoxìng gāoxìng.
Hurry and tell him that good news and cheer him up a little bit.
## Exercises
Level 2Choose the sentence that is grammatically correct.
* 1 Mother: Xiaoming, dinner is ready. Go quickly and wash your hands first, then come to dinner.
* (a) 妈妈: 小明, 饭已经做好了, 你先去洗手洗手再来吃。
* (b) 妈妈: 小明, 饭已经做好了, 你先去洗洗手再来吃。
* (c) 妈妈: 小明, 饭已经做好了, 你先去洗手一下再来吃。
* 2 Can you wait for me here for a while? I have to quickly go to the bathroom.
* (a) 你可不可以在这里等一下我? 我要去一下洗手间。
* (b) 你可不可以在这里等我等我? 我要去一下洗手间。
* (c) 你可不可以在这里等等我? 我要去一下洗手间。
* 3 I waited at the bus stop for a while. The bus didn't come, so I decided to walk to school.
* (a) 我在车站等了等, 车没来, 我就决定走路去学校了。
* (b) 我在车站等一等, 车没来, 我就决定走路去学校了。
* (c) 我在车站等一下, 车没来, 我就决定走路去学校了。
* 4 We should carefully discuss this issue. We can't make the decision now.
* (a) 这个问题, 我们应该好好地讨讨论论, 不能现在就决定。
* (b) 这个问题, 我们应该好好地讨论一讨论, 不能现在就决定。
* (c) 这个问题, 我们应该好好地讨论讨论, 不能现在就决定。
* 5 I was tired today. After dinner, I watched TV for a while and then went to bed.
* (a) 昨天我很累, 吃完晚饭, 看了看电视, 就去睡觉了。
* (b) 昨天我很累, 吃完晚饭, 看看了电视, 就去睡觉了。
* (c) 昨天我很累, 吃完晚饭, 看一看了电视, 就去睡觉了。
* 6 Mr Li, do you know Miss Wang? Let me introduce you to each other.
* (a) 李先生, 你认识王小姐吗? 我来给你们介绍一介绍。
* (b) 李先生, 你认识王小姐吗? 我来给你们介一介绍。
* (c) 李先生, 你认识王小姐吗? 我来给你们介绍一下。
* 7 Sales assistant: This coat is of the highest quality. Touch it and see how it feels.
* (a) 店员: 这件大衣是最上等的质量, 你摸摸一下。
* (b) 店员: 这件大衣是最上等的质量, 你摸摸看。
* (c) 店员: 这件大衣是最上等的质量, 你摸了摸。
* 8 As soon as Xiaoming saw his father coming home, he happily went to open the door for him.
* (a) 小明一看到爸爸回家了, 就高高兴兴地去给爸爸开门。
* (b) 小明一看到爸爸回家了, 就高兴高兴地去给爸爸开门。
* (c) 小明一看到爸爸回家了, 就高兴高兴去给爸爸开门。
* 9 Look, the tall building in front is our school's student dormitory.
* (a) 你看, 前面那个建筑高高, 就是我们学校的学生宿舍。
* (b) 你看, 前面那个高高的建筑, 就是我们学校的学生宿舍。
* (c) 你看, 前面那个很高高的建筑, 就是我们学校的学生宿舍。
* 10 Mother: Anna, do you like this skirt? If you do, then go try it on. We'll buy it if it fits.
* (a) 妈妈: 安娜, 这条裙子你喜欢吗? 如果喜欢, 就去试试看, 合身就买。
* (b) 妈妈: 安娜, 这条裙子你喜欢吗? 如果喜欢, 就去试了试, 合身就买。
* (c) 妈妈: 安娜, 这条裙子你喜欢吗? 如果喜欢, 就去试看一看, 合身就买。
* 11 Seeing that his girlfriend was in a bad mood, Xiao Li told her a joke to cheer her up.
* (a) 小李看到他女朋友心情不好, 就说一个笑话让她高高兴兴的。
* (b) 小李看到他女朋友心情不好, 就说一个笑话让她高高兴兴。
* (c) 小李看到他女朋友心情不好, 就说一个笑话让她高兴高兴。
* 12 The big exam is over. Now we can relax a little bit.
* (a) 大考考完了, 咱们可以轻松轻松的。
* (b) 大考考完了, 咱们可以轻轻松松了。
* (c) 大考考完了, 咱们可以轻松轻松了。
* 13 Everybody is busy studying for the exam. Only Xiao Wang is listening to music in relaxation (in a carefree manner).
* (a) 别人都忙着准备考试, 只有小王一个人在轻松轻松听音乐。
* (b) 别人都忙着准备考试, 只有小王一个人在轻松轻松地听音乐。
* (c) 别人都忙着准备考试, 只有小王一个人在轻轻松松地听音乐。
* 14 They had plenty of time today, so they walked to school slowly (they were not in a hurry).
* (a) 今天时间很多, 所以他们慢慢走去学校。
* (b) 今天时间很多, 所以他们很慢慢地走去学校。
* (c) 今天时间很多, 所以他们很慢很慢走去学校。
# [28
The use of 以前, 以后 and 时候](content.xhtml#bck_Ch028)
以前 (yǐqián), 以后 (yǐhòu) and 时候 (shíhòu) are three important words used to form time phrases. Although their counterparts can be found in English, the word order of such phrases is quite different in Chinese.
## A. The use of 以前 and 以后
以前 and 以后 can appear after a sentence, verb/verbal phrase or duration of time to form a time phrase. Each of these words can also be a stand-alone adverb.
## Level 1 28.1 以前 and 以后 as stand-alone adverbs
When 以前 and 以后 are used as stand-alone adverbs, they mean 'in the past; previously' and 'in the future' respectively. Their grammatical features are similar to those of 现在 (xiànzài). They can appear either at the beginning of a sentence or after the subject.
A casual word for 以前 is 过去 (guòqù). 以后 can be replaced by 将来 (jiānglái) or 未来 (wèilái); but 将来 and 未来 seem more formal than 以后.
我以前在银行工作,现在在上研究所,以后我想当教授。
Wǒ yǐqián zài yínháng gōngzuò, xiànzài zài shàng yánjiūsuǒ, yǐhòu wǒ xiǎng dāng jiàoshòu.
Previously, I worked at a bank; now I am attending graduate school; in the future, I want to be a professor.
过去大家都认为学中文没有用, 所以以前学中文的人不多。现在中国的经济发展得很快,以后(= 将来)一定会有很多人想学中文。
Guòqù dàjiā dōu rènwéi xué Zhōngwén méiyǒu yòng, suǒyǐ yǐqián xué Zhōngwén de rén bù duō. Xiànzài Zhōngguó de jīngjì fāzhǎn de hěn kuài, yǐhòu (= jiānglái) yídìng huì yǒu hěn duō rén xiǎng xué Zhōngwén.
In the past, everybody thought that studying Chinese was useless; therefore, there were not many people studying Chinese. Now China's economy is developing rapidly; in the future, there will definitely be many people wanting to study Chinese.
## Level 2 28.2 以前 and 以后 in time phrases
When 以前 or 以后 is used to form a time phrase, it must appear after a sentence, a verb/verbal phrase or duration of time. In this regard, the English and Chinese word orders are opposite and thus merit special attention. 以 can be optional.
The time phrase must appear before the main clause. In English, the main clause can appear either before or after the time phrase.
小明每天晚上睡觉(以)前, 妈妈都会给他讲一个故事。
Xiǎomíng měitiān wǎnshàng shuìjiào yǐqián, māma dōu huì gěi tā jiǎng yí ge gùshì.
Every night before Xiaoming goes to sleep, his mother will tell him a story.
王先生成绩﹑ 人品都好; 他毕业(以)后, 很多大公司想请他去工作。
Wáng xiānsheng chéngjī, rénpǐn dōu hǎo; tā bìyè yǐhòu, hěn duō dà gōngsī xiǎng qǐng tā qù gōngzuò.
Mr Wang's (university) results and his moral character were both good. After he graduated, many big companies wanted to hire him.
## Level 2 28.3 Location of the subject in a sentence with a 以前/以后 time phrase
If the time phrase and the main clause share the same subject, the subject should not be repeated. It is best to use the subject in the time phrase although it is acceptable to use it in the main clause.
她吃晚饭(以)前, 喜欢喝一杯鸡尾酒; 吃晚饭(以)后, 常常喝一杯咖啡。
Tā chī wǎnfàn (yǐ) qián, xǐhuān hē yì bēi jīwěijiǔ; chī wǎnfàn (yǐ) hòu, chángcháng hē yì bēi kāfēi.
She likes to have a cocktail before eating dinner; after eating dinner, she often has a cup of coffee.
(吃晚饭以前, 她喜欢喝一杯鸡尾酒 is considered acceptable, but 她吃晚饭以前, 她喜欢喝一杯鸡尾酒 is improper.)
王先生退休(以)前, 只知道工作, 没有任何嗜好, 所以他退休(以)后, 不知道 怎么过日子。
Wáng xiānsheng tuìxiū (yǐ) qián, zhǐ zhīdào gōngzuò, méiyǒu rènhé shìhào, suǒyǐ tā tuìxiū (yǐ) hòu, bù zhīdào zěnme guò rìzi.
Before Mr Wang retired, he only knew about his work and didn't have any hobbies; therefore, after he retired, he didn't know how to spend his days.
## Level 2 28.4 以前 and 以后 with a duration of time
以前 or 以后 can follow duration of time to mean '... ago/before' or '... later/in...'. In this case, 以 is frequently omitted.
杰夫两个月(以)前才开始学中文, 现在他已经会写几百个汉字了。
Jiéfū liǎng ge yuè (yǐ) qián cái kāishǐ xué Zhōngwén, xiànzài tā yǐjīng huì xiě jǐ bǎi ge Hànzì le.
Jeff only started to study Chinese two months ago; now he already knows how to write several hundred Chinese characters.
(Situation: This is a phone conversation.)
张: 请问, 王先生在不在?
Zhāng: Qǐng wèn, Wáng xiānsheng zài bú zài?
王太太: 他在洗澡, 请你十分钟(以)后再打来, 好不好?
Wáng tàitai: Tā zài xǐzǎo, qǐng nǐ shí fēnzhōng (yǐ) hòu zài dǎ lái, hǎo bù hǎo?
Zhang: May I ask, is Mr Wang home?
Mrs Wang: He is taking a shower. Will you please call back in ten minutes (= ten minutes later)?
## Level 2 28.5 Duration of time + 以后 = 过 \+ duration of time
'Duration of time + 以后' is interchangeable with '过 \+ duration of time'.
王: 请问, 张经理回国没有?
Wáng: Qǐng wèn, Zhāng jīnglǐ huí guó méiyǒu?
秘书: 还没有。他一个星期以后才会回来。(= 他再过一个星期才会回来。)
Mìshū: Hái méiyǒu. Tā yī ge xīngqī yǐhòu cái huì huílái. (= Tā zài guò yí ge xīngqī cái huì huílái).
Wang: May I please ask if Manager Zhang is back in the country?
Secretary: Not yet. He won't be back until a week later.
## Level 2 28.6 Negative sentences with 以前
A negative sentence can appear before 以前 without a negative meaning. This is a unique feature of the use of 以前. The expression is considered correct in Chinese.
功课还没有写完以前(= 功课写完以前), 你不可以跟朋友出去玩。
Gōngkè hái méiyǒu xiě wán yǐqián, nǐ bù kěyǐ gēn péngyǒu chūqù wán.
Before you finish your homework, you are not allowed to go out with your friends.
王先生已经二十五岁了, 还住在他爸妈的家里。他不能独立生活以前, 也不能 考虑跟女朋友结婚的事。
Wáng xiānsheng yǐjīng èrshí wǔ suì le, hái zhù zài tā bàmā de jiā lǐ. Tā bù néng dúlì shēnghuó yǐqián, yě bù néng kǎolǜ gēn nǚ péngyǒu jiéhūn de shì.
Mr Wang is already 25 years old and he still lives at his parents' house. Before he can be independent, he cannot consider marriage with his girlfriend.
## Level 2 28.7 Omitting 以后
以后 can be omitted when the perfective aspect 了 is used in the time phrase. (The perfective aspect 了 must follow the verb immediately.)
下课以后, 我们一起去看电影, 怎么样?(= 我们下了课一起去看电影, 怎么样?)
Xiàkè yǐhòu, wǒmen yìqǐ qù kàn diànyǐng, zěnmeyàng?
How about if we go to a movie together after class?
(It would be improper to say 我们下课了一起去看电影, 怎么样?)
王太太结婚以前, 在一家银行当经理; 结婚以后(= 结了婚), 就辞职在家做家庭主妇了。
Wáng tàitai jiéhūn yǐqián, zài yì jiā yínháng dāng jīnglǐ; jié hūn yǐhòu (= jié le hūn), jiù cízhí zài jiā zuò jiātíng zhǔfù le.
Before Mrs Wang got married, she was a manager at a bank; after she got married, she quit her job and became a housewife.
## Level 2 28.8 后来 vs. 以后
后来 (hòulái) and 以后 overlap in meaning in the sense that both can be used to mean 'later on' or 'afterwards'; however, 后来 strictly refers to an action that has already taken place.
### (a) Actions that have already taken place
For events that have already taken place, 后来 may sound better than 以后, although 以后 is acceptable.
昨天下午我跟我女朋友一起去看了一场电影; 后来(= 以后), 我们又一起去 一家中国餐馆吃晚饭。
Zuótiān xiàwǔ wǒ gēn wǒ nǚ péngyǒu yìqǐ qù kàn le yì chǎng diànyǐng; hòulái (= yǐhòu), wǒmen yòu yìqǐ qù yì jiā Zhōngguó cānguǎn chī wǎnfàn.
Yesterday afternoon, I went to see a movie with my girlfriend; afterwards, we also went to a Chinese restaurant to have dinner.
小明以前喜欢欺负弟弟, 所以被妈妈罚了几次,后来(= 以后)他就不敢了。
Xiǎomíng yǐqián xǐhuān qīfù dìdi, suǒyǐ bèi māma fá le jǐ cì; hòulái (= yǐhòu) tā jiù bù gǎn le.
Xiaoming used to like to bully his younger brother, so he was punished by his mother a couple of times. After that, he dared not do it again.
### (b) Actions that are yet to take place
For actions that will take place in the future, only 以后 can be used.
妈妈: 小明, 你又欺负弟弟了。今天不许你吃点心, 看你以后还敢不敢欺负他。
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ yòu qīfù dìdi le. Jīntiān bù xǔ nǐ chī diǎnxīn, kàn nǐ yǐhòu hái gǎn bù gǎn qīfù tā.
小明: 我以后不敢了。 (后来 would not be correct here.)
Xiǎomíng: Wǒ yǐhòu bù gǎn le.
Mother: Xiaoming, you bullied your younger brother again. I will not allow you to eat dessert today. I'll see if you dare to bully him again in the future.
Xiaoming: In the future, I dare not do it again.
## Level 1 28.9 以前 and 以后 as adjectives
以前 (or 过去) and 以后 (or 将来/未来) can be used as adjectives before a noun. In this case, they mean 'previous' and 'future' respectively; and 的 (de) must follow 以前/以后.
以前的错误, 咱们忘了吧。以后的计划, 才是最要紧的。
Yǐqián de cuòwù, zánmen wàng le ba. Yǐhòu de jìhuà, cái shì zuì yàojǐn de.
Let's forget about previous mistakes. Our future plans are the most important.
## B. The use of 时候
## Level 1 28.10 什么时候 vs. 几点 vs. 时间: 'when', 'what time' and 'time'
As a noun, 时候 normally refers to a point of time, not a duration of time, which should be 时间 (shíjiān).
您今天下午有没有时间? 我想来您的办公室问您几个问题。
Nín jīntiān xiàwǔ yǒu méiyǒu shíjiān? Wǒ xiǎng lái nínde bàngōngshì wèn nín jǐ ge wèntí.
Do you have time this afternoon? I would like to come to your office to ask you a few questions.
(It would be improper to ask 您今天有没有时候?)
Since 时候 refers to a point of time, 什么时候? means 'when?' Although 什么时候 literally means 'what time?' the Chinese expression for 'what time?' should be 几点? (jǐ diǎn?)
学生: 老师, 您下午有没有时间? 我想来您的办公室问几个问题。
Xuéshēng: Lǎoshī, nín xiàwǔ yǒu méiyǒu shíjiān? Wǒ xiǎng lái nínde bànggōngshì wèn jǐ ge wèntí.
老师: 对不起, 我今天下午恐怕没有空。
Lǎoshī: Duìbùqǐ, wǒ jīntiān xiàwǔ kǒngpà méiyǒu kòng.
学生: 没关系, 您什么时候有空呢?
Xuéshēng: Méi guānxi, nín shénme shíhòu yǒu kòng ne?
老师: 你明天下午来吧!
Lǎoshī: Nǐ míngtiān xiàwǔ lái ba!
学生: 好, 您要我几点来?
Xuéshēng: Hǎo, nín yào wǒ jǐ diǎn lái?
Student: Sir, do you have time in the afternoon? I would like to come to your office to ask a few questions.
Teacher: Sorry, I am afraid that I don't have time this afternoon.
Student: That's OK. When will you have time?
Teacher: Why don't you come tomorrow afternoon?
Student: OK. What time do you want me to come?
## Level 1 28.11 时候 and the measure word 个
时候 can have an optional measure word, 个. It is frequently omitted.
### (a) 这 (个) 时候 and 那 (个) 时候
这 (个) 时候 means 'at this time'; 那 (个) 时候 means 'at that time', which can refer to either a previous time frame or a future time frame.
昨天晚上我错过了最后一班公共汽车, 站在车站不知道应该怎么办。这(个)时候, 我的同屋开车经过车站, 所以他"救"了我。
Zuótiān wǎnshàng wǒ cuòguò le zuìhòu yì bān gōnggòng qìchē, zhàn zài chēzhàn bù zhīdào yīnggāi zěnme bàn. Zhè (ge) shíhòu, wǒde tóngwū kāi chē jīngguò chēzhàn, suǒyǐ tā 'jiù' le wǒ.
Last night I missed the last bus; I stood at the bus stop not knowing what I should do. At this time, my roommate drove by, so he 'saved' me.
我以前在中国住过两年; 那(个)时候, 我还不会说中文, 所以没有交到中国 朋友。
Wǒ yǐqián zài Zhōngguó zhù guo liǎng nián; nà (ge) shíhòu, wǒ hái bú huì shuō Zhōngwén, suǒyǐ méiyǒu jiāo dào Zhōngguó péngyǒu.
I lived in China for two years before. At that time, I didn't know how to speak Chinese yet, so I did not make friends with any Chinese people.
### (b) 那 (个) 时候 and 到时候
When 那 (个) 时候 refers to a future time frame, it is interchangeable with 到时候. The 候 can be omitted in all these phrases.
我女儿明年就要进大学了,那(个)时候(= 到时候), 我们会需要一大笔钱, 所以我打算下个月去找个工作。
Wǒ nǚ'ér míngnián jiù yào jìn dàxué le, nà (ge) shíhòu (= dào shíhòu), wǒmen huì xūyào yí dà bǐ qián, suǒyǐ wǒ dàsuàn xià ge yuè qù zhǎo ge gōngzuò.
My daughter is going to enter university next year. At that time, we will need a large sum of money, so I plan to go and get a job next month.
## Level 2 28.12......的时候
......的时候 is also translated as 'when' in English, but this construction is a time phrase, not a question. The......的时候 phrase must appear before the main clause. Its grammatical feature is similar to that of......以前 or......以后.
张: 昨天我给你打电话的时候, 你太太说你在睡觉。
Zhāng: Zuótiān wǒ gěi nǐ dǎ diànhuà de shíhòu, nǐ tàitai shuō nǐ zài shuìjiào.
王: 哦, 是吗? 你是几点打来的?
Wáng: Ò, shìma? Nǐ shì jǐ diǎn dǎlái de?
Zhang: When I called you yesterday, your wife said that you were taking a nap.
Wang: Oh, is that so? What time did you call?
李: 上中文课的时候, 我们老师不让我们说英文。你们老师呢?
Lǐ: Shàng Zhōngwén kè de shíhòu, wǒmen lǎoshī bú ràng wǒmen shuō Yīngwén. Nǐmen lǎoshī ne?
丁: 我们老师上课的时候不说英文, 下课以后也不说。
Dīng: Wǒmen lǎoshī shàng kè de shíhòu bù shuō Yīngwén, xià kè yǐhòu yě bù shuō.
Li: Our teacher does not allow us to speak English when we are in Chinese class. How about your teacher?
Ding: Our teacher does not speak English (when we are) in class, nor after class.
王: 今年的交换学生什么时候来?
Wáng: Jīnnián de jiāohuàn xuéshēng shénme shíhòu lái?
李: 下个月。
Lǐ: Xià ge yuè.
王: 他们来的时候, 谁去机场接他们?
Wáng: Tāmen lái de shíhòu, shéi qù jīchǎng jiē tāmen?
Wang: When will this year's exchange students arrive?
Li: Next month.
Wang: Who will go to the airport to pick them up when they arrive?
## Level 2 28.13......的时候 and the progressive aspect
When using the......的时候 phrase and describing an action in progress, '正 (在) + verb' is used more often than '在 \+ verb'.
☞ See Chapter 9 for more on the progressive aspect.
昨天发生大地震的时候, 我正在吃晚饭 (呢)。
Zuótiān fāshēng dà dìzhèn de shíhòu, wǒ zhèng zài chī wǎnfàn (ne).
When a strong earthquake occurred yesterday, I was eating dinner.
早上我出门的时候, 外面正下着大雨呢 (= 正在下大雨呢)。
Zǎoshàng wǒ chūmén de shíhòu, wàimiàn zhèng xià zhe dà yǔ ne (= zhèng zài xià dà yǔ ne).
When I left the house this morning, it was raining hard.
## Level 2 28.14 The use of 以前 or 以后 with......的时候
When 以前 or 以后 is used as a stand-alone adverb, it can be used together with the......的时候 phrase. This structure can be confusing to learners.
我现在是吃素的。我以前还吃肉的时候, 很喜欢吃牛排。
Wǒ xiànzài shì chī sù de. Wǒ yǐqián hái chī ròu de shíhòu, hěn xǐhuān chī niúpái.
I am a vegetarian now. When I used still to eat meat, I liked steak very much.
我爸妈不了解我。以后我自己当了妈妈的时候, 一定要想办法了解我的孩子。
Wǒ bàmā bù liǎojiě wǒ. Yǐhòu wǒ zìjǐ dāng le māma de shíhòu, yídìng yào xiǎng bànfǎ liǎojiě wǒde háizi.
My parents don't understand me. In the future, when I myself become a mother, I definitely will try to understand my children.
十几年(以)前我住在中国的时候, 中国不像现在这么进步。
Shí jǐ nián yǐqián wǒ zhù zài Zhōngguó de shíhòu, Zhōngguó bú xiàng xiànzài zhème jìnbù.
When I lived in China more than ten years ago, China was not as advanced as it is now.
## Level 2 28.15 The use of nouns/verbs in 以前, 以后 and......的时候 phrases
### (a) When verbs are necessary
In......以前,......以后 or......的时候 phrases, what appears before 以前, 以后 or 的时候 usually includes a verb unless a number is involved. Learners who are English speakers should be aware of this difference between English and Chinese – in English, the same phrases can include nouns only.
我爸爸每天吃晚饭以前都喝一瓶啤酒; 吃饭的时候, 他常喝一杯白葡萄酒。
Wǒ bàba měi tiān chī wǎnfàn yǐqián dōu hē yì píng píjiǔ; chī fàn de shíhòu, tā cháng hē yì bēi bái pútáo jiǔ.
My father drinks a bottle of beer every day before dinner; during dinner, he often has a glass of white wine.
(It is odd to simply say 每天晚饭以前 and is incorrect to say 饭的时候.)
老师:上中文课的时候, 你们不应该说英文; 下课以后, 最好也别说。这样, 你们的中文才会进步。
Lǎoshī: Shàng Zhōngwén kè de shíhòu, nǐmen bù yīnggāi shuō Yīngwén. Xià kè yǐhòu, zuìhǎo yě bié shuō. Zhèyàng, nǐmen de Zhōngwén cái huì jìnbù.
Teacher: During Chinese class, you should not speak English. It is best that you also don't speak English after class. This way, your Chinese will improve.
(Do not say 中文课的时候 or 课以后.)
你明天早上六点以前一定要起床。 (六点 has a number; 六点以前 is correct.)
Nǐ míngtiān zǎoshàng liù diǎn yǐqián yídìng yào qǐchuáng.
You have to get up before 6 o'clock tomorrow morning.
### (b) Nouns acceptable when 以 is dropped
If 以 is not used in 以前/以后, it is acceptable to have nouns without verbs before 前/后.
医生: 这个药, 你饭前吃两粒,饭后吃一粒。
Yīshēng: Zhè ge yào, nǐ fàn qián chī liǎng lì, fàn hòu chī yí lì.
Doctor: You take two pills of this medicine before meals and one pill after meals.
## Exercises
Translate the following sentences into Chinese. Be sure to use 以前, 以后 or 时候 in each of the sentences.
* Level 1 1 Yesterday I was busy. I studied at the library before class; and went to the coffee shop to work after class. In the evening after dinner, I had to study for a test next week.
* 2 When I was in my teens, I had already decided that I wanted to be a writer in the future.
* 3 Li: Mrs Wang, when are you free? I would like to come to your house and visit you.
Wang: I am free every day after dinner. Why don't you come tomorrow evening?
Li: Great! What time do you want me to come over?
Wang: My daughter goes to bed at 8:30. Before she goes to bed, I have to bathe her. So please come before 7:30.
* 4 Wang: Do you know when Mr Zhang will come to Shanghai?
Li: He will be here next month after he has attended an international conference in Beijing.
Wang: When he comes, who will go to meet him at the airport?
Li: Let's talk about it when the time comes.
* Level 3 5 Ten years ago, not many people had mobile phones. Ten years from now (= ten years later), there probably won't be too many people who don't have mobile phones.
* 6 Li Ming and I used to be good friends. At that time, we talked on the phone almost every day. But later I discovered that he had lied to me a few times; now we no longer talk. In the future, I will be careful when choosing friends.
* 7 In the past when I was still eating meat, I would eat hamburgers three times a week. Later on, I became a vegetarian. Nowadays when my boyfriend and I go to a hamburger place, I only eat French fries.
* 8 Before my parents were divorced, they fought almost every day. At that time, I told myself that, in the future, for the sake of my children, after I get married I will never fight with my husband.
* 9 Ding: Our English teacher does not allow us to speak Chinese during class.
Wang: Our English teacher does not speak Chinese with us either before class or after class.
# [29
Modal particles](content.xhtml#bck_Ch029)
Modal particles are also called 'sentential particles' because they appear at the end of a sentence. Some of the modal particles have grammatical functions and specific meanings; these particles are thus definable. However, many of them are used to convey certain attitudes, moods, etc. and are used intuitively by native speakers of Chinese. These modal particles cannot be clearly defined. In this chapter, the most commonly used modal particles with definable meanings and usages will be discussed.
## Level 2 29.1 The different moods conveyed by 了, 吧, 啊 after 好
The following examples show how modal particles (here, 了, 吧 and 啊 after 好) can be used to convey different moods and attitudes.
### (a) 好了!
好了! can be used to mean 'enough!', 'stop!' or 'no more!' and is used to show one's impatience. Since one of the meanings of 了 as a modal particle is to indicate a 'change of situation', 了 in this case can be considered a modal particle with a definable meaning.
王太太: 你要自己注意身体; 别吸烟, 别喝酒。
Wáng tàitai: Nǐ yào zìjǐ zhùyì shēntǐ; bié xīyān, bié hējiǔ.
王先生:好了, 别再唠叨了。 (Both 了 imply a change of situation.)
Wáng xiānsheng: Hǎo le, bié zài lāodāo le.
Mrs Wang: You have to pay attention to your own health. Don't smoke; don't drink.
Mr Wang: Enough! Stop nagging.
妈妈: 你到了国外, 要自己注意身体。
Māma: Nǐ dào le guówài, yào zìjǐ zhùyì shēntǐ.
女儿:好, 我一定会注意。 (好 and 好了 convey very different meanings.)
Nü'ér: Hǎo, wǒ yídìng huì zhùyì.
Mother: When you are abroad, you must take care of your own health.
Daughter: OK, I definitely will.
### (b) 好吧!
好吧! is used to shows one's reluctance or lack of enthusiasm in agreeing to do something.
张: 一起去看 《超人》, 怎么样?
Zhāng: Yìqǐ qù kàn 'Chāorén', zěnmeyàng?
王: 我看过了, 没什么意思。
Wáng: Wǒ kàn guo le, méi shénme yìsi.
张: 我有两张免费的票。
Zhāng: Wǒ yǒu liǎng zhāng miǎnfèi de piào.
王:好吧! 反正没什么事, 在家也无聊。
Wáng: Hǎo ba! Fǎnzhèng méi shénme shì, zài jiā yě wúliáo.
Zhang: How about if we go see Superman together?
Wang: I have seen it. It's not very interesting.
Zhang: I have two free tickets.
Wang: All right. Anyway, I don't have much to do; it's boring staying at home.
### (c) 好啊!
好啊! can be used to show one's enthusiasm in agreeing to do something.
李: 要不要一起去看 《超人》? 我有两张免费的票。
Lǐ: Yào bu yào yìqǐ qù kàn 'Chāorén'? Wǒ yǒu liǎng zhāng miǎnfèi de piào.
丁:好啊! 听说这个电影很好看。
Dīng: Hǎo a! Tīngshuō zhè ge diànyǐng hěn hǎokàn.
Li: Would you like to go see Superman with me? I have two free tickets.
Ding: OK! I've heard that this movie is good.
## Level 1/2 29.2 The use of 吗
吗 is used to ask a yes–no question. It is sometimes interchangeable with an affirmative–negative question.
☞ See 2.1 for more information on the use of 吗.
你学了两年中文, 有中文名字吗?(= 有没有中文名字?)
Nǐ xué le liǎng nián Zhōngwén, yǒu Zhōngwén míngzì ma?
You have studied Chinese for two years. Do you have a Chinese name?
### (a) Use 吗 in questions with adverbs
When the question has an adverb, such as 也 (yě), 都 (dōu), 已经 (yǐjīng), etc., only 吗 can be used.
(Situation: Li shows Wang a photo with 15 people in it and says it's his family picture.)
王: 他们都是你的家人吗?(他们都是不是你的家人?would not be proper.)
Wáng: Tāmen dōu shì nǐde jiā rén ma?
Wang: Are all of them your family (members)?
### (b) Use 吗 in questions when one has an expectation of the answer
When one has an expectation of the answer, 吗 is used to ask the question.
(Situation: Wang visits his classmate Zhang at home and sees many thick volumes of medical books.)
王: 这些是谁的书?
Wáng: Zhè xiē shì shéide shū?
张: 都是我爸爸的。
Zhāng: Dōu shì wǒ bàba de.
王: 你爸爸是医生吗?
Wáng: Nǐ bàba shì yīshēng ma?
(你爸爸是不是医生?would not be the best choice in this situation since Wang expects the answer to be 'yes'.)
Wang: Whose books are these?
Zhang: They are my father's.
Wang: Is your father a doctor?
(Situation: A telephone conversation.)
张: 请问, 王先生在家吗?(= 王先生在不在家?)
Zhāng: Qǐng wèn, Wáng xiānsheng zài jiā ma?
王太太: 他在睡觉, 有事吗? (有没有事?would not be the correct choice in this case.)
Wáng tàitai: Tā zài shuìjiào, yǒu shì ma?
Zhang: May I ask, is Mr Wang home?
Mrs Wang: He is sleeping. Do you have anything (important)?
(Situation: A student sleeps in class.)
老师: 小王, 你为什么在睡觉? 你昨天晚上没有睡觉吗? (你昨天晚上有没有 睡觉?or 你昨天晚上睡觉了没有?would not be proper in this context.)
Lǎoshī: Xiǎo Wáng, nǐ wèishénme zài shuìjiào? Nǐ zuótiān wǎnshàng méiyǒu shuìjiào ma?
小李: 老师, 您不知道吗? 小王家昨天晚上闹了一场火灾。 (您知不知道?would not be proper in this context.)
Xiǎo Lǐ: Lǎoshī! Nín bù zhīdào ma? Xiǎo Wáng jiā zuótiān wǎnshàng nào le yì chǎng huǒzāi.
Teacher: Xiao Wang, why are you sleeping? Did you not sleep last night?
Xiao Li: Sir, didn't you know that there was a fire at Xiao Wang's house last night?
## Level 1/2 29.3 The use of 呢
### (a) Asking a question in context with 呢
呢 is used to either ask a previously asked question without repeating it or to ask a question when the context clearly indicates what that question is.
老师: 小王, 这是什么字?
Lǎoshī: Xiǎo Wáng, zhè shì shénme zì?
王: 那是"大"字。
Wáng: Nà shì 'dà' zì.
老师: 对, 很好! 这个呢?(= 这个是什么字?)
Lǎoshī: Duì, hěn hǎo! Zhè ge ne? (= Zhè ge shì shénme zì?)
王: 我不知道。
Wáng: Wǒ bù zhīdào.
老师: 小王不认识这个字; 小李, 你呢?(= 你认识不认识这个字?)
Lǎoshī: Xiǎo Wáng bú rènshì zhè ge zì; Xiǎo Lǐ, nǐ ne? (= Nǐ rènshì bú rènshì zhè ge zì?)
Teacher: Xiao Wang, what character is this?
Wang: That is the character 'big'.
Teacher: Correct, good! How about this one? (= What character is this one?)
Wang: I don't know.
Teacher: Xiao Wang does not recognize this character. Xiao Li, how about you? (= Xiao Li, do you recognize this character?)
### (b) 如果/要是......呢: 'what if...?'
如果/要是......呢 is used to ask 'what if...'.
职员: 经理, 今年的迎新会, 要办什么活动?
Zhíyuán: Jīnglǐ, jīnnián de yíngxīn huì, yào bàn shénme huódòng?
经理: 室外烤肉。
Jīnglǐ: Shìwài kǎoròu.
职员: 如果下雨呢?
Zhíyuán: Rúguǒ xiàyǔ ne?
Staff: Manager, what kind of activity are we going to have for this year's welcome party?
Manager: An outdoor BBQ.
Staff: What if it rains?
### (c) Asking about 'whereabouts' with 呢
呢 can be used to ask about 'whereabouts'. When you expect to see someone or something, but what you expect to see is not there, you can use 呢 to ask 'what has happened to...?' Although such a phrase is sometimes translated into 'where is...?' its connotation is different from a question with 哪里 (nǎlǐ), which is used to ask the physical location of someone or something.
(Situation: Xiao Wang and his girlfriend are nearly always together, but today you ran into him outside the cinema and he was alone.)
你: 小王! 怎么今天一个人来看电影? 你女朋友呢? (It would not be 你女朋友在哪里?since the real meaning of the question is 'why is she not with you?')
Nǐ: Xiǎo Wáng! Zěnme jīntiān yí ge rén lái kàn diànyǐng? Nǐ nǚ péngyǒu ne?
小王: 她今天不太舒服。
Xiǎo Wáng: Tā jīntiān bú tài shūfú.
You: Xiao Wang! How come you came to the movie by yourself today? Where is your girlfriend?
Xiao Wang: She is not feeling well today.
(Situation: You are new in town and want to know where the library and Bank of China are.)
你: 请问, 图书馆在哪里?
Nǐ: Qǐng wèn, túshūguǎn zài nǎlǐ?
当地人: 前面那栋白色的大楼就是图书馆。
Dāngdì rén: Qiánmiàn nà dòng báisè de dà lóu jiù shì túshūguǎn.
你: 谢谢。中国银行呢?(= 中国银行在哪里?)
Nǐ: Xièxie. Zhōngguó yínháng ne? (= Zhōngguó yínháng zài nǎlǐ?)
当地人: 本市没有中国银行。
Dāngdì rén: Běn shì méiyǒu Zhōngguó yínháng.
You: Excuse me. Where is the library?
Local person: That white building up ahead is the library.
You: Thanks. What about the Bank of China?
Local person: There is no Bank of China in this city.
(Situation: You have returned to the town you left years ago and you are standing in front of the place where your favorite coffee shop used to be. Now it's something else.)
你: 我以前常去的那家咖啡馆呢?
Nǐ: Wǒ yǐqián cháng qù de nà jiā kāfēiguǎn ne?
当地的朋友: 那家咖啡馆已经搬走了。
Dāngdì de péngyǒu: Nà jiā kāfēiguǎn yǐjīng bān zǒu le.
你: 是吗? 搬到哪里了?
Nǐ: Shì ma? Bān dào nǎlǐ le?
You: What happened to the coffee shop that I often used to go to?
Local friend: That coffee shop has moved.
You: Is that so? Where did it move to?
### (d) Softening the tone of a question with 呢
呢 can be used at the end of a question (other than a 吗 question) to soften the tone and make the question sound less harsh or blunt. In this case, 呢 does not have a grammatical function; its use is optional.
李小姐: 王先生, 真对不起, 明天的约会, 我不能来了。
Lǐ xiǎojiě: Wáng xiānsheng, zhēn duìbùqǐ, míngtiān de yuēhuì, wǒ bù néng lái le.
王先生: 哦? 为什么呢? (Without 呢, the utterance sounds harsh.)
Wáng xiānsheng: Ò? Wèishénme ne?
Miss Li: Mr Wang, I am really sorry. I can't make it to our date tomorrow.
Mr Wang: Oh? Why's that?
你不是说六点就会回家吗? 怎么现在才回来呢? (Without 呢, the question may sound like an accusation.)
Nǐ búshì shuō liù diǎn jiù huì huí jiā ma? Zěnme xiànzài cái huí lái ne?
Didn't you say you would be home by 6 o'clock? How come you only came back now?
### (e) 还......呢!
An optional 呢 is often used when the sentence has 还 (hái) in it, although its connotation is indefinable.
李太太: 你儿子大学毕业了没有?
Lǐ tàitai: Nǐ érzi dàxué bìyè le méiyǒu?
张太太:还没有呢! 他还有两年呢! 你儿子呢?(= 你儿子大学毕业了吗?)
Zhāng tàitai: Hái méiyǒu ne! Tā hái yǒu liǎng nián ne! Nǐ érzi ne? (= Nǐ érzi dàxué bìyè le ma?)
李太太: 我儿子还在上高中呢!
Lǐ tàitai: Wǒ érzi hái zài shàng gāozhōng ne.
Mrs Li: Has your son graduated from university?
Mrs Zhang: Not yet. He still has two years. How about your son?
Mrs Li: My son is still in high school.
王先生: 这个房子不错, 够大! 五个卧房、 三个洗手间。
Wáng xiānsheng: Zhè ge fángzi bú cuò, gòu dà! Wǔ ge wòfáng, sān ge xǐshǒujiān.
房地产商: 您看, 后面还有一个大花园呢!
Fángdìchǎn shāng: Nín kàn, hòumiàn hái yǒu yí ge dà huāyuán ne!
Mr Wang: This house is not bad, big enough! Five bedrooms and three bathrooms.
Property salesperson: Look! There is also a big garden behind it.
### (f) Using 呢 with the progressive aspect
An optional 呢 can be used when the sentence indicates an action in progress.
妈妈: 小明, 怎么还不去洗碗? 你在做什么?
Māma: Xiǎomíng, zěnme hái bú qù xǐ wǎn? Nǐ zài zuò shénme?
爸爸: 他在写功课呢。我去洗吧。
Bàba: Tā zài xiě gōngkè ne. Wǒ qù xǐ ba.
Mother: Xiaoming, how come you still have not washed the dishes? What are you doing?
Father: He is doing his homework. Let me go do the dishes.
(Situation: You have a date with your girlfriend. She is waiting for you to pick her up at her house. You arrive at her house, but her younger brother is the one who opens the door.)
你: 你好! 你姐姐呢? (呢 in this question is asking the 'whereabouts' of his older sister, not her actual physical location, since you expected to see her.)
Nǐ: Nǐ hǎo! Nǐ jiějie ne?
弟弟: 她在化妆呢!
Dìdi: Tā zài huàzhuāng ne!
You: Hello! Where is your sister?
Little brother: She is putting on make-up.
## Level 1/2 29.4 The use of 吧
吧 has two definable usages: when making suggestions and when making assumptions.
### (a) Making suggestions with 吧
吧 can be used to make a suggestion or to urge someone to do something.
张: 天气这么好, 咱们去郊外走走吧!
Zhāng: Tiānqì zhème hǎo, zánmen qù jiāowài zǒu zǒu ba!
李: 今天我很忙, 你一个人去吧!
Lǐ: Jīntiān wǒ hěn máng, nǐ yí ge rén qù ba!
Zhang: The weather is so nice. Let's go out to the countryside for a walk!
Li: Today I am busy. Why don't you go by yourself?
王: 下课了, 一起去吃午饭吧!
Wáng: Xiàkè le, yìqǐ qù chī wǔfàn ba!
丁: 好, 走吧!
Dīng: Hǎo, zǒu ba!
Wang: Class is over. Shall we go have lunch together?
Ding: OK, let's go!
### (b) Making strong assumptions with 吧
吧 can be used to indicate near certainty or a strong guess/assumption, which means that the speaker is quite sure of what s/he believes to be true, but is not 100% certain. Such a sentence sometimes includes 一定 (yídìng) or words such as 大概 (dàgài) and 可能 (kěnéng), but 吧 alone can be enough to convey the feeling of certainty. A question mark, full stop or exclamation mark can be used at the end of the sentence.
(Situation: Miss Zhang is half an hour late for her date with Mr Wang.)
张: 对不起, 来晚了, 你等了很久了吧!
Zhāng: Duìbùqǐ, lái wǎn le, nǐ děng le hěn jiǔ le ba!
王: 没关系, 路上堵车, 是吧?
Wáng: Méi guānxi, lùshàng dǔchē, shì ba?
Zhang: Sorry I am late. You must have waited a long time.
Wang: It's OK. There must have been a traffic jam, right?
李: 听说小兰跟她男朋友分手了。
Lǐ: Tīngshuō Xiǎolán gēn tā nán péngyǒu fēnshǒu le.
丁: 什么? 不会吧!上星期她告诉我, 他们快要结婚了。
Dīng: Shénme? Bú huì ba! Shàng xīngqī tā gàosù wǒ, tāmen kuài yào jiéhūn le.
Li: I heard that Xiaolan and her boyfriend broke up.
Ding: What? It can't be true! She told me last week they were about to get married.
### (c) 吧 not used in a narrative
It should be noted that when 吧 is used to imply a strong assumption or near certainty, it is usually used in a dialogue, not in a narrative. In a narrative, only 一定, 可能 or 大概 is used.
最近小李的女朋友总是不跟他见面, 也不接他的电话, 所以小李认为, 她一定交了新的男朋友。(一定 indicates a strong assumption, but 吧 should not be used in this narrative.)
Zuìjìn Xiǎo Lǐ de nǚ péngyǒu zǒngshì bù gēn tā jiànmiàn, yě bù jiē tāde diànhuà, suǒyǐ Xiǎo Lǐ rènwéi, tā yídìng jiāo le xīn de nán péngyǒu.
Recently, Xiao Li's girlfriend would never meet with him and she also would not answer his phone calls. So Xiao Li thinks that she must have met someone new.
## Level 2/3 29.5 The use of 了
了can be used as a perfective aspect particle (after a verb) to indicate the completion of an action. As a modal particle (at the end of a sentence), 了 has at least three major meanings.
☞ See Chapter 10 for more information on 了.
### (a) Indicating 'already' with 了
了 as a modal particle can indicate 'already'. Therefore, when a sentence contains the adverb 已经 (yǐjīng), 了 should be used at the end of the sentence. Since the modal particle 了 can, by itself, serve the function of indicating 'already', 已经 is optional.
Compare the following dialogues to see the difference between a sentence with 了 and one without 了.
张: 今天我忘了戴手表, 请问, 现在(是)几点?
Zhāng: Jīntiān wǒ wàng le dài shǒubiǎo, qǐng wèn, xiànzài (shì) jǐ diǎn?
王: 六点半。
Wáng: Liù diǎn bàn.
Zhang: I forgot to bring my watch today. May I ask what time it is now?
Wang: It's 6.30.
Compare: 张:几点了? 小李怎么还没来?
Zhāng: Jǐ diǎn le? Xiǎo Lǐ zěnme hái méi lái?
王: 六点半了, 他大概不来了。
Wáng: Liù diǎn bàn le, tā dàgài bù lái le.
Zhang: What time is it already? How come Xiao Li is still not here?
Wang: It's already 6.30. He probably won't come.
(了 in 几点了 and 六点半了 indicates that it's getting late; therefore, the meaning of 'already' is implied. 了 in 不来了 indicates a change of situation. See below.)
他来中国半年了, 一个好玩的地方也没去过。
Tā lái Zhōngguó bàn nián le, yí ge hǎowán de dìfāng yě méi qù guo.
He has already been in China for half a year; (but) he has not been anywhere fun.
(Because 了 implies 'already', 'half a year' is considered quite a long time in this sentence.)
Compare: 他来中国才半年, 所以还不太习惯。
Tā lái Zhōngguó cái bàn nián, suǒyǐ hái bú tài xíguàn.
He has been in China for only half a year, so he is not used to it yet.
(Because 才 means 'only', this sentence cannot have 了.)
### (b) Some other expressions that should take 了
In addition to 已经, some other expressions that have a similar meaning to 已经, such as 早就 (zǎojiù: 'long ago') and 好久 (hǎojiǔ: 'for a long time') should take a modal particle 了.
李: 你知道吗? 小王跟张小姐要结婚了。 (要......了 indicates an impending action.)
Lǐ: Nǐ zhīdào ma? Xiǎo Wáng gēn Zhāng xiǎojiě yào jiéhūn le.
丁: 这件事我早就知道了。
Dīng: Zhè jiàn shì wǒ zǎojiù zhīdào le.
Li: Did you know? Xiao Wang and Miss Zhang are going to get married.
Ding: I have long known about this.
王: 今天想吃什么菜?
Wáng: Jīntiān xiǎng chī shénme cài?
张:好久没吃法国菜了, 吃法国菜吧!
Zhāng: Hǎo jiǔ méi chī Fǎguó cài le, chī Fǎguó cài ba!
Wang: What kind of food do you feel like eating today?
Zhang: I have not had French food in quite a while. Let's have French food!
### (c) Indicating a change or emergence of a situation with 了
了 as a modal particle can imply a change of situation or the emergence of a new situation.
下雨了, 咱们不能去公园了。
Xià yǔ le, zánmen bù néng qù gōngyuán le.
It's raining. We cannot go to the park (as we planned).
(了 in 下雨了 indicates the emergence of a new situation. 了 in 咱们不能去公园了 indicates a change of situation.)
医生: 今天觉得怎么样?
Yīshēng: Jīntiān juéde zěnmeyàng?
病人: 好一点了。头不疼了, 也不发烧了。
Bìngrén: Hǎo yìdiǎn le. Tóu bù téng le, yě bù fāshāo le.
医生: 我想, 你的病再过两天就会好了。(好 \+ 了 = to feel fine + new situation = to recover)
Yīshēng: Wǒ xiǎng, nǐde bìng zài guò liǎng tiān jiù huì hǎo le.
Doctor: How do you feel today?
Patient: A little better. (了 implies this is a new situation.) I don't have a headache anymore and I don't have a fever anymore, either.
Doctor: I think you will recover from your illness in two days.
### (d) 别......了
别 (bié)......了 is a negative imperative sentence used to urge the listener to stop doing something. The expression can also be 别再 (zài)......了. The implication of 了 here is a change of situation.
别哭了, 赶快想解决问题的办法吧。
Bié kū le, gǎnkuài xiǎng jiějué wèntí de bànfǎ ba.
Stop crying. (= Don't cry anymore.) Hurry and try to think of a solution to the problem.
Compare: 现在我要告诉你一个坏消息; 你听了以后,别哭。
Xiànzài wǒ yào gàosù nǐ yí ge huài xiāoxí; nǐ tīng le yǐhòu, bié kū.
I am going to tell you some bad news. When you've heard it, don't cry.
(Without 了 after 别哭, it indicates the listener is not crying.)
既然他总骗你, 以后你就别再相信他说的话了。
Jìrán ta zǒng piàn nǐ, yǐhòu nǐ jiù bié zài xiāngxìn tā shuō de huà le.
Since he always lies to you, don't believe what he says anymore.
### (e) 太......了
The 了 in 太......了 is optional, but it is frequently used. In a negative sentence, the 了 is no longer used. Used in a stand-alone exclamation, 了 is not optional.
王先生: 这个房子太小(了), 也太贵(了)。
Wáng xiānsheng: Zhè ge fángzi tài xiǎo (le), yě tài guì (le).
房地产商: 那我再带你去看一个; 那个房子不太贵, 不过那里的交通不太方便。
Fángdìchǎn shāng: Nà wǒ zài dài nǐ qù kàn yí ge; nà ge fángzi bú tài guì, búguò nàlǐ de jiāotōng bú tài fāngbiàn.
王: 大却不贵? 太好了! (了 is not optional)
Wáng: Dà què bú guì? Tài hǎo le!
Mr Wang: This house is too small, and it's also too expensive.
Property Salesperson: Then I will take you to see another one. That one is not very expensive, but it's not very easy to get around town at that location (literally: the transportation is not very convenient.)
Mr Wang: Big but not expensive? Wonderful!
### (f) Making an inference
了 can be used to make an inference according to a given situation. 那 (nà) or 那么 (nàme), meaning 'in that case' is frequently used in such a sentence. It is not unusual to see a different character, such as 咯 or 啰, both pronounced lo, in place of 了. Either a full stop or a question mark can be used.
李: 我们班, 男的都是美国人, 女的都是英国人。
Lǐ: Wǒmen bān, nán de dōu shì Měiguó rén, nǚ de dōu shì Yīngguó rén.
张:那么史密斯先生是美国人了?
Zhāng: Nàme Shǐmìsī xiānsheng shì Měiguó rén le.
Li: In our class, all the males are American and all the females are British.
Zhang: In that case, Mr Smith must be an American.
王太太: 我儿子考上了最好的大学。
Wáng tàitai: Wǒ érzi kǎo shàng le zuì hǎo de dàxué.
李太太:那你现在一定很高兴咯。
Lǐ tàitai: Nà nǐ xiànzài yídìng hěn gāoxìng lo.
Mrs Wang: My son has passed the entrance exam into the best university.
Mrs Li: Then you must be happy now.
## Level 2 29.6 The use of 的 as a modal particle
### (a) Emphasizing the 'certainty' of a future event with 会......的
的 can be used as a modal particle to emphasize 'certainty' of a future event. It is used in a sentence with 会 (huì) to reassure the listener.
妈妈: 要记得, 你到了外国, 一定要常常打电话回家。
Māma: Yào jìde, nǐ dào le wàiguó, yídìng yào chángcháng dǎ diànhuà huí jiā.
爸爸: 别担心了, 她不会忘记的。 (了 indicates a change of situation; 的 goes with 会 and is used to reassure the listener of the certainty of a future event.)
Bàba: Bié dānxīn le, tā bú huì wàngjì de.
女儿: 对, 妈妈, 您放心吧, 我会常常给你们打的。 (Another 会......的.)
Nǚ'ér: Duì, māma, nín fàngxīn ba, wǒ huì chángcháng gěi nǐmen dǎ de.
Mother: Don't forget to call us often while you are abroad.
Father: Stop worrying. She won't forget.
Daughter: That's right, Mother, don't worry! I definitely will call you often.
### (b) 挺......的/满......的: 'quite'
An optional 的 is used in 挺 (tǐng)......的 or 满 (mǎn)......的, meaning 'quite'.
李: 听说王老师昨天请你去参观他新买的房子。他的新房子怎么样?
Lǐ: Tīngshuō Wáng lǎoshī zuótiān qǐng nǐ qù cānguān tā xīn mǎi de fángzi. Tāde xīn fángzi zěnmeyàng?
张:满大﹑ 也满漂亮(的), 不过离市区挺远(的)。
Zhāng: Mǎn da, yě mǎn piàoliàng (de), búguò lí shìqū tǐng yuǎn (de).
Li: I heard that Teacher Wang invited you to visit his newly bought house. How is his new house?
Zhang: Quite big and quite pretty, but it is quite far away from the city.
## Exercises
Fill in each of the blanks with a proper modal particle (吗, 呢, 吧, 了 or 的). If no modal particle should be used from a grammatical perspective, use Ø.
Not all modal particles have grammatical functions; some only have pragmatic functions. Try to decide on a proper one for each blank, even if it is not grammatically required. English translations are not provided so as to avoid giving direct information about the answers. For English translations, see the 'Key to exercises' section.
* Level 1 1 妈妈: 小明, 你为什么又在吃点心? 你已经这么胖 ____, 别再吃 ____!
爸爸: 好 ____, 让他吃 ____, 别唠叨 ____。
* 2 这本词典上面写着你的名字, 是你的 ____! 借我用一下, 好 ____?
* 3 妈妈: 爸爸 ____? 他回家了 ____?
儿子: 他在客厅里看电视 ____。
* 4 李: 最近我快忙死 ____, 天天都半夜以后才上床睡觉 ____。
王: 那明天晚上的舞会, 你不能去 ____?
李: 我还没有决定 ____! 因为后天是星期天, 所以星期六晚上, 我想轻松一下。
* Level 3 5 妈妈: 现在几点 ____? 小明怎么还没回来 ____? 平常这个时候, 他早就回来 ____。大家都在等他回来吃饭 ____。
爸爸: 不用急, 还不到八点 ____! 咱们再等十分钟 ____!
女儿: 如果十分钟以后他还是没回来 ____? 我饿死 ____。
爸爸: 那我们就不等 ____。
* 6 男: 星期六晚上一起去吃饭, 好 ____?
女: 对不起, 我不能去外面吃饭。
男: 哦? 为什么 ____? 女: 你大概不知道 ____, 我最近正在减肥 ____!
男: 那我们星期六晚上做什么 ____?
女: 去看场电影 ____! 我好久没看电影 ____。
男: 哦, 那你还没看过 《哈利波特》 ____? 去看 《哈利波特》 ____! 女: 我对这个电影没有兴趣。男: 那 《超人》 ____?
女: 太好 ____! 听说这个电影不错, 咱们就去看 《超人》 ____。
* 7 老师: 这是什么字? 谁知道? 王中, 你知道 ____?
王中: 老师, 我们还没有学过那个字 ____!
老师: 哦, 是 ____? 好, 那我问你另外一个。厖这个 ____? 学过了 ____?
王中: 学过 ____, 可是我想不起来那个字的意思。
老师: 王中不认识这个字, 李明, 你 ____?
* 8 女: 你到了中国以后, 可能会很忙 ____, 可是一定要记得常常给我打电话 ____。
男: 没问题, 我一定会打 ____。
* 9 老师: 这几个字, 你们已经练习了很多次 ____, 应该会写了 ____!
学生: 会 ____。
老师: 下次考试的时候, 会不会忘记?
学生: 您放心 ____, 不会 ____。
* 10 王太太: 这个房子离你的公司很近, 开车只要十分钟, 而且也不太贵。 咱们买 ____!
王先生: 别再说 ____, 我不喜欢这个房子。
王太太: 为什么____?
王先生: 我觉得厨房、 客厅都太小 ____。
王太太: 你真的觉得这个厨房不够大 ____? 你大概在开玩笑 ____! 你什么时候进过厨房?
# [30
Conjunctive pairs](content.xhtml#bck_Ch030)
Conjunctions are used to connect two words, two phrases or two clauses. The relationship between the words, the phrases or the clauses is indicated by the meaning of the conjunction. In Chinese, a conjunction can be a word or a pair of words. The focus of this chapter will be on the most commonly used conjunctions that are used in pairs. Such conjunctions will thus be referred to as 'conjunctive pairs'.
**Basic grammatical features** | **Examples**
---|---
1 The subordinate clause appears before the main clause. | 因为天气不错, 所以我要出去走走。
Yīnwèi tiānqì bú cuò, suǒyǐ wǒ yào chū qù zǒu zǒu.
Because the weather is nice, I am going out for a walk.
2 A comma should be used between the subordinate clause and the main clause. | 虽然天气不错, 可是我不想出去。
Suīrán tiānqì bú cuò, kěshì wǒ bù xiǎng chū qù.
Although the weather is nice, I don't feel like going out.
3 The subject can appear before the first word of the conjunctive pair. | 这个考试虽然很难, 但是我考得很好。
Zhè ge kǎoshì suīrán hěn nán, dànshì wǒ kǎo de hěn hǎo.
Although the test was hard, I did well.
4 The subject should not be repeated if the subordinate clause and the main clause have the same subject. | 如果你明天还是不舒服, 就不必来开会了。
Rúguǒ nǐ míngtiān háishì bù shūfú, jiù bú bì lái kāi huì le.
If you still don't feel well tomorrow, you don't have to come to the meeting.
## Level 2 30.1 The use of 因为......,所以......
因为今天天气不错,所以我打算到公园去走走。 (所以 is not optional.)
Yīnwèi jīntiān tiānqì bú cuò, suǒyǐ wǒ dǎsuàn dào gōngyuán qù zǒu zǒu.
Because the weather is nice today, I plan to go to the park for a walk.
因为他昨天没有写功课,所以今天被老师骂了一顿。 (Do not repeat 他 after 所以.)
Yīnwèi tā zuótiān méiyǒu xiě gōngkè, suǒyǐ jīntiān bèi lǎoshī mà le yí dùn.
Because he did not do his homework yesterday, he was scolded by the teacher today.
他因为欠了一大笔债,所以只好把房子卖了来还债。 (The subject can appear before 因为.)
Tā yīnwèi qiàn le yí dà bǐ zhài, suǒyǐ zhǐhǎo bǎ fángzi mài le lái huán zhài.
Because he owed a large sum of money, he had no choice but to sell his house to settle the debt.
### (a) Omitting 因为
It is acceptable to use 所以 without 因为. In this case, 因此 (yīncǐ) can be used in place of 所以 to make the speech sound more formal.
小李跟他的女朋友分手了,所以最近他心情不好, 常常发脾气。
Xiǎo Lǐ gēn tāde nǚ péngyǒu fēnshǒu le, suǒyǐ zuìjìn tā xīnqíng bù haǒ, chángcháng fā píqì.
Xiao Li has broken up with his girlfriend; therefore, he has been in a bad mood lately, and often lost his temper.
最近经济很不景气,因此失业的人很多。
Zuìjìn jīngjì hěn bù jǐngqì, yīncǐ shīyè de rén hěn duō.
Recently, the economy has been in a recession; therefore, there are many unemployed people.
### (b) Omitting 所以
It is possible to have 因为 without 所以, but in this case the 因为 clause must follow the main clause, and a comma should be used between the two clauses. Also, the 因为 clause should have a subject whether or not it is the same as the subject in the main clause.
今天小王心情特别好, 因为老师在全班同学的面前夸奖他。 (The comma is not optional.)
Jīntiān Xiǎo Wáng xīnqíng tèbié hǎo, yīnwèi lǎoshī zài quán bān tóngxué de mìanqián kuājiǎng tā.
Today Xiao Wang is in a particularly good mood because his teacher praised him in front of the entire class.
我跟我男朋友分手了, 因为我发现他骗我。 (我 before 发现 is necessary even though both clauses share the same subject.)
Wǒ gēn wǒ nán péngyǒu fēnshǒu le, yīnwèi wǒ fāxiàn tā piàn wǒ.
I've broken up with my boyfriend because I found out that he lied to me.
## Level 3 30.2 The use of '因为......就/而 \+ verb or verbal phrase'
The subject must appear only once and it must appear before 因为. 就 (jiù) is used to imply that the reason is insufficient; 而 (ér) does not have such an implication. Whether or not the reason is sufficient is sometimes subjective.
### (a) When 因为......而...... and 因为......所以 can be interchangeable
The following examples show that some 因为......而...... sentences can be interchangeable with 因为......所以...... sentences.
今天小李因为身体不舒服而不能来上课。(= 今天小李因为身体不舒服,所以 不能来上课。)
Jīntiān Xiǎo Lǐ yīnwèi shēntǐ bù shūfú ér bù néng lái shàngkè.
Today Xiao Li could not come to class because he was not feeling well.
小王的女朋友因为他脾气太坏而决定跟他分手。(= 因为小王的脾气太坏,所以他女朋友决定跟他分手。)
Xiǎo Wáng de nǚ péngyǒu yīnwèi tā píqì tài huài ér juédìng gēn tā fēnshǒu.
Xiao Wang's girlfriend decided to break up with him because he is bad-tempered.
### (b) When 因为......而...... and 因为......所以 are not interchangeable
The following examples show that 因为......而...... sentences may not always be interchangeable with 因为......所以...... sentences.
小王常常因为天气不好就不去上课。
Xiǎo Wáng chángcháng yīnwèi tiānqi bù hǎo jiù bú qù shàng kè.
Xiao Wang frequently skips classes (simply) because the weather is bad. (The word 'simply' is used to show the meaning of 就, which implies the insufficient reason.)
我们老师说, 学生可以因为生病而不去上课, 但是不应该因为天气不好就不去 上课。
Wǒmen lǎoshī shuō, xuéshēng kěyǐ yīnwèi shēngbìng ér bú qù shàngkè, dànshì bù yīnggāi yīnwèi tiānqì bù hǎo jiù bú qù shàngkè.
Our teacher says that students can miss classes because they are sick, but they should not miss classes simply because the weather is bad.
### (c) Making negative 因为......而/就 sentences
Where to put the negative word in an 因为......而/就 sentence has been a confusing issue, even for advanced learners, since the English counterparts of the various possible sentences can be very similar. The following examples show how to use the negative word properly.
小李因为没有兄弟姐妹而觉得有一点寂寞。(= 小李因为没有兄弟姐妹, 所以 觉得有一点寂寞。)
Xiǎo Lǐ yīnwèi méiyǒu xiōngdì jiěmèi ér juéde yǒu yìdiǎn jìmò.
Xiao Li feels a little lonely because he does not have any siblings.
小王从来不因为没有兄弟姐妹而觉得寂寞。(This cannot be converted into 因为......所以.......)
Xiǎo Wáng cónglái bù yīnwèi méiyǒu xiōngdì jiěmèi ér juéde jìmò.
Xiao Wang never feels lonely (simply) because he does not have any siblings.
小张因为有很多兄弟姐妹而从来不觉得寂寞。(= 小张因为有很多兄弟姐妹, 所以从来不觉得寂寞。)
Xiǎo Zhāng yīnwèi yǒu hěn duō xiōngdì jiěmèi ér cónglái bù juéde jìmò.
Xiao Zhang never feels lonely because he has many siblings.
他从来不因为担心会失败而不敢尝试。(This cannot be converted into 因为...... 所以.......)
Tā cónglái bù yīnwèi dānxīn huì shībài ér bù gǎn chángshì.
He is never afraid of trying anything because he is worried that he might fail.
他因为担心会失败而从来不敢尝试。(他因为担心会失败,所以从来不敢尝试。)
Tá yīnwèi dānxīn huì shībài er cónglái bù gǎn chángshì.
He never dares to try anything because he worries that he might fail.
## Level 2 30.3 The use of 虽然......,可是/但是......
但是 (dànshì) and 可是 (kěshì) are considered interchangeable. 但是 can be shortened into 但, but 可是 is only shortened into 可 in casual speech.
虽然今天天气很好,可是(or 但是)我不能出去, 我要在家准备明天的考试。 (可是 or 但是 is not optional.)
Suīrán jīntiān tiānqì hěn hǎo, kěshì (or dànshì) wǒ bù néng chūqù, wǒ yào zài jiā zhǔnbèi míngtiān de kǎoshì.
Although today's weather is nice, I cannot go out. I must study for tomorrow's test at home.
### (a) Location of the subject
The subject in the 虽然 clause can appear before 虽然, whether or not it is the same subject in the 可是/但是 clause.
昨天的考试虽然很难,可是我考得很好, 因为我准备得很充分。
Zuótiān de kǎoshì suīrán hěn nán, kěshì wǒ kǎo de hěn hǎo, yīnwèi wǒ zhǔnbèi de hěn chōngfèn.
Although yesterday's test was difficult, I did well because I was fully prepared.
小李虽然相当聪明,但是不够用功, 所以考试成绩总是很差。
Xiǎo Lǐ suīrán xiāngdāng cōngmíng, dànshì bú gòu yònggōng, suǒyǐ kǎoshì chéngjī zǒngshì hěn chà.
Although Xiao Li is quite smart, he is not hardworking enough, so his test scores are always poor.
### (b) Omitting 虽然
It is possible to have only 可是/但是 in a sentence without 虽然.
史密斯先生中文只学了半年多,可是已经认识几百个汉字了。
Shǐmìsī xiānsheng Zhōngwén zhǐ xué le bàn nián duō, kěshì yǐjīng rènshì jǐ bǎi ge Hànzì le.
Mr Smith has only studied Chinese for a little over half a year, but he already knows several hundred Chinese characters.
### (c) Variations with 却 and 还是
The adverb 却 (què) can be used in a 可是/但是 sentence. When 却 is used, 可是/但是 becomes optional.
(虽然)医生开的药, 他都吃了,(可是)病情却越来越严重。
(Suīrán) yīshēng kāi de yào, tā dōu chī le, (kěshì) bìngqíng què yuè lái yuè yánzhòng.
He has taken all the medicine that the doctor prescribed, but his condition is getting more and more serious.
* 却 and 可是/但是 can co-exist, but they do not replace each other since 可是/但是 (conjunction) should appear before the subject, whereas 却 (adverb) must appear after the subject
(Situation: The results of a beauty pageant have been announced.)Š
评审宣布, 李小姐得了第三名。她虽然笑得很高兴,(但是)心里却相当难过。
Píngshěn xuānbù, Lǐ xiǎojiě dé le dì sān míng. Tā suīrán xiào de hěn gāoxìng, (dànshì) xīn lǐ què xiāngdāng nánguò.
The judges announced that Miss Li won third place. Although she smiled happily, she was, however, quite sad inside.
* 还是, meaning 'still', can be used in the 可是/但是 clause to indicate that there is no change or effect despite what was mentioned in the 虽然 clause. 还是 and 可是/但是 do not replace each other since 还是 is an adverb.
王先生虽然病了, 可是还是天天都来上班。
Wáng xiānsheng suīrán bìng le, kěshì háishì tiān tiān dōu lái shàngbān.
Although Mr Wang is sick, he still comes to work every day.
## Level 2 30.4 The use of 如果......,就......
如果 (rúguǒ) can be replaced by 要是 (yàoshì) to make the speech sound more casual; it can also be replaced by 倘若 (tǎngruò) to make it sound formal.
Although 就 can be interpreted as meaning 'then', it is an adverb; therefore, it should not appear before the subject of the main clause.
王: 明天是星期六, 一起到郊外走走吧!
Wáng: Míngtiān shì xīngqī liù, yìqǐ dào jiāowài zǒu zǒu ba!
张:要是天气好, 我就跟你去。 (要是天气好, 就我跟你去 is incorrect.)
Zhāng: Yàoshì tiānqì hǎo, wǒ jiù gēn nǐ qù.
Wang: Tomorrow is Saturday. How about if we go to the countryside for a walk?
Zhang: If the weather is nice, I will go with you.
### (a) Variation with 那么
An optional word 那么 (nàme) can be used in the main clause. Although 那么 literally means 'then', 那么 and 就 do not replace each other since 那么 should appear before the subject of the sentence, whereas 就 should appear after it.
李: 经理, 明天的迎新会, 在室内还是室外办?
Lǐ: Jīnglǐ, míngtiān de yíngxīn huì, zài shì nèi háishì shì wài bàn?
经理:倘若天晴,那么我们就在室外办; 倘若下雨,那么就在室内。
Jīnglǐ: Tǎngruò tiān qíng, nàme wǒmen jiù zài shì wài bàn; tǎngruò xiàyǔ, nàme jiù zài shì nèi.
Li: Manager, will tomorrow's welcome party be held indoors or outdoors?
Manager: If it is clear (sunny), then we will hold it outdoors. If it rains, then it will be indoors.
### (b) Forming questions or suggestions
When the main clause is not a simple statement, but a suggestion or a question, 就 usually is not used. However, 那么 can remain.
这个周末, 你有没有事?要是没事,(那么,)想不想去郊外走走?(There is no 就 because 想不想去郊外走走 is a question.)
Zhè ge zhōumò, nǐ yǒu méiyǒu shì? Yàoshì méi shì, (nàme) xiǎng bù xiǎng qù jiāowài zǒu zǒu?
Will you be busy this weekend? If you are not, would you like to go to the countryside for a walk?
### (c) When the main clause contains another adverb
When the main clause has another adverb, 就 can be optional and 那么 remains optional.
小王这么顽皮, 如果我是他妈妈,(那么,)一定会被他气死。 (Because of the additional adverb 一定, 就 is optional.)
Xiǎo Wáng zhème wánpí, rúguǒ wǒ shì tā māma, yídìng huì bèi tā qì sǐ.
Xiao Wang is so naughty. If I were his mother, I would be terribly upset by him.
### (d) Using the modal particle 了 to indicate a hypothetical situation
If 要是/如果/倘若 is used to indicate a hypothetical situation of a past event, the modal particle 了 is often used in the main clause to emphasize that the situation would have been different.
还好今天出门的时候带了钱。要是没带钱, 这么好的东西,就没办法买了。
Háihǎo jīntiān chū mén de shíhòu dài le qián. Yàoshì méi dàiqián, zhème hǎo de dōngxi, jiù méi bànfǎ mǎi le.
Fortunately, I brought money with me when I left the house today. If I hadn't brought any money, I would have had no way to buy something this good.
### (e) Casual speech: (要是/如果)......的话
In casual speech, 要是/如果 can be 要是/如果......的话 (de huà). When 的话 is used, 要是/如果 becomes optional.
张: 明天你跟男朋友要去哪里约会?
Zhāng: Míngtiān nǐ gēn nán péngyǒu yào qù nǎlǐ yuēhuì?
李: 天气好的话, 就去公园照相; 下雨的话, 就去看电影。
Lǐ: Tiānqì hǎo de huà, jiù qù gōngyuán zhàoxiàng; xià yǔ de huà, jiù qù kàn diànyǐng.
Zhang: Where are you and your boyfriend going on a date tomorrow?
Li: If the weather is nice, we will go to the park to take pictures. If it rains, we will go to a movie.
## Level 3 30.5 The use of 即使......,也......
即使 (jíshǐ)......也...... has two connotations: a hypothetical situation ('even if') or an extreme situation ('even').
即使 can be replaced by 就是 (jiùshì) or 就算 (jiùsuàn) to make the speech sound more casual.
### (a) A hypothetical situation: 'even if'
即使......也...... can imply a hypothetical situation that may or may not come true and 'even if' it were true or were to become true, it would result in the same effect.
王先生: 小李人品不好, 你不应该跟这种人结婚。
Wáng xiānsheng: Xiǎo Lǐ rénpǐn bù hǎo, nǐ bù yīnggāi gēn zhè zhǒng rén jiéhūn.
张小姐: 你不是我爸爸,就算你是我爸爸,也没有权利反对我跟他结婚。
Zhāng xiǎojiě: Nǐ bú shì wǒ bàba, jiùsuàn nǐ shì wǒ bàba, yě méiyǒu quánlì fǎnduì wǒ gēn tā jiéhūn.
Mr Wang: Xiao Li's moral character is bad. You should not marry this kind of man.
Miss Zhang: You are not my father. Even if you were, you would have no right to oppose my marriage to him.
我没有钱。就是有,也不会借他。
Wǒ méiyǒu qián. Jiùshì yǒu, yě bú huì jiè tā.
I don't have any money. Even if I did, I would not loan him any.
我只对音乐有兴趣, 所以我一定要念音乐。即使将来找不到工作, 我也不在乎。
Wǒ zhǐ duì yīnyuè yǒu xìngqù, suǒyǐ wǒ yídìng yào niàn yīnyuè. Jíshǐ jiānglái zhǎo bú dào gōngzuò, wǒ yě bú zàihū.
I am only interested in music, so I insist on studying music. Even if I cannot find a job in the future, I don't care.
### (b) An extreme situation: 'even'
即使......, 也...... can also imply an extreme situation, and is translated into English as 'even'. The meaning is similar to 连 (lián)......也......In this case, an optional 是 usually follows 即使/就算. Again, the connotation is that 'even' an extreme case would result in the same effect. What follows 即使(是) is a noun or noun phrase.
张经理是一个工作狂,就是周末也去公司加班。
Zhāng jīnglǐ shì yí ge gōngzuò kuáng, jiùshì zhōumò yě qù gōngsī jiābān.
Manager Zhang is a workaholic. He even goes to work extra hours on the weekend.
老师: 明天的数学考试非常容易。即使是数学最差的同学,也一定可以考得很好。
Lǎoshī: Míngtiān de shùxué kǎoshì fēicháng róngyì. Jíshǐ shì shùxué zuì chà de tóngxué, yě yídìng kěyǐ kǎo de hěn hǎo.
小李: 我的数学这么差,就算是最容易的题目, 我恐怕也答不出来。
Xiǎo Lǐ: Wǒde shùxué zhème chà, jiùsuàn shì zuì róngyì de tímù, wǒ kǒngpà yě dá bù chūlái.
Teacher: Tomorrow's mathematics test is very easy. Even those students who are poorest at mathematics can definitely do well.
Xiao Li: I'm so bad at mathematics. I probably won't be able to answer even the easiest questions.
## Level 3 30.6 The use of '无论 \+ question,都......'
无论 (wúlùn) can be replaced by 不管 (bùguǎn) to make the speech sound casual. Also, either 无论 or 不管 is optional. A sentence would have the same meaning without either word.
☞ See 34.14 for more on sentences without 无论 or 不管.
When 无论 and 都 share the same subject, the subject must not be repeated. It can appear at the beginning of the sentence or before 都.
张: 这几天我很忙, 明天下午的会, 可不可以不来参加?
Zhāng: Zhè jǐ tiān wǒ hěn máng, míngtiān xiàwǔ de huì, kě bù kěyǐ bù lái cānjiā?
经理: 明天的会非常重要, 你无论多忙都得来参加。 (你无论多忙你都得来 would be improper. But 无论多忙你都得来 is correct.)
Jīnglǐ: Míngtiān de huì fēicháng zhòngyào, nǐ wúlùn duō máng dōu děi lái cānjiā.
Zhang: I am busy these days. Can I skip tomorrow afternoon's meeting?
Manager: Tomorrow's meeting is very important. You must attend no matter how busy you are.
为了多运动, 小王无论去哪里都骑自行车或者走路。
Wèile duō yùndòng, Xiǎo Wáng wúlùn qù nǎlǐ dōu qí zìxíngchē huòzhě zǒulù.
In order to get more exercise, Xiao Wang rides his bicycle or walks no matter where he is going.
《哈利波特》 广受欢迎,无论大人还是小孩都喜欢看。
'Hālì Bōtè' guǎng shòu huānyíng, wúlùn dàrén háishì xiǎohái dōu xǐhuān kàn.
Harry Potter is widely popular. Everybody likes it, be it an adult or a child.
小兰决心要嫁给李先生,无论我怎么劝她, 她都不听。
Xiǎolán juéxīn yào jià gěi Lǐ xiānsheng, wúlùn wǒ zěnme quàn tā, tā dōu bù tīng.
Xiaolan is determined to marry Mr Li. No matter how I urge her (not to), she will not listen.
## Level 2/3 30.7 The use of 不但......, 而且(也/还)......
不但 (búdàn) can be replaced by 不仅 (bùjǐn) or 不只 (bùzhǐ). When the 不但 and 而且 (érqiě) clauses share the same subject, it appears only once before 不但.
骑自行车不但方便, 而且也是很好的运动, 所以我每天都骑自行车去上班。
Qí zìxíngchē búdàn fāngbiàn, érqiě yě shì hěn hǎo de yùndòng, suǒyǐ wǒ měi tiān dōu qí zìxíngchē qù shàngbān.
Riding bicycles is not only convenient, but also a very good form of exercise, so I ride my bicycle to work every day.
* 不但 is optional as long as 而且 is used
王先生 (不但)长得很帅,而且每个月赚不少钱, 难怪喜欢他的女孩子很多。
Wáng xiānsheng (búdàn) zhǎng de hěn shuài, érqiě měi ge yuè zhuàn bù shǎo qián, nánguài xǐhuān tā de nǚ háizi hěn duō.
Not only is Mr Wang good-looking, but he also makes a lot of money every month. No wonder many girls like him.
* When 也 or 还 is used, 而且 becomes optional
小李不但钢琴弹得好,(而且)小提琴也拉得不错。
Xiǎo Lǐ búdàn gāngqín tán de hǎo, (érqiě) xiǎotíqín yě lā de búcuò.
Not only does Xiao Li play the piano well, but he also plays the violin quite well.
* When the 不但 and 而且 clauses share the same subject, either 也 or 还 can be used
小张不但会说日文,(而且)还(or 也)会说法文。
Xiǎo Zhāng búdàn huì shuō Rìwén, (érqiě) hái (or yě) huì shuō Fǎwén.
Xiao Zhang can not only speak Japanese, but he can also speak French.
* Without 不但, 而且 can be used as a stand-alone word, meaning 'besides' or 'in addition'. The subject should always appear after 而且
张: 听说小王病了。
Zhāng: Tīngshuō Xiǎo Wáng bìng le.
李: 唉! 没错! 而且他还失业了。
Lǐ: Ài! Méi cuò. Érqiě tā hái shīyè le.
Zhang: I heard that Xiao Wang is sick.
Li: Alas! That's right! In addition, he has lost his job.
* When the 不但 clause and the 而且 clause do not have the same subject, 不但 should appear before the subject. 也 should be used in the 而且 clause; 还 cannot be used. The pattern is '不但 \+ subject A......, 而且 subject B 也......' 也 is required, not optional.
《哈利波特》 这套小说, 广受欢迎,不但小孩子喜欢看,而且很多大人也被吸引住了。
'Hālì Bōtè' zhè tào xiǎoshuō, guǎng shòu huānyíng, búdàn xiǎoháizi xǐhuān kàn, érqiě hěn duō dàrén yě bèi xīyǐn zhù le.
The Harry Potter novels are widely popular. Not only do children enjoy reading them, but grown-ups are also riveted.
数学考试以前, 小王花了很多时间, 帮助数学不好的同学。结果,不但他自己 考得很好,而且他的朋友也都考得不错。
Shùxué kǎoshì yǐqián, Xiǎo Wáng huā le hěn duō shíjiān, bāngzhù shùxué bù hǎo de tóngxué. Jiéguǒ, búdàn tā zìjǐ kǎo de hěn hǎo, érqiě tāde péngyǒu yě dōu kǎo de bú cuò.
Before the mathematics exam, Xiao Wang spent a lot of time helping his classmates whose mathematics is not good. As a result, not only did he himself do well in the exam, but also all his friends did well.
## Level 3 30.8 The use of '不但 \+ negative (不/没有)......,反而(还)......'
### (a) The connotation of 反而
With rare exceptions, the 不但 and 反而 (fǎn'ér) clauses should have the same subject, which must appear before 不但. The phrase in 反而 should be a positive sentence.
反而 is used to indicate that what happens does not stand to reason or is contrary to one's expectations; it does not have a direct counterpart in English.
第一次考试, 我考得很差, 所以我花了很多时间准备第二次考试; 没想到, 我不但没有进步,反而考得比第一次更差。(更 can be 还。)
Dì yí cì kǎoshì, wǒ kǎo de hěn chà, suǒyǐ wǒ huā le hěn duō shíjiān zhǔnbèi dì èr cì kǎoshì; méi xiǎngdào, wǒ búdàn méiyǒu jìnbù, fǎn'ér kǎo de bǐ dì yī cì gèng chà.
I did poorly on the first test, so I spent a lot of time studying for the second test. I did not expect that not only did I not improve (my scores), I did even worse.
小王总说我随时可以请他帮忙。可是昨天我向他借钱, 他不但不肯借我, 反而(还)把我骂了一顿。
Xiǎo Wáng zǒng shuō wǒ suíshí kěyǐ qǐng tā bāngmáng. Kěshì zuótiān wǒ xiàng tā jiè qián, tā búdàn bù kěn jiè wǒ, fǎn'ér (hái) bǎ wǒ mà le yí dùn.
Xiao Wang always said that I could ask him for help anytime. But (when) I tried to borrow some money from him yesterday, not only would he not lend me any, he scolded me.
### (b) 反而 as a stand-alone word
When there is a clear and self-explanatory context, the 不但 clause becomes optional and 反而 is used as a stand-alone word. In this case, 反而 must appear after the subject. (Keep in mind that 而且 as a stand-alone word must appear before the subject.)
When the 不但 part is omitted, the meaning of 反而 depends completely on the context, and cannot be translated into an actual word in English.
老师骂了他以后,他反而笑了。
Lǎoshī mà le tā yǐhòu, tā fǎn'ér xiào le.
After the teacher scolded him, he smiled.
(The reasonable expectation was that he should have felt bad and cried; therefore, 他不但没哭 becomes redundant due to the clear context. Also, 反而 must appear after 他; therefore, 反而他笑了 is incorrect.)
小李真没良心, 我帮了他这么多忙,他反而(还)在背后说我的坏话。
Xiǎo Lǐ zhēn méi liángxīn, wǒ bāng le tā zhème duō máng, ta fǎn'ér (hái) zài bèi hòu shuō wǒde huàihuà.
Xiao Li is really ungrateful. I have helped him so much, but (not only did he not thank me) he still says bad things about me behind my back.
(The context is that it stands to reason that he should have been grateful; therefore, 他不但不感谢我 is omitted.)
## Exercises
* I Fill in the blanks with proper words (conjunctions). English translations are not provided so as to avoid giving direct information about the answers. For English translations, see the 'Key to exercises' section.
* Level 1 1 安娜 ______ 不会说中文, 可是特别喜欢听中国歌曲。
* 2 因为今天天气不好,______ 我不想出去, 只想在家看看书。
* 3 王明的记性真差! 十个生词, 他已经记了一个多小时, 可是 ______ 记不住。
* 4 男: 这个星期六, 你想做什么?
女:______ 天气好, 就去野餐。
男: 天气不好呢?
女: 那 ______ 去看电影。
* 5 李先生 ______ 脾气好, 而且很会赚钱, 所以喜欢他的女孩子很多。
* Level 3 6 小兰跟她男朋友吵架了, 她妈妈不但不安慰她,______ 还说一定是她不对。
* 7 经理把小张骂了一顿, 小张心里虽然不高兴, 脸上 ______ 没有表示出来。
* 8 王中是我们班最聪明的学生, 可是 ______ 这个问题实在太难了, 所以 ______ 王中也不会回答。
* 9 李小姐不但漂亮,______ 脾气非常好。可惜我已经结婚了,______ 我还没结婚 ______, 我一定要追她。
* 10 我实在太喜欢这辆车了, 所以 ______ 多贵, 我都一定要买。
* 11 这样东西, 一点用也没有,______ 免费送我, 我也不要。
* 12 真奇怪! 老师在全班同学面前称赞李中, 李中不但不开心,______ 哭了。
* 13 在这个国家, 上大学是免费的。所以 ______ 是穷人家的小孩, 也可以上大学。
* 14 在这个国家, 上大学是免费的。所以 ______ 是穷人家还是有钱人家的小孩, 都可以上大学。
* 15 政府可以因为交通安全 ______ 规定开车的人不能打手机。
* 16 王中成绩很好, 也常常帮助同学, 所以不但老师喜欢他, 他的同学______ 都很喜欢他。
* 17 李明真懒。他常常 ______ 天气不好就不去上课。
* II Translate the following into Chinese using 因为......而/就. Do not use 所以 in any of the sentences.
* Level 3 1 Wang Ming always feels happy because he has a pretty girlfriend.
* 2 Wang Ming frequently feels unhappy because he does not have a girlfriend.
* 3 Wang Ming never feels happy simply because he has a pretty girlfriend.
* 4 Wang Ming never feels unhappy simply because he does not have a girlfriend.
* 5 You cannot miss class simply because the weather is bad.
* 6 Yesterday Wang Ming could not go to classes because he had a high fever.
* 7 Wang Ming never misses classes simply because the weather is bad; but he will sometimes miss classes because he has to go out of town on business.
# [31
Conjunctions used in context](content.xhtml#bck_Ch031)
Context plays an important role in the use of the Chinese language. Certain conjunctions and conjunctive pairs are used in context only. In other words, these conjunctions and conjunctive pairs are used when the situation being discussed is already understood by people engaged in the dialogues or has just been mentioned by one of them. Their counterparts in English may not always show this grammatical feature; therefore, learners who are English speakers should pay attention to this unique feature in Chinese.
## Level 2 31.1 The use of 既然......, (就)......
A comparison between the following two situations illustrates the significance of context.
(Situation: An excerpt from Xiao Wang's diary.)
今天早上起床以后, 看到外面是个大晴天。我想, 天气既然这么好, 为什么不到公园走走呢?(The sentence 外面是个大晴天 establishes the fact that 天气很好.)
Jīntiān zǎoshàng qǐchuáng yǐhòu, kàndào wàimiàn shì ge dà qíngtiān. Wǒ xiǎng, tiānqì jìrán zhème hǎo, wèishénme bú dào gōngyuán zǒu zǒu ne?
This morning when I got up, I saw that it was a bright sunny day outside. I thought to myself: since the weather was so nice, why not go to the park for a walk?
(Situation: An excerpt from Xiao Li's diary.)
今天早上起床以后,因为看到外面天气很好,所以决定到公园去走走。 (外面 天气很好 is the first sentence about the weather; it is not in context. Therefore, 既然 should not be used.)
Jīntiān zǎoshàng qǐchuáng yǐhòu, yīnwèi kàndào wàimiàn tiānqì hěn hǎo, suǒyǐ juédìng dào gōngyuán qù zǒu zǒu.
Upon getting up this morning, because I saw that the weather outside was nice, I decided to go to the park for a walk.
When the main sentence is a simple statement, 就 should be used. When it is a question or a suggestion, 就 normally is not used. 既然 can appear before or after the subject.
The following examples show that what follows 既然 is a fact that has been established. If there is no need to repeat the fact, 这样 (zhèyàng) or 如此 (rúcǐ) must follow 既然.
王: 你气色不太好, 怎么回事?
Wáng: Nǐ qìsè bú tài hǎo, zěnme huí shì?
张: 最近常常觉得很累, 吃不下, 睡不好。
Zhāng: Zuìjìn chángcháng juéde hěn lèi, chī bú xià, shuì bù hǎo.
王:既然这样(= 既然如此), 你怎么还不快去看医生? (or 你就应该快去看医生。)
Wáng: Jìrán zhèyàng (= Jìrán rúcǐ), nǐ zěnme hái bú kuài qù kàn yīshēng?
Wang: You don't look too well. What's the matter?
Zhang: Recently I often feel tired; I can't eat and I can't sleep well.
Wang: Since this is the case, how come you haven't hurried and gone to see a doctor? (or You should hurry and go see a doctor.)
李: 小王真可恶! 我帮过他很多忙, 可是我昨天向他借五块钱, 他竟然不肯借我。
Lǐ: Xiǎo Wáng zhēn kěwù! Wǒ bāng guò tā hěn duō máng, kěshì wǒ zuótiān xiàng tā jiè wǔ kuài qián, tā jìngrán bù kěn jiè wǒ.
丁: 他既然不把你当朋友, 你以后就别再帮他了。
Dīng: Tā jìrán bù bǎ nǐ dāng péngyǒu, nǐ yǐhòu jiù bié zài bāng tā le.
Li: Xiao Wang is really nasty. I have helped him a lot, but yesterday I asked to borrow $5 from him and surprisingly he would not lend it to me.
Ding: Since he did not treat you as a friend, don't help him anymore.
## Level 2/3 31.2 The use of 是因为
因为 (yīnwèi) is usually used to establish a cause or reason. When the cause or reason is already in context, 是因为 should be used; simply using 因为 would not be proper.
李: 唉呀, 我忘了带伞, 你在这里等一下, 我去那家便利商店买把伞。
Lǐ: Āiyā! Wǒ wàng le dài sǎn, nǐ zài zhèlǐ děng yíxià, wǒ qù nà jiā biànlì shāngdiàn mǎi bǎ sǎn.
张: 天气预报说, 今天不会下雨, 你不用去买了。
Zhāng: Tiānqì yùbào shuō, jīntiān bú huì xiàyǔ, nǐ bú yòng qù mǎi le.
李: 我要买伞是因为我不能晒太阳。 (我要买伞, 因为我不能晒太阳 is improper.)
Lǐ: Wǒ yào mǎi sǎn shì yīnwèi wǒ bù néng shài tàiyáng.
Li: Oh no! I forgot to bring an umbrella. You wait here for a moment. I'll go to that convenience store and buy an umbrella.
Zhang: The weather forecast said that it won't rain today. You don't have to buy an umbrella.
Li: (The reason) I have to buy an umbrella (is) because I cannot be exposed to the sun.
Compare: 太阳这么大! 你在这里等一下, 我得去买把伞, 因为我不能晒太阳。
Tàiyáng zhème dà. Nǐ zài zhèlǐ děng yíxià, wǒ děi qù mǎi bǎ sǎn, yīnwèi wǒ bù néng shài tàiyáng.
The sun is so bright! Will you wait here for a moment? I have to go and buy an umbrella (parasol) because I cannot be exposed to the sun.
老师: 王立, 你今天怎么又没有交功课? 又没写, 对不对?
Lǎoshī: Wáng Lì, nǐ jīntiān zěnme yòu méiyǒu jiāo gōngkè? Yòu méi xiě, duì bú duì?
王立: 昨天没交功课是因为没写, 今天没交是因为忘了带来。
Wáng Lì: Zuótiān méi jiāo gōngkè shì yīnwèi méi xiě, jīntiān méi jiāo shì yīnwèi wàng le dài lái.
Teacher: Wang Li, how come you didn't turn in your homework again? You didn't do it again, right?
Wang Li: I didn't turn in my homework yesterday because I didn't do it, but I didn't turn it in today because I forgot to bring it.
## Level 3 31.3 The more formal use of (之) 所以......是因为......
In a more formal situation, the expression is (之) 所以 (zhī suǒyǐ)......是因为......What follows (之) 所以 must be an established situation.
(Situation: Mr Zhang will not let his daughter continue to date a certain man.)
张太太: 你为什么不喜欢咱们女儿的男朋友?
Zhāng tàitai: Nǐ wèishénme bù xǐhuān zánmen nǚ'ér de nán péngyǒu?
张先生: 其实我并不讨厌他。我之所以反对他们交往是因为他太穷了。
Zhāng xiānsheng: Qíshí wǒ bìng bù tǎoyàn tā. Wǒ zhī suǒyǐ fǎngduì tāmen jiāowǎng shì yīnwèi tā tài qióng le.
Mrs Zhang: Why do you not like our daughter's boyfriend?
Mr Zhang: Actually, I do not dislike him. (The reason) I oppose their dating (is) because he is too poor.
## Level 3 31.4 The use of 'A 是 A, 可是/但是/不过......'
### (a) General usage
The usage is similar to 虽然 (suīrán)......, 可是/但是/不过 (kěshì/dànshì/búguò)......However, what follows 虽然 may or may not be in context; but what is indicated by 'A' in the 'A 是 A' part must be explicitly mentioned. Also, what follows 是 can be negative.
(Situation: Anna spent a week in Shanghai, her friend Xiaolan asks her about it.)
小兰: 听说你去了一趟上海, 你对那里的印象怎么样?
Xiǎolán: Tīngshuō nǐ qù le yí tàng Shànghǎi, nǐ duì nàlǐ de yìnxiàng zěnmeyàng?
安娜: 我觉得上海虽然是一个大都市,可是上海人不像一般大都市的居民那么冷漠。
Ānnà: Wǒ juéde Shànghǎi suīrán shì yí ge dà dūshì, kěshì Shànghǎi rén bú xiàng yìbān dà dūshì de jūmín nàme lěngmò.
小兰: 上海的东西很贵, 对不对?
Xiǎolán: Shànghǎi de dōngxi hěn guì, duì bú duì?
安娜: 东西贵是贵,可是品质都相当好。 (The word 贵 has been mentioned; therefore, 贵是贵 can be used in place of 虽然贵.)
Ānnà: Dōngxi guì shì guì, kěshì pǐnzhì dōu xiāngdāng hǎo.
小兰: 听说那里的交通很乱。
Xiǎolán: Tīngshuō nàlǐ de jiāotōng hěn luàn.
安娜:乱是不乱,可是车太多, 所以停车是一个大问题。 (The word 乱 is in context; therefore, 乱是不乱 can be used to mean 虽然不乱.)
Ānnà: Luàn shì bú luàn, kěshì chē tài duō, suǒyǐ tíng chē shì yí ge dà wèntí.
Xiaolan: I heard that you made a trip to Shanghai. What is your impression of that place?
Anna: I feel that although Shanghai is a big city, the people there are not as cold as residents generally are in big cities.
Xiaolan: Things in Shanghai are expensive, right?
Anna: While things are expensive, their quality is quite good.
Xiaolan: I heard that traffic there is bad.
Anna: Although it's not bad, there are too many cars, so parking is a big problem.
### (b) Variation with 倒
To contradict the other person's point, an optional word, 倒 (dǎo), can be used before 是.
房地产商: 这个房子这么好, 你为什么不想买? 觉得太贵了吗?
Fángdìchǎn shāng: Zhè ge fángzi zhème hǎo, nǐ wèishénme bù xiǎng mǎi? Juéde tài guì le ma?
李先生:贵(倒)是不贵,不过厨房太小了。
Lǐ xiānsheng: Guì dǎo shì bú gùi, búguò chúfáng tài xiǎo le.
Property salesperson: This house is so good. Why don't you want to buy it? Do you feel it is too expensive?
Mr Li: Although it is not expensive, its kitchen is too small.
### (c) Variation with 就是
When a good quality is followed by a negative quality, 就是 (jiùshì) is frequently used in place of 可是/但是/不过.
房地产商: 这个房子, 您喜欢吗?
Fángdìchǎn shāng: Zhè ge fángzi, nín xǐhuān ma?
王先生: 喜欢是喜欢,就是价钱太贵了。
Wáng xiānsheng: Xǐhuān shì xǐhuān, jiùshì jiàqián tài guì le.
Property salesperson: Do you like this house?
Mr Wang: Although I like it, it is too expensive.
(喜欢 can be considered a good quality; 太贵 is considered a negative quality.)
## Level 2 31.5 The use of 固然......, 但是/可是......
固然 (gùrán)......, 但是/可是...... is also similar in meaning to 虽然......, 但是/可是......, but what follows 固然 is a condition that already exists in the context. Also, it is usually used to first acknowledge the value of the other person's opinion before bringing up the counter point. Unlike other conjunctives pairs, 固然 usually does not appear before the subject.
(Situation: Two managers are having a discussion about two job applicants before deciding which one they should offer the job to.)
张经理: 她们工作经验差不多, 可是李小姐的学历比较高, 我认为我们应该请 李小姐。
Zhāng jīnglǐ: Tāmen gōngzuò jīngyàn chàbùduō, kěshì Lǐ xiǎojiě de xuélì bǐjiào gāo, wǒ rènwéi wǒmen yīnggāi qǐng Lǐ xiǎojiě.
王经理: 李小姐的学历固然比较高,可是丁小姐会说日文跟法文。我认为我们 需要像她这样的人。
Wáng jīnglǐ: Lǐ xiǎojiě de xuélì gùrán bǐjiào gāo, kěshì Dīng xiǎojiě huì shuō Rìwén gēn Fǎwén. Wǒ rènwéi wǒmen xūyào xiàng tā zhèyàng de rén.
Manager Zhang: Both of them have similar work experience, but Miss Li has a higher degree, so I think we should hire Miss Li.
Manager Wang: Although Miss Li has a higher degree, Miss Ding can speak Japanese and French. I think we need someone like her.
## Level 3 31.6 The use of 尽管......, (可是/但是) 还是......
尽管 (jǐnguǎn) is frequently translated as 'even though' in English. It is stronger in meaning and tone than 虽然 and what follows 尽管 is a fact that already exists in the context.
### (a) General usage
尽管 indicates that in spite of a certain fact, it makes no difference to the situation; hence 还是 (háishì). 虽然 may or may not have this implication.
小兰: 你一向不喜欢大都市, 为什么去上海度假? (This establishes the fact that Shanghai is a big city.)
Xiǎolán: Nǐ yíxiàng bù xǐhuān dà dūshì, wèishénme qù Shànghǎi dùjià?
安娜: 上海尽管是一个大都市,可是还是有不少幽静的地方。
Ānnà: Shànghǎi jǐnguǎn shì yí ge dà dūshì, kěshì háishì yǒu bùshǎo yōujìng de dìfāng.
Xiaolan: You have always disliked big cities. Why did you go to Shanghai on a holiday?
Anna: Even though Shanghai is a big city, there are still many secluded and quiet places.
### (b) 尽管 vs. 即使
尽管 and 即使 share similarities in the sense that the situation remains the same. However, 尽管 is used to indicate a fact, whereas 即使 is used to indicate a hypothetical situation.
(Situation: Xiao Wang attempted to borrow money from Zhang, who refused.)
张: 我不信任小王, 所以,尽管我有钱,但是还是没有借他。 (Zhang does have the money; therefore, he uses 尽管.)
Zhāng: Wǒ bú xìnrèn Xiǎo Wáng, suǒyǐ, jǐnguǎn wǒ yǒu qián, dànshì háishì méiyǒu jiè tā.
李: 我也不信任他。即使我有钱,也不会借他。 (Li does not have the money; therefore, he uses 即使.)
Lǐ: Wǒ yě bú xìnrèn tā. Jíshǐ wǒ yǒu qián, yě bú huì jiè tā.
Zhang: I don't trust Xiao Wang. Even though I had the money, I didn't lend it to him.
Li: I don't trust him, either. Even if I had the money, I would not lend it to him.
## Exercises
Write sentences based on the situations provided. Each sentence must include conjunctive pairs used in context.
* Level 2 1 Xiaolan confides to Anna that she does not really like Mr Wang even though she is dating him. Anna responds by saying that, given this fact, she should break up with him. What would Anna say?
* 2 Li Zhong is studying both Japanese and French. Someone asks him why he is studying these languages. Li Zhong says that he studies Japanese because his mother is Japanese; and French because he wants to study design in Paris in the future. What would Li Zhong say?
* 3 Mr and Mrs Wang are house hunting. They see a small house that has a reasonable price. They are debating whether they should buy it. Mrs Wang says that the house is too small. Mr Wang concedes this point but points out that it is inexpensive. What would Mr Wang say?
* 4 Mr Wang's best friend, Mr Li, has asked him for an emergency loan. Mrs Wang is opposed to this because they themselves are also short of money. Despite this, Mr Wang decides to loan the money to Mr Li. Write a sentence to describe what Mr Wang decides to do and under what circumstances.
* 5 Mr Ding's friends are surprised to see him at Anna's birthday party because everyone knows that Mr Ding has been busy with an important project. So they ask him if this means he is not as busy now. Mr Ding responds by saying that while he is still busy, he has to attend his best friend's birthday party. What would Mr Ding say?
* 6 Xiaoming's mother tells him to stop playing video games, but Xiaoming says he does not have anything to do. So his mother says that, since that is the case, she wants him to go clean up his room. What would his mother say?
* Level 3 7 Miss Zhang tried on a pretty dress that she really liked, but decided against buying it. Her friend asked her if it was because the dress was too expensive. Miss Zhang responded by saying that although it was not expensive, it did not fit very well. What would Miss Zhang say?
* 8 Miss Zhang tried on a dress but decided not to buy it. The sales clerk asked her if it was because she did not like it. Miss Zhang responded by saying that although she liked it, the dress was too expensive. What would Miss Zhang have said?
* 9 A panel of judges is discussing who should be awarded first place in an essay competition. Judge Ding favors Wang Zhong because he thinks Wang Zhong has the most unique ideas. Judge Li agrees that Wang Zhong's ideas are unique, but he points out that his grammar is poor. How would Judge Li express these opinions?
* 10 Miss Li is beautiful and has many male admirers. Many are surprised when she decides to marry Wang Ming because he does not stand out among her admirers. Miss Li explains to her women friends that the reason she decided to marry Wang Ming is because he truly loves her. How would Miss Li say this?
# [32
The use of 才 and 就](content.xhtml#bck_Ch032)
才 (cái) and 就 (jiù) are among the most commonly used adverbs in Chinese. They are often opposite in meaning, but each can have its own meaning without the other one being the counterpart. 才 and 就 often cannot be directly translated into specific words in English. The proper usage of them depends heavily on the context.
## Level 2 32.1 Indicating the time an event takes/took place
才 and 就 are opposite in meaning when they are used to indicate the time when an action or event takes/took place.
### (a) 才: later than usual or expected
才 implies that the event occurred/occurs later than usual or expected. It can also imply a delayed action. The modal particle 了 (le) is not used at the end of a 才 sentence, whether or not the event has taken place.
今天路上车特别多, 我花了一个多小时才回到家。 (Implied: Normally it does not take me over an hour to get home.)
Jīntiān lù shàng chē tèbié duō, wǒ huā le yí ge duō xiǎoshí cái dào jiā.
There was particularly a lot of traffic today. It took me over an hour to (finally) get home.
老师: 王明, 你怎么现在才来? (才 indicates that Wang Ming is later than expected.)
Lǎoshī: Wáng Míng, nǐ zěnme xiànzài cái lái?
王明: 对不起, 闹钟坏了, 所以今天早上八点才起床。 (才 indicates he got up later than usual.)
Wáng Míng: Duìbùqǐ, nàozhōng huài le, suǒyǐ jīntiān zǎoshàng bā diǎn cái qǐchuáng.
Teacher: Wang Ming, how come you only arrived now? (How come you are late?)
Wang Ming: Sorry. My alarm clock was broken, so I didn't get up until eight o'clock.
### (b) 就: earlier than usual or expected
就 implies that the event occurred/occurs sooner or earlier than usual or expected. The modal particle 了 can be used if the event has taken place.
王先生因为身体不好, 所以五十岁就退休了。 (就 implies that he retired early.)
Wáng xiānsheng yīnwèi shēntǐ bù hǎo, suǒyǐ wǔshí suì jiù tuìxiū le.
Because Mr Wang had health problems, he retired at 50.
今天交通特别顺畅, 我花了一个半小时就回到家了。 (Implied: Normally it takes me longer.)
Jīntiān jiāotōng tèbié shùnchàng, wǒ huā le yí ge bàn xiǎoshí jiù huí dào jiā le.
Today's traffic was particularly smooth. It only took me one and a half hours to get home.
### (c) 就: an immediate action
就 can also be used to imply an immediate action; that is, an action will be done without delay.
店员: 这种数位相机在打折, 您现在就买一个吧。
Diànyuán: Zhè zhǒng shùwèi xiàngjī zài dǎzhé, nín xiànzài jiù mǎi yí ge ba.
顾客: 好, 我回家去拿钱,马上就来。
Gùkè: Hǎo, wǒ huí jiā qù ná qián, mǎshàng jiù lái.
Store clerk: This type of digital camera is on sale. Why don't you buy one right now!
Customer: OK, I will go home to get some money. I will be right back.
经理: 你可不可以下星期就开始来上班?
Jīnglǐ: Nǐ kě bù kěyǐ xià xīngqī jiù kāishǐ lái shàngbān?
王: 不必等一星期, 我明天就可以开始。
Wáng: Bú bì děng yì xīngqī, wǒ míngtiān jiù kěyǐ kāishǐ.
Manager: Can you start working (as early as) next week?
Wang: No need to wait until next week. I can start (as early as) tomorrow.
## Level 2 32.2 The use of 一......就......
The 一......就...... structure indicates that the second action immediately follows/followed the first action. The subjects should appear before 一 and 就, but the same subject should not be repeated.
我每天一下班就回家给家人做晚饭。 (Do not say 我每天一下班我就回家给家人做晚饭.)
Wǒ měi tiān yí xiàbān jiù huí jiā gěi jiā rén zuò wǎnfàn.
Every day I go home to cook dinner for my family as soon as I get off work.
老师一走进教室,学生就站起来说: "老师好。"(Do not say 一老师走进教室, 就学生站起来说: "老师好。")
Lǎoshī yì zǒu jìn jiàoshì, xuéshēng jiù zhàn qǐlái shuō: 'Lǎoshī hǎo.'
As soon as the teacher walked into the classroom, the students (immediately) stood up and greeted the teacher.
## Level 2 32.3 才 or 就: a subjective choice
The choice of 才 or 就 is frequently subjective.
安娜: 我打算二十五岁结婚。
Ānnà: Wǒ dǎsuàn èrshí wǔ suì jiéhūn.
小兰: 什么? 你打算二十五岁才结婚?
Xiǎolán: Shénme? Nǐ dǎsuàn èrshí wǔ suì cái jiéhūn?
小李:二十五岁就结婚? 太早了吧!
Xiǎo Lǐ: Èrshí wǔ suì jiù jiéhūn? Tài zǎo le ba!
Anna: I plan to get married when I am 25.
Xiaolan: What? You plan to get married at (as late as) 25?
Xiao Li: Getting married at 25? It's too early, isn't it?
## Level 2 32.4 Indicating how quickly or with how much effort a result is/was achieved
才 and 就 are also used to indicate how soon or how easily the result of an effort is/was achieved. 就 implies the result was/can be achieved without much effort, whereas 才 implies a lot of effort.
小王记忆真好, 一篇文章, 他念两遍就记住了, 我常常念十几遍才记住。
Xiǎo Wáng jìyì zhēn hǎo, yì piān wénzhāng, tā niàn liǎng biàn jiù jì zhù le, wǒ chángcháng niàn shí jǐ biàn cái jì zhù.
Xiao Wang has a really good memory. He reads an article (only) twice and he memorizes it. I often read it over ten times to (finally) memorize it. ('Only' is implied by 就, 'finally' is implied by 才.)
今天我在楼下叫了他两次他就下来了。 (就 implies I usually have to call him more than twice.)
Jīntiān wǒ zài lóu xià jiào le tā liǎng cì tā jiù xiàlái le.
Today I only called out to him twice from downstairs before he came down.
Compare: 这个问题, 我问了他两次他才回答。 (才 implies that he delayed in giving a reply.)
Zhè ge wèntí, wǒ wèn le tā liǎng cì tā cái huídá.
I asked him the question twice before he (finally) replied.
## Level 2/3 32.5 只要......就...... vs. 只有......才......
Both the 只要 (zhǐ yào)......就...... structure and the 只有 (zhǐ yǒu)......才...... structure are used to indicate the condition (requirement) that is necessary for a certain result to take place. 只要......就...... implies that the results are easy to achieve, whereas 只有......才...... implies the opposite.
The subject for the 只要/只有 sentence can appear either before or after 只要/只有. If the 只要/只有 and 就/才 sentences share the same subject, it should not be repeated. If each of them has a different subject, the subject for the 就/才 sentence must appear before 就/才.
### (a) 只要......就......: 'as long as'
只要......就...... can be translated as 'as long as' or 'only need to'. It implies that the result is easy to achieve.
张: 这里的房子看起来都很不错, 为什么价钱这么便宜?
Zhāng: Zhèlǐ de fángzi kàn qǐlái dōu hěn bú cuò, wèishénme jiàqián zhème piányí?
李: 这个地方只要下雨就会淹水, 所以愿意住这里的人不多。
Lǐ: Zhè ge dìfāng zhǐyào xià yǔ jiù huì yānshuǐ, suǒyǐ yuànyì zhù zhèlǐ de rén bù duō.
Zhang: Houses here all look nice. Why are the prices so cheap?
Li: It only needs to rain and there will be a flood here, so not many people are willing to live here.
儿子: 对不起, 这次考试考得这么差。
Érzi: Duìbùqǐ, zhè cì kǎoshì kǎo de zhème chà.
妈妈: 没关系,你只要努力一点, 下次就一定会进步。
Māma: Méi guānxi, nǐ zhǐyào nǔlì yìdiǎn, xià cì jiù yídìng huì jìnbù.
爸爸:只要你下次有进步, 我就给你买一个新的电脑。
Bàba: Zhǐyào nì xià cì yǒu jìnbù, wǒ jiù gěi nǐ mǎi yí ge xīn de diànnǎo.
Son: I am sorry I did so poorly on this test.
Mother: It's OK. You only need to study a little harder and you will definitely improve next time.
Father: As long as you show improvement next time, I will buy you a new computer.
### (b) 只有......才......: 'only if'
只有......才...... can be translated as 'only if' or 'only when'. It is used to imply that there is only one way to achieve the result.
只有你去劝他, 他才会改变主意, 因为别人的话, 他都不相信。
Zhǐyǒu nǐ qù quàn tā, tā cái huì gǎibìan zhǔyì, yīnwèi biérén de huà, tā dōu bù xiāngxìn.
Only if you go persuade him will he change his mind, because he does not believe in anybody else's words.
* 只有 can be followed by a noun
有 is not optional although there is no counterpart for it in an equivalent English sentence.
小王说话喜欢夸张,只有傻瓜才会相信他的话。 (Do not say 只傻瓜才会相信 他的话.)
Xiǎo Wáng shuōhuà xǐhuān kuāzhāng, zhǐyǒu shǎguā cái huì xiāngxìn tāde huà.
Xiao Wang likes to exaggerate when he talks. Only fools will believe his words.
### (c) 只要......就...... or 只有......才......: a subjective choice
The choice of 只要......就...... or 只有......才...... can be subjective.
只要把王先生请来当顾问, 问题就能解决。 (Implied: The solution is easy.)
Zhǐyào bǎ Wáng xiānsheng qǐng lái dāng gùwèn, wèntí jiù néng jiějué.
As long as we hire Mr Wang to be our consultant, the problem can be solved.
只有把王先生请来当顾问, 问题才能解决。 (Implied: Only Mr Wang can solve our problem.)
Zhǐyǒu bǎ Wáng xiānsheng qǐng lái dāng gùwèn, wèntí cái néng jiějué.
Only by hiring Mr Wang to be our consultant can the problem be solved.
## Level 2/3 32.6 Some independent meanings of 就 and 才
才 and 就 do not always serve as counterparts to one another. The following are some of their independent meanings.
### (a) 就: 'immediacy'
就 conveys a sense of 'immediacy' both in terms of time (☞ see 32.1) and location.
姐姐: 奇怪, 我的字典怎么不见了? 你帮我找找, 好不好?
Jiějie: Qíguài, wǒde zìdiǎn zěnme bú jiàn le? Nǐ bāng wǒ zhǎo zhǎo, hǎo bù hǎo?
妹妹: 不用找了, 你看, 你的字典就在你自己的桌子上。
Mèimei: Bú yòng zhǎo le, nǐ kàn, nǐde zìdiǎn jiù zài nǐ zìjǐ de zhuōzi shàng.
Older sister: Strange, how come my dictionary has disappeared? Will you help me look (for it)?
Younger sister: No need to look. Look! Your dictionary is right (there) on your desk.
### (b) 就: 'exactness'
就 convey the sense of 'exactness' or 'none other than...'. Whatever is being referred to must be in context.
(Situation: A waiter has recommended several famous dishes to the customers.)
服务员: 除了这几个名菜以外, 菜单上还有很多不错的菜, 您看看。
Fúwùyuán: Chúle zhè jǐ ge míngcài yǐwài, càidān shàng hái yǒu hěn duō bú cuò de cài, nín kàn kàn.
客人: 不用看了, 我们就要你介绍的那三道菜。
Kèrén: Bú yòng kàn le, wǒmen jiù yào nǐ jièshào de nà sān dào cài.
Waiter: In addition to these few famous dishes, there are many more on the menu. They are all quite good. Please take a look (at the menu).
Customer: No need to look anymore. We want exactly the three dishes you recommended.
(Situation: Anna and her friend Xiaolan are looking at Anna's photo album.)
小兰: 这个穿黑衬衫的是谁?
Xiǎolán: Zhè ge chuān hēi chènshān de shì shéi?
安娜: 他就是我跟你提过的那位王先生。 (The use of 就 indicates that Mr Wang is someone that Xiaolan has heard of.)
Ānnà: Tā jiù shì wǒ gēn nǐ tí guo de nà wèi Wáng xiānsheng.
Xiaolan: Who is the person wearing a black shirt?
Anna: He is (exactly) the Mr Wang I have mentioned to you before.
### (c) 就是: indicating an exception
就是 can be used to indicate an exception after making a sweeping statement. In this case, what follows 就是 should be a sentence or a verbal phrase. It cannot be simply a noun.
我家的人都喜欢吃辣的,就是我不喜欢。
Wǒ jiā de rén dōu xǐhuān chī là de, jiùshì wǒ bù xǐhuān.
Everybody in my family likes spicy food, except me.
王: 下星期四晚上有空吗? 我要请几个朋友来吃饭。
Wáng: Xià xīngqī sì wǎnshàng yǒu kòng ma? Wǒ yào qǐng jǐ ge péngyǒu lái chī fàn.
李: 真可惜, 下星期我天天都有空,就是星期四没空。
Lǐ: Zhēn kěxí, xià xīngqī wǒ tiān tiān dōu yǒu kòng, jiùshì xīngqí sì méi kòng.
Wang: Are you free next Thursday evening? I am inviting a few friends over for dinner.
Li: Too bad, I am free every day next week except Thursday.
### (d) 才 \+ expression with a number: 'only'
才 can be used to mean 'only'. What follows 才 must be a number or an expression involving a number. 才 and 只 (zhǐ) are not interchangeable since 只 must be followed by a verb.
李: 奇怪, 小张怎么还没来?
Lǐ: Qíguài, Xiǎo Zhāng zěnme hái méi lái?
王: 现在才四点, 他六点才会来。
Wáng: Xiànzài cái sì diǎn, tā liù diǎn cái huì lái.
Li: Strange, how come Xiao Zhang is not here yet?
Wang: It's only 4 o'clock. He won't be here until 6 o'clock.
王: 这本书才五块! 怎么这么便宜? (这本书只要五块 is correct as well.)
Wáng: Zhè běn shū cái wǔ kuài! Zěnme zhème piányí?
店员: 我们这里的书都是二手的, 所以特别便宜。
Diànyuán: Wǒmen zhèlǐ de shū dōu shì èrshǒu de, suǒyǐ tèbié piányí.
王: 可惜今天我只带了三块, 不然, 一定要买。 (我才带了三块 is acceptable.)
Wáng: Kěxí jīntiān wǒ zhǐ dài le sān kuài, bùrán, yídìng yào mǎi.
Wang: This book is only $5! How come it's so cheap?
Clerk: All our books are second-hand, so they are particularly cheap.
Wang: Too bad I only brought $3; otherwise, I would definitely buy it.
### (e) 才: 'just'
才 can be used to indicate that an action only took place a very short time ago. In this sense, 才 and 刚 (gāng) are similar in meaning. When a second action follows the action that has just taken place, 就, which implies 'too soon', normally goes with the second action.
客人: 不早了, 我该回家了。
Kèrén: Bù zǎo le, wǒ gāi huí jiā le.
主人: 怎么才(= 刚)来就要走?
Zhǔrén: Zěnme cái (= gāng) lái jiù yào zǒu?
Guest: It's getting late. I should go home.
Host: You just arrived; how come you are leaving (already)?
真气人! 昨天才买的电脑, 今天就坏了。
Zhēn qìrén! Zuótiān cái mǎi de diànnǎo, jīntiān jiù huài le.
Really upsetting! The computer I just bought yesterday is already broken today.
### (f) 才......(呢): a rebuttal
才 can be used in a rebuttal to indicate that a statement made by another person is wrong while establishing one's own point of view as being correct. The modal particle 呢 (ne) is used when it is a face-to-face exchange or in a less formal situation.
(Situation: Two people are having an unpleasant verbal fight.)
王: 你是一只猪!
Wáng: Nǐ shì yì zhī zhū!
李: 你才是一只猪呢!
Lǐ: Nǐ cái shì yì zhī zhū ne!
Wang: You are a pig!
Li: You are the one that's a pig (not me!)
(Situation: A couple are trying to adopt a cat.)
先生: 这只灰色的很可爱, 收养这只, 好吗?
Xiānsheng: Zhè zhī huī sè de hěn kě'ài, shōuyǎng zhè zhī, hǎo ma?
太太: 不要! 这只虎斑的才可爱呢! (Implied: 灰的不可爱。)
Tàitai: Bú yào! Zhè zhī hǔ bān de cái kě'ài ne!
Husband: This grey one is cute. Let's adopt this one, OK?
Wife: No! This one with tiger stripes is the cute one. (Implied: The grey one is not cute.)
很多人说, 看中国电影是练习中文最好的办法, 可是我认为, 听中国流行歌曲 才是最好的办法。 (才 implies that I consider the other people's opinion to be wrong and my own opinion is correct.)
Hěn duō rén shuō, kàn Zhōngguó diànyǐng shì liànxí Zhōngwén zuì hǎo de bànfǎ, kěshì wǒ rènwéi, tīng Zhōngguó liúxíng gēqǔ cái shì zuì hǎo de bànfǎ.
Many people say that watching Chinese movies is the best way to practise Chinese; but I think that listening to Chinese pop songs is the best way (and watching movies is not).
## Exercises
Fill in each blank with 就 or 才 based on the context provided. English translations are not provided so as to avoid giving direct information about the answers. For English translations, see the 'Key to exercises' section.
* Level 21 太太: 现在 ____ 六点, 今天怎么这么早 ____ 下班了?
先生: 今天没有提早下班, 可是交通特别顺畅, 只开了半小时 ____ 到家了。
* 2 如果你想学好中文, 没有别的办法, 只有多听、 多说、 多读 ____ 学得好。
* 3 李太太: 你儿子 ____ 十七岁, 怎么 ____ 已经搬到外面去住了?
张太太: 你记错了, 我儿子去年 ____ 十八岁了。
* 4 王: 这是什么地方?
李: 这 ____ 是天安门广场。
王: 哦, 是吗? 天安门在哪里?
李: 你看, 那个高高的建筑, 那 ____ 是天安门。
* 5 小王真聪明, 别人要花好几个小时 ____ 学得会的东西, 他常常不到半小时 ____ 学会了。
* 6 老师: 张明, 请你说一说, 这个成语是什么意思?
张明: 老师, 这个成语您还没有教我们呢!
老师: 谁说的? 这个成语我上星期 ____ 教你们了。
* Level 3 7 张: 今天的功课实在太多了, 我花了三个小时 ____ 写完。
李: 什么?____ 三小时 ____ 写完了? 我写了五个小时,____ 写好一半。
* 8 丁: 我认为, 一个人如果想把中文学好, 最好的办法 ____ 是多看中国电影、 多听中文歌曲。
张: 我不同意。我觉得, 多跟中国人练习 ____ 是最好的办法。
* 9 妈妈: 你怎么现在 ____ 回来?
儿子: 现在 ____ 六点, 还不算晚啊!
妈妈: 你忘了吗? 你出门的时候, 说你五点 ____ 会回来的。
* 10 老师: 这个成语是什么意思?
学生: 我忘了。
老师: 这个成语是昨天 ____ 学的, 怎么你今天 ____ 忘了?
* 11 李: 今天真倒霉, 一出门 ____ 摔了一跤。
张: 那不算什么! 小王 ____ 倒霉呢! 他一出门 ____ 被车撞了。
* 12 妈妈: 安娜, 你在做什么? 我已经在车上等了十分钟了。你快迟到了。
安娜: 我在找功课呢! 找到了 ____ 来。
妈妈: 别找了, 你没看到吗? 你的功课 ____ 在饭桌上。
# [33
The use of adverbs in contracted sentences](content.xhtml#bck_Ch033)
A contracted sentence is a complex sentence without the first word in the conjunctive pair. For example, a sentence with the conjunctive pair 要是......就...... (if..., then...) is a complex sentence; when 要是 is omitted, (but 就 must remain,) the resulting sentence is called a contracted sentence. A contracted sentence is a complex sentence in nature, but it often has the appearance of one or two simple sentences. Learners who fail to recognize a contracted sentence as a complex sentence often misinterpret the sentence.
As a stand-alone word, the second word (often an adverb) in a conjunctive pair frequently does not convey a clear meaning to tell the relationship between the subordinate clause and the main clause. Therefore, it is important to recognize what the omitted first word is. This can be achieved by paying attention to the use of the second word in the conjunctive pair as well as the context.
☞ See Chapter 30 for detailed information on conjunctive pairs.
## Level 2/3 33.1 The use of 就
### (a) 'If'
如果/要是 (rúguǒ/yàoshì) can be omitted from 如果/要是......, 就 (jiù)......, resulting in only 就 in the main clause.
张: 下星期六晚上的派對, 你去不去?
Zhāng: Xià xīngqī liù wǎnshàng de pàiduì, nǐ qù bú qù?
王: 不忙我就去。你呢?
Wáng: Bù máng wǒ jiù qù. Nǐ ne?
张: 你去我就去。
Zhāng: Nǐ qù wǒ jiù qù.
Zhang: Are you going to the party next Saturday?
Wang: I'll go if I am not busy. How about you?
Zhang: I'll go if you go.
安娜: 昨天的舞会, 幸亏小兰没去; 去了就糟糕了。
Ānnà: Zuótiān de wǔhuì, xìngkuī Xiǎolán méi qù; qù le jiù zāogāo le.
小李: 为什么呢?
Xiǎo Lǐ: Wèishénme ne?
安娜: 因为她男朋友带了另外一个女孩去。
Ānnà: Yīnwèi tā nán péngyǒu dài le lìngwài yí ge nǚhái qù.
Anna: Fortunately Xiaolan didn't go to yesterday's dance. If she had gone, it would have been bad.
Xiao Li: Why?
Anna: Because her boyfriend brought another girl to the dance.
### (b) 'Since'
既然 (jìrán) can be omitted from 既然......, 就......, resulting in only 就 in the main clause.
(Situation: A student calls his teacher on the phone.)
学生: 我今天发烧、 肚子痛。
Xuéshēng: Wǒ jīntiān fāshāo, dùzi tòng.
老师: 不舒服就不用来上课了。
Lǎoshī: Bù shūfú jiù bú yòng lái shàngkè le.
Student: Today I have a fever and a stomach-ache.
Teacher: Since you are not feeling well, you don't have to come to class.
客人: 你真会做菜。这些菜都太好吃了!
Kèrén: Nǐ zhēn huì zuò cài. Zhè xiē cài dōu tài hǎochī le!
主人: 喜欢就多吃点吧!
Zhǔrén: Xǐhuān jiù duō chī diǎn ba!
Guest: You are really good at cooking. All these dishes are delicious!
Host: Since you like them, have some more!
### (c) 'As long as'
只要 (zhǐyào) in 只要......, 就...... can be omitted.
学外语, 没有别的诀窍, 多听, 多说, 多念就学得好。
Xué wàiyǔ, méiyǒu biéde juéqiào, duō tīng, duō shuō, duō niàn jiù xué de hǎo.
When it comes to studying a foreign language, there is no other secret. As long as you listen more, speak more and read more, you can master it.
王先生总以为, 花钱给孩子请家教, 孩子的成绩就会好, 其实事情没有他想的 那么简单。
Wáng xiānsheng zǒng yǐwéi, huā qián gěi háizi qǐng jiājiào, háizi de chéngjì jiù huì hǎo, qíshí shìqíng méiyǒu tā xiǎng de nàme jiǎndān.
Mr Wang always thinks that, as long as he spends money on hiring tutors for his child, the child's grades will be good. Actually, things are not as simple as he thinks.
### (d) 'So'
Sometimes, 就 can imply 因为 (yīnwèi)......, 所以 (suǒyǐ)...... without the presence of 因为 or 所以 at all. In this case, what follows 就 is usually an action that has been taken as a consequence of another event.
我在约好见面的地方等了他十几分钟, 他没来, 我就回家了。
Wǒ zài yuē hǎo jiànmiàn de dìfāng děng le tā shí jǐ fēnzhōng, tā méi lái, wǒ jiù huíjiā le.
I waited for him at the place we had agreed to meet for more than ten minutes. He didn't show up, so I went home.
王先生听说李小姐住院了,就买了一束花去医院看她。
Wáng xiānsheng tīngshuō Lǐ xiǎojiě zhùyuàn le, jiù mǎi le yí shù huā qù yīyuàn kàn tā.
Mr Wang heard that Miss Li had been hospitalized, so he bought a bunch of flowers and went to the hospital to visit her.
## Level 3 33.2 The use of 也
As a stand-alone word, 也 means 'also'. In a contracted sentence, its meaning of 'also' is not obvious. This may result in difficulty in comprehending the sentence.
### (a) 'Even if'
即使/就算 (jíshǐ/jiùsuàn) can be omitted, resulting in only 也 in the sentence.
王: 因为经费有限, 所以我们没法付你太高的工资。
Wáng: Yīnwèi jīngfèi yǒuxiàn, suǒyǐ wǒmen méi fǎ fù nǐ tài gāo de gōngzī.
李: 没关系, 这么有意义的事, 没钱我也愿意做。
Lǐ: Méi guānxi, zhème yǒu yìyì de shì, méi qián wǒ yě yuànyì zuò.
Wang: Because our budget is limited, we cannot pay you too high a wage.
Li: It's OK. Such meaningful work. Even if there were no pay, I would be willing to do it.
别忘了, 老板说笑话的时候, 不好笑咱们也得笑。
Bié wàng le, lǎobǎn shuō xiàohuà de shíhòu, bù hǎoxiào zánmen yě děi xiào.
Don't forget! When our boss tells a joke, even if it is not funny, we have to laugh.
### (b) 'No matter'
无论/不管 (wúlùn/bùguǎn) can be omitted, resulting in only 也 or 都 (dōu). (也 tends to be used when the main clause is negative.) A question word must appear after 无论/不管.
☞ See 33.3 for more on (无论......,) 都.......
这件事, 小兰已经下定决心, 我怎么劝她, 她也不肯改变主意。
Zhè jiàn shì, Xiǎolán yǐjīng xià dìng juéxīn. Wǒ zěnme quàn tā, tā yě bù kěn gǎibiàn zhǔyì.
Xiaolan has made up her mind about this matter. No matter how I urge her (to do otherwise), she will not change her mind.
品质这么差的东西,多便宜也不会有人要买。
Pǐnzhí zhème chà de dōngxi, duō piányí yě bú huì yǒu rén yào mǎi.
This thing is of such poor quality. No matter how inexpensive it was, no one would want to buy it.
来不及了,谁来帮忙,也没有用了。
Lái bù jí le, shéi lái bāngmáng, yě méiyǒu yòng le.
It's too late now. No matter who comes to help, it would be of no use.
### (c) 'Even if' and 'no matter'
When the subordinate clause has 再 (zài) and the main clause has 也 or 都, the contracted sentence conveys a meaning similar to both 无论/不管......, 也/都...... and 即使......, 也.......
他是不会帮你的, 你再求他也没用。
Tā shì bú huì bāng nǐ de, nǐ zài qiú tā yě méi yòng.
He is definitely not going to help you. No matter how you beg him (or even if you beg him more) it would be of no use.
王先生: 我不要跟小张说话。
Wáng xiānsheng: Wǒ bú yào gēn Xiǎo Zhāng shuō huà.
王太太: 他是咱们女儿的男朋友, 你再不喜欢他也要对他客气点。
Wáng tàitai: Tā shì zánmen nǚ'ér de nán péngyǒu, nǐ zài bù xǐhuān tā yě yào duì tā kèqì diǎn.
Mr Wang: I don't want to talk to Xiao Zhang.
Mrs Wang: He is our daughter's boyfriend. No matter how much you dislike him, you have to be a little nicer to him.
### (d) Conveying disapproval or annoyance
也 can be used to imply a mild disapproval or annoyance because someone did not do what he or she should have done after a certain event. Similarly, it can be used to imply that someone did something he or she should not have done. In this case, it is not clear what the omitted conjunctive word is.
(Situation: Xiao Zhang is the boyfriend of Mr and Mrs Wang's daughter.)
王先生: 小张, 吃了饭, 怎么也不帮忙洗碗?
Wáng xiānsheng: Xiǎo Zhāng, chī le fàn, zěnme yě bù bāngmáng xǐ wǎn?
王太太: 这种话, 你怎么也说得出来? 小张是来做客的。
Wáng tàitai: Zhè zhǒng huà, nǐ zěnme yě shuó de chūlái? Xiǎo Zhāng shì lái zuò kè de.
Mr Wang: Xiao Zhang, how come you don't help do the dishes after dinner?
Mrs. Wang: How could you have said something like this? Xiao Zhang is here as our guest.
(Situation: At the counter in a coffee shop.)
服务员: 先生, 请您等十分钟, 您的咖啡就会好了。
Fúwùyuán: Xiānsheng, qǐng nín děng shí fēnzhōng, nínde kāfēi jiù huì hǎo le.
顾客: 什么? 买杯咖啡也要等十分钟? (也 conveys a sense of annoyance. Without the phrase 买杯咖啡, 也 could not be used since a contracted sentence should have two parts.)
Gùkè: Shénme? Mǎi bēi kāfēi yě yào děng shí fēnzhōng?
Waiter: Sir, please wait ten minutes and your coffee will be ready.
Customer: What? I have to wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee?
## Level 3 33.3 The use of 都
### (a) 'Even'
都 in a contracted sentence can convey the sense that something is extreme. What has been omitted in the subordinate clause is 连 (lián), which means 'even'. The two verbs must be the same and the main clause must be negative.
王: 你看过 《哈利波特》 没有?
Wáng: Nǐ kàn guò 'Hālì Bōtè' méiyǒu?
李: 《哈利波特》? 《哈利波特》 是什么? 我听都没听过, 怎么可能会看过?
Lǐ: 'Hālì Bōtè?' 'Hālì Bōtè' shì shénme? Wǒ tīng dōu méi tīng guò, zěnme kěnéng huì kàn guò?
Wang: Have you read Harry Potter?
Li: Harry Potter? What is Harry Potter? I have not even heard of it; how could I have read it?
那个问题太容易了, 我想都不用想就会回答。
Nà ge wèntí tài róngyì le, wǒ xiǎng dōu bú yòng xiǎng jiù huì huídá.
That question was too easy. I didn't even have to think to know how to answer it.
### (b) 'No matter'
无论/不管 can be omitted, resulting in 也 or 都. 也 tends to be in a negative sentence, whereas 都 can be in either a positive or a negative sentence. ☞ See 33.2 for 也.
女儿: 你说我该买德国车还是日本车?
Nǚ'ér: Nǐ shuō wǒ gāi mǎi Déguó chē háishì Rìběn chē?
爸爸: 随便你。你买哪国车我都不付钱。
Bàba: Suíbiàn nǐ. Nǐ mǎi nǎ guó chē wǒ dōu bú fù qián.
Daughter: Do you think I should buy a German car or a Japanese car?
Father: Do whatever you want. No matter which car you buy, I won't pay for it.
女儿: 下星期我的生日舞会, 我可以请几个朋友来参加?
Nǚ'ér: Xià xīngqī wǒde shēngrì wǔhuì, wǒ kěyǐ qǐng jǐ ge péngyǒu lái cānjiā?
妈妈: 咱们家够大, 你请几个都可以。
Māma: Zánmen jiā gòu dà. Nǐ qǐng jǐ ge dōu kěyǐ.
Daughter: How many friends can I invite to my birthday party next week?
Mother: Our house is big enough. You can invite however many you want.
## Level 3 33.4 The use of 却, 倒 and 又
The similarity in meaning shared by 却 (què), 倒 (dǎo) and 又 (yòu) lies in the fact the omitted words can be 虽然 (suīrán) or 尽管 (jǐnguǎn) and that a contradiction or an unexpected result exists between the subordinate clause and the main clause.
### (a) 却
却 can be thought of as meaning 'however'.
小李有钱却从来不浪费。
Xiǎo Lǐ yǒu qián què cónglái bú làngfèi.
(Although) Xiao Li is rich, he is, however, never wasteful.
### (b) 倒
倒 is usually used to imply that something is contrary to what people might expect.
真没想到, 你年纪不大, 知识倒挺丰富的。
Zhēn méi xiǎng dào, nǐ niánjì bú dà, zhīshí dǎo tǐng fēngfù de.
This is really unexpected. Although you are young, you have quite a lot of knowledge.
### (c) 又
又 shows a direct contrast or contradiction between two actions.
你说了会来又没来, 主人当然不高兴。 (会来 and 没来 are in direct contradiction.)
Nǐ shuō le huì lái yòu méi lái, zhǔrén dāngrán bù gāoxìng.
You had said you would come but you didn't come. Of course the host was unhappy.
## Exercises
Choose the proper word to fill the gap in each contracted sentence that follows. English translations are not provided so as to avoid giving direct information about the answers. For English translations, see the 'Key to exercises' section.
* Level 2 1 李: 明天我要跟几个朋友去爬山, 你要不要一起去?
丁: 天气好我 ____ 跟你们去。
* 2 王: 明天有一个重要的考试, 你怎么还在看电视? 快去准备考试吧。
李: 准备什么? 这门课的东西, 我完全不懂, 再准备 ____ 不会及格的。
* 3 张: 你的英文说得真好, 你是怎么学的? 李: 其实学英文并不难, 多听、 多说、 多读 ____ 可以学得很好。
* 4 我儿子聪明 ____ 不肯努力学习, 所以考试总是考得很差。
* 5 安娜: 你想, 这件衣服, 我穿了, 会好看吗?
小兰: 很难说。你去试试看吧! 试了 ____ 知道。
* 6 李: 那本书早就卖完了, 你去哪里 ____ 买不到了。
王: 我不相信。
李: 不相信你 ____ 去买买看吧!
* Level 3 7 王先生: 请你嫁给我吧!
李小姐: 对不起, 我还不想结婚呢!
王先生: 你不想嫁给我, 我们 ____ 别再交往了吧!
李小姐: 你的意思是, 咱们朋友 ____ 不能做了吗?
王先生: 对, 我就是这个意思。
* 8 王: 那份工作, 薪水不错, 你为什么不做?
丁: 那种工作太无聊, 薪水多高我 ____ 不愿意做。
李: 是啊, 你这么有钱, 当然不愿意做这种工作。
王: 有钱 ____ 不能光待在家里不工作啊!
* 9 李: 明天安娜家开派对, 你去不去?
丁: 不去。
李: 是吗? 你最好的朋友小兰说她要去呢!
丁: 我最讨厌安娜。小兰去我 ____ 不去。
* 10 王中真聪明, 老师问的那个问题这么难, 可是他想 ____ 不用想就会回答。
* 11 妈妈: 别给小明那么多钱。他每次有了钱 ____ 乱花。
爸爸: 放心, 我会警告他, 这次再乱花钱, 以后 ____ 不给他零用钱了。
* 12 妈妈: 上个月爸爸寄了一百块给你, 你收到没有?
儿子: 收到了。
妈妈: 你收到了怎么 ____ 不打个电话跟我们说呢?
# [34
The use of interrogative pronouns](content.xhtml#bck_Ch034)
Interrogative pronouns are similar to the wh-question words in English. In addition to being used to ask questions, interrogative pronouns can be used in making sweeping statements and can be used in negative statements as well.
The interrogative pronouns in Chinese are 谁 (shéi), 哪 (nǎ), 什么 (shénme), 哪里 (= 哪儿) (nǎlǐ = nǎr), 怎么 (zěnme), 怎么样 (zěnmeyàng), 多 (duō), 多少 (duōshǎo), 几 (jǐ), 为什么 (wèishénme) and 干嘛 (gànmá).
## Level 1 34.1 Word order when using interrogative pronouns
Using interrogative pronouns to ask questions does not involve a change of word order in Chinese. Basically, an interrogative pronoun replaces the word that is being sought as the answer.
王: 这是什么? (Do not say 什么是这.)
Wáng: Zhè shì shénme?
李:(这)是我爸爸送我的生日礼物。
Lǐ: (Zhè) shì wǒ bàba sòng wǒ de shēngrì lǐwù.
Wang: What is this?
Li: It's the birthday present my father gave me.
客人: 请问, 你们家的洗手间在哪里? (Do not say 哪里是你们家的洗手间?)
Kèrén: Qǐng wèn, nǐmen jiā de xǐshǒujiān zài nǎlǐ?
主人: 就在客厅旁边。
Zhǔrén: Jiù zài kètīng pángbiān.
Guest: Excuse me. Where is the bathroom in your house?
Host: It's right next to the living room.
## Level 1/2 34.2 哪 and 什么
哪 should be followed by a measure word. When 哪 is used, the choice of answer is usually limited. When 什么 is used, the answer is not limited.
小兰: 晚上的舞会, 你打算穿什么去?
Xiǎolán: Wǎnshàng de wǔhuì, nǐ dǎsuàn chuān shénme qù?
安娜: 我打算穿小礼服。你看, 我有好几件, 你说, 我应该穿哪件?
Ānnà: Wǒ dǎsuàn chuān xiǎo lǐfú. Nǐ kàn, wǒ yǒu hǎo jǐ jiàn, nǐ shuō, wǒ yīnggāi chuān nǎ jiàn?
Xiaolan: What do you plan to wear to go to the party this evening?
Anna: I plan to wear a cocktail dress. Look, I have several. Tell me: which one should I wear?
Sometimes, it is hard to decide whether the choices are limited or not. In this case, either 什么 or '哪 \+ measure word' can be used.
你喜欢什么类型的女孩?= 你喜欢哪种类型的女孩?
Nǐ xǐhuān shénme lèixíng de nǚhái? = Nǐ xǐhuān nǎ zhǒng lèixíng de nǚhái?
What type of girl do you like? = Which type of girl do you like?
## Level 2 34.3 怎么 #1
怎么 can mean 'how come?' or 'how' as in 'how is it done?'
丁: 如果有人用英文跟我说"对不起", 我应该怎么回答?
Dīng: Rúguǒ yǒu rén yòng Yīngwén gēn wǒ shuō 'duìbùqǐ', wǒ yīnggāi zěnme huídá?
李: 我已经教过你十几遍了, 你怎么总是记不住呢?
Lǐ: Wǒ yǐjīng jiāo guò nǐ shí jǐ biàn le, nǐ zěnme zǒngshì jì bú zhù ne?
Ding: If someone says 'sorry' to me in English, how should I reply?
Li: I have already taught this to you more than ten times; how come you can never remember?
## Level 2 34.4 怎么 #2
Sometimes, an expression that would use 'what' in English would be an expression with 怎么 in Chinese. As a stand-alone word, 怎么 shows slight surprise or puzzlement.
(Situation: Anna found Xiaolan crying.)
安娜: 小兰, 你怎么了?
Ānnà: Xiǎolán, nǐ zěnme le?
小兰: 我把小张借我的电脑弄坏了, 现在我不知道该怎么办?
Xiǎolán: Wǒ bǎ Xiǎo Zhāng jiè wǒ de diànnǎo nòng huài le, xiànzài wǒ bù zhīdào gāi zěnme bàn?
安娜:怎么? 你自己没有电脑吗? (怎么? here shows a slight surprise.)
Ānnà: Zěnme? Nǐ zìjǐ méiyǒu diànnǎo ma?
Anna: Xiaolan, what happened to you (what's the matter)?
Xiaolan: I broke the computer Xiao Zhang lent me. Now I don't know what to do.
Anna: What was going on? You don't have your own computer?
## Level 1/2 34.5 怎么样
怎么样 can be used in place of 怎么 to indicate how something is done. But only 怎么样 can be used to ask about one's opinion of something or what something is like.
张: 下午一起去看 《超人》,怎么样?
Zhāng: Xiàwǔ yìqǐ qù kàn 'Chāorén', zěnmeyàng?
李: 这个电影, 我看过了。
Lǐ: Zhè ge diànyǐng, wǒ kàn guò le.
张: 是吗? 你觉得这个电影怎么样?
Zhāng: Shì ma? Nǐ juéde zhè ge diànyǐng zěnmeyàng?
Zhang: How about if we go see Superman in the afternoon?
Li: I have seen this movie.
Zhang: Is that so? What do you think of the movie? (Literally: How do you feel about the movie?)
## Level 2 34.6 多
多, when translated into English, also means 'how'; but it is always followed by an adjective. An optional verb, 有 (yǒu), can be used before 多 when the phrase is used to describe a noun.
张: 你去过李老师家, 对不对? 他的房子怎么样?
Zhāng: Nǐ qù guo Lǐ lǎoshī jiā, duì bú duì? Tāde fángzi zěnmeyàng?
丁: 对, 我去过, 他家非常大。
Dīng: Duì, wǒ qù guò, tā jiā fēicháng dà.
张: 是吗?(有)多大?
Zhāng: Shì ma? (Yǒu) duō dà?
Zhang: You have been to Teacher Li's house, right? How is his house?
Ding: That's right. I have been there. His house is very big.
Zhang: Oh, is that so? How big?
王: 你家离学校(有)多远? 你每天怎么来学校?
Wáng: Nǐ jiā lí xuéxiào (yǒu) duō yuǎn? Nǐ měitiān zěnme lái xuéxiào?
李: 不太远, 我每天都走路来。
Lǐ: Bú tài yuǎn, wǒ měitiān dōu zǒulù lái.
王: 要走多长时间呢?(or 要走多久呢?)
Wáng: Yǎo zǒu duō cháng shíjiān (duō jiǔ) ne?
Wang: How far is your house from school? How do you come to school every day?
Li: Not very far. I walk here every day.
Wang: How long (time) do you have to walk?
## Level 2 34.7 多少
多少 can mean 'how much' or 'how many'. When it means 'how many', the expected answer tends to be a number bigger than ten. Otherwise, 几 is usually used. When 多少 means 'how many', a measure word is optional and is frequently not used.
爸爸: 这个学校有多少(个)学生?多少是外国学生? 每年学费多少钱?
Bàba: Zhè ge xuéxiào yǒu duōshǎo (ge) xuéshēng? Duōshǎo shì wàiguó xuéshēng? Měi nián xuéfèi duōshǎo qián?
儿子: 这些我都不知道, 我只知道外国学生的学费比较高。
Érzi: Zhè xiē wǒ dōu bù zhīdào, wǒ zhǐ zhīdào wàiguó xuéshēng de xuéfèi bǐjiào gāo.
爸爸: 哦? 高多少?
Bàba: Ò? Gāo duōshǎo?
Father: How many students are there at this school? How many are foreign students? How much is the tuition fee per year?
Son: I don't know any of these (answers). I only know that foreign students' tuition is higher.
Father: Oh? How much higher?
Besides being an interrogative pronoun, 多少 can be used as an adverb, meaning 'more or less'.
王先生: 唉! 钱又用完了, 去向小李借吧!
Wáng xiānsheng: Ài! Qián yòu yòng wán le, qù xiàng Xiǎo Lǐ jiè ba!
王太太: 小李也不是有钱人, 他能借咱们多少?
Wáng tàitai: Xiǎo Lǐ yě bú shì yǒuqián rén, tā néng jiè zánmen duōshǎo?
王先生: 小李是我最好的朋友, 他多少会借咱们一些的。
Wáng xiānsheng: Xiǎo Lǐ shì wǒ zuì hǎo de péngyǒu, tā duōshǎo huì jiè zánmen yì xiē de.
Mr Wang: Oh no! Our money's run out again. Let's borrow some from Xiao Li.
Mrs Wang: Xiao Li is not a rich man, either. How much can he loan us?
Mr Wang: Xiao Li is my best friend. He more or less will loan us some.
健身房每个月的会费虽然不高, 但多少是个负担, 所以我没参加。
Jiànshēnfáng měi ge yuè de huìfèi suīrán bù gāo, dàn duōshǎo shì ge fùdān, suǒyǐ wǒ méi cānjiā.
Although the monthly membership for the gym is not high, it is more or less a burden, so I did not join (the membership).
## Level 1/2 34.8 几
几 must be followed by a measure word (except for a noun that doesn't take a measure word). When the expected answer is a number smaller than ten, 几, rather than 多少, is used. There can be exceptions to this general rule since one's expectation and the actual answer may not always match.
一年有几天? 一天有几个小时?= 一年有多少天? 一天有多少(个)小时?
Yì nián yǒu jǐ tiān? Yì tiān yǒu jǐ ge xiǎoshí? = Yì nián yǒu duōshǎo tiān? Yì tiān yǒu duōshǎo (ge) xiǎoshí?
How many days are there in a year? How many hours are there in one day?
你家有多少平方尺?几层楼?几个卧房?几个洗手间?
Nǐ jiā yǒu duōshǎo píngfāng chǐ? Jǐ céng lóu? Jǐ ge wòfáng? Jǐ ge xǐshǒujiān?
How many square feet is your house? How many storeys? How many bedrooms? How many bathrooms?
* 几 can be used in a statement to mean 'a few'. Although the context usually helps clarify the meaning, confusion can sometimes arise without the presence of punctuation.
李: 我今天想吃中国菜, 咱们找家中国餐馆吃一顿吧!
Lǐ: Wǒ jīntiān xiǎng chī Zhōngguó cài, zánmen zhǎo jiā Zhōngguó cānguǎn chī yí dùn ba.
王: 好啊! 这附近有几家不错的中国餐馆。
Wáng: Hǎo a! Zhè fùjìn yǒu jǐ jiā búcuò de Zhōngguó cānguǎn.
Li: I feel like eating Chinese food today. Let's find a Chinese restaurant to have a meal at.
Wang: OK! There are a few decent Chinese restaurants in this area. (With a question mark, the same sentence could mean 'How many Chinese restaurants are there in this area?')
* When asking a question with the expectation of a number being the answer, such as a room number, use 几 or 多少, not 什么
王小姐住几楼几号? 她的电话号码是多少?(or 她的电话是多少号/几号?)
Wáng xiǎojiě zhù jǐ lóu jǐ hào? Tāde diànhuà hàomǎ shì duōshǎo? (or Tāde diànhuà shì duōshǎo hào/jǐ hào?)
What is Miss Wang's floor number and room number? What is her telephone number?
老师: 二十五的一半是多少? 谁知道?
Lǎoshī: Èrshí wǔ de yí bàn shì duōshǎo? Shéi zhīdào?
学生: 是十二点五。
Xuéshēng: Shì shíèr diǎn wǔ.
Teacher: What is half of 25? Who knows (the answer)?
Student: It's 12.5.
## Level 1/2 34.9 为什么
为什么 is literally the combination of 'for' and 'what'. It is usually used to ask about a reason or cause. It is similar in meaning to 怎么 ('how come'), but 怎么 sounds more casual. Normally, the subject of the sentence should appear before 为什么.
李: 这里有把椅子,你为什么坐在地上? (为什么你坐在地上 sounds odd.)
Lǐ: Zhèlǐ yǒu bǎ yǐzi, nǐ wèishénme zuò zài dì shàng?
王: 那把椅子的腿坏了。
Wáng: Nà bǎ yǐzi de tuǐ huài le.
Li: There is a chair here. Why are you sitting on the floor?
Wang: The legs of that chair are broken.
* When 为什么 is used to ask a question which implies a contrast between two subjects, the subject normally appears after 为什么
老师: 王明,你昨天为什么没来上课?
Lǎoshī: Wáng Míng, nǐ zuótiān wèishénme méiyǒu lái shàng kè?
王明: 因为我头痛。
Wáng Míng: Yīnwèi wǒ tóu tòng.
老师: 李中昨天也头痛,为什么他能来,你不能来呢?
Lǎoshī: Lǐ Zhōng zuótiān yě tóu tòng, wèishénme tā néng lái, nǐ bù néng lái ne?
Teacher: Wang Ming, why didn't you come to class yesterday?
Wang Ming: Because I had a headache.
Teacher: Li Zhong also had a headache yesterday. Why is it that he could come to class but you couldn't?
* When asking about someone's intention of doing something, particularly about the purpose of coming and going somewhere, 做什么 (zuò shénme) is a more proper way to ask this question. The word order involving 做什么 is different from a 为什么 expression
安娜: 昨天是你的生日, 你男朋友为什么没来参加你的生日派对呢? 你们分手了吗?
Ānnà: Zuótiān shì nǐde shēngrì, nǐ nán péngyǒu wèishénme méi lái cānjiā nǐde shēngrì pàiduì ne? Nǐmen fēnshǒu le ma?
小兰: 没有, 他没来是因为他去日本了?
Xiǎolán: Méiyǒu, tā méi lái shì yīnwèi tā qù Rìběn le.
安娜: 哦, 他去日本做什么?
Ānnà: Ò, tā qù Rìběn zuò shénme?
Anna: Yesterday was your birthday. Why didn't your boyfriend come to your birthday party? Have you broken up?
Xiaolan: No. He didn't come because he had gone to Japan.
Anna: Oh. Why (for what purpose) did he go to Japan?
## Level 2 34.10 干嘛
干嘛 is similar in meaning to 做什么 (zuò shénme) in the sense that both are used to ask about the purpose for doing something; however, 干嘛 sounds extremely casual.
妈妈: 半夜了, 你为什么还要出门去?
Māma: Bànyè le, nǐ wèishénme hái yào chūmén qù?
儿子: 刚才小兰打电话来叫我马上到她家去一趟。
Érzi: Gāngcái Xiǎolán dǎ diànhuà lái jiào wǒ mǎshàng dào tā jiā qù yí tàng.
妈妈: 这么晚了, 她还叫你去她家干嘛?
Māma: Zhème wǎn le, tā hái jiào nǐ qù tā jiā gànmá?
Mother: It's already midnight. Why are you going out?
Son: Xiaolan called me just now and asked me to immediately go to her house.
Mother: It's already so late. Why (for what) would she ask you to go to her house?
When 干嘛 is not used to ask about the purpose of coming or going somewhere, it appears after the subject (similar to 为什么), instead of at the end of the sentence.
干嘛 can be used to ask about purpose or intention, but not cause. In the following dialogues, 干嘛 cannot be used in place of 为什么 since 干嘛 means 'what for' and is generally not used to ask about causes.
张: 今天食堂里的菜很不错,你为什么(or 怎么)没胃口?
Zhāng: Jīntiān shítáng lǐ de cài hěn búcuò, nǐ wèishénme (or zěnme) méi wèikǒu?
丁: 因为我这两天感冒, 不舒服, 所以不想吃东西。
Dīng: Yīnwèi wǒ zhè liǎng tiān gǎnmào, bù shūfú, suǒyǐ bù xiǎng chī dōngxi.
张: 最近天气这么好, 我真不懂,为什么(or 怎么)有这么多人感冒?
Zhāng: Zuìjìn tiānqì zhème hǎo, wǒ zhēn bù dǒng, wèishénme (or zěnme) yǒu zhème duō rén gǎnmào?
Zhang: Today the food at the cafeteria is not bad. Why didn't you have any appetite?
Ding: Because I've had a cold these last few days; I am not feeling well, so I don't feel like eating.
Zhang: The weather has been so nice recently. I really don't understand why so many people have caught colds.
太太: 小李人品﹑ 家世都不错, 咱们女儿要嫁他, 你干嘛反对?
Tàitai: Xiǎo Lǐ rénpǐn, jiāshì dōu búcuò, zánmen nǚ'ér yào jià tā, nǐ gànmá fǎnduì?
先生: 女儿才二十岁,干嘛这么早结婚?
Xiānsheng: Nǚ'ér cái èrshí suì, gànmá zhème zǎo jiéhūn?
Wife: Xiao Li's personal character and family background are both good. Why do you oppose our daughter marrying him?
Husband: Our daughter is only 20 years old. Why marry so early?
## Level 1 34.11 什么时候 and 几点
什么时候 (shénme shíhòu), literally 'what time', means 'when' in Chinese. 几点 (jǐ diǎn) means 'what time'.
李: 张经理, 您什么时候有空? 我想跟您谈谈。
Lǐ: Zhāng jīnglǐ, nín shénme shíhòu yǒu kòng? Wǒ xiǎng gēn nín tán tán.
张: 我今天下午有空, 你想你可以几点到我的办公室来?
Zhāng: Wǒ jīntiān xiàwǔ yǒu kòng, nǐ xiǎng nǐ kěyǐ jǐ diǎn dào wǒde bàngōngshì lái?
Li: Manager Zhang, when will you have time? I would like to talk to you.
Zhang: I am free this afternoon. What time do you think you can come to my office?
## Level 1/2 34.12 The use of question marks with indirect questions
In Chinese, there is no distinction between a direct question or an indirect question in terms of word order. Therefore, it is not unusual to have a question mark after an indirect question.
(Situation: Xiao Zhang was not paying attention to what the teacher was saying.)
老师: 现在我要请每位同学轮流说一说, 你们今天是怎么来学校的?
Lǎoshī: Xiànzài wǒ yào qǐng měi wèi tóngxué lúnliú shuō yì shuō, nǐmen jīntiān shì zěnme lái xuéxiào de?
小张: 小王, 请告诉我, 老师刚才说什么?
Xiǎo Zhāng: Xiǎo Wáng, qǐng gàosù wǒ, lǎoshī gāngcái shuō shénme?
Teacher: Now I am going to ask each of you to take turns stating how you got to school today.
Xiao Zhang: Xiao Wang, please tell me what the teacher just said.
## Level 2 34.13 Interrogative pronouns in negative statements
### (a) 什么, 多少 and 几
什么, 多少 and 几 can be used in negative statements to mean 'not much' or 'not many'. The word 没(有) often appears in such statements.
Without 多少 or 什么, the following sentences would still be correct, but the meanings would be different.
李: 昨天的派对, 我请了很多朋友, 可是没有多少人来(= 没有几个人来), 我很失望。
Lǐ: Zuótiān de pàiduì, wǒ qǐng le hěn duō péngyǒu, kěshì méiyǒu duōshǎo rén lái (= méiyǒu jǐ ge rén lái), wǒ hěn shīwàng.
王: 那是因为你的派对总是没有什么好吃的东西。
Wáng: Nà shì yīnwèi nǐde pàiduì zǒngshì méiyǒu shénme hǎochī de dōngxi.
Li: I invited many friends to my party yesterday, but not many people came. I was disappointed.
Wang: It's because there was never much good food at your parties.
他真聪明, 最难的数学问题, 他也不用花什么时间就能解答。
Tā zhēn cōngmíng, zuì nán de shùxué wèntí, tā yě bú yòng huā shénme shíjiān jiù néng jiědá.
He is truly smart. He didn't have to spend much time to solve even the hardest mathematics problem.
### (b) '怎么 \+ adjective'
'怎么 \+ adjective' can be used in a negative statement with 不 to mean 'not very'. '怎么 \+ verb (with the quality of an adjective)' in a negative sentence can mean 'not very much'.
房地产商: 这个房子, 您喜不喜欢?
Fángdìchǎn shāng: Zhè ge fángzi, nín xǐ bù xǐhuān?
王先生:不怎么喜欢, 因为我觉得地点不怎么好。
Wáng xiānsheng: Bù zěnme xǐhuān, yīnwèi wǒ juéde dìdiǎn bù zěnme hǎo.
Property salesperson: Do you like this house?
Mr Wang: I don't like it very much because I feel that the location is not very good.
## Level 3 34.14 Using interrogative pronouns to make sweeping statements: 'anybody', 'anything', etc.
An interrogative pronoun can be used to make a sweeping statement. Essentially, it is a contracted sentence since 无论/不管 (wúlùn/bùguǎn) has been omitted.
☞ See 33.2 and 33.3 for more on contracted sentences with 也 and 都.
Since interrogative pronouns are not used to ask questions in this particular pattern, each of them has a different meaning derived from its original one. For example, 谁 means 'anybody' or 'everybody'; 什么 means 'anything' or 'everything'; and so on. Sometimes, the expression 'no matter' is used to translate this structure.
The basic word order for this structure is: 'interrogative pronoun + 都/也 \+ verb'.
### (a) Positive and negative sentences
也 tends to be used in a negative sentence, although, in some cases, it can appear in a positive sentence as well. 都 can appear in either a positive or a negative sentence. Without 也 or 都, the sentence would either be incomprehensible or become a question by mistake.
张: 听说这个电影很不错,谁想去看? 一起去吧!
Zhāng: Tīngshuō zhè ge diànyǐng hěn búcuò, shéi xiǎng qù kàn? Yìqǐ qù ba!
李: 这么有名的电影,谁都想去看, 可是还没上演呢! 去哪里也看不到。
Lǐ: Zhème yǒumíng de diànyǐng, shéi dōu xiǎng qù kàn, kěshì hái méi shàngyǎn ne! Qù nǎlǐ yě kàn bú dào.
Zhang: I heard that this movie was quite good. Who wants to go see it? Let's go together.
Li: It's such a famous movie; everybody wants to see it. But it has not premiered yet. Wherever you go, you won't be able to see it.
### (b) When the interrogative pronoun is the object of the verb
Even when the interrogative pronoun is the object of the verb, it must appear before the verb.
听说张先生的新房子非常漂亮,谁都想去参观一下, 可是他谁都不请。 (谁 is the subject of 想 but the object of 请. To say 他都不请谁 is incorrect.)
Tīngshuō Zhāng xiānsheng de xīn fángzi fēicháng piàoliàng, shéi dōu xiǎng qù cānguān yíxià, kěshì tā shéi dōu bù qǐng.
I've heard that Mr Zhang's new house is extremely pretty. Everybody wants to go visit, but he is not going to invite anyone.
(Situation: Xiao Wang has invited Miss Li to go to the park with him.)
李: 你知道那个公园有多远吗? 走不到的! 我不去!
Lǐ: Nǐ zhīdào nà ge gōngyuán yǒu duō yuǎn ma? Zǒu bú dào de! Wǒ bú qù!
王: 你放心, 我买了一辆新车,多远的地方咱们都能去。
Wáng: Nǐ fàngxīn, wǒ mǎi le yí liàng xīn chē, duō yuǎn de dìfāng zánmen dōu néng qù.
Li: Do you have any idea how far that park is? It cannot be reached on foot. I am not going.
Wang: Don't worry. I've bought a new car. We can go anywhere no matter how far it is.
### (c) Location of the subject
When the interrogative pronoun is the object of the verb, the subject of the sentence can appear either before the interrogative pronoun or before 都/也.
这星期,我哪里也不去,谁的电话(我)也不接,多重要的事, 我也不管。 (哪里, 电话 and 事 are the objects of 去, 接 and 管 respectively.)
Zhè xīngqī, wǒ nǎlǐ yě bú qù, shéide diànhuà (wǒ) yě bù jiē, duō zhòngyào de shì, wǒ yě bù guǎn.
This week, I won't go anywhere; I won't answer anybody's phone calls and I won't take care of any business (no matter how important it is).
李: 你昨天去的那个派对好不好玩?
Lǐ: Nǐ zuótiān qù de nà ge pàiduì hǎo bù hǎowán?
王: 不好玩, 因为我谁都不认识(= 谁我都不认识)。
Wáng: Bù hǎowán, yīnwèi wǒ shéi dōu bú rènshì.
Li: Was the party you went to yesterday fun?
Wang: It wasn't fun because I didn't know anybody.
### (d) Word order when there are two verbs
When there are two verbs in the sentence, it is usually the second verb that appears after 都/也. The first verb may appear either before or after the interrogative pronoun, depending on the meaning of the sentence.
小兰已经打定主意了, 所以我说什么, 她都不听。 (说 is before 什么.)
Xiǎolán yǐjīng dǎ dìng zhǔyì le, suǒyǐ wǒ shuō shénme, tā dōu bù tīng.
Xiaolan has made up her mind; therefore, whatever I say (no matter what I say), she won't listen.
Compare: 这件事情太复杂了, 所以我怎么解释, 她都不懂。 (解释 is after 怎么.)
Zhè jiàn shìqíng tài fùzá le, suǒyǐ wǒ zěnme jiěshì, tā dōu bù dǒng.
This matter is too complicated; therefore, no matter how I explain, she doesn't understand.
小李个性外向, 讨人喜欢, 所以他到哪里都能很快就交到朋友。
Xiǎo Li gèxìng wàixiàng, tǎo rén xǐhuān, suǒyǐ tā dào nǎlǐ dōu néng hěn kuài jiù jiāo dào péngyǒu.
Xiao Li is outgoing and likable; therefore, wherever he goes, he can quickly make new friends.
### (e) 怎么都 and 怎么也
It should be noted that the expression 'no matter what' in English is 怎么都 or 怎么也 in Chinese.
门卡住了, 所以我怎么都打不开。
Mén kǎ zhù le, suǒyǐ wǒ zěnme dōu dǎ bù kāi.
The door is jammed, so I cannot open it no matter what.
(Situation: Anna was looking for a book that had been missing. Xiaolan told her to just go buy another copy.)
安娜: 那本书是从图书馆借来的, 所以我怎么都得把它找到。
Ānnà: Nà běn shū shì cóng túshūguǎn jiè lái de, suǒyǐ wǒ zěnme dōu děi bǎ tā zhǎodào.
Anna: That book was borrowed from the library. So I have to find it no matter what.
## Level 2 34.15 Using two identical interrogative pronouns: 'no matter'
Two identical interrogative pronouns can appear in one statement to convey the meaning 'no matter'. 就 (jiù) normally appears between the two phrases.
借书的人: 请问, 我一次可以借几本?
Jiè shū de rén: Qǐng wèn, wǒ yí cì kěyǐ jiè jǐ běn?
图书馆工作人员: 你想借几本就借几本。
Túshūguǎn gōngzuò rényuán: Nǐ xiǎng jiè jǐ běn jiù jiè jǐ běn.
Library patron: Excuse me, how many books can I borrow each time?
Library staff: You can borrow however many you want (to borrow).
王: 你说, 咱们今天该点些什么菜?
Wáng: Nǐ shuō, zánmen jīntiān gāi diǎn xiē shénme cài?
李: 你喜欢吃什么咱们就点什么。
Lǐ: Nǐ xǐhuān chī shénme zánmen jiù diǎn shénme.
Wang: Tell me, what dishes do you think we should order today?
Li: We will order whatever dishes you like to eat.
以前我总以为, 等我退休以后, 想去哪里就可以去哪里。现在我退休了, 却哪里都不想去了。
Yǐqián wǒ zǒng yǐwéi, děng wǒ tuìxiū yǐhòu, xiǎng qù nǎlǐ jiù kěyǐ qù nǎlǐ. Xiànzài wǒ tuìxiū le, què nǎlǐ dōu bù xiǎng qù le.
In the past I always thought that I would be able to go anywhere I wanted to go after I retired. Now I have retired, but I don't feel like going anywhere anymore.
## Exercises
Translate the following sentences into Chinese, taking into account any instructions given in parentheses.
* Level 2 1 Male: The weather is so nice. How about if we go to the park to take a walk?
Female: Sure. How are we going to go? By bus or by car?
* 2 Mrs Wang: Do you have any idea how expensive this car is? How can we afford it?
Mr Wang: I truly like this car. No matter how expensive it is, I am going to buy it.
* 3 Wife: How come the dishes that were just washed are still dirty? What's going on?
Husband: What? (showing slight surprise or puzzlement, not 什么) Is the dishwasher broken again?
* 4 Anna: Xiao Wang! How come you are here? It's raining so hard. How did you get here?
Wang: I came to see you because there is something very important that I wanted to tell you. So no matter how hard it was raining, I had to come.
* Level 3 5 I feel like having a cup of coffee. Do you know where I can find a coffee shop? (Literally: Where is there a coffee shop?)
* 6 Li: Whom should we ask to be our representative to answer the teacher's question?
Ding: What representative? Whoever is called on by the teacher will answer the questions. (Use two identical interrogative pronouns for the 'whoever' expression.)
* 7 Female: What time is it now? Why are you not in class? What are you doing here? (= Why did you come here?)
Male: Today the teacher dismissed the class at 2 o'clock. I don't have much to do this afternoon, so I came to invite you to go to a movie. The cinema is showing (having) four movies; which do you want to see?
Female: Great! We will go see whichever one you want to see. (Use two identical interrogative pronouns for the 'whichever' expression.)
* 8 Li: When do you usually do (physical) exercise?
Ding: There are not many people at the gym on Sunday mornings. (An interrogative pronoun must be used to express 'not many.') So I always exercise on Sunday mornings.
Li: What good exercise equipment does your gym have?
Ding: This gym is inexpensive, so there is not much good equipment. (An interrogative pronoun must be used to express 'not much'.)
# [35
Rhetorical questions](content.xhtml#bck_Ch035)
Rhetorical questions are not used to ask questions but to make statements using a question format. The reason for using a question to make a statement is to strengthen the effect of the statement. No answer or reply is expected when a rhetorical question is asked. The punctuation used at the end of a rhetorical question can be either a question mark or an exclamation mark.
## Level 1/2 35.1 Basic rhetorical questions
Nearly all questions can be asked in a rhetorical way depending on the context in which the question is uttered.
张: 哎呀! 都几点了? 小王怎么还不来? (都几点了 is a rhetorical question meaning 'it's late'.)
Zhāng: Āiyā! Dōu jǐ diǎn le? Xiǎo Wáng zěnme hái bù lái?
李: 谁知道!/你问我, 我问谁?/我怎么知道? (All are rhetorical questions meaning 'I don't know'.)
Lǐ: Shéi zhīdào!/Nǐ wèn wǒ, wǒ wèn shéi?/Wǒ zěnme zhīdào?
Zhang: Oh no! What time is time already? How come Xiao Wang is not here yet?
Li: Who knows!/You are asking me and whom should I ask?/How should I know?
## Level 1/2 35.2 Making positive and negative statements with rhetorical questions
Rhetorically, a negative question is used to make a positive statement whereas a positive question is used to make a negative statement.
(Situation: Mr Wang wants to buy a fancy car and Mrs Wang points out that they cannot afford such a car.)
王太太: 谁不想买这种车? 可是, 咱们有这个钱吗?
Wáng tàitai: Shéi bù xiǎng mǎi zhè zhǒng chē? Kěshì, zánmen yǒu zhè ge qián ma?
Mrs Wang: Who doesn't want to buy a car like this? But, do we have the money?
(Situation: Two brothers are fighting over some money left on the table. The younger one insists that the money belongs to him and the older one uses a rhetorical question to say he cannot prove it.)
哥哥: 你说是你的, 上面写着你的名字吗?
Gēge: Nǐ shuō shì nǐde, shàngmiàn xiě zhe nǐde míngzì ma?
Older brother: You said it's yours. Is your name written on it?
## Level 1/2 35.3 Using affirmative–negative questions in a rhetorical way
An affirmative–negative question used in a rhetorical way means the speaker wants the listener to share the same feeling or opinion. Phrases such as 你说 (nǐ shuō) and 你想一想 (nǐ xiǎng yì xiǎng) are used.
王: 你今天为什么看起来这么气?
Wáng: Nǐ jīntiān wèishénme kàn qǐlái zhème qì?
李: 儿子考试又不及格, 你说, 我气不气? ('我气吗?' does not convey the same meaning. '我会不气吗?' conveys a similar effect, however, since a negative question indicates a positive statement.)
Lǐ: Érzi kǎoshì yòu bù jígé, nǐ shuō, wǒ qì bú qì?
Wang: Why do you look so angry today?
Li: My son failed a test again. Tell me, should I be mad or not?
我侄子才三岁就认得几百个字了, 你说, 这个小孩聪明不聪明?
Wǒ zhízǐ cái sān suì jiù rènde jǐ bǎi ge zì le, nǐ shuō, zhè ge xiǎohái cōngmíng bù cōngmíng?
My nephew is only three years old, but he already recognizes several hundred characters. Tell me, is this child smart or not?
## Level 3 35.4 The use of 不是......吗?
This expression is used when what happens is not in keeping with what the speaker already knows. The speaker thus uses it to reaffirm what he or she knows. It is often followed or preceded by a real question using 为什么 or 怎么.
(Situation: Mr Wang said that he would drop by at 5 o'clock, but by 6 o'clock he still has not shown up.)
王先生不是说五点会来吗? 现在都六点了, 他怎么还没来?
Wáng xiānsheng bú shì shuō wǔ diǎn huì lái ma? Xiànzài dōu liù diǎn le, tā zěnme hái méi lái?
Didn't Mr Wang say he would be here by five? It's already six. How come he is not here yet?
小丁: 昨天我看到安娜跟王先生一起去看电影。
Xiǎo Dīng: Zuótiān wǒ kàn dào Ānnà gēn Wáng xiānsheng yìqǐ qù kàn diànyǐng.
小李: 安娜不是已经有男朋友了吗?
Xiǎo Lǐ: Ānnà bú shì yǐjīng yǒu nán péngyǒu le ma?
Xiao Ding: Yesterday I saw Anna going to a movie with Mr Wang.
Xiao Li: Doesn't she already have a boyfriend?
不是......吗 can be followed by a suggestion. In this case, the speaker simply wants to strengthen the effect of a statement, which may not be inconsistent with an existing situation.
(Situation: Upon seeing an announcement for a singing contest, Zhang urges his friend Wang to enter the contest because Zhang believes that Wang is a good singer.)
张: 你歌不是唱得很好吗?(=你歌唱得不是很好吗?)你去报名参加比赛吧!
Zhāng: Nǐ gē bú shì chàng de hěn hǎo ma? (= Nǐ gē cháng de bú shì hěn hǎo ma?) Nǐ qù bàomíng cānjiā bǐsài ba!
Zhang: Isn't is true that you sing well? (Meaning: Aren't you a good singer?) Why don't you sign up for the contest!
At least five variations can be derived from the basic 不是......吗 structure.
### (a) When the verb is 是
When the verb in the rhetorical question happens to be 是, 是 should be used only once.
(Situation: Upon learning that his fiancée will not invite her best friend Xiaolan to their wedding, Mr Zhang is surprised.)
张: 为什么? 你们两个不是最好的朋友吗? (Meaning: 你们两个是最好的朋友.)
Zhāng: Wèishénme? Nǐmen liǎng ge bú shì zuì hǎo de péngyǒu ma?
Zhang: Why? Aren't the two of you best friends?
### (b) Adding 也 or 都 when the verb is 是
If the adverb 也 or 都 is necessary in the 不是......吗 structure and the verb happens to be 是, the expression is 不也是......吗/不都是......吗.
(Situation: Although both Xiao Wang and Xiao Zhang are Xiao Li's good friends, Xiao Li has told his parents that he will only invite Xiao Wang to his birthday dinner.)
妈妈: 怎么不请小张呢? 他不也是你的好朋友吗? (Meaning: 他也是你的好朋友.)
Māma: Zěnme bù qǐng Xiǎo Zhāng ne? Tā bù yě shì nǐde hǎo péngyǒu ma?
爸爸: 我也觉得奇怪, 他们两个不都是你的好朋友吗? (Meaning: 他们都是你的好朋友.)
Bàba: Wǒ yě juéde qíguài, tāmen liǎng ge bù dōu shì nǐde hǎo péngyǒu ma?
Mother: How come you are not inviting Xiao Zhang? Isn't he also your good friend?
Father: I also think it's curious. Aren't they both your good friends?
### (c) Adding 也 or 都 when the verb is not 是
If the adverb 也 or 都 is necessary in the 不是......吗 structure and the verb is not 是, the expression is 不是也......吗/不是都......吗.
(Situation: Xiao Li's parents are under the impression that Xiao Li has invited both Xiao Wang and Xiao Zhang for dinner. But only Xiao Zhang shows up.)
妈妈: 你不是也请了小王吗? (Meaning: 你也请了小王.) 为什么只有小张来了呢?
Māma: Nǐ bú shì yě qǐng le Xiǎo Wáng ma? Wèishénme zhǐyǒu Xiǎo Zhāng lái le ne?
爸爸: 我也觉得奇怪, 他们两个你不是都请了吗? (Meaning: 他们两个你都请了.)
Bàba: Wǒ yě juéde qíguài, tāmen liǎng ge nǐ bú shì dōu qǐng le ma?
Mother: Didn't you also invite Xiao Wang? Why is it that only Xiao Zhang came?
Father: I also think it's curious. Didn't you invite both of them?
### (d) A rhetorical question or a negative question?
While it is important to make the distinction between 不也是......吗/不都是......吗 and 不是也......吗/不是都......吗, it is equally important to know that 也不是......吗/都不是......吗 is also a legitimate question, albeit not a rhetorical one, but a negative question.
(Situation: Anna is under the impression that the two books on the desk belong to Zhang. But when Zhang is about to leave, he only picks up the English book, not the Chinese book.)
安娜: 这本中文书不也是你的吗? 你怎么只带那本英文的, 不带这本呢?
Ānnà: Zhè běn Zhōngwén shū bù yě shì nǐde ma? Nǐ zěnme zhǐ dài nà běn Yīngwén de, bú dài zhè běn ne?
Anna: Isn't this Chinese book also yours? How come you only took that English book with you, but not this Chinese one?
(Situation: Two coats are in Xiaolan's room. Anna knows that the green coat belongs to Xiaolan's sister, so she assumes that the blue one belongs to Xiaolan. But Xiaolan's sister comes to take both away.)
安娜: 那件蓝色的大衣也不是你的吗? (This is a negative question, not a rhetorical question.)
Ānnà: Nà jiàn lánsè de dàyī yě bú shì nǐde ma?
Anna: The blue coat isn't yours as well(, is it)?
### (e) Adding 就 when the verb is 是
When the adverb is 就 (jiù) and the verb is 是; the expression is 不就是......吗.
(Situation: Mr Wang is looking for today's newspaper. His wife says it is in his hand.)
王太太: 你手上拿的不就是今天的报纸吗? (Meaning: 你手上拿的就是今天的 报纸.)
Wáng tàitai: Nǐ shǒu shàng ná de bú jiù shì jīntiān de bàozhǐ ma?
Mrs Wang: Isn't what you are holding in your hand (exactly) today's newspaper?
### (f) Adding 就 when the verb is not 是
When the adverb is 就 and the verb is not 是, the expression 不是就......吗 is frequently shortened to 不就......吗.
(Situation: Xiaolan has put off doing her homework until the very last minute. And she is anxious now. Her mother points out that she should have done it earlier.)
妈妈: 要是你昨天就把功课写完, 现在不就轻松了吗? (Meaning: 现在就轻松了.)
Māma: Yàoshì nǐ zuótiān jiù bǎ gōngkè xiě wán, xiànzài bú jiù qīngsōng le ma?
Mother: If you had done your homework yesterday, wouldn't you feel relaxed now?
## Level 1 35.5 可不是吗
可不是吗 (kě bú shì ma) is a very casual expression used to agree with what someone else has said.
王: 这几天的天气真热得受不了。
Wáng: Zhè jǐ tiān de tiānqì zhēn rè de shòu bù liǎo.
李: 可不是吗!
Lǐ: Kě bú shì ma!
Wang: The weather these days is really unbearably hot.
Li: Isn't it true!
## Level 1/2 35.6 The use of 何必 and 何苦
### (a) 何必
何必 (hébì) literally means 'why must?' Therefore, it is used in a rhetorical question to mean 'no need to'. An optional modal particle 呢 is frequently used.
(Situation: Mrs Li is going to call a plumber to fix some plumbing problem. But Mr Li says it's not necessary.)
李先生: 这种小问题, 何必花钱请人修? 我自己来修。
Lǐ xiānsheng: Zhè zhǒng xiǎo wèntí, hébì huā qián qǐng rén xiū? Wǒ zìjǐ lái xiū.
Mr Li: Why do we have to spend money to hire someone to fix such a small problem? I will fix it myself.
何必呢 can be an independent expression which follows a statement. 呢 in this case is not optional.
(Situation: Zhang realizes that he has been ripped off by a street vendor and he wants to go and argue and get his money back. Wang tries to tell him not to.)
王: 为了一点小钱去跟一个摊贩吵, 何必呢?
Wáng: Wèile yìdiǎn xiǎo qián qù gēn yí ge tān fàn chǎo, hébì ne?
Why do you have to argue with a street vendor over such a small amount of money?
### (b) 何苦
何苦 (hékǔ) and 何苦呢 have similar meanings and usage to 何必 and 何必呢, but they are only used to refer to unpleasant or trivial matters that are not worth the trouble.
(Situation: Mrs Ding is mad because her son has said something rude to her. Mr Ding tries to calm her.)
丁先生: 他是小孩子, 不懂事, 何苦为了他生这么大的气呢?
Dīng xiānsheng: Tā shì xiǎo háizi, bù dǒngshì, hékǔ wèile tā shēng zhème dà de qì ne?
Mr Ding: He is a child and immature. Why get so mad because of him? (It's not worth getting mad.)
(Situation: Xiaolan is vexed over a pair of lost sunglasses. Anna tells her it's not worth it.)
安娜: 掉了一付太阳眼镜就这么烦恼, 何苦呢?
Ānnà: Diào le yí fù tàiyáng yǎnjìng jiù zhème fánnǎo, hékǔ ne?
Anna: Why so vexed simply because you have lost a pair of sunglasses? (It's not worth it!)
## Level 3 35.7 The use of 哪里
While 哪里 (nǎlǐ) literally means 'where', it is used in a rhetorical question to make a negative statement. Therefore, 哪里 replaces either 不 (bù) or 没 (méi).
One of the proper responses to 谢谢 (xièxie: 'thank you') in Chinese is 哪里 because it is a rhetorical way to say 'not at all'.
张: 昨天电视上的天气预报不是说今天会下大雨吗? 你怎么没带伞呢?
Zhāng: Zuótiān diànshì shàng de tiānqì yùbào bú shì shuō jīntiān huì xià dà yǔ ma? Nǐ zěnme méi dài sǎn ne?
王: 我最近忙得要命, 哪里有时间看电视? (Meaning: 没有时间看电视.)
Wáng: Wǒ zuìjìn máng de yàomìng, nǎlǐ yǒu shíjiān kàn diànshì?
Zhang: Didn't yesterday's weather forecast on TV say that it would rain hard today? How come you didn't bring an umbrella?
Wang: I have been busy to death lately. Where would I get the time (from my busy schedule) to watch TV?
妈妈: 你要出门了吗? 别忘了带雨伞。
Māma: Nǐ yào chū mén le ma? Bié wàng le dài yǔsǎn.
女儿: 今天天气这么好, 哪里需要带雨伞! (Meaning: 不需要带雨伞.)
Nǚ'ér: Jīntiān tiānqì zhème hǎo, nǎlǐ xūyào dài yǔsǎn!
Mother: Are you about to go out? Don't forget to take an umbrella with you.
Daughter: Today's weather is so nice. Why would I need to take an umbrella?
## Level 2/3 35.8 The use of 难道......(吗)
This expression is used to interpret a situation in front of the speaker. The subject can appear either before or after 难道 (nándào), and 吗 is optional.
(Situation: Mrs Li is trying to read the newspaper, but her husband is standing behind her reading the headlines out loud.)
李太太: 别再念了, 行不行? 难道我不认识字吗?
Lǐ tàitai: Bié zài niàn le, xíng bù xíng? Nándào wǒ bú rènshì zì ma?
Mrs Li: Can you stop doing that? Do you mean to say that I can't read?
(Situation: Anna tells her friend Xiaolan that Mr Wang has been sending her flowers and calling her ever since they met at a party last week.)
安娜: 他又给我送花, 又给我打电话, 他难道想追我吗?
Ānnà: Tā yòu gěi wǒ sòng huā, yòu gěi wǒ dǎ diànhuà, tā nándào xiǎng zhuī wǒ ma?
小兰: 这么明显的事, 你还要问吗? 难道你自己还看不出来?
Xiǎolán: Zhème míngxiǎn de shì, nǐ hái yào wèn ma? Nándào nǐ hái kàn bù chūlái?
Anna: He has been sending me flowers and also calling me. Could it be that he is trying to pursue me?
Xiaolan: Do you have to ask about such an obvious matter? Are you saying that you yourself could not tell (what his intention is)?
## Level 2/3 35.9 Using 怎么会 in a rhetorical way
怎么会 can be used in a rhetorical way to make a negative statement meaning 'it is not possible'. In this case, it may not always have an exact counterpart in English.
(Situation: Wang says something to Zhang. Zhang is sceptical and Wang assures him it's true.)
张: 你说的都是真的吗?
Zhāng: Nǐ shuō de dōu shì zhēn de ma?
王: 我怎么会骗你呢? (Meaning: 我不会骗你的.)
Wáng: Wǒ zěnme huì piàn nǐ ne?
Zhang: Is everything you said true?
Wang: Would I lie to you? (There is no direct translation between the English and Chinese for 怎么 in this expression.)
(Situation: Mrs Ding tries to tell her husband not to trust Li.)
丁先生: 放心吧! 我们是好朋友, 他怎么会骗我呢?
Dīng xiānsheng: Fàngxīn ba! Wǒmen shì hǎo péngyǒu, tā zěnme huì piàn wǒ ne?
丁太太: 怎么不会? 他又不是你的兄弟, 连兄弟都可能骗你呢!
Dīng tàitai: Zěnme bú huì? Tā yòu bú shì nǐde xiōngdì, lián xiōngdì dōu kěnéng piàn nǐ ne!
Mr Ding: Don't worry! We are good friends. How is it possible that he would cheat me?
Mrs Ding: Why not? (Literally, how is it not possible?) He is not your brother. Even your brother can cheat you.
## Level 3 35.10 Using 什么 in a rhetorical way
When 什么 (shénme) is used in a rhetorical question, the tone is frequently a harsh one.
### (a) 'Adjective + 什么': indicating disagreement
什么 can follow an adjective, which must have been mentioned already or exist in the context. It is used to indicate a disagreement.
(Situation: Mrs Wang's daughter has married into a rich family. Mrs Li congratulates Mrs Wang, but Mrs Wang does not like her son-in-law.)
李太太: 王太太, 恭喜你, 女儿嫁了一个这么好的丈夫!
Lǐ tàitai: Wáng tàitai, gōngxǐ nǐ, nǚ'ér jià le yí ge zhème hǎo de zhàngfū!
王太太: 好什么? 连大学都没有毕业。
Wáng tàitai: Hǎo shénme? Lián dàxué dōu méiyǒu bìyè.
Mrs Li: Mrs Wang, congratulations! Your daughter has married such a nice man.
Mrs Wang: What's so nice about him? He didn't even graduate from university.
王: 火车就要开了, 小李怎么还不来? 赶不上火车就麻烦了!
Wáng: Huǒchē jiù yào kāi le, Xiǎo Lǐ zěnme hái bù lái? Gǎn bú shàng huǒchē jiù máfán le!
丁: 紧张什么? 赶不上, 就坐下班, 反正咱们也没有急事。
Dīng: Jǐnzhāng shénme? Gǎn bú shàng, jiù zuò xià bān, fǎnzhèng zánmen yě méiyǒu jíshì.
Wang: The train will depart soon. How come Xiao Li is still not here? If we miss the train, we will be in trouble.
Ding: What are you anxious about? If we miss this one, then we'll get the next one. Anyway, we don't have any urgent business.
### (b) 'Verb + 什么': 'no need to'
什么 can appear after a verb to mean 'no need to', or 'don't' (in an imperative sentence). The tone tends to be harsh. 什么 does not have a direct counterpart in English in this context.
王: 车站就在前面, 咱们去坐公共汽车吧!
Wáng: Chēzhàn jiù zài qiánmiàn, zánmen qù zuò gōnggòng qìchē ba!
李: 走路去五分钟就到了, 坐什么公共汽车! (Meaning: 不用坐公共汽车.)
Lǐ: Zǒulù qù wǔ fēnzhōng jiù dào le, zuò shénme gōnggòng qìchē!
Wang: The bus stop is right ahead. Let's take the bus!
Li: It takes only five minutes if we walk. Why take the bus?
(Situation: Anna is crying because she has done poorly on the test and is about to be punished by her mother.)
妈妈: 你哭什么? 哭也还是要罚。
Māma: Nǐ kū shénme? Kū yě háishì yào fá.
Mother: Don't cry! Even if you cry, you will still be punished.
## Level 2 35.11 Frequently used rhetorical questions with 什么
The following are some frequently used rhetorical questions involving the use of 什么.
### (a) 关你什么事?
This literally means 'what business is it of yours?' The negative statement it is making is 不关你的事 ('it is none of your business').
姐姐: 别跟小李交往, 他配不上你。
Jiějie: Bié gēn Xiǎo Lǐ jiāowǎng, tā pèi bú shàng nǐ.
妹妹: 我跟谁交往, 关你什么事?
Mèimei: Wǒ gēn shéi jiāowǎng, guān nǐ shénme shì?
Older sister: Don't date Xiao Li. He is not good enough for you.
Younger sister: What business is it of yours whom I date?
### (b) 有什么好......的?
This means 'what is there to...?' meaning 'there is no point...' The 好 in this expression is not optional since it implies 'worth'.
李太太: 你儿子马上就要毕业了, 你现在一定很高兴吧!
Lǐ tàitai: Nǐ érzi mǎshàng jiù yào bìyè le, nǐ xiànzài yídìng hěn gāoxìng ba!
丁太太: 唉, 有什么好高兴的! 工作还没有找到呢!
Dīng tàitai: Ài, yǒu shénme hǎo gāoxìng de! Gōngzuò hái méiyǒu zhǎodào ne!
Mrs Li: Your son is about to graduate. You must be happy now.
Mrs Ding: Alas, what is there to be happy about? He has not found a job yet.
(Situation: Mr Wang is about to take a holiday with his whole family. A co-worker asks him if he is looking forward to it.)
王先生: 有什么好期待的? 我宁可待在家里休息休息。
Wáng xiānsheng: Yǒu shénme hǎo qídài de? Wǒ nìngkě dāi zài jiā lǐ xiūxi xiūxi.
Mr Wang: What is there to look forward to? I would rather stay home and rest.
### (c) 又有什么关系呢?
This expression means 'what does it matter whether or not...', meaning 'it does not matter whether or not...'. It usually follows a statement of 'as long as...'. Also, it should be noted that neither 又 nor 呢 is optional in this particular expression.
(Situation: Xiaoming is upset because he did poorly on a test even though he had studied hard for it. His mother tries to console him.)
妈妈: 只要你努力了, 成绩好不好又有什么关系呢?
Māma: Zhǐyào nǐ nǔlì le, chéngjī hǎo bù hǎo yòu yǒu shénme guānxi ne?
Mother: As long as you worked hard, what does it matter whether your grade is good or not?
## Exercises
Interpret the meaning of each of the following situations and write rhetorical questions accordingly.
**Example**
It's been raining for several days. Li asks Wang if it is still going to rain the next day. Wang uses a rhetorical question to say no one knows. A good choice would be 谁知道! (Shéi zhīdào!), which means 'who knows?' Wang can also use a rhetorical question to say he does not know. A good choice would be 我怎么知道? (Wǒ zěnme zhīdào?)
* Level 3 1 Mrs Wang has two daughters, Xiaolan and Xiaoying. It always seems to Miss Zhang that Mrs Wang is partial to Xiaolan. Miss Zhang and several other women are discussing this.
* (a) Miss Zhang uses a rhetorical question to state that they are both Mrs Wang's daughters. The rhetorical question is followed by a real question of why she is partial to Xiaolan.
* (b) Miss Li uses a rhetorical question to interpret the situation by thinking that Xiaoying is not Mrs Wang's birth daughter.
* (c) Miss Chen says that she does not believe it. She also uses a rhetorical question to say that it is not likely that Mrs Wang would be partial because she thinks Mrs Wang is a good mother.
* (d) Miss Ding uses a rhetorical question to say that she agrees with Miss Chen.
* 2 Anna has decided to marry Mr Wang. Her friend Miss Zhang is discussing this situation with a group of friends. Because Mr Wang makes too little money, Miss Zhang does not think Anna should marry him. She also worries that Anna will not be happy in the future.
* (a) Miss Ding uses a rhetorical question to point out that it is not Miss Zhang's business whom Anna wants to marry.
* (b) Miss Chen uses a rhetorical question to say that being poor does not matter because Mr Wang really loves Anna.
* (c) Miss Li uses a rhetorical question to tell Miss Zhang there is nothing to worry about since Anna is not a child anymore.
* (d) Miss Wen uses a rhetorical question to bluntly tell Miss Zhang there is no need to worry because it is not as if Anna is her younger sister.
* 3 A nosy neighbor comments on the fact that Mr and Mrs Li's 35-year-old son does not have a girlfriend.
* (a) The nosy neighbor asks if this means he (the son) does not plan to get married.
* (b) Mrs Li replies with a rhetorical question that he (her son) does not have time to date because he is too busy with his work.
* (c) Mr Li angrily tells the neighbor it is none of her business whether his son plans to marry or not.
* (d) The neighbor tells Mr Li there is no need for him to get angry because she does not have any bad intentions.
* (e) After the neighbor is gone, Mrs Li tells Mr Li it is not worth getting angry over such a small matter.
* (f) Mr Li uses a rhetorical question to say that it is not a small matter.
* 4 Li Ming was diligent and did well on the test, but Anna did poorly. Two teachers are discussing them.
* (a) Teacher Wang is puzzled because he thinks Anna is equally diligent. So he uses a rhetorical question to state his opinion about Anna. It is followed by a real question to express his puzzlement.
* (b) Teacher Li uses a rhetorical question to say that Anna is not diligent and is, in fact, very lazy.
* (c) Teacher Wang uses a rhetorical question to say that Anna stays at the library until midnight every day. He uses another rhetorical question to say that she cannot possibly be lazy.
# Key to exercises
## 1 The basic formation of a Chinese sentence
* 1 王先生跟他女朋友都不喜欢看电影。
Wáng xiānsheng gēn tā nǚ péngyǒu dōu bù xǐhuān kàn diànyǐng.
* 2 丁先生也在中国教英文。
Dīng xiānsheng yě zài Zhōngguó jiāo Yīngwén.
* 3 我儿子现在都在中国学中文。/现在我儿子都在中国学中文。
Wǒ érzi xiànzài dōu zài Zhōngguó xué Zhōngwén./Xiànzài wǒ érzi dōu zài Zhōngguó xué Zhōngwén.
* 4 我常去花店为妈妈买花。
Wǒ cháng qù huādiàn wèi māma mǎi huā.
* 5 他三月去中国, 六月从上海去北京。
Tā sānyuè qù Zhōngguó, liùyuè cóng Shànghǎi qù Běijīng.
* 6 王先生喜欢李小姐不是秘密。
Wáng xiānsheng xǐhuān Lǐ xiǎojiě bú shì mìmì.
* 7 天气不好的时候, 我总是在家看电视。
Tiānqì bù hǎo de shíhòu, wǒ zǒngshì zài jiā kàn diànshì.
* 8 这个房子, 厨房太小, 价钱也太贵。
Zhè ge fángzi, chúfáng tài xiǎo, jiàqián yě tài guì.
* 9 我的朋友不都是中国人, 我也有日本朋友。
Wǒde péngyǒu bù dōu shì Zhōngguó rén, wǒ yě yǒu Rìběn péngyǒu.
* 10 昨天小王借李小姐两本书, 今天她只还小王一本。
Zuótiān Xiǎo Wáng jiè Lǐ xiǎojiě liǎng běn shū, jīntiān tā zhǐ huán Xiǎo Wáng yì běn.
* 11 我妈妈的工作是在家给别人看小孩。
Wǒ māma de gōngzuò shì zài jiā gěi biérén kān xiǎohái.
* 12 请三个人吃晚饭太贵了。
Qǐng sān ge rén chī wǎnfàn tài guì le.
* 13 中国菜、 美国菜, 我都不喜欢吃; 我只喜欢吃日本菜。
Zhōngguó cài, Měiguó cài, wǒ dōu bù xǐhuān chī, wǒ zhǐ xǐhuān chī Rìběn cài.
* 14 我爸妈的车都是日本车, 因为他们都觉得日本车很好。
Wǒ bàmā de chē dōu shì Rìběn chē, yīnwèi tāmen dōu juéde Rìběn chē hěn hǎo.
* 15 我爸妈都不常在家吃饭。
Wǒ bàmā dōu bù cháng zài jiā chī fàn.
* 16 吃晚饭以前吃点心不好。
Chī wǎnfàn yǐqián chī diǎnxīn bù hǎo.
## 2 The eleven types of question in Chinese
* 1 你有没有女朋友? (Do you have a girlfriend?)
Nǐ yǒu méiyǒu nǚ péngyǒu?
* 2 今天会下雨吗? (Is it going to rain today?)
Jīntiān huì xià yǔ ma?
* 3 今天你想吃中国菜还是法国菜? (Do you feel like eating Chinese food or French food today?)
Jīntiān nǐ xiǎng chī Zhōngguó cài háishì Fǎguó cài?
* 4 你想不想喝一杯咖啡或者茶? (Would you like a cup of coffee or tea?)
Nǐ xiǎng bù xiǎng hē yì bēi kāfēi huòzhě chá?
* 5 谁有问题? (Who has questions?)
Shéi yǒu wèntí?
* 6 你知(道)不知道李老师的办公室在哪里? (Do you know where Teacher Li's office is?)
Nǐ zhī(dào) bù zhīdào Lǐ lǎoshī de bàngōngshì zài nǎlǐ?
* 7 你妹妹呢? (Where is your sister? or What has happened to your sister?)
Nǐ mèimei ne?
* 8 这本书是你的吧! (This book must be yours, isn't it?)
Zhè běn shū shì nǐde ba!
* 9
* (a) 你高(兴)不高兴?/你高兴吗? (Are you happy?)
Nǐ gāo(xìng) bù gāoxìng?/Nǐ gāoxìng ma?
* (b) 你不高兴吗? (Aren't you happy?)
Nǐ bù gāoxìng ma?
* 10 你倒了? 那这是什么?
Nǐ dǎo le? Nà zhè shì shénme?
(倒 is the verb for 'taking out the trash'. 那 in this situation means 'in this case'.) (You took out the trash already? Then what is this?)
* 11
* (a) 你喜欢日本车还是美国车?(Do you like Japanese cars or American cars?)Nǐ xǐhuān Rìběn chē háishì Měiguó chē?
* (b) 美国车、 日本车, 我都不喜欢。你们有没有德国车或者英国车?(I like neither American cars nor Japanese cars. Do you have German cars or English cars?)
Měiguó chē, Rìběn chē, wǒ dōu bù xǐhuān. Nǐmen yǒu méiyǒu Déguó chē huòzhě Yīngguó chē?
* 12
* (a) 你想不想一起去看电影?(Would you like to go to a movie together?)
Nǐ xiǎng bù xiǎng yīqǐ qù kàn diànyǐng?
* (b) 我们去看 《超人》, 怎么样?(How about if we go see Superman?)
Wǒmen qù kàn 'Chāorén', zěnmeyàng?
* 13 他请你了吗?/他请你了没有?(Did he invite you?)
Tā qǐng nǐ le ma?/Tā qǐng nǐ le méiyǒu?
* 14 火车站呢?(What about the train station?)
Huǒchē zhàn ne?
* 15
* (a) 你知不知道你女朋友的姐姐叫什么名字?(Do you know your girlfriend's older sister's name?)
Nǐ zhī bù zhīdào nǐ nǚ péngyǒu de jiějie jiào shénme míngzì?
* (b) 你想知道她大姐还是二姐的名字?(Do you want to know her eldest sister's name or second eldest sister's?)
Nǐ xiǎng zhīdào tā dàjiě háishì èrjiě de míngzì?
## 3 The use of 是, 在 and 有, and the definiteness of nouns
* 1 我家有五个人, 这五个人是我爸妈、 我哥哥、 我妹妹跟我。
Wǒ jiā yǒu wǔ ge rén, zhè wǔ ge rén shì wǒ bàmā, wǒ gēge, wǒ mèimei gēn wǒ.
* 2 桌子上面有两本书, 一本是我的, 一本是我弟弟的。
Zhuōzi shàngmiàn yǒu liǎng běn shū, yì běn shì wǒde, yì běn shì wǒ dìdi de.
* 3 我男朋友是中国人, 他现在在英国。
Wǒ nán péngyǒu shì Zhōngguó rén, tā xiànzài zài Yīngguó.
* 4 王: 你的中文词典在哪里? 我借一下, 好吗?
Wáng: Nǐde Zhōngwén cídiǎn zài nǎlǐ? Wǒ jiè yíxià, hǎo ma?
张: 我没有中文词典。
Zhāng: Wǒ méiyǒu Zhōngwén cídiǎn.
* 5 王: 这辆日本车是你的吗?/这辆日本车是不是你的?
Wáng: Zhè liàng Rìběn chē shì nǐde ma?/Zhè liàng Rìběn chē shì bú shì nǐde?
李: 我有两辆车, 一辆是美国车, 一辆是德国车。我没有日本车。
Lǐ: Wǒ yǒu liǎng liàng chē, yí liàng shì Měiguó chē, yí liàng shì Déguó chē, wǒ méiyǒu Rìběn chē.
* 6 李: 树下有一辆车, 是你的吗?
Lǐ: Shù xià yǒu yí liàng chē, shì nǐde ma?
张: 不是, 我的车在车库里。
Zhāng: Bú shì, wǒde chē zài chēkù lǐ.
* 7 丁: 我的中文词典在哪里? 王中, 在你那里吗?
Dīng: Wǒde Zhōngwén cídiǎn zài nǎlǐ? Wáng Zhōng, zài nǐ nàlǐ ma?
王: 不在(我这里), 在李明那里。
Wáng: Bú zài (wǒ zhèlǐ), zài Lǐ Míng nàlǐ.
* 8 王: 这里有一台电脑, 是谁的? 是你的吗?/是不是你的?
Wáng: Zhèlǐ yǒu yì tái diànnǎo, shì shéi de? Shì nǐde ma?/Shì bú shì nǐde?
丁: 不是, 我的电脑在我宿舍里。李明, 是不是你的?
Dīng: Bú shì, wǒde diànnǎo zài wǒ sùshè lǐ. Lǐ Míng, shì bú shì nǐde?
李: 也不是我的, 我没有电脑。
Lǐ: Yě bú shì wǒde, wǒ méiyǒu diànnǎo.
* 9 新学生: 请问, 厕所在哪里?
Xīn xuéshēng: Qǐng wèn, cèsuǒ zài nǎlǐ?
老师: 在五楼, 这楼没有。
Lǎoshī: Zài wǔ lóu, zhè lóu méiyǒu.
新学生: 这不是五楼吗?
Xīn xuéshēng: Zhè bú shì wǔ lóu ma?
老师: 不是, 我们现在在四楼。
Lǎoshī: Bú shì, wǒmen xiànzài zài sì lóu.
* 10 王: 这里有两本语法书, 哪本是你的?
Wáng: Zhèlǐ yǒu liǎng běn yǔfǎ shū, nǎ běn shì nǐde?
李: 都不是我的, 我没有语法书。
Lǐ: Dōu bú shì wǒde, wǒ méiyǒu yǔfǎ shū.
## 4 The functions of 的, relative clauses and noun clauses
* 1 我有很多喜欢听古典音乐的朋友。 (1)
Wǒ yǒu hěn duō xǐhuān tīng gǔdiǎn yīnyuè de péngyǒu.
* 2 这么可爱的小男孩, 是你儿子吗? (1)
Zhème kě'ài de xiǎo nánhái, shì nǐ érzi ma?
* 3 你看, 这就是我上星期买的新车。 (1)
Nǐ kàn, zhè jiù shì wǒ shàng xīngqī mǎi de xīn chē.
* 4 这是谁的日本车? 是新的还是二手的? (3)
Zhè shì shéide Rìběn chē? Shì xīn de háishì èrshǒu de?
* 5 今年爸爸送我的生日礼物是一辆新车。 (1)
Jīnnián bàba sòng wǒ de shēngrì lǐwù shì yí liàng xīn chē.
* 6 我听说那家新开的书店有很多从日本来的杂志。 (2)
Wǒ tīngshuō nà jiā xīn kāi de shūdiàn yǒu hěn duō cóng Rìběn lái de zázhì.
* 7 张: 昨天我去看了一个很好看的中国电影。 (1)
Zhāng: Zuótiān wǒ qù kàn le yí ge hěn hǎokàn de Zhōngguó diànyǐng.
李: 是不是老师上星期给我们介绍的那个? (1)
Lǐ: Shì bú shì lǎoshī shàng xīngqī gěi wǒmen jièshào de nà ge?
* 8 王太太: 昨天我儿子在家办了一个非常大的舞会。 (1)
Wáng tàitai: Zuótiān wǒ érzi zài jiā bàn le yí ge fēicháng dà de wǔhuì.
李太太: 哦, 是吗? 来的人多不多? (1)
Lǐ tàitai: Ó, shì ma? Lái de rén duō bù duō?
王太太: 相当多。都是他在学校认识的年轻人。 (1)
Wáng tàitai: Xiāngdāng duō, dōu shì tā zài xuéxiào rènshì de niánqīng rén.
* 9 丁: 你看, 我买了一本王老师写的语法书。 (1)
Dīng: Nǐ kàn, wǒ mǎi le yì běn Wáng lǎoshī xiě de yǔfǎ shū.
李: 我也买了一本王老师的书。可是, 我买的是他写的一本小说。 (3)
Lǐ: Wǒ yě mǎi le yì běn Wáng lǎoshī de shū. Kěshì, wǒ mǎi de shì tā xiě de yì běn xiǎoshuō.
* 10 妹妹昨天买的那条裙子颜色不好看。 (1)
Mèimei zuótiān mǎi de nà tiáo qúnzi yánsè bù hǎokàn.
* 11 二十一世纪的中国人已经没有"重男轻女"的观念了。 (2)
Èrshí yī shìjì de Zhōngguó rén yǐjīng méiyǒu 'zhòng nán qīng nǚ' de guānniàn le.
* 12 王: 你昨天买的那本书是不是英文的?(2)
Wáng: Nǐ zuótiān mǎi de nà běn shū shì bú shì Yīngwén de?
李: 我昨天买了两本 《老人与海》 。一本是中文的, 一本是英文的。(2)
Lǐ: Wǒ zuótiān mǎi le liǎng běn 'Lǎorén Yǔ Hǎi', yī běn shì Zhōngwén de, yī běn shì Yīngwén de.
王: 啊! 我知道! 《老人与海》 是海明威写的一本有名的小说。(2)
Wáng: À! Wǒ zhīdào! 'Lǎorén Yǔ Hǎi' shì Hǎimíngwēi xiě de yī běn yǒumíng de xiǎoshuō.
* 13 很多人批评中国政府推行的"一家一个孩子"的人口政策。(2)
Hěn duō rén pīpíng Zhōngguó zhèngfǔ tuīxíng de 'yī jiā yī ge háizi' de rénkǒu zhèngcè.
* 14 我弟弟女朋友的爸爸有一辆很贵的德国车。(2)
Wǒ dìdi nǚ péngyǒu de bàba yǒu yī liàng hěn guì de Déguó chē.
* 15 小王说他有一个年轻、 漂亮的女朋友, 可是没有人见过他这个女朋友。(1)
Xiǎo Wáng shuō tā yǒu yī ge niánqīng, piàoliàng de nǚ péngyǒu, kěshì méiyǒu rén jiàn guo tā zhè ge nǚ péngyǒu.
* 16 老师: 刚才我说的话, 谁不懂? 不懂的同学, 请现在问我。(2)
Lǎoshī: Gāngcái wǒ shuō de huà, shéi bù dǒng? Bù dǒng de tóngxué, qǐng xiànzài wèn wǒ.
张同学: 您说的, 我不懂, 您再说一遍, 好吗?(1)
Zhāng tóngxué: Nín shuō de, wǒ bù dǒng. Nín zài shuō yī biàn, hǎo ma?
* 17 今天爸爸买了十个苹果。他把最大的给我, 给弟弟的是最小的。(3)
Jīntiān bàba mǎi le shí ge píngguǒ. Tā bǎ zuì dà de gěi wǒ, gěi dìdi de shì zuì xiǎo de.
## 5 Position words
* 1 咖啡馆跟花店中间有一家银行。
Kāfēiguǎn gēn huādiàn zhōngjiān yǒu yì jiā yínháng.
* 2 这条路上有三个房子, 中间那个是我家。
Zhè tiáo lù shàng yǒu sān ge fángzi, zhōngjiān nà ge shì wǒ jiā.
* 3 学生宿舍在图书馆跟书店的中间。
Xuéshēng sùshè zài túshūguǎn gēn shūdiàn de zhōngjiān.
* 4 桌子上有两本书, 上面那本是我的。
Zhuōzi shàng yǒu liǎng běn shū, shàngmiàn nà běn shì wǒde.
* 5
* (a) 学生宿舍对面有两家咖啡馆。
Xuéshēng sùshè duìmiàn yǒu liǎng jiā kāfēiguǎn.
* (b) 我在右边那家工作。
Wǒ zài yòubiān nà jiā gōngzuò.
* 6
* (a) 我家有三个卧房, 两个在二楼。
Wǒ jiā yǒu sān ge wòfáng, liǎng ge zài èr lóu.
* (b) 在一楼的那个是我的。
Zài yī lóu de nà ge shì wǒde.
* (c) 我的卧房旁边是一个小厨房, 厨房中间有一张饭桌。
Wǒde wòfáng pángbiān shì yí ge xiǎo chúfáng, chúfáng zhōngjiān yǒu yì zhāng fànzhuō.
* 7 我家左边是一家花店, 右边是一家银行。
Wǒ jiā zuǒbiān shì yì jiā huādiàn, yòubiān shì yì jiā yínháng.
* 8 图书馆旁边的大楼是学生宿舍。
Túshūguǎn pángbiān de dà lóu shì xuéshēng sùshè.
* 9 对面那家书店里有一个咖啡馆。
Duìmiàn nà jiā shūdiàn lǐ yǒu yí ge kāfēiguǎn.
* 10 这家书店里面的咖啡馆也有茶。
Zhè jiā shūdiàn lǐmiàn de kāfēiguǎn yě yǒu chá.
## 6 Prepositional constructions
### I
* 1 今天晚上我没空, 我要在家给我爸妈写信。
Jīntiān wǎnshàng wǒ méi kòng, wǒ yào zài jiā gěi wǒ bàmā xiě xìn.
I am not free this evening. I have to write a letter to my parents at home.
* 2 从我家走路去图书馆要十五分钟。
Cóng wǒ jiā zǒulù qù túshūguǎn yào shíwǔ fēnzhōng.
Walking to the library from my house takes 15 minutes.
* 3 彼得常常跟他的中国朋友练习说中文。
Bǐdé chángcháng gēn tāde Zhōngguó péngyǒu liànxí shuō Zhōngwén.
Peter often practises speaking Chinese with his Chinese friends.
* 4 我男朋友现在在中国学中文, 昨天他从北京寄来几张照片。
Wǒ nán péngyǒu xiànzài zài Zhōngguó xué Zhōngwén, zuótiān tā cóng Běijīng jì lái jǐ zhāng zhàopiàn.
My boyfriend is studying Chinese in China right now. Yesterday he sent (by mail) a few photos from Beijing.
* 5 那个人不是中国人吗? 为什么我用中文跟他说话, 他不懂呢?
Nà ge rén bú shì Zhōngguó rén ma? Wèishénme wǒ yòng Zhōngwén gēn tā shuō huà, tā bù dǒng ne?
Isn't that person Chinese? Why is it that he does not understand me when I speak with him in Chinese?
* 6 张: 小王, 你要去哪里?
Zhāng: Xiǎo Wáng, nǐ yào qù nǎlǐ?
王: 去给我女朋友买生日礼物; 明天是她的生日。
Wáng: Qù gěi wǒ nǚ péngyǒu mǎi shēngrì lǐwù; míngtiān shì tāde shēngrì.
Zhang: Xiao Wang, where are you going?
Wang: I am going to buy a birthday present for my girlfriend. Tomorrow is her birthday.
* 7 我来中国以后, 每天都用筷子吃饭, 现在我已经习惯了。
Wǒ lái Zhōngguó yǐhòu, měi tiān dōu yòng kuàizi chī fàn, xiànzài wǒ yǐjīng xíguàn le.
Since I came to China, I have been eating with chopsticks every day. Now I am already used to it.
* 8 我们从王老师那里学到很多有用的知识。
Wǒmen cóng Wáng lǎoshī nàlǐ xuédào hěn duō yǒuyòng de zhīshì.
We learned a great deal of useful knowledge from Teacher Wang.
* 9 小王上课的时候常常用手机给他的朋友发短信。
Xiǎo Wáng shàng kè de shíhòu chángcháng yòng shǒujī gěi tāde péngyǒu fā duǎnxìn.
Xiao Wang often sends text messages to his friends by mobile phone during class time.
* 10 上午我男朋友给我打电话, 请我跟他去公园玩, 可是我告诉他, 今天天气不好, 我想在家看电视。
Shàngwǔ wǒ nán péngyǒu gěi wǒ dǎ diànhuà, qǐng wǒ gēn tā qù gōngyuán wán, kěshì wǒ gàosù tā, jīntiān tiānqì bù hǎo, wǒ xiǎng zài jiā kàn diànshì.
My boyfriend called me in the morning and asked me go to the park with him, but I told him that since today's weather was not good, I wanted to watch TV at home.
* 11 我在法国学中文, 所以没有中国人跟我练习说中文。昨天我的中文老师说, 她下星期会给我介绍一个中国朋友, 以后我可以常常用中文说话。
Wǒ zài Fǎguó xué Zhōngwén, suǒyǐ méiyǒu Zhōngguó rén gēn wǒ liànxí shuō Zhōngwén. Zuótiān wǒde Zhōngwén lǎoshī shuō, tā xià xīngqī huì gěi wǒ jièshào yí ge Zhōngguó péngyǒu, yǐhòu wǒ kěyǐ chángcháng yòng Zhōngwén shuōhuà.
I am studying Chinese in France, so there are no Chinese people to practise speaking Chinese with me. Yesterday my Chinese teacher said that she would introduce a Chinese friend to me; in the future, I can often speak in Chinese.
* 12 李明在咖啡馆工作。他每天下课以后, 就从教室走路去咖啡馆工作。
Lǐ Míng zài kāfēiguǎn gōngzuò. Tā měi tiān xià kè yǐhòu, jiù cóng jiàoshì zǒulù qù kāfēiguǎn gōngzuò.
Li Ming works at a coffee shop. Every day after class, he walks from the classroom to the coffee shop to work.
### II
* 1 外地人: 请问火车站在哪里?
Wàidì rén: Qǐng wèn, huǒchē zhàn zài nǎlǐ?
本地人: 你往前走, 差不多五分钟就到了。
Běndì rén: Nǐ wǎng qián zǒu, chàbùduō wǔ fēnzhōng jiù dào le.
Visitor: Excuse me, where is the train station?
Local person: Go straight ahead, and you will be there in about five minutes.
* 2 我对学习外语非常有兴趣, 所以我会说日文跟法文。
Wǒ duì xuéxí wàiyǔ fēicháng yǒu xìngqù, suǒyǐ wǒ huì shuō Rìwén gēn Fǎwén.
I am extremely interested in studying foreign languages, so I can speak Japanese and French.
* 3 他靠亲戚朋友借他的钱念完了大学。
Tā kào qīnqī péngyǒu jiè tā de qián niàn wán le dàxué.
He relied on money his relatives and friends had loaned him to finish his college education.
* 4 我为他做了这么多事, 他居然也没有说一声"谢谢", 真气人!
Wǒ wèi tā zuò le zhème duō shì, tā jūrán yě méiyǒu shuō yì shēng 'xièxie', zhēn qìrén.
I did so much for him, and, to my surprise, he didn't even say 'thank you'. This is really upsetting.
* 5 老王很不诚实, 他对我说的话, 我完全不相信。
Lǎo Wáng hěn bù chéngshí, tā duì wǒ shuō de huà, wǒ wánquán bù xiāngxìn.
Lao Wang is dishonest. I completely don't believe anything he says to me.
* 6 为了赚一些零用钱, 我去一家中国餐馆当服务员。
Wèile zhuàn yìxiē língyòngqián, wǒ qù yì jiā Zhōngguó cānguǎn dāng fúwùyuán.
In order to earn some pocket money, I went to a Chinese restaurant to work as a waiter.
* 7 关于你上次开会提出的问题, 我们已经想到了一个解决的办法。
Guānyú nǐ shàng cì kāi huì tíchū de wèntí, wǒmen yǐjīng xiǎngdào le yí ge jiějué de bànfǎ.
Regarding the problem you brought up at the last meeting, we have come up with a solution.
* 8 那位作家根据他自己亲身的经历写了一篇很有名的短篇小说。
Nà wèi zuòjiā gēnjù tā zìjǐ qīnshēn de jīnglì xiě le yì piān hěn yǒumíng de duǎnpiān xiǎoshuō.
That author wrote a famous short story based on his personal experiences.
* 9 今天有人请我和我先生吃晚饭, 所以我要去问邻居王阿姨晚上可不可以来帮我们看孩子。
Jīntiān yǒu rén qǐng wǒ hé wǒ xiānsheng chī wǎnfàn, suǒyǐ wǒ yào qù wèn línjū Wáng āyí wǎnshàng kě bù kěyǐ lái bāng wǒmen kān háizi.
Today someone has invited me and my husband for dinner; so I am going to ask my neighbor Auntie Wang if she can come to babysit for us this evening.
* 10 由于堵车, 我今天晚了半小时才到学校。
Yóuyú dǔ chē, wǒ jīntiān wǎn le bàn xiǎoshí cái dào xuéxiào.
Due to a traffic jam, today I arrived at school half an hour late.
## 7 Imperative sentences and the use of 别
* 1 这件事虽然不是秘密, 但是请你别告诉任何人。
Zhè jiàn shì suīrán bú shì mìmì, dànshì qǐng nǐ bié gàosù rènhé rén.
* 2 王: 我要告诉你一个秘密, 但是请你别告诉小张。
Wáng: Wǒ yào gàosù nǐ yí ge mìmì, dànshì qǐng nǐ bié gàosù Xiǎo Zhāng.
李: 好, 我不告诉他, 请快告诉我这个秘密。
Lǐ: Hǎo, wǒ bú gàosù tā, qǐng kuài gàosù wǒ zhè ge mìmì.
* 3 老师: 彼得, 这是中文课, 不可以说英文。
Lǎoshī: Bǐdé, zhè shì Zhōngwén kè, bù kěyǐ shuō Yīngwén.
彼得: 安娜, 老师说什么?
Bǐdé: Ānnà, lǎoshī shuō shénme?
安娜: 他叫你别说英文。
Ānnà: Tā jiào nǐ bié shuō Yīngwén.
* 4 妈妈: 我叫你别跟小王交朋友, 你为什么不听?
Māma: Wǒ jiào nǐ bié gēn Xiǎo Wáng jiāo péngyǒu, nǐ wèishénme bù tīng?
儿子: 你别管我跟谁交朋友。
Érzi: Nǐ bié guǎn wǒ gēn shéi jiāo péngyǒu.
妈妈: 我是你妈妈, 我不管你, 谁管你?
Māma: Wǒ shì nǐ māma, wǒ bù guǎn nǐ, shéi guǎn nǐ?
* 5 王先生: 奇怪, 汽车怎么发动不了了? 别是坏了。
Wáng xiānsheng: Qíguài, qìchē zěnme fādòng bù liǎo le? Bié shì huài le.
王太太: 我看不是坏了, 是没油了。
Wáng tàitai: Wǒ kàn bú shì huài le, shì méi yóu le.
* 6 女儿: 希望明天别下雨, 如果下雨, 我跟小王就不能去野餐了。
Nǚ'ér: Xīwàng míngtiān bié xià yǔ, rúguǒ xià yǔ, wǒ gēn Xiǎo Wáng jiù bù néng qù yěcān le.
妈妈: 不管明天下不下雨, 我都不希望你跟小王出去。
Māma: Bùguǎn míngtiān xià bú xià yǔ, wǒ dōu bù xīwàng nǐ gēn Xiǎo Wáng chū qù.
女儿: 我已经不是小孩了, 我希望你别管我的事。
Nǚ'ér: Wǒ yǐjīng bú shì xiǎohái le, wǒ xīwàng nǐ bié guǎn wǒde shì.
* 7 王: 下班以后, 我们一起去啤酒馆喝啤酒, 好不好?
Wáng: Xià bān yǐhòu, wǒmen yìqǐ qù píjiǔguǎn hē píjiǔ, hǎo bù hǎo?
李: 医生叫我别喝酒, 我不去。
Lǐ: Yīshēng jiào wǒ bié hē jiǔ, wǒ bú qù.
丁: 我太太不让我喝酒, 我也不去。
Dīng: Wǒ tàitai bú ràng wǒ hē jiǔ, wǒ yě bú qù.
王: 别告诉你太太, 我也不告诉她。你跟我去, 好吗?
Wáng: Bié gàosù nǐ tàitai, wǒ yě bú gàosù tā. Nǐ gēn wǒ qù, hǎo ma?
* 8 李太太: 今天这么冷, 咱们别去公园了。一起在家看电视, 好不好?
Lǐ Tàitai: Jīntiān zhème lěng, zánmen bié qù gōngyuán le, yīqǐ zài jiā kàn diànshì, hǎo bù hǎo?
李先生: 你不去, 没关系, 可是, 别叫我也别去。
Lǐ xiānsheng: Nǐ bú qù, méi guānxi, kěshì bié jiào wǒ yě bié qù.
* 9 安娜: 小兰, 王中说, 你告诉他, 你喜欢彼得, 是吗?
Ānnà: Xiǎolán, Wáng Zhōng shuō, nǐ gàosù tā, nǐ xǐhuān Bǐdé, shì ma?
小兰: 别听王中胡说。彼得是谁? 我不认识他。你要给我们介绍吗?
Xiǎolán: Bié tīng Wáng Zhōng húshuō. Bǐdé shì shéi? Wǒ bú rènshì tā, nǐ yào gěi wǒmen jièshào ma?
安娜: 你不认识彼得? 太好了! 彼得不是好人, 他有很多女朋友, 别叫我给你们介绍。
Ānnà: Nǐ bú rènshì Bǐdé? Tài hǎo le! Bǐde bú shì hǎo rén, tā yǒu hěn duō nǚ péngyǒu, bié jiào wǒ gěi nǐmen jièshào.
小兰: 呜厖安娜, 其实我认识彼得, 也喜欢他。我叫王中别告诉你, 他为什么不听?
Xiǎolán: Wū...Ānnà, qíshí wǒ rènshì Bǐdé, yě xǐhuān tā, wǒ jiào Wáng Zhōng bié gàosù nǐ, tā wèi shénme bù tīng?
## 8 Chinese verbs
* 1
* (b) Wǒ gēn wǒ nǚ péngyǒu de bàmā hái méiyǒu jiàn guo miàn.
* 2
* (c) Zuótiān wǒ zuò le wǔ ge cài, kěshì kèrén méiyǒu lái.
* 3
* (a) Wǒ érzi bìyè sān nián le, kěshì hái méiyǒu gōngzuò.
* 4
* (c) Wǒ bàba shì jiāo Zhōngwén de.
* 5
* (a) Wǒ bù xǐhuān māma zuò de cài, suǒyǐ wǒ méiyǒu chī.
* 6
* (a) Wáng tàitai xiǎng gēn tā zhàngfū líhūn.
* 7A
* (b) Lǐ: Nǐmen zhīdào ma? Wáng Dàzhōng kuài sǐ le!
* 7B
* (c) Zhāng: Shénme? Wáng Dàzhōng bìng le?
* 7C
* (b) Chén: Wǒ yě bù zhīdào zhè jiàn shì.
* 8A
* (c) Lìlì: Xiǎolán zuìjìn pàng le.
* 8B
* (a) Ānnà: Nà shì yīnwèi tā huáiyùn le.
* 8C
* (c) Měiyīng: Shénme? Xiǎolán jiéhūn le?
* 9
* (b) Wǒ gēn tā liáo le liǎng ge xiǎoshí tiān, hái bù zhīdào tāde míngzì.
* 10
* (c) Xiàndài nǚxìng bù yīnggāi jié le hūn jiù cízhí.
## 9 The progressive aspect and the continuous aspect
* 1 王: 那些人在做什么?
Wáng: Nà xiē rén zài zuò shénme?
李: 他们在等公共汽车(呢)。
Lǐ: Tāmen zài děng gōngòng qìchē (ne).
* 2 李: 王中, 对不起这时候给你打电话, 你在睡觉吗?
Lǐ: Wáng Zhōng, duìbùqǐ zhè shíhòu gěi nǐ dǎ diànhuà, nǐ zài shuìjiào ma?
王: 没关系, 我没有在睡觉, 我在写功课呢。你也在写功课吗?
Wáng: Méi guānxi, wǒ méiyǒu zài shuìjiào, wǒ zài xiě gōngkè ne. Nǐ yě zài xiě gōngkè ma?
李: 没有, 我在看电视(呢)。
Lǐ: Méiyǒu, wǒ zài kàn diànshì (ne).
* 3 王: 你(现在)在看电视吗?
Wáng: Nǐ (xiànzài) zài kàn diànshì ma?
李: 没有, 我在上网(呢)。
Lǐ: Méiyǒu, wǒ zài shàngwǎng (ne).
王: 快开电视。王老师在唱歌呢。
Wáng: Kuài kāi diànshì. Wáng lǎoshī zài chàng gē ne.
* 4 我到家的时候, 电视开着, 可是家里的人都在睡觉, 没有人在看电视。
Wǒ dào jiā de shíhòu, diànshì kāi zhe, kěshì jiā lǐ de rén dōu zài shuìjiào, méiyǒu rén zài kàn diànshì.
* 5 每天我回到家的时候, 我妈妈总是在做晚饭。我爸爸有时候在看报, 有时候在看电视。
Měi tiān wǒ huí dào jiā de shíhòu, wǒ māma zǒngshì zài zuò wǎnfàn. Wǒ bàba yǒu shíhòu zài kàn bào, yǒu shíhòu zài kàn diànshì.
* 6 张: 那里为什么有这么多人? 他们在做什么?
Zhāng: Nàlǐ wèishénme yǒu zhème duō rén? Tāmen zài zuò shénme?
李: 他们都在等着买电影票(呢)。
Lǐ: Tāmen dōu zài děng zhe mǎi diànyǐng piào (ne).
* 7 老师指着墙上的照片说: "现在请你们看着这些照片回答我的问题。"
Lǎoshī zhǐ zhe qiáng shàng de zhàopiàn shuō: 'Xiànzài qǐng nǐmen kàn zhe zhè xiē zhàopiàn huídá wǒde wèntí'.
* 8 王: 你在看报吗? 有什么大新闻?
Wáng: Nǐ zài kàn bào ma? Yǒu shénme dà xīnwén?
李: 我不知道。我不是在看新闻, 我在找工作(呢)。
Lǐ: Wǒ bù zhīdào. Wǒ bú shì zài kàn xīnwén, wǒ zài zhǎo gōngzuò (ne).
王: 你在找工作吗? 长城中国餐馆正在找服务员呢。
Wáng: Nǐ zài zhǎo gōngzuò ma? Chángchéng Zhōngguó cānguǎn zhèng zài zhǎo fúwùyuán ne.
李: 我知道, 可是他们在找有经验的人。
Lǐ: Wǒ zhīdào, kěshì tāmen zài zhǎo yǒu jīngyàn de rén.
* 9 经理: 所有员工请来我的办公室。
Jīnglǐ: Suǒyǒu yuángōng qǐng lái wǒde bàngōngshì.
王先生: 经理, 有些人在开会(呢)。
Wáng xiānsheng: Jīnglǐ, yǒuxiē rén zài kāihuì (ne).
经理: 没在开会的人, 请立刻来我的办公室。
Jīnglǐ: Méi zài kāihuì de rén, qǐng lìkè lái wǒde bàngōngshì.
* 10 我正要进电梯的时候, 看到电梯里的四个人都在打(or 讲)电话。所以我决定等下一班电梯。
Wǒ zhèng yào jìn diàntī de shíhòu, kàndào diàntī lǐ de sì ge rén dōu zài dǎ (or jiǎng) diànhuà. Suǒyǐ wǒ juédìng děng xià yì bān diàntī.
## 10 The use of 了 (the perfective aspect particle and modal particle)
* 1
* (a) Zuótiān Wáng xiānsheng qǐng wǒ chī fàn.
* 2
* (c) Yǐqián wǒ cháng hē kāfēi, měi tiān dōu hē liǎng, sān bēi.
* 3
* (a) Lǎoshī yào wǒmen kàn de nà xiē shū, nǐ kàn le ma?
* 4
* (a) Zhè cì kǎoshì, nǐ wèishénme kǎo de zhème chà, nǐ zhǔnbèi méiyǒu?
* 5
* (b) Zuótiān wǎnshàng wǒ méiyǒu shuìjiào, yīnwèi wǒ zhěng ge wǎnshàng dōu zài xiě gōngkè.
* 6
* (c) Jīntiān xiàwǔ wǒ qù shūdiàn mǎi le sān běn Zhóngwén xiǎoshuō.
* 7
* (a) Jīntiān shì wǒde shēngrì, suǒyǐ māma zuò le hěn duō cài.
* 8
* (b) Zhāng xiānsheng mǎi le chē jiù dài tā nǚ péngyǒu qù dōufēng le.
* 9
* (b) Wǒmen míngtiān xià le kè yìqǐ qù kàn diànyǐng, hǎo bù hǎo?
* 10
* (c) Ānnà měi tiān chī le wǔfàn jiù qù túshūguǎn xuéxí.
* 11
* (b) Wǒ xià ge yuè jiù yào qù Běijīng xué Zhōngwén le.
* 12
* (c) Nǐ dōu kuài èrshí suì le, zěnme hái xiàng xiǎohái yíyàng?
* 13
* (b) Bié kū le, nǐ kū le kuài èrshí fēnzhōng le.
* 14
* (a) Wǒ mǎi le dàyī, jiù méiyǒu qián le, suǒyǐ méiyǒu mǎi qúnzi.
* 15
* (b) Zuótiān Xiǎo Wáng qǐng kè; tā zuò le hěn duō cài, kěshì méiyǒu zuò tiándiǎn.
## 11 The use of 过 (the experiential aspect particle)
* 1 那本书我已经看过(or 了)两遍了, 我不想再看了。
Nà běn shū wǒ yǐjīng kàn guo (or le) liǎng biàn le, wǒ bù xiǎng zài kàn le.
* 2 王: 你以前用过筷子吗?
Wáng: Nǐ yǐqián yòng guo kuàizi ma?
李: 我没用过。
Lǐ: Wǒ méi yòng guo.
* 3 老师: 你用 Ø 毛笔写过字吗?
Lǎoshī: Nǐ yòng máobǐ xiě guo zì ma?
学生: 没有 Ø。
Xuéshēng: Méiyǒu.
* 4 他们来 Ø 北京一个多星期了, 参观过(or 了)很多地方。
Tāmen lái Běijīng yí ge duō xīngqī le, cānguān guo (or le) hěn duō dìfāng.
* 5 我十岁的时候, 去过英国, 在那里住过(or 了)三个月 Ø。
Wǒ shí suì de shíhòu, qù guo Yīngguó, zài nàlǐ zhù guo (or le) sān ge yuè.
* 6 昨天我去 Ø 医院看医生的时候, 医生说, 我得了肺炎。他问我以前得过肺炎没有, 我告诉 Ø 他, 我小时候也得过一次。
Zuótiān wǒ qù yīyuàn kàn yīshēng de shíhòu, yīshēng shuō, wǒ dé le fèiyán. Tā wèn wǒ yǐqián dé guo fèiyán méiyǒu, wǒ gàosù tā, wǒ xiǎo shíhòu yě dé guo yí cì.
* 7 妈妈: 今天的功课, 你写了没有?
Māma: Jīntiān de gōngkè, nǐ xiě le méiyǒu?
儿子: 我写了, 可是弟弟没有写 Ø。
Érzi: Wǒ xiě le, kěshì dìdi méiyǒu xiě.
* 8 昨天我在王先生家吃 Ø 饭的时候, 用了一下儿筷子。用 Ø 筷子吃 Ø 饭真有意思, 我从来没有用 Ø 筷子吃过饭。
Zuótiān wǒ zài Wáng xiānsheng jiā chī fàn de shíhòu, yòng le yí xiàr kuàizi. Yòng kuàizi chī fàn zhēn yǒu yìsi. Wǒ cónglái méiyǒu yòng kuàizi chī guo fàn.
* 9 我小时候身体不好, 得过两次肺炎。上中学的时候, 没有得过大病; 可是上个月我又得了一次肺炎, 到现在还没有好 Ø。
Wǒ xiǎo shíhòu shēntǐ bù hǎo, dé guo liǎng cì fèiyán. Shàng zhōngxué de shíhòu, méiyǒu dé guo dà bìng; kěshì shàng ge yuè wǒ yòu dé le yí cì fèiyán, dào xiànzài hái méiyǒu hǎo.
* 10 客人: 你爸爸去哪里了?
Kèrén: Nǐ bàba qù nǎlǐ le?
男孩: 他去日本了。Nánhái: Tā qù Rìběn le.
客人: 他以前去过日本吗?Kèrén: Tā yǐqián qù guo Rìběn ma?
男孩: 没有 Ø。但是他去过很多别的国家。
Nánhái: Méiyǒu. Dànshì tā qù guo hěn duō biéde guójiā.
* 11 王: 我没有来过你们学校, 请你带我参观一下儿, 好不好?
Wáng: Wǒ méiyǒu lái guo nǐmen xuéxiào. Qǐng nǐ dài wǒ cānguān yíxiàr, hǎo bù hǎo?
张: 我们等一下儿吧。李先生也没有来过, 可是他现在还没来 Ø, 他来了我就带你们一起参观。
Zhāng: Wǒmen děng yíxiàr ba. Lǐ xiānsheng yě méiyǒu lái guo, kěshì tā xiànzài hái méi lái, tā lái le wǒ jiù dài nǐmen yìqǐ cānguān.
## 12 Modal verbs
* 1 丁: 图书馆里不可以吸烟。
Dīng: Túshūguǎn lǐ bù kěyǐ xī yān.
张: 好, 我不吸烟。可(以)不可以喝水呢?
Zhāng: Hǎo, wǒ bù xī yān. Kě(yǐ) bù kěyǐ hē shuǐ ne?
丁: 我想应该可以喝水。
Dīng: Wǒ xiǎng yīnggāi kěyǐ hē shuǐ.
Ding: Smoking is not allowed in the library.
Zhang: OK, I won't smoke. Is drinking water allowed?
Ding: I think you should be able to drink water.
* 2 张: 今天下午, 我和小李要去河边玩, 你想不想一起去?
Zhāng: Jīntiān xiàwǔ, wǒ hé Xiǎo Lǐ yào qù hé biān wán, nǐ xiǎng bù xiǎng yìqǐ qù?
王: 我很想去, 可是我想我不能去, 因为我妈妈说, 我还不会游泳, 所以不可以去河边玩。
Wáng: Wǒ hěn xiǎng qù, kěshì wǒ xiǎng wǒ bù néng qù, yīnwèi wǒ māma shuō, wǒ hái bú huì yóuyǒng, suǒyǐ bù kěyǐ qù hébiān wán.
Zhang: Xiǎo Lǐ and I are going to have some fun by the river this afternoon. Would you like to go with us?
Wang: I would like to go very much, but I don't think I can go because my mother says that I don't know how to swim yet, and therefore I am not allowed to go to the riverside to have fun.
* 3 李: 小王, 你妹妹真漂亮, 你可(以)不可以给我们介绍一下?
Lǐ: Xiǎo Wáng, nǐ mèimei zhēn piàoliàng, nǐ kě(yǐ) bù kěyǐ gěi wǒmen jièshào yíxià?
王: 你想认识我妹妹吗? 没问题, 我给你们介绍。可是, 我妹妹不会说中文, 你只能跟她说英文。
Wáng: Nǐ xiǎng rènshì wǒ mèimei ma? Méi wèntí, wǒ gěi nǐmen jièshào. Kěshì, wǒ mèimei bú huì shuō Zhōngwén, nǐ zhǐ néng gēn tā shuō Yīngwén.
Li: Xiao Wang, your younger sister is really pretty. Can you introduce us?
Wang: You would like to know my sister? No problem, I will introduce you. But my younger sister does not know how to speak Chinese. You can only speak English with her.
* 4 王: 老师今天问的那个问题, 你会不会回答?
Wáng: Lǎoshī jīntiān wèn de nà ge wèntí, nǐ huì bú huì huídá?
李: 那个问题很容易, 我会回答。Lǐ: Nà ge wèntí hěn róngyì, wǒ huì huídá.
Wang: Did you know how to answer the question that the teacher asked today?
Li: That question was easy. I knew how to answer it.
* 5 张: 我家有咖啡, 也有矿泉水, 你想喝哪个?
Zhāng: Wǒ jiā yǒu kāfēi, yě yǒu kuàngquán shuǐ, nǐ xiǎng hē nǎ ge?
丁: 我想喝酒, 有没有啤酒?
Dīng: Wǒ xiǎng hē jiǔ, yǒu méiyǒu píjiǔ?
张: 医生说, 你身体不好,不该喝酒。你忘了吗?
Zhāng: Yīshēng shuō, nǐ shēntǐ bù hǎo, bù gāi hē jiǔ. Nǐ wàng le ma?
Zhang: There is coffee at my house, and there is also mineral water. Which would you like to drink?
Ding: I feel like drinking alcohol. Is there any beer?
Zhang: The doctor said you are not healthy and you should not drink alcohol. Have you forgotten?
* 6 丁: 桌上有咖啡, 你要不要喝杯咖啡?
Dīng: Zhuō shàng yǒu kāfēi, nǐ yào bú yào hē bēi kāfēi?
王: 有没有牛奶? 我不想喝没有牛奶的咖啡。
Wáng: Yǒu méiyǒu niúnǎi? Wǒ bù xiǎng hē méiyǒu niúnǎi de kāfēi.
丁:应该有。你去厨房找一找。
Dīng: Yīnggāi yǒu. Nǐ qù chúfáng zhǎo yì zhǎo.
Ding: There is coffee on the table. Do you want to have a cup of coffee?
Wang: Is there milk? I don't feel like having coffee without milk.
Ding: There should be some. Go to the kitchen to look.
* 7 丁: 你知道不知道王老师在哪里?
Dīng: Nǐ zhīdào bù zhīdào Wáng lǎoshī zài nǎlǐ?
李: 现在两点半, 我想他现在应该在教室里教书。
Lǐ: Xiànzài liǎng diǎn bàn, wǒ xiǎng tā xiànzài yīnggāi zài jiàoshì lǐ jiāoshū.
丁: 我想问他一个问题; 你想, 我可(以)不可以现在进教室问他?
Dīng: Wǒ xiǎng wèn tā yí ge wèntí; nǐ xiǎng, wǒ kě(yǐ) bù kěyǐ xiànzài jìn jiàoshì wèn tā?
李: 我想, 别人正在上课的时候, 我们不应当进他们的教室。
Lǐ: Wǒ xiǎng, biérén zhèng zài shàngkè de shíhòu, wǒmen bù yīngdāng jìn tāmen de jiàoshì.
Ding: Do you know where Teacher Wang is?
Li: It's 2:30 now. I think he should be teaching in the classroom now.
Ding: I would like to ask him a question. Do you think I can enter the classroom to ask him?
Li: I think that we should not enter other people's classrooms when they are having a class.
* 8 张: 朋友请我跟他们一起去游泳的时候, 我总是不能去, 因为我不会游泳。我真想学, 你可(以)不可以教我?
Zhāng: Péngyǒu qǐng wǒ gēn tāmen yìqǐ qù yóuyǒng de shíhòu, wǒ zǒngshì bù néng qù, yīnwèi wǒ bú huì yóuyǒng. Wǒ zhēn xiǎng xué, nǐ kě(yǐ) bù kěyǐ jiāo wǒ?
王: 对不起, 我很愿意教你, 可是我不能教你, 因为我太忙了。小丁, 你能不能教小张?
Wáng: Duìbùqǐ, wǒ hěn yuànyì jiāo nǐ, kěshì wǒ bù néng jiāo nǐ, yīnwèi wǒ tài máng le. Xiǎo Dīng, nǐ néng bù néng jiāo Xiǎo Zhāng?
丁: 我也不能教他, 因为我也不会游泳。
Dīng: Wǒ yě bù néng jiāo tā, yīnwèi wǒ yě bú huì yóuyǒng.
Zhang: When my friends ask me to go swimming with them, I never can go because I don't know how to swim. I really would like to learn. Can you teach me?
Wang: Sorry, I am willing to teach you but I can't because I am too busy. Xiao Ding, can you teach Xiao Zhang?
Ding: I can't teach him, either, because I also don't know how to swim.
* 9 张: 老王很会作菜, 他作的法国菜特别好吃。
Zhāng: Lǎo Wáng hěn huì zuò cài, tā zuò de Fǎguó cài tèbié hǎochī.
李: 那我应该请他教我作几道他的拿手菜, 因为我正想学作菜呢。
Lǐ: Nà wǒ yīnggāi qǐng tā jiāo wǒ zuò jǐ dào tāde náshǒu cài, yīnwèi wǒ zhèng xiǎng xué zuò cài ne.
Zhang: Lao Wang is good at cooking. The French food he makes is particularly delicious.
Li: Then I should ask him to teach me how to make some of his special dishes because I am just thinking about learning how to cook.
* 10 奇怪! 车怎么不能动了?该不是坏了吧!
Qíguài, chē zěnme bù néng dòng le, gāi bú shì huài le ba!
Strange! How come the car can't move? Could it be that it's broken down?
## 13 The complement of state and the complement of degree
* 1 我昨天晚上睡得不好, 所以今天早上起得很晚。
Wǒ zuótiān wǎnshàng shuì de bù hǎo, suǒyǐ jīntiān zǎoshàng qǐ de hěn wǎn.
* 2 王中学习得很努力, 所以, 老师的问题, 他总是回答得很对。
Wáng Zhōng xuéxí de hěn nǔlì, suǒyǐ, lǎoshī de wèntí, tā zǒngshì huídá de hěn duì.
* 3 安娜跟王中跳舞都跳得不错, 可是我跳得更好。
Ānnà gēn Wáng Zhōng tiàowǔ dōu tiào de bú cuò, kěshì wǒ tiào de gèng hǎo.
* 4 李太太: 听说你的两个孩子都在学作菜。谁的菜作得好?
Lǐ tàitai: Tīngshuō nǐde liǎng ge háizi dōu zài xué zuò cài, shéi de cài zuò de hǎo?
王太太: 法国菜, 儿子作得好; 中国菜, 女儿作得好。
Wáng tàitai: Fǎguó cài, érzi zuò de hǎo; Zhōngguó cài, nǚ'ér zuò de hǎo.
* 5 我弟弟跑得不快, 可是他游泳游得很快。
Wǒ dìdi pǎo de bú kuài, kěshì tā yóuyǒng yóu de hěn kuài.
* 6 王: 李明告诉我, 你英文说得很流利。你教我说英文, 好不好?
Wáng: Lǐ Míng gàosù wǒ, nǐ Yīngwén shuō de hěn liúlì. Nǐ jiāo wǒ shuō Yīngwén, hǎo bù hǎo?
丁: 其实我的英文说得很差。你应该去请一个说得好的人教你。
Dīng: Qíshí wǒde Yīngwén shuō de hěn chà. Nǐ yīnggāi qù qǐng yí ge shuō de hǎo de rén jiāo nǐ.
* 7 李太太: 我儿子中文学得怎么样?
Lǐ tàitai: Wǒ érzi Zhōngwén xué de zěnmeyàng?
老师: 他学习得很认真, 所以他的字写得很漂亮, 他语法也学得很好, 不过日常会话, 他还说得不流利。
Lǎoshī: Tā xuéxí de hěn rènzhēn, suǒyǐ tāde zì xiě de hěn piàoliàng, tā yǔfǎ yě xué de hěn hǎo, búguò rìcháng huìhuà, tā hái shuō de bù liúlì.
* 8 妈妈: 你吃得太多了, 别吃了, 爸爸还没有吃呢!
Māma: Nǐ chī de tài duō le, bié chī le, bàba hái méiyǒu chī ne!
儿子: 我饿得要命(or 我饿死了), 你今天菜作得太少了。
Érzi: Wǒ è de yàomìng (or Wǒ è sǐ le), nǐ jīntiān cài zuò de tài shǎo le.
* 9 他开车总是开得太快, 他妈妈叫他别开得太快, 他很不高兴。
Tā kāichē zǒngshì kāi de tài kuài, tā māma jiào tā bié kāi de tài kuài, tā hěn bù gāoxìng.
* 10 今天的考试, 他准备得很好, 所以考得非常好。
Jīntiān de kǎoshì, tā zhǔnbèi de hěn hǎo, suǒyǐ kǎo de fēicháng hǎo.
* 11 男: 我饿得吃得下一只大象。
Nán: Wǒ è de chī de xià yī zhī dà xiàng.
女: 我也饿死了! (我也饿得要命!)
Nǚ: Wǒ yě è sǐ le! (Wǒ yě è de yàomìng!)
* 12 今天的考试, 弟弟考得很好, 所以爸妈高兴得不得了!
Jīntiān de kǎoshì, dìdi kǎo de hěn hǎo, suǒyǐ bàmā gāoxìng de bù de liǎo.
* 13 老师: 你今天为什么来得这么晚?
Lǎoshī: Nǐ jīntiān wèi shénme lái de zhème wǎn?
学生: 对不起, 我昨天晚上睡得不好, 所以今天早上起床起得太晚了。
Xuéshēng: Duì bù qǐ, wǒ zuótiān wǎnshàng shuì de bù hǎo, suǒyǐ jīntiān zǎoshàng qǐchuáng qǐ de tài wǎn le.
* 14 爸爸: 你昨天考试考得怎么样?
Bàba: Nǐ zuótiān kǎoshì kǎo de zěnmeyàng?
儿子: 我昨天有两个考试; 英文的, 我考得很好; 中文的, 我考得不好。
Érzi: Wǒ zuótiān yǒu liǎng ge kǎoshì; Yīngwén de, wǒ kǎo de hěn hǎo; Zhōngwén de, wǒ kǎo de bù hǎo.
## 14 The complement of duration
* 1 丁: 你以前在北京住了(or 过)几个月?
Dīng: Nǐ yǐqián zài Běijīng zhù le (or guo) jǐ ge yuè?
李: 我没有在北京住过。可是我在上海住了八个月了。
Lǐ: Wǒ méiyǒu zài Běijīng zhù guo. Kěshì wǒ zài Shànghǎi zhù le bā ge yuè le.
* 2 王: 我上大学的时候, 学过(or 了)四年半(的)中文。
Wáng: Wǒ shàng dàxué de shíhòu, xué guo (or le) sì nián bàn (de) Zhōngwén.
丁: 真的吗? 你上了几年大学?
Dīng: Zhēn de ma? Nǐ shàng le jǐ nián dàxué?
王: 我一共上了五年。
Wáng: Wǒ yígòng shàng le wǔ nián.
* 3 王: 这个问题, 我想了五个小时了, 还是不会回答。
Wáng: Zhè ge wèntí, wǒ xiǎng le wǔ ge xiǎoshí le, háishì bú huì huídá.
李: 真的吗? 我只想了五分钟就知道答案了。
Lǐ: Zhēn de ma? Wǒ zhǐ xiǎng le wǔ fēnzhōng jiù zhīdào dá'àn le.
* 4 妈妈: 你看了快四小时(的)电视了, 别看了。
Māma: Nǐ kàn le kuài sì xiǎoshí (de) diànshì le, bié kàn le.
儿子: 我写了一下午(的)功课, 请让我再看半小时。
Érzi: Wǒ xiě le yí xiàwǔ (de) gōngkè, qǐng ràng wǒ zài kàn bàn xiǎoshí.
* 5 中国人: 你中国话说得真好。你来中国多长时间了?
Zhōngguó rén: Nǐ Zhōngguó huà shuō de zhēn hǎo. Nǐ lái Zhōngguó duō cháng shíjiān le?
外国人: 哪里。我来中国五个月了。来中国以前, 我学了(or 过)两年(的)中文。
Wàiguó rén: Nǎlǐ. Wǒ lái Zhōngguó wǔ ge yuè le. Lái Zhōngguó yǐqián, wǒ xué le (or guo) liǎng nián (de) Zhōngwén.
* 6 李: 从这里去学校要坐多久(的)公共汽车?
Lǐ: Cóng zhèlǐ qù xuéxiào yào zuò duō jiǔ (de) gōnggòng qìchē?
王: 我不知道, 我总是骑自行车去学校, 我每天都要骑二十分钟。
Wáng: Wǒ bù zhīdào, wǒ zǒngshì qí zìxíngchē qù xuéxiào. Wǒ měi tiān dōu yào qí èrshí fēnzhōng.
* 7 张: 听说你学了很多年(的)外语, 是真的吗?
Zhāng: Tīngshuō nǐ xué le hěn duō nián (de) wàiyǔ, shì zhēn de ma?
李: 是真的。我学过法文、 日文跟西班牙文。法文, 我学了十年, 日文我学了五年了, 西班牙文, 也学了三年了。
Lǐ: Shì zhēn de. Wǒ xué guo Fǎwén, Rìwén gēn Xībānyáwén. Fǎwén, wǒ xué le shí nián, Rìwén, wǒ xué le wǔ nián le, Xībānyáwén, yě xué le sān nián le.
* 8 小王跟他的女朋友认识三年了。最近他们常常吵架, 他女朋友已经三个星期没有跟他说话了。
Xiǎo Wáng gēn tāde nǚ péngyǒu rènshì sān nián le. Zuìjìn tāmen chángcháng chǎojià, tā nǚ péngyǒu yǐjīng sān ge xīngqī méiyǒu gēn tā shuō huà le.
* 9 三个月没有下雨了, 这星期居然开始下了。可是一下就下了三天。
Sān ge yuè méiyǒu xià yǔ le, zhè xīngqī jūrán kāishǐ xià le. Kěshì yí xià jiù xià le sān tiān.
## 15 The complement of quantity
* 1 王: 你看过几遍 《老人与海》?(or 《老人与海》 你看过几遍?)
Wáng: Nǐ kàn guo jǐ biàn 'Lǎorén Yǔ Hǎi'?
李: 英文的, 我看过两遍; 中文的, 我也看过一遍。
Lǐ: Yīngwén de, wǒ kàn guo liǎng biàn; Zhōngwén de, wǒ yě kàn guo yí biàn.
* 2 丁: 你看过 《超人》 吗?
Dīng: Nǐ kàn guo 'Chāorén' ma?
李: 在电视上看过两次, 可是每次都没有看完。 (Do not say 在电视上看过两遍 in this case.)
Lǐ: Zài diànshì shàng kàn guo liǎng cì, kěshì měi cì dōu méiyǒu kàn wán.
* 3 昨天我去了他家两趟(or 我去了两趟他家), 可是每次他都不在。今天我要再去一趟。
Zuótiān wǒ qù le tā jiā liǎng tàng, kěshì měi cì tā dōu bú zài. Jīntiān wǒ yào zài qù yí tàng.
* 4 王明上课的时候在睡觉。老师叫了他两声, 他都没听见。我踢了他两脚(or 两下), 他才醒过来。
Wáng Míng shàng kè de shíhòu zài shuìjiào, lǎoshī jiào le tā liǎng shēng, tā dōu méi tīngjiàn. Wǒ tī le tā liǎng jiǎo (or liǎng xià), tā cái xǐng guòlái.
* 5 昨天我不舒服, 上了五、 六次厕所。 (Do not say 我上了厕所五、 六次.)
Zuótiān wǒ bù shūfú, shàng le wǔ, liù cì cèsuǒ.
* 6 上个月我病了两次, 去医院看了五次医生。
Shàng ge yuè, wǒ bìng le liǎng cì, qù yīyuàn kàn le wǔ cì yīshēng.
* 7 我们请老师再唱一遍那首歌, 他点了一下头, 喝了两口水, 就开始唱了。
Wǒmen qǐng lǎoshī zài chàng yí biàn nà shǒu gē, tā diǎn le yí xià tóu, hē le liǎng kǒu shuǐ, jiù kāishǐ chàng le.
* 8 我帮过张小姐很多次(忙), 可是她只谢过我一次。
Wǒ bāng guo Zhāng xiǎojiě hěn duō cì (máng), kěshì tā zhǐ xiè guo wǒ yí cì.
* 9 王先生跟王太太结婚才半年, 可是已经吵过十次架。(Do not say 吵过架十次.)
Wāng xiānsheng gēn Wáng tàitai jiéhūn cái bàn nián, kěshì yǐjīng chǎo guo shí cì jià.
* 10 他骗过我几次, 可是我决定再相信他一次。
Tā piàn guo wǒ jǐ cì, kěshì wǒ juédìng zài xiāngxìn tā yí cì.
* 11 那个小贩骗过好几次观光客, 所以警察也抓过他好几次。
Nà ge xiǎofàn piàn guo hǎo jǐ cì guānguāngkè, suǒyǐ jǐngchá yě zhuā guo tā hǎo jǐ cì.
* 12 李先生离过两次婚, 我不懂他为什么打算再结一次(婚)? (Do not say 离过婚两次 or 再结婚一次.)
Lǐ xiānsheng lí guo liǎng cì hūn, wǒ bù dǒng tā wèishénme dǎsuàn zài jié yí cì (hūn)?
* 13 先生: 那个苹果, 我咬了一口, 就知道已经坏了。
Xiānsheng: Nà ge píngguǒ, wǒ yǎo le yī kǒu, jiǔ zhīdào yǐjīng huài le.
太太: 我只看了一眼就知道了。
Tàitai: Wǒ zhǐ kàn le yī yǎn jiù zhīdào le.
* 14 妈妈: 我告诉过你多少次了? 吸烟对身体不好, 现在我要再说一遍: 别吸烟!
Māma: Wǒ gàosù guo nǐ duōshǎo cì le? Xīyān duì shēntǐ bù hǎo. Xiànzài wǒ yào zài shuō yī biàn: Bié xīyān!
儿子: 好了! 这三个字我已经听过几百遍了。
Érzi: Hǎo le! Zhè sān ge zì wǒ yǐjīng tīng guo jǐ bǎi biàn le!
## 16 The complement of direction
### I
* 1 安娜: 你的男朋友在对面叫你, 你为什么不过去呢?
Ānnà: Nǐ de nán péngyǒu zài duìmiàn jiào nǐ, nǐ wèishénme bú guò qù ne?
小兰: 他是男的, 应该他过来。
Xiǎolán: Tā shì nán de, yīnggāi tā guò lái.
安娜: 要是你不过去, 他也不过来, 你们就不能谈话了。
Ānnà: Yàoshì nǐ bú guò qù, tā yě bú guò lái, nǐmen jiù bù néng tánhuà le.
Anna: Your boyfriend is calling you from across the street. Why don't you go across the street?
Xiaolan: He is a man; he should come over.
Anna: If you don't go over and he doesn't come over, either, you two won't be able to talk.
* 2 你看, 他们都在山上, 我们也上去吧!
Nǐ kàn, tāmen dōu zài shān shàng, wǒmen yě shàng qù ba!
Look, they are all up on the mountain. Let's go up, too.
* 3 (妈妈给小明打电话。 Māma gěi Xiǎomíng dǎ diànhuà.)
妈妈: 小明, 大家都在家里等你一起吃饭, 你为什么还不回来呢?
Māma: Xiǎomíng, dàjiā dōu zài jiā lǐ děng nǐ yìqǐ chī fàn, nǐ wèishénme hái bù huí lái ne?
(Xiaoming's mother calls him on the telephone.)
Mother: Xiaoming, everybody is waiting for you at home to eat dinner together. Why haven't you come back?
* 4 上星期我的好朋友李中从上海寄来了一封信, 他在信上问我什么时候可以到那里去看他。
Shàng xīngqī wǒde hǎo péngyǒu Lǐ Zhōng cóng Shànghǎi jì lái le yì fēng xìn, tā zài xìn shàng wèn wǒ shénme shíhòu kěyǐ dào nàlǐ qù kàn tā.
Last week, my good friend Li Zhong sent me a letter from Shanghai. In the letter, he asked me when I could go there to visit him.
* 5 我听说你喜欢吃法国点心, 所以我去店里给你买来了一些, 都在厨房里, 你去吃吧!
Wǒ tīngshuō nǐ xǐhuān chī Fǎguó diǎnxīn, suǒyǐ wǒ qù diàn lǐ gěi nǐ mǎi lái le yì xiē, dōu zài chúfáng lǐ, nǐ qù chī ba!
I heard that you like to eat French pastries, so I went to the bakery and bought (and brought) some for you. They are in the kitchen. Go have some!
* 6 上星期我给爸爸寄去了一封信, 请他下个月来中国看我的时候, 给我带一本汉英词典来。昨天爸爸打了一个电话来, 告诉我他不能到中国来看我了, 所以我要的词典, 他会寄来。
Shàng xīngqī wǒ gěi bàba jì qù le yì fēng xìn, qǐng tā xià ge yuè lái Zhōngguó kàn wǒ de shíhòu, gěi wǒ dài yì běn Hàn Yīng cídiǎn lái. Zuótiān bàba dǎ le yí ge diànhuà lái, gàosù wǒ tā bù néng dào Zhōngguó lái kàn wǒ le, suǒyǐ wǒ yào de cídiǎn, tā huì jì lái.
Last week, I mailed a letter to my father, asking him to bring me a Chinese–English dictionary next month when he comes to visit me. Yesterday, my father called me and told me that he would not be able to come to China to see me anymore. Therefore, he would send the dictionary I want by mail.
* 7 今天我请几个朋友来我家开派对, 每个朋友都带来了一个他们在家作的菜, 但是小李去店里买了一瓶酒来。
Jīntiān wǒ qǐng jǐ ge péngyǒu lái wǒ jiā kāi pàiduì, měi ge péngyǒu dōu dài lái le yí ge tāmen zài jiā zuò de cài, dànshì Xiǎo Lǐ qù diàn lǐ mǎi le yì píng jiǔ lái.
Today I invited a few friends to my house for a party. Everyone brought a dish they made at home, but Xiao Li went to the store and bought (and brought) a bottle of wine.
* 8 汽车已经在外面等我们了, 我们快出去吧。
Qīchē yǐjīng zài wàimiàn děng wǒmen le, wǒmen kuài chūqù ba.
The car is already waiting for us outside. Let's hurry and go out(side).
* 9 我在楼上等了他半个小时, 他还没有上来, 所以我就下去找他; 可是他的朋友告诉我, 他已经回家去 (return home) 了。
Wǒ zài lóu shàng děng le tā bàn ge xiǎoshí, tā hái méiyǒu shàng lái, suǒyǐ wǒ jiù xià qù zhǎo tā; kěshì tāde péngyǒu gàosù wǒ, tā yǐjīng huí jiā qù le.
I had waited for him upstairs for half an hour, and he still did not come up, and so I went down(stairs) to look for him. But his friend told me that he had gone back home.
* 10 下雨了, 你为什么还站在外面, 快进来吧!
Xià yǔ le, nǐ wèi shénme hái zhàn zài wàimiàn, kuài jìn lái ba!
It's raining; why are you still standing outside? Hurry and come in!
* 11 别的同学都进教室去了, 你为什么还站在这里? 你也快进去吧!
Biéde tóngxué dōu jìn jiàoshì qù le, nǐ wèi shénme hái zhàn zài zhèlǐ? Nǐ yě kuài jìn qù ba!
All the other students have gone into the classroom; why are you still standing here? Hurry and go inside, too.
* 12 王先生, 你的司机现在有没有空? 你可不可以叫他开车送我去机场?
Wáng xiānsheng, nǐde sījī xiànzài yǒu méiyǒu kòng? Nǐ kě bù kěyǐ jiào tā kāi chē sòng wǒ qù jīchǎng?
Mr Wang, is your driver free now? Can you ask him to (drive and) take me to the airport?
* 13 (王先生比平常晚一小时回家; 王太太在家等他。)
(Wáng xiānsheng bǐ píngcháng wǎn yī xiǎoshí huí jiā; Wáng tàitai zài jiā děng tā.)
太太: 你怎么现在才回来? 你饿了吗? 厨房里有很多菜, 我去给你拿来。
Tàitai: Nǐ zěnme xiànzài cái huílái? Nǐ è le ma? Chúfáng lǐ yǒu hěn duō cài, wǒ qù gěi nǐ ná lái.
先生: 谢谢。我想问你, 明天我可不可以请一个朋友来吃晚饭?
Xiānsheng: Xièxie. Wǒ xiǎng wèn nǐ, míngtiān wǒ kě bù kěyǐ qǐng yī ge péngyǒu lái chī wǎnfàn?
(Mr Wang came home an hour later than usual. Mrs Wang had been waiting for him at home.)
Mrs: How come you only came back now? Are you hungry? There is a lot of food in the kitchen. I will go get it (and bring it) for you.
Mr: Thanks! I wanted to ask you if I can invite a friend here to have dinner tomorrow.
### II
* 1 你别站在那里了, 快坐下去休息休息吧! (说话的人也站着。)
Nǐ bié zhàn zài nàlǐ le, kuài zuò xiàqù xiūxi xiūxi ba! (Shuōhuà de rén yě zhàn zhe.)
Don't stand there anymore. Sit down and take a break! (The speaker is also standing.)
* 2 这家小吃店人太多了, 我不想在这里吃, 我们买一些小吃回家去吃, 好不好?
Zhè jiā xiǎochī diàn rén tài duō le, wǒ bù xiǎng zài zhèlǐ chī, wǒmen mǎi yìxiē xiǎochī huí jiā qù chī, hǎo bù hǎo?
This snack shop is too crowded. I don't want to eat here. Let's buy some snacks and go home to eat, OK?
* 3 这个人从十楼跳下来, 所以他很快就死了。(说话的人在大楼外面。)
Zhè ge rén cóng shí lóu tiào xiàlái, suǒyǐ tā hěn kuài jiù sǐ le. (Shuōhuà de rén zài dà lóu wàimiàn.)
This man jumped down from the tenth floor, so he died quickly. (The speaker is outside the building.)
* 4 十点了, 饭馆里还有很多客人在吃饭, 从外面又走进来几个人, 今天生意真好!
Shí diǎn le, fànguǎn lǐ hái yǒu hěn duō kèrén zài chī fàn, cóng wàimiàn yòu zǒu jìnlái jǐ ge rén, jīntiān shēngyì zhēn hǎo!
It's 10 o'clock already. There are still many customers eating in our restaurant, and a few more people have just walked in. Business is really good today!
* 5 我每天下午都带我的狗出去玩。
Wǒ měi tiān xiàwǔ dōu dài wǒde gǒu chūqù wán.
Every afternoon, I take my dog out to play.
* 6 在中国, 老师一进教室, 小学生就会从椅子上站起来说: "老师好。"
Zài Zhōngguó, lǎoshī yí jìn jiàoshì, xiǎo xuéshēng jiù huì cóng yǐzi shàng zhàn qǐlái shuō: 'Lǎoshī hǎo.'
In China, as soon as the teacher enters the classroom, all the students stand up from their chairs and say, 'Hello, Teacher.'
* 7 你看, 山上有一个漂亮的亭子, 咱们爬上山去照几张相吧!
Nǐ kàn, shān shàng yǒu yí ge piàoliàng de tíngzi, zánmen pá shàng shān qù zhào jǐ zhāng xiàng ba!
Look, there is a pretty pavilion on the mountain. Let's climb up the mountain to take some pictures.
* 8 爸爸每次出国, 都会给我带礼物回来。
Bàba měi cì chū guó, dōu huì gěi wǒ dài lǐwù huílái.
Every time my father goes overseas, he will bring gifts back for me.
* 9 河上有一条桥, 我打算游过去, 再从桥上走回来。
Hé shàng yǒu yì tiáo qiáo, wǒ dǎsuàn yóu guòqù, zài cóng qiáo shàng zǒu huílái.
There is a bridge on the river. I plan to swim across the river and then walk back here on the bridge.
* 10 绿灯一亮, 他就很快地穿过马路来跟我说话。
Lǜdēng yī liàng, tā jiù hěn kuài de chuān guò mǎlù lái gēn wǒ shuōhuà.
As soon as the green light was on, he immediately crossed the street to talk to me.
* 11 老师: 你们的功课都在我这里, 下课以后, 别忘了拿回去。
Lǎoshī: Nǐmen de gōngkè dōu zài wǒ zhèlǐ, xià kè yǐhòu, bié wàng le ná huí qù.
Teacher: Your homework is here with me. After class, don't forget to pick it up (get it back).
* 12 我不能跟你们去看电影, 有一个电子邮件, 我今天一定要发出去。
Wǒ bù néng gēn nǐmen qù kàn diànyǐng, yǒu yī ge diànzǐ yóujiàn, wǒ jīntiān yīdìng yào fā chūqù.
I cannot go to the movie with you. There is an email I must send out today.
## 17 The complement of result
* 1 王: 墙上有一个牌子, 你看见(or 到)了没有?
Wáng: Qiáng shàng yǒu yí ge páizi, nǐ kàn jiàn (or dào) le méiyǒu?
丁: 我看见(or到)了, 可是上面写的字, 我没有看懂。
Dīng: Wǒ kàn jiàn (or dào) le, kěshì shàngmiàn xiě de zì, wǒ méiyǒu kàn dǒng.
Wang: There was a sign on the wall. Did you see it?
Ding: I did, but I did not understand the words on the sign.
* 2 他学游泳只学了两个多小时就学会了。
Tā xué yóuyǒng zhǐ xué le liǎng ge duō xiǎoshí jiù xué huì le.
He had only spent a little over two hours before he learned how to swim.
* 3 我的车修好了, 今天我们可以开车出去玩了。
Wǒde chē xiū hǎo le, jīntiān wǒmen kěyǐ kāichē chūqù wán le.
My car is fixed. Today we can drive my car and go out to have fun.
* 4 今天的功课太多了, 我写了两个多小时, 还没有写好(or 完)。
Jīntiān de gōngkè tài duō le, wǒ xiě le liǎng ge duō xiǎoshí, hái méiyǒu xiě hǎo (or wán).
There is too much homework today. I have been working on it for over two hours, and I still have not finished.
* 5 我告诉他我姓张, 可是他听错了, 所以他叫我常先生。
Wǒ gàosù tā wǒ xìng Zhāng, kěshì tā tīng cuò le, suǒyǐ tā jiào wǒ Cháng xiānsheng.
I told him that my last name is Zhang, but he heard it wrong, so he called me Mr Chang.
* 6 我的英文不好, 所以那个英国人说的话, 我没有听懂。
Wǒde Yīngwén bù hǎo, suǒyǐ nà ge Yīngguó rén shuō de huà, wǒ méiyǒu tīng dǒng.
My English is not good, so I did not understand what that Englishman said.
* 7 要买那本畅销书的人太多了, 我去了两趟书店, 都没有买到。
Yào mǎi nà běn chàngxiāo shū de rén tài duō le, wǒ qù le liǎng tàng shūdiàn, dōu méiyǒu mǎi dào.
There are too many people who want to buy that best-selling book. I made two trips to the bookshop, but I did not get the book.
* 8 站住, 别走! 我是老师, 我还没说完话呢, 你怎么可以走?
Zhàn zhù, bié zǒu! Wǒ shì lǎoshī, wǒ hái méi shuō wán huà ne, nǐ zěnme kěyǐ zǒu?
Hold it (Stand still)! Don't go. I am the teacher. I have not finished talking, how could you leave?
* 9 今天的比赛, 德国队输了, 因为有两个球, 他们没有接住。
Jīntiān de bǐsài, Déguó duì shū le, yīnwèi yǒu liǎng ge qiú, tāmen méiyǒu jiē zhù.
The German team lost in today's game because there were two balls that they did not catch.
* 10 妈妈: 这种巧克力糖很贵, 你要慢慢地吃。
Māma: Zhè zhǒng qiǎokèlì táng hěn guì, nǐ yào màn màn de chī.
儿子: 这么一小块, 我一口就吃掉了。
Érzi: Zhème yì xiǎo kuài, wǒ yì kǒu jiù chī diào le.
Mother: This kind of chocolate is expensive. You must eat slowly.
Son: Such a little piece. I can eat it all in one bite.
* 11 大家都准备好了吗? 咱们上飞机吧! 自己的行李, 一定要拿好!
Dàjiā dōu zhǔnbèi hǎo le ma? Zánmen shàng fēijī ba! Zìjǐ de xínglǐ, yídìng yào ná hǎo!
Is everybody ready? Let's board the airplane! You must carry your own luggage securely!
* 12 今天我收到一封王小姐去年寄给我的信, 因为她把地址写错了, 所以过了一年这封信才寄到我家。
Jīntiān wǒ shōu dào yì fēng Wáng xiǎojiě qùnián jì gěi wǒ de xìn, yīnwèi tā bǎ dìzhǐ xiě cuò le, suǒyǐ guò le yì nián, zhè fēng xìn cái jì dào wǒ jiā.
Today I received a letter which Miss Wang sent to me last year. Because she wrote my address wrong, it took a year for the letter to reach my house.
* 13 王: 法文老师今天用法文说的那个故事, 你听懂了没有?
Wáng: Fǎwén lǎoshī jīntiān yòng Fǎwén shuō de nà ge gùshì, nǐ tīng dǒng le méiyǒu?
李: 今天我坐错公共汽车了, 所以我来晚了。我到教室的时候, 他刚说完, 所以那个故事, 我没有听到。
Lǐ: Jīntiān wǒ zuò cuò gōnggòng qìchē le, suǒyǐ wǒ lái wǎn le, wǒ dào jiàoshì de shíhòu, tā gāng shuō wán, suǒyǐ nà ge gùshì, wǒ méiyǒu tīng dào.
Wang: Did you understand the story our French teacher told in French today?
Li: I rode the wrong bus today, so I came late. When I got to the classroom, he had just finished telling it, so I did not hear that story.
* 14 今天应该十点十五分下课, 可是老师一直讲到十点半才下课。
Jīntiān yīnggāi shí diǎn shíwǔ fēn xià kè, kěshì lǎoshī yīzhí jiǎng dào shí diǎn bàn cái xià kè.
Today the class should have been over at 10:15, but the teacher talked until 10:30 before he dismissed it.
* 15 张先生: 你都七十岁了, 为什么还不退休?
Zhāng xiānsheng: Nǐ dōu qīshí suì le, wèi shénme hái bú tuìxiū?
李先生: 我要赚钱啊! 钱还没有赚够, 怎么能退休?
Lǐ xiānsheng: Wǒ yào zhuàn qián a! Qián hái méiyǒu zhuàn gòu, zěnme néng tuìxiū?
Mr Zhang: You are already 70 years old; why have you not retired yet?
Mr Li: I want to make money! I have not made enough money; how can I retire?
* 16 这么高的大楼, 只花了半年就盖好了, 真快!
Zhème gāo de dà góu, zhǐ huā le bàn nián jiù gài hǎo le, zhēn kuài!
Such a tall building took only half a year to build. It was really fast!
## 18 The complement of potential
* 1 这个教室只有二十把椅子, 坐不下三十个人。
Zhè ge jiàoshì zhǐ yǒu èrshí bǎ yǐzi, zuò bú xià sānshí ge rén.
This classroom has only 20 chairs. It cannot seat 30 people.
* 2 这么重的桌子, 你一个人搬得动吗? 要不要我来帮你一下?
Zhème zhòng de zhuōzi, nǐ yí ge rén bān de dòng ma? Yào bú yào wǒ lái bāng nǐ yíxià?
Such a heavy table, can you (do you have the strength to) carry it by yourself? Do you want me to come and help you?
* 3 英文小说我看不懂, 因为我的英文不好。
Yīngwén xiǎoshuō wǒ kàn bù dǒng, yīnwèi wǒde Yīngwén bù hǎo.
I cannot read (cannot understand) English novels because my English is not good.
* 4 听说那本书非常畅销, 想买的人很多, 你快去买吧, 去晚了, 就买不到了。
Tīngshuō nà běn shū fēicháng chàngxiāo, xiǎng mǎi de rén hěn duō, nǐ kuài qù mǎi ba, qù wǎn le, jiù mǎi bú dào le.
I heard that that book is extremely popular, and that many people want to buy it. Hurry and go buy it. If you go late, you won't be able to get it.
* 5 老师: 坐在后面的同学, 听得见(or 到)我说的话吗?
Lǎoshī: Zuò zài hòumiàn de tóngxué, tīng de jiàn (or dào) wǒ shuō de huà ma?
学生: 听得见(or 到), 可是黑板上的字, 我们看不见(or 到/清楚)。
Xuéshēng: Tīng de jiàn (or dào), kěshì hēibǎn shàng de zì, wǒmen kàn bú jiàn (or dào/qīngchǔ).
Teacher: Can those students who sit in the back (of the classroom) hear what I say?
Student: Yes, we can. But we cannot see (or we cannot see clearly) words on the blackboard.
* 6 主人: 还有很多菜, 再吃一点吧!
Zhǔrén: Hái yǒu hěn duō cài, zài chī yìdiǎn ba!
客人: 不了, 谢谢, 我吃不下了。
Kèrén: Bù le, xièxie, wǒ chī bú xià le.
Host: There is still plenty of food. Why don't you have some more!
Guest: No, thanks. I cannot eat anymore (I have no room anymore).
* 7 那本书, 我已经找了三天了, 我想, 可能找不到了。
Nà běn shū, wǒ yǐjīng zhǎo le sān tiān le, wǒ xiǎng, kěnéng zhǎo bú dào le.
I have been looking for that book for three days. I think I probably won't be able to find it anymore.
* 8 汽车在路上坏了, 飞机起飞以前我到不了机场了。
Qìchē zài lù shàng huài le, fēijī qǐfēi yǐqián, wǒ dào bù liǎo jīchǎng le.
My car broke down on the road. I will not be able to reach the airport before the flight takes off.
* 9 王: 昨天我在街对面叫了你五、 六次, 你怎么不过来呢?
Wáng: Zuótiān wǒ zài jiē duìmiàn jiào le nǐ wǔ, liù cì, nǐ zěnme bú guòlái ne?
张: 因为那时候街上车太多了, 我过不去。
Zhāng: Yīnwèi nà shíhòu jiē shàng chē tài duō le, wǒ guò bú qù.
Wang: Yesterday I called to you from across the street five or six times. How come you didn't come over?
Zhang: Because there were too many cars on the street at that time, I could not cross over.
* 10 香港的房价太高了, 所以我只买得起一个很小的房子。
Xiānggǎng de fáng jià tài gāo le, suǒyǐ wǒ zhǐ mǎi de qǐ yí ge hěn xiǎo de fángzi.
House prices in Hong Kong are too high, so I can only afford (to buy) a very small house.
* 11 我一个人只有两只手, 你想我怎么拿得了这么多东西? 你快过来帮我拿一些。
Wǒ yí ge rén zhǐ yǒu liǎng zhī shǒu, nǐ xiǎng wǒ zěnme ná de liǎo zhème duō dōngxi? Nǐ kuài guòlái bāng wǒ ná yìxie.
I only have two hands. How do you think I can handle to carry so many things? Hurry and come over here to help me carry some.
* 12 我听说那本书很便宜, 用不了两块钱就买得到。
Wǒ tīngshuō nà běn shū hěn piányí, yòng bù liǎo liǎng kuài qián jiù mǎi de dào.I heard that that book is inexpensive. It is available for less than $2.
* 13 我们学校的宿舍住得下一千多个学生, 可是宿舍的停车场只停得下五百辆车, 所以我常常找不到停车的地方。
Wǒmen xuéxiào de sùshè zhù de xià yì qiān duō ge xuéshēng, kěshì sùshè de tíngchēchǎng zhǐ tíng de xià wǔ bǎi liàng chē, suǒyǐ wǒ chángcháng zhǎo bú dào tíng chē de dìfāng.
Our school's dormitory can accommodate over 1,000 students, but the parking lot for the dormitory can hold only 500 cars, so I frequently cannot find a place to park.
* 14 张先生: 今天是你的生日, 咱们叫一只龙虾吧!
Zhāng xiānsheng: Jīntiān shì nǐde shēngrì, zánmen jiào yì zhī lóngxiā ba!
张太太: 龙虾? 咱们怎么吃得起龙虾?
Zhāng tàitai: Lóngxiā? Zánmen zěnme chī de qǐ lóngxiā?
Mr Zhang: Today is your birthday. Let's order a lobster!
Mrs Zhang: Lobster? How can we afford to eat lobster?
* 15 北京离这里不远, 坐飞机用不了三个小时就到得了。
Běijīng lí zhèlǐ bù yuǎn, zuò fēijī yòng bù liǎo sān xiǎoshí jiù dào de liǎo.
Beijing is not far from here. It won't take (need) three hours and we can arrive.
* 16 我爷爷虽然已经八十岁了, 可是身体很不错; 眼睛还看得见, 路也走得动, 每餐都吃得下三碗饭呢! 不过他的耳朵不好, 我们跟他说话, 他常常听不见(清楚)。
Wǒ yéye suīrán yǐjīng bāshí suì le, kěshì shēntǐ hěn bú cuò, yǎnjīng hái kàn de jiàn, lù yě zǒu de dòng, měi cān dōu chī de xià sān wǎn fàn ne! Búguò tāde ěrduo bù hǎo, wǒmen gēn tā shuō huà, tā chángcháng tīng bú jiàn (qīngchǔ).
Although my grandfather is already 80 years old, his health is pretty good. His eyes can still see, and he can (has the energy to) walk around. He can eat (has the appetite for) three bowls of rice every meal. But his ears are (hearing is) not good. When we talk to him, he often cannot hear (or cannot hear clearly).
* 17 王太太: 这辆跑车一定很贵, 咱们买得起吗?
Wáng Tàitai: Zhè liàng pǎochē hěn guì, zánmen mǎi de qǐ ma?
王先生: 这种车是古董, 今天不买, 以后就买不到了。
Wáng xiānsheng: Zhè zhǒng chē shì gǔdǒng, jīntiān bù mǎi, yǐhòu jiù mǎi bú dào le.
Mrs Wang: This sports car must be expensive. Can we afford (the money) to buy it?
Mr Wang: This car is an antique car. If we don't buy it today, we won't be able to buy (something like this) in the future (It won't be available for purchase anymore).
* 18 老师: 你今天为什么又来晚了?
Lǎoshī: Nǐ jīntiān wèi shénme yòu lái wǎn le?
学生: 对不起, 因为我昨天晚上太晚上床睡觉, 所以今天早上起不来。
Xuésheng: Duì bù qǐ, yīnwèi wǒ zuótiān wǎnshàng tài wǎn shàng chuáng, suǒyǐ jīntiān zǎoshàng qǐ bù lái.
Teacher: Why are you late again today?
Student: Sorry! Because I went to bed too late last night, I could not get up this morning.
* 19 王: 黑板上的那些英文字, 你看得见(到) 吗?
Wáng: Hēibǎn shàng de nà xiē Yīngwén zì, nǐ kàn de jiān (dào) ma?
李: 虽然看得见(到), 可是我看不懂那句话的意思, 因为我的英文不好。
Lǐ: Suīrán kàn de jiàn (dào), kěshì wǒ kàn bù dǒng nà jù huà de yìsi, yīnwèi wǒde Yīngwén bù hǎo.
Wang: Can you see those English words on the blackboard?
Li: Although I can see them, I cannot understand the meaning of that sentence because my English is not good.
* 20 丁: 这辆车只有五个座位, 坐不下六个人。
Dīng: Zhè liàng chē zhǐ yǒu wǔ ge zuòwèi, zuò bú xià liù ge rén.
张: 没关系, 咱们挤一挤, 应该挤得下。
Zhāng: Méi guānxi, zánmen jǐ yī jǐ, yīnggāi jǐ de xià.
Ding: This car only has five seats; it cannot accommodate six people.
Zhang: It's alright. Let's squeeze in; then it should be able to accommodate six.
* 21 爸爸: 小明今天为什么不吃饭?
Bàba: Xiǎomíng jīntiān wèi shénme bù chī fàn?
妈妈: 他说他不舒服, 所以吃不下。
Māma: Tā shuō tā bù shūfú, suǒyǐ chī bú xià.
Father: Why is Xiaoming not going to eat today?
Mother: He says that he is not feeling well, so he has no appetite.
* 22 王: 这座山不高, 你为什么觉得自己上不去呢?
Wáng: Zhè zuò shān bù gāo, nǐ wèi shénme juéde zìjǐ shàng bú qù ne?
李: 因为我走了一天的路, 我走不动了。要不然, 比这还高的山, 我也上得去。
Lǐ: Yīnwèi wǒ zǒu le yī tiān de lù, wǒ zǒu bú dòng le. Yào bùrán, bǐ zhè hái gāo de shān, wǒ yě shàng de qù.
Wang: This mountain is not tall. Why do you feel that you cannot go up?
Li: Because I have walked all day long, and I cannot (= have no energy to) walk anymore. Otherwise, I could go up a mountain even taller than this one.
* 23 今天的功课真多, 我写了三个小时还写不完; 我想我可能还要再写两个小时才写得完。
Jīntiān de gōngkè zhēn duō, wǒ xiě le sān ge xiǎoshí hái xiě bù wán; wǒ xiǎng wǒ kěnéng hái yào zài xiě liǎng ge xiǎoshí cái xiě de wán.
There is so much homework today. I have been writing (working on it) for three hours and I still cannot finish it. I think I probably need to work on it for another two hours before I can finally finish.
* 24 这个箱子不大, 只放得下五、 六件衣服。
Zhè ge xiāngzi bú dà, zhǐ fàng de xià wǔ, liù jiàn yīfú.
This suitcase is not large. It can only hold five or six pieces of garments.
## 19 The adverbial modifier with 地
* 1 王先生老了, 所以他(走)路走得很慢。
Wáng xiānsheng lǎo le, suǒyǐ tā (zǒu) lù zǒu de hěn màn.
* 2 今天早上我起得很早, 所以现在我可以慢慢(地)走去学校。
Jīntiān zǎoshàng wǒ qǐ de hěn zǎo, suǒyǐ xiànzài wǒ kěyǐ màn màn (de) zǒu qù xuéxiào.
* 3 王明学习得很认真, 所以考试总是考得很好。
Wáng Míng xuéxí de hěn rènzhēn, suǒyǐ kǎoshì zǒngshì kǎo de hěn hǎo.
* 4 我年轻的时候, 跑得很快; 现在每天只能慢慢(地)跑半小时, 因为医生说我需要运动。
Wǒ niánqīng de shíhòu, pǎo de hěn kuài; xiànzài měi tiān zhǐ néng màn màn (de) pǎo bàn xiǎoshí, yīnwèi yīshēng shuō wǒ xūyào yùndòng.
* 5 王先生送李小姐一个包得很漂亮的礼物, 李小姐高兴地说: "谢谢。"
Wáng xiānsheng sòng Lǐ xiǎojiě yí ge bāo de hěn piàoliàng de lǐwù, Lǐ xiǎojiě gāoxìng de shuō: 'Xièxie.'
* 6 李太太觉得李先生开得太快了, 所以她着急地说: "别开得这么快。我们时间很多, 你应该慢慢(地)开。"
Lǐ tàitai juéde Lǐ xiānsheng kāi de tài kuài le, suǒyǐ tā zháojí de shuō: 'Bié kāi de zhème kuài. Wǒmen shíjiān hěn duō, nǐ yīnggāi màn màn (de) kāi.'
* 7 李先生听了, 不高兴地说: "你看, 别人都开得比我更快。"
Lǐ xiānsheng tīng le, bù gāoxìng de shuō: 'Nǐ kàn, biérén dōu kāi de bǐ wǒ gèng kuài.'
* 8 哥哥跟我回到家的时候, 妈妈正在生气地骂弟弟。哥哥紧张地说: "今天的考试, 我也考得很差。妈妈一定会气得不让我看电视。"
Gēge gēn wǒ huí dào jiā de shíhòu, māma zhèng zài shēngqì de mà dìdi. Gēge jǐnzhāng de shuō: 'Jīntiān de kǎoshì, wǒ yě kào de hěn chà. Māma yídìng huì qì de bú ràng wǒ kàn diànshì.'
* 9 北京的交通出名地坏。你开车的时候, 一定要仔细(地)看(or 注意看/注意地看)路标。
Běijīng de jiāotōng chūmíng de huài. Nǐ kāi chē de shíhòu, yídìng yào zǐxì (de) kàn (or zhùyì kàn/zhùyì de kàn) lùbiāo.
* 10 因为王太太菜作得很好, 所以王先生结婚以后, 就慢慢(地)胖起来了。
Yīnwèi Wáng tàitai cài zuò de hěn hǎo, suǒyǐ Wáng xiānsheng jiéhūn yǐhòu, jiù màn màn (de) pàng qǐlái le.
* 11 你说话别说得那么大声! 你没有看到别的同学都在安静地看书吗?
Nǐ shuō huà bié shuō de nàme dàshēng! Nǐ méiyǒu kàndào biéde tóngxué dōu zài ānjìng de kàn shū ma?
* 12 妈妈: 你这次考试为什么又考得这么差?
Māma: Nǐ zhè cì kǎoshì wèi shénme yòu kǎo de zhème chà?
爸爸: 一定是因为你学习得不够努力。
Bàba: Yīdìng shì yīnwèi nǐ xuéxí de bú gòu nǔlì.
儿子: 对不起! 下次考试我一定会好好地准备。
Érzi: Duì bù qǐ! Xià cì kǎoshì wǒ yīdìng huì hǎo hǎo de zhǔnbèi.
* 13 今年夏天天气热得不得了。可是从九月开始, 天气就慢慢(地)凉快了。
Jīnnián xiàtiān tiānqì rè de bù de liǎo. Kěshì cóng jiǔ yuè kāishǐ, tiānqì jiù màn màn (de) liángkuài le.
* 14 李小姐很少笑; 可是她听到那个好消息以后, 就开心地笑了(= 笑得很开心)。
Lǐ xiǎojiě hěnshǎo xiào; kěshì tā tīngdào nà ge hǎo xiāoxí yǐhòu, jiù kāixīn de xiào le (= xiào de hěn kāixìn).
## 20 The 是......的 structure
* 1
* (b) Wǒ shì cóng Běijīng lái de, bú shì Shànghaǐ.
* 2
* (c) Wǒ xiě le yì běn xiǎoshuō.
* 3
* (a) Nǐde nán péngyǒu gàosù wǒ de.
* 4
* (a) Ò, shìma? Tāmen shì jǐ diǎn zǒu de?
* 5
* (a) Wǒ gēn wǒ xiānsheng shì zài Zhōngguó jié de hūn.
* 6
* (c) Zhè běn shū shì wǒ māma xiě de.
* 7
* (b) Nǐ bàba tuìxiū yǐqián, shì zuò shénme de?
* 8
* (a) Shì shéi bǎ wǒde mìmì gàosù nǐ de?
* 9
* (b) Yīnwèi nà jiàn dàyī tài guì le, wǒ mǎi bù qǐ.
* 10
* (c) Wǒ shì yì jiǔ jiǔ liù nián zài Zhōngguó shēng de.
* 11
* (b) Wáng xiānsheng shì zěnme sǐ de, méiyǒu rén zhīdào.
* 12
* (a) Zhāng Míng, shì nǐ! Nǐ zěnme lái le?
* 13
* (c) Wǒ shì zuò huǒchē lái de.
* 14
* (a) Bàba gàosù wǒ de.
* 15
* (a) Wǒ bú shì lái dàoqiàn de, shì lái huán nǐ dōngxi de.
* 16
* (c) Nín tuìxiū yǐhòu, yào zuò shénme?
* 17
* (c) Wǒ juéde zhè liàng chē shì lǜ de, bú shì lán de.
* 18
* (b) Wǒ xiāngxìn, zhè zhǒng chē shì bú huì piányí de.
* 19
* (a) Kèrén jiǔ diǎn jiù zǒu le.
* 20
* (b) Nà tiáo qúnzi tài hóng le.
## 21 Subjectless sentences and existential sentences
* 1 昨天只来了三个客人, 不过这三个客人今天又来了。
Zuótiān zhǐ lái le sān ge kèrén, búguò zhè sān ge kèrén jīntiān yòu lái le.
* 2 这里的冬天, 天天刮风, 有时候还下雪。
Zhèlǐ de dōngtiān, tiān tiān guā fēng, yǒu shíhòu hái xià xuě.
* 3 春天了, 虽然有时候下雨, 可是很少刮风了。
Chūntiān le, suīrán yǒu shíhòu xià yǔ, kěshì hěn shǎo guā fēng le.
* 4 雨下得太大了。下大雨的时候, 我不喜欢出去。
Yǔ xià de tài dà le. Xià dà yǔ de shíhòu, wǒ bù xǐhuān chūqù.
* 5 王先生: 张先生的手机号码, 你写在哪里?(or 你把张先生的手机号码写在哪里?)
Wáng xiānsheng: Zhāng xiānsheng de shǒujī haòmǎ, nǐ xiě zài nǎlǐ? (or Nǐ bǎ Zhāng xiānsheng de shǒujī hàomǎ xiě zài nǎlǐ?)
王太太: 日历上写着两个号码, 我不知道哪个是他的手机号码。
Wáng tàitai: Rìlì shàng xiě zhe liǎng ge hàomǎ, wǒ bù zhīdào nǎ ge shì tāde shǒujī hàomǎ.
* 6 妈, 楼下来了两个我不认识的人。
Mā, lóu xià lái le liǎng ge wǒ bú rènshì de rén.
* 7 张太太: 我的新车, 你为什么又停在树下? (or 你为什么又把我的新车停在树下?)
Zhāng tàitai: Wǒde xīn chē, nǐ wèishénme yòu tíng zài shù xià? (or Nǐ wèishénme yòu bǎ wǒde xīn chē tíng zài shù xià?)
儿子: 我回家的时候, 车库里放了(or 放着)几个大箱子, 所以我不能把车停在车库里。
Érzi: Wǒ huí jiā de shíhòu, chēkù lǐ fàng le (or fàng zhe) jǐ ge dà xiāngzi, suǒyǐ wǒ bù néng bǎ chē tíng zài chēkù lǐ.
* 8 她走以前, 在一张纸上写了几个字, 然后把那张纸放在我的口袋里。我打开一看, 上面写了(or 写着)她的名字跟电话号码。
Tā zǒu yǐqián, zài yì zhāng zhǐ shàng xiě le jǐ ge zì, ránhòu bǎ nà zhāng zhǐ fàng zài wǒde kǒudài lǐ. Wǒ dǎkāi yí kàn, shàngmiàn xiě le (or xiě zhe) tāde míngzì gēn diànhuà hàomǎ.
* 9 王明: 外面停了(or 停着)一辆新车, 是不是你的?(听说你买了一辆新车, 现在停在外面的那辆, 是不是你的?)
Wáng Míng: Wàimiàn tíng le (or tíng zhe) yí liàng xīn chē, shì bú shì nǐde? (Tīngshuō nǐ mǎi le yí liàng xīn chē, xiànzài tíng zài wàimiàn de nà liàng, shì bú shì nǐde?)
李中: 不是, 我的车停在车库里。我不会把新买的车停在街上的。(新买的车, 我是不会停在街上的。)
Lǐ Zhōng: Bú shì, wǒde chē tíng zài chēkù lǐ. Wǒ bú huì bǎ xīn mǎi de chē tíng zài jiē shàng de. (Xīn mǎi de chē, wǒ shì bú huì tíng zài jiē shàng de.)
* 10 我住在一楼。最近认识了一个姓张的老先生, 他跟他太太住在三楼。张先生告诉我, 二楼住了两个美国人, 这个大楼一共住了五家人。(住了 sounds better than 住着.)
Wǒ zhù zài yī lóu. Zuìjìn rènshì le yí ge xìng Zhāng de lǎo xiānsheng, tā gēn tā tàitai zhù zài sān lóu. Zhāng xiānsheng gàosù wǒ, èr lóu zhù le liǎng ge Měiguó rén, zhè ge dàlóu yígòng zhù le wǔ jiā rén.
## 22 The 把 structure
* 1 王: 你把那封信给丁小姐了没有?
Wáng: Nǐ bǎ nà fēng xìn gěi Dīng xiǎojiě méiyǒu?
李: 还没有呢, 因为昨天我没有看到她。 (Not convertible)
Lǐ: Hái méiyǒu ne, yīnwèi zuótiān wǒ méiyǒu kàndào ta.
* 2 现在我要去图书馆借一本小说。 (Not convertible)
Xiànzài wǒ yào qù túshūguǎn jiè yì běn xiǎoshuō.
* 3 王: 请把我说的话记住。
Wáng: Qǐng bǎ wǒ shuō de huà jì zhù.
李: 请放心, 我已经把那些话写在一个本子上了。
Lǐ: Qǐng fàngxīn, wǒ yǐjīng bǎ nà xiē huà xiě zǎi yí ge běnzi shàng le.
* 4 明天别忘了带一个照相机来。 (Not convertible)
Míngtiān bié wàng le dài yí ge zhàoxiàngjī lái.
* 5 丁: 你不可以把我说的话告诉小王。
Dīng: Nǐ bù kěyǐ bǎ wǒ shuō de huà gàosù Xiǎo Wáng.
李: 我根本不认识小王。 (Not convertible)
Lǐ: Wǒ gēnběn bú rènshì Xiǎo Wáng.
* 6 小明: 你包了太多饺子了, 我一个人吃不了一百个饺子。 (Not convertible)
Xiǎomíng: Nǐ bāo le tài duō jiǎozi le, wǒ yí ge rén chī bù liǎo yì bǎi ge jiǎozi.
妈妈: 我们可以把你吃不完的留到明天吃。
Māma: Wǒmen kěyǐ bǎ nǐ chī bù wán de liú dào míngtiān chī.
* 7 我听说王老师住院了; 我想去医院看他。 (Not convertible)
Wǒ tīngshuō Wáng lǎoshī zhùyuàn le; wǒ xiǎng qù yīyuàn kàn tā.
* 8 你说的话, 我听不清楚。 (Not convertible) 你可不可以把那些话再说一遍?
Nǐ shuō de huà, wǒ tīng bù qīngchǔ. Nǐ kě bù kěyǐ bǎ nà xiē huà zài shuō yí biàn?
* 9 我把新秘书的名字忘了, 所以我请李先生把她的名字再告诉我一次。
Wǒ bǎ xīn mìshū de míngzì wàng le, suǒyǐ wǒ qǐng Lǐ xiānsheng bǎ tāde míngzì zài gàosù wǒ yí cì.
* 10 王: 你弟弟病了三天了, 你怎么还不把他送去医院?
Wáng: Nǐ dìdi bìng le sān tiān le, nǐ zěnme hái bù bǎ tā sòng qù yīyuàn?
李: 昨天送去了, 可是医生说他只是感冒, 所以叫我把他带回家来休息。
Lǐ: Zuótiān sòng qù le, kěshǐ yīshēng shuō tā zhǐ shì gǎnmào, suǒyǐ jiào wǒ bǎ tā dài huí jiā lái xiūxí.
* 11 他去那家新开的百货公司给他女朋友买了一个很贵的礼物。 (Not convertible)
Tā qù nà jiā xīn kāi de bǎihuò gōngsī gěi tā nǚ péngyǒu mǎi le yí ge hěn guì de lǐwù.
* 12 出门的时候, 一定要把大衣穿上, 还要把门锁好。
Chū mén de shíhòu, yīdìng yào bǎ dàyī chuān shàng, hái yào bǎ mén suǒ hǎo.
* 13 你把王小姐的电话号码写在哪里?
Nǐ bǎ Wáng xiǎojiě de diànhuà hàomǎ xiě zài nǎlǐ?
## 23 Passive structures
### I
* 1 这篇文章写得很好, 所以被老师放在我们班的博客(or 部落格)上了。
Zhè piān wénzhāng xiě de hěn hǎo, suǒyǐ bèi lǎoshī fàng zài wǒmen bān de bókè (or bùluògé) shàng le.
* 2 这本小说是一位有名的中国作家写的。
Zhè běn xiǎoshuō shì yí wèi yǒumíng de Zhōngguó zuòjiā xiě de.
* 3 她的电脑被偷了, 所以她的生活受到很大的影响。
Tāde diànnǎo bèi tōu le, suǒyǐ tāde shēnghuó shòudào hěn dà de yǐngxiǎng.
* 4 李: 自从我来到中国以后, 被摊贩骗过(or 了)好几次。
Lǐ: Zìcóng wǒ lái dào Zhōngguó yǐhòu, bèi tānfàn piàn guo (or le) hǎo jǐ cì.
张: 我也被骗过。
Zhāng: Wǒ yě bèi piàn guo.
王: 我从来没有被骗过。
Wáng: Wǒ cónglái méiyǒu bèi piàn guo.
* 5 今天早上妈妈被我放的音乐吵醒了, 所以我被她骂了(can be 我被骂了一顿)。
Jīntiān zǎoshàng māma bèi wǒ fàng de yīnyuè chǎo xǐng le, suǒyǐ wǒ bèi tā mà le (can be wǒ bèi mà le yí dùn).
* 6 我被他烦得一件事也不能做。
Wǒ bèi tā fán de yí jiàn shì yě bù néng zuò.
### II
* 1 那几张纸叫风(给)吹走了。= 那几张纸让风(给)吹走了。= 那几张纸给风吹走了。
Nà jǐ zhāng zhǐ jiào fēng (gěi) chuī zǒu le. = Nà jǐ zhāng zhǐ ràng fēng (gěi) chuī zǒu le. = Nà jǐ zhāng zhǐ gěi fēng chuī zǒu le.
* 2 王立的爸爸是医生, 王立受到(了)他的影响, 决定以后也要当医生。
Wáng Lì de bàba shì yīshēng, Wáng Lì shòudào (le) tāde yǐngxiǎng, juédìng yǐhòu yě yào dāng yīshēng.
* 3 我上星期买的古董花瓶叫(or 让)我儿子(给)打破了。
Wǒ shàng xīngqī mǎi de gǔdǒng huāpíng jiào (or ràng) wǒ érzi (gěi) dǎ pò le.
* 4 王明被选作我们的班长。Wáng Míng bèi xuǎn zuò wǒmen de bānzhǎng.
* 5 李中的建议受到(or 遭到)全班同学的反对。
Lǐ Zhōng de jiànyì shòudào (or zāodào) quán bān tóngxué de fǎnduì.
* 6 王先生是我们的代表; 你的问题由他回答。
Wáng xiānsheng shì wǒmen de dàibiǎo; nǐde wèntí yóu tā huídá.
* 7 因为这条河的水受到(了)严重的污染, 所以河里的鱼不能吃。
Yīnwèi zhè tiáo hé de shuǐ shòudào (le) yánzhòng de wūrǎn, suǒyǐ hé lǐ de yú bù néng chī.
* 8 最近王中常常获得(or 得到、 受到)老师的夸奖。
Zuìjìn Wáng Zhōng chángcháng huòdé (or dédào, shòudào) lǎoshī de kuājiǎng.
* 9 张明在批评老师的时候, 他的话被老师听到了; 老师很不高兴, 所以他今天被老师骂了。
Zhāng Míng zài pīpíng lǎoshī de shíhòu, tāde huà bèi lǎoshī tīngdào le; lǎoshī hěn bù gāoxìng, suǒyǐ tā jīntiān bèi lǎoshī mà le.
* 10 张明常被他的同学笑。今天他又被笑了; 老师说, 以后笑他的人会被罚。
Zhāng Míng cháng bèi tāde tóngxué xiào. Jīntiān tā yòu bèi xiào le; lǎoshī shuō, yǐhòu xiào tā de rén huì bèi fá.
## 24 Making comparisons (1)
**I**
* 1 昨天的考试, 王中考得比我更好(or 还好)。
Zuótiān de kǎoshì, Wáng Zhōng kǎo de bǐ wǒ gèng hǎo (or hái hǎo).
Wang Zhong did even better than I did on yesterday's test.
* 2 我跑得不比王中慢。
Wǒ pǎo de bù bǐ Wáng Zhōng màn.
I don't run any more slowly than Wang Zhong.
* 3 我的房子没有李先生的大, 可是比他的贵。
Wǒde fángzi méiyǒu Lǐ xiānsheng de dà, kěshì bǐ tāde guì.
My house is not as big as Mr Li's, but it is more expensive than his.
* 4 我们班的同学都不如李明(那么)聪明。
Wǒmen bān de tóngxué dōu bùrú Lǐ Míng (nàme) cōngmíng.
None of the students in our class is as smart as Li Ming.
* 5 我哥哥不比我高,(or 我不比我哥哥矮,)可是他比我胖很多(or 胖得多/胖多了)。
Wǒ gēge bù bǐ wǒ gāo, (or wǒ bù bǐ wǒ gēge ǎi,) kěshì tā bǐ wǒ pàng hěn duō (or pàng de duō/pàng duō le.)
My older brother is not taller than I am, (or I am not shorter than my older brother), but he is much heavier (fatter) than I am.
* 6 昨天没有今天(这么)冷。Zuótiān méiyǒu jīntiān (zhème) lěng.Yesterday was not as cold as today.
* 7 我工作的时间比张先生长, 可是赚的钱没有他多。 (or 张先生工作的时间比我短, 可是我赚的钱没有他多。)
Wǒ gōngzuò de shíjiān bǐ Zhāng xiānsheng cháng, kěshì zhuàn de qián méiyǒu tā duō. (or Zhāng xiānsheng gōngzuò de shíjiān bǐ wǒ duǎn, kěshì wǒ zhuàn de qián méiyǒu tā duō.)
My work hours are longer than Mr Zhang's, but my income (the money I make) is not as much as his.
* 8 李先生的房子, 卧室没有我的多, 厨房也没有我的大。
Lǐ xiānsheng de fángzi, wòshì méiyǒu wǒde duō, chúfáng yě méiyǒu wǒde dà.
Mr Li's house does not have as many bedrooms as my house does, and his kitchen is not as big as mine.
* 9 李中学习得比他的同学努力, 所以他考试的成绩也比他们好。
Lǐ Zhōng xuéxí de bǐ tāde tóngxué nǔlì, suǒyǐ tā kǎoshì de chéngjī yě bǐ tāmen hǎo.
Li Zhong studies more diligently than his classmates, so his test grades are better than theirs.
* 10 李老师的学生不比王老师的少, 可是王老师比李老师喜欢(or 爱)抱怨。
Lǐ lǎoshī de xuéshēng bù bǐ Wáng lǎoshī de shǎo, kěshì Wáng lǎoshī bǐ Lǐ lǎoshī xǐhuān (or ài) bàoyuàn.
Teacher Li does not have fewer students than Teacher Wang, but Teacher Wang likes to complain more than Teacher Li does.
**II**
* 1
* (a) Wǒ érzi bā suì, nǐ érzi yǒu méiyǒu wǒ èrzi dà?
* 2
* (b) Zhōngguó cài gēn Fǎguó cài, wǒ xǐhuān chī Fǎguó cài.
* 3
* (a) Wǒ juéde Zhōngguó cài bùrú Fǎguó cài hǎochī.
* 4
* (b) 'Hóng Lóu Mèng' bǐ 'Xī Yóu Jì' gèng yǒumíng.
* 5
* (c) Zhè cì kǎoshì fēicháng nán, lǎoshī shuō xià cì kǎoshì bú huì yǒu zhè cì nán.
* 6
* (b) Yīngwén kè de xuéshēng bǐ Zhōngwén kè de duō duōshǎo?
* 7
* (c) Wǒmen xūyào wǔ zhāng piào, nǐ zhǐ mǎi le sì zhāng, nǐ shǎo mǎi le yī zhāng.
* 8
* (b) Wáng Zhōng pǎo de bù bǐ wǒ kuài, kěshì jiàoliàn ràng tā cānjiā bǐsài, bú ràng wǒ cānjiā.
* 9
* (a) Zhè ge diànyǐng méiyǒu wǒ xiǎng de yǒu yìsi.
* 10
* (c) Wǒ jiā bǐ tā jiā dà diǎn, kěshì guì duō le.
* 11
* (c) Běijīng de dōngtiān bǐ Shànghǎi de gèng lěng yīdiǎn.
## 25 Making comparisons (2)
* 1 张老师: 我从来没有教过像王明这么聪明的学生。
Zhāng lǎoshī: Wǒ cónglái méiyǒu jiāo guo xiàng Wáng Míng zhème cōngmíng de xuéshēng.
李老师: 我教过跟他一样聪明的学生, 可是没有教过比他更聪明的。
Lǐ lǎoshī: Wǒ jiāo guo gēn tā yíyàng cōngmíng de xuéshēng, kěshǐ méiyǒu jiāo guo bǐ tā gèng cōngmíng de.
* 2 李中跟他弟弟一样高, 可是没有他弟弟那么瘦(= 不像他弟弟那么瘦)。
Lǐ Zhōng gēn tā dìdi yíyàng gāo, kěshì méiyǒu tā dìdi nàme shòu (= bú xiàng tā dìdi nàme shòu).
* 3 这两件大衣颜色跟式样都一样, 可是质料不一样, 所以价钱差很多。
Zhè liǎng jiàn dàyī yánsè gēn shìyàng dōu yíyàng, kěshì zhíliào bù yíyàng, suǒyǐ jiàqián chà hěn duō.
* 4 李: 张先生的女朋友真漂亮, 王先生的女朋友没有她那么漂亮。
Lǐ: Zhāng xiānsheng de nǚ péngyǒu zhēn piàoliàng, Wáng xiānsheng de nǚ péngyǒu méiyǒu tā nàme piàoliàng.
丁: 可是我知道她跟张先生的女朋友一样善良。
Dīng: Kěshì wǒ zhīdào tā gēn Zhāng xiānsheng de nǚ péngyǒu yíyàng shànliáng.
陈: 如果我认识一个像(or 有)王先生的女朋友那么漂亮的女孩, 我会非常高兴。
Chén: Rúguǒ wǒ rènshì yí ge xiàng (or yǒu) Wáng xiānsheng de nǚ péngyǒu nàme piàoliàng de nǚhái, wǒ huì fēicháng gāoxìng.
* 5 李: 今天真冷, 如果明天像今天这么冷(= 如果明天像今天一样冷), 我就要待在家里。
Lǐ: Jīntiān zhēn lěng, rúguǒ míngtiān xiàng jīntiān zhème lěng (= rúguǒ míngtiān xiàng jīntiān yíyàng lěng), wǒ jiù yào dāi zài jiā lǐ.
王: 明天不会跟今天一样冷, 会比今天更冷。
Wáng: Míngtiān bú huì gēn jīntiān yíyàng lěng, huì bǐ jīntiān gèng lěng.
* 6 女: 你什么时候来看我?
Nǚ: Nǐ shénme shíhòu lái kàn wǒ?
男: 明年吧! 明年我不会像今年这么忙。
Nán: Míngnián ba! Míngnián wǒ bú huì xiàng jīnnián zhème máng.
女: 好吧! 不过别又像上次一样, 上次你出发前一天取消了你的班机。
Nǚ: Hǎo ba! Búguò bié yòu xiàng shàng cì yíyàng, shàng cì nǐ chūfā qián yì tiān qǔxiāo le nǐde bānjī.
* 7 这里的风景像画一样美。
Zhèlǐ de fēngjǐng xiàng huà yíyàng měi.
* 8 王: 如果我像他那么有钱, 我会买一幢跟他一样大的房子。
Wáng: Rúguǒ wǒ xiàng tā nàme yǒuqián, wǒ huì mǎi yí zhuàng gēn tā yíyàng dà de fángzi.
丁: 那个房子没有那么大。虽然我没有(or 不像)他那么有钱, 可是我已经有了一幢比他更大的房子。
Dīng: Nà ge fángzi méiyǒu nàme dà. Suīrán wǒ méiyǒu (or bú xiàng) tā nàme yǒuqián, kěshì wǒ yǐjīng yǒu le yí zhuàng bǐ tā gèng dà de fángzi.
* 9 虽然安娜没有(or 不像)王中那么聪明, 可是她也不像(or 没有)王中那么懒, 所以他们的考试成绩总是差不多。
Suīrán Ānnà méiyǒu (or bú xiàng) Wáng Zhōng nàme cōngmíng, kěshì tā yě bú xiàng (or méiyǒu) Wáng Zhōng nàme lǎn, suǒyǐ tāmen de kǎoshì chéngjī zǒngshì chàbùduō.
* 10 小明比他姐姐小两岁, 可是已经跟姐姐一样高了。
Xiǎo Míng bǐ tā jiějie xiǎo liǎng suì, kěshì yǐjīng gēn jiějie yīyàng gāo le.
* 11 昨天非常冷, 今天不像昨天那么冷, (or 今天没有那么冷,)我想明天也不会有(or 不会像)昨天那么冷。
Zuótiān fēicháng lěng, jīntiān bú xiàng zuótiān nàme lěng, (or jīntiān méiyǒu nàme lěng,) wǒ xiǎng míngtiān yě bú huì yǒu (or bú huì xiàng) zuótiān nàme lěng.
## 26 Measure words
* 1 这个房子非常大, 有五间卧房、 三个半洗澡间。
Zhè ge fángzi fēicháng dà, yǒu wǔ jiān wòfáng, sān ge bàn xǐzǎojiān.
This house is extremely big; there are five bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms.
* 2 一星期有七天, 我天天都学习中文。
Yì xīngqī yǒu qī tiān, wǒ tiān tiān dōu xuéxí Zhōngwén.
There are seven days in a week. I study Chinese every day.
* 3 我每天都喝三杯咖啡。
Wǒ měi tiān dōu hē sān bēi kāfēi.
I drink three cups of coffee every day.
* 4 桌子上面那本英文书是谁的?
Zhuōzi shàngmiàn nà běn Yīngwén shū shì shéide?
Whom does the English book on the table belong to?
* 5 我们班每人都有一个中文名字。
Wǒmen bān měi rén dōu yǒu yí ge Zhōngwén míngzì.
Everyone in my class has a Chinese name.
* 6 这一群小狗真可爱。
Zhè yì qún xiǎo gǒu zhēn kě'ài.
This group of small dogs are really cute.
* 7 这件大衣不是我的,我的新大衣是黑色的。
Zhè jiàn dàyī bú shì wǒde, wǒde xīn dàyī shì hēi sè de.This coat is not mine; my new coat is black.
* 8 王明不是个好人, 你怎么会认识这种人(or 这样的人)?
Wáng Míng bú shì ge hǎo rén, nǐ zěnme huì rènshì zhè zhǒng rén (or zhèyàng de rén)?
Wang Ming is not a nice person. How did you get to know this type of a person (or such a person)?
* 9 我在上海住过三星期, 也在北京住过半年(or 一年半)。
Wǒ zài Shànghǎi zhù guo sān xīngqī, yě zài Běijīng zhù guo bàn nián (or yì nián bàn).
I lived in Shanghai for three weeks; I also lived in Beijing for half a year (or one and a half years).
* 10 我喜欢蓝色, 所以昨天买了三条蓝裙子。
Wǒ xǐhuān lán sè, suǒyǐ zuótiān mǎi le sān tiáo lán qúnzi.
I like the color blue, so I bought three blue skirts yesterday.
* 11 桌上有两个大杯子, 我跟弟弟口渴, 所以一人喝了一大杯水。
Zhuō shàng yǒu liǎng ge dà bēizi, wǒ gēn dìdi kǒu kě, suǒyǐ yì rén hē le yí dà bēi shuǐ.
There were two big glasses on the table. My younger brother and I were thirsty, so each of us drank a big glass of water (Meaning: a full glass of water).
* 12 你说, 你喝了多少瓶啤酒?
Nǐ shuō, nǐ hē le duōshǎo píng píjiǔ?
Tell me, how many bottles of beer did you drink?
* 13 你看过哪些有名的中国小说?(or 你看过哪本有名的中国小说?)
Nǐ kàn guo nǎ xiē yǒumíng de Zhōngguó xiǎoshuō? (or Nǐ kàn guo nǎ běn yǒumíng de Zhōngguó xiǎoshuō?)
Which famous Chinese novels have you read? (or Which famous Chinese novel have you read?)
* 14 我的女朋友是日本人, 你的女朋友是哪国人?
Wǒde nǚ péngyǒu shì Rìběn rén, nǐde nǚ péngyǒu shì nǎ guó rén?
My girlfriend is Japanese. Which country is your girlfriend from?
* 15 停在你家前面的日本车是谁的?
Tíng zài nǐ jiā qiánmiàn de Rìběn chē shì shéi de?
Whom does the car parked in front of your house belong to?
* 16 我的车太旧了,下个月我想去买辆新车。
Wǒde chē tài jiù le, xià ge yuè wǒ xiǎng qù mǎi liàng xīn chē.
My car is too old. I am planning on going to buy a new car next month.
* 17 我家前面、 后面都有一个小院子,前面的那个(or 前面的)比较大。
Wǒ jiā qiánmiàn, hòumiàn dōu yǒu yī ge xiǎo yuànzi, qiánmiàn de nà ge (or qiánmiàn de) bǐjiào dà.
There is a small yard both in front and behind my house. The one in front is bigger.
* 18 今天我不饿, 所以只吃了半碗饭。
Jīntiān wǒ bú è, suǒyǐ zhǐ chī le bàn wǎn fàn.
I was not hungry today, so I only had half a bowl of rice.
* 19 还有半个月是我生日,那天我想请四、 五个朋友来我家吃饭。
Hái yǒu bàn ge yuè shì wǒ shēngrì, nà tiān wǒ xiǎng qǐng sì, wǔ ge péngyǒu lái wǒ jiā chī fàn.
There is half a month before it is my birthday. I am planning to invite four or five friends to my house for a meal that day.
* 20 上个考试我考得很差; 这(个)星期我要好好地准备下个考试。
Shàng ge kǎoshì wǒ kǎo de hěn chà; zhè (ge) xīngqī wǒ yào hǎo hǎo de zhǔnbèi xià ge kǎoshì.
I did poorly on the last test. This week I will do a good job of studying for the next test.
## 27 Verb reduplication and adjective reduplication
* 1
* (b) 妈妈: 小明, 饭已经做好了, 你先去洗洗手再来吃。
Māma: Xiǎomíng, fàn yǐjīng zuò hǎo le, nǐ xiān qù xǐ xǐ shǒu zài lái chī.
* 2
* (c) 你可不可以在这里等等我? 我要去一下洗手间。
Nǐ kě bù kěyǐ zài zhèlǐ děng děng wǒ? Wǒ yào qù yíxià xǐshǒujiān.
* 3
* (a) 我在车站等了等, 车没来, 我就决定走路去学校了。
Wǒ zài chēzhàn děng le děng, chē méi lái, wǒ jiù juédìng zǒulù qù xuéxiào le.
* 4
* (c) 这个问题, 我们应该好好地讨论讨论, 不能现在就决定。
Zhè ge wèntí, wǒmen yīnggāi hǎo hǎo de tǎolùn tǎolùn, bù néng xiànzài jiù juédìng.
* 5
* (a) 昨天我很累, 吃完晚饭, 看了看电视, 就去睡觉了。
Zuótiān wǒ hěn lèi, chī wán wǎnfàn, kàn le kàn diànshì, jiù qù shuìjiào le.
* 6
* (c) 李先生, 你认识王小姐吗? 我来给你们介绍一下。
Lǐ xiānsheng, nǐ rènshì Wáng xiǎojiě ma? Wǒ lái gěi nǐmen jièshào yíxià.
* 7
* (b) 店员: 这件大衣是最上等的质料, 你摸摸看。
Diànyuán: Zhè jiàn dàyī shì zuì shàngděng de zhíliào, nǐ mō mō kàn.
* 8
* (a) 小明一看到爸爸回家了, 就高高兴兴地去给爸爸开门。
Xiǎomíng yí kàndào bàba huí jiā le, jiù gāo gāo xìng xìng de qù gěi bàba kāi mén.
* 9
* (b) 你看, 前面那个高高的建筑, 就是我们学校的学生宿舍。
Nǐ kàn, qiánmiàn nà ge gāo gāo de jiànzhù, jiù shì wǒmen xuéxiào de xuéshēng sùshè.
* 10
* (a)妈妈: 安娜, 这条裙子你喜欢吗? 如果喜欢, 就去试试看, 合身就买。
Māma: Ānnà, zhè tiáo qúnzi nǐ xǐhuān ma? Rúguǒ xǐhuān, jiù qù shì shì kàn, héshēn jiù mǎi.
* 11
* (c) 小李看到他女朋友心情不好, 就说一个笑话让她高兴高兴。
Xiǎo Lǐ kàn dào tā nǚ péngyǒu xīnqìng bù hǎo, jiù shuō yī ge xiàohuà ràng tā gāoxìng gāoxìng.
* 12
* (c) 大考考完了, 咱们可以轻松轻松了。
Dà kǎo kǎo wán le, zánmen kěyǐ qīngsōng qīngsōng le.
* 13
* (c) 别人都忙着准备考试, 只有小王一个人在轻轻松松地听音乐。
Biérén dōu máng zhe zhǔnbèi kǎoshì, zhǐ yǒu Xiǎo Wáng yī ge rén zài qīng qīng sōng sōng de tīng yīnyuè.
* 14
* (a) 今天时间很多, 所以他们慢慢走去学校。
Jīntiān shíjiān hěn duō, suǒyǐ tāmen màn màn zǒu qù xuéxiào.
## 28 The use of 以前, 以后 and 时候
* 1 昨天我很忙; 上课以前在图书馆学习; 下课以后去咖啡馆工作。晚上吃了晚饭以后, 还得准备下星期的考试。
Zuótiān wǒ hěn máng; shàng kè yǐqián zài túshūguǎn xuéxí; xià kè yǐhòu qù kāfēiguǎn gōngzuò. Wǎnshàng chī le wǎnfàn yǐhòu, hái děi zhǔnbèi xià xīngqī de kǎoshì.
* 2 我十几岁的时候, 就决定以后要当作家。
Wǒ shí jǐ suì de shíhòu, jiù juédìng yǐhòu yào dāng zuòjiā.
* 3 李: 王太太, 你什么时候有空? 我想来你家看你。
Lǐ: Wáng tàitai, nǐ shénme shíhòu yǒu kòng? Wǒ xiǎng lái nǐ jiā kàn nǐ.
王: 我每天吃了晚饭以后都有空。你明天晚上来吧!
Wáng: Wǒ měi tiān chī le wǎnfàn yìhǒu dōu yǒu kòng. Nǐ míngtiān wǎnshàng lái ba!
李: 太好了! 你要我几点来?
Lǐ: Tài hǎo le! Nǐ yào wǒ jǐ diǎn lái?
王: 我女儿八点半睡觉。她睡觉以前, 我要给她洗澡; 所以请你七点半以前来。
Wáng: Wǒ nǚ'ér bā diǎn bàn shuìjiào. Tā shuìjiào yǐqián, wǒ yào gěi tā xǐzǎo; suǒyǐ qǐng nǐ qī diǎn bàn yǐqián lái.
* 4 王: 你知道不知道张先生什么时候来上海?
Wáng: Nǐ zhīdào bù zhīdào Zhāng xiānsheng shénme shíhòu lái Shànghǎi?
李: 他下个月在北京参加了一个国际会议以后就会来。
Lǐ: Tā xià ge yuè zài Běijīng cānjiā le yí ge guójì huìyì yǐhòu jiù huì lái.
王: 他来的时候, 谁去机场接他?
Wáng: Tā lái de shíhòu, shéi qù jīchǎng jiē tā?
李: 到时候再说吧!
Lǐ: Dào shíhòu zài shuō ba!
* 5 十年以前有手机的人不多; 十年以后, 没有手机的人大概不会太多了。
Shí nián yǐqián yǒu shǒujī de rén bù duō; shí nián yǐhòu, méiyǒu shǒujī de rén dàgài bú huì tài duō le.
* 6 以前李明跟我是好朋友; 那时候, 我们差不多天天都互相打电话。可是后来我发现他骗了我几次, 现在我们不说话了。以后我选择朋友的时候, 会很小心。
Yǐqián Lǐ Míng gēn wǒ shì hǎo péngyǒu; nà shíhòu, wǒmen chàbùduō tiān tiān dōu hùxiāng dǎ diànhuà. Kěshì hòulái wǒ fāxiàn tā piàn le wǒ jǐ cì, xiànzài wǒmen bù shuōhuà le. Yǐhòu wǒ xuǎnzé péngyǒu de shíhòu, huì hěn xiǎoxīn.
* 7 以前我还吃肉的时候, 每星期吃三次汉堡; 后来, 我变成了一个素食者。现在我跟我男朋友去汉堡店吃饭的时候, 我只吃薯条。
Yǐqián wǒ hái chī ròu de shíhòu, měi xīngqī chī sān cì hànbǎo; hòulái, wǒ biànchéng le yí ge sùshízhě. Xiànzài wǒ gēn wǒ nán péngyǒu qù hànbǎo diàn chī fàn de shíhòu, wǒ zhǐ chī shǔtiáo.
* 8 我爸妈还没有离婚以前(or 我爸妈离婚以前/我爸妈还没有离婚的时候), 差不多天天吵架。那时候, 我告诉自己, 以后我结了婚, 为了孩子, 一定不跟丈夫吵架。
Wǒ bàmā hái méiyǒu líhūn yǐqián (or Wǒ bàmā líhūn yǐqián / Wǒ bàmā hái méiyǒu líhūn de shíhòu), chàbùduō tiān tiān chǎojià. Nà shíhòu, wǒ gàosù zìjǐ, yǐhòu wǒ jié le hūn, wèile háizi, yídìng bù gēn zhàngfū chǎojià.
* 9 丁: 上课的时候, 我们英文老师不让我们说中文。
Dīng: Shàng kè de shíhòu, wǒmen Yīngwén lǎoshī bú ràng wǒmen shuō Zhōngwén.
王: 我们英文老师上课以前或者下课以后都不跟我们说中文。
Wáng: Wǒmen Yīngwén lǎoshī shàng kè yǐqián huòzhě xià kè yǐhòu dōu bù gēn wǒmen shuō Zhōngwén.
## 29 Modal particles
* 1 妈妈: 小明, 你为什么又在吃点心? 你已经这么胖了, 别再吃了!
Māma: Xiǎomíng, nǐ wèishénme yòu zài chī diǎnxīn? Nǐ yǐjīng zhème pàng le, bié zài chī le.
爸爸: 好了, 让他吃吧, 别唠叨了。
Bàba: Hǎo le, ràng tā chī ba, bié lāodāo le.
Mother: Xiaoming, why are you eating snacks again? You are already so overweight, stop eating.
Father: Enough! Why don't you just let him eat. Stop nagging.
* 2 这本词典上面写着你的名字, 是你的吧! 借我用一下, 好吗?
Zhè běn cídiǎn shàngmiàn xiě zhe nǐde míngzì, shì nǐde ba! Jiè wǒ yòng yíxià, hǎo ma?
Your name is written in this dictionary; it must be yours, right? Can I borrow it for a while?
* 3 妈妈: 爸爸呢? 他回家了吗?
Māma: Bàba ne? Tā huí jiā le ma?
儿子: 他在客厅里看电视呢。
Érzi: Tā zài kètīng lǐ kàn diànshì ne.
Mother: Where is your father? Has he come home?
Son: He is watching TV in the living room.
* 4 李: 最近我快忙死了, 天天都半夜以后才上床睡觉 Ø 。
Lǐ: Zuìjìn wǒ kuài máng sǐ le, tiān tiān dōu bànyè yǐhòu cái shàngchuáng shuìjiào.
王: 那明天晚上的舞会, 你不能去了?Wáng: Nà míngtiān wǎnshàng de wǔhuì, nǐ bù néng qù le?
李: 我还没有决定呢! 因为后天是星期天, 所以星期六晚上, 我想轻松一下。
Lǐ: Wǒ hái méiyǒu juédìng ne! Yīnwèi hòutián shì xīngqī tiān, suǒyǐ xīngqī liù wǎnshàng, wǒ xiǎng qīngsōng yíxià.
Li: Lately I have been almost busy to death. I go to bed after midnight every day.
Wang: This means you cannot go to the dance party tomorrow evening, right?
Li: I have not decided yet. Because the day after tomorrow is Sunday, I want to relax a little bit on Saturday evening.
* 5 妈妈: 现在几点了? 小明怎么还没回来呢? 平常这个时候, 他早就回来了。大家都在等他回来吃饭呢。
Māma: Xiànzài jǐ diǎn le? Xiǎomíng zěnme hái méi huí lái ne? Píngcháng zhè ge shíhòu, tā zǎo jiù huí lái le. Dàjiā dōu zài děng tā huí lái chī fàn ne.
爸爸: 不用急, 还不到八点呢! 咱们再等十分钟吧!
Bàba: Bú yòng jí, hái bú dào bā diǎn ne! Zánmen zài děng shí fēnzhōng ba!
女儿: 如果十分钟以后他还是没回来呢? 我饿死了。
Nǚ'ér: Rúguǒ shí fēnzhōng yǐhòu tā háishì méi huí lái ne? Wǒ è sǐ le.
爸爸: 那我们就不等了。
Bàba: Nà wǒmen jiù bù děng le.
Mother: What time is it already? How come Xiaoming is not home yet? Usually he would have been back long before this time. Everybody's waiting for him to be back to have dinner.
Father: No need to get anxious. It is not 8 o'clock yet. Let's wait another ten minutes.
Daughter: What if he is still not back after ten minutes? I am hungry to death.
Father: Then we won't wait for him any longer.
* 6 男: 星期六晚上一起去吃饭, 好吗?
Nán: Xīngqī liù wǎnshàng yìqǐ qù chī fàn, hǎo ma?
女: 对不起, 我不能去外面吃饭。
Nǚ: Duìbùqǐ, wǒ bù néng qù wàimiàn chī fàn.
男: 哦? 为什么呢?
Nán: Ò? Wèishénme ne?
女: 你大概不知道吧, 我最近正在减肥呢!
Nǚ: Nǐ dàgài bù zhīdào ba, wǒ zuìjìn zhèng zài jiǎnféi ne!
男: 那我们星期六晚上做什么呢?
Nán: Nà wǒmen xīngqī liù wǎnshàng zuò shénme ne?
女: 去看场电影吧! 我好久没看电影了。
Nǚ: Qù kàn chǎng diànyǐng ba! Wǒ hǎojiǔ méi kàn diànyǐng le.
男: 哦, 那你还没看过 《哈利波特》 了? 去看 《哈利波特》 吧!
Nán: Ò, nà nǐ hái méi kàn guo 'Hālì Bōtè' le? Qù kàn 'Hālì Bōtè' ba!
女: 我对这个电影没有兴趣。
Nǚ: Wǒ duì zhè ge diànyǐng méiyǒu xìngqù.
男: 那 《超人》 呢?
Nán: Nà 'Chāorén' ne?
女: 太好了! 听说这个电影不错, 咱们就去看 《超人》 吧。
Nǚ: Tài hǎo le! Tīngshuō zhè ge diànyǐng bú cuò, zánmen jiù qù kàn 'Chāorén' ba.
Male: Shall we go out for dinner on Saturday evening?
Female: Sorry, I cannot go out to eat. Male: Oh? Why?Female: You must not know that I have been trying to lose weight.
Male: Then what shall we do on Saturday evening?Female: Let's go to a movie. I haven't seen a movie in a long time.
Male: Oh, then that'll mean you have not seen Harry Potter, right? Let's go see Harry Potter.
Female: I am not interested in this movie.
Male: Then what about Superman?
Female: Great! I heard that this movie is quite good. Let's go see Superman.
* 7 老师: 这是什么字? 谁知道? 王中, 你知道吗?
Lǎoshī: Zhè shì shénme zì? Shéi zhīdào? Wáng Zhōng, nǐ zhīdào ma?
王中: 老师, 我们还没有学过那个字呢!
Wáng Zhōng: Lǎoshī, wǒmen hái méiyǒu xué guo nà ge zì ne!
老师: 哦, 是吗? 好, 那我问你另外一个。厖这个呢? 学过了吗?
Lǎoshī, Ò, shì ma? Hǎo, nà wǒ wèn nǐ lìngwài yí ge.......Zhè ge ne? Xué guò le ma?
王中: 学过了, 可是我想不起来那个字的意思。
Wáng Zhōng: Xué guo le, kěshì wǒ xiǎng bù qǐlái nà ge zì de yìsi.
老师: 王中不认识这个字, 李明, 你呢?
Lǎoshī: Wáng Zhōng bú rènshì zhè ge zì. Lǐ Míng, nǐ ne?
Teacher: What is this character? Who knows? Wang Zhong, do you know this character?
Wang Zhong: Sir, we have not yet learned that character!
Teacher: Oh, is that so? OK, then I will ask you another one....What about this one? Have you learned it?
Wang Zhong: Yes, but I cannot recall the meaning of that character.
Teacher: Wang Zhong does not know this character. Li Ming, how about you?
* 8 女: 你到了中国以后, 可能会很忙 Ø, 可是一定要记得常常给我打电话 Ø。
Nǚ: Nǐ dào le Zhōngguó yǐhòu, kěnéng huì hěn máng, kěshì yídìng yào jìde chángcháng gěi wǒ dǎ diànhuà.
男: 没问题, 我一定会打的。
Nán: Méi wèntí, wǒ yídìng huì dǎ de.
Female: After you arrive in China, you probably will be busy, but you must remember to call me often.
Male: No problem, I definitely will.
* 9 老师: 这几个字, 你们已经练习了很多次了, 应该会写了吧!
Lǎoshī: Zhè jǐ ge zì, nǐmen yǐjīngt liànxí le hěn duō cì le, yīnggāi huì xiě le ba!
学生: 会了。
Xuéshēng: Huì le.
老师: 下次考试的时候, 会不会忘记?
Lǎoshī: Xià cì kǎoshì de shíhòu, huì bú huì wàngjì?
学生: 您放心吧! 不会的。
Xuéshēng: Nín fàngxīn ba! Bú huì de.
Teacher: You have practiced these characters many times. You ought to have learned how to write them now, right?
Students: Yes, we have.
Teacher: Will you forget how to write them on the next test? Students: Don't worry! We definitely won't.
* 10 王太太: 这个房子离你的公司很近, 开车只要十分钟, 而且也不太贵。咱们买吧! Ø
Wáng tàitai: Zhè ge fángzi lí nǐde gōngsī hěn jìn, kāi chē zhǐ yào shí fēn zhōng, érqiě yě bú tài guì. Zánmen mǎi ba!
王先生: 别再说了, 我不喜欢这个房子。
Wáng xiānsheng: Bié zài shuō le, wǒ bù xǐhuān zhè ge fángzi.
王太太: 为什么呢?
Wáng tàitai: Wèi shénme ne?
王先生: 我觉得厨房、 客厅都太小了。
Wáng xiānsheng: wǒ juéde chúfáng, kètīng dōu tài xiǎo le.
王太太: 你真的觉得这个厨房不够大吗? 你大概在开玩笑吧! 你什么时候进过厨房?
Wáng tàitai: Nǐ zhēn de juéde zhè ge chúfáng bú gòu dà ma? Nǐ dàgài zài kāi wánxiào ba! Nǐ shénme shíhòu jìn guo chúfáng?
Mrs Wang: This house is close to your company; it takes only ten minutes to get there by car; besides, it is not too expensive. Let's buy it.
Mr Wang: Don't say anything more. I don't like this house.
Mrs Wang: Why (not)?
Mr Wang: I think both the living room and the kitchen are too small.
Mrs Wang: You really think the kitchen is not big enough? You must be joking, aren't you? When did you ever go into the kitchen?
## 30 Conjunctive pairs
### I
* 1 安娜虽然不会说中文, 可是特别喜欢听中国歌曲。
Ānnà suīrán bú huì shuō Zhōngwén, kěshì tèbié xǐhuān tīng Zhōngguó gēqǔ.
Although Anna does not know how to speak Chinese, she likes to listen to Chinese songs very much.
* 2 因为今天天气不好,所以我不想出去, 只想在家看看书。
Yīnwèi jīntiān tiānqì bù hǎo, suǒyǐ wǒ bù xiǎng chū qù, zhǐ xiǎng zài jiā kàn kàn shū.
Because today's weather is not good, I don't feel like going out; I only want to stay home and read.
* 3 王明的记性真差! 十个生词, 他已经记了一个多小时, 可是还是记不住。
Wáng Míng de jìxìng zhēn chà! Shí ge shēngcí, tā yǐjīng jì le yí ge duō xiǎoshí, kěshì háishì jì bú zhù.
Wang Ming has a really bad memory. There are only ten vocabulary words, and he has been trying to memorize them for over an hour, but he still cannot memorize them.
* 4 男: 这个星期六, 你想做什么?
Nán: Zhè ge xīngqī liù, nǐ xiǎng zuò shénme?
女:如果天气好, 就去野餐。
Nǚ: Rúguǒ tiānqì hǎo, jiù qù yěcān.
男: 天气不好呢?
Nán: Tiānqì bù hǎo ne?
女: 那就去看电影。
Nǚ: Nà jiù qù kàn diànyǐng.
Male: What would you like to do this Saturday?
Female: Let's go for a picnic if the weather is nice. Male: What if the weather is bad?
Female: Then we will go to a movie.
* 5 李先生不但脾气好, 而且很会赚钱, 所以喜欢他的女孩子很多。
Lǐ xiānsheng búdàn píqì hǎo, érqiě hěn huì zhuàn qián, suǒyǐ xǐhuān tā de nǚ háizi hěn duō.
Mr Li is not only nice-tempered, but is also good at making money; therefore, many girls like him.
* 6 小兰跟她男朋友吵架了, 她妈妈不但不安慰她,反而还说一定是她不对。
Xiǎolán gēn tā nán péngyǒu chǎojià le, tā māma búdàn bù ānwèi tā, fǎn'ér hái shuō yídìng shì tā bú duì.
Xiaolan had a fight with her boyfriend. Her mother not only would not console her; she would instead say that it must have been her fault.
* 7 经理把小张骂了一顿, 小张心里虽然不高兴, 脸上却没有表示出来。
Jīnglǐ bǎ Xiǎo Zhāng mà le yí dùn, Xiǎo Zhāng xīn lǐ suīrán bù gāoxìng, liǎn shàng què méiyǒu biǎoshì chūlái.
The manager scolded Xiao Zhang. Although Xiao Zhang was upset inside, he did not let it show in his face.
* 8 王中是我们班最聪明的学生, 可是因为这个问题实在太难了, 所以就是(or 连、 即使是)王中也不会回答。
Wáng Zhōng shì wǒmen bān zuì cóngmíng de xuéshēng, kěshì yīnwèi zhè ge wèntí shízài tài nán le, suǒyǐ jiùshì (or lián, jíshǐ shì) Wáng Zhōng yě bú huì huídá.
Wang Zhong is the smartest student in our class, but because this question is truly too difficult, even Wang Zhong does not know how to answer it.
* 9 李小姐不但漂亮,而且脾气非常好。可惜我已经结婚了,如果我还没结婚的话, 我一定要追她。
Lǐ xiǎojiě búdàn piàoliàng, érqiě píqì fēicháng hǎo. Kěxī wǒ yǐjīng jiéhūn le, rúguǒ wǒ hái méi jiéhūn de huà, wǒ yídìng yào zhuī tā.
Miss Li is not only pretty, but also has a nice temper. It is a pity that I am already married. If I weren't married, I would definitely pursue her.
* 10 我实在太喜欢这辆车了, 所以无论(or 不管)多贵, 我都一定要买。
Wǒ shízài tài xǐhuān zhè liàng chē le, suǒyǐ wúlùn (or bùguǎn) duō guì, wǒ dōu yídìng yào mǎi.
I really like this car; therefore, no matter how expensive it is, I will buy it.
* 11 这样东西, 一点用也没有,就算(or 即使)免费送我, 我也不要。
Zhè yàng dōngxi, yìdiǎn yòng yě méiyǒu, jiùsuàn (or jíshǐ) miǎnfèi sòng wǒ, wǒ yě bú yào.This thing is completely useless. Even if it were given to me for free, I would not want it.
* 12 真奇怪! 老师在全班同学面前称赞李中, 李中不但不开心,反而哭了。
Zhēn qíguài! Lǎoshī zài quán bān tóngxué miànqián chēngzàn Lǐ Zhōng, Lǐ Zhōng búdàn bù kāixīn, fǎn'ér kū le.
How strange! The teacher praised Li Zhong in front of the entire class. Not only was Li Zhong not happy, instead, he cried.
* 13 在这个国家, 上大学是免费的; 所以即使(or 就算)是穷人家的小孩, 也可以上大学。
Zài zhè ge guójiā, shàng dàxué shì miǎnfèi de; suǒyǐ jíshǐ (or jiùsuàn) shì qióng rén jiā de xiǎohái, yě kěyǐ shàng dàxué.
In this country, going to university is free; therefore, even children of poor families can go to university.
* 14 在这个国家, 上大学是免费的; 所以无论(or 不管)是穷人家还是有钱人家的小孩, 都可以上大学。
Zài zhè ge guójiā, shàng dàxué shì miǎnfèi de; suǒyǐ wúlùn (or bùguǎn) shì qióng rén jiā háishì yǒuqián rén jiā de xiǎohái, dōu kěyǐ shàng dàxué.
In this country, going to university is free; therefore, whether one is from a rich family or from a poor family, one can go to university.
* 15 政府可以因为交通安全而规定开车的人不能打手机。
Zhèngfǔ kěyǐ yīnwèi jiāotōng ānquán ér guīdìng kāi chē de rén bù néng dǎ shǒujī.
The government can stipulate that drivers cannot use their cell phones because of road safety.
* 16 王中成绩很好, 也常帮助同学, 所以不但老师喜欢他, 他的同学也都很喜欢他。
Wáng Zhōng chéngjī hěn hǎo, yě cháng bāngzhù tóngxué, suǒyǐ búdàn lǎoshī xǐhuān tā, tāde tóngxué yě dōu hěn xǐhuān tā.
Wang Zhong's school performance has been good, and he often helps his classmates; therefore, not only does the teach like him, but also all his classmates like him.
* 17 李明真懒。他常因为天气不好就不去上课。
Lǐ Míng zhēn lǎn. Tā cháng yīnwèi tiānqì bù hǎo jiù bú qù shàng kè.
Li Ming is really lazy. He often skips classes simply because the weather is bad.
### II
* 1 王明因为有一个很漂亮的女朋友而总是觉得很快乐。
Wáng Míng yīnwèi yǒu yí ge hěn piàoliàng de nǚ péngyǒu ér zǒngshì juéde hěn kuàilè.
* 2 王明常常因为没有女朋友而觉得不快乐。 (or 王明因为没有女朋友而常常觉得不快乐。)
Wáng Míng chángcháng yīnwèi méiyǒu nǚ péngyǒu ér juéde bú kuàilè.
* 3 王明从来不因为有一个很漂亮的女朋友就觉得快乐。Wáng Míng cónglái bù yīnwèi yǒu yí ge hěn piàoliàng de nǚ péngyǒu jiù juéde hěn kuàilè.
* 4 王明从来不因为没有女朋友就觉得不快乐。
Wáng Míng cónglái bù yīnwèi méiyǒu nǚ péngyǒu jiù juéde bú kuàilè.
* 5 你不能因为天气不好就不去上课。
Nǐ bù néng yīnwèi tiānqì bù hǎo jiù bú qù shàng kè.
* 6 昨天王明因为发高烧而不能去上课。
Zuótiān Wáng Míng yīnwèi fā gāo shāo ér bù néng qù shàng kè.
* 7 王明从来不因为天气不好就不去上课, 可是他有时候会因为要出差而不去上课。
Wáng Míng cónglái bù yīnwèi tiānqì bù hǎo jiù bú qù shàng kè, kěshì tā yǒu shíhòu huì yīnwèi yào chūchāi ér bú qù shàng kè.
## 31 Conjunctions used in context
* 1 安娜: 既然你不喜欢他, 就应该跟他分手。
Ānnà: Jìrán nǐ bù xǐhuān tā, jiù yīnggāi gēn tā fēnshǒu.
* 2 李中: 我学日文是因为我妈妈是日本人, 学法文是因为我以后想去巴黎学设计。
Lǐ Zhōng: Wǒ xué Rìwén shì yīnwèi wǒ māma shì Rìběn rén, xué Fǎwén shì yīnwèi wǒ yǐhòu xiǎng qù Bālí xué shèjì.
* 3 王先生: 这个房子小是小, 可是不贵。
Wáng xiānsheng: Zhè ge fángzi xiǎo shì xiǎo, kěshì bú guì.
* 4 尽管王太太反对, 王先生还是决定把钱借给李先生。
Jǐnguǎn Wáng tàitai fǎnduì, Wáng xiānsheng háishì juédìng bǎ qián jiè gěi Lǐ xiānsheng.
* 5 丁先生: 我忙是忙, 可是安娜是我最好的朋友, 所以我一定要来参加她的生日舞会。
Dīng xiānsheng: Wǒ máng shì máng, kěshì Ānnà shì wǒ zuì hǎo de péngyǒu, suǒyǐ wǒ yídìng yào lái cānjiā tāde shēngrì wǔhuì.
* 6 妈妈: 既然你没事做, 就去把你的房间整理一下吧!
Māma: Jìrán nǐ méi shì zuò, jiù qù bǎ nǐde fángjiān zhěnglǐ yíxià ba!
* 7 张小姐: 那件衣服贵(倒)是不贵, 就是不太合身。
Zhāng xiǎojiě: Nà jiàn yīfú guì (dǎo) shì bú guì, jiùshì bú tài héshēn.
* 8 张小姐: 我喜欢是喜欢, 就是太贵了。
Zhāng xiǎojiě: Wǒ xǐhuān shì xǐhuān, jiùshì tài guì le.
* 9 李: 王中的想法固然很特别, 可是他的语法不好。Lǐ: Wáng Zhōng de xiǎngfǎ gùrán hěn tèbié, kěshì tāde yǔfǎ bù hǎo.
* 10 李小姐: 我(之)所以决定跟王明结婚是因为他实在很爱我。
Lǐ xiǎojiě: Wǒ (zhī) suǒyǐ juédìng gēn Wáng Míng jiéhūn shì yīnwèi tā shízài hěn ài wǒ.
## 32 The use of 才 and 就
* 1 太太: 现在才六点, 今天怎么这么早就下班了?
Tàitai: Xiànzài cái liù diǎn, jīntiān zěnme zhème zǎo jiù xià bān le?
先生: 今天没有提早下班, 可是交通特别顺畅, 只开了半小时就到家了。
Xiānsheng: Jīntiān méiyǒu tízǎo xià bān, kěshì jiāotōng tèbié shùnchàng, zhǐ kāi le bàn xiǎoshí jiù dào jiā le.
Wife: It's only 6 o'clock. How come you got off work so early today?
Husband: I didn't get off work early today. But somehow the traffic was particularly smooth. I only drove for half an hour and I got back.
* 2 如果你想学好中文, 没有别的办法, 只有多听、 多说、 多读才学得好。
Rúguǒ nǐ xiǎng xué hǎo Zhōngwén, méiyǒu biéde bànfǎ, zhǐyǒu duō tīng, duō shuō, duō dú cái xué de hǎo.
If you want to learn Chinese well, there is no other way. Only by listening more, speaking more, and reading more can you master it.
* 3 李太太: 你儿子才十七岁, 怎么就已经搬到外面去住了?
Lǐ tàitai: Nǐ érzi cái shíqī suì, zěnme jiù yǐjīng bān dào wàimiàn qù zhù le?
张太太: 你记错了, 我儿子去年就十八岁了。
Zhāng tàitai: Nǐ jì cuò le, wǒ érzi qùnián jiù shíbā suì le.
Mrs Li: Your son is only 17 years old. How come he has already moved out?
Mrs Zhang: You've remembered it wrong. My son already turned 18 last year.
* 4 王: 这是什么地方?
Wáng: Zhè shì shénme dìfāng?
李: 这就是天安门广场。
Lǐ: Zhè jiù shì Tiān'ānmén guǎngchǎng.
王: 哦, 是吗? 天安门在哪里?
Wáng: Ò, shì ma? Tiān'ānmén zài nǎlǐ?
李: 你看, 那个高高的建筑, 那就是天安门。
Lǐ: Nǐ kàn, nà ge gāo gāo de jiànzhù, nà jiù shì Tiān'ānmén.
Wang: What's this place?
Li: This is (the famous) Tian'anmen Square.
Wang: Oh, is that so? Where is Tian'anmen?
Li: Look, that tall building, that is Tian'anmen.
* 5 小王真聪明, 别人要花好几个小时才学得会的东西, 他常常不到半小时就学会了。
Xiǎo Wáng zhēn cōngmíng, biérén yào huā hǎo jǐ ge xiǎoshí cái xué de huì de dōngxi, tā chángcháng bú dào bàn xiǎoshí jiù xué huì le.
Xiao Wang is really smart. He often needs only less than half an hour to learn things that other people need several hours to learn.
* 6 老师: 张明, 请你说一说, 这个成语是什么意思?
Lǎoshī: Zhāng Míng, qǐng nǐ shuō yì shuō, zhè ge chéngyǔ shì shénme yìsi?
张明: 老师, 这个成语您还没有教我们呢!
Zhāng Míng: Lǎoshī, zhè ge chéngyǔ nín hái méiyǒu jiāo wǒmen ne!
老师: 谁说的? 这个成语我上星期就教你们了。
Lǎoshī: Shéi shuō de? Zhè ge chéngyǔ wǒ shàng xīngqī jiù jiāo nǐmen le.
Teacher: Zhang Ming, please tell us what this proverb means.
Zhang Ming: Sir, you have not taught us that proverb. Teacher: Who says so? I already taught you this proverb last week.
* 7 张: 今天的功课实在太多了, 我花了三个小时才写完。
Zhāng: Jīntiān de gōngkè shízài tài duō le, wǒ huā le sān ge xiǎoshí cái xiě wán.
李: 什么?才三小时就写完了? 我写了五个小时,才写好一半。
Lǐ: Shénme? Cái sān xiǎoshí jiù xiě wán le? Wǒ xiě le wǔ ge xiǎoshí, cái xiě hǎo yí bàn.
Zhang: There really was too much homework today. It took me three hours to finally finish it.
Li: What? It took you only three hours to finish? I worked on it for five hours and I only finished half of it.
* 8 丁: 我认为, 一个人如果想把中文学好, 最好的办法就是多看中国电影、 多听中文歌曲。
Dīng: Wǒ rènwéi, yí ge rén rúguǒ xiǎng bǎ Zhōngwén xué hǎo, zuì hǎo de bànfǎ jiù shì duō kàn Zhōngguó diànyǐng, duō tīng Zhōngwén gēqǔ.
张: 我不同意。我觉得, 多跟中国人练习才是最好的办法。
Zhāng: Wǒ bù tóngyì. Wǒ juéde, duō gēn Zhōngguó rén liànxí cái shì zuì hǎo de bànfǎ.
Ding: I think that, if one wants to learn Chinese well, the best way is to watch more Chinese movies and to listen more to Chinese songs.
Zhang: I don't agree. I feel that to practise more often with Chinese people is the best way to learn.
* 9 妈妈: 你怎么现在才回来?
Māma: Nǐ zěnme xiànzài cái huí lái?
儿子: 现在才六点, 还不算晚啊!
Érzi: Xiànzài cái liù diǎn, hái bú suàn wǎn a!
妈妈: 你忘了吗? 你出门的时候, 说你五点就会回来的。
Māma: Nǐ wàng le ma? Nǐ chū mén de shíhòu, shuō nǐ wǔ diǎn jiù huì huí lái de.
Mother: How come you were late? (What took you so long?)
Son: It's only 6 o'clock. It is not late yet.
Mother: Did you forget that you said you would be home at 5 o'clock when you left the house?
* 10 老师: 这个成语是什么意思?
Lǎoshī: Zhè ge chéngyǔ shì shénme yìsi?
学生: 我忘了。
Xuéshēng: Wǒ wàng le.
老师: 这个成语是昨天才学的, 怎么你今天就忘了?
Lǎoshī: Zhè ge chéngyǔ shì zuótiān cái xué de, zěnme nǐ jīntiān jiù wàng le?
Teacher: What does this proverb mean?
Student: I've forgotten.
Teacher: You just learned this proverb yesterday; how come you've already forgotten?
* 11 李: 今天真倒霉, 一出门就摔了一跤。
Lǐ: Jīntiān zhēn dǎoméi, yì chū mén jiù shuāi le yì jiāo.
张: 那不算什么! 小王才倒霉呢! 他一出门就被车撞了。
Zhāng: Nà bú suàn shénme! Xiǎo Wáng cái dǎoméi ne! Tā yì chū mén jiù bèi chē zhuàng le.
Li: Today I was really unlucky. The moment I left my house, I slipped and fell.
Zhang: That's nothing! Xiao Wang is the one who was unlucky. As soon as he left his house, he was hit by a car.
* 12 妈妈: 小兰, 你在做什么? 我已经在车上等了十分钟了。你快迟到了。
Māma: Xiǎolán, nǐ zài zuò shénme? Wǒ yǐjīng zài chē shàng děng le shí fēnzhōng le. Nǐ kuài chídào le.
小兰: 我在找功课呢! 找到了就来。
Xiǎolán: Wǒ zài zhǎo gōngkè ne! Zhǎodào le jiù lái.
妈妈: 别找了, 你没看到吗? 你的功课就在饭桌上。
Māma: Bié zhǎo le, nǐ méi kàn dào ma? Nǐde gōngkè jiù zài fànzhuō shàng.
Mother: Xiaolan, what are you doing? I have been waiting in the car for ten minutes. You are going to be late (for school).
Xiaolan: I am looking for my homework. I will come over as soon as I have found it.
Mother: Don't look anymore. Did you not see that your homework is right there on the dinner table?
## 33 The use of adverbs in contracted sentences
* 1 李: 明天我要跟几个朋友去爬山, 你要不要一起去?
Lǐ: Míngtiān wǒ yào gēn jǐ ge péngyǒu qù pá shān, nǐ yào bú yào yìqǐ qù?
丁: 天气好我就跟你们去。
Dīng: Tiānqì hǎo wǒ jiù gēn nǐmen qù.
Li: I am going hiking in the mountains with a few friends tomorrow. Do you want to go with us?
Ding: I will go with you if the weather is nice.
* 2 王: 明天有一个重要的考试, 你怎么还在看电视? 快去准备考试吧。
Wáng: Míngtiān yǒu yí ge zhòngyào de kǎoshì, nǐ zěnme hái zài kàn diànshi? Kuài qù zhǔnbèi kǎoshì ba!
李: 准备什么? 这门课的东西, 我完全不懂, 再准备也不会及格的。
Lǐ: Zhǔnbèi shénme? Zhè mén kè de dōngxi, wǒ wánquán bù dǒng, zài zhǔnbèi yě bú huì jígé de.
Wang: There is an important test tomorrow. How come you are still watching TV? Go and prepare for the test now.
Li: What is there to prepare? I completely do not understand the materials for this class. No matter how much I prepare, I won't pass the test.
* 3 张: 你的英文说得真好, 你是怎么学的?
Zhāng: Nǐde Yīngwén shuō de zhēn hǎo, nǐ shì zěnme xué de?
李: 其实学英文并不难, 多听、 多说、 多读就可以学得很好。
Lǐ: Qíshí xué Yīngwén bìng bù nán, duō tīng, duō shuō, duō dú jiù kěyǐ xué de hěn hǎo.
Zhang: You speak English so well. How did you learn it?
Li: Actually English is not hard to learn. As long as you listen more, speak more and read more, you can learn it well.
* 4 我儿子聪明却不肯努力学习, 所以考试总是考得很差。
Wǒ érzi cōngmíng què bù kěn nǔlì xuéxí, suǒyǐ kǎoshì zǒngshì kǎo de hěn chà.
My son is smart yet he is unwilling to study hard; so he always does poorly on tests.
* 5 安娜: 你想, 这件衣服, 我穿了, 会好看吗?
Ānnà: Nǐ xiǎng, zhè jiàn yīfú, wǒ chuān le, huì hǎokàn ma?
小兰: 很难说。你去试试看吧! 试了就知道。
Xiǎolán: Hěn nán shuō. Nǐ qù shì shì kàn ba! Shì le jiù zhīdào.
Anna: Do you think I would look good if I wear this dress?
Xiaolan: It's hard to say. Why don't you go try it on? Once you try it on, we will know.
* 6 李: 那本书早就卖完了, 你去哪里都买不到了。
Lǐ: Nà běn shū zǎo jiù mài wán le, nǐ qù nǎlǐ dōu mǎi bú dào le.
王: 我不相信。
Wáng: Wǒ bù xiāngxìn.
李: 不相信你就去买买看吧!
Lǐ: Bù xiāngxìn nǐ jiù qù mǎi mǎi kàn ba!
Li: All copies of that book have long been sold out. Wherever you go, you will not be able to get it now.
Wang: I don't believe it.
Li: If you don't believe it, you go try and buy it (and see what happens).
* 7 王先生: 请你嫁给我吧!
Wáng xiānsheng: Qǐng nǐ jià gěi wǒ ba!
李小姐: 对不起, 我还不想结婚呢!
Lǐ xiǎojiě: Duìbùqǐ, wǒ hái bù xiǎng jiéhūn ne!
王先生: 你不想嫁给我, 我们就别再交往了吧!
Wáng xiānsheng: Nǐ bù xiǎng jià gěi wǒ, wǒmen jiù bié zài jiāowǎng le ba!
李小姐: 你的意思是, 咱们朋友也不能做了吗?
Lǐ xiǎojiě: Nǐde yìsi shì, zánmen péngyǒu yě bù néng zuò le ma?
王先生: 对, 我就是这个意思。
Wáng xiānsheng: Duì, wǒ jiù shì zhè ge yìsi.
Mr Wang: Will you marry me?
Miss Li: Sorry, but I don't want to get married yet.
Mr Wang: Since you don't want to marry me, let's not date anymore.
Miss Li: Do you mean that we cannot even be friends?
Mr Wang: That's right. That is exactly what I mean.
* 8 王: 那份工作, 薪水不错, 你为什么不做?
Wáng: Nà fèn gōngzuò, xīnshuǐ bú cuò, nǐ wèishénme bú zuò?
丁: 那种工作太无聊, 薪水多高我都不愿意做。
Dīng: Nà zhǒng gōngzuò tài wúliáo, xīnshuǐ duō gāo wǒ dōu bú yuànyì zuò.
李: 是啊, 你这么有钱, 当然不愿意做这种工作。
Lǐ: Shì a, nǐ zhème yǒuqián, dāngrán bú yuànyì zuò zhè zhǒng gōngzuò.
王: 有钱也不能光待在家里不工作啊!
Wáng: Yǒuqián yě bù néng guāng dāi zài jiā lǐ bù gōngzuò a!
Wang: The salary for that job is not bad. Why wouldn't you take the job?
Ding: That type of work is too boring. No matter how high the salary is, I am not willing to do it.
Li: Yeah! You are so wealthy; of course, you are not willing to do this type of work.
Wang: Even if you are wealthy, you can't just stay home and not go out to work.
* 9 李: 明天安娜家开派对, 你去不去?
Lǐ: Míngtiān Ānnà jiā kāi pàiduì, nǐ qù bú qù?
丁: 不去。
Dīng: Bú qù.
李: 是吗? 你最好的朋友小兰说她要去呢!
Lǐ: Shì ma? Nǐ zuì hǎo de péngyǒu Xiǎolán shuō tā yào qù ne!
丁: 我最讨厌安娜。小兰去我也不去。
Dīng: Wǒ zuì tǎoyàn Ānnà. Xiǎolán qù wǒ yě bú qù.
Li: There will be a party at Anna's house tomorrow. Are you going?
Ding: I am not going.
Li: Is that so? Your best friend Xiaolan said that she would go.
Ding: I hate Anna. Even if Xiaolan goes, I won't go.
* 10 王中真聪明, 老师问的那个问题这么难, 可是他想都不用想就会回答。
Wáng Zhōng zhēn cōngmíng, lǎoshī wèn de nà ge wèntí zhème nán, kěshì tā xiǎng dōu bú yòng xiǎng jiù huì huídá.
Wang Zhong is really smart. The question our teacher asked was so difficult, but he didn't even have to think and he knew how to answer it.
* 11 妈妈: 别给小明那么多钱。他有了钱就乱花。
Māma: Bié gěi Xiǎomíng nàme duō qián. Tā yǒu le qián jiù luàn huā.
爸爸: 放心! 我会警告他, 这次再乱花钱, 以后就不给他零用钱了。
Bàba: Fàngxīn! Wǒ huì jǐnggào tā, zhè cì zài luàn huā qián, yǐhòu jiù bù gěi tā língyòng qián le.
Mother: Don't give Xiaoming so much money. As soon as he has got money, he would spend it without restraint.
Father: Don't worry! I will warn him that if he spends money without restraint again, I will not give him anymore spending money.
* 12 妈妈: 上个月爸爸寄了一张支票给你, 你收到没有?
Māma: Shàng ge yuè bàba jì le yī zhāng zhīpiào gěi nǐ, nǐ shōudào méiyǔ?
儿子: 收到了。
Érzi: Shōudào le.
妈妈: 你收到了怎么也没有打个电话跟我们说呢?
Māma: Nǐ shōudào le zěnme yě méiyǒu dǎ ge diànhuà gēn wǒmen shuō ne?
Mother: Last month your father sent you a check; did you receive it?
Son: Yes, I did.
Mother: Since you did, why didn't you call us and let us know? (You should have called.)
## 34 The use of interrogative pronouns
* 1 男: 天气这么好, 去公园走走, 怎么样?
Nán: Tiānqì zhème hǎo, qù gōngyuán zǒu zǒu, zěnmeyàng?
女: 好啊! 怎么去? 坐公共汽车还是开车?
Nǚ: Hǎo a! Zěnme qù? Zuò gōnggòng qìchē háishì kāi chē?
* 2 王太太: 你知道这辆车有多贵吗? 我们怎么买得起?
Wáng tàitai: Nǐ zhīdào zhè liàng chē yǒu duō guì ma? Wǒmen zěnme mǎi de qǐ?
王先生: 我实在太喜欢这辆车了, 多贵我都要买。
Wáng xiānsheng: Wǒ shízài tài xǐhuān zhè liàng chē le, duō guì wǒ dōu yào mǎi.
* 3 太太: 刚洗好的碗怎么还是脏的? 这是怎么回事?
Tàitai: Gāng xǐ hǎo de wǎn zěnme háishì zāng de? Zhè shì zěnme huí shì?
先生: 怎么? 洗碗机又坏了吗?
Xiānsheng: Zěnme? Xǐwǎn jī yòu huài le ma?
* 4 安娜: 小王! 你怎么来了? 雨下得这么大, 你是怎么来的?
Ānnà: Xiǎo Wáng? Nǐ zěnme lái le? Yǔ xià de zhème dà, nǐ shì zěnme lái de?
王: 我来找你是因为有一件很重要的事我要告诉你。所以雨多大我也要来。
Wáng: Wǒ lái zhǎo nǐ shì yīnwèi yǒu yí jiàn hěn zhòngyào de shì wǒ yào gàosù nǐ. Suǒyǐ yǔ duō dà wǒ yě yào lái.
* 5 我想喝杯咖啡, 你知不知道哪里有咖啡馆?
Wǒ xiǎng hē bēi kāfēi, nǐ zhī bù zhīdào nǎlǐ yǒu kāfēiguǎn?
* 6 李: 我们应该请谁当代表来回答老师的问题?
Lǐ: Wǒmen yīnggāi qǐng shéi dāng dàibiǎo lái huídá lǎoshī de wèntí?
丁: 什么代表? 谁被老师叫到谁就回答。
Dīng: Shénme dàibiǎo? Shéi bèi lǎoshī jiào dào shéi jiù huídá.
* 7 女: 现在几点? 你为什么不在教室里上课? 你来做什么? (or 你来干嘛?)
Nǚ: Xiànzài jǐ diǎn? Nǐ wèishénme bú zài jiàoshì lǐ shàng kè? Nǐ lái zuò shénme? (or Nǐ lái gànmá?)
男: 今天老师两点就让我们下课了, 下午我没有什么事, 所以我想请你去看电影。电影院有四个电影, 你想看哪个?
Nán: Jīntiān lǎoshī liǎng diǎn jiù ràng wǒmen xià kè le. Xiàwǔ wǒ méiyǒu shénme shì, suǒyǐ wǒ xiǎng qǐng nǐ qù kàn diànyǐng. Diànyǐngyuàn yǒu sì ge diànyǐng, nǐ xiǎng kàn nǎ ge?
女: 太好了! 你想看哪个我们就看哪个。
Nǚ: Tài hǎo le! Nǐ xiǎng kàn nǎ ge wǒmen jiù kàn nǎ ge.
* 8 李: 你平常什么时候运动?
Lǐ: Nǐ píngcháng shénme shíhòu yùndòng?
丁: 星期天早上健身房没有什么人(or 没有多少人), 所以我总是星期天早上运动。
Dīng: Xīngqī tiān zǎoshàng jiànshēnfáng méiyǒu shénme rén (or méiyǒu duōshǎo rén), suǒyǐ wǒ zǒngshì xīngqī tiān zǎoshàng yùndòng.
李: 你的健身房有什么(or 有哪些)好的运动设备?
Lǐ: Nǐde jiànshēnfáng yǒu shénme (or yǒu nǎ xiē) hǎo de yùndòng shèbèi?
丁: 这个健身房很便宜, 所以没有什么好的设备。
Dīng: Zhè ge jiànshēnfáng hěn piányí, suǒyǐ méiyǒu shénme hǎo de shèbèi.
## 35 Rhetorical questions
* 1 张: 小兰跟小英不都是王太太的女儿吗? 为什么王太太好像比较喜欢小兰呢?
Zhāng: Xiǎolán gēn Xiǎoyīng bù dōu shì Wáng tàitai de nǚ'ér ma? Wèishénme Wáng tàitai hǎoxiàng bǐjiào xǐhuān Xiǎolán ne?
李: 难道小英不是王太太亲生的女儿吗?
Lǐ: Nándào Xiǎoyīng bú shì Wáng tàitai qīnshēng de nǚ'ér ma?
陈: 我不相信王太太会偏心, 她是一个这么好的妈妈, 怎么会偏心?
Chén: Wǒ bù xiāngxìn Wáng tàitai huì piānxīn, tā shì yí ge zhème hǎo de māma, zěnme huì piānxīn?
丁: 可不是吗!
Dīng: Kě bú shì ma!
* 2 丁: 安娜要跟谁结婚, 关你什么事?
Dīng: Ānnà yào gēn shéi jiéhūn, guān nǐ shénme shì?
陈: 王先生这么爱安娜, 他穷一点又有什么关系呢?
Chén: Wáng xiānsheng zhème ài Ānnà, tā qióng yìdiǎn yòu yǒu shénme guānxi ne?
李: 安娜不是小孩子了, 何必为她担心?
Lǐ: Ānnà bú shì xiǎo háizi le, hébì wèi tā dānxīn?
文: 安娜又不是你妹妹, 你担什么心?
Wén: Ānnà yòu bú shì nǐ mèimei, nǐ dān shénme xīn?
* 3 邻居: 难道你儿子不打算结婚吗?
Línjū: Nándào nǐ érzi bù dǎsuàn jiéhūn ma?
李太太: 我儿子工作忙得要命, 他哪里有时间交女朋友?
Lǐ tàitai: Wǒ érzi gōngzuò máng de yàomìng, tā nǎlǐ yǒu shíjiān jiāo nǚ péngyǒu?
李先生: 我儿子结婚不结婚, 关你什么事?
Lǐ xiānsheng: Wǒ érzi jiéhūn bù jiéhūn, guān nǐ shénme shì?
邻居: 我没有恶意, 你何必发脾气?
Línjū: Wǒ méiyǒu èyì, nǐ hébì fā píqì?
李太太: 你何苦为这种小事发脾气?
Lǐ tàitai: Nǐ hékǔ wèi zhè zhǒng xiǎo shì fā píqì?
李先生: 这怎么是小事?
Lǐ xiānsheng: Zhè zěnme shì xiǎo shì?
* 4 王: 安娜不是也很用功吗? 为什么考得这么差呢?
Wáng: Ānnà bú shì yě hěn yònggōng ma? Wèishénme kǎo de zhème chà ne?
李: 安娜哪里用功? 她懒得要命。
Lǐ: Ānnà nǎlǐ yònggōng? Tā lǎn de yàomìng.
王: 她不是每天晚上都在图书馆待到半夜吗? 怎么会懒呢?
Wáng: Tǎ bú shì měi tiān wǎnshàng dōu zài túshūguǎn dāi dào bànyè ma? Zěnme huì lǎn ne?
# Index
ability , –
academic specialty
acquired skill
action about to happen , –
action in progress , , ; see also progressive aspect
action verbs –, ,
adjectival clauses
adjectival verbs , –, , ; instantaneous adjectival verbs ; modal particle le 了 ; negative form –
adjectives: in comparisons ; in emphatic expression ; functioning as adverbs –; mutually exclusive ; as the predicate , –; reduplicated –; stating fact ,
adverbs: in contracted sentences –; of manner ; word order –
adverbial modifiers , –
affiliation
affirmative-negative questionsviii, –, , , –
affordability
already , –, , , ,
alternative questions –
annoyance
'as long as' , , ,
aspect viii; continuous , –; experiential , –, ; perfective , , , –, , , ; progressive , –, , , –
assumption , , –, –, –
auxiliary verb see modal verb
availability –,
ba 吧 , , –, , , –, –
bàn 半
bǎ 把 structure , , , , , , –, –
basic pattern: complement of duration , ; complement of state –
'be' in English
bèi 被 structure –
bǐ 比 , –
biàn 遍
bié 别 –, –
bié......le 别......了 –, , –
biéshì......(ba) 别是......(吧)
bǐjiào 比较 ,
bìxū 必须 ,
'bodily movement' words
bú bì 不必 , –
bù bǐ/bú huì bǐ 不比/不会比 , –
bù céng 不曾
bùdàn 不但 , –
bù dōu 不都 ,
bùguǎn 不管 , , ,
búguò 不过
bú huì yǒu 不会有 –
bùjǐn 不仅
bú jiù (shì)......ma? 不就 (是)......吗?
bù kěyǐ 不可以 , , , , ,
bù......le 不......了
bù néng bù/bù dé bù 不能不/不得不 ,
bùrú 不如
bù shǎo 不少 –, ,
bú shì......ma? 不是......吗?–
bù tóng/bù yīyàng 不同/不一样 , ,
bú xiàng 不像 , , ,
bù xíng 不行 , –
bù xǔ 不许
búyào 不要 , , , ,
búyòng 不用 ,
bùzhǐ 不只
bù zhǔn 不准
cái 才 –
céngjīng 曾经
chàbùduō/chà hěn duō 差不多/差很多
cháng 常 –
change of situation , , , , –, , ,
chéng 成 as 'other element' in bǎ 把 structure –,
cì 次
commas: in complex sentences , ; after disyllabic prepositional phrases ; after the preposed object –, ; after sentential subjects ; in topic-comment structure –
comment viii, , –
comparisons –; implied , , , , , –
compass points dōng, xī, nán, běi 东, 西, 南, 北
complement viii; in bǎ 把 structure –; and compound verbs –; of degree , , , –, ; of direction –, , , ; of duration –, –, ; of occurrence –; of potential , , –, –, ; of quantitative difference , –, –, , ; of quantity –, –; of result , –, , –, , –, ; of state –, , –, –
complex complements of direction –; abstract meaning –
compound verbs –,–, , ; and aspect particles ; and complement
–, , ; instantaneous verbs –
cóng 从 , –,
cónglái 从来
conjunctions , ; used in context –
conjunctive pairs , –
container words
context , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , –, , , , , ,
continuous aspect , –
contracted sentences –
copula verb 'be' in English
crime
cuò 错 as complement of result
dà大 and measure words
dànshì 但是 , –, ,
dǎo 倒
dào 到: as a verb in complement of direction –; as a complement
of result –; as 'other element' in bǎ 把 structure
dǎoshì 倒是
dào shíhòu 到时候
de 的: when de 的 is not used ; with disyllabic modifiers –, ; insertion pattern ; with location phrases ; as a modal particle ; with monosyllabic modifiers , ; and noun clauses –; and omission of nouns , –, ; possessive ; and reduplicated adjectives –
de 得: in complement of degree –; in complement of potential , –; in complement of state –, , –, –
de 地: when de 地 is optional –, ; with monosyllabic adjectives ; and reduplicated adjectives ; and reduplicated adjectival verbs
de huà 的话 –
de shíhòu 的时候 , –
dédào 得到
definiteness viii, , , , –, , , –, –
degree: adjective indicating degree , ; complement of degree , , , –, degree adverb viii, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
děi 得 , –
dependent clause viii, –
diào 掉 as complement of result
direct object viii, , ,
direction, complement of: simple complement of direction –; complex complement of direction –
disappearance of a situation
disapproval
disyllabic viii, –, , , , ; adjectives , , , ; modifiers , ; prepositions , , ; verbs , ,
dòng 动 as a complement of potential
dǒng 懂 as a complement of result
dōng, xī, nán, běi 东, 西, 南, 北
dōu 都: already , –; even ; in
bú shì......ma? 不是......吗?; no matter , , –; referring to the object ; referring to the subject ; word order –,
dōu bù 都不 ,
duì 对 as complement of result ,
duō 多 , –, , , , , –, , , , –
duō cháng shíjiān 多长时间
duō jiǔ 多久
duōshǎo 多少 , –, , , , –,
duration, complement of –, –, ; in negative sentences ; after nouns or pronouns
durative verb ,
duty , ,
effort: conscious –; and result , –
either... or...
elliptical sentences , , ,
emergence of a situation , , , –, –, , ,
emphatic expressions: using huì......de
会......的 –; using shì......de
是......的 –
ér 而 –
érqiě 而且 , –
even –,
even if ,
even more –
exactness –
existence , , , , , , –,
existential sentences –
expectation , , , , , , , , ; contrary to , –, ; earlier than ; later than
experience , –,
experiential aspect , –
expletive 'it' in English
extreme situations –
facts: indicated by an adjective –, ; indicated by jǐnguǎn 尽管 –; fact vs impact
fǎn'ér 反而 –
first observation/mentioning –
fixed schedules
focus: position word and noun –; in
shì......de 是......的 structure –
gāi 该
gāi bú huì/shì......ba 该不会/是......吧
gāng 刚 –
gànmá 干嘛 , –
gěi 给: optional word in bǎ 把 structure ; as 'other element' in bǎ 把 structure
; in passive structure ; as preposition –; as verb 'to give'
gēn 跟: in making comparisons –, –, ; in prepositions ,
general public –
generic , –, –, , –,
gèng 更 –
'good at' ,
gòu 够 as complement of result
guān nǐ shénme shì? 关你什么事?
guo/guò 过: comparing guo 过 with le 了 –; guò 过 and duration of time
gùrán 固然
habitual event / behavior , , , ,
hái/hái yào 还/还要 in making comparisons
–
hái 还, implying 'also' –
hái méiyǒu......(ne) 还没有......(呢)
hái méiyǒu......guo (ne) 还没有......过 (呢)–
hái......ne 还......呢
háishì 还是: alternative question , –, ; used with suīrán 虽然 and jǐnguǎn
尽管 ,
hǎo 好 as complement of result –
hǎo jiǔ 好久
hébì 何必
hékǔ 何苦
hěn duō 很多 –, , , , , ,
hidden subjects
hòulái 后来 –
huì 会: complement of result ; modal verbs –
huòdé 获得 –
huòzhě 或者
hypothetical situations –, , ,
identification , , ,
immediacy ,
impact , –,
impending events –, –
imperative sentences , –, ; and adjectives –; indirect –; negative –, –, ; with or without nǐ/nǐmen 你/你们 , ; with qǐng 请 –,
indefiniteness viii, , , , –, , –
independent clauses viii,
indirect imperative sentences –
indirect objects viii, , ,
indirect questions ,
indirect speech
inference ,
insertion patterns
instantaneous action/event –, , , , ; before and after stages
instantaneous verbs –, –, , , –; and progressive aspect –,
intention –, –
intentional act/action –, ; adverbial modifier with de 地; zuò 作 in bǎ 把 structure
interrogative pronouns ix, , –, , , –; asking questions –; in negative statements ; making sweeping statements –; two identical interrogative pronouns
jǐ 几 , , , , , ,
jiàn 见 as complement of result –,
jiāng 将: with zài 在prepositional phrase indicating time ; formal for bǎ 把
jiào 叫 in passive structure –
jǐ diǎn 几点 , , , –,
jǐnguǎn 尽管 –,
jìrán 既然 –,
jíshi 即使 –, ,
jiù 就 , –, –, –, –, ,
jiùshì 就是 , ,
jiùsuàn 就算 ,
jiù yào......le 就要......了 ,
just (very short time ago)–
kàn 看 after reduplicated verbs
kě bú shì ma? 可不是吗?
kěn 肯
kěnéng 可能 , , , ,
kěshì 可是 –, , –
kěyǐ 可以 , , , , –,
kěyǐ bù 可以不
kuài......le 快......了 –
kuài yào......le 快要......了 –
le 了: comparing le 了 with guo 过 –; indicating hypothetical situations ; modal particles , –, –, , , –; or as the 'other element' in bǎ 把 structure ; perfective aspect particle , , –, , , , ; and relative clauses ; zhe 着 in existential sentences
le ma? 了吗?, –,
let's...–
lián 连 ,
liǎo 了 as complement of potential –
lo 咯/啰 ,
location: forming location words –; in subjectless sentences
ma 吗 , –, , –, –
máfán nǐ 麻烦你
main clause see independent clause
mǎn......de 满......的
measure words ix, –; nouns with no measure word –; nouns with optional measure word –
méiyǒu 没有 , , –, , , , –, –
meteorological phenomena –
mistake implied
modal particle ix, , –, –
modal verbs ix, –
monosyllabic ix, , , , , , , , , , –, ,
'more or less' –
'much more' –; see also vague difference
mystery
nǎ 哪 , –
nǎlǐ 哪里 ,
name 那么 , , –, –, –, ,
nándào 难道 –
nǎr 哪儿 see 哪里
nà (ge) shíhòu 那 (个) 时候
native place
ne 呢 , –, –, –, , –
near certainty , –
necessity ,
negative comparisons –
negative imperative sentences –, –,
negative questions –, ,
néng/nénggòu 能/能够 –, , –
never
'no matter' , , –, –
non–action verbs –; and degree adverbs
; negative form –; with the quality of adjectives , , ,
non-subject-predicate construction ix, , –
non-definite ,
not... anymore , , –
'not yet' , –
notional passive
noun clauses –
objects: in comparison ; in complement of result –; direct viii, , , ; indirect viii, , , ; pre-position ix, , , , , , , , –, , , –, , , , , ; in shì......de 是......的 structure –
object + subject + verb ,
obligation see duty
occurrence, complement of –
'of', in English and de 的 –
omission of nouns: after adjectives ; in compound verbs ; after measure words –; after position words ; after relative clauses –;
'only if' –
only, used with a number
or
origin ,
other elements: in bǎ 把 structure , –; in bèi 被 structure ,
outcome , , –
passive sentence structure ix, , , –
perfective aspect , , , –, , ,
performance in a task ,
performer of the action , , –
permission , , ,
placement verbs ix, , , , –
position words –; when lǐ 里 a is not used ; and nouns –; when tóu, biān, miàn 头, 边, 面 is optional ;
positive questions , ,
possibility , –,
potential, complement of , , –, –,
precise difference , –,
predicate ix, –, , , , –, , ,
pre-existent in the context ix; see also context
prepositions –
prepositional constructions –; as a complement of result –; indicating location, direction, and space –; indicating target, object, or interaction
–; indicating time –
prepositional phrases , , –, –; after verb , –; before verb –, –;beginning of sentence –
probability
profession
progressive aspects –
psychological state , , ,
purpose , , , , –
puzzlement ,
qǐ 起 as complement of potential
qǐlái 起来 , –
quantitative difference, complement of , –, –, ,
quantity, complement of –, –
què 却 ,
question type –
ràng 让 in passive structure –
rebuttal
receiver of the action , ,
reduplication: adjectives –, –; measure words ; verbs , –,
relative clauses ix, –, , , , , –
requirement , –,
result, complement of , –, , –, , –,
rhetorical questions , , –
rúguǒ 如果 –, –
school-related activities
season and seasonal activity
sentential subjects x,
separable verbs
sequential actions
shǎo 少 –, , , , , ,
shéi 谁 ,
shénme 什么 , , , –
shénme shíhòu 什么时候 , –,
shì 是: identification , , ; indicating 'although' in context –; with modal verbs –; with mutually exclusive adjectives ; and position words
shì......de 是......的 structure –, ; emphatic expression –; identifying people –; providing focus –; stating fact
shíhòu 时候 –
shíjiān 时间 , –
shì yīnwèi 是因为 –
shòudào 受到 –
sǐ 死 as complement of result
simple complement of direction –
simultaneous actions
so + adjective + that –
softening the tone , , ,
sòng 送 , –,
state, complement of –, , –, –
subject x, –, ; in complex sentences , –, ; hidden ; in yóu 由 sentences ; no subject in bèi 被 structure ; in sentences with
yóu 由 ; sentential x,
subjectless sentences , , –
subject + object + verb
subject-predicate construction x, ,
subject + verb + object ,
subordinate clause see dependent clause
suīrán 虽然 , –
suǒ 所 in relative clauses
suǒyǐ 所以 , –, , –,
surprise ,
tag questions , ,
tài......(le) 太......(了)
tā/tāmen, in bǎ 把 structure –
tàng 趟 –
tǎngruò 倘若 –
'the fact that', in English
time phrase x, , , , , , –, , , –, –
tǐng......de 挺......的
topic see comment
topic-comment structure x, , , , ,
transformation ,
unexpected , , ,
unknown information
unmarked passive , ,
unmarked questions ,
vague differences , –,
verbs: action –, , ; adjectival , –, , ; bǎ 把 ending structure
–; in comparisons –; compound –; instantaneous –, –, , , –; non-action –, , ; placement ix, , , , –; verb omission pattern , , ; verb repetition pattern , , –; verb restrictions in bǎ 把 structure
volition –
wán 完, as complement of result
wǎn 晚, in making comparisons –
wéi......suǒ 为......所......
wèicéng 未曾
wèishénme 为什么 , –
'wh-' question words in English see interrogative pronoun
whereabouts –, ,
whether... or... see alternative questions
willingness ,
wúlùn 无论 see bùguǎn 不管
xià 下, as complement of potential –
xiàlái 下来 , ,
xiān 先, in making comparisons –
xiàng 像 –
xiǎng 想, as a modal verb –,
xiǎo 小, and measure words
xiàqù 下去 , ,
xíng 行 ,
yào 要, as a modal verb –, , –
yào......le 要......了 –
yàoshì 要是 , –, –,
yě 也 –, –, –, –, –,
yǐqián 以前 , –, –
yǐhòu 以后 , –, –
yǐjīng 已经 ,
yī......jiù......一......就......
yīnwèi 因为 , –, , –,
yīng 应
yīngdāng 应当
yīnggāi 应该 –, –
yīxià(r) 一下(儿), , –, –
yīyàng 一样 –, , –
yòng 用 , ,
yóu 由
yòu 又
yǒu 有 , , –; existence , ; in existential sentences ; and making comparisons , –, ; and position words ; possession
yǒu shénme hǎo......de? 有什么好......的?
–
yòu yǒu shénme guānxi ne? 又有什么关系......呢?
yǒu/yǒu xiē 有/有些 –
yǔ, 与in place of gēn 跟
yuànyì 愿意 ,
zài 在 , ; as the 'other element' in bǎ 把 structure ; and position words ; as a preposition –, , –, ; progressive aspect –,
zài...‥ yě...‥ 再......也......
zǎo 早 in making comparisons
zǎo jiù 早就
zāodào/zāoshòu 遭到/遭受
zěnme 怎么 , , ,
zěnme dōu/zěnme yě 怎么都/怎么也
zěnmeyàng 怎么样 , , , , , ,
zhe 着: in existential sentences –; simultaneous actions
zhè (ge) shíhòu 这 (个) 时候
zhème 这么 , , , , ,
zhèng......ne 正......呢 –
zhèng xiǎng 正想
zhèng yào 正要
zhèng zài......ne 正在......呢 –,
zhèng zhǔnbèi/zhěng dǎsuàn 正准备/正打算
zhī suǒyǐ 之所以 –
zhǐyào......jiù......只要......就......, ,
zhǐyǒu......cái......只要......才......
–
zhù 住: as complement of result ; as a placement verb
zuò 作, as the 'other element' in bǎ 把 structure ,
zuò shénme 做什么
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
} | 367 |
package kv
import (
"math/rand"
"github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/client"
"github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/keys"
"github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/roachpb"
"github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/util"
"golang.org/x/net/context"
)
// truncate restricts all contained requests to the given key range.
// Even on error, the returned closure must be executed; it undoes any
// truncations performed.
// All requests contained in the batch are "truncated" to the given
// span, inserting NoopRequest appropriately to replace requests which
// are left without a key range to operate on. The number of non-noop
// requests after truncation is returned along with a closure which
// must be executed to undo the truncation, even in case of an error.
// TODO(tschottdorf): Consider returning a new BatchRequest, which has more
// overhead in the common case of a batch which never needs truncation but is
// less magical.
func truncate(br *roachpb.BatchRequest, rs roachpb.RSpan) (func(), int, error) {
truncateOne := func(args roachpb.Request) (bool, []func(), error) {
if _, ok := args.(*roachpb.NoopRequest); ok {
return true, nil, nil
}
header := args.Header()
if !roachpb.IsRange(args) {
// This is a point request.
if len(header.EndKey) > 0 {
return false, nil, util.Errorf("%T is not a range command, but EndKey is set", args)
}
if !rs.ContainsKey(keys.Addr(header.Key)) {
return true, nil, nil
}
return false, nil, nil
}
// We're dealing with a range-spanning request.
var undo []func()
keyAddr, endKeyAddr := keys.Addr(header.Key), keys.Addr(header.EndKey)
if l, r := !keyAddr.Equal(header.Key), !endKeyAddr.Equal(header.EndKey); l || r {
if !rs.ContainsKeyRange(keyAddr, endKeyAddr) {
return false, nil, util.Errorf("local key range must not span ranges")
}
if !l || !r {
return false, nil, util.Errorf("local key mixed with global key in range")
}
return false, nil, nil
}
// Below, {end,}keyAddr equals header.{End,}Key, so nothing is local.
if keyAddr.Less(rs.Key) {
{
origKey := header.Key
undo = append(undo, func() { header.Key = origKey })
}
header.Key = rs.Key.AsRawKey() // "key" can't be local
keyAddr = rs.Key
}
if !endKeyAddr.Less(rs.EndKey) {
{
origEndKey := header.EndKey
undo = append(undo, func() { header.EndKey = origEndKey })
}
header.EndKey = rs.EndKey.AsRawKey() // "endKey" can't be local
endKeyAddr = rs.EndKey
}
// Check whether the truncation has left any keys in the range. If not,
// we need to cut it out of the request.
return !keyAddr.Less(endKeyAddr), undo, nil
}
var fns []func()
gUndo := func() {
for _, f := range fns {
f()
}
}
var numNoop int
for pos, arg := range br.Requests {
omit, undo, err := truncateOne(arg.GetInner())
if omit {
numNoop++
nReq := &roachpb.RequestUnion{}
if !nReq.SetValue(&roachpb.NoopRequest{}) {
panic("RequestUnion excludes NoopRequest")
}
oReq := br.Requests[pos]
br.Requests[pos] = *nReq
posCpy := pos // for closure
undo = append(undo, func() {
br.Requests[posCpy] = oReq
})
}
fns = append(fns, undo...)
if err != nil {
return gUndo, 0, err
}
}
return gUndo, len(br.Requests) - numNoop, nil
}
// SenderFn is a function that implements a Sender.
type senderFn func(context.Context, roachpb.BatchRequest) (*roachpb.BatchResponse, *roachpb.Error)
// Send implements batch.Sender.
func (f senderFn) Send(ctx context.Context, ba roachpb.BatchRequest) (*roachpb.BatchResponse, *roachpb.Error) {
return f(ctx, ba)
}
// A ChunkingSender sends batches, subdividing them appropriately.
type chunkingSender struct {
f senderFn
}
// NewChunkingSender returns a new chunking sender which sends through the supplied
// SenderFn.
func newChunkingSender(f senderFn) client.Sender {
return &chunkingSender{f: f}
}
// Send implements Sender.
// TODO(tschottdorf): We actually don't want to chop EndTransaction off for
// single-range requests (but that happens now since EndTransaction has the
// isAlone flag). Whether it is one or not is unknown right now (you can only
// find out after you've sent to the Range/looked up a descriptor that suggests
// that you're multi-range. In those cases, the wrapped sender should return an
// error so that we split and retry once the chunk which contains
// EndTransaction (i.e. the last one).
func (cs *chunkingSender) Send(ctx context.Context, ba roachpb.BatchRequest) (*roachpb.BatchResponse, *roachpb.Error) {
if len(ba.Requests) < 1 {
panic("empty batch")
}
// Deterministically create ClientCmdIDs for all parts of the batch if
// a CmdID is already set (otherwise, leave them empty).
var nextID func() roachpb.ClientCmdID
empty := roachpb.ClientCmdID{}
if empty == ba.CmdID {
nextID = func() roachpb.ClientCmdID {
return empty
}
} else {
rng := rand.New(rand.NewSource(ba.CmdID.Random))
id := ba.CmdID
nextID = func() roachpb.ClientCmdID {
curID := id // copy
id.Random = rng.Int63() // adjust for next call
return curID
}
}
parts := ba.Split()
var rplChunks []*roachpb.BatchResponse
for _, part := range parts {
ba.Requests = part
ba.CmdID = nextID()
rpl, err := cs.f(ctx, ba)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
// Propagate transaction from last reply to next request. The final
// update is taken and put into the response's main header.
ba.Txn.Update(rpl.Header().Txn)
rplChunks = append(rplChunks, rpl)
}
reply := rplChunks[0]
for _, rpl := range rplChunks[1:] {
reply.Responses = append(reply.Responses, rpl.Responses...)
}
lastHeader := rplChunks[len(rplChunks)-1].BatchResponse_Header
reply.Error = lastHeader.Error
reply.Timestamp = lastHeader.Timestamp
reply.Txn = ba.Txn
return reply, nil
}
// prev gives the right boundary of the union of all requests which don't
// affect keys larger than the given key.
// TODO(tschottdorf): again, better on BatchRequest itself, but can't pull
// 'keys' into 'roachpb'.
func prev(ba roachpb.BatchRequest, k roachpb.RKey) roachpb.RKey {
candidate := roachpb.RKeyMin
for _, union := range ba.Requests {
h := union.GetInner().Header()
addr := keys.Addr(h.Key)
eAddr := keys.Addr(h.EndKey)
if len(eAddr) == 0 {
// Can probably avoid having to compute Next() here if
// we're in the mood for some more complexity.
eAddr = addr.Next()
}
if !eAddr.Less(k) {
if !k.Less(addr) {
// Range contains k, so won't be able to go lower.
return k
}
// Range is disjoint from [KeyMin,k).
continue
}
// We want the largest surviving candidate.
if candidate.Less(addr) {
candidate = addr
}
}
return candidate
}
// next gives the left boundary of the union of all requests which don't
// affect keys less than the given key.
// TODO(tschottdorf): again, better on BatchRequest itself, but can't pull
// 'keys' into 'proto'.
func next(ba roachpb.BatchRequest, k roachpb.RKey) roachpb.RKey {
candidate := roachpb.RKeyMax
for _, union := range ba.Requests {
h := union.GetInner().Header()
addr := keys.Addr(h.Key)
if addr.Less(k) {
if eAddr := keys.Addr(h.EndKey); k.Less(eAddr) {
// Starts below k, but continues beyond. Need to stay at k.
return k
}
// Affects only [KeyMin,k).
continue
}
// We want the smallest of the surviving candidates.
if addr.Less(candidate) {
candidate = addr
}
}
return candidate
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 5,026 |
Q: how reference storyboard (current view) from another normal class I would like to create an animation in a class (outside of my normal view) called from viewDidLoad method and make it run on the storyboard :
How do I connect the class effect with the class ViewController (storyboard) ??
class ViewController : UIViewController
{
var effetto:Effects = Effects()
override func viewDidLoad()
{
super.viewDidLoad()
effects.typeEffects = 1
effects.createEffect
}
}
class Effects {
var squareView: UIView!
var gravity: UIGravityBehavior!
var animator: UIDynamicAnimator!
var collision: UICollisionBehavior!
var typeEffects = 0
func createEffect()
{
If var typeEffect = 1){
gravity()
} else {
other()
}
}
func gravity()
{
squareView = UIView(frame: CGRect(x: 100, y: 100, width: 100, height: 100))
squareView.backgroundColor = UIColor.blueColor()
viewController.addSubview(squareView)
animator = UIDynamicAnimator(referenceView: viewControlle)
gravity = UIGravityBehavior(items: [squareView])
animator.addBehavior(gravity)
collision = UICollisionBehavior(items: [squareView])
collision.translatesReferenceBoundsIntoBoundary = true
// collision.addBoundaryWithIdentifier("barrier", fromPoint: CGPointMake(self.view.frame.origin.x, 350), toPoint: CGPointMake(self.view.frame.origin.x + self.view.frame.width, 350))
animator.addBehavior(collision)
}
func other()
{
......
}
}
A: Just pick the ViewController in the storyboard. Then go to the identity inspector on the right pane. The top option is to select the class.
A: In short, you dont hook your non-subclass object to anything in the storyboard. Your UIViewController's class name is non-descriptive but it would still work and contains an instance of the Effects class. On viewDidLoad you are creating an instance of that class. Just type in ViewController for the class name in the identity inspector in IB. Otherwise name it more descriptive such as the following then add EffectsViewController in the identity inspector if it's confusing. Something like the following should work(not tested and is shown purely to show object passing)
class EffectsViewController : UIViewController
{
var effects:Effects = Effects()
override func viewDidLoad()
{
super.viewDidLoad()
effects.effectsViewController = self
effects.typeEffects = 1
effects.createEffect
}
}
class Effects {
var effectsViewController: EffectsViewController!
var squareView: UIView!
var gravity: UIGravityBehavior!
var animator: UIDynamicAnimator!
var collision: UICollisionBehavior!
var typeEffects = 0
func createEffect()
{
If var typeEffect = 1){
gravity()
} else {
other()
}
}
func gravity()
{
squareView = UIView(frame: CGRect(x: 100, y: 100, width: 100, height: 100))
squareView.backgroundColor = UIColor.blueColor()
effectsViewController.addSubview(squareView)
animator = UIDynamicAnimator(referenceView: viewControlle)
gravity = UIGravityBehavior(items: [squareView])
animator.addBehavior(gravity)
collision = UICollisionBehavior(items: [squareView])
collision.translatesReferenceBoundsIntoBoundary = true
// collision.addBoundaryWithIdentifier("barrier", fromPoint: CGPointMake(self.view.frame.origin.x, 350), toPoint: CGPointMake(self.view.frame.origin.x + self.view.frame.width, 350))
animator.addBehavior(collision)
}
func other()
{
......
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 2,407 |
package org.wso2.carbon.cassandra.cluster.proxy.service;
import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;
import org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory;
import org.wso2.carbon.cassandra.cluster.proxy.data.ProxyKeyspaceInitialInfo;
import org.wso2.carbon.cassandra.cluster.proxy.data.ProxyNodeInitialInfo;
import org.wso2.carbon.cassandra.cluster.proxy.exception.ClusterProxyAdminException;
import org.wso2.carbon.cassandra.cluster.proxy.internal.AuthenticateStub;
import org.wso2.carbon.cassandra.cluster.proxy.mapper.DataMapper;
import org.wso2.carbon.core.AbstractAdmin;
import static org.wso2.carbon.cassandra.cluster.proxy.internal.AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub;
public class ClusterProxyOperationAdmin extends AbstractAdmin {
private static final Log log = LogFactory.getLog(ClusterProxyOperationAdmin.class);
private DataMapper dataMapper;
public ClusterProxyOperationAdmin()
{
this.dataMapper = new DataMapper();
}
public boolean drainNode(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).drainNode();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while drain the node",e,log);
}
}
public boolean decommissionNode(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).decommissionNode();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while decommission the node",e,log);
}
}
public void moveNode(String host,String newToken)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).moveNode(newToken);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while move node",e,log);
}
}
public boolean flushColumnFamilies(String host,String keyspace,String[] columnFamilies) throws
ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).flushColumnFamilies(keyspace, columnFamilies);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while flush column families",e,log);
}
}
public boolean repairColumnFamilies(String host,String keyspace,String[] columnFamilies) throws
ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).repairColumnFamilies(keyspace, columnFamilies);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while repair column families",e,log);
}
}
public boolean compactColumnFamilies(String host,String keyspace,String[] columnFamilies) throws
ClusterProxyAdminException{
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).compactColumnFamilies(keyspace, columnFamilies);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while compact column families",e,log);
}
}
public boolean cleanUpColumnFamilies(String host,String keyspace, String[] columnFamilies)
throws
ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).cleanUpColumnFamilies(keyspace, columnFamilies);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while cleanup column families",e,log);
}
}
/**
*Perform garbage collection of the node
*/
public void performGC(String host) throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).performGC();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while performGC",e,log);
}
}
public boolean cleanUpKeyspace(String host,String keyspace)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).cleanUpKeyspace(keyspace);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while cleanup keyspace",e,log);
}
}
public boolean flushKeyspace(String host,String keyspace) throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).flushKeyspace(keyspace);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while flush keyspace",e,log);
}
}
public boolean compactKeyspace(String host,String keyspace)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).compactKeyspace(keyspace);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while compact keyspace",e,log);
}
}
public boolean repairKeyspace(String host,String keyspace)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).repairKeyspace(keyspace);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while repair keyspace",e,log);
}
}
public boolean scrubKeyspace(String host,String keyspace) throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).scrubKeyspace(keyspace);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while scrub keyspace",e,log);
}
}
public boolean scrubColumnFamilies(String host,String keyspace,String[] columnFamilies) throws
ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).scrubColumnFamilies(keyspace, columnFamilies);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while scrub column families",e,log);
}
}
public boolean upgradeSSTablesInKeyspace(String host,String keyspace) throws
ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).upgradeSSTablesInKeyspace(keyspace);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while upgrade SSTables of keyspace",e,log);
}
}
public boolean upgradeSSTablesColumnFamilies(String host,String keyspace,String[] columnFamilies)
throws
ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).upgradeSSTablesColumnFamilies(keyspace, columnFamilies);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while upgrade SSTables of column families",e,log);
}
}
public void takeSnapshotOfNode(String host,String snapShotName) throws
ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).takeSnapshotOfNode(snapShotName);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while take snapshot of node",e,log);
}
}
public void takeSnapshotOfKeyspace(String host,String snapShotName,String keyspace) throws
ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).takeSnapshotOfKeyspace(snapShotName, keyspace);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while take snapshot of keyspace",e,log);
}
}
public void takeSnapshotOfColumnFamily(String host,String snapShotName,String keyspace,String columnFamily)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).takeSnapshotOfColumnFamily(snapShotName, keyspace, columnFamily);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while take snapshot of column family",e,log);
}
}
public void clearSnapshotOfNode(String host,String snapShotName) throws
ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).clearSnapshotOfNode(snapShotName);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while clear the snapshot of node",e,log);
}
}
public void clearSnapshotOfKeyspace(String host,String snapShotName,String keyspace) throws
ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).clearSnapshotOfKeyspace(snapShotName, keyspace);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while clear the snapshot of keyspace",e,log);
}
}
/**
* Check whether node is join in the ring or not
* @return return true if node is join in the ring else false
*/
public boolean isJoined(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).isJoined();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while getting join status",e,log);
}
}
/**
* Check whether RPC server is running
* @return return true if RPC is running and else return false
*
*/
public boolean isRPCRunning(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).isRPCRunning();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while geting RPC server status",e,log);
}
}
/**
* Check whether Gossip server is running
* @return return true if Gossip is running and else return false
*/
public boolean isGossipServerEnable(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).isGossipServerEnable();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while getting gossip server status",e,log);
}
}
/**
* Stop the RPC server
*/
public void stopRPCServer(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).stopRPCServer();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while stop RPC server",e,log);
}
}
/**
* Start the RPC server of the node
*/
public void startRPCServer(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).startRPCServer();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while start rpc server",e,log);
}
}
/**
* Start the gossip server of the node
*/
public void startGossipServer(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).startGossipServer();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while start gossip server",e,log);
}
}
/**
* Stop the gossip server of the node
*/
public void stopGossipServer(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).stopGossipServer();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while stop gossip server",e,log);
}
}
public void setIncrementalBackUpStatus(String host,boolean status)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).setIncrementalBackUpStatus(status);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while setting incremental backup status",e,log);
}
}
public boolean getIncrementalBackUpStatus(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).getIncrementalBackUpStatus();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while getting incremental backup status",e,log);
}
}
public boolean joinCluster(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).joinCluster();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while join cluster",e,log);
}
}
public boolean invalidateRowCache(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).invalidateRowCache();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while invalidate row cache",e,log);
}
}
public boolean invalidateKeyCache(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).invalidateKeyCache();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while invalidate key cache",e,log);
}
}
public boolean resetLocalSchema(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).resetLocalSchema();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while reset local schema",e,log);
}
}
public void removeToken(String host,String token)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).removeToken(token);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while remove token",e,log);
}
}
public void forceRemoveCompletion(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).forceRemoveCompletion();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while force remove completion",e,log);
}
}
public void setStreamThroughputMbPerSec(String host,int value)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).setStreamThroughputMbPerSec(value);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while setting stream throughput",e,log);
}
}
public void setCompactionThroughputMbPerSec(String host,int value)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).setCompactionThroughputMbPerSec(value);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while set compaction throughput",e,log);
}
}
public void rebuild(String host,String dataCenter)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).rebuild(dataCenter);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while refresh the node",e,log);
}
}
public void refresh(String host,String keyspace,String columnFamily)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).refresh(keyspace, columnFamily);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while refresh",e,log);
}
}
public void rebuildColumnFamilyWithIndex(String host,String keyspace,String columnFamily,String[] index)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).rebuildColumnFamilyWithIndex(keyspace, columnFamily, index);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while rebuild the column family with index",e,log);
}
}
public void rebuildColumnFamily(String host,String keyspace,String columnFamily)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).rebuildColumnFamily(keyspace, columnFamily);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error while rebuild the column family",e,log);
}
}
public void setKeyCacheCapacity(String host,int keyCacheCapacity)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).setKeyCacheCapacity(keyCacheCapacity);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Unable to set key cache capacity",e,log);
}
}
public void setRowCacheCapacity(String host,int rowCacheCapacity)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).setRowCacheCapacity(rowCacheCapacity);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Unable to set row cache capacity",e,log);
}
}
public String getRemovalStatus(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).getRemovalStatus();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Unable to get removal status",e,log);
}
}
public void setCompactionThresholds(String host,String keyspace,String columnFamily,int minThresholds,int maxThresholds)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).setCompactionThresholds(keyspace, columnFamily, minThresholds, maxThresholds);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Error setting compaction thresholds",e,log);
}
}
public String[] getSnapshotTags(String host) throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).getSnapshots();
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Unable to get snapshot tags",e,log);
}
}
public void stopCompaction(String host,String type)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).stopCompaction(type);
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Unable to complete compaction stop",e,log);
}
}
public ProxyNodeInitialInfo getNodeInitialInfo(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return dataMapper.getNodeInitialInfo(AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).getNodeInitialInfo());
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Unable to get node initial info",e,log);
}
}
public ProxyKeyspaceInitialInfo getKeyspaceInitialInfo(String host)
throws ClusterProxyAdminException {
try{
return dataMapper.getKeyspaceInitialInfo(AuthenticateStub.getAuthenticatedOperationStub(host).getKeyspaceInitialInfo());
}catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ClusterProxyAdminException("Unable to get node keyspace initial info",e,log);
}
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 2,358 |
package deprecated;
/**
* @author Lorenzo Speranzoni
* @since 29 Apr 2015
*/
public interface Neo4ArtLegacyIndex
{
String getName();
Neo4ArtLegacyIndexType getType();
} | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 47 |
Lazzaro Calvi (Gênes, 1502 - 1607 (ou 1587?)) est un peintre italien actif au .
Biographie
Lazzaro Calvi est un peintre actif à la fin de la Renaissance. Il est né à Gênes et s'est formé auprès de son père Agostino Calvi et Perin del Vaga. Des sources anciennes affirment qu'il aurait vécu jusqu'à l'âge de 105 ans
Son frère aîné Pantaleone (mort en 1595) était aussi un peintre. Ils ont travaillé ensemble à Gênes et dans différentes villes de la république Génoise, ainsi qu'à Monaco et Naples. Pantaleone agissant en tant que décorateur pour des œuvres de Luzzato.
Lazzaro Calvi, irrité par le succès de certains de ses contemporains, a mandaté l'empoisonnement de Giacomo Bargone et il a soudoyé des personnes afin de vilipender les œuvres des plus habiles peintres de l'époque et à exalter les siennes.
Mortifié pour avoir été mis en challenge avec des artistes contemporains, Lazzaro abandonne la peinture pour s'adonner à la navigation et l'escrime. Vingt ans plus tard il revient à la peinture qu'il exerce jusqu'à sa , ses dernières œuvres étant pour l'église Santa Caterina.
Les fils de son frère Pantaleone: Aurelio, Marcantonio, Benedetto, et Felice sont également devenus peintres.
Œuvres
Façade du Palazzo Doria (actuellement Palazzo Spinola) en collaboration avec son frère Pantaleone.
Continence de Scipion pour un palais de Gênes,
Naissance et Vie de saint Jean-Baptiste, en collaboration avec Andrea Semini et Luca Cambiaso, chapelle dei Nobili Centurioni.
Déposition, signé et daté 1577, église Santissima Annunziata e Santa Caterina di Portoria, Gênes
Saint Martin et le Pauvre, église Nostra Signora della Cella, Gênes.
Bibliographie
Notes et références
Lien externe
Naissance à Gênes
Peintre italien du XVIe siècle
Peintre baroque italien
Naissance en 1502
Date de décès non renseignée (XVIe siècle) | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 8,892 |
Der Heubützlipass ist ein Saumpfad auf in den Schweizer Alpen am Grat zwischen Fahnenstock () im Westen und Heubützler () im Osten. Er verbindet die Gemeinde Weisstannen im Weisstannental im Norden mit dem Calfeisental im Süden und weiter nach Vättis im Taminatal, beide im Kanton St. Gallen. Der Pass dient als Übergang von der Sardonaalp ins Gebiet Foo im hinteren Weisstannental und ist weiss-rot-weiss markiert. Beim Abstieg ins Weisstannental muss nach rund 750 Metern am Nordgrat des Fahnenstocks der hohe Muotatalsattel passiert werden, von wo aus der Weg nach Westen steil durchs Muotatal nach Foo absteigt. Vom Heubützlipass führt ein Wanderweg am Plattenseeli vorbei zum östlich gelegenen Heidelpass.
Der Pass liegt an der vierten Etappe des Sardona Welterbe-Wanderwegs.
Eine alpine Zweitagestour führt von Flims über die Trinserfurgga (weiss-blau-weiss markiert, ) zur Sardonahütte () und von dort über den Heubützli- und Foopass () nach Elm ins Glarnerland.
Weblinks
Hikr.org: Heubützlipass
Einzelnachweise
Alpenpass
Gebirgspass
Pass im Kanton St. Gallen
Mels
Pfäfers | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 50 |
Fernán Pérez es una localidad y pedanía española de la provincia de Almería perteneciente al municipio de Níjar. Está situada en la Comarca Metropolitana de Almería, dentro del parque natural de Cabo de Gata-Níjar, a 46,4 km de la capital provincial, Almería y a 15,2 km de la capital del municipio, Níjar. Su población en fue de habitantes (INE).
Demografía
Evolución de la población
Monumentos
Por los alrededores de esta localidad se puede encontrar monumentos como el acueducto de Fernán Pérez, una noria, aljibes y algún molino de viento, también destaca la antigüedad de su iglesia.
Iglesia de Bodas de Sangre
En la iglesia de esta pedanía, en el año 1928 estaba previsto celebrar la boda de Francisca Cañadas Morales con Casimiro Pérez Pino a las 3 de la madrugada, historia conocida como Bodas de Sangre de Federico García Lorca, no pudo celebrarse ya que Francisca huyó con su primo y más tarde éste fue asesinado. Es una de las iglesias más antiguas del municipio de Níjar.
Acueducto del Cortijo de la Huerta Grande
El origen de la construcción fue para la captación de agua por una mina del cortijo expósito ubicado en la sierra de Cabo de Gata. Su construcción comenzó a finales del siglo XIX, Actualmente no se usa, es uno de los monumentos más emblemáticos de esta localidad.
Economía
La pedanía destaca por su agricultura y ganadería.
Véase también
Níjar
Parque natural de Cabo de Gata
Comarca Metropolitana de Almería
Referencias
Localidades de la provincia de Almería
Pedanías de la provincia de Almería
Comarca Metropolitana de Almería
Níjar | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 3,381 |
Presidentvalet i Filippinerna ägde rum måndag den 11 maj 1998. Det var det andra presidentvalet som hölls enligt den filippinska grundlagen från 1987. Det fanns tio presidentkandidater.
Joseph Estrada från Laban ng Makabayang Masang Pilipino-partiet vann med 10 722 295 röster och en röstandel på 39,86% mot Jose de Venecias 4 268 483 (15,87%). Estrada fick det största antalet röster och den största röstandelen för en president hittills.
1998 i Filippinerna
Filippinerna
Presidentval i Filippinerna | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 1,453 |
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<div class="section" id="numpy-nanmin">
<h1>numpy.nanmin<a class="headerlink" href="#numpy-nanmin" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<dl class="function">
<dt id="numpy.nanmin">
<tt class="descclassname">numpy.</tt><tt class="descname">nanmin</tt><big>(</big><em>a</em>, <em>axis=None</em>, <em>out=None</em>, <em>keepdims=False</em><big>)</big><a class="reference external" href="http://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/v1.8.0/numpy/lib/nanfunctions.py#L137"><span class="viewcode-link">[source]</span></a><a class="headerlink" href="#numpy.nanmin" title="Permalink to this definition">¶</a></dt>
<dd><p>Return minimum of an array or minimum along an axis, ignoring any NaNs.
When all-NaN slices are encountered a <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">RuntimeWarning</span></tt> is raised and
Nan is returned for that slice.</p>
<table class="docutils field-list" frame="void" rules="none">
<col class="field-name" />
<col class="field-body" />
<tbody valign="top">
<tr class="field-odd field"><th class="field-name">Parameters:</th><td class="field-body"><p class="first"><strong>a</strong> : array_like</p>
<blockquote>
<div><p>Array containing numbers whose minimum is desired. If <em class="xref py py-obj">a</em> is not an
array, a conversion is attempted.</p>
</div></blockquote>
<p><strong>axis</strong> : int, optional</p>
<blockquote>
<div><p>Axis along which the minimum is computed. The default is to compute
the minimum of the flattened array.</p>
</div></blockquote>
<p><strong>out</strong> : ndarray, optional</p>
<blockquote>
<div><p>Alternate output array in which to place the result. The default
is <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">None</span></tt>; if provided, it must have the same shape as the
expected output, but the type will be cast if necessary. See
<tt class="xref py py-obj docutils literal"><span class="pre">doc.ufuncs</span></tt> for details.</p>
<div class="versionadded">
<p><span class="versionmodified">New in version 1.8.0.</span></p>
</div>
</div></blockquote>
<p><strong>keepdims</strong> : bool, optional</p>
<blockquote>
<div><p>If this is set to True, the axes which are reduced are left in the
result as dimensions with size one. With this option, the result
will broadcast correctly against the original <em class="xref py py-obj">a</em>.</p>
<div class="versionadded">
<p><span class="versionmodified">New in version 1.8.0.</span></p>
</div>
</div></blockquote>
</td>
</tr>
<tr class="field-even field"><th class="field-name">Returns:</th><td class="field-body"><p class="first"><strong>nanmin</strong> : ndarray</p>
<blockquote class="last">
<div><p>An array with the same shape as <em class="xref py py-obj">a</em>, with the specified axis
removed. If <em class="xref py py-obj">a</em> is a 0-d array, or if axis is None, an ndarray
scalar is returned. The same dtype as <em class="xref py py-obj">a</em> is returned.</p>
</div></blockquote>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<div class="admonition seealso">
<p class="first admonition-title">See also</p>
<dl class="docutils">
<dt><a class="reference internal" href="numpy.nanmax.html#numpy.nanmax" title="numpy.nanmax"><tt class="xref py py-obj docutils literal"><span class="pre">nanmax</span></tt></a></dt>
<dd>The maximum value of an array along a given axis, ignoring any NaNs.</dd>
<dt><a class="reference internal" href="numpy.amin.html#numpy.amin" title="numpy.amin"><tt class="xref py py-obj docutils literal"><span class="pre">amin</span></tt></a></dt>
<dd>The minimum value of an array along a given axis, propagating any NaNs.</dd>
<dt><a class="reference internal" href="numpy.fmin.html#numpy.fmin" title="numpy.fmin"><tt class="xref py py-obj docutils literal"><span class="pre">fmin</span></tt></a></dt>
<dd>Element-wise minimum of two arrays, ignoring any NaNs.</dd>
<dt><a class="reference internal" href="numpy.minimum.html#numpy.minimum" title="numpy.minimum"><tt class="xref py py-obj docutils literal"><span class="pre">minimum</span></tt></a></dt>
<dd>Element-wise minimum of two arrays, propagating any NaNs.</dd>
<dt><a class="reference internal" href="numpy.isnan.html#numpy.isnan" title="numpy.isnan"><tt class="xref py py-obj docutils literal"><span class="pre">isnan</span></tt></a></dt>
<dd>Shows which elements are Not a Number (NaN).</dd>
<dt><a class="reference internal" href="numpy.isfinite.html#numpy.isfinite" title="numpy.isfinite"><tt class="xref py py-obj docutils literal"><span class="pre">isfinite</span></tt></a></dt>
<dd>Shows which elements are neither NaN nor infinity.</dd>
</dl>
<p class="last"><a class="reference internal" href="numpy.amax.html#numpy.amax" title="numpy.amax"><tt class="xref py py-obj docutils literal"><span class="pre">amax</span></tt></a>, <a class="reference internal" href="numpy.fmax.html#numpy.fmax" title="numpy.fmax"><tt class="xref py py-obj docutils literal"><span class="pre">fmax</span></tt></a>, <a class="reference internal" href="numpy.maximum.html#numpy.maximum" title="numpy.maximum"><tt class="xref py py-obj docutils literal"><span class="pre">maximum</span></tt></a></p>
</div>
<p class="rubric">Notes</p>
<p>Numpy uses the IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point for Arithmetic
(IEEE 754). This means that Not a Number is not equivalent to infinity.
Positive infinity is treated as a very large number and negative
infinity is treated as a very small (i.e. negative) number.</p>
<p>If the input has a integer type the function is equivalent to np.min.</p>
<p class="rubric">Examples</p>
<div class="highlight-python"><div class="highlight"><pre><span class="gp">>>> </span><span class="n">a</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">array</span><span class="p">([[</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">2</span><span class="p">],</span> <span class="p">[</span><span class="mi">3</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">nan</span><span class="p">]])</span>
<span class="gp">>>> </span><span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">nanmin</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">a</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="go">1.0</span>
<span class="gp">>>> </span><span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">nanmin</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">a</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">axis</span><span class="o">=</span><span class="mi">0</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="go">array([ 1., 2.])</span>
<span class="gp">>>> </span><span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">nanmin</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">a</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">axis</span><span class="o">=</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="go">array([ 1., 3.])</span>
</pre></div>
</div>
<p>When positive infinity and negative infinity are present:</p>
<div class="highlight-python"><div class="highlight"><pre><span class="gp">>>> </span><span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">nanmin</span><span class="p">([</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">2</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">nan</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">inf</span><span class="p">])</span>
<span class="go">1.0</span>
<span class="gp">>>> </span><span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">nanmin</span><span class="p">([</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">2</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">nan</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">np</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">NINF</span><span class="p">])</span>
<span class="go">-inf</span>
</pre></div>
</div>
</dd></dl>
</div>
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\section*{Introduction}
Hierarchical organisation is an ubiquitous feature of a large variety of systems studied in natural- and social sciences. Examples of empirical studies on hierarchy are including the transcriptional regulatory network of Escherichia coli \cite{Zeng_Ecoli}, the dominant-subordinate hierarchy among crayfish \cite{Huber_crayfish}, the leader-follower network of pigeon flocks \cite{Tamas_pigeons,Pigeon_context}, the rhesus macaque kingdoms \cite{McCowan_macaque}, neural networks \cite{Kaiser_neural} and technological networks \cite{Pumain_book}, social interactions \cite{Guimera_hier_soc,our_pref_coms,Sole_hier_soc}, urban planning \cite{Krugman_urban,Batty_urban}, ecological systems \cite{Hirata_eco,Wickens_eco}, and evolution \cite{Eldrege_book,McShea_organism}. Naturally, hierarchy is a very relevant concept also in network theory \cite{Pumain_book,Laci_hier_scale,Newman_hier,Sole_chaos_hier}. The network approach has become an ubiquitous tool for analysing complex systems ranging from the interactions within cells through transportation systems, the Internet and other technological networks to economic networks, collaboration networks and the society \cite{Laci_revmod,Dorog_book}.
Grasping the signs of hierarchy in networks is a non-trivial task with a number of possible different approaches. On the one hand, we may try the statistical inference of an underlying hierarchy based on the observed network structure, as suggested in Ref.\cite{Newman_hier}. On the other hand, the introduction of a hierarchy measure is also a natural idea \cite{krackhardt1994graph,Sneppen_hier_measures,Luo-Magee_complexity,Enys_hierarchy,Sole_hier_PNAS}. In general, a hierarchy measure, can be viewed as a function on the domain of graphs, $H:\mathbb{G}\mapsto\mathbb{R}$, mapping a graph $\mathcal{G}\in\mathbb{G}$ into a real number, $H(\mathcal{G})\in\mathbb{R}$. The value of the measure is actually $H(\mathcal{G})\in[0,1]$ or $H(\mathcal{G})\in[-1,1]$ in most cases, with high values corresponding to hierarchical structures and low values indicating the absence of hierarchy in the examined network.
One of the first methods was proposed by D.\ Krackhardt, motivated by organisational hierarchy, defining the hierarchy measure simply as the number of ordered pairs divided by the number of connected pairs \cite{krackhardt1994graph}. In the approach introduced by A.\ Trusina et al., the position of the nodes in the hierarchy is assumed to be given by the degree, and the hierarchy measure is given by the fraction of directed shortest paths going strictly upwards in the hierarchy \cite{Sneppen_hier_measures}. Another way for quantifying the possible asymmetry between nodes is to assume some sort of flow on the links, and examine whether the global map of flows in the system is revealing a kind of overall directionality or not. Probably the simplest approach in this framework is to define the fraction of links not participating in any cycle as the measure of the hierarchy, as suggested by J. Luo and C.\ L.\ Magee \cite{Luo-Magee_complexity}.
A further important property of a hierarchical system is that reaching the rest of the network should be relatively easy for the nodes high in the hierarchy, and more difficult for the nodes at the bottom of the hierarchy, as pointed out by E.\ Mones et al.\ in Ref.\cite{Enys_hierarchy}. The hierarchy measure based on this aspect is given by the Global Reaching Centrality, characterising the inhomogeneity of the fraction of reachable nodes in at most $m$-steps in the network \cite{Enys_hierarchy}. A more elaborate quantification of hierarchy was proposed by B. Corominas-Murta et al.\ in Ref.\cite{Sole_hier_PNAS} with the introduction of Treeness, Feedforwardness and Orderability, projecting the studied network onto a point in a 3 dimensional space, where each dimension is aimed to capture a different aspect of hierarchy. Treeness, $T$, is measuring how ambiguous are the chain of commands in the network, while Feedforwardness, $F$ is related to the size and position of the strongly connected components in the network. Finally, the orderability, $O$ is simply the fraction of nodes not taking part in any directed cycles, i.e., it is analogous to the hierarchy measure introduced by J. Luo and C.\ L.\ Magee. The 3d scatter plots of $T$, $F$ and $O$ provided very interesting results, revealing different clusters of hierarchical networks \cite{Sole_hier_PNAS}. A more detailed description and comparison between the mentioned methods is given in the Supplementary Information S1.
Although the methods listed above allow the examination of the hierarchical organisation from different perspectives, a noteworthy common aspect of these approaches that they all treat acyclic networks as already maximally hierarchical, independent of the further details of the graph structure. (The Global Reaching Centrality given in Ref.\cite{Enys_hierarchy} is an exception, considering the star configuration as the most hierarchical). Here we argue that different acyclic networks are not necessarily equally hierarchical. The general intuition of a hierarchy is usually corresponding to a multi level pyramidal structure, with levels becoming wider and wider as we descend from the root towards the bottom. On the one hand this way the top nodes in the hierarchy can reach most of the network in a very effective way, i.e., via paths of average length scaling as $\ln N$, where $N$ denotes the number of nodes. On the other hand, in this structure all nodes can have a treatable number of direct subordinates. In contrast, if we consider a directed chain, all the levels are of size one, and this is leading to a large average distance scaling as $N$. The other extreme limiting case of acyclic networks is given by the directed star configuration, where all the nodes have a single incoming link from a central hub, and no further out-links. In this case the hierarchy is consisting of only two levels, and the supposed leader in the network has to cope with a number of direct descendants scaling as $N$. Based on that, introducing a hierarchy measure preferring trees to chains and stars would be a substantial step towards achieving a more intuitive approach for evaluating the importance of hierarchy in a network structure.
In this paper we tackle this problem with the help of random walks on the network. Random walks provide a fundamental model for stochastic processes in a large variety of systems ranging from physics \cite{DeGennes_book}, chemistry \cite{Van_Kampen_book} and computer science \cite{Weiss_book} through biology and ecology \cite{Goel_book,Codling_rw} to economics \cite{Malkiel_book} and psychology \cite{Stone_psy}. In the current problem of quantifying the extent of hierarchy in a network structure, random walkers can be used to evaluate the rank of the nodes in the hierarchy.
The basic idea is assuming an information flow on the links from nodes high in the hierarchy towards the lower levels, in a similar fashion as in case of a company, where the management is likely to send information and instructions to the employees on a regular basis. Given the network structure, the source of information in the system can be traced back by sending random walkers traversing the links in reverse direction from all nodes. In case the density of the random walkers is reaching a steady state, its value at a given node can be interpreted as the probability that the node was the source of information. Consequently, high random walker density values indicate a high standing in the hierarchy, whereas low density values are corresponding to bottom nodes. The significance of hierarchical organisation in the network structure can be judged based on the inhomogeneity of the distribution: In a homogeneous distribution we cannot pinpoint the source of information, thus, it is corresponding to a non-hierarchical network. In contrast, a very inhomogeneous distribution is indicating a strongly hierarchical structure.
\section*{Random walk hierarchy measure}
The details of the random walk process are the following. Since the random walkers are traversing the links backwards, the transition probability for a walker from node $j$ to $i$ is proportional to the inverse of the in-degree of $j$, i.e., $P(j\rightarrow i)\propto 1/k_j^{\rm in}$. Another important factor to be taken into account is the limited capacity of the information sources for sending information: In general we can assume that the more out-neighbours a given node has, the less resource it can allocate for managing the communication over a given link. This effect can be taken into account by assuming that $P(j\rightarrow i)$ is also proportional to the out-degree of $i$, i.e., $P(j\rightarrow i)\propto 1/k_{i}^{\rm out}$.Combining the above factors together is resulting in
\begin{equation}
P(j\rightarrow i)=\frac{1}{k_j^{\rm in}}\frac{1}{k_i^{\rm out}}
\label{eq:trans_k}
\end{equation}
for the transition probability of the random walkers from node $j$ to $i$. (In case $i$ is not an in-neighbour of $j$ the transition probability $P(j\rightarrow i)$ is zero by definition). We note that due to the second factor on the right hand side of (\ref{eq:trans_k}), the probability for staying at the same node can be non-zero in general, given by $P(j\rightarrow j)=1-\sum_{i\neq j} P(j\rightarrow i)$. For weighted networks (\ref{eq:trans_k}) can be naturally generalised to
\begin{equation}
P(j\rightarrow i)=\frac{w_{ij}}{\sum_lw_{lj}}\frac{w_{ij}}{\sum_l w_{il}},
\label{eq:trans_w}
\end{equation}
where $w_{ij}$ denotes the weight of the link from $i$ to $j$.
In case of acyclic networks, all random walkers eventually converge into nodes with no incoming links, (i.e., the ``sources'' in the network). In order to avoid judging the importance of hierarchical organisation in the system solely based on these ``sources'', we inject new random walkers into the network at every time step. The update rules are the following:
\begin{itemize}
\item[1.] We insert $f$ random walkers into the system, increasing the random walker density on every node by $f/N$, thus, the random walker density at node $i$ given by $p_i(t)$ is changing as
\begin{equation}
p_i(t)\mapsto p_i(t)+\frac{f}{N}.
\end{equation}
\item[2.] We let all random walkers in the system proceed on step, governed by the transition probabilities given in (\ref{eq:trans_k}). By introducing a transition matrix $\mathbf{T}$ with matrix elements $T_{ij}=P(j\rightarrow i)$, the density of random walkers on node $i$ after the transition can be expressed as
\begin{equation}
p_i(t+1)=\sum_{j=1}^N T_{ij}p_j(t).
\end{equation}
\item[3.] The total sum of random walkers has to be normalised, i.e., we require $\sum_{i=1}^N p_i(t+1)=1$. Since the sum of new random walkers added to the system was $f$, we have to simply divide the density of random walkers by $1+f$ in order to fulfil the normalisation condition,
\begin{equation}
p_i(t+1)\mapsto \frac{p_i(t+1)}{1+f}.
\end{equation}
\end{itemize}
The above normalisation of the random walker density to unity after each iteration is equivalent to using ``decaying'' random walkers, having a weight decreasing by a factor of $(1+f)^{-1}$ in each step. Let us denote the characteristic distance under which the weight of a random walker is decreased to $e^{-1}$ by $\lambda$, fulfilling
\begin{equation}
(1+f)^{-\lambda}=e^{-1}.
\end{equation}
Based on that, $f$ can be also expressed as
\begin{equation}
f=e^{1/\lambda}-1.
\end{equation}
Although $\lambda$, (or equivalently, $f$) is a parameter of the method at the current stage, later on in the Results we shall find a natural condition for fixing $\lambda$ at an optimal value in general.
Our main object of interest is the stationary distribution of the random walkers in the network. By writing this distribution in a vector form of $\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat}$, where the $i$-th component of the vector, $p_i^{\rm stat}$, is corresponding to the random walker density on node $i$, we can derive a simple equation based on the update rules. Adding $f/N$ new random walkers at each node is simply incrementing each vector component by $f/N$, while the transition to the next site by the random walkers corresponds to multiplying by the transition matrix $\mathbf{T}$. Finally, the normalisation of the random walker density simply multiplies each vector component by $1/(1+f)$. Based on the above the stationary distribution fulfils
\begin{equation}
\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat}=\frac{1}{1+f}\left[\mathbf{T}\left(\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}\mathbf{1}\right)\right]=e^{-1/\lambda}\left[\mathbf{T}\left(\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat}+\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\mathbf{1}\right)\right],
\label{eq:p_stac_alap}
\end{equation}
where $\mathbf{1}$ is corresponding to a vector of size $N$ with all elements equal to 1. By expressing $\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat}$ we obtain
\begin{equation}
\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat}=\frac{f}{N}\left[(1+f)\mathbf{I}-\mathbf{T}\right]^{-1}\mathbf{T}\mathbf{1}=\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\left[e^{1/\lambda}\mathbf{I}-\mathbf{T}\right]^{-1}\mathbf{T}\mathbf{1},
\label{eq:p_stac}
\end{equation}
where $\mathbf{I}$ is denoting the identity matrix. Since $\mathbf{T}$ is a left stochastic matrix, the absolute value of its largest eigenvalue is 1. Consequently, the absolute value of the eigenvalues of $\frac{1}{(1+f)}\mathbf{T}$ are smaller than 1, and therefore, (\ref{eq:p_stac}) can also be written as
\begin{equation}
\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat}=\frac{f}{N}\sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\left(\frac{1}{1+f}\mathbf{T}\right)^n\mathbf{1}=\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\left(e^{-1/\lambda}\mathbf{T}\right)^n\mathbf{1}.
\label{eq:q}
\end{equation}
This formula is very intuitive, showing explicitly that the stationary distribution of random walkers at a given node is given by the sum of the probabilities of all the paths ending on the node, where the contributions from longer paths are suppressed exponentially as a function of the path length. Based on (\ref{eq:p_stac}-\ref{eq:q}), $\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat}$ can be computed very efficiently. If the size of the network is moderate, we can use (\ref{eq:p_stac}) for obtaining exact results. However, if matrix inversion is becoming computationally expensive, a very good approximation of $\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat}$ can be calculated according to (\ref{eq:q}). I.e., by carrying out the summation up to a certain finite limit $n_{\rm max}$, the obtained result is converging to the exact $\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat}$ exponentially fast.
Our hierarchy measure is based on the inhomogeneity of the stationary distribution of the random walkers. There are several different possibilities for quantifying the inhomogeneity of a probability distribution in general, here we choose the relative standard deviation, (also called as the coefficient of variation). Thus, the random walk hierarchy measure is defined as
\begin{equation}
H=\frac{\sigma(\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat})}{\mu( \mathbf{p}^{\rm stat})},
\end{equation}
where $\mu(\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat})$ and $\sigma(\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat})$ denote the mean and the standard deviation of $p_i^{\rm stat}$ respectively. Since $\sum_{i=1}^N p_i^{\rm stat}=1$, the mean is given simply by $\mu(\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat})=1/N$, and our hierarchy measure can be expressed as
\begin{equation}
H=N\sqrt{\frac{1}{N}\sum_{i=1}^N(p_i^{\rm stat})^2-\frac{1}{N^2}}=
\sqrt{N\sum_{i=1}^N(p_i^{\rm stat})^2-1}.
\label{eq:RWH_final}
\end{equation}
\section*{Results}
\subsection*{Hierarchy of acyclic networks}
For demonstrating the sensitivity of our measure to the topology also in case of acyclic networks, first we evaluate $H$ for chains, regular trees with a constant branching number $b$, and stars. According to calculations detailed in Methods, the corresponding hierarchy values can be expressed as
\begin{eqnarray}
H_{\rm chain}&=&\sqrt{\frac{2}{N}\frac{e^{(3-2N)/\lambda}\left(e^{N/\lambda}-1\right)\left(e^{N/\lambda}-e^{1/\lambda}\right)}{\left(e^{1/\lambda}-1\right)^2\left(e^{1/\lambda}+1\right)}},
\label{eq:RWH_chain_final} \\
H_{\rm tree}&=&\sqrt{N \sum_{l=1}^{l_{\rm max}}b^{l-1}(p_l^{\rm stat})^2-1},
\label{eq:RWH_tree_final} \\
H_{\rm star}&=&\frac{\sqrt{(N-1)e^{2/\lambda}}}{(N-1)\left(e^{1/\lambda}-1\right)+1},
\label{eq:RWH_star_final}
\end{eqnarray}
where $N$ is the number of nodes in the networks, $l$ denotes the levels in case of the tree (starting from $l=1$ at the root and ending with $l_{\rm max}$ at the leafs), and $p_l^{\rm stat}$ is corresponding to the stationary distribution of the walkers on level $l$ in (\ref{eq:RWH_tree_final}), which can be obtained from a simple recursion written as
\begin{eqnarray}
p_{l_{\rm max}}^{\rm stat}&=&\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\frac{b-1}{1+be^{1/\lambda}-b},
\label{eq:p_tree_lmax}\\
p_l^{\rm stat}&=&\frac{b}{1+be^{1/\lambda}-b}p_{l+1}^{\rm stat}+\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\frac{2b-1}{1+be^{1/\lambda}-b}
\label{eq:p_tree_l}\\
p_1^{\rm stat}&=&\frac{p_2^{\rm stat}}{e^{1/\lambda}-1}+\frac{2}{N}.
\label{eq:p_tree_first}
\end{eqnarray}
In Fig.\ref{fig:chain_tree_star}.\ we compare the hierarchy measures given in (\ref{eq:RWH_chain_final}-\ref{eq:RWH_star_final}) at $\lambda=2$ (Fig.\ref{fig:chain_tree_star}a) and at $\lambda=4$ (Fig.\ref{fig:chain_tree_star}b). Our construction algorithm for the trees with a branching number $b$ was to start by adding $b$ links to the root, then move to the second level and subsequently add $b$ links to every node on this level, and so on, move to the next level only when the given level was completed. Whenever the number of nodes in the tree has reached $N$, the algorithm terminates, and naturally, the resulting tree is not completely regular in most of the cases. Nevertheless, the overall structure of the trees obtained in this way is getting closer and closer to regular trees as $N$ is increasing.
\begin{figure}[h]
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.63\textwidth]{Fig1.eps}}
\caption{Comparing the random walk hierarchy for chains, regular trees and stars. a) The behaviour of $H$ as a function of $N$ for a chain (black), a regular tree with branching number $b=3$ (red), a regular tree with $b=5$ (green), a regular tree with $b=7$ (blue) and a star (orange) at $\lambda=2$. b) The same plot as in a) when $\lambda$ is set to $\lambda=4$.}
\label{fig:chain_tree_star}
\end{figure}
According to Fig.\ref{fig:chain_tree_star}.\ the $H$ for the chain and the star configurations has a peak at very small system sizes, and shows a decreasing tendency for growing $N$. In contrast, for regular trees $H$ seems more or less converging to a finite value. Thus, above a certain $N$ it is the structure of the tree, (encoded in the branching number), what determines the hierarchy measure, not the size of the tree. This is indicating that $H$ is behaving similarly to intensive quantities in physics in some aspects. The ``intensive'' property of the hierarchy measure is analysed in more details in the Supplementary Information S2, here we note that if we take a pair of graphs ${\mathcal G}_1$ and ${\mathcal G_2}$ which are not connected to each other, then $H$ for the union of the graphs is equal to the weighted quadratic mean of the $H$ values calculated for the graphs separately,
\begin{equation}
H_{{\mathcal G}_1\cup{\mathcal G}_2}=\sqrt{\frac{N_1\left[H_{{\mathcal G}_1}\right]^2+N_2\left[H_{{\mathcal G}_2}\right]^2}{N_1+N_2}}.
\end{equation}
Thus, in the special case of a pair of isomorphic graphs $H_{{\mathcal G}_1\cup{\mathcal G}_2}=H_{{\mathcal G}_1}=H_{{\mathcal G}_2}$.
We continue with the examination of the behaviour of $H$ in the thermodynamic limit. According to calculations detailed in Methods, when the system size is diverging, $N\rightarrow\infty$, the hierarchies given in (\ref{eq:RWH_chain_final}-\ref{eq:RWH_star_final}) take the form of
\begin{eqnarray}
H_{\rm chain}&\propto& N^{-1/2},
\label{eq:chain_inf} \\
H_{\rm tree}&=&\left\lbrace \begin{array}{ll}
\sqrt{\frac{(b-1)e^{2/\lambda}}{(1+be^{1/\lambda}-b)^2-b}}, & \lambda< \lambda_{\rm c}(b) \\
\infty & \lambda \geq\lambda_{\rm c}(b)
\end{array}\right.
\label{eq:RWH_tree_inf} \\
H_{\rm star}&\propto& N^{-1/2}.
\label{eq:RWH_star_inf}
\end{eqnarray}
Thus, the hierarchy measure is vanishing for a chain and a star in the thermodynamic limit. In contrast, $H_{\rm tree}$ is converging to a well defined finite limit value or $b<1<\infty$ when $\lambda$ is smaller than a $b$ dependent critical value, and is diverging otherwise. In the Methods we show that the critical $\lambda$ value is given by
\begin{equation}
\lambda_{\rm c}(b)=\left[\ln\left(\frac{\sqrt{b}-1}{b}+1\right)\right]^{-1}.
\label{eq:lambda_c}
\end{equation}
\begin{figure}[h]
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{Fig2.eps}}
\caption{2d plot of the random walk hierarchy measure $H$ for infinitely large regular trees as a function of the branching number $b$ and the parameter $\lambda$. The formula for $H$ is given in (\ref{eq:RWH_tree_inf}). At $b=1$ we recover the infinitely large chain, while the infinitely large star is corresponding to the $b\rightarrow\infty$ limit. The dashed line is showing the maximum place of $H$.}
\label{fig:RWH_inf_trees}
\end{figure}
The behaviour of the limiting $H_{\rm tree}$ given in (\ref{eq:RWH_tree_inf}) is shown in a 2d plot in Fig.\ref{fig:RWH_inf_trees}.\ as a function of $b$ and $\lambda$. At $b=1$ the tree becomes equivalent to an infinitely large chain, and according to (\ref{eq:chain_inf}) the $H$ becomes zero. The 2d surface displayed in Fig.\ref{fig:RWH_inf_trees}.\ is consistent with this result, as it starts from $H=0$ at $b=1$ for all $\lambda$ values. Similarly, the $H$ for an infinitely large star is also zero according to (\ref{eq:RWH_star_inf}). The surface shown in Fig.\ref{fig:RWH_inf_trees}.\ is consistent with this result as well, as we can see a decreasing tendency in $H$ as a function of $b$ in the large $b$ regime.
In the range of intermediate branching numbers we can observe an $\lambda$ dependent maximum in $H$.
This behaviour is examined in more details in the Supplementary Information S3.
Based on the behaviour of $H$ in the thermodynamic limit, we can also fix the $\lambda$ parameter at an optimal value in general as follows. Since $\lambda$ is corresponding to the characteristic path length a random walker can traverse before ``decaying'', on the one hand we would like to choose a $\lambda$ as high as possible. I.e., if $\lambda$ is small, the random walkers can explore only within a very limited range from their origin, thus, the information we can retrieve via the random walkers is also very local. However, due to its self similar nature, hierarchical organisation can manifest on all length scales, therefore, we need random walkers travelling longer distances in order to be able to tell apart hierarchical and non-hierarchical networks.
On the other hand, if $\lambda$ is too large, we may run into diverging hierarchy values according to (\ref{eq:RWH_tree_inf}), which needs to be avoided in case of a well behaving hierarchy measure. Therefore, we fix $\lambda$ at a value as high as possible where a diverging $H$ is avoided for sure even in case of infinitely large regular trees. According to (\ref{eq:lambda_c}), the minimum of $\lambda_{\rm c}(b)$ can be found at $b=4$, where $\lambda_{\rm c}(b=4)\simeq 4.48$. Since the path length traversed by a random walker is increasing by unity under every iteration, it is also natural to set $\lambda$ to an integer value. Based on the above, the optimal setting for $\lambda$ is given by $\lambda=4$. In the rest of the paper we are assuming that $\lambda$ is set to this optimal value, and thereby consider our approach a parameter free method for measuring the amount of hierarchical organisation in the structure of networks.
Since real world hierarchies are usually not as highly ordered as a regular tree with a constant branching number, we extended our comparison studies of acyclic graphs also to general directed trees. By applying a simple algorithm detailed in Methods, we generated a large family of trees with branching numbers varying around a given average branching number $\left< b\right>$ according to a shifted Poisson distribution. In Fig.\ref{fig:Poisson_trees}. we show the average of the random walk hierarchy measure, $\left< H\right>$ as a function of $\left< b\right>$, calculated based on 100 realisations of trees consisting of $N=1000$ nodes. According to the curve, the maximum of $\left< H\right>$ is at an intermediate average branching number, where the structure of the network is really tree like. I.e., for low average branching numbers, (where the structure is basically a chain), and also for very large branching numbers comparable to the system size, (where the structure is close to a star), the obtained $\left< H\right>$ values are considerably lower.
\begin{figure}[hbt]
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.6\textwidth]{Fig3.eps}}
\caption{The average random walk hierarchy $\left< H \right>$ as a function of the average branching number $\left< b\right>$ for general trees of $N=1000$ nodes, averaged over $100$ instances. When $\left< b\right>$ is close to one, the tree is basically a chain, whereas at very large branching number, its structure is close to a star.}
\label{fig:Poisson_trees}
\end{figure}
\subsection*{Results on real networks}
\subsubsection*{St. Marks food web}
Here we apply our method for analysing the hierarchy of the St.\ Marks food web \cite{Luczkovich_St_Marks}, representing a part of the ecosystem of Goose Creek Bay, St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, Florida, USA. The nodes of the network are corresponding to living compartments, (group of species) based on probable diet and life history characteristics. Thus, compartments range from single species (e.g., pinfish) through a couple of species (e.g., gulf flounder and needlefish) to large groups of taxa, (e.g., bacterioplankton). The links between the nodes represent the feeding pathways, pointing from consumers to their food sources, where the link weights are corresponding to the fractions of the consumer's diet.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{Fig4.eps}}
\caption{Hierarchy of the St.\ Marks food web. a) The nodes are ordered according to the stationary distribution of the random walkers calculated from (\ref{eq:p_stac}), and the hierarchy levels are corresponding to groups of nodes for which the standard deviation of $p^{\rm stat}_i$ is at most $0.125\cdot\sigma(\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat})$, where $\sigma(\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat})$ denotes the standard deviation of $p_i^{\rm stat}$ over the whole network. The colour coding of the nodes reflects their effective trophic level published in \cite{Luczkovich_St_Marks}. b) Listing of the abbreviations used in a).}
\label{fig:St_Marks}
\end{figure}
The static distribution of the random walkers on the network defined above can be calculated using (\ref{eq:p_stac}). However, $p^{\rm stat}_i$ is defining only a ranking between the nodes and does not provide the hierarchy levels in the first place. Therefore, we sampled and aggregated nodes into levels so that in each level, the standard deviation of $p^{\rm stat}_i$ is lower than a pre-defined fraction of the standard deviation in the whole network. (This type of procedure for obtaining the hierarchy levels was established in \cite{Enys_hierarchy}).
In Fig.\ref{fig:St_Marks}.\ we show the resulting hierarchy between the compartments when the standard deviation of $p_i^{\rm stat}$ within the levels is at most $0.125\cdot \sigma(\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat})$. The hierarchy levels are consistent with the common sense about food webs as e.g., benthic algae is on the lowest level, herbivorous ducks are somewhere in the middle, and raptors (such as e.g., the bald eagle) are on the top of the hierarchy. The colour coding of the nodes is showing the effective trophic level of the compartments given in \cite{Luczkovich_St_Marks}, ranging between 1.0 and 4.32. Apparently, the position of the nodes in the hierarchy and their colour are coherent in most of the cases, e.g., the root has the highest effective trophic level, and the nodes with the lowest trophic level are at the bottom of the hierarchy. However, a small number of discrepancies can be also observed, (e.g., as in case of Gulf flounder \& needlefish), signing that the effective trophic levels and the random walk based hierarchy are catching slightly different aspects of the studied food web.
Finally, the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between the ranking of the compartments according to $p_i^{\rm stat}$ and the ranking according to the effective trophic levels is $0.593$. In contrast, the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between the effective trophic levels and the hierarchy obtained after applying a degree preserving link randomisation to the network is only $0.006\pm 0.138$. Based on the above, our hierarchy is highly consistent with former results from ecology.
\subsection*{Comparing different networks}
We also calculated the $H$ given in (\ref{eq:RWH_final}) for numerous different systems ranging from metabolic and regulatory networks through citation, trust and language networks to the Internet and the WWW. (A detailed description of the networks is given in the Supplementary Information S4). In Fig.\ref{fig:scatter}.\ we show the obtained hierarchy values as a function of the network size, $N$.
\begin{figure}[hbt]
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{Fig5.eps}}
\caption{Random walk hierarchy of different real networks. Each symbol is corresponding to a different network, where the shape and colour of the symbols is encoding the type of the system. The horizontal coordinate of the symbols is corresponding to the size of the corresponding network, while the vertical coordinate is giving $H$.}
\label{fig:scatter}
\end{figure}
According to the figure food webs, electric circuits and regulatory networks provide the largest $H$ values, and in contrast, the informal networks of acquaintances in different organisations seem the least hierarchical. In the mean time, the WWW, the Internet, the citation-, metabolic-, trust- and language networks appear to be moderately hierarchical.
However, under certain circumstances we may obtain a moderate hierarchy measure even in a random graph. E.g., the structure of the giant component in the Erd\H os--R\'enyi graph \cite{Erdos} is more or less tree-like if we are close to the percolation threshold, and tree-like structures are usually considered highly hierarchical. Accordingly, in order to make a fair judgement on the importance of hierarchy in the topology of a real network, we need to compare the measured $H$ to the result we expect in a suitably chosen random network ensemble, modelling the structure of the given network under the assumption of random connections. In order to take into account of the degree distribution of the studied networks, we use the configuration model for evaluating the expected value of $H$ in the random network ensemble. A sample from this ensemble can be obtained by simply link randomising the given real network, keeping the degree of the nodes fixed under the random rewiring of the connections.
The difference between $H$ obtained for the real networks and the expected value of $H$ in their random counterparts can be measured in terms of the $z$-score, defined as
\begin{equation}
z=\frac{H-\left< H\right>}{\sigma(H)},
\end{equation}
where $\left< H\right>$ and $\sigma(H)$ denote the expected value- and the standard deviation of $H$ in the random ensemble, respectively. Thus, we basically scale the difference between the real $H$ and the average of $H$ over the random ensemble by the standard deviation of $H$ in the random ensemble.
In Fig.\ref{fig:z_score}. we show the $z$-scores corresponding to the $H$ values displayed in Fig.\ref{fig:scatter}. According to the results, the citation networks and the network between the web pages of the nd.edu domain achieve outstandingly high $z$-scores. Furthermore, all of the food webs, the Internet networks and also the rest of the WWW networks obtain considerably large positive $z$-scores. This means that the structure of these networks is far more hierarchical compared to a random network with the same degree distribution. In contrast, all of the regulatory- and metabolic networks have negative $z$-scores, (with rather large absolute values in the latter case). Thus, these networks are less hierarchical compared to what we would expect on a random base.
\begin{figure}[hbt]
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.67\textwidth]{Fig6.eps}}
\caption{The $z$-score of $H$ for the networks shown in Fig.\ref{fig:scatter}. The $z$-score, given by $z=(H-\left< H\right>)/\sigma(H)$ is plotted as a function of the system size $N$. The random null-model for evaluating $\left< H\right>$ and $\sigma(H)$ is corresponding to the configuration model.}
\label{fig:z_score}
\end{figure}
Finally, in case of the electric-, organisational-, and language networks we see a mixed picture, where both positive and negative $z$-scores occur. Most of the organisational networks have positive $z$-scores, reaching to a quite high value in case Consulting network, while in parallel we obtain a negative $z$-score for the Enron network. The word adjacency network for the French, Spanish and Japanese languages have negative $z$-scores, opposed to a clearly positive $z$-score in case of the English language. A more detailed analysis of these results is provided in the Supplementary Information S4.
\section*{Discussion}
Measuring the significance of hierarchical organisation in the structure of a complex network is a non-trivial problem with a number of different options available. Here we have proposed a novel method based on random walks on the network. The basic idea behind our approach is that if nodes were sending instructions or information over the links to their subordinates, then the sources of the information could be traced using random walkers traversing the links backwards. The update rules of the dynamics are chosen in a way to make the density of the walkers on the nodes converge to a stationary distribution exponentially fast with the number of iterations. The position of the nodes in the hierarchy is determined by this distribution, with high random walker densities corresponding to top nodes, and low values of the distribution signalling bottom nodes. The overall measure of the hierarchy is given by the inhomogeneity of the stationary distribution.
The calculation of the hierarchy measure can be carried out based on repeated multiplications of an $N$ by $N$ transition matrix, making the method computationally very efficient and opens up the possibility for GPU based parallelisation. The other main advantage of our approach is that it can differentiate between directed acyclic graphs of distinct nature, opposed to most other methods treating all directed acyclic networks as already maximally hierarchical. The random walk hierarchy measure provides higher scores for trees showing a multilevel pyramidal structure compared to chains and stars. This is consistent with a general intuitive picture about hierarchies: the multilevel pyramidal structure enables the leaders in the tip of the hierarchy to reach the rest of the system via relatively short paths, and also avoids the ``overloading'' of any nodes with a too large number of direct subordinates. In contrast, the distance between the top and the bottom becomes very large in a chain, while the number of direct subordinates for the central node is diverging with the system size in case of a star. A further interesting property of our measure is that it is behaving similarly to intensive quantities in physics. I.e., for regular trees with a constant branching number the hierarchy measure is converging to a well defined value in the thermodynamic limit. Thus, above a certain scale it is the structure, (encoded in the branching number), what determines the hierarchy, not the size of the network.
Moreover, our tests on real world networks provided rather encouraging results. On the one hand, the detailed analysis of the St.\ Marks food web resulted in hierarchy levels that are highly consistent with former results from ecology on the effective trophic levels in the system. On the other hand, the large scale analysis of numerous further real networks revealed that the value of the hierarchy measure on its own does not always provide a fair characterisation of the importance of hierarchy in the structure of the studied system. According to our results, in some cases a relatively low $H$ value can be accompanied by an outstandingly high $z$-score, when we compare the actual $H$ to the expected value of $H$ in a randomly rewired network with the same degree distribution. This leads to the conclusion that the basic network characteristics such as the link density, degree distribution, etc. can inflict some constrains on the possible range of $H$ and also on $\left< H\right>$ in the corresponding random network ensemble. However, the further analysis of these effects is out of the scope of the present paper and is providing interesting directions for further research.
\section*{Methods}
\subsection*{Hierarchy of chains, regular trees and stars}
First we note that $H=0$ when the network is consisting of only a single directed cycle. Since all the nodes are equivalent in this case, $p_i^{\rm stat}=1/N$ for all $i$, thus, $\sigma(\mathbf{p}^{\rm stat})=0$. Now let us examine how does $H$ change if we move from a cycle to a chain by cutting a single link. Since all the nodes have a unit in-degree except the first node, and all the nodes have a unit out-degree except the last node, the transition probability from level $l$ to level $l-1$ is unity. Therefore, the stationary distribution on the last node is zero, $p_N^{\rm stat}=0$, (since the total amount of injected random walkers exit immediately, and there is no inflow of walkers from outside). Based on (\ref{eq:p_stac_alap}), the stationary distribution of the walkers on the intermediate levels fulfils
\begin{equation}
p_l^{\rm stat}=\frac{1}{1+f}\left( p_{l+1}^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}\right)=e^{-1/\lambda}\left(p_{l+1}^{\rm stat}+\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\right),
\label{eq:chain}
\end{equation}
while in case of the first node the injected random walkers cannot exit the node, resulting in
\begin{equation}
p_1^{\rm stat}=\frac{1}{1+f}\left[p_2^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}+p_1^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}\right]=e^{-1/\lambda}\left[p_2^{\rm stat}+p_1^{\rm stat}+2\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\right]
\label{eq:chain_1}
\end{equation}
By solving (\ref{eq:chain}-\ref{eq:chain_1}) we gain
\begin{eqnarray}
p_l^{\rm stat}&=&\frac{1}{N}\left[1-\frac{1}{(1+f)^{N-l}}\right]=\frac{1-e^{-\frac{N-l}{\lambda}}}{N}
\;\;\; (2\leq l\leq N), \\
p_1^{\rm stat}&=&\frac{p_2^{\rm stat}}{f}+\frac{2}{N}=\frac{p_2^{\rm stat}}{e^{1/\lambda}-1}+\frac{2}{N}.
\end{eqnarray}
By substituting into (\ref{eq:RWH_final}) the result simplifies to (\ref{eq:RWH_chain_final}).
The random walk hierarchy measure for general trees with varying branching number cannot be given in a general formula, nevertheless it can be calculated exactly for any particular finite tree based on (\ref{eq:p_stac}) and (\ref{eq:RWH_final}). However, in case of a regular tree with branching number $b$, a simple recursion can be given for the stationary distribution of the random walkers, as the transition probability from any node to its ``leader'' in the level above is simply $1/b$. The random walkers cannot exit from the root, which we label as level $l=1$, and there is an inflow of walkers from the second level, resulting in
\begin{eqnarray}
p_1^{\rm stat}&=&\frac{1}{1+f}\left[b\left(p_2^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}\right)\frac{1}{b}+p_1^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}\right]= \nonumber \\
&=&e^{-1/\lambda}\left[p_2^{\rm stat}+p_1^{\rm stat}+2\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\right],
\label{eq:p_tree_1}
\end{eqnarray}
which is exactly the same as in case of the first node in the chain, given in (\ref{eq:chain_1}). For the intermediate levels, we have an inflow of walkers from the level below, and also a term corresponding to the probability of the walkers staying at the given level instead of moving to the level above, yielding altogether
\begin{eqnarray}
p_l^{\rm stat}&=&\frac{1}{1+f}\left[ b\left(p_{l+1}^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}\right)\frac{1}{b}+\left(p_l^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}\right)\left(1-\frac{1}{b}\right)\right]= \nonumber \\
& &e^{-1/\lambda}\left[p_{l+1}^{\rm stat}+\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}+\left(p_l^{\rm stat}+\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\right)\left(1-\frac{1}{b}\right)\right]
\label{eq:p_tree_l_meth}
\end{eqnarray}
Finally, on the last level $l=l_{\rm max}$ we have no inflow from other nodes, giving
\begin{eqnarray}
p_{l_{\rm max}}^{\rm stat}&=&\frac{1}{1+f}\left(p_{l_{\rm max}}^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}\right)\left(1-\frac{1}{b}\right)=\nonumber \\
& &e^{-1/\lambda}\left(p_{l_{\rm max}}^{\rm stat}+\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\right)\left(1-\frac{1}{b}\right),
\end{eqnarray}
which provides an immediate solution for $p_{l_{\rm max}}$ in the form given in (\ref{eq:p_tree_lmax}). Based on (\ref{eq:p_tree_lmax}) we can calculate the stationary distribution on the rest of the levels as well, i.e., by rearranging (\ref{eq:p_tree_1}) and (\ref{eq:p_tree_l_meth}) we gain (\ref{eq:p_tree_l}) and (\ref{eq:p_tree_first}).
The hierarchy measure for the star can be evaluated in a similar fashion to that of the chain. In this case $N-1$ peripheral nodes are connected to a central node, from which the random walkers cannot exit. Thus, the stationary distribution of the random walkers fulfil
\begin{eqnarray}
p_{\rm c}^{\rm stat}&=&\frac{1}{1+f}\left[p_{\rm c}^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}
+(N-1)\left(p_{\rm p}^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}\right)\frac{1}{N-1}\right]=\nonumber \\
& &e^{-1/\lambda}\left[p_{\rm c}^{\rm stat}+p_{\rm p}^{\rm stat}+2\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\right],
\label{eq:star_cent}\\
p_{\rm p}^{\rm stat}&=&\frac{1}{1+f}\left(p_{\rm p}^{\rm stat}+\frac{f}{N}\right)\left(1-\frac{1}{N-1}\right)=\nonumber \\
& &e^{-1/\lambda}\left(p_{\rm p}^{\rm stat}+\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\right)\left(1-\frac{1}{N-1}\right)
\label{eq:star_peri}
\end{eqnarray}
where $p_{\rm c}^{\rm stat}$ denotes the density on the central node, and $p_{\rm p}^{\rm stat}$ is equal to the density on the peripheral nodes. From (\ref{eq:star_peri}) we can express $p_{\rm p}^{\rm stat}$ directly as
\begin{equation}
p_{\rm p}^{\rm stat}=\frac{f}{N}\frac{N-2}{f(N-1)+1}=\frac{e^{1/\lambda}-1}{N}\frac{N-2}{(e^{1/\lambda}-1)(N-1)+1},
\label{eq:star_p_res}
\end{equation}
and by substituting (\ref{eq:star_p_res}) into (\ref{eq:star_cent}) we arrive to
\begin{equation}
p_{\rm c}^{\rm stat}=\frac{1}{N}\left(2+\frac{N-2}{f(N-1)+1}\right)=\frac{1}{N}\left(2+\frac{N-2}{(e^{1/\lambda}-1)(N-1)+1}\right)
\label{eq:star_c_res}
\end{equation}
for the central node. According to (\ref{eq:RWH_final}), the random walk hierarchy measure can be given in this case as
\begin{equation}
H_{\rm star}=\sqrt{N\left[(p_c^{\rm stat})^2+(N-1)(p_p^{\rm stat})^2\right]-1}.
\label{eq:RWH_star_alap}
\end{equation}
By substituting (\ref{eq:star_p_res}) and (\ref{eq:star_c_res}) into (\ref{eq:RWH_star_alap}), the resulting formula can be simplified to (\ref{eq:RWH_star_final}).
\subsection*{Hierarchy in the thermodynamic limit}
Taking the $N\rightarrow\infty$ limit of $H_{\rm chain}$ given in (\ref{eq:RWH_chain_final}) and of $H_{\rm star}$ written in (\ref{eq:RWH_star_final}) is trivial, the results are given in (\ref{eq:chain_inf}) and in (\ref{eq:RWH_star_inf}) respectively. In contrast, the evaluating the $N\rightarrow\infty$ limit of $H_{\rm tree}$ given in (\ref{eq:RWH_tree_final}) is more complicated and can be carried out as follows.
First we separate the first term from the rest in the sum over the levels in (\ref{eq:RWH_tree_final}) as
\begin{equation}
H_{\rm tree}=\sqrt{N \left(\sum_{l=2}^{l_{\rm max}}b^{l-1}(p_l^{\rm stat})^2+(p_1^{\rm stat})^2\right)-1}.
\label{eq:sum_sep}
\end{equation}
In order to evaluate the remaining sum, we express $p_l^{\rm stat}$ given in (\ref{eq:p_tree_l}) as
\begin{equation}
p_l^{\rm stat}=\frac{1}{N}\left[A+B\cdot C^{l_{\rm max}-l+1}\right],
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
A=\frac{(2b-1)f}{1+b(f-1)},~~~
B=-\frac{bf(1+f)}{1+b(f-1)},~~~
C=\frac{b}{1+bf}.
\label{eq:letter_def}
\end{equation}
Based on the above,
\begin{eqnarray}
& &N\left(\sum_{l=2}^{l_{\rm max}} b^{l-1}(p_l^{\rm stat})^2\right)=
\frac{1}{N}\sum_{l=2}^{l_{\rm max}} b^{l-1}\left[A+BC^{l_{\rm max}-l+1}\right]^2=
\nonumber \\
& &
\frac{1}{N}\sum_{l=2}^{l_{\rm max }}\left[A^2 b^{l-1} + 2 AB b^{l-1}C^{l_{\rm max}-l+1} + B^2 b^{l-1} C^{2(l_{\rm max}-l+1)}\right]= \nonumber \\
& &\frac{1}{N}\left\{A^2\left(\frac{b^{l_{\rm max}}-1}{b-1}-1\right) + 2 AB b^{l_{\rm max}}\left[\frac{\left(\frac{C}{b}\right)^{l_{\rm max}-l+1}}{\frac{C}{b}-1}-1\right]+ \right. \nonumber \\ & &\left. +B^2 b^{l_{\rm max}}\left[\frac{\left(\frac{C^2}{b}\right)^{l_{\rm max}-l+1}}{\frac{C^2}{b}-1}-1\right]\right\}. \label{eq:sum_temp}
\end{eqnarray}
By using that $N=\frac{b^{l_{\rm max}}-1}{b-1}\approx\frac{b^{l_{\rm max}}}{b-1}$ if $N>>1$, (\ref{eq:sum_temp}) can be also written as
\begin{eqnarray}
& &N\left(\sum_{l=2}^{l_{\rm max}} b^{l-1}(p_l^{\rm stat})^2\right)=\frac{1}{N}\bigg\{A^2(N-1)-(2AB+B^2)\left[N(b-1)+1\right]+ \nonumber \\ & & -\frac{2AB}{C/b-1}\left[N(b-1)+1\right]-\frac{B^2}{C^2/b-1}\left[N(b-1)+1\right]\bigg\}+ \nonumber \\ & & + \frac{b-1}{b^{l_{\rm max}}}\left\{\frac{2AB}{C/b-1}C^{l_{\rm max}}+\frac{B^2}{C^2/b-1}C^{2l_{\rm max}}\right\}=\nonumber \\ & &
A^2-(2AB+B^2)(b-1)-\frac{2AB}{C/b-1}(b-1)-\frac{B^2}{C^2/b-1}(b-1)+\nonumber \\ & &+\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{N}\right)+(b-1)\left[\frac{2AB}{C/b-1}\left(\frac{C}{b}\right)^{l_{\rm max}}+\frac{B^2}{C^2/b-1}\left(\frac{C^2}{b}\right)^{l_{\rm max}}\right]
\label{eq:sum_temp2}
\end{eqnarray}
According to (\ref{eq:letter_def})
\begin{equation}
\frac{C}{b}=\frac{1}{1+bf}<1.
\end{equation}
However, the similar inequality of
\begin{equation}
\frac{C^2}{b}=\frac{b}{(1+bf)^2}<1
\end{equation}
holds if and only
\begin{equation}
\frac{\sqrt{b}-1}{b}<f,
\label{eq:b_cond}
\end{equation}
or in terms of $\lambda$ if and and only
\begin{equation}
\lambda<\left[ \ln\left(\frac{\sqrt{b}-1}{b}+1\right)\right]^{-1}.
\label{eq:lam_cond}
\end{equation}
Thus, when (\ref{eq:b_cond}), or equivalently (\ref{eq:lam_cond}) are fulfilled, the last two terms in (\ref{eq:sum_temp2}) vanish if $l_{\rm max}\to\infty$. By using (\ref{eq:letter_def}) and neglecting the $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{N}\right)$ terms we obtain
\begin{equation}
\lim_{l_{\rm max}\to\infty} N\left(\sum_{l=2}^{l_{\rm max}} b^{l-1}(p_l^{\rm stat})^2\right)=
\frac{f(b^2f+b(4+f)-f-2)}{b^2f^2+b(2f-1)+1}.
\label{eq:sum_fin}
\end{equation}
Now let us examine the $(p_1^{\rm stat})^2$ term in (\ref{eq:sum_sep}). According to (\ref{eq:p_tree_1}) we can write
\begin{equation}
p_{1}^{\rm stat}=\frac{p_{2}^{\rm stat}}{f}+\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{N}\right),
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
p_{2}^{\rm stat}=\frac{b-1}{b^{l_{\rm max}-1}}\left(A+BC^{l_{\rm max}-1}\right)=\frac{(b-1)B}{C}\left(\frac{C}{b}\right)^{l_{\rm max}}+\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{N}\right).
\end{equation}
Since $l_{\rm max}=\mathcal{O}(\log N)$ and $\frac{C}{b}<1$,
\begin{equation}
\left(\frac{C}{b}\right)^{l_{\rm max}}\propto e^{-\log N}=\frac{1}{N},
\end{equation}
and we obtain that
\begin{equation}
p_1^{\rm stat}=\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{N}\right).
\end{equation}
As a consequence, $N (p_1^{\rm stat})^2=\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{N}\right)$, which is also vanishing when $N\to\infty$. Hence, by substituting (\ref{eq:sum_fin}) into (\ref{eq:sum_sep}) and neglecting the $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{N}\right)$ terms we arrive to
\begin{eqnarray}
\lim_{l_{\rm max}\rightarrow \infty} H_{\rm tree}&=&\lim_{l_{\rm max}\to\infty} \sqrt{N\left(\sum_{l=2}^{l_{\rm max}}b^{l-1}(p_l^{\rm stat})^2+(p_{1}^{\rm stat})^2\right)-1}=\nonumber \\
& &\sqrt{\frac{(b-1)(f+1)^2}{b^2f^2+b(2f-1)+1}}=\sqrt{\frac{(b-1)e^{2/\lambda}}{(1+be^{1/\lambda}-b)^2-b}},
\end{eqnarray}
equivalent to the formula given in (\ref{eq:RWH_tree_inf}).
\subsection*{Generating trees with a varying branching number}
We used the following algorithm for generating a tree with varying branching number between $N$ nodes:
\begin{enumerate}
\item[(i)] Initially the nodes are ordered, however, they are also completely isolated from each other
\item[(ii)] We iterate over the nodes according to their order. For current node $i$ we draw a number $\kappa(i)$ from a Poisson distribution with a fixed parameter $\alpha$, and assign the branching number $b(i)=\kappa(i)+1$ to the node. (This way it is guaranteed that the branching number of $i$ is $b(i)\geq 1$).
\item[(iii)] We scan the nodes coming after $i$ and stop at the first node $j$ with no incoming link. We attach directed links pointing from $i$ to the nodes starting from $j$ and ending at $j+b(i)-1$.
\item[(iv)] We repeat steps (ii)-(iii) until all nodes become connected to the tree.
\end{enumerate}
The advantage of this algorithm is that it enables the study of the swift transition from a chain through a family of trees with increasing average branching number to a star. I.e., if we set the parameter of the Poisson distribution to $\alpha=0$, we obtain $b(i)=1$ for all nodes, thus, the resulting graph is actually a chain. However, if $\alpha$ is large enough compared to $N$, the branching number drawn for the first node is already larger than $N$, thus, we obtain a star. For intermediate parameter values the average branching number of the tree is of course $\left< b\right>=1+\alpha$. However, the branching numbers of the individual nodes in the tree will deviate from this average in a similar manner to real systems.
\section*{Acknowledgements}
The authors are grateful to Tam{\'a}s Vicsek and Enys Mones for the fruitful discussions and help in the data collection. The research was partially supported by the European Union and the European Social Fund through project FuturICT.hu (grant no.:TAMOP-4.2.2.C-11/1/KONV-2012-0013) and by the Hungarian National Science Fund (OTKA K105447). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
\section*{Author contributions}
GP developed the concept of the study. DC and GP worked out the definition of the hierarchy measure, DC derived the behaviour in the thermodynamic limit. DC collected the network data and carried out its analysis. DC and GP prepared the figures and contributed to the result interpretation. GP drafted the manuscript.
\section*{Additional information}
Supplementary information accompanies this paper.\\
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 335 |
\section{X-IFU: a breakthrough capability for Athena}
We first recap the way X-IFU will address its core scientific objectives, emphasizing on the drivers of its performance requirements, which are met in its current design.
\subsection{To address its core scientific objectives}
ESA's Athena X-ray observatory mission was selected in 2014 to address the Hot and Energetic Universe science theme \cite{2013arXiv1306.2307N,Barret_2013sf2a.conf..447B,barcons2015JPhCS.610a2008B,Barcons2017AN....338..153B,Barret2020AN....341..224B,Pointecouteau2013arXiv1306.2319P,Ettori2013arXiv1306.2322E,Croston2013arXiv1306.2323C,Kaastra2013arXiv1306.2324K,Aird2013arXiv1306.2325A,Georgakakis2013arXiv1306.2328G,Cappi2013arXiv1306.2330C,Dovciak2013arXiv1306.2331D,Branduardi2013arXiv1306.2332B,Sciortino2013arXiv1306.2333S,Motch2013arXiv1306.2334M,Decourchelle2013arXiv1306.2335D,Jonker2013arXiv1306.2336J}. The Hot Universe refers to the baryons in the Universe at temperatures above $10^{5-6}$ K, which accounts for most of its baryons content. The Energetic Universe refers to all phenomena occurring in the vicinity of compact objects across the mass spectrum. Onto supermassive black holes, those largely influence their surroundings out to large-scales through a poorly understood process called Cosmic Feedback. As X-rays are copiously produced by hot gas and accretion around black holes, the best observational handle on the Hot and Energetic Universe is through X-ray observations. In addition X-rays can escape relatively unimpeded from significantly obscured environments and are sensitive, for a wide range of column densities, to all ionization states (from cold to highly ionized gas) of all most abundant elements (such as C, N, O, Si, Mg, Fe, Ni, etc.).
\begin{figure}[!b]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=16.5cm]{Figures/Fig_Cucchetti_simulations.pdf}
\caption{Examples of (Top:) Spatial distribution profiles of the ICM parameters for a nearby "typical" cluster. (From left to right): Plasma temperature in keV, abundance of iron (with respect to solar) and bulk motion (km/s) computed from the mean redshift of the cluster. White dots represent the excised point sources. (Bottom:) Corresponding normalised relative error distribution (\%) of output with respect to input histogram (green) along with Gaussian best fit (red solid line). Blue dashed lines indicate the mean values of the statistical error related to the fit.
(Credits: \cite{cucchetti2018A&A...620A.173C}, simulations courtesy: S. Borgani, V. Biffi, K. Dolag, L. Tornatore, E. Rasia - INAF Trieste) }
\label{fig:cluster}
\end{figure}
To address its science objectives Athena has been conceived as a large observatory requiring in particular the capability to perform spatially-resolved high-resolution spectroscopy, as well as the capability to observe bright X-ray sources, including also its fast repointing capability. This defines the sizing requirements for the Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) \cite{2018SPIE10699E..1GB}.
In short, the X-IFU will enable for the first time, critical observations of the hot and energetic universe, in particular 1) the study the chemical evolution of the Universe along with the physical processes governing the assembly and the evolution of the large-scale structures and 2) the determination of how black holes (and all types of compact objects) work and shape the Universe. The breadth of the science affordable with the X-IFU will encompass key scientific issues of the Hot and Energetic Universe science theme and beyond.
X-IFU will provide revolutionary observations through:
\begin{itemize}
\item Integral field spectroscopic mapping of hot cosmic plasmas, enabling 3-D measurements of gas bulk motions and turbulence, chemical abundances and the spatial distribution of these and other physical parameters in local and distant galaxy clusters (see Figure \ref{fig:cluster}). This drives the X-IFU field of view and spatial resolution, quantum efficiency, particle background, spectral resolution and calibration accuracy.
\end{itemize}
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=8.5cm]{Figures/Fig_xifu_filament_z0.pdf}\includegraphics[width=8.5cm]{Figures/Fig_xifu_high_z_grb_absorption_lines.pdf}
\caption{Left) Simulated X-IFU spectrum of an intervening absorber in the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium at z=0.4339. The plot shows the ratio of the X-IFU data of the blazar 1ES 1553+113 with the local best-fitting continuum model, to highlight the two OVII He-$\alpha$ and He-$\beta$ absorption lines. The simulation is performed using the best fitting parameters derived from the long XMM-Newton RGS observations\cite{nicastro2018Natur.558..406N}. Right) A simulated X-IFU X-ray spectrum of a medium bright (fluence $=0.4 \times 10^{-6}$ erg cm$^{-2}$) Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) afterglow at $z = 7$, characterized by deep narrow resonant lines of Fe, Si, S, Ar, Mg, from the gas in the environment of the GRB. An effective intrinsic column density of $2 \times 10^{22}$ cm$^{-2}$ has been adopted. }
\label{fig:whim}
\end{figure}
\begin{itemize}
\item High sensitivity to line detection, enabling the detection of absorption and emission lines from Warm and Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM) filaments and weak spectral features produced by unusual ion species or states (see Figure \ref{fig:whim}). This drives the X-IFU spectral resolution, quantum efficiency, calibration, throughput and fast reaction time.
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=8.5cm]{Figures/Fig_xifu_pds456.pdf}\includegraphics[width=8.5cm]{Figures/Fig_xifu_GRS1915_winds.pdf}
\caption{Left) Probing (slow) warm absorbers and (fast) massive outflows in AGN. Simulated 100 ks X-IFU spectrum of PDS456 (z=0.184) above 4 keV obtained assuming a source state as in the XMM+NuSTAR observations of PDS456 as shown in \cite{reeves2018ApJ...867...38R}. Right) X-IFU simulated observation lasting only ~120 seconds of the Black Hole binary GRS1915+105. A disk wind, as reported in \cite{miller2016ApJ...821L...9M} has been simulated. Strong spectral features can be clearly seen in the spectrum.This rich set of features will enable unprecedented studies of the structure of the disk winds.}
\label{fig:pds}
\end{figure}
\item Physical characterization of the Hot and Energetic Universe, including plasma diagnostics using emission line multiplets, absorption lines (see Figure \ref{fig:pds}), AGN reverberation and black hole spin measurements, winds in galactic sources in outburst, AGN winds and outflows. This drives the X-IFU spectral resolution, calibration, high-count rate capability and fast reaction time.
\end{itemize}
\subsection{To surpass all other past and future instruments/missions}
In the current X-ray science context, the X-IFU has been thought and designed to provide unprecedented spatially-resolved spectroscopy with performances greatly exceeding those offered by current X-ray observatories like XMM-Newton and Chandra, or XRISM with its Resolve high resolution spectrometer \cite{Guainazzi2020IAUS..342...29G}. This capability comes from an X-ray telescope combining unprecedented collecting area (1.4 m$^2$ at 1 keV), a very good angular resolution (5-10") to provide sufficient counts on a 5' (equivalent diameter) field of view, a better than $2.5$ eV energy resolution below 7 keV and a sensitive band pass going from 0.2 to 12 keV (see Figure \ref{fig:fom_image})
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=16cm]{Figures/Fig_Perseus_xifu_resolve.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=8.5cm]{Figures/Fig_fom1a.pdf}\includegraphics[width=8.5cm]{Figures/Fig_fom1b.pdf}
\caption{Top) The Hitomi/SXS=XRISM/Resolve and X-IFU images and spectra of Perseus cluster. Credit: Jeremy Sanders (MPE). This combined figure shows at the same time the significant improvement in fine imaging, over a comparable field of view, as well as the higher throughput of X-IFU compared to Resolve (the two spectra are simulated with the same exposure time). Bottom) Effective area (left) and weak narrow line sensitivity (right) of X-IFU in comparison with the one of XRISM/Resolve and Chandra/XMM-Newton gratings (not encapsulated in that figure, the fact that the angular resolution will be ten times better for Athena/X-IFU compared to XRISM/Resolve). The effective area requirement applying to X-IFU are indicated with filled green square symbols. This assumes the mirror telescope configuration as described in ATHENA - Telescope Reference Design
and Effective Area Estimates, ESA-ATHENA-ESTEC-PL-DD- 001, Issue 3.3, 21/12/2020 and the instrument efficiency presented in \S \ref{subsec_ie}.}
\label{fig:fom_image}
\end{figure}
\section{The X-IFU instrument}
The X-IFU key performance requirements matching the Athena science requirements are listed in Table \ref{tab:performance}.
\begin{table}[!h]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|}
\hline
Key performance parameter & Value \\
\hline
Energy range & 0.2-12 keV \\
Spectral resolution & $<$ 2.5 eV up to 7 keV \\
Energy scale calibration & 0.4 eV in the 0.2-7 keV range \\
Field of view& 5' (equivalent diameter) \\
Instrument efficiency at 0.35, 1.0, 7.0, 10 keV & $>13$\%, $>57$\%, $>63$\%, $>42$\% \\
Non X-ray background& $< 5\times 10^{-3}$ counts/s/cm$^2$/keV (E $> 2$ keV) \\
Relative time resolution& 10 $\mu s$ \\
2.5 eV throughput (broadband, point source) &80\% at 1 mCrab (goal of 10 mCrab) \\
10 eV throughput (5-8 keV, point source)& 50\% at 1 Crab \\
2.5 eV throughput (broadband, extended source) &80\% at $ 2\times10^{-11}$ ergs/s/cm$^2$/arcmin$^2$ \\
Continuous cool time / regeneration time& Up to 28.5 hours (75\% duty cycle)\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{X-IFU top level performance requirements.}
\label{tab:performance}
\end{table}
Next, we move to the description of the instrument, whose physical and programmatic breakdown is shown in Figure \ref{fig:phy_breakdown}. In the following sections, we will go through all the main components of the instrument. It is hosted by the Athena Science Instrument Module, which provides in particular the cryostat and the associated cooling chain. These are not described in this paper (see\cite{Barret_2013arXiv1308.6784B,Ravera_2014SPIE.9144E..2LR,Barret_2016SPIE.9905E..2FB,Barret_2018SPIE10699E..1GB,Pajot_2018JLTP..193..901P} for a description of the previous incarnations of X-IFU, when the cryostat and cooling chain were in the Consortium perimeter, and still relevant for the global SIM architecture today.).
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_xifu_physical_breakdown.pdf}
\caption{The Physical Breakdown of the X-IFU instrument, highlighting its main components, as well as the country responsible for the procurement.}
\label{fig:phy_breakdown}
\end{figure}
\subsection{The Transition Edge Sensor (TES) Array}
\label{sec:tes_array}
TESs are superconducting thin film thermistors operated in the sharp transition region between the superconducting and normal states. The X-IFU TESs consist of a 50 $\mu$m-square Mo/Au bilayer voltage biased at a superconducting-to-normal transition temperature of $\sim 90$ mK. The TES is deposited atop a 0.5 $\mu$m-thick silicon-nitride membrane, which forms a weak thermal link to the heat sink. TESs are coupled to an electroplated Au/Bi/Au absorber, which provides the X-ray stopping power. Its composition (Bi to Au ratio) is chosen to provide the desired pixel heat capacity (optimized for energy resolution and dynamic range), while simultaneously achieving the desired pixel quantum efficiency. This optimization has a limit, as a minimal layer of gold is required for intra-pixel heat diffusion. A small gold cap is deposited on top of the absorber to optimize infrared reflectivity and protect the porous bismuth from humidity. For the baseline 317 $\mu$m pitch pixels, a target of $\sim 91$\% intrinsic stopping power at 7 keV is achieved with a total gold thickness of 1.09 $\mu$m (of which 40 nm are used for the capping) and bismuth thickness of 5.51 $\mu$m. The spacing between the pixels further introduces a flat multiplicative factor in the instrument efficiency. State of the art fabrication processes allow reaching an average gap of 6.34 $\mu$m, leading to a 96 \% filling factor.
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=16cm]{Figures/Fig_TES_basic_principles.pdf}
\caption{Left) The schematic of a TES. Right) The resistance variation as a function of the temperature, showing a sharp rise in the transition region between the superconducting and normal states\cite{Ravera_2014SPIE.9144E..2LR}.}
\label{fig:tes_principle}
\end{figure}
The absorption of an X-ray in the absorber leads to a temperature increase of the TES/absorber couple and thus of the TES resistance (see Figure \ref{fig:tes_principle}). Under an (almost) constant bias voltage, the current going through the TES then shows a sharp decrease. Overall, each X-ray photon will create a current pulse, whose amplitude (and shape) depends on its energy. It is reconstructed on board to provide a precise measurement of the photon energy and arrival time. The combination of the TES/absorber heat capacity, the thermal conductance to the cold bath, and the electrical properties of the TES circuit, including the detector setpoint, define the temporal shape of the pulse. These are optimized to match the X-IFU 0.2 to 12 keV operating range and allow a multiplexed readout with minimal resolution degradation (see \ref{sec:CFEE}).\cite{Smith_2016SPIE.9905E..2HS,Smith_2021ITAS...3161918S}
\begin{figure}[!b]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=16cm]{Figures/Fig_TES_schematic_and_array_.pdf}
\caption{Left) Top-down view of pixel design. Center) Cross-section cartoon view of pixel layout. Right) Photograph of a X-IFU prototype hexagonal detector with more than 3000 pixels.}
\label{fig:TES}
\end{figure}
\subsection{The cold front end electronics}
\label{sec:CFEE}
The amplification of the signal generated by the TES relies on SQUIDs (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices), split in two stages and referred to as MUX SQUIDs (also called SQ1) for the first stage, and as the AMP SQUIDs (sometimes named SSA for SQUID Series Array) for the second one\cite{Welty_1993ITAS....3.2605W,Kiviranta_2021ITAS...3160356K} respectively. SQUIDs are extremely sensitive magnetometers, operating at cryogenic temperatures. The current flowing through the TES is converted into a magnetic field by an input coil. To linearize the near-sinusoidal MUX SQUID response and increase its dynamic range, the digital readout electronics generates a current for a feedback coil to null the magnetic field sensed by the SQUID (see Figure \ref{fig:feedback_loop_and_tdm_readout}). This error signal is then read out by the AMP SQUID, operated at 2K, to be amplified and increase the signal robustness against down-stream and external noise sources. The output voltage is then delivered to the low-noise amplifier of the WFEE operated at room temperature.
Because resources are limited on the spacecraft, multiplexing is required and the baseline adopted for X-IFU is Time Division Multiplexing (TDM\cite{Doriese_2016JLTP..184..389D,Doriese_2019ITAS...2905577D,Durkin_2021ITAS...3165279D}), see Figure \ref{fig:feedback_loop_and_tdm_readout} for a description of the TDM principles (an alternative readout technique would be frequency domain multiplexing\cite{Vaccaro_2022arXiv220812604V,Akamatsu_2020JLTP..199..737A,Akamatsu_2021ApPhL.119r2601A}). In TDM, each DC-biased TES is associated with a MUX SQUID. Those are activated sequentially via a flux-actuated superconducting switch, so the TESs in each readout column are measured sequentially. Every SQ1 activation is called a row and a full set of samples of a column constitutes a readout frame. TDM columns are read out in parallel: the SQ1 of the same row number of each column are activated synchronously. The row addressing is performed in the Digital Readout Electronic (DRE). In order to limit the number of row address lines, two levels of switches are used: instead of having 34 pairs of command lines to command the ON/OFF state of the MUX SQUID, a command matrix of 9x4 is implemented, thus requiring only 13 pairs.
In its present configuration, the total number of pixels of the detector array of X-IFU is 2376, divided in 6 groups of 396 pixels each. Each group of 396 pixels is read out by independent electronics, so that a failure would not lead to a loss larger than one sixth of the whole detector. One group of 396 pixels is thus made of 12 columns of 33(+1) pixels (33 rows with sensitive pixels $\times$ 12 columns = 396 pixels, plus one "dark row" with a pure resistor attached, that monitors the drift in the gain of the readout electronics).
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_Feedback_loop_TDM_Readout_principle.pdf}
\caption{Left) Illustration of the feedback loop used to null out the magnetic field sensed by the SQUID\cite{Irwin_2005cpd..book...63I}. Right) Schematic\cite{Durkin_2019ITAS...2904472D} of 2-column × 2-row TDM. Each dc-biased TES is read out by a first stage SQUID amplifier (SQ1) via inductive coupling (M$_{in1}$). A row of SQ1s is turned on by applying a row address current (I$_{RA}$) to the corresponding row address line, opening the row's flux actuated switches. During TDM operation, rows are opened sequentially, reading out one TES per column at a time. Each column's SQ1 signals are passed to a SQUID series array amplifier, whose voltage (V$_{er}$) is read out by room temperature electronics.}
\label{fig:feedback_loop_and_tdm_readout}
\end{figure}
\subsection{The cryogenic anti-coincidence (cryo-AC) detector and associated electronics}
\label{sec:cryoac}
Background will be generated by primary and secondary particles hitting the prime TES array and depositing energy in the science energy range of the X-IFU. A second cryogenic detector is accommodated just underneath the prime array (at a distance less than 1 mm, see Figure \ref{fig:cryoac}), so that events depositing energies both in the micro-calorimeter array and the cryo-AC\ can be flagged out, and removed from the count stream from the observed source (see \cite{Lotti_2021ApJ...909..111L} for a recent review of the particle background of the X-IFU). The cryo-AC\ is made of Si-suspended absorbers sensed by a network of IrAu TES\cite{Macculi_2016SPIE.9905E..2KM,Macculi_2020SPIE11444E..4AM,Macculi_2020JLTP..199..416M,DAndrea_2020JLTP..199...65D} (the first demonstration of the joint operation of the main TES array and the cryo-AC\ is presented here\cite{DAndrea_2022JLTP..tmp..139D}). Time coincident multiple events (generated primarily by secondary particles generated in the metallic parts close to the detector) can also be flagged out, although not necessarily having a time coincident event in the cryo-AC. The cryo-AC\ detector is segmented in four quadrants, each associated with its own readout electronics (cryo-AC\ Warm Front End Electronics, cryo-AC-WFEE and Warm Back End Electronics cryo-AC- WBEE \cite{Macculi_2016SPIE.9905E..2KM,Macculi_2020SPIE11444E..4AM}). The cryo-AC\ WFEE is divided in 4 quadrants, each one providing bias to TES and SQUID for a single pixel and producing the analog scientific signal and housekeeping. The cryo-AC\ WBEE performs the digital processing, detecting and time stamping cosmic ray events by applying a proper trigger logic algorithm (Chiarello et al., 2022, SPIE, submitted), and generating the associated telemetry. The WBEE function is implemented in two identical independent units operated in cold redundancy. Both units can operate the 4 anti-coincidence detection chains. Failure in one readout chain would mean that approximately one fourth of the prime array would have a higher background, however not leading to a complete loss as the pointing of the telescope could be offset as to avoid that particular quadrant.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=15cm]{Figures/Fig_Cryo_AC.pdf}
\caption{Left) Working principle of the cryo-AC. Right) The cryo-AC\ demonstration model and its cold front end electronics as used for the coupled test with prime micro-calorimeter array\cite{DAndrea_2022JLTP..tmp..139D}.}
\label{fig:cryoac}
\end{figure}
\subsection{The warm readout electronics}
Next we move to the two main components of the warm electronics of the main readout detection chain.
\subsubsection{Warm Front-End Electronics (WFEE)}
The first stage of the warm electronics is called the Warm Front-End Electronics (WFEE\cite{Prele_020SPIE11444E..3UP}, see Figure \ref{fig:WFEE}). The main functions ensured by the WFEE are:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item To amplify the error signal provided by the cold electronics (one by column),
\item To bias the TES (one TES bias per column),
\item To bias the 50mK and 2K SQUID,
\item To buffer the feedback signals,
\item To buffer the row addressing signal that controls the pixels selection.
\end{itemize}
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_WFEE.pdf}
\caption{Exploded view of one WFEE box with its main components highlighted: the ASIC module with the buffers, the row addressing signal buffer module and finally the regulator module and the converter filtering board.}
\label{fig:WFEE}
\end{figure}
As dealing with extremely sensitive signals, the WFEE must be accommodated as close as possible to the cryostat and share a Faraday cage with it to avoid noises generated by electromagnetic fields and common mode perturbations, and as far as possible from noisy digital electronics. The WFEE is implemented by 6 independent units, aligned on the 6 cold electronics groups. These 6 WFEE units are grouped in 3 electronic boxes. One unit thus corresponds to 12 readout chains.
\subsubsection{Digital Readout Electronics (DRE)}
\label{DRE}
The second stage of the warm detection chain is the Digital Readout Electronics (DRE\cite{Ravera_2018SPIE10699E..4VR} for a description of the DRE prototype developed for Frequency Domain Multiplexing, but sharing some commonalities with the one being developed now for TDM readout, see Figure \ref{fig:DRE}). Its main functions are to:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item Generate the row addressing signals to select the row to be readout,
\item Sample the error signal of the pixels of the selected row,
\item Generate the feedback signal for the MUX SQUIDs,
\item Generate dynamic offset compensation signals to the SSA to account for the offset dispersion of the different MUX SQUIDs output voltage inside a column
\item Identify events in the pixel data flow and extract the data records (8192 samples each: the sampling frequency is 183.8 kHz equivalent to one sample every 5.44 $\mu$s),
\item Process the data record to estimate the arrival time, to digitize the energy of the event and determine its grade\cite{Peille_2016SPIE.9905E..5WP,Cobo_2018SPIE10699E..4SC,Cobo_2020SPIE11444E..96C,Vega_2022PASP..134b4504V}. The accurate energy of the photon in keV will then be obtained on-ground accounting for the gain scale (and other corrections).
\item Produce telemetry packets and send them to the spacecraft mass memory.
\end{itemize}
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_DRE.pdf}
\caption{Left) Layout of a DRE unit, with the warm harnesses connecting to the WFEE. Center) The rear of a DRE unit, showing covers to protect internal interfaces against electromagnetic interferences. Right) Physical breakdown of a DRE unit, made of 3 demultiplexing (DEMUX) modules, 1 raw addressing and synchronisation (RAS) module and one module holding the event processor (EP). The DC converter is located at the bottom of the DRE Unit.}
\label{fig:DRE}
\end{figure}
The switching from one pixel to the other that results from the multiplexing generates high frequency transient signals along the detection chain that can propagate within one column and from one chain to its neighbors through parasitic coupling mechanisms. To minimize the impact of possible interferences, a synchronization is implemented so that the switching occurs at the very same time for the 72 chains, and the sampling of the signal can be done in a steady time window where no switching occurs. This synchronization is based on the distribution by the Instrument Control Unit (ICU) of 2 clocks to the 6 DRE (where the row addressing driving the switching is implemented), one at the frame frequency (183.8 kHz) and one at 62.5 MHz. The DRE FPGA master clock is derived from the latter.
The DRE also implement an adjustable delay (several steps of 8 ns), that allows to correct static delays that may result from differences in harnesses length or electronics.
\subsection{The 2K Core}
The 2K Core consists of the Focal Plane Assembly (FPA) and the hybrid cooler cold mechanical assembly (CMA). It is placed inside the cryostat (see Figure \ref{fig:2KCore}). The so-called 2K Frame provides mechanical support to the FPA and CMA, and the thermal and mechanical interfaces with the cryostat. The 2K Frame provides also EMC tightness to the FPA, some harness routing, e.g. for the cryo-AC\ signals, as well as thermal sensors and heaters.
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_2KCore.pdf}
\caption{Left) The Focal Plane Assembly external layout, without FPA 2K baffle but with electrical interfaces with FPA Cold harnesses. Center) Hybrid Cooler Mechanical Assembly. Right) The 2K Frame}
\label{fig:2KCore}
\end{figure}
\subsubsection{Focal Plane Assembly (FPA)}
The FPA\cite{Jackson_2016SPIE.9905E..2IJ} hosts the two cryogenic detectors (prime micro-calorimeter array and cryo-AC) and their cold readout electronics, further providing the thermal isolation and electromagnetic shielding required to operate the sensor array at $\sim 50$ mK within the environment of the 2K Core, located inside the instrument cryostat. An exploded view of the FPA is shown in Figure \ref{fig:FPA} (see van Weers, 2022, SPIE, submitted).
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_FPA.pdf}
\caption{Left) Left: The various sub-assemblies of the FPA-DM during integration. At the top left the Niobium shield is shown. The triangle in centre is one of three Kevlar cord assemblies which, together, form the suspension of the T1 stage. The hexagonal structure on the left is the partially assembled detector stage (see right figure). On the right, the first FPA-DM completely assembled. The front-side red cap is a protective cover to avoid contamination of the optical filter. The three front black covers will be replaced by the readout harness during further tests. The black back-side cover protects the sensitive electronics and internal harness of the FPA during transport and handling (van Weers et al., 2022, SPIE, submitteed and AthenaNuggets43). Right) Preliminary design concept of the T0 (50 mK) detector assembly. The TES array is mounted at the top of the structure and wire-bounded to an interconnect chip. Each carrier/interconnect chip holds 4 MUX SQUID chips with Indium bump-bonds realizing the required high-density, low-impedance contacts between the carrier and MUX SQUID chips. As a baseline, the Nb flex harness from the FPA's T2 stage will be glued to a rigid support that is mounted below the Carrier chip, allowing wire-bonding directly from the Nb flex harness to the carrier chip.}
\label{fig:FPA}
\end{figure}
The FPA implements the following functions:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item the main TES detector array operated at nominal temperature T0 stage (50 mK),
\item the cryogenic input electronics: 1) MUX SQUIDs for the main array at nominal temperature T0 stage; 2) AMP SQUID at nominal temperature T2 stage (2 K),
\item the magnetic and electric field shielding from the environment,
\item optical filtering of low-energy out-of-band photons from both sky and on-board metrology sources,
\item the cryo-AC\ detector.
\end{itemize}
\subsubsection{The hybrid cooler}
The hybrid cooler implements the following thermal functions:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item To provide and control cooling power at a T0 thermal interface (50 mK range): this function provides cooling power to the detector stage of the FPA,
\item To provide cooling power at a T1 thermal interface (300 mK range): this function provides cooling power to the T1 stage of the FPA (intercept of heat loads from T2 stage to T0 stage),
\item To reject heat at T2 (1.9 K range) and T3 (4.9 K range): this function allows to evacuate the heat generated by the sub-Kelvin cooling on the two heat sinks provided by the upper cooling chain.
\end{itemize}
The Hybrid cooler\cite{Duband_2014SPIE.9144E..5WD,Duband_2017SPIE10566E..0AD} combines 1) a $^3$He sorption cooler, providing the cooling power at T1 (300 mK range), 2) An Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator (ADR), providing the cooling power at T0 (50 mK range). The total cooling power is $\sim 1 \mu$W and $\sim 15-20\mu$W at 50 and 300 mK respectively (see Figure \ref{fig:hybrid_cooler}), providing significant margins with respect to the currently estimated FPA dissipation (of order 500 nW and 6-7$\mu$W respectively).
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_Hybrid_cooler.pdf}
\caption{Top) The schematic of the Hybrid cooler mechanical assembly. Bottom left) The working principle of the sorption stage. Bottom right) The working principle of an Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator (ADR).}
\label{fig:hybrid_cooler}
\end{figure}
The sorption stage features:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item a sorption pump,
\item an evaporator, into which liquid $^3$He is condensed and then pumped down, with a thermal link to the objects to be cooled: the ADR stage of the cooler, and the T1 stage ($\sim 300$ mK) of the FPA,
\item a pumping line, between the pump and the evaporator,
\item thermal links toward heat sinks at T2 (1.9K) and T3 (4.9 K), provided by the upper cryochain,
\item two gas gap heat switches (HS1 and HS2), allowing to thermally connect or disconnect respectively the sorption pump to the T3 interface, and the evaporator cold end to the T2 interface.
\end{itemize}
This system is a one-shot system and needs to be recycled once all the liquid helium has been exhausted. During the recycling phase, the sorption pump first is heated to exhaust most of the helium gas and allows good condensation efficiency. Then once the liquid has been condensed, the sorption pump is cooled back down to ensure the pumping effect and lower the saturated vapor pressure of the liquid helium bath.
The ADR stage is based on magnetic cooling, which principle is based on the entropy reduction of the disordered spins of paramagnetic material: 1) when submitted to a magnetic field, the spins in the paramagnetic material tend to align along the field direction; the order in the material increases, thus the entropy decreases, and the material releases heat toward a heat sink; 2) when the magnetic field is gradually reduced and turned off, the spins turn back to their random orientation, which needs some energy; if the material is thermally isolated, this energy is drawn from the thermal agitation, which cools the material in an adiabatic process. Thus, like the sorption stage, the ADR stage has a cyclic operation, with a cooling phase followed by a recycling phase.
The ADR stage is composed of:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item a cryogenic superconductor coil,
\item a paramagnetic salt pill accommodated inside of the coil,
\item a thermal link to the object to be cooled: the T0 stage ($\sim 50$ mK) of the FPA (detector stage),
\item a third heat switch (HS3), allowing to thermally connect the salt pill to the cold end of the sorption stage evaporator during the recycling phase, to thermally disconnect the salt pill from the rest of the cooler during the cooling phase.
\end{itemize}
The Hybrid Cooler will provide a minimum cold time of 28.5 hours, while the total recycling time should not exceed 8 hours and 50 minutes. A partial regeneration of the cooler is also possible.
The CMA is controlled by 2 independent warm electronics, operated in cold redundancy, that enable the control of the cooler (e.g., cold tips temperature regulation, regeneration) as well as any telemetry needed to operate the cooler.
\subsection{The thermal filters}
\label{sec:filters}
The thermal filter (THF) stack is a set of 5 filters accommodated in the field of view of the X-IFU\cite{Barbera_2014SPIE.9144E..5UB,Barbera_2016JLTP..184..706B,Sciortino_2016SPIE.9905E..66S,Barbera_2018JLTP..193..793B,Barbera_2018SPIE10699E..1RB,Locicero_2018SPIE10699E..4RL,Sciortino_2018SPIE10699E..50S,Sciortino_2018JLTP..193..799S,Puccio_2020JATIS...6c8003P}. The functions implemented by the thermal filters are:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item To protect the detector from photons shot noise and thermal radiations,
\item To ensure the EMC tightness of the 2K Faraday cage,
\item To ensure the EMC tightness of the 300K Faraday cage.
\end{itemize}
These functions have to comply to the following set of constraints: 1) Transparency to X-rays, 2) Temperature interfaces set by the cryostat and the FPA, 3) Thermal loads onto colder stages, 4) Mechanical loads from launch vibrations, 5) Differential pressure during instrument pumping, 6) Thermal conductivity across the filter opening. Figure \ref{fig:thermal_filters} shows a schematic diagram of the THF stack with specified distances from the focal plane (Z, in mm), clear aperture diameter (D, in mm). Filters are named by the approximate temperature of the shield they are mounted on.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_Thermal_Filters.pdf}
\caption{Left) The stack of thermal filters located in the X-IFU field of view. Three filters have interfaces with the cryostat through the aperture cylinder, and 2 filters (the coldest) are located in the FPA. Right) THF300 schematic mounting of the film and supporting mesh inside the two-parts type frame. \textcircled{1} is the outer frame, \textcircled{2} is the inner frame, \textcircled{3} is the supporting mesh and \textcircled{4} is the thin polyimide/Al foil. }
\label{fig:thermal_filters}
\end{figure}
In its current design, each filter is composed of 30 nm of Aluminum (of which 7 nm are considered to be oxidized to Al$_2$O$_3$) and 45 nm of polyimide. The meshes of all filters were optimized for a blocking factor between 2 and 2.5\%, the colder (and thus smaller) filters having a poorer transmission due to the minimal thickness of the mesh wires. This leads to a total loss of $\sim 10.7 $\%.
\subsection{The Aperture Cylinder (ApC)}
The Aperture Cylinder (ApC), together with the stack of thermal filters, forms a feed-through assembly that allows X-rays to reach the TES array, with minimal absorption in the useful energy range 0.2–12 keV (see Figure \ref{fig:apc}).
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_Aperture_Cylinder.pdf}
\caption{Left) The ApC architecture and interfaces. Right) Drawing of the mechanical design of the ApC. See Thibert et al., 2022, SPIE submitted.}
\label{fig:apc}
\end{figure}
The ApC contributes to, or ensures, the following functions of the X-IFU:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item To ensure the EMC tightness of the 300K Faraday cage,
\item To support mechanically the filters,
\item To ensure the thermalization of the filters with respect to the cryostat interface temperature,
\item To protect the detector from photons shot noise and thermal radiations,
\item To protect the filters from Dewar contamination,
\item To provide heating capability to the thermal filters,
\item To reduce straylight radiation to the detector,
\item To protect the detector against the radiated electromagnetic fields.
\end{itemize}
\subsection{The Filter Wheel (FW)}
The Filter Wheel used for X-IFU implements the following functions\cite{Bozzo_2016arXiv160903776B}:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item Reduction of the optical load from bright stars which could degrade the energy resolution of the instrument,
\item Possibility to optimize the observational throughput in case of bright X-ray targets,
\item Provision of a radioactive calibration source ($^{55}$Fe) as a backup to the Modulated X-ray Sources (MXS) and for early calibration purposes,
\item Capability to monitor the intrinsic instrumental background,
\item Powering and controlling the Modulated X-ray Sources (flash duration, intensity, frequency),
\item Protection of the X-IFU focal plane detectors against micro meteorites and contamination.
\end{itemize}
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_Filter_wheel.pdf}
\caption{Left) The various filter positions of the X-IFU FW. Right) The FW developed for Hitomi by the University of Geneva and the Swiss industry Ruag Space. The approximate size of the overall FW shown above is 351 mm (length) $\times$ 384 mm (width) $\times$ 100 mm (height)\cite{Bozzo_2016arXiv160903776B}. The X-IFU FW having one more filter will be significantly larger in diameter ($\sim 68$ cm). }
\label{fig:filterwheel}
\end{figure}
The current implementation of the filter wheel foresees (see Figure \ref{fig:filterwheel}):
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item One closed position (Molybdenum filter), to be used during launch for the protection of the focal plane detectors and in-flight for the evaluation of the internal detectors background.
\item One open position (no filter) that is used for most observations or in the event of failures related to the FW.
\item One thick filter with a transmission equivalent to 100-$\mu$m of Beryllium to suppress the X-ray fluxes of celestial sources at energies $< 3$ keV. This filter can thus be adopted to limit the degradation of the X-IFU performances during the observations of particularly soft and bright X-ray sources.
\item One thinner filter with a transmission equivalent to 20-$\mu$m of Beryllium for the observation of X-ray sources of intermediate brightness (while preserving more soft X-ray photons).
\item Two optical blocking filters that are needed to limit the optical load (and thus the degradation of the instrument energy resolution) from the bright UV/V counterparts of the X-ray sources to be observed by the X-IFU. The first filter will be made out of a 200 nm-thick polyimide foil covered with a layer of 30 nm-thick Aluminum layer. The second filter will be made out of a 200 nm-thick polyimide foil covered by a 60 nm-thick Aluminum layer.
\item A number of $^{55}$Fe radioactive sources, to be used for the calibration of the X-IFU.
\end{itemize}
The filter wheel mechanical assembly (FWA) is controlled by its associated electronic box: the filter wheel electronics (FWE).
\subsection{The Calibration Assembly (CAS)}
\label{sec:cas}
To capitalize on the good intrinsic energy resolution of the X-IFU main detector, it is critical to be able to correct for drifts in the detector response and in the electronics. These drifts can be caused by many factors including the thermal load on the detector, its magnetic field and temperature variations in the electronics, etc... They typically need to be corrected to a level of better than a few 0.1 eV. The drifts are assumed to be slowly varying and being able to correct these on a 4000 s time scale is sufficient.
X-ray emission lines, if intense enough, allow such post-facto drift corrections. Natural X-ray sources (such as a $^{55}$Fe source) would be bright enough but illuminate continuously the detector (can be placed on a position in the filter wheel) but would contribute to the instrumental background if used during the observation. Therefore, modulated X-ray sources (MXS), similar to the one developed for Hitomi, are the natural choice\cite{deVries_2018SPIE10699E..65D}.
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_CAS.pdf}
\caption{Left) View of CAS with 6 MXS and 2 High Voltage Power Supply units (I-PRR Design). Center) One MXS Right) FW and CAS accommodation wrt Athena telescope X-Ray beam and detector visibility cone.}
\label{fig:cas}
\end{figure}
The CAS includes (see Figure \ref{fig:cas}) :
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item 6 Modulated X-ray Sources (MXS),
\item A CAS ring carrying the MXS around the telescope X-ray beam,
\item The high voltage harness linking the HVPS to the MXS,
\item 2 High Voltage Power Supplies (HVPS),
\item a CAS support plate.
\end{itemize}
The CAS, alongside the FW, is mechanically supported by the Filter Wheel support Structure (FWSS, plate), to be accommodated in the SIM at the entrance of the instrument (see Figure \ref{fig:cas}). The MXS photon flashes will be synchronized with the instrument time reference, thereby allowing their identification in the science telemetry. The flashes will last typically 1 second and be generated every 67 seconds.
As stated above, the MXS are controlled by the FW electronics.
\subsection{The 2K Core Controller}
The 2K Core Controller (2KCC) is a unit which groups all the items controlling the 2K Core in a single box. Its main function is to perform the internal thermal control of the 2K Core, and in particular of the T0 (50 mK) stage of the FPA. The 2KCC merges the Hybrid Cooler Controller electronics (HybCCE) and the FPA Auxiliary Board (FAB).
The HybCCE is in charge of controlling the hybrid cooler. Its functions are:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item To provide electrical power to the ADR magnetic coil and the associated $^3$He sorption stage,
\item To perform temperature and voltage acquisitions of the different items in the cooler,
\item To manage the temperature regulation of the cooler, based on cooler's temperatures and ADR current control.
\end{itemize}
The FAB is in charge of the:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item Housekeeping of the FPA (readout of FPA thermal sensors),
\item Powering the FPA heaters,
\item Control the FPA B-coil used to optimize the magnetic field at the detector interface.
\end{itemize}
Additionally, the 2KCC is in charge of the housekeeping (thermal sensors readout and heaters activation) for the 2K Core frame (2KC HK) (2K plate, 2K EMC covers, 2K and 4K thermal links, etc.). The 2KCC also includes a DC/DC converter (also called LVPS or CV) for the supply of secondary power to the other parts of the unit (FAB, HybCCE \& 2KC HK).
\subsection{Cold harnesses}
The signals generated within the cryostat must be propagated to the warm electronics. This is achieved via cold harnesses, which are divided in 5 bundles: 1) 3 harnesses for the FPA Detector signals 2) 1 harness for the cryo-AC\ signals and including the 2K core housekeeping (HK) and control signals 3) 1 harness for the Hybrid Cooler ADR Coil current lead. Those harnesses are a critical part of any cryogenic system, as they must fulfill several requirements, 1) low thermal loads, implying the use of ultra thin, low thermal conductance wires (stainless steel or phosphor bronze, as thin as 100$\mu$m), 2) a careful optimization between joule dissipation and conductive losses, 3) a limited crosstalk between wires, 4) a large number of wires to be accommodated via connectors on the cold side, where room is highly constrained.
There are two technologies to be considered for X-IFU: Twisted Shielded Pairs (TSP) versus looms. The current understanding is that TSP wires are better for performance, but more delicate for manufacturing and implementation, and more demanding or constraining in terms of interfaces (rejected heat loads, mass, volume, stiffness, bending radius). Looms are easier to implement and less constraining, but may have worse performance. Because it is believed that manufacturing and thermal issues can be overcome, TSP are currently the preferred option. The wiring of the cold harnesses for X-IFU is presented in Figure \ref{fig:cold_harnesses}.
\begin{figure}[!th]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_Cold_Harnesses.pdf}
\caption{Cold harness overview, showing the three types of harnesses used for X-IFU. }
\label{fig:cold_harnesses}
\end{figure}
\subsection{The Instrument Control Unit}
The ICU embeds the instrument central software (Boot software and Application software) and provides all the communication and synchronization capabilities to command and control the instrument. It is the unique communication node with the satellite: in flight, all the commands and telemetry are normally exchanged through the ICU. In order to keep the ICU as independent from other units as possible, the instrument design limits the complexity of the interfaces enabling the ICU control and command: 1) All instrument's units are connected to the ICU through an internal SpaceWire (SPW) network. The ICU is connected to the spacecraft through a SPW link.
The Instrument Control Unit (ICU) implements the following functions:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item To synchronize photon readout. This function enables a synchronous readout of the pixels, to avoid that transient perturbations generated by the multiplexing (when switching from a pixel to another) do not happen when the sampling of other readout chains occur (see \S \ref{DRE})
\item To manage instrument internal communications. This function provides the X-IFU units with a low level bi-directional capability of exchanging digital information,
\item To manage platform communications. This functions provides the X-IFU with a capability to send standardized space packets to the spacecraft, and to receive standardized space packets from the spacecraft
\item To manage observability and commandability,
\item To distribute time information to subsystems. This function distributes time information (time references, time broadcast…) from which units needing a time stamping capability can derive an adequate time reference,
\item To ensure instrument safety. This function monitors critical instrument parameters, and performs (or requests) the passivation actions (including from the spacecraft) needed to avoid failure propagation inside the instrument,
\item To manage instrument expertise. This function gathers all the observability and commandability services needed to monitor the performance of the main readout chain. As the needs related to expertise go far beyond the classical command and control function, it is presented as a separated function,
\item To manage instrument operability (modes transitions, autonomy…). This function gathers the highest level of autonomy services needed to implement the instrument operations: recycling sequences, detectors setup, calibration sequences…
\end{itemize}
It is made of a single box, hosting two independent units used in an adapted cold redundancy concept: only one unit is used as the instrument controller, but the second one could be switched ON for maintenance (mainly software upload or troubleshooting). In this case, the first unit controls the instrument, and the second is not allowed to interact with other instrument units.
The spacecraft and instrument units are connected to a 100 Mbps Space Wire router implemented in the ICU. This architecture enables high date rate communications for instrument management purposes and science telemetry transfer.
\section{Mass and Electrical Power budgets}
The budgets presented below are the current estimates at the time of the X-IFU SRR. They would still remain subject to changes in later phases of the project.
\subsection{Mass budget}
The X-IFU mass budget is given in Table \ref{tab:mass_budget}. This does not include the cryostat and the cooling chain, which are not in the X-IFU Consortium perimeter. The not-to-exceed mass allocation for X-IFU is 270 kg.
\begin{table}[!h]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|l|c|}
\hline
Unit & Mass (kg) \\
\hline
Hybrid Cooler Mechanical Assembly & 8.6 \\
Focal Plane Assembly & 11.3 \\
Connector boxes & 2.2 \\
2K Core frame & 8.1 \\
sub-total 2K Core & 30.2 \\
\hline
Aperture Cylinder & 4.3 \\
\hline
Filter Wheel & 13.0 \\
Filter Wheel Supporting Structure & 8.6 \\
Calibration assembly & 5.3 \\
sub-total & 26.9 \\
\hline
Warm Front End Electronics & 24.9 \\
Digital Readout electronics & 102.4 \\
cryo-AC\ Warm Front End Electronics & 2 \\
cryo-AC\ Warm Back End Electronics & 4 \\
Instrument Control Unit & 15 \\
Filter wheel electronics & 3.2 \\
2K Core Controller & 22 \\
sub-total e-Boxes & 173.4 \\
\hline
FPA Cold Harness & 15 \\
2K C-HK and CryoAC Cold Harness & 5 \\
Hybrid cooler coil harness & 1 \\
sub-total cold harnesses & 21 \\
\hline
Total X-IFU & 221.3 kg \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{The nominal mass budget of X-IFU to be compared with the 270 kg not-to exceed allocations.}
\label{tab:mass_budget}
\end{table}
\subsection{Electrical power Budget}
The electrical power budgets are provided in Table \ref{tab:electrical_power_budget} for three sizing instrument modes, excluding again the cryogenic chain:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item In "RECYCLE" mode, the cryo-cooler is recycling,
\item In "SETUP" mode, the instrument gets ready for observing (the filter wheel can be activated and calibration sources active),
\item In "OBSERVATION" mode, the detection chain is active, the MXS are one and are running at a stable pulse rate and the cooling is active with regulation,
\end{itemize}
\begin{table}[!h]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|l|c|c|c|}
\hline
Unit & RECYCLE & SETUP & OBSERVATION \\
\hline
Digital Readout electronics (6 identical units) & 718.2 & 718.2& 718.2\\
Instrument Control Unit & 20 & 20 & 20 \\
cryo-AC\ & 28.8 & 28.8 & 28.8 \\
2K Core Controller & 34 & 28.8& 28.8\\
Filter wheel electronics & 15.8 & 27.9 & 17.0 \\
\hline
Total & 816.8 & 823.7 & 812.8 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{The electrical power budget for X-IFU in three instrument modes. The allocation for X-IFU is 1300 W, indicating that in all sizing cases, the margin is about 60\%. }
\label{tab:electrical_power_budget}
\end{table}
\subsection{Science telemetry budget}
The six DRE and the cryo-AC\ will produce science telemetry packets that are transmitted to the platform for storage before downlink to the ground. The DRE and CryoAC will implement output buffers and overflow control to ensure they do not exceed the permitted on-board data-rate. Each event requires 120 bits to be fully described. For a moderately bright X-ray source of 10 mCrab, this leads to a data rate of 75 kbits/s and a volume of 7.5 Gbits for a 100 ks observation. The X-IFU further produces a steady rate of 18 kbits/s, as the sum of the background bit rate, calibration bit rate, cryo-AC\ bit rate (1.8 Gbits for 100 ks). These volumes are to be compared with the 26 Gbits of mass memory allocated daily to X-IFU. Larger volumes of data would still be allowed for the observations of brighter sources, provided adapting the WFI observations to produce lower data rate around this period.
\section{Performance assessment}
Next we present the latest assessment of the main X-IFU performance parameters, starting with the instrument efficiency.
\subsection{Instrument efficiency}
\label{subsec_ie}
The instrument efficiency (IE) refers to the probability of a photon arriving at the top of the aperture cylinder in the X-IFU field of view to be detected by the instrument and incorporated in the final science data. This includes the absorber quantum efficiency and the array geometrical filling factor (see \S \ref{sec:tes_array}), the transmission of the thermal filters (see \S \ref{sec:filters}), the loss of transmission due to contamination, the loss due to dead time process, as well as the detector yield. This excludes however dead time due to MXS-related veto processes, which rather corresponds to calibration time, as well as the rejection of events at high count rates, which is captured in the throughput requirements.
Molecular contamination onto the thermal filters will lower their transmission, notably at the lowest energies. We chose to allocate 20\% (End-of-Life) of transmission loss at 0.35 keV (corresponding to a transmission loss of 4\% at 1 keV).
The most likely candidate species for contamination are carbon (hydro carbonate) and oxygen (water), which coincidentally represent the worst case species at 350 eV and 1 keV. Particulate contamination is deemed negligible.
\begin{table}[!h]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|l|c|c|c|c|}
\hline Energy &0.35 keV &1 keV &7 keV &10 keV \\
\hline
Absorbers & 0.96 & 0.96 & 0.87 & 0.58 \\
Filters & 0.21& 0.76 & 0.89 & 0.89 \\
Contamination & 0.80 & 0.96 & 1.0 & 1.0 \\
Yield & 0.92 & 0.92 & 0.92 & 0.92 \\
Deadtime & 0.98 & 0.98 & 0.98 & 0.98 \\
\hline
Total & 0.143 & 0.629 & 0.695 & 0.463 \\
Requirement & 0.13 & 0.57 & 0.63 & 0.42 \\
Margin & 10.2 \% & 9.4 \%& 9.4 \% & 9.4 \% \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Instrument efficiency allocation.}
\label{tab:ie_allocation}
\end{table}
The detector yield is expected to be dominated by the fraction of ``dead pixels'' in the sensor array (due to various fabrication defects). Accounting for all the possible losses in the different cold connections, as well as the MUX SQUID chip fabrication yield and possible loss via ESD events, we expect a total yield of $\sim 92$\%, to be consolidated after testing all fabrication processes on large number of samples.
As for dead time, we currently identify two sources, cryo-AC\ vetoes and thermal background, for a total of 2\% equally split between these two contributors.
The breakdown of the instrument efficiency following the assumptions listed above is shown in table \ref{tab:ie_allocation}. As can be seen, the present allocations leave a margin of $\sim 10$ \% at all energies (see Figure \ref{fig:instrument_efficiency}). This reserve may notably be used to compensate for lower than expected TES array yield or to allow for a safer filter mesh design ($\sim 5$\% higher blocking factor).
\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{Figures/Fig_instrument_efficiency.png}
\caption{The variation of the instrument efficiency with energy, according to the breakdown of Table \ref{tab:ie_allocation}.}
\label{fig:instrument_efficiency}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Energy Resolution}
The X-IFU energy resolution not only depends on the performance of its cold detection chain, but also on the effect of its environment. The current X-IFU resolution budget is dominated by the detector array intrinsic performance (2.1 eV of the total allocated 2.5 eV FWHM). The remainder (1.4 eV - contributions to the ERB add in quadrature) consists of $\sim 60$ contributions, each of which represents in itself a small increase of the total the instrument resolution (typically 0.1 - 0.2 eV) and must be carefully sized following our growing understanding of the different contributors and their criticality. Today, the energy resolution budget can essentially be separated into three types of contributors: 1) noise terms generated by or picked-up from the different elements of the readout chain, including the detectors, 2) low frequency gain drifts of the environment of the detectors and electronics, 3) and higher order effects that cannot be associated to either category \cite{denHartog_2014SPIE.9144E..5QD,Peille_2018SPIE10699E..4KP}. All contributors (in eV) are added in quadrature to the total budget. The main contributors to the energy resolution budget are listed in Table \ref{tab:erb}.
\begin{table}[!h]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|p{4cm}|p{3cm}|p{8.5cm}|}
\hline
Contribution & Allocation & Comment \\
\hline
$\Delta$E at instrument level & 2.5 eV & up to 7 keV \\
\hline Detector array & 2.1 eV & Including non-linearity and non-optimal set points. Allows 1.4 eV for all other terms \\
Instantaneous gain calibration accuracy & 0.3° eV & To be achieved over 4000 s, and taking into account MXS limitations\\
Active crosstalk & 0.20 eV & Taken separately in lieu of a detailed budget for individual units \\
Focal Plane Assembly & 0.58 eV & The SQ1 receives a 0.45 eV contribution\\
Digital Readout Electronics & 0.57 eV & Incl. some extra margin for DACs. In particular the SQ1 feedback gets 0.46 eV. Arrival phase variation receives 0.2 eV. \\
Detector Cooling System & 0.59 eV & Incl. harness and aperture cylinder. Conducted susceptibility receives 0.22 eV \\
Warm Front-End Electronics & 0.46 eV & LNA white and $1/f$ noise receives 0.36 eV \\
Unspecified margin & 0.71 eV & \\
\hline \end{tabular}
\caption{Main contributors to the energy resolution budget, leading to a 2.5 eV resolution at system level.}
\label{tab:erb}
\end{table}
As shown in Figure \ref{fig:TDM_Spectral_resolution_smith_2021}, TDM multiplexed, multi-channel readout has been already shown to meet the energy resolution requirement for X-IFU, using lab electronics\cite{Smith_2021ITAS...3161918S,Durkin_2019ITAS...2904472D}.
\subsection{Energy scale knowledge}
\label{sec:escale}
The energy scale is the function that relates the output of the on-board Event Processor (in digital units) to actual calibrated keV units. The X-IFU requirement on its knowledge is to achieve a 1$\sigma$ error of $<0.4$ eV in the range $0.2 - 7$ keV, over a 4 ks (TBC) timescale. This requirement derives from the need to measure accurately (down to 20 km/s accuracy) bulk motions of hot plasma in galaxy clusters, being deemed sufficient to measure the thermal broadening in typical clusters as to reveal any significant non-thermal pressure associated with gas motions in addition to bulk velocities\cite{Ettori_2013arXiv1306.2322E}.
Owing to the high sensitivity of the microcalorimeters, the energy scale function is sensitive to the different instrumental conditions. The real detector energy scale will thus drift over time and the use of a single ground-calibrated energy scale function would inevitably result in large systematic errors in the energy measurement. The present strategy is to accurately map during ground calibration the gain scale behaviour as a function of the main drift sources (temperature, magnetic field, optical load, etc...) and later interpolate the current gain scale using different real-time observables. For this, we will primarily use on-board modulated X-ray sources (see \S \ref{sec:cas}) providing X-ray photons at known characteristic energies, but also dedicated pixel readings and subsystem housekeeping data \cite{Porter_2016JLTP..184..498P,Cucchetti_2018SPIE10699E..4MC}.
\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_TDM_spectral_resolution_from_smith_2021.pdf}
\caption{Left) From \cite{Smith_2021ITAS...3161918S} Co-added 8-column by 32-row spectra for (a) Ti-K$\alpha$, (b) Mn-K$\alpha$, (c) Co-K$\alpha$, (d) Cu-K$\alpha$ and (e) Br-K$\alpha$ (measured from K-Br). The red dots are the data points, the light blue lines are the natural lines shapes and the dark blue line is the fit to data. The fitted $\Delta$E (Full Width at Half Maximum, FWHM), number of counts and number of pixels included in each spectrum are shown on the figures (f) $\Delta$E FWHM as a function of energy for the 1-column by 40-row measurements\cite{Durkin_2019ITAS...2904472D} and the new 8-column by 32-row results (red squares). The improved $\Delta$E FWHM is attributed to lower noise, improvements in the dynamic behavior of the readout chain and more optimized TES bias point. The dashed black line shows the X-IFU instrument level resolution requirements, and the dashed blue line shows the currently assumed requirements considering only the detector and readout subsystem and excluding margin. Right) From \cite{Smith_2021ITAS...3161918S} $\Delta$E FWHM array heat map measured at Co-K$\alpha$.}
\label{fig:TDM_Spectral_resolution_smith_2021}
\end{figure}
We identify four main contributors to the energy scale:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item the accuracy of the ground calibration of this function, limited by the statistics of the calibration data (0.1 eV 1$\sigma$),
\item the instantaneous precision of the gain drift measurement that will be limited by the number of useful MXS counts available on the correction timescale (4 ks),
\item the systematic non-linearities introduced by the imperfect settling of the readout signal at the end of a TDM row\cite{Durkin_2021ITAS...3165279D} (expected to be $<0.05$ eV with the X-IFU readout bandwidths),
\item the finite accuracy of the gain drift correction algorithms and housekeeping data which introduce systematic correction errors.
\end{itemize}
An extensive demonstration campaign is ongoing at GSFC using a prototype 8x32 TDM setup\cite{Smith_2021ITAS...3161918S} to demonstrate our ability to accurately correct gain drifts inside the expected parameter space of X-IFU operating conditions with different correction algorithms. First results indicate error levels relatively consistent with predictions obtained through simulations of the instrumental readout via XIFUSIM\cite{Kirsch_2022JLTP..tmp...59K,Cucchetti_2018SPIE10699E..4MC}, on which the instrument energy scale budget is based. Overall, our current best estimate for the energy scale performance amounts to 0.33 eV.
\subsection{Count rate capability}
In this section, we review the count rate capability of X-IFU, starting with the list of requirements to be met (see the last column, Table \ref{tab:count_rate_and_requirement}). One of the most emblematic count rate requirements for X-IFU is the one related to mCrab intensity sources observed out-of-focus requiring a throughput of 80\% for 2.5 eV spectral resolution, and is driven by the capability to observe bright gamma-ray burst afterglows to probe the Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium\cite{Brand_2016SPIE.9905E..5FB,Walsh_2020A&A...642A..24W}. Another one is certainly the one related to the capability of observing very bright X-ray sources (1 Crab intensity level) with X-IFU, thanks to the optics defocussing and the addition of thick filters along the light path. This one is driven by the objective to probe stellar mass black hole spins, winds and outflows in binary systems\cite{Motch2013arXiv1306.2334M}.
\begin{table}[!h]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|p{4.15cm}|P{4.5cm}|P{2.75cm}|P{2.45cm}|}
\hline
Observation type & Astrophysical flux & Count rate at X-IFU TES array & Resolution \& (Throughput) \\
\hline
Defocused point source & 1 mCrab &62 cps & 2.5 eV ($>80$\%)\\
Defocused point source (G) & 10 mCrab&620 cps & 2.5 eV ($>80$\%) \\
Brightest point source & 1 Crab&8.2 kcps (Be filt)& 10 eV ($>50$\%) \\
Focused point source & 0.25 mCrab & 15.5 cps &2.5 eV ($>80$\%)\\
Extended source &Perseus inner 1'x1' &0.44 cps/pixel&2.5 eV ($>80$\%)\\
Extended source (G) &CasA average flux& 2.5 cps/pixel&2.5 eV ($>80$\%)\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{This table lists the observation type (focused, defocused, point or extended source, G refers to the Goal), the astrophysical flux, the count rate at the X-IFU entrance, the X-IFU at the TES array, i.e. after passing through the filter wheel filter, and finally the requirement in terms of spectral resolution (in eV) and throughput (\%). The defocusing depth assumed is 35 mm, see Kammoun et al.\cite{Kammoun_2022arXiv220501126K}, for more details, including a method to analyze bright source defocused observations. For the requirements, the count rates are estimated assuming a Crab like spectrum for point source and a thermal APEC 4 keV absorbed APEC model for extended source. The reference telescope design used in this table is: ATHENA - Telescope Reference Design and Effective Area Estimates, ESA-ATHENA-ESTEC-PL-DD- 001, Issue 3.3, 21/12/2020. Note that the requirement of 10 eV resolution with a 50\% throughput applies to the 5 to 8 keV band, and is met assuming a 100 $\mu$m thick beryllium filter cutting off most of the photons below 2-3 keV.}
\label{tab:count_rate_and_requirement}
\end{table}
We define the throughput as the fraction of valid events selected to pass a certain resolution criterion (currently 2.5 eV or 10 eV depending on the requirement) among all detected events. Most count rate requirements are thus expressed as a minimum throughput to be met at a given reference instrument count rate. This stems from the fact that the energy resolution of a photon detected by a micro-calorimeter depends on the time separation between individual X-ray pulses in the pixels' timeline, as well as on the presence of crosstalk signals generated by simultaneous events on neighbour pixels: the 2.5 eV resolution will only be achieved for photons well isolated within the data stream timeline.
\subsubsection{Components of the throughput budget}
The throughput performance depends on several factors\cite{Peille_2018JLTP..193..940P}. The main ones are listed below:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item The instrument efficiency as described above,
\item The pixel pitch which drives the event spread of the sources onto different neighbouring pixels: smaller pixels would each receive lower count rates and better share the overall count rate load,
\item The pixel speed. At high count rates, the current pulses used for the energy reconstruction of the impacting X-rays will get packed together in the pixels timelines, leading to two main degradations of the instrument performance. For each event, if the preceding pulse is too close, the energy reconstruction will be biased (by an amount depending on the time separation) and the event will need to be rejected from the science data. Such events are called secondaries. A nearby subsequent pulse will in turn shorten the amount of data available for the reconstruction and degrade the energy resolution. To characterize these effects, different grades can be defined as shown in Table \ref{tab:grades}.
\item Another main limitation to the instrument count rate capability is crosstalk between pixels. Crosstalk can be defined as any science signal, originating from the absorption of energy on one pixel, contributing to an energy measurement on another pixel. It may arise via various mechanisms: 1) Thermal leakage on the detector array.
2) Next-in time crosstalk related to the imperfect settling of the TDM switch at the end of a row period.
3) Inductive coupling due to the finite mutual inductance between elements of the readout chain
\item Event Processor (EP) performance. Due to limited on board computing power and memory, the X-IFU EP will have a maximal event processing rate. However, together with the processing of the MXS events, the EP is being designed for a maximum processing rate of $\sim$20 kcps, in order not to introduce further throughput losses.
\end{itemize}
\begin{table}[!h]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|l|c|c|c|}
\hline
Grade & Time since & Record length & Resolution \\
& previous pulse & (time between the start&for primary events \\
& & of the record and & \\
& & the next pulse) & \\
\hline
Very high resolution & $> 3676$ samples (20 ms) & $> 8192$ samples (44.6 ms) & 2.5 eV \\
High resolution & $> 3676$ samples (20 ms) & $> 4096$ samples (22.3 ms) & $\sim 2.5$ eV \\
Intermediate resolution & $> 1838$ samples (10 ms) & $> 2048$ samples (11.1 ms) & $2.6$ eV \\
Medium resolution & $> 1838$ samples (10 ms) & $> 512$ samples (2.8 ms) & $3.0$ eV \\
Limited resolution & $> 1838$ samples (10 ms)& $> 256$ samples (1.4 ms) & $7.0$ eV \\
Low resolution & $> 1838$ samples (10 ms)& $> 8$ samples (44 $\mu$s, TBC) & $\sim 30.0$ eV \\
Secondaries & $> 1838$ samples (10 ms)& - & N/A \\
Invalid & - & $< 8$ samples ( 44 $\mu$s, TBC) & N/A\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Definition of the different event grades for X-IFU.}
\label{tab:grades}
\end{table}
\begin{figure}[!t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=15cm]{Figures/Fig_summary_througput.pdf}
\caption{Top) The defocused PSF of the Athena optics at 13 energies as seen by X-IFU\cite{Kammoun_2022arXiv220501126K}. The bottom rightmost panel shows the in-focus PSF at 1 keV (Half Energy Width = 5"), for comparison. The grid in this panel shows the X-IFU pixels. We note that the in-focus PSF is shown on a 20" × 20" image while the defocused PSF is shown on a 200" $\times$ 200" image. The full field of view of the X-IFU is of the order of 300" (equivalent diameter) Bottom) Summary of the throughput performance for all the observing cases specified in the X-IFU URD. Requirements and goals are shown with crosses. Top left: High resolution observation of a defocused point source. Top right: Limited resolution (10 eV) observation of a defocused point source (for the filter configuration, the plot includes the 5 \% loss due to the limited transmission of the beryllium filter in the 5 to 8 keV band of interest). Bottom left: High resolution observation of a focused point source. Bottom right: High resolution observation of an extended source.}
\label{fig:throughput}
\end{figure}
Figure \ref{fig:throughput} shows the expected instrument throughput performance as a function of count rate/flux for the different observation types specified in the X-IFU count rate requirements, and relying on the defocusing capability of the Athena telescope (see Figure \ref{fig:throughput} to visualize how the point spread function of the optics varies with energy at an out-of-focus distance of 35 mm, \cite{Kammoun_2022arXiv220501126K}). These results were obtained using detailed End-to-End simulations performed in the SIXTE environment\cite{Dauser_2019A&A...630A..66D}, taking into account all the above-mentioned processes\cite{Peille_2018JLTP..193..940P}. As can be seen, a significant margin exists with respect to all performance requirements, and almost all goals are met. The only exception is the extended source goal by a few percentage points. This actually shows that the X-IFU instrument is not being oversized. This study notably serves as an input to key subsystem performance requirements, in particular those related to pixel speed constraints and crosstalk level.
\subsubsection{Undetected pileup}
Pileup originates at high count rates when events are too close to one another in a pixel timeline, such that the triggering stage of the event processor will only detect one event. Phase A studies showed via simulations of the X-IFU trigger algorithms a fraction of undetected pileup events of less than 0.1 \% for all the X-IFU high count rate cases, i.e. a factor of 10 margin with respect to the requirement \cite{Cobo_2018SPIE10699E..4SC}. This is achieved thanks to the sharp rise of the X-ray pulses, which can be be easily identified in the low-noise pixel timeline.
\subsection{Non X-ray background}
The non-X-ray background includes all events generated by charged particles depositing energy in a pixel and in the instrument energy range that make it to the scientific data\cite{Lotti_2021ApJ...909..111L}. Its level is defined after all veto mechanisms have been applied (currently includes coincidence with a cryo-AC\ event and coincidence with another event in the array to reject secondary showers - see \S \ref{sec:cryoac}).
The X-IFU background rejection efficiency depends on the geometrical configuration of the cryo-AC\ and main detector array - related to the classical concept of the anti-coincidence solid angle coverage -, and on the capability of the main array to discriminate background events on its own, relying on the energy deposited and on the pixel pattern turned on by the impacting particles ("detector rejection efficiency"). Two different screening strategies are thus applied to the flux incident on the X-IFU:
\begin{enumerate}
\item Time coincidence with the cryo-AC: photons are not expected to produce a coincidence signal in the cryo-AC, so we can assume that every event that is detected simultaneously in both the cryo-AC\ and the main detector can be rejected as particle-induced one.
\item Pattern recognition: due to the detector features (no charge cloud diffusion among different pixels as in CCD-like detectors, pixels physically separated) source photons will not produce complicate pixel patterns to reconstruct. Instead, we can assume that all the events that turn on more than one pixel can be rejected as induced by particles with skew trajectories intersecting more than one pixel, or by simultaneous impacts by multiple particles.
\end{enumerate}
Extensive Monte Carlo simulations have been performed using the Geant4 software to assess the X-IFU background level for different geometrical configurations\cite{Lotti_2021ApJ...909..111L}. Special care was taken to incorporate the most representative mass model of the FPA. These simulations have shown the need for a low Z coating (e.g. kapton) inside the FPA Nb shield to limit the secondary electron production in close proximity of the detector.
Our current best estimate of the instrumental background, accounting for a previously used reference configuration for the FPA indicates a non-compliance of the order of 26\% compared to the requirement ($5 \times 10^{-3}$ counts cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ keV$^{-1}$, 2-10 keV band, excluding fluorescence photons), taking into account a 20\% modeling margin based on a comparison exercise performed between Geant4 simulations and the measured in orbit Hitomi/SXS instrumental background\footnote{Ozaki \& Fioretti 2018: \url{https://indico.esa.int/event/249/contributions/4195/attachments/3262/4235/Hitomi-related_Geant4_activities.pdf}}. However, with an updated FPA mass model (e.g. with the location of the 50 mK filter at the bottom of the Niobium shield and larger clearance from the detector surface) it appears that the non-compliance may reach around 40-50\% including the modeling margin. We recall these estimates are based on worst case assumptions for the L1 environment (solar minimum), such that much lower background periods can be expected along the mission lifetime.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_xifu_instrumental_backrgound.pdf}
\caption{Total background level (GCR protons, $\alpha$ particles and electrons) of $4.6 \pm 0.07 \times 10^{-3}$ counts cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ keV$^{-1}$, (no margin included), at a resolution of 1 keV on the left and 10 eV on the right. These 100 ks simulations were performed on the Kapton/Au passive shielding configuration, with the 0.25 mm clearance from the detector surface. Note that the gold fluorescence peak at 9.7 keV is clearly visible.}
\label{fig:background}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Targets of Opportunity (ToO)}
Concerning ToO, X-IFU has to fulfill two scientific requirements stated as :
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item X-IFU shall be able to deliver 50 high-resolution X-ray spectra of GRB afterglows with at least 1 million counts over its nominal mission lifetime.
\item X-IFU shall be able to perform observations of a ToO in four hours wrt. ToO alert with at least 50 ks (TBC) available exposure for 40\% (TBC) of the events (assuming a 50\% Field-of-Regard, FoR)
\end{itemize}
The X-IFU, with its cooling cycle, plays a key role in the ToO response capability as a successful observation is only possible if sufficient cold time is available at the appropriate time. Of course, in the end, the corresponding performance depends on the full Athena system.
The main instrument contributors are: 1) The cold time (a significant fraction of "successful" ToO are observed without recycling the instrument) 2) The duty cycle (ratio between the cold time and the sum of the cold time and regeneration time) 3) The duration of a detector set-up, including possible calibrations required to get the right performance at the beginning of the observation.
To optimize the instrument fast response, different recycling schemes have been investigated via extensive Monte Carlo simulations, accounting for a full modeling of the Athena system and its mock observing plan\cite{Jaubert_2019}. The best strategy (so called "partial heat-up") uses the capability of the sub-Kelvin cooler to anticipate the early phase of the recycling (heat-up) and wait for a variable time (standby), before finishing the recycling and cooling down. The reference tuning of the cooler is a regeneration time of 8h50, a cold time = 28h30, corresponding to a duty cycle = 76.3 \% (note that a conservative 30 minutes of cold time is reserved prior to any observation to properly set up the instrument).
A sensitivity analysis of the ToO requirement with respect to the hybrid cooler performance parameters (cold and regeneration times) was also performed. This showed that the requirement expressed as 4 h delay / 50 ksec of observing time for 80\% of accessible ToO (FOR = 50\%) is never met for all cases of tuning. Instead a 8 h delay / 50 ksec is achievable for the "reference tuning" of the cooler. For the requirement expressed in terms of number of photons collected and number of successful ToO over the mission lifetime, this objective is always met with significant margins for all tuning of the X-IFU cooler. For the reference tuning, X-IFU could record up to $\sim 25$ one million count GRB afterglow spectra per year, indicating a factor of 2 margin in performance. The Athena effective observing efficiency was further shown not to depend at first order on the cold time of X-IFU. On the other hand, to optimize the Athena scheduling performance, the X-IFU duty cycle should be larger than the fraction of time allocated to X-IFU
\section{Technology demonstration and schedule}
A demonstration plan of critical technologies and design has been elaborated in view of the mission adoption and later the instrument Preliminary Design Review. This plan includes demonstration activities at different levels, from key technological technologies to the coupling of several subsystem demonstrators.
At subsystem level, the items considered in the plan are :
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item the FPA and associated technologies, e.g. the TES array, the Kevlar suspensions, the SQUIDs, internal harnesses\ldots
\item the hybrid cooler, e.g. the ADR superconducting coil\ldots
\item the cryo-AC, e.g. the cryo-AC\ TES chip and CFEE\ldots
\item the thermal filters, e.g. their resistance to vibration loads\ldots
\item the aperture cylinder, e.g. EMC tightness, contamination protection\ldots
\item the readout electronics, e.g. for the DRE: the RAS and DEMUX modules, the DC/DC converter, and for the WFEE: the ASIC holding the low-noise amplifier\ldots
\item the cold harnesses, e.g. technology trade-off between looms and shielded twisted pairs\ldots
\item the optical filters of the filter wheel
\end{itemize}
Not all sub-systems are involved in the plan, as some have already reached or exceeded the required level of technology readiness. Those activities are mostly funded by the national funding agencies, with support from ESA in some cases.
At system level, there are two main activities foreseen:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item The first one involves the first demonstration of a 2K Core 1) to validate the integration of the FPA DM with the subKelvin cooler (EM model from Safari) and 2K core structure, 2) to assess the sensitivity of the 2K core performances against external perturbations (microvibrations, thermal stability, magnetic field). 3) to characterize the recycling phase and stabilization time needed after recycling phase and finally 4) to determine the best way to thermally regulate the 50mK stage (=T0 stage) of FPA DM. This activity is funded in part by ESA in the context of the Core Technology Program "Detector Cooling System", and is supported by JAXA through the key procurement of a 2K Joule Thomson cooler\cite{Prouve_2020Cryo..11203144P,Shinozaki_2019MS&E..502a2069S}. The activity will rely on a demonstration model for the FPA, holding an array of 80 pixels readout by a frequency domain multiplexing lab electronics (note that TDM readout was selected as the X-IFU baseline after the design activities of the FPA DM had started).
\item The second one involves the demonstration of a multiplexed readout chain featuring design solutions for X-IFU (e.g. balanced differential readout, impedance matching, filtering at 2K, etc...), which were put in place to mitigate two risks: EMI/EMC compatibility and the impact of parasitic couplings on the dynamic behaviour of the TDM signals. The intention is to validate early on these design choices, as well as the associated interfaces between the different elements of the chain, in particular well in advance of the EM test campaign.
This activity constitutes the so-called early verification phase. It will rely on the development and coupled testing of demonstration models of the X-IFU electronics (WFEE + DRE), as well as breadboards to study the electrical interface between the FPA, WFEE and cold harness. The demonstration electronics will eventually be coupled to a dedicated cryogenic test platform, housed in a commercial two-stage ADR cryostat, hosting a focal plane array placed at 50 mK with a kilopixel TES array and associated cold readout electronics\cite{Betancourt_2021arXiv210703412B} (see Figure \ref{fig:gse_cryostat} left).
As discussed above, the choice to implement TDM readout for X-IFU was based mainly on the maturity level of this solution. Demonstration in laboratory set-up have shown performances compliant, if not exceeding X-IFU requirements\cite{Smith_2021ITAS...3161918S,Durkin_2019ITAS...2904472D}.
\end{itemize}
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_xifu_development_schedule.pdf}
\caption{Top panel) The main instrument/mission development phases. Mid panel) The main instrument test campaigns. Cryostat XIII refers to the on-going DCS development. Bottom panels) On the left the engineering model test campaign and on the right the proto-flight model test campaign.}
\label{fig:schedule}
\end{figure}
At the time of the SRR preparation, the assumption for the launch date of Athena was the end of 2035 and the adoption of the mission in June 2023. The development schedule of X-IFU, including the early verification phase, as iterated with ESA is presented in Figure \ref{fig:schedule}. Although this schedule is now obsolete, it is worth noting that the X-IFU engineering model delivery to industry was planned for September 2027, while the delivery of the flight model was planned by August 2030 (meaning about 3 years were needed to move from one model to the next). The models would have then been integrated in the cryostat at the Prime premises and coupled tests performed, including calibration activities. Note that these coupled activities at the Prime facilities are costly and will be part of the items to discuss as part of the upcoming design to cost exercise. The relatively long leap time separating the X-IFU model delivery dates and the launch date will also have to be looked at for optimizations.
\section{Calibration}
X-IFU being a sensitive high resolution spectrometer, special care is required for its calibration both on the ground and in-flight\cite{Cucchetti_2018SPIE10699E..4OC,Barret_2019A&A...628A...5B}. The X-IFU calibration strategy combines measurements and analysis:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item At component level (detector array, filters, readout electronics, ...),
\item At sub-system level (Focal Plane Assembly, detection chain, …),
\item At instrument level (integrated in the GSE cryostat, on the Science Instrument Module, during Thermal Vacuum/Thermal Balance of the SIM and/or the spacecraft which should be the last opportunity to have a cold instrument before launch),
\item In-flight on internal sources or specific X-IFU configuration (ie on MXS, with filter wheel in closed position, specific acquisition mode during the calibration performance verification phase,...),
\item In-flight on sky sources,
\item X-ray emission fundamental physics modeling and ground measurements, at high energy resolution. These include simulations or revised and updated standards needed for such a high-resolution spectroscopy mission.
\end{itemize}
Figure \ref{fig:calib_strategy} gives the strategy that will be followed for the calibration of the various instrument parameters. As can be seen, most of the final ground calibration references are expected to be acquired at SIM level, i.e. in the flight cryostat of the X-IFU instrument in order to have a representative environment including all the major drivers of the performance. This calibration campaign is expected to last $\sim$ 4 months, a duration that is mainly driven by the need to acquire accurate reference energy scales under different operating conditions (see \S \ref{sec:escale}).
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_xifu_calibration_strategy.pdf}
\caption{Calibration strategy outline.A check symbol \checkmark indicates when calibration activities are performed. Text entries indicate the component or sub-systems that are considered or other specific characterization or action. The red color highlights the last opportunity to calibrate the parameter. Italics refers to AIT/AIV activities.}
\label{fig:calib_strategy}
\end{figure}
One critical step of our verification and calibration is also the thermal GSE (also C2CC, for 2K Core Calibration, see Figure \ref{fig:gse_cryostat}, right). The C2CC is an assembly of structural, mechanical, electrical and software elements designed to verify the functions and performances of the 2K core, under its operational conditions. This means that this cryostat should provide the adequate environment at the 2K core interfaces in terms of micro-vibrations, EMC (especially magnetic field), thermal (temperature level and thermal stability). An aperture cylinder including thermal filters GSE will be also integrated into the C2CC. A functional cold harness representative of the flight ones in terms of material, length, thermal interfaces will be connected to the 2K core. This stage constitutes the last level of integration prior to the instrument delivery, allowing to verify the instrument performances, including their sensitivity to environment conditions and perform pre-calibrations in advance of the more extensive SIM level campaign.
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_IRAP_cyrogenic_test_bench_and_INTA_TGSE.pdf}
\caption{Left) The snout is composed of a 1024 TES array with its associated cold readout electronics. The snout is placed in the niobium shield and connected to the 50 mK stage. Superconducting looms insure the signals connection to the 500 mK terminator card and then to the 3 K cold electronics\cite{Betancourt_2021arXiv210703412B} (see Castellani et al., 2022, SPIE submitted). Right) Conceptual scheme of the cryostat for testing and calibrating the Focal Plane Assembly of Athena/X-IFU. Credit: INTA – C2CC team (and AthenaNuggets62). }
\label{fig:gse_cryostat}
\end{figure}
For the instrument calibration, a diversity of calibration sources will be used, as described below:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item First, we plan to use rotating target sources (RTSs) similar to the ones used for Hitomi/SXS\cite{Eckart_10.1117/1.JATIS.4.2.021406}. RTSs provide a rotating scan of the X-ray lines at a given frequency, which enables them to observe all line complexes in a single cold time and provides a way to track long term drifts in the ground calibration measurements
\item These rotating sources will be complemented by the use of a dedicated Electron Beam Ion Trap (EBIT,\cite{Levine_1988PhST...22..157L}). Many of the known L/K fluorescent lines at $<1$ keVs are indeed broad, and their detailed shape and centroid are either not accurately known, or can depend on chemical composition of the target and thus do not constitute reliable references. EBITs can produce narrower (typically tenth of eV FWHM) well-known X-ray lines at low energy, providing a more accurate description of the energy scale for a lower number of counts (approx. 5000 counts instead of 10000 for $K_{\alpha}$ lines). The use of this source has clear implications on the X-IFU interface due to its large volume, which will need to fit below the SIM.
\item Channel-Cut Crystal Monochromators (CCCMs)\cite{Leutenegger_2020RScI...91h3110L} will also be used for more efficient energy resolution measurements, but also to verify the calibration of the instrument extended line spread function performed at TES array level.
\item A flight-like MXS and $^{55}$Fe sources that are used to reproduce, without using the flight hardware, the fiducial lines expected in-flight throughout the calibration.
\end{itemize}
Some calibration activities will be performed at system level. The extended line spread function will be calibrated at TES array level with CCCMs as it only depends on the physics of photon absorption in the detector. On the other hand, the X-IFU will not be exposed to a synchrotron beam to calibrate its quantum efficiency, given the complexity of such test. Instead we will rely on a set of measurements at sub-system level (thermal filters and TES array).
The possibility of irradiating a representative FPA by protons was also investigated as a way to validate the models used for the computation of the expected NXB. This was not followed up in favor of more focused verification activities of the key processes dominating the X-IFU background (electron back scattering on XIFU-like absorber samples and secondary electron production in the kapton-coated Nb shield). For the calibration of the NXB, we plan to perform long dark exposures with the filter wheel in the closed position, further relying on a high-performance radiation monitor tracking variations of the charged particle environment.
\section{Overview of the X-IFU Instrument Science Center (X-ISC)}
The X-IFU Instrument Science Center (X-ISC) is an integral part of the instrument delivery. It will be developed within the X-IFU Consortium, with the activities ramping up 5 to 7 years before launch. Prime contributors to the X-ISC\ are France, Switzerland, Italy (see Figure \ref{fig:xisc}). The X-ISC\ includes responsibilities for X-IFU instrument operations and calibration. In conjunction, the X-ISC\ will be responsible for instrument performance evaluation, instrument calibration and trend monitoring during the mission operations, contiguous with their role in instrument testing, characterisation and calibration pre-launch. The X-ISC\ will generally be responsible for the provision of all detailed instrument knowledge and expertise to successfully operate the instrument. It will operate together with the ESA Mission Operation Center (MOC) and Science Operation Center (SOC), and form the X-IFU component of the Athena Science Ground Segment (SGS).
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_XISC_overall_organisation.pdf}
\caption{The overall organisation structure for the X-ISC. Only the Prime contributors are shown. Other contributions from Consortium partners will make up the X-ISC.}
\label{fig:xisc}
\end{figure}
More specifically, in the current share of work with ESA as described in the science implementation plan, the main responsibilities of the X-ISC\ are:
\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{-2pt}
\item Instrument testing, validation, characterisation and calibration, including definition of instrument tests to be performed in the in-flight Checkout, Commissioning and Performance Verification Phases.
\item In-flight instrument performance evaluation, instrument calibration and trend monitoring and following-up instrument operational anomalies.
\item Production of instrument and software user manuals, and inputs for the observers' manuals and for all instrument specific user support documentation. In particular, the X-ISC will review and formally endorse instrument manuals issued in support of the calls for observing proposals.
\item Provision of a scientific simulator and instrument observation-time estimators: tools to simulate planned observations and to calculate s/n vs. observation time and vice-versa, for use in proposal preparation as well as preparation of calibrations and any other observations/measurements. They are critical for an efficient planning and will need to be incorporated early within the SOC framework.
\item While the SOC will be responsible for Athena Common Software System (ACSS) coordination, X-ISC\ will allocate resources for a joint ACSS coordination board and join the SOC in the testing and validation of new releases of the ACSS; X-ISC\ will provide S/W contributions and carry out ACSS related activities. These comprise (but are not limited to) the development of the data models, common libraries, pipeline scripting language, graphical user interfaces, as well as S/W integration activities and the development of S/W integration servers.
\item Development and provision of the standard scientific data processing (DP) S/W and calibration files that are used both for the pipeline and interactive (IA) processing, including documentation. The IA scientific DP S/W, including necessary calibration files, will be distributed via the SOC.
\item Development, testing, and operation of the scientific data processing pipeline to process Level-0.5 data into Level-1 and 2 products. Pipeline products will be delivered to SOC for storage and distribution
\item Production of value-added scientific data products, including catalogues, surveys, and other contributions to Level-3 products.
\item As part of the X-ISC\ daily and long-term instrument performance monitoring, the X-ISC\ will be responsible for the verification, quality control, and validation of all data products, including the quick-look analysis (QLA) of products suited for the health monitoring of the instruments.
\item Provision of up-to-date instrument calibration parameters (calibration files)
\item Assisting the SOC in supporting the user community in those cases where in-depth instrument expertise beyond SOC capabilities is required.
\end{itemize}
\section{X-IFU Consortium organisation}
The X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) and its associated X-IFU Instrument Science Center (X-ISC) will be provided by an international consortium of ten ESA member states, plus the United States and Japan. Two other European countries (Ireland and United Kingdom) are providing scientific support to X-IFU.
\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_xifu_consortium_organisation.pdf}
\caption{The X-IFU Consortium organisation, highlighting the X-IFU Consortium Management Team, and the Project Manager and Principal Investigator interfaces.}
\label{fig:organisation}
\end{figure}
The X-IFU Consortium Management Team (XCMT) acts as the governing body of the X-IFU consortium. The XCMT consists of the X-IFU Project Manager (V. Albouys), the X-IFU Principal Investigator (D. Barret), and the two X-IFU Co-Principal Investigators (J.W den Herder and L. Piro), with the X-IFU Science Advisory Team Chair in attendance (M. Cappi). The XCMT is jointly chaired by the CNES PM and the PI, with the PI in charge of organizing the meetings and the day-to-day communication of the XCMT. The XCMT assists and supports the X-IFU PM and X-IFU PI in all X-IFU related matters (technical, programmatic, organizational, scientific).
The PI and the PM interact with various bodies within the Consortium and with the ESA study team (see Figure \ref{fig:organisation}). This organisation was formally endorsed by ESA in December 2018 through the instrument consortia consolidation process. The X-IFU PI is supported by the X-IFU Science Advisory Team (XSAT), acting as a forum to address all scientific matters related to the development of the X-IFU. The X-IFU PI relies on an X-IFU Calibration Team, chaired by the X-IFU Instrument scientist, to carry out all activities related to the calibration of the instrument, both on-ground and in-flight. The X-IFU Instrument Science Center is the joint responsibility of the X-IFU PM and PI, and its development is delegated to an X-ISC system lead and an X-IFU project scientist. The X-IFU PM prime responsibility are the engineering activities of the X-IFU and the delivery of the instrument and its X-ISC to ESA on behalf of the X-IFU Consortium. The X-IFU PM is the interface with ESA and the industrial primes on aspects related to the interfaces between X-IFU and the Athena satellite. The X-IFU PM is supported by a team of project managers providing a forum for discussing project related issues (e.g. planning). The X-IFU PM is also supported by CNES/Consortium Working Groups.
Within the current perimeter of the Consortium, the split of X-IFU co-investigators and consortium members is presented in Figure \ref{fig:coi_split}. This gives an overview of the respective efforts put in the X-IFU by each country.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=17cm]{Figures/Fig_xifu_nbcois_members_at_SRR.pdf}
\caption{The split of active members of the X-IFU Consortium and X-IFU co-investigators per country. Ireland and the United Kingdom have no identified contributions to the instrument or the ground segment but contribute to scientific activities. None have co-investigators. Note that people identified as contractors, observers or associates, in the Consortium database are not included as active members of the X-IFU Consortium.}
\label{fig:coi_split}
\end{figure}
\section{Communication and outreach}
The X-IFU internal communication is managed through various tools, such as the Document Management System CapLinked, Teamwork for action management, Formsite for form online forms and surveys. The external communication is achieved through a dedicated web site\footnote{\url{http://x-ifu.irap.omp.eu}}, which is the gate for accessing X-IFU related resources, e.g. response files. The web site is providing access to outreach material and links to the social media, e.g. a YouTube channel dedicated to X-IFU in which movies explaining X-IFU are available in several languages. Outreach activities are coordinated with the Athena community office\cite{Martinez_2020sea..confE.232M}. The Consortium database, more than 300 entries, is managed through Python, interfacing with the web site (where the various bodies of the Consortium are listed).
\section{X-IFU and its environmental footprint}
As shown above, the X-IFU is a rather complex instrument, involving very advanced technologies, large resources, and a large number of partners, spread all across the world. X-IFU is being developed right at the time, when it is becoming very clear that without an immediate and drastic reduction of our emissions (by at least 50\% by 2030), across all sectors, the objective of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees will not be reached. X-IFU is also developed when the need for building new large scientific infrastructures having major environmental impacts is being debated within the community\cite{Knodlseder_2022NatAs...6..503K}, this very same community that should lead by example \cite{Burtscher_2022NatAs...6..764B}. In this context, a life cycle assessment (LCA) of X-IFU is being performed to evaluate the global footprint of developing X-IFU along its complete life cycle. The LCA will identify the contribution of all life cycle phases (from cradle to grave) to several environmental impacts, including global warming (in particular CO$_2$ emissions), waste, water consumption, raw materials consumption, human health, biodiversity. The idea is simply to identify hot spots and take corrective actions whenever possible, while not jeopardizing the ultimate success of the project. X-IFU has already committed to reduce significantly its global travel footprint\cite{Barret_2020ExA....49..183B}, starting even in the pre-covid era, but the LCA will enable us to go one step further, by identifying those actions in our daily activities that can lead to substantial reductions of our impact, such as switching off test equipments over night, sharing resources and infrastructures wherever possible. At the time of this writing, the assessment is not completed, but the data have been collected from all sub-systems making up the X-IFU. There has been an enthusiastic support for the tedious data collection, which are now extrapolated when partial and properly modeled with a dedicated LCA software. There is great hope that the quality of the assessment will enable clear guidelines to be formulated for building the X-IFU, while lowering its environmental impact.
\section{From the SRR onward}
The discovery of an unanticipated cost increase of Athena by the ESA executive now imposes us the challenge of a design-to-cost exercise to bring the cost of Athena within an envelope affordable by the ESA science program ($\sim 1.3$ G€). This exercise should preserve the flagship capabilities of the Athena mission. The X-IFU team, including its international partners, has the expertise and is committed to enter this exercise in a pro-active way, focusing first on the way to simplify the cooling chain. Let alone that we feel accountable for the tax-payer money already spent, the scientific and technical expertise developed over the years should not be wasted, and will be a critical input of the design-to-cost exercise, which will start from the X-IFU design presented at the SRR.
The extent by which X-IFU will change will also depend on the changes applying to the overall telescope and spacecraft, which are under ESA responsibility. A close collaboration between ESA and the instrument teams will be required for Athena to retain the capability to reach most, if not all, the scientific objectives spelled out for the Hot and Energetic Universe, and whose priorities have been repeated constantly since its original formulation in 2013.
\section{Conclusions}
X-IFU entered its system requirement review with a consolidated design and performance budgets understood. As an indication of the extent of the work done for the SRR, the data pack produced by the team consisted of over 100 documents and of more than 5000 pages. This paper aimed at summarizing this documentation, providing a reference point for the upcoming design-to-cost exercise. We, as a team, will use all our knowledge for X-IFU to maintain flagship capabilities in spatially resolved high resolution X-ray spectroscopy, as to enable most of the original X-IFU related scientific objectives of the Athena mission to be retained.
\label{sec:intro}
\section{Acknowledgments}
This paper is based on the documentation assembled by the CNES project team and the Consortium partners for the X-IFU System Requirement Review, which has started end of June, albeit with reduced objectives (the review will be completed in September 2022). DB wishes to thank the CNES Project and Support teams for continuing the preparation of the SRR data pack, during the disruptive and unfortunate events that happened to Athena, which could have led to the termination of X-IFU. Should their effort be rewarded in the upcoming design-to-cost exercise. DB would also like to express his gratitude to the CNES Management (Philippe Baptiste, President), Lionel Suchet (Chief Operating Officer), the French ESA SPC delegation (Olivier La Marle and Juliette Lambin) for their unfailing support to X-IFU. This support was instrumental in preserving an X-IFU on the new Athena mission and will remain precious in the upcoming phase of the reformulation of the mission. Special thanks to all the SPC delegations which supported the objective of keeping a flagship X-ray observatory in the ESA Science Program. DB is also thankful to Gilles Bergametti (President of the CNES Comité des Programmes Scientifiques, CPS), Athena Coustenis (President of the CNES Comité d'évaluation de la recherche et de l'exploration spatiale, CERES) and Pierre-Olivier Petrucci (President of the Programme National des Hautes Energies) for their support and for providing the feedback from the French scientific community at large. This work has been also supported by ASI (Italian Space Agency) through the Contract 2019-27-HH.0, and by the ESA (European Space Agency) Core Technology Program (CTP) Contract No. 4000114932/15/NL/BW and the AREMBES - ESA CTP No.4000116655/16/NL/BW. This publication is part of grant RTI2018-096686-B-C21 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by "ERDF A way of making Europe".
| {
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**PRAISE FOR THE FALL AWAY SERIES**
"Passion and anger simmer on the page, turning love into a battlefield. . . . Their chemistry is downright explosive."
— _Publishers Weekly_
"Another powerfully written contemporary love story that delivers . . . raw emotions."
— _Booklist_
"A wonderfully addictive read that kept my heart racing from start to finish. I could not put it down! 5 stars!!"
—Aestas Book Blog
"A heated and passionate novel, full of feeling and intensity that will appeal to the reader seeking an emotional rush."
—IndieReader
"I love, love, love, love, love, love, love this book! What a wonderful debut novel by Penelope Douglas! This book had me hooked! So addictive! So witty! So devastating! So amazing!"
—Komal Kant, author of _Falling for Hadie_
ALSO BY PENELOPE DOUGLAS
The Fall Away Series
_Bully_
_Until You_
_Rival_
_Falling Away_
_Aflame_ (digital novella)
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
Published by New American Library,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
This book is an original publication of New American Library.
Copyright © Penelope Douglas, 2015
Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Random House, LLC, 2015
Excerpt from _Falling Away_ copyright © Penelope Douglas, 2015
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Douglas, Penelope, 1977–
Misconduct/Penelope Douglas.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-40894-4
I. Title.
PS3604.O93236M57 2015
813'.6—dc23 2015029233
Designed by Kelly Lipovich
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
# Contents
_Praise_
_Also by Penelope Douglas_
_Title Page_
_Copyright_
_Dedication_
_Playlist_
_Letter to the Reader_
_Epigraph_
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
_Readers Guide_
_Excerpt from_ Falling Away
_About the Author_
For our teachers . . .
PLAYLIST
"Home" by Three Days Grace
"Dangerous" by Shaman's Harvest
"Always" by Saliva
"Hazy Shade of Winter" by the Bangles
"Because I Got High" by Afroman
"Only Girl" by Rihanna
"You Know You Like It" by DJ Snake & AlunaGeorge
"Room to Breathe" by You Me at Six
"Untraveled Road" by Thousand Foot Krutch
"Drown" by Theory of a Deadman
"When the Saints Go Marching In" by Louis Armstrong
"To the Hills" by Laurel
"Failure" by Breaking Benjamin
"Paralyzed" by In Flames
"Glycerine" by Bush
"No Woman, No Cry" by Bob Marley and the Wailers
_Dear Reader,_
_All of my books come with Pinterest boards to enhance your reading experience. Please enjoy Misconduct_ _'s board at www.pinterest.com/penelopedouglas/misconduct-2015/ as you read._
_You will also find discussion questions at the end of this book._
_Love is a game that two can play and both win._
—Eva Gabor
# ONE
EASTON
While most Mardi Gras balls were lively, with performers from their parades that day in attendance to entertain the guests, this particular party overflowed with a very different vibe.
I looked around me at the rich and powerful who made up the guest list, sizing everyone up, their connections and names more of a résumé than their educations or careers.
And while everyone around me appeared relaxed—due to the heavy flow of champagne, I was sure—it was just a mask on top of their masks.
They weren't calm. They were working. Deals were being made and relationships bought, and the politicians were always on the job.
But still . . . there was a charge in the air. It was Mardi Gras in New Orleans, after all.
It was the time of year when many locals escaped the city, with the tsunami of tourists clogging the streets and the traffic turning what was normally a fifteen-minute drive into three hours as constant parades blocked your route.
The city and its surrounding areas hosted between forty and fifty parades every Mardi Gras season, and each parade had a krewe—a not-for-profit organization that donated money to build the floats, some costing as much as eighty thousand dollars, while the krewe members enjoyed the privilege of donning masks as they tossed beads and other trinkets into a bedlam of outstretched hands and screaming crowds.
This particular krewe was exclusive, almost aristocratic with its money and political connections. Lawyers, CEOs, judges, you name it . . . Anyone who was anyone in this city was here tonight. Hence why my brother accepted an invitation.
Jack knew that New Orleans society was like a candy-covered chocolate. You had to break through the shell to get to the good stuff.
Deals and relationships weren't made at conference tables or offices. They were settled over glasses of Chivas at a cigar bar or around ten pounds of crawfish at a filthy seafood dive in the Quarter with calliope music from the _Natchez_ steamboat drifting in through the open French doors. People didn't trust signatures so much as they trusted your ability to bullshit while you were drunk.
All reasons I loved this city.
It held the history of weathered storms—of blood, sweat, music, agony, and death by people who expected to fall but knew how to get back up.
I offered the waiter a modest smile as I plucked another glass of champagne off his tray and turned back around, regarding the imitation Degas hanging before me.
_Oil on canvas would burn quickly_. _Very quickly_ _,_ I mused, inching closer as the chill from the champagne flute seeped through my manicured fingers.
God, I was bored. When I started fantasizing about inanimate objects going up in flames, it was time to call it a night.
But then I felt my phone vibrate against my thigh, and I straightened, pulling away from the painting again.
"Jack," I whispered under my breath as I set down my glass on a high, round table and clawed my dress up my leg to get at my phone strapped around my thigh. I hated carrying purses, and since my brother was here with me and had the credit cards, all I needed was a place to secure my cell.
Swiping the screen, I clicked on the text notification.
If you say anything rude, my future is ruined.
I shot my head up, a smile spreading across my face as I scanned the ballroom. I spotted my brother standing in a circle of people but facing me with a warning eyebrow raised and a smirk on his face.
Moi? I texted back, looking at him like I was affronted.
He read the text and shook his head, grinning. I know your vibes, Easton.
I rolled my eyes at him, amusement tilting my lips up into a smile.
Jack most certainly did know my vibes.
But he should've known better. I would never let my brother down. I might have inherited our father's quick temper and our mother's inability not to say things that shouldn't be said, but I was loyal. When my brother called, I came. When he needed me, I didn't ask questions. For him, I would tolerate just about anything.
I shall endure, I replied, my usual sarcasm evident as I met his mischievous hazel eyes.
Jack was three years older and about to finish his third year of law school at Tulane. Time and again, he dragged me to benefits, luncheons, and galas as he schmoozed his way through the New Orleans elite, making his connections and building relationships. All so he could secure the right job offers when he graduated a little more than a year from now.
I hated wasting time on things that didn't interest me, but Jack didn't have a girlfriend to bore with these functions, so I often stepped in as the dutiful "plus one."
Find something to play with, he teased. And don't get dirty.
I cocked an eyebrow across the room at him, hoping he saw the dare in my expression. Even through my black metal half mask.
_If you say so . . ._ I taunted with my eyes.
I'd hung in there with Jack as he had made the rounds when we arrived, conversing and networking, until they started talking mistrials and mitigating circumstances. That was when I made my escape, choosing to wander and ponder in silence rather than be forced to smile and nod as if I had any interest in what they were talking about.
But now, glancing around the crowd and trying to take Jack's suggestion to find something—or someone—to occupy my time, I had to admit I wouldn't even know where to start.
My brother could work the room like a fine instrument—laughing and shaking hands just like a good ole boy—but I muddled around the edges.
In but not quite _in_.
There was a time when those roles were reversed.
And there was a time when I cared.
Leaning down, I inched up the sheer red layers of my gown to tuck my phone away in a concealed carry strap secured around my leg. Not that I was concealing a weapon, but it served a purpose nonetheless.
I let the hems of my gown fall back down to my feet, loving the weightlessness of the fabric as it brushed across my legs. Since it was February, it was still fairly cold outside, but I had been unable to resist the indulgence of the flowing, lightweight fluidity of the fabric though it was probably meant for spring.
For a girl who'd spent most of her upbringing in sneakers and tennis skirts, the gown earned me looks from men meant for the woman I sometimes had trouble believing I'd become.
Falling to the tops of my feet, the gown hugged my torso in a crisscross pattern on the front and back, but flared out only slightly below the waist in an A-line fit. It was bright red, and looked perfect with my black metal half mask, which curved over the top of my left eye, down the right side of my nose, and covered half of my right cheek in a lace pattern.
My only other accessory was a pair of diamond stud earrings given to me by my parents when I'd won the US Open junior tournament ten years ago.
Bending over, I slipped my heel off, the only part of the outfit I hated.
I arched my foot and then pointed my toes, rolling my ankle. Everything ached from the pressure of being packed together, and I didn't understand how other women lived in these every day.
Balancing myself on one leg, I grabbed my champagne glass and slid the other foot back into the shoe, but it stumbled out of my hand and fell to the ground.
Sighing, I leaned down to snatch up the heel.
But I stopped midbend, jerking back when someone grabbed my wrist and snatched the glass out of my hand.
"Careful," a low, deep voice warned.
I blinked, my eyes shooting between the hand on my wrist and the floor, where I had spilled half of my drink when I'd bent over.
I moved to straighten, but then I paused, seeing a man set the glass down and immediately kneel in front of me on one knee, avoiding the spot on the carpeting where my drink had spilled.
"Allow me," he suggested.
Ignoring the flutter in my chest, I watched as he took my ankle and slid my foot effortlessly back into my heel, his sure hands setting me right again.
The heat of his fingers spread up my leg, and I narrowed my eyes, a little annoyed that my heart was beating so fast.
He wasn't wearing a mask like most of the other guests. According to my father's general wisdom, it probably meant that he didn't play games or feel the need to be a part of the crowd. He wanted everyone to know who he was. Fearless, bold, a rule breaker . . .
But my inner cynic would say he'd probably just forgotten his mask at home.
He glanced up at me, a pert tilt to his lips and his hooded eyes taking me in with interest. I knew right away that he was older.
Significantly.
Probably midthirties, judging by the faint lines around his eyes.
And although that wasn't old, it was almost outside of my generation at twenty-three.
I liked that, too. If his hands were sure, maybe his tongue would be, too. Conversation-wise, I meant.
His black hair was cut close to the scalp on the sides and in the back, with the longer hair on top styled neatly. He was clean-shaven, and his tailored wool tux was a black deep enough to make everyone else's here look faded. His shoes outshined his Rolex, and thank goodness for that. Men with bling were high maintenance.
And he was handsome. The narrow jaw and high cheekbones accentuated his sharp black eyebrows over stone blue eyes.
He was more than handsome. He was seductive.
I felt a small smile tug at the corners of my lips.
"Thank you," I said softly, moving my foot back to the floor.
His fingers grazed an inch higher on my calf before letting me go, and I had to fight the chills that spread over my skin.
He was bold, too.
I held his eyes—the color of a cloud heavy with unfallen rain—as he rose, standing tall and not making any move to back off.
"Losing shoes, spilling drinks . . . Are you normally such a hot mess?" he teased, the confident mischief in his eyes turning everything below my waist warm.
I raised my eyebrows, shooting him a cocky smirk. "Feeling up strange women, condescending remarks . . . Are you normally so rude?" I asked.
His eyes held a smile, but I didn't wait for him to answer.
I plucked my champagne flute off the table and glided around him, back to the painting.
If he was the kind of man I'd hoped he was, he'd follow. He was attractive, and I was intrigued, but that didn't mean he didn't have to work for it.
I tilted the glass to my mouth, taking in the chilled bitterness of the bubbles on my tongue as I felt him watching me.
"You don't appear to be having a very good time," he observed, stepping up to my side.
His subtle cologne drifted through my nostrils, and my eyelids fluttered for a moment.
"On the contrary . . ." I gestured to the imitation Degas with my champagne. "I was just contemplating how some gasoline and a match would improve this painting."
He laughed under his breath, and I loved how his eyes shimmered in the dim light of the ballroom. "That bad, huh?"
I nodded, sighing. "That bad."
Standing next to him, I felt the full measure of his size. I was no shorty at five seven, but even in heels, I still came only to his shoulder. His chest was wide but lean, and I loved that I could make out the muscles in his upper arms when he crossed them over it. Even through his tux.
He looked down at me with the stern expression of a superior. "Do you often have pyrotechnic fantasies?" he asked, looking amused.
I turned back to the painting, absently staring at it as I thought about his question.
_Pyrotechnic fantasies?_ No.
I had lots of fantasies, pyrotechnic and not, but how obvious would I be to tell him that? It was a cheap response to a leading question. I wouldn't be so obvious.
"I don't want to start fires," I assured him, staring at the Degas with the flute against my lips. "I just like standing in the middle of burning rooms."
Tipping back the glass, I finished off the champagne and turned to set it down, but he took the base of the flute, stopping me.
"How long would you stay?" he inquired, his eyes thoughtful as he took the glass from my hand and set it down on the table. "Before you tried to escape, that is."
"Longer than anyone else."
He looked at me quizzically.
"How about you?" I questioned. "Would you join the mayhem in the mad rush for the exit?"
He turned back to the painting, smirking. "No," he answered. "I'd already be outside, of course."
I narrowed my eyes, confused.
He grinned at me and leaned in to whisper, "I set the fire, after all."
My jaw ached with a smile I refused to bestow on him. I didn't like surprises, but he was interesting, and he looked me in the eye when he spoke to me.
Of course, I wasn't as interested in his answers as I was in his ability to keep the conversation going. I could indulge in small talk, but this was more fun.
I let my eyes drift away from him.
"I'm sorry you don't like the artwork," he said, regarding the piece on the wall.
My thigh quivered with the vibration from my phone, but I ignored it.
I cleared my throat. "Degas is a wonderful artist," I went on. "I like him. He aimed to depict movement rather than stationary figures in many of his works."
"Except this one." He nodded to the piece of the lonely woman sitting in a bar.
"Yes, except this one," I agreed, gesturing to _L'absinthe_. "He also tried to show humans in isolation. This one was called ugly and disgusting by critics when it was unveiled."
"But you love it," he deduced.
I turned, slowly moving along the wall, knowing he'd follow.
"Yes, even when he is copied by bad artists," I joked. "But luckily no one here will know the difference."
I heard his quiet laugh at my audacity, and he was probably wondering whether or not to be insulted. Either way, he struck me as the type of man who didn't really care. My respect probably wasn't what he was after.
I felt his eyes wash over my back, following the lines of my body down to my hips. Other than my arms, my back was the only part of my body left bare by the fabric and crisscross work.
Turning through the open French doors, I walked onto the wide, candlelit balcony. The music inside slowly became a faint echo behind us.
"You don't really care about Degas, do you?" I asked, turning my head only enough to see him out of the corner of my eye as I walked to the railing.
"I couldn't give a fuck less about Degas," he stated without shame. "What's your name?"
"You don't really care about that, either."
But then his hand grabbed mine, pulling me to a stop. I turned halfway, looking up at him.
"I don't ask questions I don't want the answers to." It sounded like a warning.
I curled my fingers, feeling my heart skip a beat.
While I'd gotten the impression this man had a playful side, I now understood he had other faces, too.
"Easton," I acquiesced.
Turning back around, I pressed my hips against the railing and gripped the banister, feeling him behind me.
I breathed in, the scent of magnolias from the ballroom filling my nose along with a tinge of the ever-present flavor indigenous only to the Quarter. Aged wood, stale liquor, old paper, and rain all combined to create a fragrance that was almost more delicious than food on a quiet morning walk down Bourbon in the fog.
"Wouldn't you like to know my name?" he asked.
"I don't ask questions I don't want the answers to," I replied quietly.
I felt his smile even though I couldn't see it.
I stared out over the Quarter, nearly losing my breath at the sight.
A sea of people covered Bourbon Street like a flood, with barely enough room to turn around or maneuver through the masses. It was a sight I'd rarely seen in the five years I'd lived here, preferring to avoid the French Quarter during Mardi Gras in favor of the local hangouts on Frenchmen Street.
But it still had to be appreciated for the awe-inspiring sight it was.
The streetlamps glowed in the late-evening air, but they served only as a decoration. The neon lights of the bars, jazz clubs, and restaurants—not to mention the throngs of beads flying through the air from the balconies and down to waiting hands—cast a colorful display full of light, music, excitement, and hunger.
Anything went during Mardi Gras. _Eat what you want. Drink your fill. Say anything, and_ —I blinked, feeling him move to my side— _satiate all of your appetites._
Mardi Gras was a free pass. One night when rules were taboo and you did whatever you wanted, because you'd wake up tomorrow—Ash Wednesday—ready to purge your sins and cleanse your soul for the next six weeks of Lent.
I envied their carefree revelry, wishing for the courage to let go, stop looking over my shoulder, and laugh at things I wouldn't remember in the morning.
"Such chaos," I commented, observing the crowds stretching as far as the eye could see down in the street. "I've never had a desire to be in the midst of all that."
I turned my head, meeting his eyes as I swept my long, dark brown hair over my shoulder.
"But I like watching all the commotion from up here," I told him.
He narrowed his eyes. "That's no good," he scolded with a hint of a smile. "Everyone needs to experience the madness of the crowds down there at least once."
"As you sidestep the puddles of vomit, right?" I shot back.
He shook his head, amused. Leaning his hands on the railing and cocking his head at me, he asked, "So what do you do?"
"I finish my master's degree in a couple of months," I replied. "At Loyola."
A moment of apprehension crossed his eyes, and I cocked my head. Maybe he had thought I was older than I was.
"Does that bother you?" I asked.
"Why would it bother me?" he challenged.
I tilted the corner of my mouth in a smile at his game. "You didn't follow me out here for the exercise," I pointed out, both of us knowing damn well where the night between two consenting adults could lead. "I'm still in college, for a couple of months anyway. We might not have anything in common."
"I wouldn't worry," he replied, sounding cocky. "You've held my interest this far."
My eyes flared, and I looked away, tempted to either laugh or chastise him in anger.
"So what do you do, then?" I inquired, not really caring.
He stood up straight and slid his hands into his pockets as he turned to me. "Guess," he commanded.
I peered up at him, also turning my body to face his.
_Guess._
_Okay . . ._
Letting my eyes fall down his neck and chest, I took in the black three-piece tux with the silk necktie fitted around the collar of his white shirt.
Every hair was in place, and his statuesque face gleamed alabaster in the candlelight.
His shoes were shiny and unmarred, and the face of his Rolex, with its black alligator-skin strap, reflected the colorful glow of the Christmas lights across the street, which probably remained up all year.
It was virtually impossible to tell exactly what he did for a living, but I could venture a guess.
Stepping up, I reached out with soft hands and slowly opened his jacket at the waist, seeing his arms fall to his sides as he probably wondered what the hell I was doing.
Looking up at him, I tried to keep my breathing steady, but the heat in his eyes as he looked down at me made it difficult.
I inched forward, my body nearly touching his, and then I licked my lips and let my eyes drop to his waist.
"Well," I played, "I was going to say junior partner, but that's a Ferragamo belt."
His chest moved with his suddenly shallow breaths. "And?"
I looked up, meeting his mischievous eyes again. "And usually it's BOSS or Versace for this set." I nodded toward the ballroom, indicating the gentlemen inside. "But if you can spend four hundred dollars for a belt," I clarified to him, "I'm going to say _senior_ partner instead."
He snorted but made no move to take my hands away.
"You're a lawyer," I finally stated.
He squinted his eyes, regarding me. "You seem to know a lot about men's belts," he observed, "and how to spot money."
I almost rolled my eyes. He either thought I was a debutante, used to expensive things, or a woman on the prowl for a rich man.
I was neither.
"Don't worry," I assured him, leaning back against the railing. "If you're lucky enough to get anything out of me, it will come free."
His body tensed, and he tilted his chin up, looking at me like he wasn't quite sure what to do with me. I dropped my eyes, grinding my fingers into my palms and trying to calm my nerves.
_Why did I say that?_
We weren't in a bar, where it would be assumed that if we got along we might go home together. He was flirting, and I was flirting, but I shouldn't have been so forward.
Even if it was what I wanted.
I may not do relationships, but that didn't mean I didn't like to lose myself in someone for a night. And it had been too long.
He stepped up, and my breath caught when he positioned himself in front of me, planting his hands on the railing at my sides.
Leaning down into my space, he spoke softly. "For such a young woman, you have quite a mouth on you."
And then his eyes fell to my lips, and my knees nearly buckled.
"I can stop if you want," I taunted in a quiet voice.
But he grinned. "Now, what fun would that be?" he shot back, still staring at my mouth.
I inhaled, bringing the scent of him into my lungs as my brain turned fuzzy with the aromas of spice and sandalwood.
"Tell me," he started, "if I'm a lawyer, how do you know that?"
"Well." I straightened. "Your nails are clean, so you don't work in labor," I pointed out, nudging my way out of his hold and walking past him to the stone vase filled with flowers. "Your clothes are designer and tailored, so you make money." I looked him up and down, taking in his appearance. "And it's New Orleans. You can't walk two feet without bumping into a lawyer or a law student."
I drew the flower petals between my fingers, feeling their silky softness as I sensed him approach my side.
"Keep going," he insisted. "What brought me here tonight, then?"
My jaw tingled with a smile. He liked to play.
That was odd, actually. I wasn't used to men who knew how to keep my attention.
"You were forced," I answered, thinking about the man I wanted him to be. Not one of those stuffy men inside, smoking cigars and patting themselves on the back. I wanted him to be different.
I went on. "You don't really know any of these people, and they don't know you, do they?" I ventured. "You felt obligated to attend tonight due to family pressure or maybe by your boss's request."
He watched me, a hint of something I couldn't place in his eyes.
"You're just waiting," I continued, "trying to determine when you can politely abandon the uptight political conversations, bad food, and roomful of people you can't stand."
He leaned against the railing again, regarding me as he listened.
"You're restless," I stated. "There are other things you wish you could be doing right now, but you're not sure you should or you're not sure they're things you can have." I raised my eyes, meeting his.
He stared back in silence, and I desperately wanted to know what he was thinking.
Of course, I'd been describing myself this whole time, but his gaze was locked on me, never breaking eye contact.
I moved closer to him, the February chill finally catching up with me.
"What will I do when I leave tonight?" he asked.
"You won't leave alone," I determined. "A man like you probably didn't _arrive_ alone."
He cocked an eyebrow, challenging me, but he didn't deny it.
I stared at him, waiting for his admission. Was he here with someone? Was he bold enough to come on to me with another woman around?
He wasn't wearing a wedding ring, but that didn't mean he wasn't attached.
"And you?" He reached out and took a lock of my hair between his fingers. "Who are you here with?"
I thought about my brother, who'd probably been calling me, since I'd felt my phone vibrate twice.
"Never mind," he refuted. "I don't want to know yet."
"Why?"
"Because . . ." He looked up, focusing over my head out in the distance. "You distract me, and I like it. I'm having fun."
Yeah, I was, too. For the first time all night.
Attendees laughed and danced inside, while the two of us, alone in the cold night with only a few other people lounging around the large balcony, carried on with our stolen moment.
"I should really get back, though," I suggested, pulling away.
My brother was no doubt looking for me.
But he reached out and grabbed my hand, narrowing his eyes. "Not yet," he urged, looking behind me toward the ballroom.
I stopped, not making a move to take away my hand.
He stood in front of me, his chest nearly touching mine.
"You're right," he whispered, his breath falling over me. "I don't really like a lot of those people, and they don't really know me." His voice turned hoarse. "But I like you. I'm not ready to say good night yet."
I swallowed, hearing the soft trickle of a slow jazz tune drifting out from the ballroom.
"Dance with me," he commanded.
He didn't wait for a response.
Sliding a hand around my waist, he guided me in, and I sucked in a sharp breath, my body meeting his for the first time.
Raising my arms, I put my right hand on his shoulder and my left hand in his as I let him lead me in a small circle, remaining in our own small, private space. Chills broke out down my arms, but I didn't think he noticed.
I let my eyes fall closed for a moment, not understanding what made him feel so good. My hands tingled and my legs felt weak.
There was rarely ever a time when I felt drawn to a man. I'd felt attraction and passion, and I'd enjoyed sex, but I'd never opened myself up to someone long enough to connect.
Now I found myself not wanting this evening to end any way other than in his arms.
That's where I wanted this to go. I didn't need his name, what he did for a living, or his family history. I just wanted to be close to someone and feel good, and maybe that would be enough to satisfy me for the next few months until I needed someone again.
Shaking my head slightly, I tried to clear my thoughts.
_Enough, Easton._ He was good-looking and interesting, but I didn't see anything in him that I hadn't seen in any other man.
He wasn't special.
Looking up, I asked, "You're not enjoying the party, so what would you rather be doing right now?"
He shot me a small, sexy smile. "I like what I'm doing right now."
I rolled my eyes, covering up how much I also liked him holding me close. "I mean, if not this?"
He twisted his lips, looking me over like he was thinking. "I'd be working, I guess," he answered. "I work a lot."
So he'd rather be doing work than schmoozing and drinking at a Mardi Gras ball? I dipped my head, breaking out in a laugh.
"What?" He pinched his eyebrows together.
I met his eyes, seeing the confusion. "You prefer work," I stated. "I can relate to that."
He nodded. "My work challenges me, but it's also predictable. I like that," he admitted. "I don't like surprises."
I instantly slowed, nearly stopping our dance.
I said the same thing all the time. I never liked surprises _._
"Everything else outside of work is unpredictable," I added for him. "It's hard to control."
He cocked his head and brought his hand up to my face, running his thumb along my cheek.
"Yeah," he mused, leaning in while his hand circled the back of my neck possessively. "But there are times," he said softly, "when I like to lose control."
I closed my eyes. _Jesus._
"What's your last name?" he asked.
I opened my eyes, blinking. _My last name?_ I had kind of liked keeping specifics off the table. I didn't even know his first name yet.
"Easton?" he pressed.
I narrowed my eyes. "Why do you want to know that?"
He stepped forward, charging me slowly and pushing me backward. I had to keep backing up so as not to fall. "Because I intend on getting to know you," he said. It sounded like a threat.
"Why?"
"Because I like talking to you," he shot back, his voice thick with a laugh he was holding in.
I hit the wall behind me and stopped, glancing over at the people sitting at the table across the balcony.
He closed the remaining distance between us and dipped down until his face was a couple of inches from mine.
I locked my hands behind my back, instinctively tapping the wall with my fingers and counting in my head. _One, two, three—_
"Do you like _me_?" He cut me off, a playful tilt to his lips.
I couldn't keep the smile off my face. I turned my head, but I knew he saw it anyway.
"I don't know," I answered casually. "You might be too much of a gentleman."
The corners of his lips curled, looking sinister, and he threaded his hand around the back of my neck and through my hair, gripping my waist with the other and pressing his body to mine.
"Which means I'm still a man, only with more skill," he whispered against my lips, making my breath shake. "And there's only one place I won't be careful with you."
A whimper escaped, and I felt his hand tighten in my hair. He stared at my mouth, looking like he was ready to eat.
"I think you like me," he whispered, and I could almost taste his hot breath. "I think you even want to know my name."
He inched in, and I braced myself, so ready for it, but then suddenly he stopped and looked up.
"Tyler, there you—" A woman's voice stopped midsentence.
I twisted my head to see a beautiful blonde, maybe seven years older than me with a slightly surprised but not angry look on her face.
_Tyler._
That was his name.
And I shifted, forcing his hands to drop away from me.
Tyler straightened and looked at the woman.
"They're about to start," she told him, clutching her small purse in both hands in front of her. "Come inside."
He nodded. "Yes, thank you, Tessa."
She cast me a quick look before spinning around and walking back inside the ballroom.
Well, she must not be his wife.
Not that I thought he had one anyway, with no wedding ring, but she'd called him Tyler, which meant she was familiar with him.
I smoothed my dress down and touched my mask, making sure everything was in place.
"She's a date," he pointed out. "Not a girlfriend."
I shook my head, finally looking up at him. "No need to explain," I said lightly.
I was glad he wasn't married, but if he wanted to misbehave while he had a date in the next room, that was on him. I wasn't going to feel embarrassed.
But I was disappointed.
I looked around, avoiding his gaze, and hugged myself, rubbing my arms. The cold had turned bitter, and it sank into my bones now.
I hadn't wanted the night to end, but it was over now.
I'd liked it when I didn't know his name. I'd liked it when I was waiting to find out.
He leaned in. "I—"
But then he stopped, looking up with a scowl on his face, as a voice came over the microphone from inside.
"Give me your last name," he demanded quickly, pinning me with a hard stare.
"Now, what fun would that be?" I replied with his same sarcastic remark.
But he didn't see it as funny.
He shifted, tipping his head up and listening to the man on the microphone and looking hurried.
Why did he look so nervous?
"Shit," he cursed, and then leaned in to me, planting his hands on the wall behind my head.
"If you leave," he warned, "there will be nothing holding me back when we run into each other again."
A shiver ran through my chest, and my thighs tensed.
But I hid it well.
"In your dreams," I shot back. "I don't like lawyers."
He grinned, straightening and looking down at me. "I'm not a lawyer."
And with a smug look, he walked past me, back into the ballroom.
I let out a breath, my shoulders falling slightly. _Damn it._
I was both sick with disappointment and filled with unspent lust. What an asshole he was for leading me on when he had someone inside.
I'd acted like I'd known he hadn't come alone, but I hadn't really believed it. Perhaps he thought he'd get my number, take her home tonight, and call me tomorrow.
But that wasn't going to happen.
Sex happened where and when I wanted it. I didn't wait for men who put me on a menu.
I felt my phone vibrate again, and I ignored it, knowing Jack was probably pissed I'd disappeared for so long.
Stepping into the lively ballroom, with glasses clinking and people laughing, I ignored the speaker on stage when I peered over the crowd and spotted my brother by the tall double doors.
He had on his coat and held mine in his hand, and he looked aggravated. I moved swiftly over to him, turning around so he could put my wrap on me.
"Where were you?" he complained.
"Playing," I mumbled, not even trying to hide the teasing in my voice.
The speaker onstage droned on, slurring his words, and the audience laughed at his jokes, everyone else drunk enough to find them funny.
"Well, I want to get out of here before the NOPD parade comes down Bourbon," Jack reminded me, and then turned to fiddle with his phone.
I'd forgotten about the parade.
At midnight on Mardi Gras, the New Orleans Police Department—in their fleet of horses, dogs, ATVs, cars, trucks, and officers—walked the entire length of Bourbon, clearing the streets, an act that signaled the end of Mardi Gras and the beginning of Lent.
Partygoers filtered down the side streets only to return as soon as the police had passed by. We had gotten a hotel room on Decatur for the night to avoid traffic back to school in Uptown, but we needed to hurry if we were to get through the crowd before the police blocked our route.
"Come on," he urged, making his way out the doors while I began to follow.
"So, ladies and gentlemen!" the loud voice boomed behind me. "Please help me welcome a man who I hope will soon be announcing his candidacy for the United States Senate next year!" Everyone started clapping as he shouted, "Mr. Tyler Marek!"
I spun around, my eyes rounding as I saw the man who had just pinned me against a wall outside step onto the stage.
_Holy shit._
"Damn, I didn't know he was here," my brother said, coming up to my side.
"You know him?" I asked, glancing at my brother before turning back to the stage.
"You've never heard of Tyler Marek?" he scolded. "He owns the third largest construction company in the world, Easton. Rumor has it, he's running for the Senate next year. I wish I could've met him."
A politician?
_Jesus._ I'd stepped into that one.
I should've been embarrassed. These people were clearly his friends—or associates—and the ball was, at least in some small part, in his honor. I'd insulted the food, the attendees, and while everyone seemed to know exactly who he was, I'd had no idea.
I tightened my wrap around my body, seeing him give the crowd a playful look I was already familiar with.
And just then, I stilled, seeing his eyes catch mine, and heat rose in my cheeks at the slow, self-satisfied smirk spreading across his face.
He started to speak, but I no longer cared to listen.
_If you leave, there will be nothing holding me back when we run into each other again._
I arched an eyebrow at him and then leaned over to the empty round table next to the exit and blew out the small candle sitting there. Smoke drifted up, filling the air with its pungent scent.
And without a backward glance, I left the ballroom, my brother following behind.
# TWO
EASTON
_Six months later_
My brother was my best friend. Not many girls my age could say that, but it was true.
Most siblings fought at one time or another. Competition and grudges form, and you run the risk of treating each other like shit because you can. Family is family after all, and they'll forgive and forget.
But Jack and I never had that problem.
When we were young, we trained together and played together, and as adults, nothing had changed. He had never not wanted to be around me, and I often joked that he liked me more than I did.
And he would agree, always hinting that I was too hard on myself, but he was the same way.
It was a learned behavior in our home, and we didn't do anything half-assed. Although at the time I'd resented our parents pushing us as hard as they did, I supposed it nurtured qualities that would help us in any field we pursued in our futures.
"Come on." My brother heaved at my side, pulling to a stop and shaking his head at me. "Enough," he ordered.
I halted, sucking in air as sweat soaked my back and neck.
"Two more laps," I pushed. "You could've made it two more laps."
He gulped air and walked over to the edge of the path covered by the canopy of old oaks lining the trail in Audubon Park.
"It's August, Easton," he bit out as he put his hands on his hips and bowed his head, trying to catch his breath. "And we live in a semitropical climate. It's too hot for this."
Grabbing the T-shirt out of the back of his mesh shorts, he wiped the sweat off his forehead and face.
I followed, pushing the strands of hair that had fallen out of my ponytail back over the top of my head. "Well, now you don't get your smoothie," I grumbled, bringing up the bribe I'd offered to get him out here on a Sunday morning.
"Screw the smoothie," he shot back. "I should've stayed in bed. School is already kicking my ass, and I need the rest."
He dropped his T-shirt to the ground and gestured toward me.
"Go on," he urged. "Lie down."
I walked over in front of him, knowing better than to argue. He'd had enough and wanted to get the workout over with.
I dropped to my ass and lay down with my knees bent, while he stepped on top of my toes, safe inside my sneakers, to hold me in place.
Crossing my arms over my chest and clutching my shoulders, I tightened my stomach muscles and pulled up and then shot back down until my shoulder blades hit the grass. I pulled up again, repeating the crunches over and over as my brother stood above me texting.
He was always working—texting, e-mailing, organizing—and it always had to do with school or something related to his future.
He was driven, committed, and controlled, and we were exactly alike.
According to studies, firstborn children were reliable, conscientious, and cautious, and my brother was certainly all of those. As a middle child, I was supposed to be a peacemaker and a people-pleaser with lots of friends.
I wasn't any of those things.
The only quality I shared with other middle children was a sense of rebelliousness. However, I hardly thought that had anything to do with my birth placement and, instead, had everything to do with my youth.
While many middle children often felt as if they didn't have an identity or anything special about them that set them apart, I, on the other hand, had had more attention than I'd deserved and had gotten tired of being under a spotlight. Tired of being special, gifted, and prized.
I wanted more—or less. However you looked at it.
I pulled up and fell back, never releasing the muscles in my abs. "I'm proud of you, you know?" I breathed out, looking up at him. "This is your year."
"Yeah." He smirked, his eyes still on his phone as he joked, "What do you know?"
Jack had just started his final year at Tulane Law School. Not only was he busy with classes, moot court, and the pro bono requirement for his degree, but he was also looking for an internship to get a head start in the field. He'd worked hard and deserved every inch he'd gained, never expecting anything handed to him.
"I know you're up at four a.m. every morning to study before class." I winced as my abs started to burn. "You refuse to date, because it'll interfere with your studies, and you take those insipid law journals everywhere with you: the streetcar, the coffee shop, and even to the bathroom—"
"Hey—"
"You're the hardest worker." I continued, ignoring his embarrassed protest. "And you're in the ninety-eighth percentile. You didn't get there by luck." I smiled sweetly, getting cocky. "I may get a sunburn basking in the glow of your success."
He rolled his eyes and stepped off my toes, dropping to the ground himself. We both turned to get on our hands and toes, immediately dropping and rising for push-ups.
We worked out together at least once a week, although it was usually more than that. Between finishing my degree and graduating last May and Jack's demanding schedule, we had no set days or times, but we made it a point to keep each other motivated.
My brother had never really been an athlete, but he'd grown up helping me train, so exercise was as much a part of his life as it was mine.
"I love you, you know?" He stared at the ground beneath him as he dropped down and pushed back up. "I should say it more."
I stopped and turned, sitting on my ass as I peered over at him.
He did the same, resting his forearms on his knees and looking solemn.
"It was hard growing up with you, Easton," he told me, staring off in front of him, looking somber. "All the attention, the way our parents prioritized our lives around you . . ." He trailed off, stopping short, and I knew what he wasn't saying.
Our parents had loved all three of their children—him, me, and our younger sister, Avery—but he knew and I knew, even though it was never talked about at the time, that I came first. My rising tennis career took precedence over everything.
Jack and Avery couldn't take any extracurricular activities if it interfered with my training schedule, and they'd had to sit through countless matches, invisible because our parents' eyes were always on me. Only me.
My brother shouldn't have been my best friend. He should've resented me.
He popped up off the ground and reached out, offering me a hand. I took it and let him pull me up, my body vibrating with fatigue.
"You never let it go to your head, though," he allowed. "You always acted like Avery and I were just as important."
"Of course you were," I stated without hesitation as I dusted off my shorts.
"Yeah, well, our parents didn't always think so." He sighed. "Thanks for letting me have this," he said, referring to our choice to move to New Orleans five years ago, so he could attend Tulane, "and thanks for letting me feel like a big brother for a change."
I laughed, raising my fists and jabbing at him. "Yeah, you're capable of it sometimes," I teased in a light voice.
"Sometimes?" He held up his palms so I could slap at them. "I'm three years older than you, Pork Chop."
"Only physically." I shrugged. "According to studies, men trail women in maturity by eleven years."
He jabbed back, and I blocked, pushing his thick arm off to the side and seeing him stumble.
"You and your statistics," he complained. "Where did you read that?"
"The Internet."
"Ah, the infinite abyss of reliable information." He threw a few more slow punches, and I bobbed and ducked as we danced in a circle.
"Why don't you try getting out of your apartment and testing those theories out on your own?" he challenged.
I hooded my eyes, annoyed. "I get out of my apartment."
"Sure." He nodded. "For work. Or with me. Or when you're on the prowl."
I inhaled an angry breath, jabbing him harder and finally catching him in the chest.
He grunted. "Ouch."
And then shit got real.
He straightened, steeling his body and moving in, punching faster and making me duck, swerve, and sweat.
_On the prowl?_ He knew he shouldn't have made a dig at me.
Everything else could be Jack's business. We didn't make decisions without the other's input, and when our world had fallen apart five years ago, I'd let him hold my hand from time to time to make him feel useful, but my sex life was the one thing I kept private.
Most of the time I stayed so busy that I didn't miss men. And I certainly had no interest in inviting one into my life for anything long-term.
It wasn't that I hadn't tried, but I didn't like messy and unpredictable, and relationships made me feel caged.
But once in a while I started to miss being touched. I missed being close to someone and being wanted. Even if just for a night.
So I'd go out and get it out of my system and then come home, my feathers smooth again. Sometimes it was a "friend" who didn't have any more of an interest in a relationship than I did, but occasionally, when I wanted to push the envelope for extra excitement, it was someone new.
Someone unknown.
"I mean, at the very least," my brother complained, "try taking an actual self-defense class instead of testing out moves on me that you learned from YouTube."
I grabbed his hand and bent his arm at the wrist, making him hunch over with the pain. His face twisted, and I stepped up to him, gloating.
"You don't like being my tackling dummy?" I taunted, adding pressure to his wrist.
He twisted his lips in annoyance, and before I knew what had happened, he'd grabbed my leg out from under me and pushed me down onto the ground. I crashed to my ass, pain spreading up to my hips and down my thighs.
He shot down, coming to bend over me and pin my neck to the ground with his hand.
I squirmed and tried to pry out of his grip, but it wasn't working. I could feel my face tighten and rush with blood. I probably looked like a tomato.
He lightened his grip and narrowed his concerned eyes on me, speaking sadly. "You're lonely, Easton."
I blinked, the sound of my breathing flooding my ears and echoing in my head. I felt like I wanted the ground beneath me to open and swallow me up whole.
Why would my brother say that?
I was alone, not lonely, and it wasn't like he had room to talk.
And my life was good. My apartment was gorgeous, I'd graduated at the top of my class at Loyola, and I had just landed a great position as a history teacher at an elite private school here in the city.
I was going to be a part of the future, doing work that meant something.
And I was only twenty-three.
I'd been focused, and I was still very young. It wasn't like there was any rush. It wasn't like I was going to be alone forever.
He released me and sat back, pushing his sandy blond hair back on his forehead. "I just worry about you," he explained. "I still think you should talk to someone."
I sat up on my elbows and gave him a pointed look, staying calm despite the anger crawling its way into my chest. "I'm fine," I maintained.
"Really?" he challenged. "And how many times did you go back to check that you locked your front door this morning?"
I rolled my eyes, looking away. I should never have told him. My little compulsions made my brother nervous.
Okay, so sometimes I liked to make sure everything was in its place. Sometimes locking my front door four times instead of just once made me feel safer.
And sometimes I liked to count things.
But the truth was I simply liked to be aware of my environment and the people around me.
And I managed my habit well enough that people didn't notice. My brother probably never would have if I hadn't told him.
"I'm not the center of attention anymore," I reminded him. "Stop trying to keep me there, okay? I'm fine." I pushed myself up and got to my feet, dusting off my butt as he also stood.
"My bathroom door handle broke," I told him, inserting my earbuds in my ears before he had a chance to say anything else. "So I need to hit the hardware store."
"Well, do you want me to look at it?" He slipped back into his gray T-shirt as I veered around him back toward St. Charles Avenue.
I shook my head, joking as I walked away, "You wouldn't know what you were doing any more than I would."
"You got something against just hiring a repairman?" he shouted after me as I walked.
I turned, dishing his attitude right back at him. "You got something against tutorials on YouTube?" I shot out, and continued with my life motto, which he knew all too well. "Always go to bed smarter—"
"—than you were when you woke up," he finished in a mocking voice.
I smiled and turned on "Hazy Shade of Winter" by the Bangles before jogging out of the park.
—
I spent the hour after I returned home crouched down next to my bathroom door as I pored over the instructions on how to install my new doorknob.
Luckily I'd bought a general tool set when I'd moved into my apartment two months ago, after graduation, but the clerk at the store had suckered me into a cordless power drill, which I was enjoying way too much.
Knowledge made us stronger, and I liked being able to do things for myself. Every new challenge was a mental checkoff of something I wouldn't need to learn later.
My brother, however, didn't share my need for autonomy.
When I'd moved in, he'd bought me a coffeepot as a housewarming gift. I'd bought a fire extinguisher and a thirty-eight-piece handyman set.
He'd gifted me with a wine rack stocked with pinot noir, and I'd added two more dead bolts to the front door.
Our senses of self-sufficiency were different, but then they had to be. Our experiences were very different growing up.
I smiled to myself, embarrassment warming my cheeks as I drilled in the screws. I was glad Jack wasn't here to see how this was possibly the most fun I'd had all week.
I may have gotten overzealous and split the wood in the door when tightening the screws, too.
And I may even have crawled around my entire apartment tightening any screw I could find before I decided to put my new toy away for the day.
He'd have me committed. Or at least send me on a forced spa day.
After eating a sandwich for lunch, I showered and combed my closet for an outfit for tonight.
The new academic year started tomorrow, and my students' parents had been invited for an open house this evening at Braddock Autenberry, my new school.
Or my _only_ school, as this was my first teaching position.
Having gotten my keys to the school a couple weeks ago, I had prepared the room, and it was all set for tomorrow. Tonight I could try to relax and tend to the parents making their rounds to the different rooms before school started in the morning.
Reaching into my closet, I picked out my red pencil skirt, which fell just above the knee in the front but was cut to drape just below the knees in the back, stitched with a slight ruffle there for flare.
Laying it on the bed, I dug back into the closet for my fitted black blouse. It had long, cuffed sleeves and buttoned up to the neck.
To finish off the outfit, my heels were plain black with a pointed toe. I twisted my lips at the sight of them, setting them on the floor next to my bed.
I hated heels, but tonight was "make a good first impression," kind of occasion, so I'd suck it up. I'd filter in sneakers and flats throughout the school year, though.
The outfit was conservative but stylish, and after I did my light makeup and my hair in loose curls, pulling back the sides and fixing a clip to the back of my head, I dressed with care, making sure not to wrinkle anything.
This was a brand-new start, and I wanted to make sure everything was perfect.
Once I'd fastened my watch to my wrist and put in the diamond studs from my parents, I smoothed my hand down my shirt and skirt, brushing off lint that wasn't really there.
_Perfect._
I checked the windows, the stove, and both doors, making sure everything was secure—twice—before I left.
When I arrived at the school, in the heart of Uptown, I still had a couple more hours before the open house began. I checked my mailbox in the teachers' lounge, made some extra copies of my parent letter, and double-checked my laptop and projector to make sure my PowerPoint presentation was set to run.
We were supposed to have a mini speech ready to go when parents arrived, but I'd gauged—hopefully correctly—that parents would filter in and out, visiting classrooms in no set order, so I'd just designed a presentation with pictures and captions to play in the background. They could watch it or not.
Student textbooks were on the desk for their perusal, and copies of my syllabus and calendar with my contact information sat on a table by the door.
Other teachers at our staff development days this past week had talked about bringing cookies and chocolate-covered strawberries to offer parents when they visited their rooms, but after the school nurse scared the shit out of us with the EpiPen training on Wednesday, I'd decided not to take any chances with allergies. Bottled water, it was.
I let Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry" play lightly in the background from my iPod dock as I walked around, double – and triple-checking everything to make sure the room was ready to go, for not only tonight but for tomorrow, as well.
"Are you Easton Bradbury?" a voice chirped behind me.
I turned, seeing a redhead in a navy blue A-line dress hovering at my classroom door.
"I'm Kristen Meyer," she continued, placing her hand on her chest. "I teach Technology and Earth Science. I'm right across the hall."
I put a smile on my face and walked over, noticing that she looked only a few years older than me.
"Hi." I shook her hand. "I'm Easton. Sorry we didn't meet this week."
Our staff meetings were mostly departmentalized, and since I was US and World History, she and I had probably been in the same room for only a few hours during our staff meetings before we'd split off into groups.
Her red lips spread in a beautiful smile. "This is your first year?"
I nodded, sighing. "Yes," I admitted. "I've done observations and a practicum, but other than that, I'm"—I exhaled a nervous breath—"new."
"You'll get that crash course tomorrow." She waved her hand, walking past me into the room and looking around. "Don't worry, though. The first year's the easiest."
I pinched my eyebrows together, not believing that for a second. "I've heard the exact opposite, actually."
She twirled around, looking completely at ease with herself. "Oh, that's what they tell you to give you something to look forward to," she joked. "Your first year you're just trying to keep your head above water, you know? Learn the ropes, get paperwork done on time, spend countless hours preparing one thing only to find out the lesson bombed . . . " She laughed.
"What they don't tell you," she continued, leaning against a student desk, "is that college prepared you for nothing. Your first year, you're learning to teach. Every year after that you're trying to be successful at it. That's the hard part."
"Great," I said sarcastically, laughing and putting my hands on my hips. "I _thought_ I learned to teach in college."
"You didn't," she deadpanned. "Tomorrow is baptism by fire. Get ready."
I looked away, straightening my back. It was my brain cracking the whip, so I wouldn't scowl.
Deep down I knew she was probably right, but I still didn't like being knocked off my horse when I'd spent months preparing.
I'd done the work, taking all the classes I needed and even extra ones. I'd read up on the latest research and strategies, and I'd opted not to lesson plan with the other history teachers in favor of planning on my own—which I was allowed to do as long as I covered the curriculum and standards.
My lesson plans were done for the whole school year, but now I was worried about whether I'd done a lot of work for nothing.
What if I had no idea what I was getting myself into?
"Don't worry," Kristen spoke up. "It's not the students that are the problem." She lowered her voice and leaned in. "The parents are very invested in where their tuition money goes."
"What do you mean?"
She straightened, crossing her arms over her chest and speaking quietly. "Public school parents tend not to be involved enough. Private school parents, maybe too much. They can get invasive," she warned. "And they bring lawyers to parent-teacher conferences sometimes, so be prepared."
And then she patted me on the back, like I'd needed comforting, and walked out.
_They can get invasive?_
I cocked an eyebrow and stepped up to the large side-by-side windows lining the wall to rearrange the plants on the sill. Peering out the windows, I noticed that the sun had set and parents and students were stepping out of expensive cars, making their way into the school.
The manicured ladies meddled with their children's hair, while the fathers conducted business on their phones.
I spun around, heading for my classroom door to prop it open.
I knew how to handle invasive.
Over the next couple of hours, parents and students filtered in and out of the room, following their class schedule to meet every teacher and learn their class route. Since my students would be mostly freshmen, I had a great turnout. Most parents wanted their sons and daughters to have the lay of the land before their first day of high school, and judging by the sign-in sheet I'd asked parents to fill out, I'd met almost two-thirds of my kids and their families. The ones I hadn't met, I would try to call or e-mail this week to introduce myself and "open the lines of communication."
I moved around the room, introducing myself and chatting with families here and there but mostly just watching. I'd adorned the walls with some maps and posters, while a few artifacts and tools used by historians and archeologists sat on tables and shelves. They moved from one area to another, taking in the clues I'd left as to what we'd study this year.
Even though I had about a hundred eighty days with the students, this was the night that was the most important. Seeing how your future student interacted with their parents offered a good indication of what to expect during the school year.
Which parent did they seem to fear more? (That's the one you would call when there was trouble.) How did they speak to their parents? (Then you'd know how they'd speak to you.)
A couple parents and kids still flitted around the room, but as it was almost end time, everyone was starting to leave.
"Hi." I walked up to a young man who'd been slouched in one of the desks for a while, sitting alone. "What's your name?"
The kid wore earbuds and played on his phone, but he shot his eyes up at me, looking annoyed.
I wanted to sit down and spark up a conversation, but I could already feel the apprehension. This one was defiant.
Catching sight of the name tag the PTA had stuck to the left of his chest when he'd showed up tonight, I held out my hand.
"Christian?" I smiled. "Nice to meet you. I'm E—" But I stopped and corrected myself. "Ms. Bradbury," I amended. "Which class will you be joining us for?"
But then his phone beeped, and he sighed, pulling out his earbuds. "Do you have a charger?" he asked, looking impatient.
I dropped my hand and tilted my chin down, eyeing him. Thank goodness I didn't believe in first impressions; otherwise I might have been irritated at his lack of manners.
He waited for me to answer, staring at me with blue-gray eyes beneath black hair, stylishly mussed, and I waited as well, crossing my arms over my chest.
He rolled his eyes and gave in, finally looking at the piece of paper lying on the desk. "I'll be joining you for US History," he answered, his flippant tone putting me on edge.
I nodded and took the paper, creased with half a dozen folds. "And where are your parents?" I inquired.
"My mother's in Egypt."
I noticed that he was in my first-period class and handed the paper back to him. "And your father?" I prodded.
He sat up, stuffing the paper into the back pocket of his khakis. "At a city planner's meeting. He's meeting me here."
I watched him stand up and smooth a hand down his black shirt and khaki and black necktie. He was nearly as tall as me.
I straightened and cleared my throat. "A city planner's meeting?" I questioned. "On a Sunday night?"
His white teeth shone in a condescending smile. "Good catch," he commended. "I asked him the same question. He ignored me."
I arched an eyebrow, immediately discerning that he and his father didn't get along. What were they going to be like in the same room together?
He affixed the earbuds back into his ears, getting ready to tune me out. "If I give you any grief, it's best just to call my mother in Africa rather than deal with my father," he told me. "Just a tip."
I shot up my eyebrows, breaking out in a small grin. He was a little pill.
But then so was I. I could understand where this one was coming from. We might just get along after all.
Turning around, I walked to my desk and slipped my phone out of the drawer. Dislodging the battery, I walked over and handed it to him.
"Charge it back up tonight and we'll exchange tomorrow morning, okay?"
He pinched his eyebrows together and slowly reached out his hand, taking the battery. Luckily we both had the latest generation of the same phone.
"According to the student handbook," he started, swapping out his nearly dead battery with mine, "we're not allowed cell phones in the classroom."
"In my class, you are," I shot back, standing my ground. "You'll find out more about that tomorrow."
He handed me the dead battery and nodded. I relaxed, relieved that he seemed to soften a little.
"Christian."
We both looked up, turning our heads toward the door, when the sharp tone startled us both.
Standing in the doorway, filling the space in a deep-black three-piece suit, white shirt, and gold tie was Christian. All grown up.
The stone-blue eyes narrowed on us under eyebrows that didn't curve but slanted.
_Oh, shit._
I stood there, stunned still and not breathing as my fists instantly clenched.
I may have just met the son, but I already knew the father.
I looked away, blinking long and hard. _No, no, no . . ._
My pulse raced, and my forehead and neck broke out in a cold sweat.
I didn't know if he recognized me, but I couldn't bring myself to move toward him. What the hell was I supposed to do?
It was Tyler Marek.
The same man who'd danced with me, flirted with me, and told me there was one place where he wouldn't be careful with me was my student's parent?
Spinning around, I returned to the front of the room, choosing to ignore him.
I circled my desk and bent down to the open drawer so I could replace the battery in my phone. I didn't need to bend, but I could feel his eyes following me, and I needed a moment to panic in private.
I closed my eyes, inhaling deeply.
He hadn't seemed like the type to have a kid when I'd met him before. Had I been wrong? Was he married?
I hadn't seen a ring on his finger last February at the Mardi Gras ball, but that didn't mean anything nowadays. Men took them off as easily as they put them on.
What would happen if he recognized me? Thank God I hadn't slept with him.
I drew in a long breath as I replaced the case on my phone and closed my bag.
Licking my dry lips, I swallowed the lump in my throat and forced myself to stand the hell up and deal with it.
Straightening my back, I smoothed a hand down my blouse and shirt.
I gathered some of the surveys that parents had filled out and straightened them, setting them in the tray in the corner of my desk.
The other parents and students had already drifted out of the room, and I tensed, seeing his long legs coming to stand in front of my desk.
_Tyler Marek._
I'd thought about him. More than I wanted to admit.
However, I'd resisted the urge to Google him for more information, not wanting to indulge my pointless curiosity.
I'd never expected to see him again, much less here.
"I've met you before, haven't I?" he asked, sounding almost sure.
I looked up, chills spreading down my arms at his sharp gaze. He held my eyes, calm and attentive as he waited for his answer.
I swallowed and steeled my shaky smile. "I don't believe we've met, sir." I held out my hand, hoping whatever memory lapse he was having would be permanent.
Of course, I'd been wearing a mask that night—a pathetic mask but still a mask—so his image of that girl in the red dress might be obscured. Hopefully it would stay that way.
Not that a dance and flirting were scandalous, but it would certainly be awkward.
He shook my hand, and I remembered how those same hands had held my waist, the back of my neck . . .
He squinted, studying me, and I wanted to sink into a hole, away from his scrutiny, because at any moment he'd remember.
"You seem familiar," he pushed, not convinced.
"I'm Ms. Bradbury." I changed the subject, walking around the desk. "Your son and I have already met. I'll be teaching him US History first period this year."
_And with hopefully only one parent-teacher conference, and then you and I will never have to run into each other again._
It wasn't that I was embarrassed or scared. I could handle some discomfort.
But this guy had turned me on.
I'd looked back on our interaction often over the past few months. On quiet nights when I'd wanted someone's hands on me and the only person keeping me company was myself, I'd remembered that dance, his mouth close to mine and his eyes looking down at me.
I'd slept with other people since then, but strangely, he was always where my mind wandered back to when it wanted a fantasy.
And now with him close . . .
He continued to study me, an eyebrow arched, and I was suddenly nervous. He looked formidable. Not at all as playful as he'd looked that night.
"Christian," he called to his son. "Come here."
His son barely looked up from his phone or the video game he played as he walked past us.
"I've been here," he said, anger twisting his voice. "I need something to drink."
"There's bottled water by the door," I instructed, but he just kept walking, leaving the room without another word.
His father's jaw hardened, and I could tell he was angry.
"Excuse my son," he apologized. "His mother is away for a year, and he's a little out of sorts."
_His mother._ Not _my wife_ , then.
The air-conditioning poured down from overhead, caressing my face, and I felt it waft lightly against my blouse, cooling the light layer of sweat.
Tyler and I were alone in the room, and I inhaled through my nose, smelling his intoxicating scent, which I could almost taste on my tongue.
I walked around him, toward the papers by the door. "Well, I know you have other classrooms to visit and not much time," I told him, "so here is a letter explaining my background and plans for the year." I picked up a single-sided letter off the desk and also a two-page detailed calendar, walking over and handing both to him.
"And there's also a syllabus with a rundown of dates when tests occur and when papers and projects are due," I continued as his eyes left mine to peruse the documents.
His eyebrows nose-dived as he studied them.
"All of this information is also on my website," I told him. "This is just a hard copy in case you prefer it."
I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to keep my voice light. "Do you have any questions for me?"
I probably sounded like I was trying to rush him out of here, but the longer he stayed, the greater the chance that he would remember me.
"Yes," he said quietly, still flipping through the papers. "I do have a question."
I stiffened, trying to remember to breathe.
"How long have you been a teacher?" he asked.
"This will be my first year," I said in all confidence.
He raised his eyebrows, the edges of his mouth curling. "I hope you're good."
I cocked my head, peering at him. "Excuse me?" I asked, trying not to sound offended at the innuendo.
"My son can be a handful," he clarified. "He doesn't misbehave, but he's willful. I hope you know what you're doing."
I nodded slightly and turned to go back to my desk.
_Doesn't misbehave?_
From what I'd already seen, he was very much a handful. I just hoped I didn't need to call his father or deal with him for anything.
Back behind my desk, I looked up and saw that he was still by the door, looking at me like he was trying to figure something out.
"Was there something else?" I tried to sound polite.
He shook his head as if he was still thinking. "I'm just . . . almost sure I know you."
"Easton?" Kristen poked her head inside my door, interrupting. "Some of us are going—oh, I'm sorry." She stopped, seeing the parent still in the room.
My eyes fluttered closed, and my stomach flipped.
_Shit._
"Sorry to interrupt," she chirped. "Stop by my room when you're done, okay?"
And then she let the door close, leaving us alone.
I darted my gaze over to Mr. Marek, and he turned his eyes away from the door and pinned me with a sharp stare.
And then, like the raging sun over a cube of ice, his hard gaze melted, turning into one of knowing as realization hit, his eyes softened, and his mouth curled with amusement.
_Fuck._
"Your name is Easton?" He stepped toward me slowly, every step shooting through my veins and making my blood rush.
"That's an unusual name for a woman," he went on, inching closer. "In fact, I've met only one other with the name."
I let the air drift out of my lungs, and I raised my eyes, meeting his.
But his eyes fell away from my face and moved down my body as if he was trying to connect who I was now with what he remembered from six months ago.
He finally met my gaze again and leaned in, looking expectant. "You haven't asked my name yet," he toyed.
The hair on my neck stood on end.
"Would you like to know?" he pressed, playing with me.
As the parent of a student, introductions were in order.
But he was having fun with me right now, and while I wanted a good relationship with my students' parents, I needed to sever the hand to save the arm.
I didn't know what would happen if he saw me as anything other than Christian's teacher, and that's the only way he should see me.
"Mr. Marek." I spoke calmly but firmly. "If you have no further questions, I'm sure your son is waiting for you. Again," I added. "Perhaps you should make sure he's okay."
The hint of the smile in his eyes immediately disappeared, and I watched him straighten and his expression harden.
He was insulted. Good.
I glanced to the door and back to him. "Have a good evening."
# THREE
TYLER
"You're smiling," my brother, Jay, observed, sitting opposite me in the back of the Range Rover.
I ignored him as I watched the pedestrians race by, mostly joggers and some students carrying backpacks, as Patrick, my driver, took us home.
I wasn't smiling.
I was insulted, amused, and intrigued, picturing her beautiful and flushed face in my head.
Her blouse, buttoned up to the neck, her tight red skirt and those heels accentuating her shapely calves, and her proper little attitude were so different from what I remembered from last Mardi Gras.
But they definitely weren't a disappointment, either.
She'd been tough and sexy, almost untouchable, last winter, and she'd fascinated the hell out of me. She'd had a mouth on her that had amused me and had gotten me hard, and then she'd stunned me when she'd just up and left, not the slightest bit interested in making it easy for me.
But unfortunately, I hadn't been able to find her after the Mardi Gras ball.
She hadn't been on the guest list, which meant she'd come with someone, and I hadn't wanted to go poking around and start people talking, so I'd let it go.
But now here she was, my kid's teacher, dangerous and forbidden, which only increased her allure, and she'd been just as hot tonight as she'd been on that balcony all those months ago—the difference being now I couldn't fucking touch her.
I loosened my tie, my neck sweating even though the AC was on full blast, and I looked over at my son, sitting in the seat next to me with his head buried in his phone.
It was going to be a long fucking year.
"Well, get ready for a kick in the nuts." My brother leaned back in his seat, tapping his phone with its stylus. "Mason Blackwell just got a two-million-dollar donation from the Earhart Fellowship. They're officially backing him for representing their high moral fiber."
_Mason Blackwell_. My only real opponent for the Senate.
"High moral fiber," I repeated under my breath. "While I eat babies and bathe in blood, right?"
Jay chuckled, finally looking up. "They don't say that," he assured. "Not exactly anyway. They really don't say anything. You're a mystery," he chirped, his eyes condescending.
We'd had this conversation, but the issue was never settled for him. He just kept digging, hoping to wear me down, but there was no fucking way I was letting the press into my personal life. It was his responsibility to spin the media and keep the focus on what was important.
"This is your job," I reminded him, hardening my eyes so he knew I meant business.
But he shook his head at me and leaned forward. "Tyler." He'd lowered his voice to a whisper for my son's sake. "I can feed the papers whatever you want, but in front of the cameras you'd better start coming up with some answers. It's the twenty-first century, and people—voters," he clarified, "want to know everything."
"Things that aren't any of their business," I shot back in a low voice, hearing Christian's game noises continue undisturbed.
I had nothing violent or illegal to hide, but they were starting to prod about my kid—wondering where I've been in his life, and they were getting nosy about my past relationships. Shit that wasn't anyone's business.
But Jay wanted me to be an open book.
He pulled away, crashing back into his seat. "Kim Kardashian Instagrams her ass," he gritted out. "This is the world we live in, God help us, and I promise you, a little pic of what you had for breakfast would go viral more than any of your speeches or commercials. Get social. Twitter, Facebook—"
"You've got people handling that shi—" I halted, glancing at my son and then back to Jay. "Stuff," I corrected, not wanting to swear in front of Christian.
It had been a hard habit to break, and since Christian had always—always—lived with his mother, my language had never been something I worried about in private. Now I just had to remember that being around my son was like being at a public function or in front of the cameras.
Your true self isn't always the person people should see.
I had a team of employees to handle my website and social media, so I wouldn't have to. It was one of the first things I'd put in place last winter when I'd decided to start preparing to run for the Senate. I hadn't officially announced my candidacy, and the campaign wouldn't start for another six months, but we were already laying the groundwork and preparing.
My brother nodded. "Yeah, we have people handling your social media, but it would be nice if you added some personality here and there. Share fatherhood stories, funny anecdotes, selfies . . . whatever." He waved me off. "People are addicted to that stuff. They'll eat it up."
I closed my eyes and leaned my head into my fingers, rubbing circles on my left temple. It was still more than a year until elections, and if I won, I'd be in for even more invasion into my privacy.
"I mean, look at him," my brother snapped, and I opened my eyes to see him gesturing to my kid.
I turned my head and watched my son, phone turned sideways, held between both hands as his thumbs shot out like bullets, tapping the screen.
That was practically all he did twenty-four/seven, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen his eyes. Every time I tried to spark up a conversation and ask what he was doing, he acted as if he'd barely heard me.
Jay was right. He was consumed. They all were.
"Do you have to be on that thing all the time?" I prodded, unable to hide the aggravation in my voice.
I knew he heard me, because I saw the minute eye roll he barely tried to hide.
"Christian," I snipped, reaching over and grabbing the phone out of his hands in an attempt to get his attention.
Or maybe just a reaction.
His jaw clenched, and he let out a sigh, barely tolerating me.
He'd been ignoring me ever since his mother and stepfather had left the country on their research trip a week ago and he'd moved in with me.
"Okay," he challenged, dropping his hands to his lap and looking at me with disdain. "What do you want to talk about?"
I cocked an eyebrow, taken aback a little. I'd expected him to argue—or maybe ignore me as usual—but had I wanted to talk?
I'd been trying to talk to him, connect with him, for years, but now I realized that I didn't know what I was going to say.
And he knew it. He knew I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
He breathed out a laugh and gave me a condescending look. "Gimme a break," he grumbled. "We barely resemble estranged brothers, much less father and son. Don't start something we both know you won't finish."
Then he reached out for his phone, but I hardened my expression and pulled my hand away.
"I need my phone back," he shot out, tension crossing his face. "Ms. Bradbury, or whatever her name is, lent me her battery, and I have to bring it back tomorrow."
"Too bad," I barked, stuffing his phone in my pocket and turning my burning eyes to my brother. "You know, that's really the problem here. Role models like teachers who enable children to continue to disconnect from the world."
"Well, you would know," Christian bit out at my side. "You disconnect all the time, and you don't need technology to do it."
I tipped my chin down, tightening my jaw. _Jesus Christ._
If I weren't so fucking pissed, I might've laughed.
I remembered getting in my father's face time and again when I was younger. Christian looked exactly like me, but even if he didn't, there would be no doubt he was my kid. I'd been just as defiant at that age.
"Your energies belong elsewhere," Jay pointed out, trying to reel my focus back in, "and your time is sparse," he reminded me.
_My energies belong elsewhere. My time is sparse._
Meaning my brother didn't think fighting a losing battle with my kid was a good use of my time.
I looked over at Christian, watching him stare at nothing out his window and finding my chest tightening.
My shit relationship with my kid was my own fault. It had been no surprise when he'd fought his mother and me about staying here for the year instead of going with her to Africa.
He needed time. Of course, it was time I didn't have, but even when I did try, he shut me out.
I knew I wouldn't win any fatherhood awards, but I had supported him his entire life and I'd always treated him well. I'd taken care of his wants and needs, and maybe I'd never pushed hard enough and maybe I'd never put him as a top priority, but I'd had no idea it was going to be this hard to bond with him later on. I didn't exactly get along with my father all the time, either, but I respected him.
Christian couldn't respect me any less than he already did.
And it was getting harder and harder to ignore the voice in my head that said it was too late.
The car turned up Prytania Street, dipping along one of many of the broken, potholed roads of New Orleans.
I turned my eyes out the window as well, the conversation in the car having gone silent.
I took in the evening bustle of the city, with its array of boutiques, shops, and intimate restaurants. Out of every neighborhood in the city—the Quarter, the Marigny, the Central Business District, the Warehouse District, Midtown, Uptown—it was the Garden District that captivated me the most.
Nestled between St. Charles Avenue and Magazine Street, Prytania had some of the best architecture in a neighborhood adorned with vibrant colors, flowers, and foliage, and the best restaurants located in buildings that probably wouldn't pass any health-code inspections. The wealthy and pristine blended effortlessly with the chipped and aged, and that was called character. You couldn't buy it, and you couldn't describe it.
But it was the same thing that made a house a home.
The nineteenth-century mansions loomed on both sides, protected behind their wrought-iron gates and massive live oaks lining the street. Gas flames flickered in lanterns hanging outside front doors, and cyclists cruised past with either backpacks strapped to their backs—probably students—or instruments secured to their bodies—street performers.
Lightning flashed outside, energizing the life on the streets, and then thunder cracked, reminding me that it was hurricane season. We'd be getting a lot of rain in the coming weeks.
We drove up the long street, entering the quieter and even more picturesque section, and then slowed to turn into my driveway, taking us deeper into the veil of trees, behind which sat my home.
The old Victorian, surrounded by a generous plot of land, was three stories tall and featured a pool and a guesthouse on the grounds. Even though it had been in desperate need of renovations when I'd bought it ten years ago, I hadn't doubted my purchase for a moment. The beauty of the home was in the quiet, isolated feel of its position even though I was in the heart of the city.
Bars, restaurants, and shops sat only a short distance away, but inside the house, you wouldn't know it.
The home was surrounded by an acre of land with the lushest grass and foliage I'd ever seen, as well as a few old oaks that created a canopy around the edges, hiding the house and allowing me the privacy I enjoyed.
And even though my son and I were barely on speaking terms, I knew he loved it here as well.
His mother and her husband lived in the more sedate Uptown area, not far from here in distance—only a matter of blocks—but worlds apart in terms of liveliness and culture.
After pulling into the carport, my driver got out to open our doors, but Christian swung his door open first and bolted out, obviously still angry that he'd lost his phone.
I hadn't planned on keeping it, but since he'd chosen to be disrespectful, I might, after all.
His mother had said that I needed to earn his love, and that may be true—he had no reason to like me, and I knew that—but I wouldn't coddle him, either. He'd show his elders respect, because it was good manners. If I tried to get his love first, he might never take me seriously.
Or he might not, either way. I really had no idea what I was doing.
I watched Christian barrel into the house by the side door, and I waved off Patrick when he tried to open my door. Picking up the papers I'd collected when I'd visited all of Christian's teachers, I handed them to my brother.
"His syllabi," I explained. "Find them online and download them to my phone, and then enter the important dates on my calendar as well as all of the teachers' contact information," I told him.
He nodded once. "Consider it done," he said, flipping through the papers.
My brother was my campaign manager, having left his position at my company to handle my political interests full-time last spring. He also tried to do anything that made my life easier.
"Is this her?" he asked, stopping on one set of papers. "Easton Bradbury?"
_Her?_ And then I remembered that Christian had mentioned her name about the phone battery.
Jay slipped the papers into his briefcase and started typing quickly on his phone.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Googling her," he said matter-of-factly.
I breathed out a quiet laugh I was sure he didn't hear. Thank goodness for my brother and his tech savviness. He researched everything and everyone, and I was better for it. But I didn't require his interference when it came to my son.
I moved to get out but stopped when he spoke up.
"Twenty-three years old, summa cum laude from Loyola University—"
"I don't care." I cut him off, stepping out of the car.
But the truth was, I kind of did care. I liked my memory of her and hadn't enjoyed a woman nearly as much since our night together, and we'd only talked. Her mystery made the attraction more fun, and I didn't want that ruined.
Easton was a woman I'd wanted in my bed, but Ms. Bradbury was off-limits.
The lines were there, clear as day, and not to be breached. For the sake of my son and my career.
"How's my week looking?" I changed the subject as I entered the large kitchen through the side door.
"You're booked solid Monday through Wednesday between the office and meetings." He slammed the door behind him and followed me through the kitchen and down the hallway, past the living room and media room.
"But Thursday and Friday are calm," he went on, "and I confirmed your dinner this weekend with Miss McAuliffe. If you're still up for it," he added.
"Of course I am." I pulled off my tie, entering my den and slipping off my jacket.
Tessa McAuliffe was uncomplicated and low-maintenance. She was beautiful, discreet, and good in bed, and while my brother had encouraged me to form a steady relationship with her—or anyone—to help my campaign, I simply wouldn't be pushed into changing my life for a vote.
Getting into the Senate was important to me, but while I enjoyed Tessa's company for what it was, I didn't love her and didn't have the time to try.
And surprisingly, she never gave the impression she wasn't okay with that.
She was a producer and anchor for a local morning show, and from day one, there were never any misconceptions about what was expected from either of us. On occasion we met for dinner and then ended the evening in a hotel room. That was it.
Afterward, I'd call on her again when I felt the need. Or she'd call me. It never went beyond that.
I briefly contemplated seeking a serious relationship when I'd first started campaigning. Most voters wanted to see candidates representing good family values in their own homes—spouse and children—but I had been focused on work, and I refused to force my private life.
My son, my unmarried status, my thoughts about what it would be like to possibly have more children someday—once I'd proven I could parent the child I already had, of course—were private matters and no one else's business. Why the hell did it matter when it came to my ability to serve?
"The kid ate dinner, right?" I asked him, rounding my desk and turning on my computer.
He unbuttoned his jacket and tossed his briefcase onto one of the two chairs on the other side of my desk.
"Yeah." He nodded. "I had Patrick take him to Lebanon Café before the open house."
Patrick was a fan of falafels and Christian seemed to love anything with hummus. It was the second time in the past week they'd eaten dinner together. I reminded myself to make sure I was home for supper tomorrow night, though. With the fucking impromptu meeting with my father earlier, I'd had Patrick drop Christian off at the open house, telling him I had a city planner's meeting instead of that I was being grilled by my father.
At thirty-five, I still answered to him, and while as a son I hated it, I could appreciate it as a father. My dad had been a good parent. I only wished the apple hadn't fallen so far from the tree.
"All right, let's get to work."
I poured myself a drink at the small bar against the wall, and Jay and I spent the next two hours condensing a list of meetings to be set up with the who's who of political influence in the city. Unfortunately, campaigns fed off donations, and I'd insisted early on using my own money, because I hated asking anyone for anything.
After events and meetings were added to the calendar, I let Jay go home, and I stayed up refining my speech for the Knights of Columbus on Wednesday.
I rubbed the fine stubble on my jaw, wondering if Christian would like to come with me to one of these events. I couldn't imagine he'd find it interesting, but it might be a way for him to see what I did and to spend time together.
I shook my head, standing up and switching off my lamp.
I wanted too many things.
That was the problem. Too many goals and not enough time.
I'd been an arrogant and irresponsible twenty-year-old when Christian was born. I'd wanted what I'd wanted, and I'd blown off consequences, even after he was born. Now I knew the price of my actions, and it was a matter of having to choose. I knew I couldn't have everything I wanted, but I still didn't like making choices.
Leaving the room, I headed upstairs for my bedroom, but stopped, seeing the glow of a lamp coming out of Christian's cracked door down the hall.
Walking down to his room, I pushed the door open and saw him passed out on his stomach, fully clothed on top of the covers.
I went over and gazed down at him, feeling the same tightening in my chest that I'd felt in the car.
He looked so peaceful, his chest rising and falling in calm, even breaths with his head turned to one side. The two ever-present creases between his eyes were gone, and his black hair had gotten rumpled, now covering his forehead and sitting close to his eyes. I remembered seeing him once as a baby, looking almost exactly the same.
But back then he'd smiled all the time. Now he was always angry.
I sat down on the edge of his bed, pulling a spare blanket up over him.
Staring down, I felt my shoulders relax as I rested my elbows on my knees. "I know this is awkward," I told him, whispering. "It's different for both of us, but I want you here."
He shifted, twisting his head away toward the wall, still sleeping. I reached out to touch him but stopped short and got up instead, leaving the room.
I shook my head as I tore off my clothes and made my way to my bedroom.
Why was it so much easier to be with him when he didn't know I was there?
I headed a multimillion-dollar corporation. I'd traveled in every hemisphere and climbed a volcano when I was eighteen. I had some of the most intimidating people eating out of the palm of my fucking hand, so why was I afraid of my own kid? I stepped into my bedroom, tossing my shirt and tie onto a chair and slipping off the rest of my clothes.
All of the hardwood surfaces in the room—from the floors to the furniture—shined with the soft glow of the bedside table lamp, and I walked across the ornate area rug, running my hand through my hair and trying to figure out what to do with him.
His mother, despite her animosity toward me, was a good parent, and Christian got along with her. She was strict and provided routine, and that's what I needed to do for Christian.
And that not only included him but me as well. I needed to be home for meals. Or at least more meals. And I needed to be consistent. Checking his homework, attending his sports games, and staying on top of where he was and what he was doing.
I'd asked for this, after all. I'd fought him and his mother to keep him in the country this year.
I climbed into the shower, rolling my neck under the hot spray of the dual showerheads and letting it relax the tense muscles in my shoulders and back.
Easton.
I should Google her. She was a fucking mystery, and she was teaching my kid.
I grabbed the bar of soap and ran it over my chest and arms, thinking about how she'd behaved six months ago compared to tonight. Different but very much the same. In control, sexy, but with a distance I couldn't put my finger on. It was almost as if she were a reflection in a mirror. There but not really real.
Almost as if she were still wearing that mask.
I should've kissed her that night. I should've looked down into those blue eyes and watched her lose control when I shut her up and made her melt like I wanted to.
What I wouldn't give to strip off those prim clothes I'd seen tonight, pin her to the bed, and . . .
I sucked in a breath, slamming my hand into the marble wall to support myself.
_Shit._
I swallowed, gasping for breath as I smoothed my wet hand over the top of my head.
Looking down, I saw the stretched skin of my cock, begging for release as it pulsed and throbbed.
Slamming the knob to the left, I breathed hard under the sudden rush of cold water, clenching my teeth in frustration.
Easton Bradbury was off-limits.
_And don't forget it._
# FOUR
EASTON
"Okay, so . . . " I started, slowly stalking between the rows of desks and smiling at the printout of a Facebook post in my hand. "The question posed in the Facebook group yesterday that received the most responses was 'Why did men ever stop wearing tights? I would've rocked that,'" I read to the class.
The freshman boys broke out in snorts while the girls giggled, remembering the lengthy conversation some of them had carried on last night.
Marcus Matthews popped up and jumped onto his chair, holding his hands up in the air and smiling as he soaked in the praise and taking credit for his question last night.
I shook my head, amused. "Sit down," I ordered, shooting my pointed finger from him to the chair. "Now."
He laughed, but quickly jumped down and took his seat, the rest of the class still voicing their amusement behind him.
During the three weeks since school had started, we'd moved quickly through the curriculum and had been studying the independence of America, the founding fathers, and the Revolutionary War, hence the men-in-tights question.
Out of all the activities I'd planned to engage them, the social media requirements were the most successful. The parents had all received a lengthy letter after the first day, explaining the rhyme and reason to social media in the classroom. The students—per school rule—were already required to have laptops, which made it even more convenient to jump online anytime we wanted without the need for a computer lab. And it fit in perfectly with my goal of educating students to live in the digital world.
Social media was a necessary evil.
There were certainly dangers, and there had been a lot of apprehension from parents at first, but once I'd called and e-mailed to smooth over any resistance, all was well. They eventually understood my position, and most parents found great enjoyment in seeing the class's interactions online, given that they weren't able to see the students' engagement in the classroom.
Parents and students were invited to join our private Facebook group, where I posted assignments, discussion questions, and pictures of what happened in class or videos of presentations. Over the days and weeks, participation grew exponentially as parents were able to take a bigger role in their children's education and see not only their children's work but others' as well.
Not that students should be compared, but I found it a great motivator when parents saw the work of students who held the bar higher.
We also had Twitter accounts and a Twitter board in the classroom, as well as private Pinterest boards, where students and parents could brainstorm and collectively gather research.
Only a few parents were still uncooperative—I glanced at Christian Marek, seeing him slouch at his desk—so I did my best to make accommodations.
But I knew those students still felt left out. I had considered the possibility of abandoning the entire method, because I didn't want anyone hurt, but once I saw the participation and benefit, I refused. I'd simply have to get through to the parents.
I allowed myself a small smile, grinning at Marcus's pride in himself. But the silence off to the back where Christian sat was almost more deafening than the students' excitement.
He stared at his laptop screen, looking half angry and half bored. I couldn't figure him out. I knew he had friends. I'd seen him eating with other kids at lunch and playing on the field, laughing and joking.
But in the classroom—or my classroom, anyway—it was like he wasn't even here. He performed well on take-home assignments, but he never participated in discussions and he did poorly on quizzes and tests. Anything that took place in the classroom was unsuccessful.
I'd tried talking to him, but I wasn't getting anywhere, and I was going to have to come to terms with the options I was left with to help him.
Like calling his father, which I should've already done but hadn't found the guts.
I turned back to the class, refocusing my attention. "Congratulations, Mr. Matthews." I nodded, teasing Marcus. "While your question was meant to be funny—no doubt—it did spark some interesting comments about the history of attire."
I rounded the front of the classroom and leaned back on my desk. "Since fashion is a very popular topic, we also delved into the history of women's fashion, and that led to a debate on feminism," I reminded them. "Now, of course, fashion wasn't a topic I was supposed to teach you this year." I smiled. "But you were critically thinking and you saw how topics like these are interrelated. You were discussing, comparing, and contrasting . . ." I sighed, eyeing them with amusement before I continued. "And it certainly wasn't boring to read your responses, so good job."
The class cheered, and Marcus shouted out, "So do we get Song of the Week?" He lifted his eyebrows in expectation.
"When your team has earned fifty points," I reiterated the rule. I rewarded them individually, but I also had a team incentive, which allowed their group to pick one song to play in class once they'd reached fifty points, if all work was turned in and they demonstrated good citizenship online and in the classroom.
I walked to the Smart Board—today's version of a chalkboard—and picked up a stylus, tapping the board to activate it. The projector fed the image from my computer, and all of the students' numbers appeared on the board, ready to receive their responses.
"Don't forget"—I glanced up as I replaced the stylus—"group five is sending current-events tweets before seven p.m. this evening. Once reviewed, I will retweet them for you," I told them, seeing Christian talking to the girl next to him out of the corner of my eye.
"You are to pick one, read and reflect, and turn in your one-page, typed assignment—twelve-point font, Times New Roman, not Courier New," I specified, knowing their trick of using a bigger font, "and have that to me by Friday. Any questions?"
Mumbles in the negative sounded from around the room, and I nodded. "Okay, grab your responders. Pop quiz."
"I have a question." I heard someone speak up. "When are we going to use the textbooks?"
I looked up, seeing Christian's eyes on me as the other students switched on their remotelike devices, which I used to record their multiple-choice answers instead of paper and pencil.
I stood up straight, inquiring, "Would you prefer to use the textbooks?"
But Marcus blurted out a response instead. "No," he answered, turning his head to Christian. "Dude, shut up."
Christian cocked an eyebrow, keeping cool as he ignored his classmate. "The textbooks are provided by the school. They have the curriculum we're supposed to learn, right?" he asked almost as an accusation.
"Yes," I confirmed.
"So why aren't we using them?" he pressed.
I inhaled a long, slow breath, careful to keep my expression even.
Kids will challenge us, test boundaries, and throw us curveballs, I was told. Keep your cool, treat every kid like they're your own, and never let them see you falter. Christian certainly challenged me on all those levels.
Not only was he not performing up to his potential in class, but he also challenged me on occasion. Whether it be tardiness, flippant behavior, or distracting other students, he seemed to have a penchant for disobedience.
And as much as he tried to hinder me from doing my job, the person I was outside of the classroom couldn't help but admire him a little.
I knew from experience that misbehavior came from a need for control when you lacked it in other venues. And while I sympathized with him—and whatever he wasn't getting at home or elsewhere—he clearly thought he could get away with it here.
"That's a good question," I told him, walking around my desk. "Why do you think we don't use the textbooks?"
He laughed to himself and then pinned me with a look. "What I think is that you give me more questions when I just want answers."
I stiffened, my smile falling as students in the room either tried to cover their laughs with their hands or stared between Christian and me wide-eyed and waiting for whatever would happen next.
Christian had a self-satisfied look on his face, and my blood heated with the challenge.
I swallowed and spoke calmly. "Everyone open up to page fifty-six."
"Ugh." Marcus groaned. "Nice job," he shot over his shoulder, not looking at Christian.
Everyone dug their books out of the compartments under their desks, and the sounds of pages flipping and students grumbling filled the classroom.
I picked up my teacher's manual and cleared my throat.
"Okay, this chapter covers the contributions of Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and Betsy Ross," I went on. "I'd like you to read—"
"But we already learned about them!" Jordan Burrows, the girl sitting next to Christian, called out.
I pinched my eyebrows together, cocking my head and feigning ignorance. "Did we?"
Another student jumped in. "We did the book study in groups two weeks ago and the virtual museums," he reminded me.
"Oh." I played along. "Okay, pardon me," I said, moving on. "Turn to page sixty-eight. This chapter covers the presidencies of George Washington through Thomas Jefferson—"
"We already learned that, too." Kat Robichaux laughed from my right. "You uploaded our campaign posters to Pinterest."
I looked up at Christian, who hopefully was getting the idea.
We had been learning everything in the textbook, even though we hadn't learned it from there. Students absorbed more when they sought knowledge themselves and put it to practice by creating a product instead of merely reading from a single text.
"Ah," I replied. "I remember now."
Christian shifted in his seat, knowing full well the point had been made.
"So," I went on, "on page seventy-nine, there are twenty questions to help us prepare for our unit test tomorrow. We can spend the rest of class answering them silently on paper, or we can take ten minutes with the responders and then move on to start researching slave ships online."
"Responders," the students cut in without hesitation.
"We could take a vote," I chirped, not really trying to be fair but to drive the point home for someone in particular.
"Responders!" the students repeated, this time louder.
The class picked up their remotelike devices. For the next ten minutes, I displayed multiple-choice questions on the board, giving them about a minute to answer on their devices, and then, once their responses had been recorded in the program, I displayed the bar graph showing how many students answered a certain way.
Afterward, we jumped on our laptops while I continued to project on the Smart Board as we dived into the next unit with some questions and research online before the end of class.
As the students walked out, moving on to their next class, I watched Christian inching slowly along and peering out the window as he made his way out the door.
"Christian," I called as he passed by my desk.
He stopped and looked at me like he usually did. With boredom.
"Your questions are important," I assured him. "And very welcome in this class. But I do expect you to use manners."
He remained silent, his eyes staring off to the side. I knew he wasn't a bad kid, and he was certainly smart, but the curtain over his eyes lifted very rarely. When it did, I saw the kid inside. When the curtain was drawn, he was unapproachable.
"Where is your phone?" I asked. "You need it for class, and you haven't had it."
He'd also failed to return my battery.
Not a big deal, since we used the same brand of phone, and I was getting by with his, but the students were allowed to use their phones in class—kept in the corner of their desks on silent and facedown—to access their calculators, random number generators for our activities, and other apps I'd found useful for engagement.
I'd found the more you allowed them their technology, the less they tried to sneak it. And since all of these students carried phones, I didn't worry about anyone feeling left out.
"If there's a problem, I can speak to your father," I offered, knowing Christian probably wouldn't choose to be without his phone himself.
But Christian broke out in a smirk, meeting my eyes. "You will speak to him." He jerked his chin toward the window. "Sooner than you think."
And he turned, walking out and letting the heavy wooden door slam shut behind him.
What had that meant?
I twisted my head toward the window, and stood up to head over to the window to see what he'd been referring to.
But I stopped, hearing the intercom beep.
"Ms. Bradbury?" Principal Shaw's voice called.
"Yes?" I answered.
"Would you please come to my office?" he asked, the fake nicety in his voice turning me off. "And bring your lesson plans, as well."
I raised my eyebrows, my legs going a little weak.
"Uh," I breathed out. "Of course."
It didn't matter if you were fourteen or twenty-three, a student, a teacher, or a parent—you still got nauseous when the principal called you down.
And he wanted my lesson plans? Why? They were online. He could see them anytime he wanted to.
I groaned, slipping off my jacket and tossing it over my chair—which left me in my slim-fitting black pants and long-sleeved gray blouse. I grabbed the hard-copy plans we were instructed to keep on our desk in case of an impromptu observation.
Thankfully, I had second period free, so I wouldn't have students for close to another hour.
I walked down the hall and through the front office, past the students either waiting for the nurse or waiting to be disciplined. My heels fell silent as soon as they hit the carpet in the hallway.
I tucked the binder under my arm and knocked twice on Mr. Shaw's door.
"Come in," he called.
I took in a deep breath, turned the knob, and entered, nodding at Mr. Shaw with a small smile as he stood up from behind his desk.
Turning to close the door, I immediately halted, spotting Tyler Marek standing in the back of the office.
I looked away, closed the door, and turned back to my superior, tensing against my racing heart.
What the hell did he want?
"Ms. Bradbury." Mr. Shaw held out his hand, gesturing to Christian's father. "This is Tyler Marek, Christian's—"
"Yes, we've met." I cut him off in a stiff voice, stepping forward to stand behind one of the two chairs Shaw had in front of his desk.
Marek stayed behind, hovering like a dark shadow in the corner, and I knew what I was supposed to do. Shake hands, greet him, smile . . . No, no, and no.
Shaw looked uncomfortable, and it was my fault, but I had a feeling I wouldn't like what was going to happen.
He regained his composure and cleared his throat, gesturing. "Please sit down," he suggested, looking to both of us.
I rounded the chair and took a seat, but Christian's father continued to stand instead of taking the seat next to me.
"Mr. Marek has some concerns regarding Christian," Shaw told me, "and his performance in your class. Can you enlighten me as to what problems you're having?"
I blinked, sensing Marek stepping forward and approaching my back.
Suddenly I felt as if all of our roles were reversed. Shaw was the concerned, neutral parent, Marek was the displeased teacher, and I was the student being put under the microscope. How dare he treat me as if I didn't know my job?
"Sir, I . . ." I tried to rein in my temper before I said something I'd regret. "Sir, this is the first I've heard that Mr. Marek has concerns. I'd like to know what they are as well."
I couldn't hide the discomfort from my voice. I was far from friendly, but at least I hadn't sounded curt.
Christian was having problems, but it was still early in the year, and I was still trying to create a relationship with him. I'd sent home—even mailed on one occasion—reminders about the social media groups and highlighted copies of the syllabus with important dates. I may not have called, but it wasn't as if I hadn't done anything.
Shaw looked up, offering Marek an uncomfortable smile. "Mr. Marek, your support of this school has gone above and beyond, and we are so grateful to have your son here. Please, tell me your concerns and how we can help."
I let my eyes drop as I waited, his presence making my back tingle with awareness.
He stepped up to my side and lowered himself into the seat next to me, unbuttoning his suit jacket and relaxing into the chair, looking confident.
"On the first day of school," he started, looking only at Shaw, "my son came home and informed me that he had to have his phone in Ms. Bradbury's class. Now, I purchased an expensive laptop, like many of the parents in this school, because we knew what tools were needed for a school of this caliber. Those expectations are very reasonable," he pointed out, and I braced myself, knowing where this was going.
"However," he continued, "my son is fourteen, and I'm not comfortable with him on social media. I've gone into this Facebook group the students frequent, and I don't particularly like where some of these discussions venture. Christian is expected to maintain three different social media accounts, and he's conversing with people I don't know," he stated. "Not only is his safety and those who influence him of greater concern now, but also the amount of distraction he contends with. He'll be doing his math homework, and his phone will be going off due to notifications for Ms. Bradbury's groups."
I bit my tongue, both figuratively and literally, not because his concerns weren't valid, but because this had all been addressed if he'd cared to take interest weeks ago.
I cleared my throat, turning to look at him. "Mr. Marek—"
"Call me Tyler," he instructed, and I shot up my eyes, seeing the devious amusement behind his gaze.
I shook my head, annoyed that he kept working that into our conversations.
"Mr. Marek," I continued, standing my ground, "on the first day of school, I sent home a document explaining all of this, because I foresaw these concerns."
His eyebrow shot up. I was calling him out as an absentee parent, and he knew it.
I kept going, straightening my back and feeling Shaw watching me. "I requested that parents sign it and return it—"
"Mr. Shaw," someone called behind me from the door, and I stopped, grinding my teeth in annoyance.
"Sorry to interrupt," she said, "but there's an issue that needs your quick attention in the front office."
It was Mrs. Vincent, the secretary. She must not have knocked.
Mr. Shaw gave us an apologetic smile and rose from his desk. "Please excuse me for a moment."
I let out a quiet breath, frustrated, but thankfully no one noticed. Shaw walked around his desk and across the room, leaving me alone with Marek.
_Wonderful._
The door clicked shut behind me, and I couldn't ignore the feeling of Marek's large frame next to me—his stiffness and silence telling me he was just as annoyed as I was. I hoped he wouldn't talk, but the sound of the air-conditioning circulating throughout the room only accentuated the deafening silence.
And if he did say anything that rubbed me the wrong way, I couldn't predict how I would react. I had little control of my mouth with my superior in the room, let alone with him gone.
I held my hands in my lap. Marek stayed motionless.
I looked off, out the window. He inhaled a long breath through his nose.
I checked the cleanliness of my nails, feigning boredom, while heat spread over my face and down my neck as I tried to convince myself that it wasn't his eyes raking down my body.
"You do realize," he shot out, startling me out of my thoughts, "that you don't have a union to protect you, right?"
I clenched the binder in my lap and stared ahead, his thinly veiled threat and tensed voice not getting by me.
Yes, I was aware. Most private school teachers were hired and fired at will, and administrators liked to have that freedom. Hence, no benefit of unions to protect us like the public school teachers enjoyed.
"And even so you still can't stop yourself from mouthing off," he commented.
_Mouthing off?_
"Is that what this is about?" I turned, struggling to keep my voice even. "You're playing a game with me?"
He narrowed his eyes, his black eyebrows pinching together.
"This is about my son," he clarified.
"And this is my job," I threw back. "I know what I'm doing, and I care very much about your son." And then I quickly added, "About all of my students, of course."
What was his problem anyway? My class curriculum didn't carry unreasonable expectations. All of these students had phones. Hell, I'd seen their five-year-old siblings with phones in the parking lot.
I'd thoroughly reviewed my intentions with the administrators and the parents, and any naysayers had quickly come around. Not only was Marek ignorant, but he was late to the game.
He'd been well informed, but this was the first time I'd seen hide or hair of him since the open house.
"You're incredible," I mumbled.
I saw his face turn toward me out of the corner of my eye. "I would watch my step if I were you," he threatened.
I twisted my head away, closing my eyes and inhaling a deep breath.
In his head, we weren't equals. He'd put on a good front last Mardi Gras when he'd thought I was nothing more than a good time, but now I was useless to him. His inferior.
He was arrogant and ignorant and not even the slightest bit interested in treating me with the respect I'd earned, given my education and hard work.
I liked control, and I loved being in charge, but had I told my doctor how to do his job when he'd ordered me off my ankle for six weeks when I was seventeen? No. I'd deferred to those who knew what they were talking about, and if I had any questions, I'd asked.
Politely.
I gnawed at my lips, trying to keep my big mouth shut. This had always been a problem for me. It had caused me trouble in my tennis career, because I couldn't maintain perspective and distance myself from criticism when I thought I'd been wronged.
_Kill 'em with kindness_ , my father had encouraged. "Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?" Abraham Lincoln had said.
But even though I understood the wisdom of those words, I'd never been able to rein it in. If I had something to say, I lost all control and gave in to a rant.
My chest rose and fell quickly, and I gritted my teeth.
"Oh, for Christ's sake." He laughed. "Spit it out, then. Go ahead. I know you want to."
I shot up, out of my chair, and glared down at him. "You went over my head," I growled, not hesitating. "You're not interested in communicating with me as Christian's teacher. If you were, I would've heard from you by now. You wanted to humiliate me in front of my superior."
He cocked his head, watching me as his jaw flexed.
"If you had a concern," I went on, "then you should've come to me, and if that failed, then gone to Shaw. You didn't sign any of the documents I sent home, and you haven't accepted any invitations into the social media groups, proving that you have no interest in Christian's education. This is a farce and a waste of my time."
"And have you contacted me?" he retorted as he rose from his seat, standing within an inch of me and looking down. "When I didn't sign the papers or join the groups, or when he failed the last unit test"—he bared his teeth—"did you e-mail or call me to discuss my son's education?"
"It's not my responsibility to chase you down!" I fought.
"Yeah, it kind of is," he retorted. "Parent communication is part of your job, so let's talk about why you're communicating regularly with Christian's friends' parents but not with me."
"Are you serious?" I nearly laughed, dropping the binder on the chair. "We're not playing some childish 'who's going to call first?' game. This isn't high school!"
"Then stop acting like a brat," he ordered, his minty breath falling across my face. "You know nothing about my interest in my son."
"Interest in your son?" This time my lips spread wide in a smile as I looked up at him. "Don't make me laugh. Does he even know your name?"
His eyes flared and then turned dark.
My throat tightened, and I couldn't swallow. _Shit._ I'd gone too far.
I was close enough to hear the heavy breaths from his nose, and I wasn't sure what he would do if I tried to back away. Not that I felt threatened—physically anyway—but I suddenly felt like I needed space.
His body was flush with mine, and his scent made my eyelids flutter.
His eyes narrowed on me and then fell to my mouth. _Oh, God._
"Okay, sorry about that." Shaw burst into the office, and Marek and I pulled apart, turning away from each other while the principal twisted around to close the door.
_Shit._
I smoothed my hand down my blouse and leaned over, picking up the binder of lesson plans.
We hadn't done anything, but it felt like we had.
Shaw walked around us, and I glanced at Marek to see him glaring ahead, his arms crossed over his chest.
"While Mrs. Vincent practically runs this school," Shaw went on, amusement in his voice, "some things require my signature. So where were we?"
"Edward," Marek interrupted, buttoning his Armani jacket and offering a tight smile. "Unfortunately I have a meeting to get to," he told him. "Ms. Bradbury and I have talked, and she's agreed to adjust her lesson plans to make accommodations for Christian."
_Excuse me?_
I started to twist my head to shoot him a look, but I stopped, correcting myself. Instead, I clamped my teeth together and lifted my chin, refusing to look at him.
I would _not_ be adjusting my lesson plans.
"Oh, wonderful." Shaw smiled, looking relieved. "Thank you, Ms. Bradbury, for compromising. I love it when things work out so easily."
I decided it was best to let the issue lie. What Shaw didn't know wouldn't hurt him, and Marek would most likely zone out of his parenting responsibilities for another few weeks before I would have to deal with him again.
"Ms. Bradbury." Marek turned, holding out a hand for me to shake.
I met his eyes, noticing how one was not quite as wide as the other, giving his expression a sinister look as it pierced me.
Two things could be assumed about Marek: He expected to get everything he wanted, and he thought he just had.
_Idiot._
—
The chilled pint glass was a welcome relief in my hand as I took a sip of the Abita Amber, the local favorite brew. It was mid-September, and the evenings still hadn't cooled down enough to be pleasant. If not for the humidity, the city might feel more comfortable instead of like a stuffy, packed elevator with no room to move.
I fingered through the container on my table, counting all of the sugar packets as I sat at Port of Call, waiting for my brother to join me for dinner.
Seven Equals, six Sweet'N Lows, five regular sugars, and seven Splendas. _What a mess._
I twisted around, grabbing another container off the table behind me, and picked out what I needed. The little packages crackled as I pulled them out and fit one more Equal, two more Sweet'N Lows, three regular sugars, and one more Splenda into the uneven container on my table.
Leaving the rest in the borrowed container, I replaced it on the table behind me and then recounted all of the packets. Eight, eight, eight, and eight.
_Perfect._
I took a deep breath and set the container back along the edge of the table with the condiments and napkins, and . . .
And I stopped, looking up to catch my brother standing at the table with a drink in his hand, watching me.
_Shit._
I rolled my eyes and waited for him to sit down.
We hadn't seen each other in four days. I'd offered to help with student council after school this week, and he'd been buried in research and papers.
His white oxford was wrinkled and open at the collar, but he still drew women's eyes as he approached the table. He leaned back in his chair, giving me the eye that said he was thinking and he had things he wasn't sure he should say or how to say them.
"Out with it," I relented, shaking my head and looking at the tabletop.
"I don't know what to say."
I shot my eyes up, tucking in my chair. "Then stop looking at me like I'm Howard Hughes," I ordered. "It's a nondestructive disorder that's very common. It soothes me."
"Nondestructive," he repeated, taking a drink. "Was it five or six times that you went back into your apartment to make sure your stove was off today?"
I shifted, straightening my shoulders as the server came by, setting down waters on our table.
"Well, how am I supposed to remember if I shut it off after cooking the heroin?" I joked, and my brother broke out in a laugh.
I knew he thought my obsessive-compulsive bullshit was baggage that I needed help getting past, but the truth was, it was something I felt I needed.
Ever since I was sixteen anyway.
When someone you trusted steals your sense of security and holds your life in the palm of his hand for two whole years, your mind finds ways to compensate for the loss of control.
I felt safer when things were in order. When I had dominion over even the most trivial of matters.
My entire family—my parents and sister, now gone, and my brother—had paid a hefty price for letting someone we thought we could trust into our lives all those years ago.
In comparison, my little compulsive disorder was of no concern to me.
If I didn't count the sugar packets or make sure the stove was off four times this morning or brush my teeth for a count of one hundred twenty seconds, something bad would happen. I didn't know what, and I knew it was ridiculous, but I still felt safer carrying on with my day.
Normally, during work, when I was busy, it didn't concern me as much, but when I was idle—like now—I tended to fiddle, arrange, and count.
It was a false sense of security, but it was something.
Control over anything, even if it couldn't be everything, calmed me.
"So how's school?" he asked.
I leaned my elbows on the table and took a sip of beer. "It's pretty good. I like the kids."
The kids were actually the easy part. Keeping their attention was hard and energy-consuming, but keeping up with all of the side duties was more frustrating and a huge time suck.
"You look tired," he commented.
"So do you," I shot back, smiling. "Don't worry. I'm fine, Jack. I'm on my feet all day, and by end time I've hit the wall, but it's a good kind of exhausted."
"Like tennis?"
I paused, thinking about that one.
"Kind of," I answered. "Only better, I guess. I used to feel like I went out there on the court and gave my all. I used every muscle and every ounce of perseverance to fight through the struggle."
"And now?" he pressed.
"And now I do the same thing, but I know why," I answered. "There's a reason for all of it."
He watched me, a thoughtful look crossing his face. He seemed to buy what I told him, and why shouldn't he? It was true.
Tennis had been my life. It was fun at times and nearly unbearable at others, and while I hadn't known what the purpose of working and competing were, I went to bed with the satisfaction that I'd pushed my body to the limit and fought hard.
But I also never felt compelled to do it.
"Avery would be proud," Jack said in a low voice, giving me a small smile.
I looked away, sadness twisting my stomach.
Would she? Would my sister be proud that I was living her dream?
# FIVE
TYLER
"So did you deal with it?" Jay asked about Christian's teacher as he trailed behind me with his face buried in a press packet for next Monday's television interview.
I pushed through my office doors, seeing Corinne, my assistant, pouring water into glasses around the conference table off to the left in preparation for our meeting this morning.
"Of course," I mumbled, rounding my desk and unbuttoning my jacket.
"Well, you canceled a TV spot for that meeting. You can't do that again," he warned.
I cocked an eyebrow and ignored him, looking over his shoulder to Corinne and mouthing, _Coffee_.
She nodded and left the room.
I let out a breath and focused on the computer screen, checking my messages. "I didn't ask for the TV spot to begin with," I reminded him. "I'm not even running for senator yet. Officially, anyway," I added. "Don't you think we're jumping the gun?"
"Tyler, that's what I need to talk to you about." His tone sounded annoyed. "You won't win anything until you step up the schmoozing. The reason campaigns have funds is because they run off donations."
I shook my head, glancing over my schedule for the day. "I don't like donations." I felt like I had to repeat that on a daily basis for him.
"Yes, I understand that. Believe me," he said, sounding even more annoyed, "I'm well aware of your feelings on the subject."
I didn't need help funding my campaign. I'd built the fifth-largest media company in the South, with interests in television, Internet, and communication. Then I'd sold it and started all over from the ground up, building one of the top-ten-largest construction companies in the world.
It wasn't that I'd disliked the media world. I'd hated it.
I'd thought that media would be a great place to network and be visible for my political aspirations, but making something that you couldn't touch felt empty.
I realized I didn't need to wait to get into office to make positive change. I could start now.
So once I'd felt satisfied that I'd taken the company as far as I could on my own, I'd handed it over, and now I built fleets of things I could touch. Towers, homes, skyscrapers, ships, and even the equipment that built these things. I produced something, and better yet, it was something people needed. Something that gave people jobs.
I owned the sixty-story building that housed my office, more real estate than I knew what to do with, and I certainly didn't need handouts from people who wanted to have a politician in their pocket.
I had accomplished my successes on my own, and I'd get the Senate on my own.
But my brother had different ideas.
"Tyler, let me explain something." He dropped his binder on the chair and planted his hands on my desk, leaning down. "When you're not vying for donations, you're also not vying for support. When Blackwell got a two-million-dollar donation, he also got their endorsement . . ." He explained it as if I were a child.
"He got the votes of everyone in that organization," he went on. "And their friends. And _their_ friends," he added. "Donations aren't just about money. They're about other people putting their confidence in you. They'll publicly endorse you, because they have a stake in your success when you have their cash."
"Exactly." I nodded, the chip still weighing on my shoulder. "I'm not here to play chess with these people and be their pawn."
I twisted around, picking up an article I'd cut out from the table next to the window. "Look at this," I shot out, holding up the clipping. "Senator McCoy here cut funding for after-school programs to reroute the money from the state to the city parks in Denver," I explained. "However, the city parks don't show that money in their quarterly budget. So where'd the money go?"
The question was rhetorical, so I didn't wait for an answer. I dropped the clipping and grabbed the new printout I'd gotten off the Internet last night.
"And then this guy," I started, taunting my brother. "Representative Kelley wants to cut funding to women's clinics, because 'why do women need a separate doctor from men?'" I quoted him from the article and then looked to my brother, scowling. "This genius thinks both genders have the same reproductive system, and yet he gets to vote on legislation that determines medical treatment for women."
I started laughing, seeing my brother close his eyes and shake his head.
"This is why I'm running, Jay," I stated. "Not so I can be a contender in a popularity contest of who's got the most fucking friends."
"Oh, fuck you, Tyler." He groaned, running his hand through his hair and standing up. "I'm going for a drink, and tomorrow I am rebuilding you from the ground up."
And then he turned, making his way out of my office.
_A drink?_
I looked down at my watch. "It's eleven o'clock in the morning!" I argued.
"It's New Orleans," he deadpanned, as if that explained everything.
"And another thing . . ." He spun around, walking backward for the door. "Start being seen with a woman in public."
At that point I pursed my lips, pretty sick of all of his orders. "I thought you said me being single appealed to the 'single woman vote,'" I gritted out.
"Yeah, single. Not celibate," he retorted. "You look gay."
And then he turned around again, disappearing out the door.
I rubbed my hand down my face, feeling the back of my neck break out in a sweat.
_Jesus Christ._ Why was this so complicated?
Why was _everything_ so complicated?
I didn't want the Senate handed to me on a silver platter—I'd planned to work, and I was proud of my platform—but these fucking games . . . who I dated, what I wore, orchestrating fake photo ops with my kid, who happened to hate me, just so we appeared to have a close family . . . All of it was bullshit.
I knew CEOs who wrote off prostitutes on their taxes, politicians whose kids were on drugs, and civil projects funded by gangsters. All of these people put on masks to offer a clean, well-put-together appearance that was nothing but a complete lie.
I wanted the job, but I didn't like pretending I was something I wasn't, and I didn't want to lose my freedom.
There was nothing wrong with me. I shouldn't have to change.
I picked up the coffee Corinne had set on my desk and walked over to the wall of windows, staring out at the city.
My city.
The mighty Mississippi sat like the breath of life not far in the distance, busy with its fleets of cargo ships and tugboats as it calmly flowed past the convention center, St. Louis Cathedral, and the French Market.
I sipped the black coffee, strong and bitter the way I liked it, and noticed the storm clouds in the distance, rolling in from south of the river.
_My city._
Life existed in every inch of it. Between the flowers and moss that popped out of the concrete sidewalk slabs, the chipped paint decorating the shops on Magazine Street, and the musicians strumming their guitars in the Quarter, there was so much I never wanted to change.
And so much I did.
That's why I wanted to be in a position to give back and effect change in this city.
But I didn't want to play by Jay's rules. There were sides of me that I certainly didn't want in the spotlight but that I didn't want to hide either.
Like the part of me that had wanted to keep fighting her yesterday.
I narrowed my eyes, staring off out the windows.
I hadn't meant to come off as such a dick, but she'd made me nervous. She wasn't exactly approachable—not anymore, anyway—and her disdain was thick from the moment she'd walked into the room and seen me.
She acted like she hated me, and I wasn't sure why I cared.
After Christian had been bugging me time and again about the damn phone, I'd finally had enough and decided, on a whim, to go in and deal with it. I'd intended to make an appointment, but then Shaw—who I'd gathered at the open house was a major kiss-ass—insisted on handling it now to appease me.
I'd waited, and when she'd walked into the room, her long brown hair spilling around her, I could barely handle it.
All I could remember was that same rich hair cascading down the smooth skin of her back as I followed her out to the balcony that night.
God, she was beautiful.
I didn't care that we were fighting this morning, or that she looked furious with me. She was passionate, and if we'd been in my office instead, that meeting would've ended differently.
I glanced over at my black leather couch, imagining what she would look like on it.
She wouldn't be easy.
In fact, I had a strange feeling it would be like high school, and I'd feel like I'd scored if I just got my hand up her shirt.
But that was wishful thinking. I couldn't touch her.
Not that she wouldn't try to resist me anyway—the dynamics of our relationship had changed—but there was no way I could risk hurting my son or thwarting my ambitions.
_Tyler Marek Seduces Son's High School Teacher._
Yeah, the headlines would sink me, and Jay would have a meltdown.
Brynne, Christian's mother, would cut me off from my son, and Christian would never forgive me. Our relationship was already teetering on the edge, and he only needed an excuse.
So why didn't knowing any of that make her less desirable?
—
I opened the oven, grabbing the pot holder and taking the plate out of the warmer. Mrs. Giroux, the housekeeper, had been great about picking up cooking as one of her duties since Christian had come to live here. She had meals waiting for us daily, but even though I tried not to, I did miss dinner once in a while.
Christian and I had eaten together probably five times in the last three weeks. On occasion it was my fault. Something popped up, or I'd been running late, but more times than not Christian avoided me.
He spent time with friends, choosing to eat at their house, or he'd scarf down his dinner before I got home. He was about as distant as his teacher.
I made my way down the marble hallway, carrying my plate, napkin, and a bottle of beer, past the columns to my office, but I stopped, hearing laughter coming from the media room.
"No, dude!" someone shouted while another kid laughed. "Look at these pictures! We should print those."
I narrowed my eyes, turning to the right and inching toward the room.
"Shit. Vince just tweeted," I heard Christian say. "Aw, that's sick! I wonder if this house is still around. Get on Google Earth."
My mouth tilted in a smile, hearing his excitement. Google Earth? Well, at least it wasn't porn.
I set the food down on the small table next to the double wooden doors leading to the room and pushed a door open, peering inside.
"Hey," I said, seeing my son and two friends sprawled out on the carpeted floor instead of using the recliners in the room. They all had their laptops in front of them and looked completely engaged in whatever they were doing.
Christian's eyes flashed to me, but then he focused back down on his laptop, brushing me off. "Hey," he mumbled, having lost his smile.
The other two were munching and working, and I stepped into the room, loosening my tie and taking off my jacket.
"Did you eat?" I asked, making my way to the center of the room.
Christian didn't look at me, only gestured to the pizza boxes on the floor before resuming his work on the computer.
I sighed, rubbing my jaw in frustration.
Christian was an only child, his mother having chosen not to have any more with her husband. As I'd worked and built my legacy over the past decade, I'd always assumed I'd have more kids eventually.
When I found the right woman.
It was the natural progression and how we marked our lives, after all. Go to college, begin a career, marry, and have children. I hadn't wanted to be a father at twenty, but I wanted to be one now.
But how successful would I be if the kid I already had never stopped hating me?
"What are you guys up to?" I pushed, walking around behind Christian and taking a look at his screen.
"Just schoolwork," he answered, scrolling through pictures.
"Pirate's Alley?" I slowly inched in, recognizing the colors of the buildings and the Old Absinthe House sign in the photo.
"Have you ever been there, Christian?" I asked, looking down at the top of his head. One of his legs bent in toward his body, and the other lay straight out on the side of the laptop.
"Yeah." His voice sounded clipped as he reached for his friend's phone and started tweeting.
I studied the screen, seeing that he was on the Internet. I didn't know much about Pinterest, but it seemed to be a popular site. It looked like he was doing schoolwork, though.
"So what's the assignment?" I demanded, my own tone turning harder.
"Ms. Bradbury posted a scavenger hunt for extra credit today," he bit out. "We're mapping points of interest during the eighteen hundreds. Whoever is first, wins, okay?"
I could see the muscles in his jaw flex in anger, reminding me that my son was growing into a man with a fight of his own.
"She assigned this today?" I asked, trying to stay calm even though I knew the answer.
After I'd told her specifically that my son would not be allowed on social media for homework.
He had his phone after his schoolwork and on weekends, but clearly he was still able to get online and borrow friends' phones.
Christian shook his head and tossed his friend's phone back at him.
"No, right there." His friend leaned over and pointed out a pic on the screen, referencing the map on his phone. "This one's on the corner of Ursuline."
And I was forgotten.
But I'd barely noticed anyway, my jaw hardening at the mention of Ms. Bradbury and her foolish determination to continue to piss me off.
I yanked at my tie as I walked out of the room, and ignored the food I'd left on the table.
# SIX
EASTON
I leaped to the right, landing on my left foot as I held the racket with both hands and slammed the tennis ball back across the court. Popping back upright, I raced to the center again, oxygen rushing in and out of my lungs as I bounced on my feet.
The next shot fired out of the ball machine low and high, and I lurched my arm back, taking the racket over my head and swinging hard, sending the ball straight for the ground and out of bounds on the other side of the net.
_Shit._
I ran my sandpaper tongue over my lips, desperate for water from all of the exertion as I ran frontward, backward, and left to right, trying to keep up with the speed, trajectory, and spin I'd programmed into the machine.
I'd clearly overestimated the shape I was in.
Sure, I exercised. I ran and used my own small equipment to do strength training at my apartment, but tennis required muscles I rarely used anymore.
Every six months or so, I'd start to miss the game, the new challenge that every serve would offer, and I'd use my membership to access the pristine private courts at the gym.
I never played anyone, though. I hadn't played with a partner since the first round of Wimbledon, July second, five years ago, shortly before I moved to New Orleans with my brother. That was the day I'd gotten a code violation, a default on match point, and so, with no hope of winning, I'd walked off the court before the game was officially over and never returned to competitive tennis again.
My brother had tried comforting me, telling me that I couldn't expect to get my head in the game after what we'd been through earlier that summer. It had been a hard time.
Hell, it had been a hard two years prior to that, but it was still a moment I wished I could go back and change. My last match on a professional court had been my worst, and it was the only thing in my life I was ashamed of.
I'd behaved like a brat, and despite everything I'd accomplished up until that point, that's how people remembered the old Easton Bradbury.
But I would make damn sure that this Easton Bradbury never made that same mistake.
It was strange how something that felt like second nature at one time now felt so foreign. I used to do this every day. I'd wake up at five o'clock in the morning, eat a light breakfast or drink a protein shake, put on my gear, and hit the court for five hours.
In between I'd do my home study and eat, and then I'd go back out for either more practice or another workout.
At night I'd ice sore joints and muscles and read before bed.
I didn't go to school, I didn't go to parties, and I didn't have friends. That's probably why Jack was my BFF.
I grunted, feeling the ache in my grip as I squeezed the racket and backhanded the next tennis ball, sending it over the damn baseline.
"Damn it," I mumbled, pulling to a stop as I put my hands on my hips and dropped my head. "Shit."
I dug the remote out of the waistband of my tennis skirt and pointed it at the ball machine, powering it down just as a ball came flying toward me.
I ducked and then twisted my head in the other direction, hearing a car honk behind me.
Jack sat in his Jeep Wrangler laughing at me as "Untraveled Road" by Thousand Foot Krutch blared from his car.
I rolled my eyes and walked for the gate, handing the remote to the attendant and grabbing my gym bag. I tossed my towel into a bin before swerving around the fence and down the sidewalk.
"You only caught the end of that," I protested, climbing into the passenger seat. "I was hitting balls like crazy."
He smiled to himself, shifting into gear and pulling away from the curb. "You know you could play with me, right?"
I snorted. "No offense, but I want to be challenged, Jack."
His chest shook with laughter. "Brat."
I smiled and dug my phone out of my duffel before stuffing the bag onto the floor between my legs.
Jack had actually been a great sparring partner when I was younger. He'd even competed before it became obvious at an early age that it just wasn't a passion for him.
When my parents noticed that I was more interested and a lot more pliable, they let him off the hook and nurtured me. I never understood why it was so important for one of us to be competing at a high level in a sport, but I basically just wrote it off as a desire for them to be in the limelight and live vicariously, both of them amateur athletes in their day.
"You only come out here sporadically, and you always want to be alone," Jack commented, turning onto St. Charles and traveling past Tulane, heading toward the Garden District. "It's like you're forcing yourself to do something you don't want to do. As if you still feel obligated to play."
Spills of gold fell across my lap from the sunlight peeking through the trees overhead, and I checked my e-mail as I tried to ignore Jack's constant invasiveness.
He'd been like this since that summer five years ago, but I thought once I'd graduated college, he'd refocus more on himself.
"Easton?" my brother pressed.
My eyelids fluttered in annoyance, and I scrolled through messages, forgetting my brother as soon as I saw one from Tyler Marek.
I swallowed the thickness in my throat, my eyes moving over his name and trying to ignore the strange hunger that filled my stomach at the enticing thought of an interaction with him.
"Easton?" Jack pushed again, his voice sounding annoyed.
"Jack, just put a cork in it," I barked, clicking on the e-mail and reading Marek's message.
Dear Ms. Bradbury,
I was under the impression that we'd handled this.
While I understand you are a trained professional, there are certain things I will allow and certain things I will not. My expectations for my son's education follow the state standards, and I suggest you find a way to do your job—like all the other teachers in that school—that does not increase the burden on families more than the tuition we already pay. In the future, I expect the following:
1. My son is NOT permitted on social media for homework. I encourage an atmosphere free of distractions, so I demand work where this is not required. No argument.
2. I will be notified BEFORE anything less than an A for an assignment is entered into his final grades.
3. The rubrics for the presentation grades don't make sense. The presentations happen in school and are not something I can see, assess, or help him with. Performance assignments should not be graded.
4. Observing more experienced professionals in your field may yield a better understanding of student learning. If you'd like, I'd be happy to suggest to Principal Shaw that you shadow more adept teachers.
I trust that we will not have any other problems and you'll prepare accordingly. My son will NOT be bringing his phone to class in the future. If you have any concerns, please contact my office anytime for an appointment.
Sincerely,
Tyler Marek
Silvery shots of pain ran through my jaw, and I realized I was clenching my teeth and not breathing.
I closed my eyes, drawing in a long, hot breath.
_Son of a bitch._
I dropped my head back. "Ugh!" I growled, slamming my fists down on my thighs.
"Whoa," I heard Jack say to my left. "What's wrong?"
I shook my head, seething. "A burden on families," I bit out, barely unlocking my teeth. "This asshole is a millionaire, and social networking is free! What the hell is he talking about?" I shouted at my brother. "Son of a . . . !"
"What the hell happened, Easton?" he demanded again, this time louder as he swerved and then righted the steering wheel. A streetcar passed us on the left, its bell dinging.
I ignored him and looked down, scrolling through my phone. I'd programmed in parents' home and work numbers the first week, so I clicked on Marek's and found his cell phone number.
It was a Saturday, so I was guessing he wasn't at work. I refused to e-mail back. I wanted this dealt with now.
"Easton, what are you doing?" I could see my brother working the wheel nervously and glancing at me.
I shook my head, laughing to myself. "Shadow more adept teachers," I mocked, repeating his e-mail in a fake masculine voice as I looked to my brother with the phone ringing in my ear.
"I have to take time out of my hectic day to notify him personally every time his little prince gets a B?" I continued, complaining. "And why? So he can threaten me into not entering the grade?"
"Did a parent e-mail you?" he asked, slowly putting the pieces together.
I nodded. "Yeah. He expects and demands that I make changes, because he has a hang-up about my methods. Arrogant, entitled—" I stopped myself before my temper got away from me.
When there was no answer, I pulled the phone away from my ear and ended the call, clicking on his work number next. For men like him, the office never really closed. Perhaps he had a receptionist who could make an appointment.
The phone rang twice, and then I heard a click as someone answered.
"Good morning. Tyler Marek's office," a woman's pleasant voice chirped. "How can I help you?"
My heart pounded in my ears, and I could feel the pulse in my neck throb. I held back, almost wishing he wasn't in his office after all.
I needed time to calm down.
But I swallowed and pushed forward anyway. "Yes, hello," I rushed out.
"Easton, keep your cool," I heard my brother warn from my side.
I bit my lip to keep the anger out of my voice. "I'm Easton Bradbury calling for Mr. Marek," I told her. "I'm sure he's not in today, but—"
"Just a moment, please," she interrupted, and disappeared.
I sucked in a breath, realizing that he was in after all.
"Marek?" my brother asked. "Tyler Marek?"
I glanced at him, arching an eyebrow in annoyance.
"Easton, get off the call," Jack ordered.
His arm shot out, trying to grab the phone, but I slapped his hand away.
"Watch the road!" I barked, pointing at the street ahead.
"Easton, I'm serious," he growled. "Tyler Marek has a workforce of more than ten thousand people. He may be a senator, for crying out loud. It isn't your place to argue with him."
I shot him a look. _My place?_
My brother was worried about his career, but I didn't care who Marek was. He was still a man.
Nothing but a man.
"Ms. Bradbury."
I turned my head away from my brother, suddenly hearing Marek's voice in my ear.
Thick anticipation filled my chest, and I dropped my eyes, disappointed that I was actually excited.
"Mr. Marek," I replied curtly, remembering why I had called. "I received your e-mail, and I'd love to . . ." I trailed off, wiping the sweat off my hairline. "I'd love to schedule a meeting to sit down and work out a plan for Christian."
"We've already met," he pointed out, his voice clipped. "And it was not a productive use of my time, Ms. Bradbury."
I tried reasoning. "Mr. Marek, we both want what's best for your son. If we work together—"
"Ms. Bradbury." He cut me off, and I could hear people talking in the background. "Apparently I wasn't clear enough in my e-mail, so let me save us both some time. My son has no problems with any other teacher, so it goes without saying that _you're_ the problem." His stern voice cut me, and I felt like shrinking. "You suffer from an overindulged sense of entitlement, and you forget that your job is on a yearly contract."
My eyes widened, taking in his threat that my job this year could belong to someone else next year. I fisted the hem of the skirt at my thigh.
"Now, I'm a busy man," he continued, sounding condescending, "and I don't have time for silly young women who don't know their place."
My skin stung from where my fingernail dug in. His son didn't have problems with me. Perhaps I graded harder than other teachers, and I might have had unorthodox methods, but most of the students enjoyed my class, including Christian. When he participated. If he ever challenged me, it was because his father wouldn't allow him the freedom to have the tools to participate like all the other students.
"Now, can I get on with my day and consider this issue settled?" he sniped.
Heat spread over my skin, and I bared my teeth. "You can go to hell," I shot back, raging. "No wonder he can't stand you."
"Easton!" Jack burst out next to me.
But it was too late.
My eyes widened, and my hand tingled, nearly losing my grip on the phone.
_What the hell did I just say?_
I opened my mouth, unsure of what to say. _I didn't just say that to a parent._
I did _not_ say that to a parent.
There was only silence on the other end of the line, and I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to find the words.
"Mr. Marek," I inched out in a softer voice. "I'm sorry. I—"
But then I heard a _click_ , and the line went dead.
"Shit!" I cried, bringing the phone away from my ear and seeing CALL ENDED on the screen.
"He hung up." I looked at my brother. "I'm screwed."
Jack shook his head at me, his lips tight, clearly furious with me. He swerved to the left and downshifted, taking a sharp turn onto Poydras.
"Where are you going?" I asked, thoughts of Marek calling Shaw right now running through my head.
Insulting a parent wasn't good.
"To his office," he answered, his tone unusually defiant. "You're going to go apologize before he has a chance to file a complaint."
_To his office?_
"I . . . I," I stammered. "No!" I yelled. "No. Absolutely not! I can't talk to him right now."
But my brother didn't say anything. He just kept driving.
I put my hand to my forehead, panicking. "I can't believe I just said that. What was I thinking?"
"You weren't thinking," he retorted. "And you're going to go beg for forgiveness."
I shook my head. "Jack, it's completely inappropriate," I pleaded with him. "Please. I'm not dressed right."
But he ignored me again, speeding into the Central Business District and closer to Marek's office.
I looked down at my navy blue and white pin-striped tennis skirt with pleated ruffles on the back. It barely hit halfway down my thighs.
My peach-colored shirt was long-sleeved, but it was skintight, serving the purpose of absorbing my sweat but definitely not my humiliation.
I closed my eyes, groaning. I couldn't be less armed for a meeting with him.
—
Jack dropped me off in front of the building while he went to park in a garage. I stood out on the front sidewalk and tipped my head all the way back, scowling up at his building.
Big silver letters were posted on the front, spelling MAREK, the candy-apple-red glow behind the name reminding me of the dress I was wearing when I'd first met him.
The whole building was his?
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, forcing the muscles in my face to relax.
Heading inside, I approached one of the check-in stations. I peered to the right and saw security running people through metal detectors.
Placing my palms down on the cool black granite counter, I forced a small smile. "Hello, I . . ." I hesitated, my nerves firing. "I needed to speak with Tyler Marek. If he's in," I added.
"What's your name, miss?" the young man asked, picking up his phone.
"Easton," I breathed out, willing my heart to slow down. "Easton Bradbury."
He waited, then finally spoke into the phone. "Hello. I have Easton Bradbury to see Mr. Marek."
"I don't have an appointment," I pointed out, whispering to him.
He offered a placating smile and waited for what the other person had to say.
He nodded. "Thank you," he told them.
Hanging up the phone, he typed something into the computer quickly, and before I knew it, he handed me a badge with a bar code and pointed me toward the elevators.
"He'll see you," he said, nodding. "It's the sixtieth floor."
"Which office?" I asked.
But he just laughed and continued to shuffle papers without looking at me.
I let out a sigh and made my way through security, letting them scan my card and push me through.
I took the elevator up, making several stops on the way for others to get off.
We stopped at three odd-numbered floors and three even-numbered floors, and I pursed my lips, knowing that didn't mean anything, but it still made me uncomfortable.
If we had stopped at _two_ odd-numbered floors instead, the odds would've added up to an even number, and everything would've been fine.
I rolled my eyes, shaking my head. _God, I am sick._
The only person left in the elevator, I watched the blue digital numbers reach sixty.
I straightened, steeling myself as the doors opened.
And I understood why the clerk had laughed at me when I'd asked _which office_. The sixtieth floor _was_ Marek's office, apparently.
Ahead stood two tall wooden doors and desks belonging to two assistants on either side of the doors, one man and one woman.
The woman looked up from her computer and nodded toward the doors. "Go in, Ms. Bradbury."
I ran my hand down my clothes, smoothing them over before reaching up and tightening my ponytail.
But I'd already lost hope of salvaging my pride. Why hadn't I at least convinced Jack to take me home for a change of clothes?
Grabbing hold of a vertical bar serving as a door handle, I pulled one of the big doors open and stepped in, immediately spotting Marek ahead of me, standing behind his desk.
"Ms. Bradbury." He glanced up, one hand in his pocket as the other pushed keys on his computer. "Come in."
His eyes left mine and dropped down my body, taking in my appearance, I would assume. Despite the air-conditioning chilling the room, I felt my thighs warm and heat pool in my stomach.
I squared my shoulders and approached his desk, trying to ignore the sudden powerless feeling.
Out of habit, I counted my steps in my head. _One, two, three, fo_ _—_
But then I stopped in my tracks, catching something out of the corner of my eye.
I looked to my right, and my eyebrows shot up, seeing an oval conference table on the other side of a glass partition, filled with people. A lot of people.
_Shit._
I swallowed, turning for the doors again. "I'll wait."
There was no way I was speaking to him with other people in the room.
"You wanted to see me," he snapped. "Speak."
I turned. "But you're busy."
"I'm always busy," he retorted. "Get on with it."
I groaned inwardly, understanding why he was so open to seeing me now.
A weight settled in my stomach, but I hid it as well as I could as I stepped toward his desk again.
I kept my voice low and gave him a fake close-lipped smile. "You're enjoying seeing my dignity as a muddy puddle on the floor, aren't you?"
The corner of his mouth lifted, and he locked eyes with me again. "I think that's understandable after your behavior, don't you?"
I averted my eyes, licking my lips.
I hated his gloating, but I couldn't say he was wrong. I'd earned this dose of humility. No matter how vile his e-mail was, I should never have lowered myself to his level. The animosity would only hurt Christian.
"Mr. Marek." I took a deep breath, bracing myself. "I had no right to say what I said," I told him. "And I was very wrong. I know nothing about you or your son, and I lashed out."
"Like a brat," he added, staring at me with condescension.
_Yes, like a brat._
I dropped my eyes, remembering how I'd never gotten angry as a child. When I started to become a woman, though, I raced to fury, throwing my racket when I'd fault or yelling when I was frustrated.
I'd been under stress at the time, I'd been caged, and I'd hated the loss of control. Now I had control, and I resented anything that threatened it.
Marek kept pushing into my space—the meeting the other day and then the e-mail today—but I knew my job.
I knew what I was doing. Why didn't he see that?
I raised my eyes, staring back up at him. "I truly apologize."
"Are you really sorry?" He grabbed a gray file folder and a pen as he rounded the desk. "Or are you more afraid you'll lose your job?"
I narrowed my eyes. "You're insinuating I'm apologizing out of fear?"
He cocked his head, telling me with his amused eyes that's exactly what he was thinking.
"Mr. Marek," I said in a firm voice, standing tall. "I don't do things I don't want to do. I don't need to beg for anything or bow down to anyone. If I apologize, it's because I know I did something wrong," I affirmed. "It was a cruel thing to say, and you didn't deserve it."
A hint of a smile peeked out, but he hid it almost immediately. He let out a sigh, his eyes softening, and he turned around, making his way for the head of the conference table.
"Ms. Bradbury is Christian's history teacher," he pointed out to everyone at the table, looking back at me and grinning as he tossed the folder onto the table. "She doesn't think much of me."
I snorted, but I didn't think anyone heard it.
The man seated to his left laughed. "You're not alone, honey." He tipped his chin at me.
Marek grabbed a piece of paper, balled it up, and threw it at him, only making the man laugh more.
The two seemed close, and I faltered at seeing Marek playful.
"I'm Jay, his brother." The man rose from his chair and held out his hand.
I hesitated for only a moment before walking to the other half of the room and up the step to the table.
The office was massive, but it was partitioned by what had to be a ten-foot-long pane of glass separating—but not closing off—the room into two parts: Marek's office and a private conference area, probably for his convenience.
After all, why go down to another floor and meet with your personnel when you could make them all come up to you?
I shook Jay's hand, at once liking his easy smile and humor. I couldn't help but glance over, seeing Marek watching me.
His navy blue suit went well with the steel-gray walls, and I liked how some of his black hair had fallen out of place over his temple.
Everyone at the table—men and women—were dressed in business attire, and they looked like they'd been here a while. Papers, laptops, and phones were spread over the table in no discernible order, and I had to push away the pinpricks under my skin, urging me to organize their shit.
Plates with croissants and bagels were scattered about, while half-filled glasses of water sweated with condensation, their ice cubes having long since melted.
I wondered how long they'd been here. On a Saturday, no less.
"You don't have to worry, Easton. We're fine," I heard Marek say, and I shot my eyes back over to him. "Apology accepted, but my e-mail does still stand."
I rubbed my thumbs across my fingers, trying to remember what he was referring to.
He'd called me Easton.
"I'm against a fourteen-year-old on social media, and I can't imagine I'm the only parent uncomfortable with it." His tone was firm but gentler than it had been on the phone. "Adjustments will have to be made."
_Ah, back to this._
I kept my face even, about to suggest again that we sit down and talk through this, because I wasn't giving up, but someone else spoke up first.
"Social media?" a man to my right asked. "Jesus, Facebook has taken over my kids' lives. It's all they do," he blurted out, chiming in on the conversation and looking around to his colleagues. "You know, my sixteen-year-old actually wants a mount in the shower with waterproof casing for his phone. I'm surprised he hasn't glued it to his hand."
I hooded my eyes, focusing on a spot on the table and hearing laughter sound off around me as everyone started backing Marek up.
"It's an epidemic," a woman agreed. "And dangerous. Do you know how many sexual predators find their victims online?"
_Do you know how many victims of sexual predators drink water? Ban water!_
Grunts of approval chimed in, and I could feel myself losing the moment of relief I'd felt when he'd accepted my apology.
My fists tightened, and I knew I needed to leave. Now.
"Exactly," someone else replied. "The more we put ourselves out there, the more disconnected we are from real life. I'm sick of seeing people's faces buried in their phones."
"Complete time suckage." Jay shook his head, speaking up. "And kids have no attention spans anymore because of it."
I no longer liked Jay.
I glanced at Marek, who watched me with a hint of a smile on his face as the wall against me grew higher and higher.
"And there are so many stories where kids are getting bullied," another gentleman droned, "or put in danger because of it. I mean, has being able to Instagram what you had for lunch really made our lives better?"
Everyone started laughing, and every muscle in my body tensed like steel.
"Kids don't need social media," someone maintained. "Not until they're old enough . . ."
_Yada, yada, yada . . ._ I stopped listening. Everyone continued sharing their own two cents, but I just stood there looking at him.
He held my eyes, his mouth opening slightly as he raised the glass to his lips and took a small drink of water. He leaned back in his chair, relaxed and confident, because he knew he'd gotten what he wanted.
He still didn't see me as a capable woman. He still didn't respect me.
And when his eyes started falling down my body, raking over my waist and down to my bare thighs, I knew that he wanted something else.
The only thing he thought I was good for.
I inhaled a sharp breath and held up my hands, cutting everyone off in the middle of their rants. "You're absolutely right," I told them, my voice hard. "You're all absolutely right."
I offered a tight smile and looked around the table, everyone having gone quiet.
"Social media is a double-edged sword, bringing both advantages and"—I looked at Marek—"definite concerns. I agree with you," I placated.
Marek cocked his head, looking at me with interest as everyone gave me their full attention.
"However," I stated matter-of-factly, "it is here to stay. Whether you like it or not," I added.
I lifted my chin and let my eyes wander around the table as I began to circle. "We live in a data-driven world, and it is not something that will change."
I walked slowly around the table, speaking to everyone and feeling Marek's eyes on me.
"Let me break this down for you," I told them, crossing my arms over my chest and speaking slowly. "Every time we get a text or a tweet or a Facebook notification," I explained, "we get a shot of adrenaline. The constant influx of information has become an addiction—like a drug—and when our phones beep or light up, we get a small rush."
I met their eyes.
"And like all drugs, it isn't long before we need our next fix." And I gestured to their phones on the table as I spoke. "Which is exactly why you all brought your phones into this meeting with you right now instead of leaving them in your own offices," I speculated. "Sooner rather than later, you know you're going to feel that desperation, which will prompt you to check for a new e-mail or message. You're addicted to the information, same as your children."
"But in school?" a woman burst out. "Why should they have phones in school or be allowed to play around on social media for homework?"
"Because you let them have it at home," I shot back, trying to keep my tone gentle. "Do you expect the craving for it to end when they step onto school grounds?"
She twisted her lips and sat back in her chair.
"How does a teacher compete with the kind of hold social media has over his or her students' attention?" I asked them. "Because even if they're forced to be without their phones, they're thinking about their phones. They're hiding them. They're texting under their desks. They're sneaking to the bathroom to use them . . ." I trailed off, hopefully proving that the battle was real.
"I have two choices," I continued. "I can either fight it and treat it as a nuisance, or . . ." I calmed down, looking at Marek. "I can embrace it as a tool. Not only is their technology ensuring one hundred percent participation in my class," I pointed out, "but it is also teaching them community and digital citizenship."
I lowered my chin, pinning him with a hard look. "They do not merely attend a class, Mr. Marek," I explained, seeing his eyes narrow on me. "They interact with one another on multiple forums, seeing through social barriers and expressing themselves in the tolerant community that I oversee. They're learning, they're engaged, and they're treating one another well."
I moved around to his other side, standing more confidently than I had since the open house.
"Now, I understand you're a smart man," I went on, "and you couldn't have gotten where you are without being determined and intelligent. But I also think that you do whatever you want and say whatever you like without fear of accountability. I always have a very good reason for everything I do. Do you?
"Don't tell me how to do my job," I advised, "and I won't be so arrogant as to tell you how to do yours."
And before anyone had a chance to speak, I twisted on my heel and walked out.
# SEVEN
EASTON
"What will you do with the textbooks?" I asked the librarian as I unloaded the old history books I'd been storing in my classroom.
She grabbed the stack and started pulling them off her counter, one by one, to load onto a cart.
"I think they'll be donated," she answered. "Although I hear you don't even use the new fancy ones we paid good money for."
I smiled, bending down to my rolling chair to pick up another four books to hand to her.
"Not that I don't appreciate them," I teased, and she shot me a wink.
If anyone had a problem with me not teaching from the textbook, it certainly wasn't her. She had been teaching in Orleans Parish for more than thirty years and had been in all types of schools, from the advantaged to the destitute. She knew how to make do with what you had and had told me the first week that the best teachers were facilitators. The more the kids did for themselves, the more they learned.
"Hey," someone chirped.
I twisted my head, seeing Kristen Meyer pushing her rolling chair toward the checkout desk as well.
"What's up?" She heaved a sigh, sounding out of breath.
"Just getting rid of the old history texts," I told her. "You?"
"Ugh." She unloaded a stack of what looked like typical library books on geology. "Is it winter break yet?" she whined.
I let out a laugh. It wasn't even October yet.
"All right, I've still got a few things to do before I head home for the day. Thanks," I told the librarian, and then looked to Kristen as I leaned down to start pushing my chair back. "Have a good night," I singsonged.
"Wait," she shot out. "I'll come with you."
She hurried, dumping the rest of the books on the counter and pushing her chair, following me out.
I exited through the double doors, moving out of the way and holding one open for her.
The school was quiet—all of the students and many of the teachers having already left for the day—and I breathed in, smelling the rain that I knew was coming. The sky had been dark this morning, heavy with thick clouds, and the current weather filled me with trepidation as the wind in the trees carried the warning of a storm that would, without a doubt, be angry.
A hurricane was in the Caribbean, heading for the Gulf, but as of right now, it wasn't set to hit New Orleans. I hoped we were only looking at a tropical storm, but either way, the school was closing for the next two days in anticipation of flooding.
"So," Kristen drawled as we pushed our chairs on their wheels down the hallway. "I heard something that can't possibly be true."
I kept pushing my chair, our heels echoing in unison down the hall.
"I heard that you"—she spoke slowly—"showed up at Tyler Marek's office this weekend and told him off." I could feel her eyes on me as I looked straight ahead. "And that you were wearing a miniskirt, no less," she added.
"I wasn't wearing a miniskirt," I grumbled. "How the hell did you hear that?"
She squealed, her mouth opening in a gasp. "So it's true?"
I turned away and continued down the hall, squeezing the chair in my fingers.
He'd talked to Shaw, after all?
_Shit._
"It's okay," she soothed. "It's just that Myron Cates is one of Marek's vice presidents," she told me. "His wife and I became good friends when I taught her son last year, and she said her husband came home Saturday from work having witnessed a bold young woman serving Tyler Marek his ass on a platter."
She nodded and smiled as if it were an accomplishment.
I looked up at the ceiling, sighing. _Great._ Another parent I'd made a dynamite impression on.
"Are you . . ." she inched out, "like, seeing him?"
I shot her a look. "Excuse me?"
"Marek?" she suggested. "He's certainly handsome. And successful. And . . ." She eyed me, looking thoughtful, "and you're seeing him outside of school hours."
I shook my head. "This conversation is over."
I was not _seeing_ him outside of school hours. This was how the simplest things could get twisted around and sooner or later the story doesn't even resemble the truth. Myron Cates's wife and Kristen Meyer were going to have me giving Marek a lap dance on a Mardi Gras float next thing I knew.
"Okay, good," she chirped. "If you're not seeing anyone, then come out with me tonight."
It was Monday, but the students had gotten a surprise two-day vacation due to the storm, so there was no school until Thursday.
"I have plans," I lied.
Even I knew I should've gone out and given it a shot. Kristen was a little annoying, but nice.
I just wasn't a particularly social person, and it had been a long day already.
Maybe another time.
But the next thing I knew, she plopped down on her chair and pushed with her feet, sending herself rolling down the hallway backward and smiling at me.
"Come on," she urged. "Live a little."
I couldn't help but laugh, seeing her sliding down the floor like a carefree child.
"Life moves pretty fast," she stated. "If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
I rolled my eyes. "Okay, Ferris," I joked, recognizing her _Ferris Bueller's Day Off_ reference. "I know how to have fun."
She snickered, blowing out a breath. "I don't even think you know how to smile," she taunted.
I gasped in feigned outrage.
Plopping my ass down in my chair, I slipped off my heels and turned like her, pushing off with my foot, one after the other, and scurrying after her.
"I know how to have fun," I boasted, clutching my heels to my chest.
The hem of my navy blue dress rested at my knees, and I pedaled my feet, laughing as I caught up to her.
She picked up the pace, and I stood up, tossing my heels into the seat of the chair as I grabbed the sides of the chair and raced it.
"You can't do that!" she screamed, wide-eyed.
I flew past her, rounding the corner to our classrooms.
"There are no rules!" I shouted over my shoulder.
And then I pushed off, dropping into my chair once again and letting myself sail backward to the finish line. I held up my hands, gloating.
"And let that be a lesson to you." I smiled ahead at her playful scowl.
But then her eyebrows shot up, and her mouth fell open.
I looked over my shoulder and immediately put my feet down on the floor, stopping myself.
"Mr. Marek," I said, looking up at him leaning against the wall next to my classroom door.
_What is he doing here?_
My chest rose and fell from the exertion, and he tipped his chin down, cocking an eyebrow at me.
I shot up, smoothing my dress down and glancing over at Kristen. I only caught her smirk before she disappeared, pushing her chair into her classroom down the hall.
I turned back to Marek. "Excuse me," I said, feeling heat spread over my cheeks. "We were just . . ."
I trailed off, leaving it there. He knew what we were doing.
His three-piece black pin-striped suit looked crisp and dark against his fair skin, and his white shirt and slate-gray tie shimmered in the glow of the light overhead.
I took a few steps forward. "What are you doing here?" I asked.
His eyes shot down to my feet, and I followed his gaze, remembering that I'd forgotten to put my heels back on.
"Always losing your shoes," he commented, a smile curling his mouth.
I pursed my lips and turned around, snatching my heels off the seat and slipping them back onto my feet. Grabbing the back of the chair, I pulled it behind me and entered my classroom, knowing he'd follow.
"You came to my workplace unannounced," he stated behind me. "I thought I would return the favor."
I replaced my chair behind my desk and looked up, seeing that he had closed the door behind him.
"And?" I prompted.
"And I came to apologize," he admitted, stopping a few feet in front of my desk. "I've been unfair, and I'm sorry. Christian has his phone back, so we'll see how this goes."
I stilled, my heart galloping in my chest, and I almost smiled.
_Really?_
I opened my mouth but had to swallow the lump before I could speak. "Well, that's great," I said, surprised. "Thank you."
I guess I got through to him at his office.
He slid one of his hands into a pocket and narrowed his eyes on me, looking a little surprised.
"You seem very knowledgeable and determined." His voice sounded genuine. "You're an impressive woman, Ms. Bradbury, and I should've taken the time to understand your methods."
I kept my shoulders squared, but my eyes dropped, embarrassment warming my cheeks.
"Thank you," I mumbled, turning around to grab a dry-erase marker to start writing the schedule on the board for when the kids came back on Thursday.
"Christian talks about your class," he said behind me. "I can tell your teaching interests him, even if he would never admit it."
I uncapped the marker and rested my hand on the board but didn't write anything.
"He really can't stand me, can he?"
I dropped my hand to my side and spun around slowly, surprised by his question.
And feeling terrible all over again. I should never have said that.
No matter how much I thought I knew about him, they were nothing more than assumptions. Who was I to insinuate his son didn't care for him or vice versa? And what gave me the right to say anything at all in the first place?
He breathed deeply, and for the first time since I'd met him, he looked unsure of himself.
"I was twenty when he was born," he told me. "That's no excuse, but it's the only one I have."
_Twenty._
I was twenty-three, and I couldn't imagine having a child right now.
I watched him and waited, not wanting to say anything or interrupt because I found I kind of liked it when he talked.
"I know what you think of me." He looked me dead in the eye and then dropped his gaze, speaking in a voice close to a whisper. "And what he thinks of me."
And then he let out a bitter laugh, shaking his head. "I don't know why I even care what you think. You don't give a shit about me, but I guess that's what's so intriguing." He moved forward, his soft eyes turning to steel. "You're so cold and distant," he charged. "I guess I wouldn't think anything of it if I hadn't seen you so different at one time."
I inhaled a shaky breath, looking down at his right hand. The same one that had held my waist while we danced.
I licked my lips, barely noticing him advance.
"You were flirty and fun." His voice turned husky, and I looked up, seeing him round my desk slowly. "And you keep pissing me off, but it feels good," he whispered, playing with me, drawing me in.
I knew that look in his eyes. I may not know much about him, but I knew that look.
And we were in my classroom.
His son's classroom.
I may have had little shame, but he had none.
"Mr.—"
He cut me off. "Why won't you ever say my name?"
I shook my head, confused. "Why do you care what I think?"
"I don't," he maintained. "I care that you don't think of me at all."
I narrowed my eyes on him, clenching my teeth. "That's not . . ." I trailed off, plastering my back against the whiteboard as he hovered over me.
"That's not what?" he pressed, his voice sounding strained.
He stood so close that I had only to lift a hand and I could touch him.
"That's not true," I finished.
He leaned in. "You look at me like I don't matter." His eyes searched mine. "And I don't like it."
"I . . ." I shifted my eyes, avoiding his gaze. "I . . ."
Did I look at him like that?
"The masquerade, Shaw's office, my office . . ." he went on. "You've completely held my attention in any room we've been in together," he admitted. "Whereas you make me feel like I'm not worth your time. How do you do that?"
My body vibrated with his heat, and it was like being with him at that ball all over again. My eyelids fluttered, and I couldn't look at him.
"I . . ." _Fuck, why can't I speak?_
I cleared my throat, forcing my eyes up to his. "I don't mean to be cold." I spoke softly. "You are worth my time." And then I added, "Like all of my students' parents."
He dropped his eyes, speaking softly as well. "It's not often I let people speak to me the way I let you," he confessed. "Nor should I enjoy it as much as I do."
My heart hammered in my chest, and I wanted to tell him all of that was true for me as well. He dominated my attention when he was around, and I felt like he didn't see me or think anything of me.
And even though he pissed me off and riled my temper, I kind of enjoyed it.
In fact, I wanted to run toward it.
"Why you?" he questioned. "Why have I been thinking of you ever since that Mardi Gras ball?"
He pressed his body to mine, and I shook my head slowly.
"Mr. Marek," I pleaded, but it was useless. My eyes fell to his mouth, and then I glanced to my closed door, knowing that even though the students were gone for the day, there might still be staff around. "Please."
"There was something that drew us together that night," he maintained. "Something that got under my skin, something that's still there."
His mouth was an inch from mine, and I breathed hard, needing to push him away, but at the same time, that was the last thing I wanted.
"Easton," he whispered, and reached down behind my thigh, lifting it to press himself closer against me.
I groaned, feeling the ridge of his cock nestle between my legs.
"We can't do this," I told him.
My clothes felt like sandpaper on my skin, and I wanted them off. I wanted his shirt open and to know what he felt like under my fingertips.
"I know," he answered.
But while his left hand held my knee up, his right hand slid between my legs and rubbed my clit through my panties.
I sucked in a sharp breath and clutched his shoulders, letting my eyes fall closed as my head floated away from me.
"Mr. Marek," I begged.
But his breath fell against my mouth, and he whispered, "I told you there would be no stopping me when we finally ran into each other again."
And before I could open my eyes, he'd captured my bottom lip between his teeth and then kissed me, sending me reeling until I didn't know which way was up.
I couldn't fight it. His tongue dove into my mouth as he pressed me against the whiteboard and kissed me hard. I circled my arms around his neck, knowing I was getting myself into a shit ton of trouble, but I didn't care at the moment.
My body needed him. That's all it was.
I wouldn't get involved emotionally—I never did.
He grabbed me underneath both thighs and swung me around, planting my ass on the desk.
I groaned, his mouth working strong and fast over mine, stealing my breath as pleasure swarmed in my chest. It spiraled downward like a cyclone low in my belly.
I tightened my legs around his waist as his fingers slid under my dress, raking down my thighs.
I grabbed the back of his neck, cocking my head and returning every inch of his kiss. He tasted like coffee with vanilla, and I felt a hint of stubble on his face under my fingertips.
Dropping my hands down his body, I started unbuttoning his black vest. It was too thick, and I couldn't feel him.
I pulled my mouth back, then dove back in to flick his tongue with mine.
"Jesus Christ," he groaned, eating me up with quick kisses and nibbles. "Why does it have to be you, huh?"
I fumbled with the last button and finally tore open the vest, running my hands up his stomach and chest, covered only by his fine white dress shirt.
But even through the shirt, I felt the dips of his abs and pecs and of his toned waist and back.
Something screeched to my right, and I twisted my head to see the flailing branches of the tree outside scraping against the windowpane. The leaves blew, and I knew the storm would be here soon.
But I turned back to him, both of us breathing heavily, and I loved the storm in Tyler Marek's eyes even more.
He slid his hands inside my panties and leaned his forehead into mine. I whimpered and grasped the back of his neck with both hands, my pussy throbbing at the thick ridge of his cock pressing against my leg.
He leaned down, his teeth nipping at my jaw as my eyes fluttered closed.
"Tyler." I let my head fall back, craning my neck for his lips. "Mr. Marek, please stop," I begged.
His hot breath fell across my ear, and I shivered.
"I thought about you all weekend," he whispered. "How do you make me do that?"
I snatched up his lips again. I liked what he was telling me too much.
He grabbed the hair at the back of my head and pulled, exposing my neck again as he dived down and whispered against my skin, "When you walked in, dressed in that short little skirt, my fucking hands wanted these thighs"—he raked his fingers down my legs again—"almost as much as my mouth did," he admitted.
I squeezed my eyes shut, the need becoming agony. "Mr. Marek," I quaked. "Oh, God."
I didn't want to stop him, but . . .
I bit my bottom lip, feeling his fingers slide up and down my pussy, dipping and bringing out the wetness, spreading it over my clit.
And then whimpered, feeling two long fingers plunge inside of me.
"Shit," I moaned, squirming against his fingers. "Please stop," I pleaded. "Tyler, please."
But he just added another finger, staring down and watching the pleasure of what he was doing spread across my face.
"Say it again," he ordered.
I blinked, opening my eyes, even though his thumb rubbing circles on my clit was driving me wild.
"Tyler," I said gently. "Please stop."
His mouth curled into a smile, and he stole a kiss, nipping at my bottom lip. "You don't want me to, do you?" he breathed out.
He increased his speed, flicking my clit faster and harder and curling the fingers inside of me, making me suck in air quicker and quicker and making me so needy I damn near gave in and begged to ride his cock.
"Tyler, oh, my God," I cried, squeezing my eyes shut again and feeling my insides swirl and tighten.
"On second thought, call me Mr. Marek," he insisted, and I popped my eyes open, seeing the devil in his grin.
I bit my lips between my teeth, groaning as I leaned back on my hands and slid my ass back and forth, fucking his fingers.
"Yes, Mr. Marek," I breathed out, dropping my head back as the whole fucking world started to spin.
One of my heels dropped to the floor, but I couldn't care less.
He continued staring down at me, looking like he was completely captivated with my face.
"You going to be nice from now on?" he challenged in a hard voice, rubbing harder.
"Yes, Mr. Marek," I rushed out.
"You going to keep your temper in check?" His long fingers filled me up again and again.
I nodded frantically, feeling the orgasm coming. "Yes, Mr. Marek."
"And I'm not done with you yet," he warned. "Just so you know."
I breathed in and out quickly, my body tensing and shaking. "Yes," I cried out.
And then the orgasm exploded, spreading down my thighs and through my belly. I dropped my head all the way back, plastering my hand to my mouth to stifle the cry as I squeezed my eyes shut and let him rub my clit, bringing the orgasm to an end.
My legs, suddenly as shaky as Jell-O, released their grip on his waist and dangled off the side of the desk.
He kissed me, holding my lips for a few moments, and for just a few moments I felt like I did on Sunday mornings. When I woke up and realized I could stay in bed.
_Content._
A small smile spread across my mouth, and I felt high from him.
He withdrew his fingers, and I was almost sad at the loss until he brought them up to my mouth, resting them against my lips. I opened, and I sucked each finger, my lips wrapping around him and cleaning off the proof of what he'd gotten out of me.
His thumb dragged out of my mouth, tugging gently at my lip, and I watched him watch me.
I blinked long and hard, letting out a sigh.
_What the hell are we doing?_
I couldn't get involved with a parent, and even if I did, it couldn't be him.
I enjoyed him too much.
I leaned up, planting my feet on the ground, both heels having fallen off. I straightened my underwear and smoothed down my skirt as he slowly buttoned up his vest and straightened his tie.
"I hope it's smooth sailing for us from now on," he commented, buttoning his jacket.
I nodded absently, smoothing my hands down my hair. "Yes," I said, focused more on my messed-up appearance.
But his finger hooked under my chin and lifted. I raised my eyes, meeting his.
" _Yes_ , what?" he prompted, looking stern.
My clit pulsed and started throbbing again, and I bit back the excitement warming up my chest.
"Yes, Mr. Marek."
He leaned in slowly, kissing my lips once more, and then pulled back and looked down at me.
"Is my tie straight?" he asked, changing the subject.
I couldn't contain the small laugh that escaped. It amazed me how he could go from hot to boyish in a matter of two seconds.
I reached up and fixed his black and gray tie and then straightened my back, again checking my dress and my hair.
But he tipped my chin back up, locking eyes with me. "You're perfect," he assured me. "Everything about you is perfect."
But then I gasped as he spun me around and forced me to bend over. I had time only to twist my head to see what he was doing behind me before he yanked up my dress and slapped me on the ass.
"Wha—!"
He pulled me back up, my ass pressing into his groin as he smoothed my dress down and palmed my behind, breathing against my neck.
"Except that little episode at my office on Saturday," he growled low in my ear. "Don't ever mouth off to me in public again."
And then he let me go and walked for the door, stopping once he'd put his hand on the door handle.
"I'll see you soon, Ms. Bradbury." He smirked and walked out, the sound of the janitor's cart rolling down the hallway outside my door.
I stared at his back as he left, my stomach churning at his commands and confidence, and I shot out my foot, kicking the leg of my chair.
He had spanked me.
He'd spanked me!
I looked over at the windows, the angry sky dark with the promise of rain and the trees' leaves dancing wildly.
Smooth sailing, my ass.
# EIGHT
TYLER
"Hey," I greeted Christian as I walked into the dark kitchen. "How did practice go?"
He was sitting at the granite island, leaning back in his chair with his thumbs jutting out furiously on his phone.
"Fine," he replied, not looking at me.
His eyebrows were pinched together, heavy in concentration on whatever he was doing, or maybe he was just trying to look like he was busy.
He grabbed a piece of popcorn out of the bowl in front of him and tossed it into the air, catching it in his mouth.
I glanced down at the floor, shaking my head and smiling at the evidence that he wasn't a perfect shot every time.
I walked around the island and opened the refrigerator, grabbing a beer.
"The rain is starting," I told him. "Do me a favor and make sure the shutters in your bedroom are drawn and all of your windows are locked."
"Mrs. Giroux already made the rounds to all the rooms," he told me, continuing to type on his phone.
"Good." I nodded, twisting the lid off my longneck. "I don't think the hurricane will hit us, but I want you to stay inside unless you're in school or with me."
The storm had entered the Gulf, but its trajectory showed it heading toward Florida, so, at most, we were looking at a tropical storm.
"There is no school."
I swallowed the beer and gave him a questioning look. "What are you talking about?"
He looked up at me as if I was supposed to know. "They canceled school until Thursday," he announced. "They're anticipating some flooding, so I'm off for the next two days."
I set the beer down with a _clunk_ and placed my hands on the island, staring at him.
"Do they send home notes letting parents know this sh—" I stopped myself. "Stuff?" I corrected.
"Yeah," he answered, sounding sarcastic as he put his hand on the paper on the island and pushed it over. "They also e-mailed the parents, if you cared to check."
I picked up the light blue piece of paper and read the notice.
The school sat in a depressed piece of land, and due to the heavy rains expected, they didn't feel it was safe for students or teachers to be traveling the streets to and from the school.
"Oh," I mumbled, calming down. "Well, that's a nice surprise, I guess. I used to love surprise days off as a kid."
"I'm not a kid," he shot back, grabbing his Dr Pepper off the counter and taking a drink. "You missed that part, remember?"
I set the paper down, loosening my tie and slipping off my jacket.
What was he trying to accomplish with this behavior?
I took a deep breath and let it roll off me.
"Well, the Saints are playing tonight," I said, looking over my shoulder at him as I grabbed a sandwich off the plate in the refrigerator. "I was thinking we could hit Manning's for a bite to eat and watch the game."
He hopped off his chair and picked up his soda. "Marcus's dad is taking him to their cabin in Mississippi to fish for a couple days to get away from the rain. They invited me." He started to walk out of the kitchen. "They'll be here to pick me up in half an hour."
_What?_
I slammed the refrigerator door closed and charged after him.
"Stop!" I barked, following after him down the hallway. "I didn't give you permission to go anywhere. Do you even know how to fish?"
He rounded the staircase and stopped to look at me, disdain written all over his face.
"My dad has taken me fishing," he pointed out, talking about his stepfather. "Many times. And I've been to Marcus's cabin. Many times since elementary school. I wonder why you don't know this," he sniped, and continued jogging up the steps.
"Christian, stop!" I ordered again, my fist wrapping around the banister as I glared up at him.
That prick was not his father. I was.
"Goddamn it, Christian," I gritted out, talking to his back. "I know nothing about you. I know that." I tried to slow my breathing. My pulse was raging. "I messed up a lot," I added. "And I was never there. I never put you first, and I'm sorry."
I lowered my eyes, knowing he had every reason to hate me. Who was I to him anyway?
"I need you to start letting me in." I spoke quietly. "Let me get to know you."
I heard footfalls and looked up to see him continuing up the stairs away from me.
"When you start trying, maybe I will," he called back before disappearing around the corner.
I started after him, but then Jay's voice came from behind me. He'd just stepped out of my office.
"Just let him go," he urged.
I stopped, looking up at the top of the stairs. "I've been letting him go."
"So what are you going to do?" he challenged. "Keep him from going, so you can take him fishing instead?" I heard the teasing note in his voice. "Or hiking?" he suggested, knowing all too well that I didn't have time to do either. "We have work to do, Tyler."
I closed my eyes, feeling fucking defeated.
Jay was right.
I could chuck everything and spend the weekend fishing with my kid with my phone turned off and the laptops abandoned at home, and we'd have a great time.
But then e-mails would back up, production would stop because I wasn't there to hold hands and make decisions, and Mason Blackwell would have more endorsements, because he'd stayed home and kept working.
I could tell my kid that things would calm down after the campaign.
And then I'd promise him I'd be there after the election.
And then there'd be this trip or that, and he would realize as well as me that the choices I refused to make still had consequences. They already did.
I walked back down the stairs, refusing to look at my brother as I passed him.
"Go home," I told him.
—
Christian left around six, and I spent the rest of the evening in my office, going over quarterly budgets and making calls to set up new contracts.
I e-mailed my assistant, Corinne, to make flight arrangements first thing tomorrow for a trip to Asia in late November and to begin making arrangements for a luncheon I wanted to host at the house in a couple of weeks.
We could try to make it a family affair. Christian might like being able to invite friends.
It would probably be the only way I could get him to attend.
Then I researched some information online and faxed Jay my notes to add to the speech he was editing for me for a city council meeting later in the week.
"Mr. Marek."
I glanced up from my desk to see Mrs. Giroux, the housekeeper, standing in the doorway.
"Hi." I stood up, walking to the bar to fix a drink. "What are you still doing here?"
She entered, carrying something under her arm. "I went out for supplies, just in case." She smiled, her blond hair—graying around her face—tied back in a low ponytail.
"We weren't stocked with batteries or water, among other things," she added. "You should be good to go now if the storm intensifies."
"Okay, good," I commented. "Thank you."
I was glad she had thought ahead. Most residents of New Orleans—especially people like me, who'd lived here their whole lives—knew to keep bottled water, canned goods, and things like flashlights, batteries, and first aid supplies on hand. We were used to storms and torrential rains, so when we could stay in the city and weather it, we did.
When we couldn't in safety, we left.
The rain wasn't terrible yet, but it would be a monsoon out there tomorrow.
And by Thursday we'd have streets full of leaves, trash to clean up, and mud puddles to avoid.
I replaced the cap on the Chivas and walked with my glass back to my desk.
She approached. "I was just heading out, but I found Christian's laptop in the TV room." She handed it over. "I'm not sure where his charger is, and I didn't want to leave it on the floor."
I took it and set it down on top of my closed one.
"Thank you." I smiled. "Now get home before your husband comes down on me," I teased.
She rolled her eyes and waved me off. "All right. I'll see how the weather is the day after tomorrow. If you need anything, let me know."
"Will do."
I watched her leave and then picked up the laptop, ready to set it aside, but then I stopped, hesitating for a moment.
_Social media groups._
Letting my curiosity get the better of me, I set the laptop back down and opened it up.
I powered up the computer and brought up the Internet. Facebook was the home page, and I held back, feeling guilty about invading his privacy.
But I wasn't prying unnecessarily. I was researching. I wanted to know what my son was like.
There was a shit ton of selfies, mostly young girls, and I immediately scrolled quicker, suddenly feeling like a perv for nosing around their adolescent world.
I caught sight of his groups on the left and saw MS. BRADBURY FIRST PERIOD and clicked on it.
Scrolling down the posts, I saw photos of student work, discussion threads about what they had talked about that day, and even parents commenting with their opinions on a historical event.
The participation was widespread, and everyone seemed excited.
I couldn't help feeling like shit.
Christian was in this group, interacting with his peers, their parents, and his teacher, and I was nowhere.
I saw a message from Ms. Bradbury posted about two hours ago, wishing the kids a pleasant and safe few days off and to not forget to work on their assignments which were still due Friday.
Some of the students commented with pictures or jokes all done in good humor. They seemed to like her.
And I still knew almost nothing about her.
I closed the laptop and set it aside, opening up my own again.
I hesitated for only a moment, and then brought up my web browser, typing in "Easton Bradbury."
# NINE
EASTON
I tore open the bag of microwave popcorn, a steam cloud full of the scent of butter and salt bursting forth as I shook the contents out into a large glass bowl.
"Always" by Saliva played on the iPod, and I bobbed my head to the music. Tossing the bag away, I grabbed two Coronas out of the refrigerator.
"All right. Your windows are all secure," my brother called as he pounded down the stairs. "I'm surprised you don't have shutters, though. I thought you'd think of that, Miss Self-Sufficient."
I shook my head, handing him a beer. "Well, consider it my next project."
He grabbed the bottle opener out of the drawer and popped the top. "There's no way you're hanging out the windows to install them yourself, Easton. You're hiring someone to do that job."
I shook more salt onto the popcorn. "I was going to."
"No, you weren't," he deadpanned.
I laughed to myself. _No, I wasn't._
Installing shutters sounded fun. Of course, I'd have little knowledge of what I was doing, and by the time I was done, the house would probably look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, but it'd be something new to learn.
And it would get Jack off my back.
I think it honestly bugged him that I didn't need his help more, which was why he reveled in situations such as these. It gave him the opportunity to hover even when I'd assured him the house was ready for a storm. Windows and doors secure, batteries and flashlights stocked in the kitchen drawer, and food and water shelved in the pantry if need be. That was about all we could do.
The ominous clouds this morning had turned into a light rain this afternoon, and after considering the forecast for the next forty-eight hours, most schools in the parish had decided to close. E-mails and letters were sent home to parents, and I posted in the Facebook groups, reminding students that the chapter test was still set for Friday and to continue with their reading to prepare.
I'd come home, changed into some pajama shorts and my Loyola Wolf Pack T-shirt, and then downloaded some scary movies. Jack had rushed over to make sure I was safe.
"Maybe I should stay here," he offered, leaning against the counter behind me.
I picked two cloth napkins out of the drawer and then popped the top on my Corona. "Jack, when was I born?" I asked, not looking at him.
"November seventh."
"What year?" I pressed.
"Nineteen ninety-one."
"Which makes me how old?" I ran my hand over the napkin, smoothing the folded rectangle as I waited.
"Twenty-three." He sighed.
I turned and looked at him, his contrite expression telling me he understood everything I didn't say. He didn't need to hold my hand during a rainstorm or worry that I'd cross paths with a black cat.
"I'm twenty-three," I reiterated. "I don't worry that you can take care of yourself."
"I haven't gone through what you've gone through," he said, sounding defensive but sad. "You were sixteen when he started . . ."
I looked away, swallowing the lump blocking my airway.
"When he started following you, texting you, terrorizing you . . ." Jack went on, looking pained.
I shook my head. "Jack," I warned, wanting him to stop.
"You never knew what was coming." He squeezed the neck of the bottle in his hands. "You never knew whether he was going to show up in—"
"Jack, stop," I gritted out, cutting him off.
"I know you have guilt about Avery and our parents . . . about that night—"
I snapped my eyes up to his. "Enough!" I ordered.
He held my eyes, both of us frozen in the kitchen as the sound of fat raindrops pounded the roof and windows.
His expression hardened, turning from sad to challenging, and he set down his beer and powered into the living room, going straight for the bookshelf.
My arms heated with fear, and my throbbing heart pounded harder as I watched him reach onto one of the shelves and unearth the small wooden chest nestled there.
He turned around, gesturing to the locked box.
"What are you keeping in here?" he demanded.
But I clamped my jaw shut. He was invading my privacy, and I refused to give in.
"Open it," he ordered, knowing that I had the key.
I tipped my chin up and tried to calm my racing heart. "No," I answered calmly.
"Easton." His jaw flexed. "Open it."
I looked away. How the hell had he known something was in there?
My eyes burned, and I blinked long and hard. _I can't open the box._ I wouldn't. It hadn't been opened in five years, and this was none of my brother's business.
"No."
He stared at me, shaking his head, probably not knowing what to do.
He walked over, speaking quietly. "You keep the past too close. You're not moving on." His eyes searched my face, almost pleading. "I don't know what's in there, but I know it's too heavy a weight for you to carry around with you. You're twenty-three. You say you're a woman, but you still live within the lines as if you were a child." He dropped his eyes, whispering in a shaky voice, "You don't step out of the box, Easton."
I let out a breath and turned, walking back to my popcorn. "That's not true."
"Do you have any friends?" he challenged, following me. "Who was the last person to make you laugh? When was the last time you went to bed with someone more than once?"
I ground my teeth together, picking up the snacks and walking back to the living room.
But Jack kept pressing, "Has anyone other than me ever been in this apartment?" he asked.
I slammed my food down on the coffee table and picked up the remote.
"I'm tired of seeing you alone," he burst out. "I'm ready to burn this fucking place down and everything in it, so you're forced to leave the safety of your little shell!"
"Ugh!" I grabbed a handful of popcorn and flung it at him, the popped kernels hitting his face.
He jerked back, struck dumb by what I'd done.
Dropping his gaze, he arched an eyebrow, looking down at the white puffs on the floor.
I snorted, trying to contain my laugh, and he couldn't keep from smiling either, as he looked up at me.
"Ask me how old you are again," he grumbled. "I think I'd like to change my answer."
He brushed off crumbs from his shirt as I kept laughing.
But then we both jerked, a knock on the front door catching our attention.
Jack looked to me, a question in his eyes, but I shrugged. I had no idea who would be knocking on my door. He was right, after all. I had no friends.
I walked into the hallway, my bare feet quiet against the hardwood floor.
"Who is it?" I called, leaning up on my tiptoes to see into the peephole.
And my stomach instantly dropped. I fell away from the door, landing back on the heels of my feet.
_What the hell?_
"Easton?" he called through the door. "It's Tyler Marek."
I pinched my eyebrows together and shot up, peeping through the hole again.
_How does he know where I live?_
He was still dressed in the same suit from today, although his tie was loosened and his hair was wet, probably due to the rain. His head was cast downward as he waited, and I dropped to my feet again, realizing I was breathing a mile a minute.
I couldn't have a parent from school at my house. What did he think he was doing?
I unlocked the dead bolts and chain but opened the door only enough to fit my body between it and the frame.
"What the hell are you doing here?" I demanded. "This is my home."
He leaned a hand against the door frame and raised his eyebrows, a cocky smile dancing across his face.
"I made you come on a desk this morning," he pointed out. "I can't stop by your house?"
A snort that turned into a quiet laugh escaped from behind me, and I peeked over my shoulder to see my brother leaning against the frame between the living room and the entryway, smiling.
"Is someone here?" Tyler stood up straight, narrowing his eyes on me.
I inhaled a deep breath. "What do you want?" I asked, getting to the point.
He pushed his wet hair back over the top of his forehead and stuck his other hand in his pocket, all of a sudden looking nervous.
He cleared his throat, raising his hesitant gaze up to mine. "I want to apologize."
I let out a bitter laugh. "Don't worry, Mr. Marek. This morning is our little secret. Just go away."
I moved to close the door, but he shot out his hand, keeping it open.
"Easton," he called out, sounding unusually gentle. "I should never have been rough with you today, and I'm sorry."
_Rough with me?_
I narrowed my eyes, suspicious. "Why?" I asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Why are you sorry?" I demanded, forgetting my brother standing nearby.
Tyler Marek was never gentle, and I'd never given him the impression that I had a problem with that. Why did he suddenly feel bad?
He opened his mouth, looking like he wasn't sure what to say. "I . . ." He cleared his throat again. "I just don't feel like I've treated you as well as you should be treated," he admitted.
I stood there, frozen in place and staring at him suspiciously. What the hell was going on?
When had I ever given him the impression that I couldn't take what he dished out? And now he was worried about me?
"All right." My brother grabbed the door and opened it completely, breaking me out of my daze. "I'm out." He leaned down to kiss my cheek. "Be safe and . . ." He looked at Tyler as he slipped past both of us and through the door. "We'll meet another time."
He jogged down the steps, his dark green T-shirt slowly turning black in the rain as he ran for his Jeep.
Tyler looked after him and then turned to me, cocking his head. "I'm not a jealous man, but for you I might make an exception."
_Huh?_
And then I realized he'd never met my brother. He thought Jack was a lover.
"No need to be jealous," I reassured him. "You're the parent of a student and nothing more."
He looked away, shaking his head at my audacity.
But then his expression cleared and he looked at me pointedly. "Why didn't you tell me you played tennis professionally?" he asked.
My face fell. "You had me investigated?" I accused.
"No. I know how to Google, thank you," he retorted. "You're as much of a mystery as my son, so I looked you up."
My hand fell off the door handle, and I searched my brain for a way to deter him without making him more curious.
He stepped through the door, and I backed away, letting him in.
"There wasn't so much on Easton Bradbury, the Loyola student or teacher," he told me, closing the door behind him. "But there were thousands of hits and pictures on you as an athlete." He inched closer to me, not giving up. "Tennis player, close family, promising future that crashed and burned when . . ." He trailed off, and I looked up, seeing the uncertainty in his eyes.
I smoothed my hand down my T-shirt and shorts, steeling my spine.
Now he knew everything. Nearly everything.
There were articles, video footage, interviews . . . My rise had been highly publicized, and so had my fall.
When my parents and sister died on that rainy night in a vicious accident, I'd lost everything. My routine, the world as I knew it, and my desire to play.
Who was I if I wasn't the star in their lives, and why the hell did I want to play tennis anymore anyway?
It was my fault they'd been driving that night, and when it was time to get back on the court, my will to play was gone. Even now, on the rare occasion I tried, my game had gone to shit.
My magnificent exit and display of temper were forever digitized. I'd forfeited the match and walked off the court, pushing cameras and microphones out of my face as I left for the last time.
"Easton, I'm sorry." Marek reached out and touched my cheek
But I pushed his hands away and stepped back. "Stop apologizing."
How dared he act like I needed to be put back together?
"Don't handle me, Tyler," I growled. "I'm tired of everyone hovering and sticking their noses in. You don't matter," I shot out bitterly, "so stop trying to push your way in."
I charged into the living room, but he grabbed my arm and swung me back around, pulling me to him. I crashed against his chest, the rain on his clothes like ice against my arms and legs, and my breath caught.
"Yeah." He nodded. "I don't matter. I don't matter so much that there was no way in hell you could say no to me today," he charged. "And I'd be willing to bet I'm the first man you can't say no to, because it's the same way for me."
He bent his head down to mine, our noses brushing. "You're strong and proud, resilient and capable. I can see that." His voice was thick, like he was feeling more than he was saying. "I value those qualities in a person, Easton. You don't give anyone an inch, and it's like looking into a mirror, because it's the same independence I value." He looked at me like a dare and wrapped an arm around my waist, pulling me closer and whispering, "And when I touch you, I can't explain what I feel, but I know you're feeling me, too."
I closed my eyes, inhaling his sweet scent of cologne and leather—probably from his car—and even the cold rain on his clothes couldn't cool me down now.
I let my head fall to the side against his chest as I spoke, closing my eyes. "Everyone watched me all the time." I trembled. "The cameras, the crowd, my parents . . . Everything I did was under a microscope."
I slipped my arms inside his jacket and wrapped them around his waist.
"If my lips were tight, then I was angry," I told him, reminiscing about the commentators' assumptions as they watched me on the court. "If I hesitated, I was scared. If I didn't smile at the camera, I was a spoilsport . . ."
I dipped my nose into his shirt, inhaling a long breath before I looked up at him. "Everything was judged." I shrugged. "And when my parents and younger sister died in a car accident, it only got worse. Everyone was in my face."
I pulled away, turning around and crossing my arms over my chest.
"So I started over," I told him. "Jack and I moved to New Orleans, went to college, and let the past go."
I turned and locked eyes with him. The room looked so small with him in it, and I realized that he was the first person, other than my brother, who'd been in my apartment. Droplets of rain spilled down his temple and neck, and I licked my lips, trying to keep the libido that was beginning to heat low in my stomach chained.
I cleared my throat. "But after five years, my brother still tries to hold my hand. He still worries about me. Am I happy? Do I smile enough?" I approached Tyler, dropping my arms to my sides. "He forgets that I'm a grown woman."
I slipped my hand against his, resting it there lightly. "But you don't," I whispered, seeing his fist curl, holding mine inside it.
"I didn't know," he said softly, his breath fanning across my forehead. "I should've treated you—"
I cut him off, looking up. "I like how you are with me. You're not careful with me. You see more of me than anybody else does."
I pressed my body against his, arching up on my toes and leaning toward his lips. His breath hitched, and I slipped my hands inside his jacket again and gripped his waist.
"Don't be careful with me, Tyler," I whispered, catching his bottom lip, sucking it quickly and then letting it go. "Please," I pleaded.
And he groaned, closing his eyes and diving in.
He held me to his body and captured my mouth, moving over my lips slow but hard. He tasted cool and fresh, like water, but then he pulled away and dove for my neck.
I gasped, his hot breath on my skin causing chills to spread over my body as he kissed and bit me gently.
"Don't be careful," I reminded him in a whimper as I reached up and circled his neck with my arms, holding him to me.
He picked me up, and I wrapped my legs around his waist, kissing him with full force on the mouth.
"Your clothes are all wet," I rushed out between kisses, breathless. "Get them off."
"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked, nibbling at my mouth.
"Do what?" I played, licking and biting his jaw, hearing him suck in a breath. "Fuck like animals in my bed upstairs?"
His fingers dug into the skin of my ass, and I went to town with my tongue. I attacked his neck, his jaw, and his lips, squeezing my thighs around him.
"Fuck." He stilled, holding me tight. "Just wait. Hold on," he gasped, dropping me back down to my feet and letting me go.
"What's wrong?" My voice trembled. I was so fucking turned on, and he'd just stopped.
His shoulders slumped slightly, and his face was twisted as he breathed in and out. "Shit, that's painful," he cursed, the bulge in his pants hard and ready.
What was he waiting for?
"What's wrong? Is it Christian?" I asked gently, feeling guilty.
He shook his head. "No," he choked out. "He's away for a couple of days." He jerked his chin to the stairs. "Go get dressed."
"Why?"
I curled my toes into the floor, my clit pounding like my heartbeat during a run. I didn't want to leave. What the hell?
"Now," he ordered, his voice hard and pissed off. "I'm taking you to dinner. Go get dressed."
# TEN
TYLER
I knew her kind.
It was like looking in a mirror, and I had no doubt that everything she'd told me was true. She was too brave to lie.
But I also knew she was trying to distract me. She didn't want to open up too much or take off the mask.
Easton Bradbury was a survivor, and she'd ride me to kingdom come if it would get me to stop asking questions.
I'd love every minute, but I didn't like how she kept me at arm's length.
I'd always set the boundaries, not the other way around.
She'd gone upstairs, without argument surprisingly, and came back down dressed in a pleated black miniskirt.
It was sexy but tasteful. Her top was off-white and off the shoulder, and it felt like water when I placed my hand on her back and guided her to the car, beneath an umbrella I'd found right beside her door.
Every bar in the Vieux Carre was open, and the streets were flooded with people, despite the heavy rain.
The French Quarter was the highest point in New Orleans, so it rarely flooded, not that flooding would stop the residents. The electric charge in the air only incited the already thick lust for life that flowed in their veins.
Just give them an excuse and there was a party.
Patrick dropped us off at Père Antoine on Royal Street, a block off Bourbon, and I rushed her inside, doing a piss-poor job of not ogling her beautiful legs, decorated with drops of rain, as she followed the hostess to a table and I followed behind.
I sipped my Jameson neat and watched her trail her fingers along the edge of the tablecloth in front of her, her lips moving slightly. The cloth was white with small flowers sewn into the design.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
She looked up, her eyes wide.
"I . . ." She closed her mouth and then opened it again. "I was counting," she admitted. "It's kind of a habit I've been working on stopping, but sometimes I still find myself doing it."
"What do you count?"
Her head turned, her eyes scanning the room as she spoke, as if she was afraid to look at me. "I count my steps as I walk sometimes." She looked down, smoothing her clothes as she went on. "My strokes when I brush my teeth. The number of turns when I use a faucet. Everything has to be an even number."
I set my drink down. "What if it only takes three turns to get your desired temperature with the faucet?"
She glanced up. "Then I do shorter turns to get to four," she shot back, a hint of a smile on her face.
I narrowed my eyes, studying her.
She blushed, looking embarrassed as she leaned her elbows on the table and took a drink of her gin and tonic.
Why couldn't I get a reading on her?
Her face was oval shaped with high cheekbones, and she had big blue eyes that always seemed covered by some kind of filter. I couldn't look at her and tell what she was thinking.
Her top lip curved downward, making her bottom lip look pouty, both the color of a sullied pink that I wanted to feed on.
Her shoulders were squared, and her jaw was strong, but she wouldn't meet my eyes, and her breathing was shaky.
So much like a strong woman, but the vulnerability and temper were that of someone who worked very hard to never really face the world.
She wanted me but acted like I could easily be replaced.
I thought about her when we were apart, and I wanted to know that she thought about me too.
"So why do you do it?" I pressed.
She shook her head, shrugging slightly. "It's soothing, I guess," she placated.
"Have you talked to anyone about it?"
She met my eyes, holding the glass in her hand as she leaned on the table. "I have. Sporadically," she added. "Most people like me function just fine, and when I'm busy, I forget about it. But at certain times"—she paused, watching me—"I regress."
_Certain times?_ Did I make her nervous?
"It just makes me feel better," she explained. "And sometimes, it's just a habit."
I nodded, understanding. "So you count things. What's your favorite number?"
"Eight."
I laughed a little. "Didn't have to think about that, huh?"
She blushed, giving me a timid smile.
Licking her lips, she reached for the container of sweeteners and pulled some out, setting them side by side on the table.
"Can't have two," she told me, looking at me with amusement as she explained, "because if they separate, then they're alone." She slid the packets apart, proving her point.
Then she grabbed two more, lining them up with the others. "Can't have four, because even if there's two in each group, it's still only _one couple_ in each group."
Her voice turned playful, and she seemed to relax as she got caught up in explaining her secret obsession.
She took out more packets, making two groups of three. "And you can't have six, because if you separate them into two groups of three like this, then there's three in each group, and that's an odd number."
Her eyes widened, looking like that would be the worst thing ever, and I laughed.
She took out two more packets, making two groups of four each. Eight packets total.
"Eight is perfect." She grinned, fingering the packets to make sure they were straight. "Two groups. Four in each group making two couples in each group."
And she looked up, nodding once as if everything were perfect with the world.
I couldn't help it. My lips curled into a smile because she was the fucking epitome of intriguing. So sexy, but if you blinked too long, she was transformed and you realized everything you thought you knew about her barely touched the surface.
She hooded her eyes and looked away, smiling to herself. "I'm crazy," she admitted. "That's what you're thinking."
I let my eyes rake down her bare neck to where her shirt fell off her shoulder. The hardened point of her nipple poked through the thin fabric, and I knew she wasn't wearing a bra.
The shirt was the only barrier, and that turned me on more than the idea of her naked did.
I raised my eyes to her. "I'm thinking you're beautiful," I said in a low voice. "And if you need everything in eights, it could be a long night."
She held my eyes, not moving, but I could see the excitement trying to break out across her face. Her hitched breathing, her stillness . . . I loved that I'd shut her up for once. She was fun, and I enjoyed peeling away her layers.
The waiter came over, setting down the crawfish étouffée for Easton and my blackened catfish and left to get us another round of drinks.
She took her spoon and pushed it through her stew of rice and peeled crawfish tails. I grabbed my fork and knife, ready to cut into a meal I wasn't the least bit hungry for, but I stopped, seeing her take a small piece of bread and dip it into the stew. She brought the bread up, dripping with creole sauce, and caught it with her mouth, sucking the tip of her thumb before starting to chew.
Glancing up, she caught me staring. "What?" she asked more as an accusation.
I cut into my food. "You're only allowed finger foods when we go out to eat," I deemed.
I heard her snort. " _If_ we go out again," she corrected.
She picked up her spoon and we both started eating. I ate the fish with the sauce and all of the rice, quickly realizing I was hungrier than I'd thought. I rarely just sat and ate, unless it was with Christian, and more often than not, we were both interrupted by phone calls or texts at the dinner table.
Business dinners were a lot of talking and drinking, so Mrs. Giroux's home-cooked meals were much appreciated. It was my fault I chose to eat them at my desk as I worked.
I raised my eyes, watching her eat and loving the sight of her sitting there: her dark hair spilling over her shoulder, her skin glowing in the light of the ostentatious chandelier hanging above her, her downcast eyes as she licked her lips after taking a drink.
I wasn't thinking about work or home. At the moment I wondered only what she was thinking.
"Why do you want to go into politics?"
I stopped, looking up. She watched me silently, waiting.
I shrugged slightly, setting down my silverware and relaxing into my seat.
"I have money," I pointed out, picking up my drink. "Now I'm bored, and I want power."
She set her spoon down, sitting back and crossing her arms over her chest. She cocked her head, unamused.
My chest shook with a laugh before I took a sip and set down my drink. She didn't take any bullshit, did she?
"I've been on top of the world my whole life," I told her, fingering the glass. "I grew up attending private schools, and my father made sure I had everything I could ever want. College was a blast. Being on my own, money I didn't earn or question where it came from sitting in my pocket . . ." I trailed off, staring at the table and narrowing my eyes.
"I didn't concern myself with anything that brought me down," I confessed. "I was arrogant."
I stopped and smirked at her. "Well, more arrogant than I am now," I added. "I was self-serving and selfish."
The waiter stopped and set down the drinks, leaving just as quietly when neither of us looked at him.
I raised my eyes, meeting hers. "When I was nineteen I got a girl pregnant." I swallowed the lump, remembering that day I'd wished so many times I could go back and redo. "She wasn't even really my girlfriend," I added. "It was new, and it was casual, and then all of a sudden my connection to her was permanent."
Easton's expression was emotionless as she listened.
"And you know what?" I continued. "I still didn't change. I threw money at her so she'd go away, and after a year or so, she married someone else."
I looked away, feeling ashamed. "A great guy who wanted her even though she had another man's kid, a guy who was there for my son."
My throat tightened, and I forced my breathing to slow. I'd worked very hard over the years not to think about Christian waking up in the middle of the night or having stories read to him by someone else. Times when he was small and helpless and needed me and I was nowhere around.
I was never there.
"I thought I was a man." I spoke quietly. "I wasn't even close."
She dropped her eyes, looking saddened, and I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Did she think less of me now?
Of course she did.
"When I was twenty-two," I went on, "I was in my last semester of college and ready to be done. I had to take this social science course to fulfill a requirement. I forget what it was called," I told her, "but I remember, very well, arguing with the professor one day. He was giving us some prison statistics. Percentages of the inmates' races, percentages of repeat offenders . . ."
I tipped back the drink, finishing it off, setting the glass down, and clearing my throat.
"Everyone thought that the inequalities in prison culture were shocking, but I didn't care. It didn't seem like a big deal."
A smile escaped me as I remembered that day. "The professor got in my face and told me to look harder." I looked at her point-blank, imitating his deep, gruffly voice. "'Mr. Marek, if you're not angry, then you're not paying attention.' And I shot back with 'Well, I don't want to be angry all the time. Ignorance is bliss, and I don't care about fuckups who got sent to prison for their own mistakes' and all that bullshit. I thought I was so smart."
I felt utterly ridiculous, quoting my twenty-two-year-old self. Back when I thought I knew everything.
I continued to explain. "He wanted us to question the how and why, and I couldn't have cared less. I wanted to make money"—I shrugged my shoulders—"go to parties, and have fun."
She continued listening, not moving a muscle.
"And then," I continued. "I remember like it was yesterday. He looked me in the eye, and he said, 'Tyler, if you're going to be a burden on the world, then just die now. We don't need you.'"
She blinked, looking a little shocked. "Wow," she whispered.
"Yeah." I nodded. "He shut me up. And he made me open my eyes," I added, remembering the moment my outlook on life changed.
"I was a nobody," I explained. "Expendable and useless . . . I was a loser who took and never gave."
I glanced up, seeing the waiter approach, and waited for him to take the plates away.
"Would you like coffee?" he asked.
I shook my head, waving him off.
"And so"—I looked at her again after he'd gone—"in my last year of college, I finally started studying. I read books about prisons, poverty, religion, war, gangs, economics, even agriculture," I explained, "and the following fall I went back to school for my graduate degree, because I wanted to make more than just money. I wanted to make a difference and be remembered."
Her eyes dropped, and a small, thoughtful smile peeked out as if she understood just what I was talking about.
"I realized that if I wanted to effect change," I told her, "and be a person others could count on, then I needed to start with my own kid. He was two years old at that point and had seen me . . ." I shook my head. "Very rarely," I confessed. "Brynne, his mother, didn't want to have anything to do with me, though."
I took in a hard breath, the weight of regret making it hard to talk. "She took the money my father sent every month for Christian's sake, but I'd burned my bridges with her. She told me that our son had a father who loved him already and I'd only confuse him."
"And you agreed with her," Easton ascertained.
I nodded. "I was scared off," I admitted. "I was working hard to contribute to the rest of the world, but when it came to my kid . . ." I dropped my eyes, shaking my head at how easily I'd talked myself out of his life back then. "I was too afraid of failing." I raised my eyes, meeting hers. "So I didn't even try. I saw her husband with my kid, and I didn't know how the hell I was going to compete with that. I wanted to be in his life, but I'd still just be the weekend daddy."
At the time, it had made sense.
I'd wanted him to know me, but what if I didn't live up to his expectations? He'd already had a full-time father and a life that was familiar.
What if he still hated me?
No, there was time. Later. When he'd grown up enough to understand. Then I could be his father.
"As he grew, I tried to keep in contact with him," I consoled myself out loud. "I never pressed for any kind of custody, because my traveling was sporadic and unpredictable, and Brynne let Christian go with me from time to time as long as that's what he wanted," I explained. "But he started having friends, sports, extracurricular activities, and so I let him have his life. We grew even further apart."
"But he's with you now," she pointed out, sounding hopeful.
But I couldn't summon her optimism. Under the same roof, I felt more distanced from my son than when he wasn't there.
"I was supposed to pick him up for dinner one night last June," I explained, "and he stood me up. He went to a baseball game with his other father." I accentuated the word "other."
"I got pissed and went to collect him, and Brynne started yelling at me on the phone to leave them alone," I went on. "I was just making everyone unhappy, she told me, but he was my son, and I wanted him with me that night."
I blinked away the burn in my eyes, remembering how fucking sick I'd gotten of her telling me he wasn't mine.
"And I was pissed, because I had no right to be pissed," I told Easton. "Brynne was right. I was the outsider. I'd given him up. And I was making everyone unhappy."
The waiter brought the bill, and I dug my wallet out of my breast pocket and handed him a couple bills.
"Keep the change," I said, and didn't watch him leave.
Easton leaned her chin on her hand, her eyes never leaving me.
I picked my napkin off my lap and dropped it on the table.
"When she said they were going to Egypt for a year," I continued, "and that she was taking Christian, I said no. I told her I wasn't letting my son leave the country, and we fought. A lot.
"But I was done being a coward. I wanted my son with me." I didn't know why, but I wanted Easton to understand that. "I thought it was too late when he was two. I thought it was too late when he was ten. And now that he's fourteen I've finally fucking realized that it's never too late," I told her.
I swirled the brown liquid I had yet to drink, knowing that I was still failing with my son and wondering what Easton was thinking of me. Maybe she'd learned too much, and I'd fucked up.
I'd gone to her apartment tonight because, after what I'd seen online, I didn't want to bring her any unhappiness. I wouldn't be so arrogant as to think I could make her life better—she seemed to be doing pretty well—but I was reminded that what others let us see is very little. There's a lot I didn't know about her, but I did know she was hiding something.
She deserved to smile, and for some reason, I wanted to give her that.
But telling her my own shit might've pushed her away.
Women didn't tend to like weakness and mistakes in men, but when she'd looked so interested, something compelled me to spill everything.
I guess I hadn't really told anyone all of that before.
She sat there, watching me, and I tipped my drink at her, blowing off the whole thing with a smile and suddenly feeling like I'd made a huge mistake in telling her.
"Anyway," I joked. "That's why I want to be in politics."
# ELEVEN
EASTON
_W_ _hat is he doing to me?_
I'd sat there, silent nearly the entire time, and listened to the things that had brought him to where he was now. The mistakes of his youth, the teacher who'd pushed him, the son who thought nothing of him, and all the things he didn't know how to fix.
And all I wanted in the world was for him to keep talking.
I liked how his experiences had shaped him and how he was committed to succeeding. He didn't give up. When I saw the moments he'd looked away from me or heard the hesitance in his voice during his story, I knew he still felt like that twenty-two-year-old kid down deep.
The midthirties construction mogul who dominated conference rooms and crowds still didn't think he was a man.
I had no doubt that Christian's mother had every reason to be angry and not to trust him. She'd been young, too, I was sure, and he'd left her holding the bag.
But I could see the regret and pain Tyler tried to hide on his face at all the lost years with his son.
And he wouldn't give up again.
A man who endeavored to be better was already superior to the men who claimed to be great.
He took my hand, leading me out of the restaurant, and I threaded my fingers through his, holding back the smile at the chills spreading up my arms.
We stepped out of the restaurant and onto the sidewalk, stopping to take in the sight of the rain pouring down in buckets and yet doing nothing to deter the party in the street.
The heavy drops hit the ground in sheets upon sheets, and I had to squint to make out people's faces, dancing in the midst of the celebration.
Trumpet music played off to my left, and I looked over, seeing an older man with graying hair swaying to and fro under the canopy as he played "When the Saints Go Marching In."
Peering back out to the crowd in the streets and lining the sidewalks, their black and gold football jerseys glued to their drenched skin, I realized that it was Monday-night football. The Saints must've won.
I couldn't care less about football, but I envied how something so insignificant in the scheme of things could make people so happy.
Women adorned with beads around their necks clutched the long green necks of the Hand Grenade drinks in their fists and twirled, kicking up the water that had accumulated on Royal, while men smiled, nearly tripping over their own steps. All laughing and probably enjoying one of the best moments of their lives, because they felt truly free right now. Chaos lost in chaos. Liberty in being a small part of a larger madness.
When you weren't seen, you weren't judged. There was a desirable freedom in that.
"You think less of me." He spoke at my side, still watching the rain. "Don't you?"
I narrowed my eyes on him and shook my head. "No."
"I'm not the same man I was back then, Easton." He looked down at me. "I take care of what's mine now."
His hard stone eyes held mine, and there was nothing that I didn't want him to prove. Would he be rough but never hurt? Get me to want more?
Make me never want to leave?
I turned away from him and stepped off the sidewalk, instantly pummeled with heavy raindrops as I walked into the street.
Water filled my flats, and my skirt and shirt instantly stuck to my skin. I closed my eyes, feeling him behind me, watching.
The cool rain soaked my hair, and I threw back my head, letting it cool off my face.
_Why him?_ Why had he been the one to push his way in, and why had I allowed it?
A wall of warmth hit my back, and I felt his hand take my hip. I turned my head, and he caught my face in his hand and covered my mouth with his.
_Tyler._
I darted out my tongue, brushing it against his and feeling my breath catch in my throat. My skin buzzed, desire pooled between my legs, and I snaked my hand up, holding the side of his face as I dived in, kissing him greedily.
I flicked his top lip with my tongue and dragged out his bottom lip between my teeth, taking time to let him do the same to me.
His hands fell down to my stomach, pulling me back and holding me to his body as his lips worked mine, leaving me breathless.
The rain spilled over us, plastering our clothes to our bodies, and his tongue darted out, licking and sucking the water off my jaw and chin.
"Tyler," I gasped, squeezing my eyes shut, because he felt so good it almost hurt. "Tyler, this is wrong."
I pulled away from him and turned around, breathing hard.
It wasn't easy to say no to something you wanted, but I was taught that while some mistakes can be overcome, others should never be made. In our hearts, we always know what's right and wrong. That's not the struggle.
The struggle is wanting what's wrong for you and gauging whether or not the consequences are worth it.
"I like your kid," I told him. "And I love my job. You're in the public eye. We can't do this."
By now my arms hung at my sides, weighing a thousand pounds. I wasn't tired, but for some reason I felt exhausted.
He tipped his chin down at me and inched forward.
"Easton, you're coming home with me," he stated as if it were a done deal.
My weary heart pumped harder, begging me to agree. _If you don't give in, you'll always want him._
_Go home with him. Get in his bed. Self-destruct, because some rides can't be stopped._
But I couldn't.
What if things turned bad? I couldn't just not see him.
And New Orleans might be a large city, but there were almost no degrees of separation from you and the stranger on the street. Someone—anyone—was bound to see us together, and it would be only a matter of time before we were found out.
_No._
I looked up at him, speaking softly. "Take me home, please," I told him. "To _my_ house."
His eyes narrowed and his jaw hardened, but I didn't wait for an argument. Spinning around, I dashed across Royal and continued walking down the quieter side street, toward the parking garage.
The rain had drenched my clothes, and I folded my arms over my chest to ease the chill seeping through my skin.
I could hear his footsteps behind me, and I walked quickly to avoid any further discussion, speed-walking past a hotel entrance and continuing down the sidewalk.
If he pressed me further, I knew I'd be tempted to give in.
But he hooked my elbow, bringing me to a stop as I twisted around to face him.
"I like you, okay?" he said, letting his gaze fall and looking like it was hard for him to admit that.
He stepped closer. "I like you a lot, and I don't know why, because you're fucking miserable to me half the time," he mused. "You rarely smile. You never laugh, but you love to argue, and for some reason I want you around. I want you to know things about me, and I like telling you shit. Why do I feel like I'm in the wrong here?"
I bowed my head, hoping he wouldn't see the smile his words had caused. He was absolutely right. I was a miserable person half the time, and it was odd that he liked me as much as he did.
And in a different situation, maybe I'd give him a shot. Maybe.
"Marek?" I heard a voice boom through the storm. "Is that you?"
Tyler and I pulled away from each other, and I peered around him, seeing the group of men standing underneath the canopy of the hotel entrance we'd just passed.
Tyler twisted his head, his face immediately turning stern at the sight of the four men in suits, smoking cigars.
He took my hand and walked us back to where the men were standing, and I noticed he kept me slightly behind him instead of at his side.
"Blackwell." Tyler's deep voice sounded impatient.
Mason Blackwell—whom I recognized from TV and his involvement with city council—looked completely at ease and in good humor, something I'd never seen from Tyler.
His black tie was loosened, and his hand rested in his pants pocket. He wore an easy smile, and I could smell the odor from the cigar hooked under his pointer finger as he grinned at Tyler.
But from Tyler's rigid stance, I could tell he wasn't as comfortable with Blackwell.
"They've instituted curfew on the Westbank," he told Tyler. "But the party still goes strong over here."
His white teeth disappeared as he brought the cigar to his mouth and puffed away.
A few young women, dressed in short cocktail dresses, came bursting out of the hotel doors, giggling and stumbling, before they stopped at the group of men, each cozying up to a different gentleman.
A young brunette, her hair a shade lighter than mine, put her hand on Blackwell's chest as she hugged his side, looking intimate.
Tyler cleared his throat. "How's your wife, Mason?" he asked, hints of both amusement and disdain seeping out of the comment.
Blackwell's hand was in his pocket, so I didn't notice a wedding ring, but the young woman's left hand was draped over his shoulder, and she wasn't wearing one.
Blackwell stared at Tyler with a smile that didn't reach his eyes, and the tension in the air between the two men thickened.
His gaze shifted from Tyler, finding me at his side, slightly behind him.
"Hello?" he greeted, cocking his head and letting his gaze rake down my figure.
He sucked in a breath through his teeth and he half grinned at Tyler. "I envy you," he said, bringing the cigar up to his mouth. "For once."
My stomach rolled, and I swallowed, tasting something bitter. Perhaps the cigar was a turnoff, or maybe it was his blatant arrogance, but I felt a sudden urge to shut him up.
Mason held out his hand to me, a lascivious look in his eyes. "Mason Blackwell," he introduced himself.
But Tyler stepped in front of me, blocking Mason's view.
"She's cold," he shot out. "I'm taking her home."
And without a goodbye, he grabbed my hand and pulled me back down the street so briskly that I had to jog to keep up.
"He's not your favorite person," I mused, blinking away the rain in my eyes. "I can see why. I like him better on TV."
Tyler crossed the street, dragging me in tow as he turned down another street.
"You don't like him at all," he bit out in a low voice.
The sidewalk dipped, and I stumbled. Picking up the pace, I jogged a few steps and continued to follow him down the dark, vacant street.
"Tyler, I wasn't going to introduce myself," I assured him, wondering why he was so brusque all of a sudden.
Is that why he'd blocked Mason from shaking my hand? I hadn't planned to tell him who I was. I knew he and Tyler were rivals, vying for the same Senate seat. He could use me against Tyler, and I wasn't stupid.
I held tight to his hand, because he was going so fast. "This is exactly what I was talking about," I maintained, standing my ground. "We're bound to run into people you know. What are you going to do? Slink into my apartment at night after Christian's gone to bed?" I shot out. "Take me to hole-in-the-wall restaurants buried in the Marigny? I don't want to be your secret, Tyler. This is too dangerous."
But then my breath caught in my throat as he yanked me off the street and through a wide-open gate that led to a darkened driveway, immediately backing me up against the wall next to the gate.
Only just a hair away from prying eyes.
The doors of the huge wooden gate opened for cars to come in and out, and I knew that the driveway would lead into the living area, giving way to a large courtyard.
So far, though, there was no sign of anyone.
"What are you doing?" I gasped.
His forehead pressed against mine, and his hands moved urgently, holding my face. "Dark spaces, quiet places," he whispered over my mouth. "That's all we need, Easton."
And I sucked in a breath as he dove in, taking my lips, moving fast and making it sting so sweetly when he sucked and bit my bottom lip like he was starving.
I moaned, feeling the thick ridge of his cock as he ground into me.
His hands dropped, lifting me by the backs of my thighs and pinning me to the wall as he continued. I tightened my legs around his waist and held him close.
He moved his hands up, squeezing my ass in both of his greedy hands, and he was going at my mouth again and again so fast I couldn't think straight.
"Tyler, please," I rushed out, gasping for breath. "We can't."
He was making it impossible, and I knew I was lost.
_Fuck!_
He lifted me higher, holding tight as he pulled down my off-the-shoulder blouse enough to expose my naked breast.
The hardened skin of my nipple begged for his mouth, but I wrapped my hands around his neck, drawing him closer to me.
He caught my nipple in his mouth, quick and rough, and I shivered as he dragged his teeth and sucked, making it burn. I closed my eyes, arching my back to give him more.
He came up, hovering over my lips, while his fingers slipped between us and into my underwear, finding my pussy wet.
"I don't give a damn who you introduce yourself to," he growled, sliding his finger in and out of me, "as long as it's not that piece of shit."
"Tyler . . ." I squeezed my eyes shut as he pumped his finger.
"He's always so fucking smug," he gritted out, biting at my jaw, "always getting the upper hand. I thought I'd like having something he wanted, but I don't." He slipped in a second finger, stretching me. "I don't want him looking at you, Easton."
He grabbed the hem of my panties, and I bit my bottom lip to stifle the cry as he ripped them clean off my body.
"I was jealous. I never get jealous," he charged, pressing me against the wall and grinding his hips against my bare pussy. "You make me insecure. Why do you do that, huh?"
I groaned, my thighs aching, the heat between my legs unbearable.
"Because you covet something you can't have," I taunted. "And you're afraid someone else will get it."
I rolled my hips, rubbing myself against him. Against the only part of him I wanted.
But instead, he slowed, looking at me with mischief.
He leaned in toward my ear and whispered, "You poor thing." He sounded sinister. "You actually think there are things I can't have?"
I smiled, tightening my arms around his neck, and brushed my lips across his jaw to hover over his lips. "Make it worth the risk," I challenged. "Show me how you take what you want."
He breathed out a quiet laugh against my cheek and palmed my tit, squeezing it possessively.
"I'm burning," I gasped.
He flashed me a smug smirk, and my pussy clenched as I moaned, feeling his hand work between our bodies, unfastening his belt. "I'll make it better," he promised.
The warm flesh of his cock crowned my entrance, and he slid it up and down my slit to spread my wetness.
"Wait," I panted, trying to pull off his jacket. I wanted to see his body.
But he slammed his hips into mine, and I cried out, that sweet pain of the first thrust spreading through my belly as he slid into me.
"Oh, God," I groaned. "I fucking hate you."
Why couldn't he wait? I wanted to feel his skin.
"As long as you fucking fuck me, I don't care."
He reached down between my legs and hooked an arm under my left thigh, holding me in place, and I closed my eyes, letting my head fall back, as he thrust his cock inside of me again and again, going faster and faster until all I could do was grab his jacket in my fists and hold on for the ride.
He gripped my ass in one hand, while his other wrapped around my thigh, and yanked me to him, demanding that I feel every inch.
The cool, wet air filled with the smell of earth surrounded us, and I heard laughter coming from off in the distance.
People were coming down the sidewalk, and here I was, skirt around my waist, getting fucked by a man I wasn't even sure I liked.
But—I whimpered, rolling my hips and fucking him back—I damn well liked what he did to me.
"Tyler," I cried out, my back stinging from the friction of the wall as he thrust into me.
I looked at him, seeing his eyes on mine, and we both watched each other, our lips barely an inch apart as he lowered his forehead to mine.
My pussy clenched around his cock, loving every inch he put into me and feeling that high every time he rubbed my G-spot.
He bit my bottom lip. "Is that it?" He slid in and out of me, raw and rough. "Do you like how I take what I want?"
The amused tone was so fucking smug, I wanted to teach him a lesson.
"No," I answered. "You're being careful with me."
"Am I?" he repeated, feigning concern.
And before I knew it, he'd dropped me to my feet and spun me around. He lifted my skirt again, and I bent just a little, planting my hands on the wall as he gripped the curve of my hips and impaled me with his cock.
"Ah." My breathing shook and my legs tingled. "Tyler, God."
I reached back and snaked an arm around his neck as he pushed me gently against the wall, still driving into me. The rough, cool bricks bit into my chest, and he seemed to realize it, because he placed a hand against the wall for my face to rest on.
My eyes rolled to the back of my head, my orgasm cresting deep inside. "You feel so good," I said in barely a whisper.
He took my face and turned me toward him, dipping his tongue into my mouth and kissing me long and slow.
I felt my insides tighten and clench, and while his body didn't slow down, it was his lips that captivated me the most.
Soft, sweet, and gentle with me.
"Easton," he breathed against my mouth.
I opened my eyes to see him looking at me.
His gaze turned thoughtful. "I've been with enough women to know when it's right and when it's wrong"—he bit my bottom lip and released it—"and when I have you in my hands, it feels more right than anything."
I moaned, holding his eyes as I pushed against the wall and backed up into his thrusts.
"I still haven't felt your skin on mine," he said, his voice turning harder as he lowered his hands, kneading and squeezing my hips roughly. "And I still haven't tasted you."
I dropped my head, struggling to catch my breath. "Please," I begged, though I wasn't sure what for. "Tyler, please."
I didn't want him to stop what he was doing and I didn't want him to stop what he was saying, but I knew he should.
"I'm going to strip you down and get you in a bed," he breathed into my ear, "so I can see this beautiful body fuck me from on top,"
I dug my nails into the brick, scratching the hard surface. "Yes," I groaned. "So good."
He leaned in until there was absolutely no space between us. "I hope you're on the pill." His thrusts grew harder and faster, and I backed up into it, my moans, his grunts, and our skin meeting over and over again the only sounds in our little space. "I'm taking you home with me, and we're doing this all over again."
I spoke into his ear, smiling. "But I have schoolwork," I played. "You and I have a parent-teacher conference soon, and you're not the only parent I have to take care of."
His eyes flared before falling closed. He was close.
"Your schoolwork and the other parents can wait," he ordered, grabbing my hair, his breath falling on the side of my face. "You're still taking care of me."
My pussy tightened around his cock, and I opened my mouth, gasping and moaning.
"Tyler," I cried out.
He breathed hard, squeezing my tit as he moaned. "Oh, fuck."
And I hunched over, crying out as my insides exploded and his dick rammed my sweet spot, bringing me home.
"Oh, God," I groaned.
Warmth spread through my belly, and my legs shook from the tingles spreading down my muscles.
My whole body continued to jerk, and my head bobbed back and forth as he kept pounding me from behind.
"Ah," he growled, and I winced from how hard he gripped my hips.
He yanked me back again, my neck jerking twice as he slammed his cock deep inside me and came. The warmth of his come filled me up, and his ragged breathing fell across my shoulder blade as he bowed his head, trying to catch his breath.
He stayed inside me, and I made no move to separate us.
_Holy shit._
The slow realization hit me of where we were and that anyone could have seen us. My body—hot only moments ago—began to cool from my wet clothes, and the soreness between my legs started to feel heavier by the second. My back probably had scratches on it, my ass and hips probably had bruises from his hands, and my panties were a torn scrap on the dirty ground.
But I didn't care.
I tilted my head, finding his sweet lips and getting lost in his soft kiss.
No, I didn't care.
_Shit._
# TWELVE
TYLER
The constant rain pummeled the windows, and I blinked awake, the only light in the room coming from the blue glare of the digits on the alarm clock.
Sitting up slowly, I combed my fingers through my hair and wiped away the sweat on my forehead.
_Shit, it's hot in here._ The humidity from the rain always made everything so miserable.
Glancing to my side, I noticed the small form underneath the sheet, and I slowly leaned down on one elbow, my heart racing with pleasure at the sight of Easton Bradbury curled up on her side, her hand—palm up—resting next to her face.
Her eyelids, with their thick, brown lashes, rested calmly, with none of her usual little scowls tightening her pretty face. She looked peaceful.
I inhaled a heavy breath, suddenly feeling like the air was too thick.
What the hell was she doing to me?
I hadn't felt like this in a long time.
Not since the first time I realized I wanted my son and I was losing him.
Christian had barely been a toddler the first time I'd seen him. And for the first time in my life, I finally started to realize there were things I might not be able to have.
And I'd been scared. Exactly like I was now.
_Christian smiles so wide his eyes close as he kicks the beach ball with his little legs. His mouth makes an O when he sees how far the ball travels, and he takes off, running after it._
_I look between Brynne and him, playing in the park and unaware that I'm there. My heart aches._
_My son._
_I can barely breathe._
_I was driving down St. Charles when I'd spotted her car. I'd glanced around for only a few seconds before I saw her._
_And him._
_I don't know why I did it, but I'd pulled over. We hadn't spoken lately, and I hadn't seen my son since he was born. I thought about him, but it still didn't feel like he was real._
_Not until now._
_I swallow, seeing her pick him up and hold him over her head. He's only about a year and a half, and I smile, noticing how happy and playful he is._
_He looks just like me._
Life was scarier—and harder—when you had things you were afraid to lose.
Reaching out, I ran my thumb down her golden cheek, the skin as smooth as water.
She pursed her rose lips, her soft breathing sweeter than music, and I let out a breath, running my possessive hand down her side and over her ass.
What the hell was I doing? Why was she so damn addictive?
She reminded me so much of myself—the pride, the independence, the stubbornness . . .
But I rarely ever spent the night with a woman, much less brought them to my house, so why the hell had I done so with her?
I struggled with too many expectations from other people on me, as well as my own, to bring a woman into the mix.
This was a mistake.
She'd start getting demanding, I'd start disappointing her, and she'd eventually realize that she would never come first.
At least that's the way it had always been.
Pushing away my warring thoughts, I slowly pulled down the sheet, exposing her perfect breasts, full with hard nipples that begged for my mouth.
My cock began to rush with heat and harden, and my chest swelled with the need to be something for her that I had never been for any other woman. I wanted to give her everything. I wanted to never disappoint her.
Reaching down, I took myself in my hand and stroked as I leaned over and flicked her nipple with my tongue and then caught it between my teeth, dragging out the sensation.
She moaned, and the sheet over my cock tented. I loved that little sound of hers.
"Do that again," I begged, opening my mouth and sucking in as much of her tit as I could handle.
Her hand went to my hair, and I could feel the vibrations of her groan against my mouth as I kissed her body.
_Fuck._
I let out a breath, feeling my groin tighten even further. "You got me hard again."
And I grabbed her hand, laying it on my steel cock.
She mewed like a satisfied kitten, and I looked up to see her eyes still closed but a little smile peeking out.
I didn't wait. I never fucking waited with her.
I rose and climbed on top of her, nestling between the warm legs she so graciously opened for me.
I grinded up and down her slick heat, feeling her wetness on my cock already.
"Jesus, you're wet," I whispered against her mouth as I laid my chest flush with hers with my forearms resting on either side of her head. "Is that what I do to you? Huh?" I teased.
But rather than her usual smart-ass comebacks, she blinked awake and gazed at me, looking so fucking innocent and dreamy.
"Yeah." She nodded.
My fists balled above her head, and I covered her mouth with mine as I thrust my hips, sliding into her tight body.
What the hell was I doing?
—
The hot spray cascaded over my head and down my neck and shoulders, sending chills over my skin as my body finally relaxed. I'd woken up again during the night with another erection and realized it was because her mouth was wrapped around my cock under the sheets.
I leaned a hand against the black tiled shower wall and bowed my head, letting out a breath.
Biologically, neither one of us was at our sexual peak, but you wouldn't know it. I was practically in high school all over again, with an insatiable young woman I couldn't get enough of, and all she had to do was look at me or breathe and I was as hard as a steel pole.
I hadn't felt an urge to go more than twice a night in years, and here I was, four times in the last eight hours, with muscles I'd forgotten existed aching.
I couldn't be more satisfied. Or less.
Plus, I had a shitload of work to do—I shouldn't have overslept—but if I took her home, I knew I'd only be running back to her in a matter of hours.
I turned off the water and grabbed the towel hanging off the hook. After drying off my face and hair, I wrapped it around my waist and stepped out of the shower.
But as soon as I walked back into my bedroom, I stopped and hardened my glare.
"What are you doing?"
Easton was fully dressed in her wrinkled skirt and blouse from last night and sitting on the edge of the bed, bending over as she slipped her feet back into her flats.
She glanced over at me briefly before turning away again.
"I need to go home."
I ground my teeth together to prevent myself from shouting at her, instead walking over to yank a pair of dark-washed jeans out of my closet.
"You got a dog?" I asked, ripping off the towel and tossing it.
"No."
I peered over at her as I slipped my legs into the pants. "A cat? A kid? You left the stove on?" I went on.
She pursed her lips, knowing I was mocking her. Turning away, she ran her fingers through her hair, trying to tame it.
"Take your clothes off, Easton. They're dirty," I ordered, buttoning my jeans. "I have a T-shirt you can wear."
Her posture straightened, and I could see she was taking a deep breath. I combed my fingers through my wet hair as I walked over to her.
"I'm a gentleman only when I need to be," I warned. "It's a monsoon out there. You're not walking out of here."
She spun around, her worried eyes pulling at my heart.
"I shouldn't have come back here." She crossed her arms over her chest. "Christian could come home unexpectedly, or . . ."
"Christian won't be home," I cut in. "Trust me. This is the last place he wants to be."
She shifted on her feet, refusing to meet my eyes.
I tipped her chin up, making her look at me. "I want you to spend time with me," I told her. "I'm not saying I want a relationship. God knows, I suck at that. But I'd like us to relax for a day, okay?"
She looked away, letting out a sigh. "I hate not knowing what to expect." She gave a sad little laugh. "I hate not seeing what's coming at me, and I get nervous when things go off course. I—"
"You're on the pill, right?" I shot out, but I managed to keep my voice light.
She blinked, straightening her back at my sudden change of subject.
"Excuse me?" she blurted out, looking confused.
I almost laughed. "I haven't been pulling out, and you never answered me last night."
"Well, you didn't really ask," she reminded me. "And you didn't seem too concerned about it, either."
"In the moment, no," I agreed, walking over to my chest of drawers and getting her a white V-neck. "And after feeling you without one, I doubt I'll want to start now." I walked back over to her and handed her the shirt.
"You are on the pill?" I asked again. "Right?"
Her eyebrow quirked, and the mischievous grin she offered delighted me.
"Easton." I gave her the warning tone I usually reserved for my son and my employees.
Her smile spread wide, actually revealing teeth. "Of course," she soothed. "I would've stopped you if I wasn't."
I shook my head, taking her shirt and lifting it up over her head. Whether or not getting involved with my son's teacher was a huge mistake, getting her pregnant would definitely be a disaster.
"You see?" I told her. "Problems can always be bigger."
I undid her zipper and let her skirt fall to the ground. She was completely nude underneath, and I felt my heart pick up its pace when I remembered her lacy underwear were probably still lying somewhere in the French Quarter.
I slipped the T-shirt over her head and then reached down and grabbed her ass, bringing her closer.
"You distracted me on purpose," she accused, a hint of amusement in her eyes.
_Yes, yes, I had._ Her head had been starting to work again, just like last night, and I didn't want her worrying about half a million things that wouldn't happen today.
Or to start counting things, for crying out loud.
"Yes." I trailed my lips across her cheek and down to her neck. "Because you can't go home," I whispered as her arms circled my neck and held me close.
"Why?"
I squeezed her ass, pressing her to my hardening cock. "Because your pussy is like gold, and in a matter of hours, I'll want more of it."
"Ugh," she growled, pushing me away but smiling. "I see men in their thirties are no tamer than men in their twenties."
I pinched her chin between my thumb and index finger. "Lucky you," I replied.
She shook her head at me, probably deciding to pack away her escape plan for now. She was stuck.
"I'm going to go make some phone calls," I told her, backing away. "Feel free to use the shower, and there's food in the kitchen if you're hungry."
# THIRTEEN
EASTON
Arguing with Tyler Marek was a waste of time, especially when you didn't really disagree.
I _should've_ gone home.
I had work to get ahead on, an oven that I could've been cleaning, and lots of updates to be made to my website for the students and parents. Not to mention, I had leftover homemade bread in the freezer that needed to be eaten before the end of the month. I had a responsibility to Christian, and if I were his mother, I'd . . .
I let out a deep breath as I walked up to the vanity in his huge bathroom, having put back on his T-shirt after my shower, I rubbed the back of my head with a gray towel and shook my head.
_I should go home._
But he kept wanting me.
He kept tapping at my shell like I was an egg he needed to crack. And while I constantly felt like goo that would spill everywhere if not protected by my hard outer armor, he made me feel like I didn't need it.
Like he was going to take care of everything.
Here, in his cave of a house, with its shutters drawn and big, empty rooms, the serene glow of the soft lamps and the pitter-patter of rain on the roof, I'd finally relaxed.
He made me feel safe, and while I didn't need a man to protect me, I kind of enjoyed letting some of the worry go. For the first time in a long time, I'd closed my eyes and fallen asleep last night without a struggle, peaceful in the feeling that someone was next to me.
And when I woke up, I hadn't had the split-second moment of panic I always had before I registered that I was safe.
Instead, I'd woken up this morning, and rather than quickly scanning the room and taking inventory, my eyes had immediately fallen on Tyler's back as he walked to the bathroom and winked at me over his shoulder before disappearing into the shower.
I found his hairbrush on the expansive sink counter, along with a hair dryer. After combing out my hair, I blew it out, threw the used towel in the hamper, and made up his bed. I also folded my clothes neatly, placing them on the chair in the corner, and scanned the room to make sure everything was in its place.
Or in its place as well as I could tell.
Stepping out of the room and into the hallway—if you could call it that—I slowly turned my head, taking in the surroundings that I had failed to notice last night as Tyler practically hauled me upstairs.
The landing was circular with a railing, so you could lean over and peer downstairs. Bedroom doors—or I assumed that's what they were—lined the edges, and there was another staircase, leading to a third floor. The dark teak floors glimmered in the gentle lighting from the chandelier hanging above, and all of the wooden furniture surfaces shined. The lemon scent of wood polish, leather, and cologne filled my lungs, and it brought a smile to my face.
Men lived here, and those scents brought back memories of growing up with Jack and my father.
Trailing down the stairs, I stepped hesitantly, poking out my head with a watchful eye. I was still afraid Christian or someone else might appear and I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to explain myself.
Peering to the right, I spied the foyer, so I turned left, heading toward the back of the house, figuring I'd find the kitchen. At the sound of Tyler's voice, I stopped at the entrance to another hallway and caught a glimpse of a light coming through another door.
I couldn't make out what he was saying, but he had that deep, frigid tone that he'd tried using on me in his office last Saturday, so I deduced he was probably on a business call.
I continued looking for the kitchen, my stomach swimming with butterflies at the image of him conducting business and issuing orders with his scary arched eyebrow while wearing nothing but those jeans.
When I found it, I rummaged through the refrigerator, craving carbs and protein.
I'd want him again when he was done with his big, bad call, so I needed energy.
When I switched on the radio, Rihanna's "Only Girl" filled the room, and I started bobbing my head as I padded around the kitchen in my bare feet. I chopped up some leftover potatoes I'd found in the refrigerator and fried up some bacon. After mixing up some eggs, chives, salt, and pepper, I poured the mixture into a pan, scooped the bacon pieces and potatoes on top, and then placed the dish in the oven to bake for a country French omelet.
Before I knew it, I was happily lost in fixing place settings at the granite island with coffee and orange juice and chopping up fresh pineapple, strawberries, and blueberries for a salad, as well as drawing hot biscuits from the oven. I figured they were homemade, since I'd found them in a plastic container in the refrigerator, so all I'd needed to do was heat them up.
I wasn't sure who kept the kitchen so well stocked or who'd originally cooked the biscuits I was reheating, but I guessed it wasn't Tyler. I couldn't picture that.
I grabbed the pot holders and switched off the oven, leaning down to retrieve the pan.
"Goddamn," I heard behind me. "You're never allowed to wear underwear again."
I peeked over my shoulder, still leaning down to the stove, and saw Tyler standing on the other side of the counter with his eyes nowhere near mine. His forearms rested on the island, and his head was cocked to the side as his gaze swept over my bottom and down my legs. And since he'd torn away my underwear last night, I wore nothing underneath.
I grabbed the pan and straightened, smiling as I placed it on top of the oven.
"How's business?" I asked, using a knife to cut the large omelet in half.
"I've still got a bit to do," he answered, and I heard him pouring coffee, "but I'm not allowed to touch you until it's finished, so I'll get it done quickly."
I twisted my head around to narrow my eyes on him.
He must've seen the question in my eyes, because he laughed to himself. "On the rare occasion I have something I'd rather be doing instead of work, I have to bargain with myself," he explained, and locked his gaze on mine. "And I can't put my hands on you until I'm done with my work. That's the bargain today."
I smirked. "We'll see," I taunted.
He arched his damn eyebrows at me and set the coffeepot down.
I slid half an omelet onto a spatula. "You like omelets, I hope?"
"Yes," he rushed out, sounding relieved as he slid onto the stool. "I'm starving. You didn't have to do this, but thank you. It looks great."
He immediately started digging into the omelet, and I had a hard time not watching him as he ate everything on his plate and downed his glass of orange juice, quickly pouring himself another. The fruit and biscuits in front of him disappeared just as fast, but I, on the other hand, had to force myself to take bites, because I was having more fun watching him wolf down his breakfast.
He kind of ate like he screwed. In the moment, it was the only thing he needed, and while it was happening, it was the only thing he was thinking about.
His hair was devoid of any product and fell casually to the side, while his jeans hung loosely, just above the curve of his ass. I set my fork down, hungry but not for food anymore, as my heart rate picked up, and I devoured him with my eyes.
"Easton," he growled, making my name sound like a warning. "I mean it. I need to work."
I snapped my eyes up to see him sipping coffee and staring ahead, a hard expression on his face. He knew what I'd been thinking.
"Can't keep up with the appetite of a twenty-three-year-old?" I teased.
He looked affronted. "You're going to pay for that."
_Oh, I hope so._
I was half tempted to put more effort into distracting him. I liked making him angry.
But I decided against it, realizing it would divulge to him how much I was enjoying his company.
I let my eyes trail down his thick, corded forearms, wide chest, and toned stomach, almost wishing Tyler were twenty-two again. Maybe if I'd slept with the cocky asswipe he'd been in his youth, I wouldn't have grown to like him as much as I had already.
He was still an asshole, but it came off endearing most of the time, and he completely turned me on. He was also patient, as eager to please me in bed as he was to please himself, and confident in what he wanted.
And today that was me.
I cleared my throat and tried to continue eating. "Are you sure you're not expecting anyone home today?" I asked.
"I just called Christian to check in," he assured me. "He's a hundred twenty miles away and already out fishing for the day."
I winced and returned to my fruit.
"What?"
I looked up at him, not having meant for him to see my reaction.
"Ah, well . . ." I searched for the words. "I guess it seems boring. For me anyway," I added.
"I agree." He nodded, surprising me. "I'm not much of a country boy."
I grinned to myself, happy to hear that I hadn't offended him. Or maybe happy to hear we had that in common, as well.
I'd never been interested in hunting or fishing, although I didn't think I'd be averse to camping and hiking if I ever got the chance to try them.
Reaching over and grabbing the iPad, I laid it on the island between our plates.
"I'd say the wilderness you brave is far more dangerous, anyway," I commented, gesturing to the _Times-Picayune_ article I'd found about him online.
He rolled his eyes at the headline: _Marek and Blackwell Vying for Senate?_
"You investigated me?" he accused, eyeing me playfully as he repeated my words to him from last night.
I licked my lips, trying to hide the smile. "I know how to Google," I retorted.
I brought up the notes I'd made on the iPad, shoving it over to him as I hopped off my stool and began clearing dishes.
"What's this?" he asked about what I'd written.
"I made some notes on your platform," I told him, clearing off the plates and placing them in the dishwasher.
While the food had been in the oven, I'd scanned some articles about him and browsed around his website, taking a look at random press conferences he'd given concerning news in his company or his interest in running for senator.
"Who writes your speeches?" I asked.
"I do."
My eyebrows shot up, but I didn't turn away in time. He'd seen my face.
"What?" he asked, sounding defensive.
I dried off my hands and faced him, wondering how I would tell a man as insistent and stubborn as Tyler Marek that he kind of stunk at something.
He watched me, and I gave him an apologetic smile. "No offense," I inched out, "but your speeches are lacking. You're about as heartwarming as a meat locker."
His back straightened and his chin dipped, and for a moment I thought I was in for another spanking.
"And your online presence needs work," I added. "You're kind of dull."
His eyes narrowed. "Get in my lap. I'll show you how dull I am."
I rolled my eyes, ignoring his threat as I circled the island and came to stand at his side.
"Here, look." I tapped the screen, bringing up his social media."Your Twitter followers." I pointed to his number and then brought up another profile. "Mason Blackwell's Twitter followers."
I eyed him, hoping he saw the huge difference. Mason Blackwell had five times as many followers, but he didn't have nearly the influence of Tyler Marek.
Tyler owned a multimillion-dollar worldwide corporation. So why did he come off looking like a hermit?
I went on, scrolling through the iPad, pointing things out. "You tweet—or the person you hired tweets—once every other day. And it's boring," I told him. "Retweets of articles, 'have a nice day everyone,' Blah."
Tyler looked up, clearly not appreciating my attitude.
I continued. "He tweets every other hour, and it's photos, family funnies, mundane crap, but it's engaging," I explained, meeting Tyler's eyes.
He sighed, sounding stubborn. "I already hear this from my brother. I don't need it from you," he argued. "Twitter won't put me in office. People vote for—"
"Whoever's popular, Tyler," I cut in, not sorry that I sounded curt. "Sorry to say, but not every voter makes informed decisions."
And then a thought crossed my mind, and I grinned, grabbing the iPad and snapping a picture of his nearly empty bowl of fruit, save for a strawberry half and two blueberries.
Attaching the photo and adding a caption, I posted it under his profile. Lucky for me the device was already logged into his account.
Handing over the iPad, I let him take a look.
He read, "'Having breakfast on lockdown. Stay safe out there everyone!'"
I blew on my fingernails and brushed them over my shirtsleeve, pleased with myself.
His eyebrows nose-dived. "Wait," he bit out. "You can see my stomach in that picture."
"Mmm-hmm," I cooed, nodding.
He glared at me. "My bare stomach, Easton," he pointed out, as if I were blind.
I held up my pointer finger and thumb, measuring an inch. "Just a sliver."
The small white ceramic bowl was sitting near the edge of the island. The picture showed not only the bowl, but a nice slice of his tight stomach.
He shoved the iPad at me. "Delete it."
I grabbed it, feigning nonchalance. "Sorry. No can do." I shrugged and then looked at the iPad when I heard a notification alert. "Oh, look! It's already been retweeted twice, and it's probably been screenshot by ten other users," I explained. "If you delete it now, it'll look weird."
"Give it to me." He stood up, holding out his hand. "I'll figure it out myself."
"No!"
I ran around the island, stuffing the iPad into the microwave, and moved to turn around, but he was already at my back, stopping me.
I breathed out a laugh, the heat of the chase filling my lungs with excitement.
"You can't have it," I whispered, plastering my palms against the microwave.
His body blanketed my back, and his lips nuzzled my neck, making my eyelids grow heavy.
His fingertips grazed up over my hips, and I realized that he was pulling up the T-shirt.
"Maybe that's not what I want anymore." His gravelly voice was filled with promise, and I immediately groaned at the rush of heat between my legs.
But I wasn't fooled.
"You're trying to distract me," I assessed, although I didn't mind it in the least.
His quiet laugh tickled my ear, but his hands continued to roam, and I let my head fall to the side, feeling him immediately bury his nose in my neck.
"What is that?" he asked, popping his head up.
I blinked as his attention shifted, the tingles his hands were bringing dissipating. I listened, hearing beeps and whistles, and I turned around, smiling.
"Favorites, retweets, replies," I listed, gloating. "The sounds of victory."
He pinned me with a familiar stubborn look, but I caught the hint of amusement underneath.
"Go finish your work." I jerked my chin in the direction of the hallway. "You can thank me later."
# FOURTEEN
TYLER
When I was her age, twenty-three, she was twelve, for Christ's sake.
Not to mention that Brynne would have my head—and deservedly so—if she ever found out about the things I was doing with Christian's teacher.
What the fuck was the matter with me?
Every time I had the opportunity to take the high road in my personal life, I didn't. I'd put my kid on the back burner for the sake of my career, and now I felt like I was taking advantage of a young woman.
Sure, she was just as complicated as I was and she gave as good as she got, but I'd learned to assess the road ahead before taking steps. With her, I had no idea what the next hour held, much less the next week or month.
She was unpredictable and entirely too addicting. It wasn't so much the woman she tried to be that I liked but the girl she tried to hide. The one who needed to be held.
I sat at my desk, trying to work through the laundry list of e-mails I'd accumulated since leaving work yesterday as her music played in the background and she sang along a few feet away. Something about "drown" or "drowning." It had been so long since I'd listened to music, but thanks to her and Christian, I was getting up to speed.
Despite the fact that I was swamped, as usual.
Production had stopped in Brazil due to rain, and a contract I'd already secured in Japan now had a lower bidder, so I was trying to put out fires, but my head just wasn't in the game today.
The storm outside had lightened, but it was still too heavy to enjoy leaving the house.
Not that I wanted to anyway.
I glanced over, seeing Easton standing at the bookshelves in my office, the hem of my T-shirt rising up her thigh and over the curve of her ass as she reached to the third shelf.
_Jesus._
I blinked and refocused on my computer screen, mentally hitting myself for inviting her in here. I didn't want her to be bored, so I'd told her to hang out, grab a book, and read or work on the spare laptop if she needed.
However, she'd quickly turned into a woman on a mission, unable to resist alphabetizing my small personal library.
"This doesn't drive you crazy?" she'd complained, wincing at the sight of my messy shelves. "This would drive me crazy."
Yeah, so I let her off her leash to have at it.
As long as she didn't incorporate the entire fucking Dewey Decimal System into her organization, I had no problem watching her cute little behind while she reached for books.
However, I wasn't getting much done.
She'd been quiet, concentrating on her own work, but when a five-foot-seven brunette with gorgeous golden legs is crawling around on your floor, organizing stacks of books and looking cute as hell, watching her is an irresistible enjoyment.
"Are you almost finished?" She stood on the small ladder, reaching up and replacing the last few books.
I blinked, refocusing on my screen. "Not yet," I answered. "About ten more e-mails to respond to."
I wiggled my fingers, trying to remember what I needed to type and realizing I'd forgotten what the damn e-mail I needed to respond to had said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed her stepping down from the ladder, barely making a sound.
"Tyler?"
I looked up, seeing her standing on the other side of my desk with a sweet look on her face. I narrowed my eyes.
_What is she up to?_
"I'm getting bored," she said.
"The kitchen cabinets need organizing," I shot back.
But she let out a sigh. "I think I'm just going to go take a bubble bath in your huge tub and wait for you," she chirped. "And think about you. Maybe."
I raised my eyes, swallowing down the thought of her wet and covered in suds.
"Sit down," I commanded, pointing to the couch. "This was an hour's worth of work that's turned into two, because you're distracting me."
"You told me to come in here!"
"And you're not taking a bath," I shouted, ignoring her interruption, "because I'm going to damn well come with you, so don't move! You understand?"
"I'm bored," she repeated, "and I don't like not to be doing things."
"Tough."
And I dropped my eyes back to the screen, typing I-have-no-idea-what just to get it done. My fingers worked without thinking, and I was probably coming off less polite than I normally made the effort to appear in my business communications, but there were better things to be doing.
She stood on the other side of my desk, watching me. "All right," she said. "I'll make you a deal."
I tapped the keyboard, trying to ignore her. The sooner I could finish, the sooner we could spend the rest of the day in bed.
"If you finish your e-mails before I'm done, I'll stay," she challenged. "If you don't finish those ten e-mails before I'm done, I'm leaving, and I don't care whether it's raining or not."
_What?_
I shot my eyes up to her, scowling. "Before you're done?" I shot out. "Done with what?"
A twinkle flashed in her eye, but she didn't smile.
Instead, she walked over to the coffee-colored leather sofa and picked up the black pin-striped suit jacket I'd left there days ago, when I'd come home from work. With her back to me, she slipped my T-shirt over her head, dropping it to the floor, and brought my jacket up to her front, covering herself.
Every inch of me felt like I'd climbed into a hot, soothing bath, but my racing heart was anything but soothed. I fisted my fingers, seeing her long, naked back, smooth and toned, and I wanted to touch every part of her, including that perfect, heart-shaped ass she was flashing me.
Lying down on the sofa, she spread my jacket over her naked body, one hand rubbing the fabric over the inside of her thigh while the other slipped underneath the jacket.
My breath caught, seeing her fingers move under the coat, while she rubbed my jacket over her pussy, rolling her hips into the cloth.
_Before I'm done._ She was masturbating.
"Oh, you fucking bitch," I whispered, meeting her heated eyes.
She blinked, and I expected to see her looking amused and playful, but she looked beautifully desperate.
"It has your smell on it." She ground my jacket between her legs, closing her eyes and arching her neck back.
The jacket covered her as if I were wearing it and lying on top of her, from the neck to the tops of her thighs. Her legs were bent at the knees, and the bottoms of her feet were touching, making a diamond shape. That hand that I was so jealous of played slowly and softly, judging from the little movements under the jacket.
The idea of my clothes on her naked body was driving me fucking insane.
My jeans were tight, and the ache between my legs was growing.
"That's a two-thousand-dollar suit," I pointed out, trying to sound unaffected.
She dragged her bottom lip between her teeth, groaning as she clutched the fabric resting between her legs. "Worth every penny," she taunted. "God, it feels like you."
The corner of my lips turned up. I loved the idea of showing her that I felt a hell of a lot better than some piece of cloth she was dry fucking.
"Move the jacket," I told her.
She opened her eyes and peered over at me, a rose-tinged blush falling across her cheeks.
"I don't think that's a good idea." Her body shifted and squirmed under the jacket as she continued fingering herself. "It'll distract you."
"Move the fucking jacket, Easton."
A smile flashed across her eyes, and she slid the jacket off her body, letting it fall to the floor.
_Jesus._
I tipped my chin at her. "Drop your foot to the ground and open your legs wider."
She did it, letting her right foot rest on the hardwood floor and spreading her thighs wide. My view was perfect.
She grazed her clit with her middle finger, rubbing over it and playing as she watched me.
"You better get typing," she teased, tapping her clit three times. "Type, type, type . . ." she taunted.
I scowled, ducking my head and typing furiously and then punching the backspace button fifteen times because of all the mistakes I was making.
I tried not to look at her, but it was like she was the only thing in the room, completely dominating my senses. I kept typing, but I would blink and dart my gaze over to see her rubbing her hard little nub in circles faster and faster. The flesh was dark pink, and I couldn't stop wishing my mouth was buried in it.
I finished the e-mail, clicked _Send_ , and double-clicked on another one. Some VP in the South American office whining about delayed production on the new line of equipment.
_Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Get it done._
I didn't really say that. Only the last part, but . . .
Her little moans carried across the room and vibrated over my skin, and I groaned, feeling my dick grow steel-rod straight. She wasn't loud or exaggerated, and that made it hotter, because it was real.
I clicked _Send_ , and then I opened up another e-mail. "Don't come," I ordered, looking up to check on her.
Her left hand was gripping the back of the sofa next to her, and her head was up, so she could watch her fingers move softly in and out. Her mouth was open, and her face looked pained as she let out little cries.
_Shit._
I typed faster.
"I wish you were here," she breathed out, teasing me. "Your kisses drive me crazy, so I wonder what your tongue would feel like between my legs."
I grunted, shifting in my seat, and clicked _Send_ , opening up another e-mail.
"God, I can see your cock through your pants," she mewed. "It's making my mouth water, baby."
I blinked long and hard.
_Type, type, type . . ._ My fingers worked hard, making constant mistakes, but I kept my head down, scowling, every muscle in my face as hard as iron.
_Open, type, send, open, type, send . . ._ I grunted, shifting in my seat, her little moans getting higher and higher and making my body ache like hell.
"Please tell me I can have it," she begged. "Please."
"Are you trying to make me come?" I growled. "You said I had to finish 'before you were done,' so masturbate and shut up. I can't concentrate with that talk."
I opened another e-mail—only two left—but then I heard her small, taunting voice, sounding innocent.
"Yes, Mr. Marek."
_Fuck._
I glared at her, barely hesitating before shooting out of my chair. I slammed the laptop closed and rounded the desk, holding her eyes as excitement flashed across her face.
"You asked for it," I gritted out.
I pushed my pants down, letting them drop to the floor, and then I came down on her and nestled my hips between her thighs.
I groaned, my heart racing as I grabbed my cock and ran it up and down her pussy. "This is what you do to me."
She bit her bottom lip, squirming as she moaned.
I grabbed the backs of her thighs and pulled her into position. "You get me all worked up, and this is what happens."
I pressed my hand into the armrest behind her head and thrust hard, sliding into her hot little pussy.
"Ah, ah!" she gasped, her eyes pinching together in sweet pain.
"Goddamn it," I moaned. "You feel so fucking good."
The first fucking thrust is always the best.
I held myself up with one hand on the sofa behind her head, and I slid my other hand under her ass, keeping her where I wanted her as I pulled out and slid back in again, hard and deep, up to the hilt.
"Oh, Tyler." She swallowed, moving both hands to my back and spreading her legs even wider.
I slid into her again and again, faster and faster every time, until I was pounding into her so hard that I couldn't see straight.
Her pretty tits bounced back and forth as sweat started to glide down my back.
"Ah, oh God." She moaned, breathing hard and arching her head back.
Her cries filled the room, and her skin was glued to the leather of the sofa, but her pussy was hot and smooth, and I darted down, catching her bottom lip between my teeth.
"You're bad for me, and I love it," I breathed out, grinding between her legs, not letting up for a second.
She kissed me deep, pushing her head up and putting everything into it. Her tongue tasted sweet and sexy, just like her, and we were both moaning, like animals that couldn't get enough.
She fell back on the sofa and held on to my back, letting me have my way with her.
"I love your body, Tyler." She ran her fingers lightly down my chest and stomach.
I gave her a small grin, liking the sound of that. I was usually the one complimenting a woman's body. I didn't know why, but it wasn't something women often thought to say to a man, and I loved her for it.
Especially since I wasn't the twentysomething she was probably used to being with. I didn't mind being older than her, but I didn't want to seem old.
"I don't want anyone else to have it while we're doing this, okay?" she asked, looking up at me.
I laughed and circled my arms around her waist, flipping us both over so that I sat up against the back of the couch with my feet on the floor, and she sat on top, straddling my hips with my dick still inside her.
"You laying claim?" I teased, gripping her ass as she immediately began rolling her hips, riding me.
"I mean it," she stated firmly. "You've seen my temper."
I smiled at her, arching my head back and closing my eyes as she slid up and down my cock. "Don't worry," I soothed. "This dick is yours."
Sex had never been this good with anyone in my life, and there had been plenty to compare her to. The thing I'd learned about sex was that for it to be good, it had to be more than just fucking. Playing, teasing, talking—the pair up of the right two people—and you had the difference between an act that you'd forget in two minutes and something that you wanted again and again.
Easton Bradbury kept me wanting more.
She seemed to like my answer, because she leaned down and trailed kisses over my neck and jaw. "Same goes for you." I squeezed her ass tighter with my other hand and threaded my fingers through her hair, pulling gently and raising her head to face me. "You got that?"
She licked her lips, looking at me with a sudden serious expression, almost sad. "You're the only one I want," she spoke softly. "Right now."
That made me jerk my head up and narrow my eyes on her.
Tightening my grip, I grabbed and lifted her again, tossing her back down on the couch before pinning her wrists above her head.
"That wasn't exactly reassuring," I barked, thrusting good and hard.
She squeezed her eyes shut, moaning, "Oh, God. Tyler." She cried out, "Fuck, I'm coming!"
I felt her pussy clenching around my cock, and I showed her no mercy. Diving into her mouth, I tasted her tongue and let her cries drown out in my kiss.
She grabbed my ass and held tight, the bite of her nails stinging my skin as her body tensed beneath me.
She spasmed, her short, fast breaths echoing around me as her body shook with the orgasm.
"You make me want to ignore my work," I accused, loving how wet she was after coming, "and I'd rather have you here at my beck and call than let you go home. Now, if you liked that," I bit out, referring to the orgasm I'd just given her, "then I think you can assume you're going to be coming back for more for the foreseeable future."
She blinked her eyes open, looking desperate and confused. "All I know"—she breathed hard, searching for words—"is that you're the only one I want."
"For today?" I asked gently, placing my elbows on either side of her head and grazing my lips over hers, before whispering, "Or can I at least get a week out of you?"
She opened her mouth, trying to catch my lips for a kiss, but I pulled back just far enough to tease her.
Anger flashed in her eyes, and I smiled, loving that she liked getting kissed by me.
"What's your track record, Easton?" I looked down into her eyes, keeping my voice calm. "How many boyfriends have you had? How long did they last? How long before you're ready to jump into a new bed?"
Her eyebrows shot up, and she pushed at my chest. "Get off me," she gritted out.
But I continued my smooth, even rhythm as pleasure started to course through my groin. "How long?" I taunted.
"What about you?" she snapped, pushing at my chest. "You can't tell me you don't have another woman somewhere."
"Oh, I do," I replied, keeping my voice light. "Several, actually. One on every continent."
"Go to hell." She slammed her palm into my chest. "And get off me!"
But I grabbed her hands and pinned them up above her head.
"There's one in France and another in London. And they have beautiful women in Buenos Aires."
She pinched her lips and pushed against my chest. "Ugh!"
I rolled my hips as I continued to move in and out of her while I tried not to laugh. "But you know why I want the hot little teacher in New Orleans?" I taunted, looking down into her eyes. "Because she fucking gives me what I want better than anyone else."
The two small wrinkles between her eyes deepened, and her jaw hardened as she tried very hard to look angry when she wasn't.
"You've got a hell of a body, Easton," I breathed out over her lips. "You've also got a sharp tongue, and your temper is a hell of a lot of fun. It's not just about sex."
I dipped down, kissing her neck as I released her hands and grabbed the armrest to anchor myself. I began moving faster again, her small whimpers in my ear growing more desperate as her body took control.
I grunted, feeling the pleasure course down my cock.
God, I needed to come.
She squeezed her eyes shut. I could tell she was about to come again, too.
"So you wanna have fun with me for a while?" I asked.
"Yes," she gasped, pleading. "Yes."
I arched up, peering down at her closed eyes and her chest rising and falling with heavy breaths.
"Please, what?" I thrust into her harder, seeing her come apart.
God, she was beautiful. For one second she was stripped down, bare, and gorgeous, without any of her armor—and it made me feel like she would die without the one thing I could give her. But I also hated that those moments came so rarely, because I lived for them now.
"Please kiss me," she begged.
I covered her mouth with mine as I went at her with everything I had.
"Yes!" she cried, then pulled away to shout, "Fuck! Harder!"
I gripped her thigh and gave her everything I had, completely lost in her moans and cries, smell and taste. Her sounds got higher and her skin was drenched.
"Fuck," I gasped out, closing my eyes, letting the moment overtake me.
"Ah!" she cried out, then stilled, holding on for the ride.
I thrust into her again, my body jerking as I finally spilled inside of her.
"Jesus Christ," I groaned, sliding out of her before slowly lowering my body back down on hers and kissing her collarbone.
My back started to cool, and my body buzzed with exhaustion.
I swallowed, trying to catch my breath. She was stunning.
"What are you doing to me?" I asked, breathless.
Her hands came up, threading through my hair and grazing down my neck. She trailed sweet kisses across my cheek and then wrapped her arms around my neck, damp with sweat, and held me in place.
But when I tried to arch up to look down at her, she tightened her hold, not releasing me.
"I can't look at you and say this," she said quietly, her soft voice sounding sad.
I stilled and averted my gaze, ignoring the apprehension building in my chest.
"My track record isn't good," she started. "I've never had a boyfriend. I've never wanted anyone again and again," she admitted. "But when I think about you, I get excited."
I stayed, listening, even though a smile started to spread my lips.
"You feed on me like food," she went on, "and it makes me happy, because you exhaust me to where I can't think." She placed a light kiss on my neck, sliding her hands down my back. "You like that I'm difficult, and God, I love your body, Tyler. I definitely want more."
She started breathing hard again, and I felt the hair on my arms stand up when she ran her feet up the backs of my legs and began sucking on my neck and kissing my ear.
My eyes closed. "Don't," I groaned. "I think my dick is dead."
I felt her shake with laughter beneath me.
"Let's go get in the shower," she whispered. "We'll see if your dick likes my mouth as much as my pussy."
# FIFTEEN
EASTON
I stared out the window, seeing the early-morning joggers hop over streetcar tracks and puddles glistening with light from oncoming headlights.
This was the time of day when I liked the city most.
Predawn, before the sun burned off the blue-gray clouds, when the city was heavy with the memory of whatever fun had been had the night before but quiet and peaceful as most still slept.
My favorite time.
"Stop looking at me," I chastised as I gazed out the window, inhaling his scent as he sat next to me, trying to keep the smile off my face.
"No," he shot back.
I wasn't used to someone else being forefront in my mind, but I was always hyper-aware of him now. It kind of sucked. In an attempt to calm myself, I smoothed my hands down my wrinkled skirt and pushed up the sleeves of his white button-down, feeling completely out of order.
"Stop fidgeting," he commanded.
I turned my head to look at him, arching an eyebrow.
"You're all sleek in your pressed suit," I pointed out, "and I'm doing the walk of shame in no makeup and men's clothes."
He was taking me home before he headed into the office. Christian was due back later today, and although he'd told me I could sleep in and he'd have Patrick drive me home later, I didn't feel right about being there without him. I'd wanted to go home last night, but he'd talked me into staying again.
Today, though, I had work to catch up on, and he had a company to get back to now that the rain had subsided.
He smiled over at me and reached up, pushing the button to raise the privacy glass between Patrick and us.
"You're stunning," he said in all seriousness, giving me that look of his that made me hot. "And you shouldn't be embarrassed. I'm lucky people can't see the scratch marks on my back," he joked.
It made me laugh as an image of the marks on his back in the shower this morning flashed through my mind.
Butterflies fluttered through my chest, and I released the breath I'd been holding. Maybe that was the ticket. Picture him naked, and he wasn't so formidable.
"If you'd like," he started in his smooth voice, "I can offer you an opportunity to rebuild your self-esteem."
I cocked my head, peering over at him. "Oh?"
He nodded. "I'm hosting a luncheon at the house this Sunday, and I want you there," he stated, and then blinked. "I _would like_ you there," he corrected, as if remembering he wasn't addressing an employee.
I shook my head, even as a grin escaped. The gesture thrilled me, though I would never admit it to him. I looked back out the window, lifting my chin.
It didn't unnerve me that he wanted to see more of me. But it did unnerve me that I liked that he wanted to see more of me.
But at his _house_? During the day, with other people there? If I were social—which I wasn't—it would still be awkward. And make what we were doing even less tactful.
"Tyler, we can't—"
"Not together," he interrupted, reassuring me. "But I like to see you and not be able to touch you. It adds to the fun."
When I turned toward him, expecting to see a mischievous smile, instead I saw a serious, even expression that made me rethink my smart-ass comeback. His eyes were pinned to mine, and I turned forward again, taking a deep breath and resisting the urge to crawl into his lap.
I cleared my throat. "What kind of luncheon is it?"
"Networking," he answered. "The city elite, a few politicians . . ." He trailed off, sounding bored. "Christian will be there."
"Thanks." I shook my head. "But I think—"
He cut me off. "You can bring a friend, if you like. Or your brother?"
I sat up straight, steeling my jaw.
I didn't want to decline the invitation, but I knew I had to. Even if we weren't romantically involved, it was a conflict of interest to attend parties at a student's home.
"You don't have to be nervous," he teased. "I'm sure you can handle the company."
I couldn't help the laugh that escaped.
"I'm not nervous," I argued, turning my head to regard him again. "And I know what you're trying to do."
He thought I couldn't handle myself around his crowd. I'd played tennis with movie stars in the stands.
The car slowed to a stop, and I glanced outside to see that we had arrived in front of my house. Leaves and fronds from a few palm trees in the neighborhood littered the ground, but the rest of the house seemed to be fine, despite my lack of shutters. The ground was still wet, the light sprinkle still falling rippling the puddles that had accumulated on the ground.
I picked up my blouse from next to me on the seat and moved to get out, but he caught my arms, stopping me gently.
"Noon," he said softly, not really demanding but not really asking, either. "I'll leave you alone the rest of the week, so we can both get some work done," he explained, taking his hand away and sitting back, "but if you're not there, I'll come to get you myself."
Despite my best intentions, I smirked, rising to his challenge. Then I leaned over the console and placed an innocent kiss on his cheek.
Whispering against his skin, I teased, "I love it when you play predator. It's so cute."
But then I yelped when he grabbed me under the arms and dragged me over to his lap, wrapping his arms around me and cutting off my breath with a kiss as he held me tight.
I moaned, but I couldn't fight. His tongue swirled with mine and his hand slipped up my thigh, grabbing my ass cheek.
His lips moved over mine, eating me up and sending me reeling. My head spun, and I wanted him again.
And if what I could feel poking into my behind was any indication, he wanted me, too.
Tyler and I were one and the same. Both of us hated to be handled.
Until now.
I liked his dominance, and I think he liked mine.
He pulled away, and I felt like the air had been ripped out of my lungs.
He placed his hands on his armrest and breathed hard.
"Now get out of here," he ordered, his tone turning clipped. "And if you don't show on Sunday, I'll never do that again."
Arrogant, confident, son of a . . .
I hopped off his lap and pounded on the window for Patrick to let me out. I didn't have to turn around to know that Marek was smiling.
And when Patrick opened the door, I stepped out, not once turning around for Tyler to see my grin.
Once I'd stepped inside the house, I heard his car pull away, and I closed the door, slipping off my flats.
Catching myself in the large square mirror on the wall perpendicular to the door, I took in my appearance, feeling completely disheveled but not out of sorts. My deep brown hair was clean, but it was a little frizzy, since it hadn't been blow-dried properly, curled, straightened, or styled in any way. I always thought I looked bland without makeup, but my skin was glowing, and there was a natural blush across my cheeks that I'd never seemed to have before.
The top two buttons of his shirt were open, and I wasn't wearing a bra, so I could feel the smooth, soft fabric against my sensitive skin. Everything touched me like it was a new feeling. Like my skin had come alive, tingling with frenzy.
I pulled the collar over my nose and inhaled, the smell of a spice, wood, and leather filling my chest.
Twisting around, I hit all the locks on the door and then rounded the entryway into the living room.
I stopped, spotting my brother sprawled out on the couch.
"Jack?" I called, walking up to the couch.
He shifted, lying there in his jeans with no T-shirt as his eyes slowly blinked awake. I looked over at the clock, seeing it was still only six oh four. He must've been here overnight.
"What are you doing here?" I rounded the couch to stand next to him.
He opened his eyes and focused on me. "Easton, what the hell?" he grumbled.
Sitting up, he planted his feet on the ground and hunched over, putting his elbows on his knees as he rubbed his eyes.
"Did you just get in?" he asked, peering up at me with worried eyes.
I tossed my blouse on the chair off to the side. "Yeah. What are you doing here?" I asked again.
He yawned. "The power went out in my neighborhood yesterday, so I let myself in," he explained, raising his arms above his head to stretch. "You have cable, so . . ."
I exhaled a laugh and leaned down to start tossing his soda cans and napkins inside the empty pizza box. I never cleaned up after him, but I was in a good mood this morning.
"Where were you?" he pressed again. "I texted."
I picked up the pizza box full of his garbage and shoved it to his chest. "I was out," I answered.
He cocked an eyebrow and set the box aside. His eyes fell down my clothes, and he reached up, rubbing the hem of my shirt between his fingers.
"Expensive," he commented, realization crossing his face as he turned away.
He closed his eyes and ran a hand through his hair, but I didn't care what he was going to say. Jack watched over me too closely, and I was done with it.
"I want nothing more than to see you with someone," he appeased, "but don't you think you're playing with fire?"
I leaned over, picked up the box again, and pushed it against his chest harder this time.
"I like fire," I stated, and stepped up onto the couch and sat down on its back.
"Yes, you're a risk taker," he teased, "but only when you're sure of the outcome, Easton. Hate to burst your bubble, but those aren't really risks."
I shook my head, rolling my eyes at him. "I'm not falling in love with him. We're both way too complicated for that."
"Do you want him to?"
"What?" I heaved a sigh.
"Fall in love with you."
I stared at my brother, trying to keep a hint of a smile on my face to hide the fact that I was actually thinking about it.
Did I want Tyler Marek to love me?
No, no, of course not.
I wanted someone to love me. Eventually. But I didn't want it to happen yet.
I thought I'd have years to build a relationship with someone. Years to get my life in order. To feel comfortable letting someone in. But not now and not him.
He was too caught up in his own life—as I was in mine.
He was also twelve years older and at a different point in his life. He probably had too many obligations to take time to travel and explore. And he probably had too many hang-ups about his own parenting abilities to want more children. I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to have them, either, but it wasn't something I was ready to rule out.
No. Tyler Marek was a fling.
I licked my lips, flashing my brother a smile. "He makes me laugh and he turns me on," I taunted. "And I love it when he does this thing with his tongue—"
"Okay!" he burst out, turning away. "We're not that close."
I shook with quiet laughter, sinking down onto the couch.
"You want to know the best part?" I asked, and he looked at me.
"I haven't counted anything since yesterday morning," I told him.
He looked at me like he didn't believe me. "Really?"
I nodded, standing up and crossing my arms over my chest.
"I'm keeping my expectations reasonable," I assured him. "But for now, I feel relaxed for the first time in forever. I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts."
He seemed to give up his objections, because he slowly started nodding and taking deep breaths. My brother was a contradiction, and I still had trouble understanding him. He wanted me to move on, but he seemed to get antsy whenever I picked up a racket. He wanted me to date—not just have dalliances—but apparently someone like Tyler Marek wasn't what he had in mind.
If anything, I would've thought my brother would entertain the idea. Tyler was successful, connected, and political, everything my brother wanted to be.
I knew what my brother _said_ he wanted for me, but on the rare occasion—like lately—when I seemed to go after it, he would try to pull me back, and I didn't understand why.
"Well." He heaved out a sigh and shot me a nudging smile. "Since you're in such a good mood, I have been dying for some of your bacon and mushroom quiche."
"Quiche?" I winced. "Do you have any idea how long that's going to take?"
He widened his smile, looking more comical than sympathetic, with both rows of teeth showing.
But I couldn't deny him. Being needed kept me busy.
I rolled my eyes. "Fine, but I'm playing music, then. Use the headphones if you want to watch TV."
I rounded the couch and walked into the kitchen, halting immediately when I spotted three cabinets and a drawer open.
_Seriously?_
"Jack!" I called, walking over and closing everything. "If you're going to hang out here, at least close the cabinets and drawers after you've opened them."
—
"Now, in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War"—I paced down the aisle in my classroom the next day—"our country experienced the First Industrial Revolution," I told the students, summarizing the reading from the storm break.
"What kind of inventions sprang forth?" I asked, snapping my fingers. "Let's go. Come on."
"The cotton gin!" Rayder Broussard shot out.
"Which did what?" I continued, listening as I stared at the tile and paced back and forth.
"Uh," a girl stuttered, and then shouted, "Cotton fibers separated from seeds, enabling clothing to be more quickly produced!"
I looked up, seeing it was a student from Team One, so I jetted over to the board and tallied a point for her team and one for Rayder's.
"What else?" I called out.
The students flipped through their notes and charts, working vigorously and still going strong despite being worked like machines from the moment they'd stepped into the room today. They sat or stood scattered around the room in organized chaos with their groups and with their noses buried in their research. I would've loved this level of participation if my intentions were noble.
But they weren't. I'd needed the distraction ever since my brother's visit yesterday. He'd denied leaving my kitchen a mess, and now it was all I could think about. If Jack hadn't left the drawer and cabinets open, then who had?
He should've known. The minute he'd walked into the apartment the night before and seen the kitchen out of sorts, he should've known something was wrong. I never left things out of place.
Four cups in a stack in the cabinet, two turns to close the toothpaste, closet organized—blouses, shirts, pants, skirts, dark to light—everything was always in order.
But upon further inspection yesterday, I'd found my shower curtain also open and two skirts I hadn't worn lately hanging on the back of my bedroom chair.
My heart started to pound again, and I swallowed.
While I arranged and organized things as a way to achieve a small sense of control, it had begun as a way to tell if anyone had been in my space.
At sixteen, when I'd started obsessing, if something was mussed, crooked, or out of place, I would know that I wasn't safe.
And while now I still did it for a measure of peace, I hadn't felt unsafe in five years. Not since the last time I'd seen him.
Maybe I'd taken the skirts out two nights ago, when Tyler had wanted to take me to dinner. Maybe I'd opened the cabinets and drawer before that, when I was arguing with Jack.
I hadn't counted anything lately, so maybe I was starting to loosen my grip on the order I'd once needed. Maybe my brain was so preoccupied with my class and with Tyler that I'd started to do what I'd needed to do for years: move on and let go.
Or maybe my brother did open the cabinets and drawers and just forgot.
_Maybe._
I blinked, the class's commotion growing louder.
I took a deep breath, forcing myself to relax. "Come on!" I clapped my hands, rejoining the class. "Team One is in the lead here!"
I looked to Christian, who sat with his team but was not participating. "Christian?" I prompted. "Any ideas?"
He didn't answer but only flipped through his notes absently, not attempting to even look like he was trying to work.
"The steam engine!" someone shouted.
I let my aggravation over Christian's continued defiance go as I met Sheldon's eyes and mentally tallied Team Three.
"Which did what?" I called out, walking for the whiteboard again.
I heard a chair screech behind me as someone shot up. "It allowed a wide range of machines to be powered!"
I recognized Marcus's voice and placed another point for Team One and one for Team Three on the board.
"What else?"
"The telegraph!" someone called.
"And what was its purpose?"
"To um . . ." The girl's voice drifted off, while everyone else whispered in their groups or flipped through their notes.
"Come on," I urged. "You're heading for Earth, and your spaceship is out of control. You're going to crash!" I shouted, a smile tilting my lips.
"Communicate over long distances using Morse code!" Dane called out, his eyes wide with excitement.
"They already could communicate over long distances by writing letters," I challenged.
"But the telegraph was quicker!" he shouted, pointing his finger up in the air as if declaring war.
I laughed. "Good!" I praised, walking to the board and marking points.
Turning around, I walked back down the aisle, paying special attention to Christian.
"Now," I started. "Imagine that you need a ride home, and cell phones don't exist. How do you get home?" I asked.
"Find a phone," Sidney Jane answered.
But I shot back. "The school's closed, so you can't use theirs."
"Go to a business and use their phone," Ryan Cruzate called out.
I shrugged. "No one answers when you call."
"Walk home," Shelby Roussel continued the problem-solving.
I nodded. "Okay, you got there, but you don't have a key."
"Sit your butt outside," Marcus joked, a few kids joining in the laughter.
"It's raining," I argued again.
Trey Watts locked his hands behind his head. "Go to a friend's and wait," he suggested.
"They're not home, either." I winced with fake sympathy.
"Call someone—"
I stopped her with a head shake about the same time she realized we'd already been through that. The class laughed when they remembered that they don't have cell phones in this scenario. How easy it was to forget that we no longer had something we didn't realize we relied on so much.
And there really was no solution. You adjust and cope, but you can't make it the same again.
I paced the aisle, feeling Christian's silence like a deafening weight to my left.
"Now, we can survive without cell phones and microwaves," I explained, "but advances in technology have obviously made life easier. To the point where, in some cases, we don't know what we'd do without them."
"If your mom—or dad—had a cell phone," I went on, "you could've reached them wherever they were, no matter that they weren't home. Now, we know what some of the big inventions during the Industrial Revolution were, and we know what they did, but what was the impact on our country and our daily lives after they came into existence?" I asked. "How did they make life easier? Or more difficult? How does new technology"—I raised my voice for emphasis—"forever change the course of our lives?"
I gazed around the room, seeing their contemplative expressions. I hoped they weren't merely blank and that they were actually thinking.
Maybe I'd asked too many questions at once.
I glanced to Christian, who stared at me, looking very much like he had something to say but was holding back.
"Make a T-chart," I ordered. "Label pros and cons and then put your pencils down."
The students did what was asked of them. They opened their notebooks to a blank page, drawing one line down the middle and one across the top and labeling the two sections.
After they'd replaced their pencils on their desks, I went on.
"Revolution usually means quick, dramatic change," I pointed out. "Do you think the Industrial Revolution was aptly named? Were the changes in production and distribution fast, or were they a steady development over time?"
I walked up the last aisle and stopped. "Christian, what do you think?"
He shook his head, looking bored. "I think it was fast, I guess."
"Why?"
He dropped his eyes, mumbling, "I don't know."
I got closer. "You don't have to know." I kept my voice light. "Tell me what you think."
His eyes shot up to mine. "I don't know," he repeated, his voice turning angry.
"It was decades," I shot out, knowing I was close to overstepping my bounds. One of the first things you learn about classroom management is to never call out a student in front of the class.
But I needed a reaction out of him. I needed him to do something. To say something.
"Is that fast or steady, Christian? What do you think?"
"It's all about perspective, I guess!" he barked. "Humans are, like, two hundred thousand years old, so yeah, a lot of advancement in only a few decades would be fast," he argued. "Some civilizations in history barely made any progress in generations, while others a lot. Everyone's frame of reference is different!"
I held his angry blue-gray eyes—the same as his father's—and elation flooded my chest. I let out a breath and gave him a small smile, nodding.
"That's a good point," I told him, and then turned around to walk away.
"But then it may not be fast, either," he continued, and I stopped.
Spinning around, I watched as he crossed his arms over his chest and tilted his chin up, more confident.
"I would say the past two decades have seen even more advancement in manufacturing and technology than during the Industrial Revolution," he debated. "The phones, the iPads, automobiles, the Mars rover . . ." He trailed off. "It's about perspective."
It felt like those moments when you get exactly what you want and then you don't know what to do with what you got.
I stood there, wondering what the good teachers do when a student opens up, and I was clueless. Christian Marek was an angry kid. He was difficult and defiant and so like his father and yet so different. Whereas I gathered Tyler always felt he had something to prove, Christian seemed like someone who never needed to prove anything to anyone.
"So was it fast or steady?" a student called out to my left.
I bowed my head, smiling as I turned around and walked to the front of the classroom.
I cleared my throat. "You're not being graded on what you think," I told the class. "You're being graded on why you think it. Defend your answers."
I turned off the Smart Board and placed my hands on my hips.
"Complete your T-chart with the pros and cons of the impact on life by the inventions of the Industrial Revolution. Then tweet what you learned today—hashtag Bradbury2015—and then you may get online and start adding primary sources to your folder for the Deep South project," I instructed.
I turned, grabbing a dry-erase marker, and finished adding points for the class.
"Aw, yeah!" I heard Marcus bellow when he saw the points I added to Team One. "We got fifty points. Good job, Marek!!"
Team One clapped, celebrating their success and the final point Christian had earned for them, bringing them to a total of fifty before all the other teams.
"So we get Song of the Week, right?" Marcus asked, already working his laptop to find his song, no doubt.
"Yes." I nodded. "You have five minutes."
"It's my choice, everyone!" he shouted, clicking his computer and standing up as the song began playing.
The entire class stopped what they were doing and joined in the fun as the song came out louder and louder from Marcus's computer. Soon there were hands in the air, voices singing along, and people standing up at their desks, moving to the music.
I laughed at the sight, loving the amount of work they put in to succeed just so they could have these five minutes as often as possible. Even Christian was laughing as he watched others dance to the music.
And then my face fell and I sucked in a breath as I finally realized what song was playing, Afroman's "Because I Got High."
"Wait!" I blurted out. "That song has profanity."
Marcus jerked his shoulders in moves probably only he thought were cool.
"How would you know, Ms. Bradbury?" he singsonged.
And I just planted my face in my hands as the entire class joined in on the chorus so loudly the entire school probably heard.
# SIXTEEN
TYLER
Two days later and I was still thinking about her. What the hell was wrong with me? The luncheon was the day after tomorrow, and I couldn't wait. I hoped she wasn't going to chicken out, because it would throw off my entire fucking day.
I pulled back the pen, noticing I'd been retracing notes I'd already made as I sat at the head of the conference table, vaguely aware of Stevenson, one of my vice presidents, updating everyone on distribution figures from the last quarter.
I wasn't even listening.
Every time I sat still, my head would drift back to her. Her body, her lips, her hunger . . . She was driving me crazy, and I knew right then and there that I hadn't lied to her.
I might actually have a crush.
And I dropped the pen to the table, knowing that was the last thing I needed.
Easton Bradbury was beautiful, educated, and strong. She was built for challenges. But she was also complicated, difficult, and moody. She wouldn't make friends easily.
Even if she weren't my son's teacher—even if I weren't about to enter a campaign, knowing that going public with a love interest could put me further under the microscope—Easton could still fuck me up.
Damaged people were survivors, and they survived because they always put themselves first. Self-preservation demanded it.
I didn't like realizing I might not be the first one to walk away.
I had to enjoy her for what she was and not let her mean more than that. She was fun company, good in bed, and a welcome distraction when I had time for one. And I had every confidence I was the same for her.
Other than that, she needed to be pushed out of my head.
I came back, refocusing on the table in front of me. "All right," I said, cutting off Stevenson midsentence. "Everyone go to lunch. We'll continue this later."
I didn't wait to see if anyone had any questions before I got up and moved back into the main office to continue the work that was doubling before me, no matter how many hours I spent at it.
Everyone slowly drifted out while I got on the computer and started reviewing messages from Corinne.
There was a stockholders' meeting in the evening, but I was going to send Jay in my place, and some new contracts to delegate to regional vice presidents.
Jay was right. I couldn't handle everything myself. With the campaign—and the Senate, if I won—I was going to have to learn how to hand off more work to others.
Then I looked around, seeing that my brother had left the meeting. Picking up my phone, I speed-dialed him.
But Corinne walked in. "Mr. Marek? Ms. McAuliffe is here to see you," she said.
"Five minutes," I commanded.
She nodded, knowing that it was her job to come in and scurry out whoever I needed gone, so I could get on with my day.
Corinne walked out, and Jay picked up his phone.
"You just told us to go to lunch," he pointed out, knowing I needed him back here.
"Not you," I shot back. "I want to be out of here by four, so get back in here."
"Four?" he blurted out, but I hung up the phone without responding.
I never left the office that early, and he knew it. But slowly I'd started to try to manage my time better. I could take a break, eat dinner with Christian, and then work in my home office while he went to his room to do homework or over to a friend's house.
I began clicking on the messages on my computer when I saw Tessa stroll in, a casual smile brightening her face and her beige suit jacket and handbag hanging in her hand.
She was dressed in a burgundy blouse and a beige pencil skirt, and as usual, she had a relaxed sway to her hips and determination in her steps, as if she were always comfortable, no matter the room or the company.
Such a contrast to Easton's stiff posture and the black curtain that seemed to hang over her eyes.
_I don't want anyone else to have it while we're doing this, okay?_
I inhaled a deep breath and hardened my jaw.
"Close the door," Tessa instructed Corinne a few feet behind her, turning her head only enough to be understood but not enough to see her.
Corinne shut the door, and Tessa tossed her things onto one of the chairs opposite my desk.
She smiled. "I thought you were away on business," she said sweetly, but I knew she was scolding. "Or perhaps detained with no way to communicate." She circled the desk, making her way to me. "Or maybe you lost my number and, knowing how anti–social media you are, you didn't think to tweet."
Twitter? Was she kidding?
Tessa and I were never the type to check in with each other, and while I knew she was playing it cool, it was unlike her to show up at my office without calling.
Or put herself on my side of the desk, interrupting my day. That was what I liked—or did like—about Tessa. She respected our careers, and she didn't get territorial.
Not like Easton. I started to smile at the thought of her but stopped myself.
"Tessa—"
"I'm seeing someone?" she interrupted, finishing for me. "Is that what you're going to say?"
I sat down, watching her as I ran my finger over my lips. I knew what was coming.
She looked at me, all business, calm and levelheaded. "Here's the thing, Tyler." She sat down on the edge of my desk, crossing one leg over the other. "I don't care. Her, me . . ." She shrugged. "You get two for the price of one. Which works for me, because I don't want anything more anyway."
And then she leaned in, running a finger down my light blue tie. "But I don't want to lose what I already have," she clarified.
I looked up into her eyes, wondering why she was really here. A few months ago she'd insisted on having our lunch date in my office, but we'd never eaten. She'd walked in, pulled up her skirt, and straddled me in my chair.
And while I'd enjoyed it, I was simply wondering now if the five minutes I'd told Corinne to give us were up yet.
I let out a breath and cocked my head. "You haven't been waiting around for me to call," I challenged.
"No," she allowed, pulling back with a smile. "But I would've canceled any plans I'd made if you had."
I grinned, appreciating her candor. She was useful, and I'd rather keep her on my side if I could. We'd enjoyed each other, and there was mutual respect for the other's position and connections in the city.
But the thing was . . . I'd never craved her.
And I no longer wanted her.
It's not that I was callous or that I thought women were disposable. I only involved myself with women who knew the score and wanted the same thing as me.
Easy fun.
Now everything felt different.
_Because of Easton._
Her sharp tongue spouted words that cut, but it also tasted like a cool lake on a hot day.
I remembered her whispers in my ear, waking me up Wednesday morning before she slipped a leg over my stomach and climbed on.
I inhaled a sharp breath, refocusing on the current situation _._
"It turns out," I confided, "maybe I do want to complicate my life a little."
Her eyes widened, and she smiled big. "Dish," she demanded.
I let out a bitter laugh. "Not a chance."
"It's off the record," she assured me, holding up her hands in innocence.
"You're never off the record."
"Oh, come on." She waved a hand at me. "You're bound to take her to dinner sometime. The press would kill to see someone unknown on your arm. You can't hide her away forever."
That's exactly what I wanted to do. If anyone found out, we'd be done, and I wasn't ready.
I let out a sigh. "I can do whatever I want," I replied, aware I sounded a little cocky.
She pursed her lips in a plotting smile. "I'm intrigued."
"But not disappointed, I see," I shot back.
_"Psh."_ She laughed and hopped off my desk. "I would be disappointed if I thought it would last."
I narrowed my eyes, watching her walk back around the desk to the chair and pick up her jacket and handbag.
She cocked her head, looking coy. "But you, Tyler, are a bachelor for life," she asserted. "I only hope you marry her. It'll make our little interludes all the more fun."
And with a confident smirk, she spun around and walked for the door, calling one last time over her shoulder, "You'll call me when you're done with your shiny new toy?" But she didn't wait for an answer.
Swinging the door open, she disappeared, and I let my eyes fall closed as I pinched the bridge of my nose. I wasn't quite sure if there was a man alive in this city who could match that woman's set of balls.
"Jesus Christ," I breathed out.
"Well, that was quick."
I looked up to see my brother strolling back in, his attention half on me and half on his phone.
"She'd make a good politician's wife," he hinted. "No matter what, she always looks cheerful."
I cocked an eyebrow and stood up, getting ready to sort through what I needed him to handle today.
_Cheerful._ And then I snorted, thinking how much that word and Easton would never go hand in hand.
My phone buzzed, and I immediately stopped, reaching into my top drawer for it.
Since Easton's little lesson to all of my VPs the other day, I'd set out to prove her wrong by leaving my phone out of reach at certain times. There was no such thing as an information addiction. It was simply an excuse so she could manage attention in an easier way.
But when I saw a text from her, liquid heat rushed in my veins, and I couldn't possibly ignore her like I did others when I was busy.
How many politicians does it take to change a lightbulb? she'd texted.
How many?
Two, she answered. One to change it, and one to change it back.
I laughed, causing Jay to peer up from his phone with an inquiring look.
Tweet that, she ordered.
I shook my head but did it anyway.
"What are you doing?" Jay pried as I clicked on my Twitter app and began typing.
"Tweeting," I said in a low voice.
"Oh," he said, sounding surprised. "Good. Your breakfast tweet earlier this week was exactly what I've been talking about. People eat that shit up."
I finished the tweet, tossed my phone down on a pile of folders at the edge of my desk, and ran my hand through my hair.
"I need you to make sure Corinne has everything set up for the luncheon," I told him, "and can you set up a conference call with Mexico City for one o'clock today?" I asked but didn't wait for an answer as I grabbed a sheet from the printer, handing it to him. "Also, here's the speech for the veterans benefit. I made some changes, so just look it over for me."
I sat back down, straightening my tie and grabbing the remote. I turned on the TVs on the wall, a barrage of news stations coming to life and their chatter filling the room as I turned to my computer and jumped online.
Trying to organize my day to allow for more time for Christian was kicking my ass.
"Are you okay?" Jay asked.
"Where the hell are those deeds to that land in California?" I barked, ignoring him as I scanned my e-mails.
The lawyer was supposed to scan them and send them over, so we could get on the land, and I knew there were at least fifteen other fucking things I was forgetting to do.
"Corinne, get in here!" I shouted.
"All right, I'm outta here. I'll take care of this," I heard him say, holding up the speech I'd run through last night. "Is Tessa coming to the luncheon?"
"Yes, of course," I answered. "She's influential, isn't she?"
"And Ms. Bradbury?"
I stopped, looking up at him and sitting back in my seat. How the hell did he know?
He smirked, shaking his head at me. "Give me a break, Tyler," he scolded. "It was pretty clear you weren't the one taking that picture of your breakfast, and judging by the sparks in your office last Saturday . . ."
He stood there, probably waiting for me to say something, but I didn't.
Jay was younger, but I knew he never took it to heart that I was the boss. He liked working here and working with someone who took his bullshit.
Working together had never been a problem. Until now.
An average assistant would know their boundaries. A brother had none.
"Look," he started, "I'm not saying you can't—"
"That's right." I cut him off, nodding. "You're not telling me anything."
I let his expertise drive the invitations I accepted, the platform I created, as well as guide my campaign, but I would keep Easton separate.
It wasn't that my brother didn't have a right to ask. I just didn't care to hear what I knew he would say.
"Tessa McAuliffe is _our_ business," I clarified. "Whoever I fuck is _mine_."
—
I'd gathered in my short and limited experience as a father that being a parent was like tossing marbles up into the air and seeing how many would land in a shot glass.
I'd read enough and seen enough to know that kids could grow up in the worst hell and become valedictorians and doctors. Or they could be raised in privilege with two parents and Christmas trees stocked with gifts and still die of overdoses or by suicide.
One irrefutable fact about parenting that I knew even before I was one was that there was no "right" way. No set list of proven methods to follow if you wanted your kid to captain a submarine or conduct orchestras or be president.
If you pushed them to succeed, they could resent you. If you didn't push them enough, they could still resent you. If you gave them what they needed, they would complain about not having what they wanted, and if you gave them what they wanted, they may only want more.
How much was too much? How much was too little? How hard should you push to be able to call it encouragement, because if you pushed too hard, they'd call it bad parenting?
How do they know that you love them? How do you know if they love you?
How do you know if they're going to be okay?
I stared out the car window, watching Christian talking to a couple of girls, and there was an ocean of regret for the years I'd missed. I could tell myself that he'd turned out well. Maybe if I had been in his life, he wouldn't have become this strong or confident, but I knew I was making excuses. I should've been there.
Easton stood at the bottom of the stone steps, smiling as she talked to a parent, her arms crossed. The students had just gotten out of school, and although Patrick usually picked Christian up, I'd decided to be here as well. I'd worked through lunch, even stopping Corinne from ordering food, so I didn't waste time eating. I still had a few loose ends to tie up for the day, but I could get to that after Christian and I had dinner.
"Patrick?" I leaned forward and handed him a small black bag. "Would you please take this to Miss Bradbury?" I told him. "And hurry Christian up, please."
"Yes, sir." He reached around and took the bag, then hopped out of the car, leaving me alone.
I watched as he traipsed over to Easton, interrupting her conversation. Politely, I was sure, knowing Patrick.
She smiled at him, and the parent waved goodbye to her as she took the bag Patrick offered. Her face was a mixture of surprise and something else I couldn't place. Curiosity, maybe?
She knew Patrick, so she had to know it was from me. He bowed his head quickly, saying goodbye, and she dipped her head, peering into the bag.
I watched her, my heart starting to beat faster, and I had to remind myself that I'd see her Sunday.
She slipped her hand into the bag and picked out the small box. Opening it up, she plucked out the smoky gray Lamborghini lighter I'd stopped to buy on the way here.
Her eyebrows pinched together as she cocked her head, studying it. I almost laughed, because she looked intrigued but utterly confused. Easton, I already knew, wasn't a woman who liked to be caught off guard, and I enjoyed gaining the upper hand this once.
She pushed the button and jerked a little, breaking out in a smile as the flame appeared. Reaching back into the bag, she plucked out the small white card and read my message.
Don't set any fires without me, it read.
She smiled to herself, the genuine kind of smile she always tried to hide. I knew if I were next to her I'd be able to see her blush.
Finally looking up, she met my eyes, and I saw the need there that I was hard-pressed to ignore as well.
The car door opened and Christian appeared, climbing in and dropping his bag before he sat down. When I looked back, Easton was just disappearing back into the school.
I loosened my tie and set my phone down on the console. "How was your day?" I asked.
"Fine," he responded.
Yes. Fine.
_Okay, yes, no, maybe, whatever_ . . . His usual responses.
"Was that Sarah Richmond you were talking to?" I inquired. "Clyde Richmond's daughter?"
He took out his phone and started scrolling with his thumb. "Yeah, I guess."
"I talked to your mother today." I crossed my legs, resting my ankle over the top of my other knee. "She would like you to go to Egypt for Christmas to spend some time with her."
I didn't want him to go. My father and his wife were planning a huge party, and Christian could get to know my side of the family better, not to mention that I'd never spent a Christmas with him.
But he sat there, focused on his phone, and nodded absently. "Yeah, whatever," he mumbled.
I shook my head.
Picking up my phone, I texted him. Right there, two feet away from me, because he wouldn't talk to me, so I had to text my kid to have a fucking conversation with him.
I would rather you stay. I clicked _Send._
I heard his phone beep and watched his lips tighten when he saw it was from me. He started to look up but stopped, instead typing out a response, I assumed.
I don't like you, he texted back.
I stared at it, hating those words and feeling my chest tighten like a rubber band was wrapping around my heart.
I know, I responded.
His phone beeped, and he hesitated, looking like he was wondering if he wanted to continue the conversation.
But he did.
You piss me off, he admitted.
I nodded as I typed. I do that to a lot of people.
I'm not a lot of people, he shot back immediately.
I paused, feeling guilty that I'd made him think he was no more important than anyone else in my life.
I know, I agreed.
He started typing, and I waited, but when he kept going and I hadn't received a text, I stilled just as much out of gratitude as out of fear.
I was afraid he had more to say that would be hard to hear, but I was also elated that he was talking to me. Albeit texting, but it was still communication, and it was about as much open dialogue as we'd had since he'd moved in.
Patrick turned onto St. Charles and headed east toward the CBD when my phone buzzed.
I opened Christian's message.
I used to see you on TV or in the newspaper, he wrote. You had time for everyone but me. I used to wonder what was wrong with me, and then I realized that you were just an asshole.
I gritted my teeth as I held the phone and tried to figure out what I was going to say to him. He was right, after all. There was no excuse and no reason good enough.
And I'd known this was coming.
_Come on, Tyler._ You've had fourteen years to figure out how to make this up to him. _You got nothing?_
My phone buzzed again.
You're an asshole.
I texted quickly. I know.
A huge asshole! he shot back.
I know, I replied again.
That was all I could do.
He was right, and if I didn't stay calm, I'd push him farther away.
And I'm sick of this jazz shit! he texted.
I forced away the smile that pulled at my lips. Patrick kept the music light—with no lyrics—per my request, since I often made phone calls or worked on my laptop in the car.
I texted back. What kind of music do you like to listen to?
Rock.
I licked my lips and looked up, calling out to Patrick.
"Patrick, could you put on a rock station, please?" I asked.
Without answering, he began spinning the dial in search of a different station. Finally, once he settled on a tune that sounded angry and talked about "home," I leaned back in my seat and took the opportunity to push Christian further. He was talking to me—or yelling—but we still hadn't accomplished anything.
We've got a party on Sunday, I texted. You could invite friends.
His phone beeped, and I glanced over out of the corner of my eye to see his eyebrows furrowed. Finally, he started typing.
I don't want to go to a party.
I continued. Food, music, swimming . . . You and your friends can enjoy the pool before it gets cold.
He sat there, staring at the text and wiggling his thumbs over the screen, looking like he wasn't sure how to answer. He hadn't said no, so I sent another text before he found a way to say no.
I invited Clyde Richmond. His daughter may come. I hoped like hell that enticed him.
The luncheon was for business, but families and significant others were coming. Some bridges needed to be built, but it was supposed to be a relaxed occasion, as well. If Christian liked the girl, as he appeared to—and he had the safety of his friends—maybe he'd brave it.
He began typing, but it was a while before I got another text.
I invited a few people, he wrote.
My jaw ached with a smile, and I looked out the window, letting out a breath. He must've sent a mass text to his friends. He was giving me a shot, at least.
I had one foot in the door.
"Are we going home, sir?" Patrick's voice came drifting back.
And I blinked, realizing I hadn't told him where we were going.
"Ah, Commander's Palace," I told him. I was starving.
"Not again," Christian blurted out, startling me.
I twisted my head to see him scowling.
And I laughed to myself, because I liked it. _Give me anger. Give me annoyance. Just give me something._
I raised my eyebrows in expectation and waved my hand, inviting him to reissue the order to Patrick.
"Camellia Grill," he told Patrick.
And I slipped my phone into my breast pocket, hoping I wouldn't need it at dinner.
# SEVENTEEN
EASTON
Letting Tyler Marek push me into corners and whisper into my ear right under the noses of everyone around us was going to get me into trouble.
And him.
He had a lot to lose, too.
So why wasn't I ending it?
I was standing in the middle of a burning room, daring myself to stay as long as possible before it was time to run.
"Are you ready?"
Jack looked over the hood at me, straightening his navy blue and pink polka-dot tie over his pink pin-striped shirt. Not many men would brave such a color, but New Orleans men were a different animal, and it looked good on him. Especially with his matching navy blue slacks.
I smiled lazily. "Ready for what?" I asked, glancing at Kristen Meyer as she climbed out of the back of Jack's Jeep.
Tyler had said I could bring a friend, and I thought it would be more comfortable—or comforting—to have backup when I knew Jack was going to spend his afternoon schmoozing.
"Are you ready for the party?" Jack repeated. "You're Miss Antisocial-Constantly-Uncomfortable-Wants-to-Be-Home-Instead-of-at-a-Party-Ever, so I guess I shouldn't worry, right?"
His lips were spread from ear to ear, pleased with his own assessment of me, and I just rolled my eyes.
"Ah." Kristen spoke up, smoothing down her sleeveless knee-length peach dress. "So it's not just me. She's always difficult."
She shot me a joking glare as she put her hands on her hips and grinned.
Apparently she thought we were close enough to insult each other in good humor.
I cocked an eyebrow. "Just because I don't bounce around like I'm in a Skittles commercial doesn't mean I'm difficult."
And I walked off, hearing their snorts behind me as they followed.
I almost went for the side door, next to the covered driveway, but I caught myself just in time, remembering I had to keep up the pretense that I'd never been here and most guests wouldn't use that door. Of course, my brother was informed about how close Marek and I had gotten, but that didn't mean I could be careless.
Before we even reached the front door, though, it opened, a butler I hadn't seen before greeting us.
"Good afternoon."
"Hello." I nodded, taking a few steps into the entryway and stopping.
Kristen and Jack strolled in behind me, and the sunlight fanning across the floor slowly fell away as the door closed.
I inhaled and instantly dipped my head, trying to hide the smile caused by the flutters in my stomach. I loved his smell, and I suddenly realized my new favorite place was being curled up in his sheets, where that scent covered me.
"Ms. Bradbury," I heard a voice say from above.
I looked up, seeing Christian descend the dark hardwood stairs with one hand on the cast-iron railing, and I immediately felt a light layer of sweat break out on my forehead.
Yes, this was definitely inappropriate. I shouldn't have come.
"I didn't know you'd be here." He looked at me quizzically as he reached the bottom of the stairs.
Yeah, I shouldn't be, should I?
I forced a smile, taking him in. I was glad to see I hadn't over – or underdressed.
He wore black slacks with black shoes, and while he hadn't put on a tie, he still looked dressy in a light blue oxford with his sleeves rolled up. I'd decided to take advantage of the warm October weather and wore a sleeveless dress that fell just above my knees, but while it was mostly white, it was filled with a spatter of pink and blue flowers in the middle that looked a lot like a watercolor painting. It was vintage, and I loved it.
"Hi, Christian," I greeted in a light voice. The pleasant-teacher one I used for the students. "Yes, your father invited me. This is my brother, Jack." I waved my hand, joking, "He's nicer than me. I promise."
He nodded but didn't smile.
"And you know Ms. Meyer." I gestured to Kristen.
Christian gave her a half smile, but there was something that still wasn't right. I didn't know if he'd already been put off before we got here, or if it was my overactive sense of guilt that he might not want me here, but he seemed displeased about something.
We'd made some progress in class, and his work outside of the classroom was excellent. Whatever was bothering him wasn't getting in the way of his performance, so I could only hope it had nothing to do with me.
The quiet butler in his white jacket and black tie approached us. "Everyone's out back," he told us. "Down the hall and you'll see the glass doors."
"Yeah," Christian spoke up. "Follow me."
And he turned around, leading us to the back of the house. The echo of mine and Kristen's heels drowned out any other sound as Christian took us across the white marble floors of the entryway to the slate tiles of the kitchen toward the French doors leading out to the patio.
"Wow. Look at this place." Kristen's whisper was filled with awe.
But I refused to look around. If I did, I'd see the door leading to the study where he'd mauled me four days ago or the stove where I'd made breakfast wearing only his shirt.
"It's a large house," I commented to Christian ahead of me. "I mean for just you and your dad."
We all walked through the doors, and Christian turned around, regarding us casually.
"He's my father, not my dad," he pointed out, looking around. "And this is his house, not mine."
Reaching over, he grabbed a bottle of water from the neatly lined-up beverages on the refreshments table and offered a cocky smirk. "Have fun," he said, and then spun around, walking away.
My brother appeared at my side, shaking his head and watching Christian stroll away to his friends. "Pretty cold for a fourteen-year-old."
Yes, he was.
However, I couldn't help but envy him. Maybe if I'd known my own mind at that age as well as he did, I wouldn't have behaved so stupidly. He stood his ground, he knew who he was, and he held everyone to a standard. Christian wasn't denying himself good things because he was damaged. Rather, he was shielding himself against harmful things because he'd been disappointed.
Sometimes second chances were too much to ask. Or maybe he'd realize that his dad was still learning.
"Ms. Bradbury."
Speak of the devil . . .
Elation swept through my chest, and I couldn't keep the smile at bay this time.
Turning around, I held out my hand, keeping up appearances. "Mr. Marek," I greeted as he took my hand, a mischievous look crossing his face.
He was dressed in a black suit, cut to flow with the shape of his body.
And even though the suit was dark-colored, his white shirt and light blue tie gave off a casual and bright appearance for a luncheon set outside.
He took longer than necessary, holding my eyes just enough to tell me I was on his mind, and then he turned to my brother, holding out his hand.
"Jack, right?" he asked.
My brother held out his hand, taking Tyler's. "Yes, sir. Jack Bradbury."
"Hi, Mr. Marek." Kristen held out her hand. "I'm Ms. Meyer. I teach—"
"Earth Science." He cut her off, nodding and taking her hand. "Yes, I know who you are. Welcome."
I glanced around, wondering how long I should stick around before I left. Jack would undoubtedly stay until the party ended. The amount of suits here, all important people in New Orleans, was a social buffet for my brother, and I was sure he couldn't wait to start making the rounds.
Kristen had the personality to fit in anywhere. She probably made friends easily. I was different.
Not difficult, just different.
And right now I was sure I'd have more fun at home repotting some plants or sharpening my new steak knife set.
"Well, make yourselves at home," Tyler told us, gesturing with the rocks glass he held in his hand. "Food and refreshments are over there, so feel free to help yourself and mingle."
He spared me a quick glance before addressing my brother again. "There are some people I'd like you to meet," he told Jack, taking him away.
"And, Ms. Bradbury?" He turned back around, leaning in. "The ladies are over there."
He nodded to the clique of beige and pink congregating around the tables, laughing and talking.
"It's probably safer," he said, and I jerked my eyes back up to him just in time to see his smug smirk before turning away.
_Safer?_
_As in,_ _I'll be less intimidated?_
I snorted, following Kristen over to the refreshments. Maybe he was teasing me. Maybe he was challenging me, but I wasn't bored anymore.
Picking up a champagne flute filled with some kind of orange liquid, I floated around the party with Kristen, taking in the lively atmosphere and the beautiful day. The backyard was paved with more slate tiles, similar to the ones in the kitchen, with sparse sections of lush grass here and there. There were a few trees, as tall as one-story houses, and around the perimeter a cast-iron fence and a vast offering of foliage, including ferns, rosebushes, and neatly trimmed hedges.
There were tables with hors d'oeuvres and refreshments, as well as a full bar, because New Orleanians drink for everything. Even funerals. Lunch would most likely be served at the tables instead of buffet style, because, well, Tyler Marek didn't do business half-assed.
And this luncheon was business.
The centerpiece of the backyard was a rectangular-shaped pool with deep blue tiles, which made it look like the Mediterranean Sea. Or so I believed. I'd actually never been there.
And then, glancing to the left, I instantly paused, seeing a single tennis court. I narrowed my eyes.
Why hadn't I noticed that this week when I was here?
It wasn't like I'd spent any time outside, but I'd taken a look through the doors at least and noticed the pool and the beautiful landscaping.
My feet and legs tingled with the desire to get on the court and break a sweat. I suddenly wanted to hold a racket and chase the ball again. For years I'd try—sporadically—to get back on the court and feel comfortable, but it never worked. Now I wanted to.
A love of tennis may have been "beaten into me," so to speak, but it was still love.
The guests had separated into factions, it seemed. Christian, along with a few friends I recognized, had plates loaded with food and were disappearing back into the house, probably for a movie or video games. I couldn't imagine this scene was a lot of fun for them.
The ladies—or wives—had grouped off, and while they appeared to be enjoying themselves, I didn't want to surrender to whatever mold Tyler challenged me with. Many of the ladies, I was sure, ran charity organizations, wrote successful blogs, and had careers of their own; however, there was still a good-ole-boy mentality in this city that kept women on the sidelines.
I set down my empty glass and picked up another of the same drink. It was nonalcoholic but still a delicious concoction of orange juice, pineapple juice, and Sprite, I believed.
With Kristen following, I headed over to Jack as he chatted with a small group of men, including Tyler, Mason Blackwell, and a few others I didn't recognize. I couldn't imagine why Tyler had invited Blackwell—I knew he didn't like him—but I was sure it had everything to do with business and nothing to do with pleasure.
"The other party has already endorsed Evelyn Tragger," one of the gentlemen said casually, speaking to Blackwell. "She's plainspoken and hard-nosed. She has a good reputation north of Baton Rouge, and she's very popular with certain circles here."
"And she is not happy with you, Mason," another guest joked before taking a sip out of his rocks glass.
I stopped behind Blackwell, no one noticing my presence.
"Of course she's not," Blackwell asserted. "Most unmarried women are disgruntled."
The group broke out in laughter, some nodding in agreement, and their ignorant, pasty, self-satisfied smiles suddenly irritated me.
Straightening my back and crossing my arms over my chest, I cocked my head. "And because you're male that makes you worthy of office?" I retorted.
Everyone turned to face me, suddenly noticing I was there, except Jack. He simply let his head fall back as he sighed, probably bracing himself for my antics, which he knew all too well.
Blackwell looked at me with a half smile and definite amusement in his eyes. The three gentlemen I didn't recognize regarded me with interest, appearing surprised but not the least bit offended. I had no idea what Tyler was thinking, but I could feel his gaze on me.
"Uh, gentlemen." I heard the laughter Tyler kept contained. "This is Ms. Easton Bradbury. She's a—"
"Voter," I finished for him, pinning Blackwell with a stern stare. "And I'd like to know, Mr. Blackwell, why it is that with one hundred senators in this country, only about twenty are female?"
I didn't so much care either way about the gender of our leaders, but I was interested in hearing his answer.
"None of them are from Louisiana or from the South, for that matter," I added. "In fact, Louisiana has elected only one female senator throughout history."
That was a lie. There'd been three, actually, but I wanted to see if anyone would correct me.
He stood there, one hand casually sliding into his pocket and the other holding a glass of something brown.
"The job goes to whoever is qualified," he answered, and I almost laughed.
"Twenty-eight percent child poverty rate," I pointed out, "and one of the largest prison inmate increases in the country."
Politics and history went hand in hand. I couldn't love one without being informed about the other.
I held his stare. "We're also the unhealthiest state in the union, based on obesity, suicide, alcohol consumption, and teen pregnancy."
His stare faltered for a split second, and I deduced either he was unaware, aware but didn't care, or he had no response.
The problem with people like Blackwell was that they treated public service as an extension of their careers. It was a means to gain influence and change laws that kept them from making money in whatever manner they chose. Their public service wasn't about the public at all.
And I wasn't so sure Tyler had a nobler agenda, either.
I took a deep breath, lifting my chin. "I just told you that much of your future constituency is underfed and undereducated," I clarified. "Now, I would never base my vote on someone's race or gender, but you can be sure my vote isn't guaranteed simply because you have a dick."
Tyler choked on his drink, coughing, and the other gentlemen broke out in snorts and laughs that were quickly concealed with a hand over the mouth.
Kristen cleared her throat, and I could tell she wanted to laugh, while a smile tugged at Blackwell's lips.
Leaning in, he whispered in my ear, "But you haven't seen it."
His smooth voice was filled with sexual innuendo, and I stilled, feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up. This guy was disgusting.
"Tyler," a woman said behind me. "Aren't you going to introduce me?"
Blackwell pulled back, still smirking, and I turned my head, seeing a beautiful blonde in a red wrap dress walk up from behind.
And I tensed, remembering her. She was the blonde from the Mardi Gras ball last year.
She came to stand at Tyler's side, and I instantly felt heat rush to my cheeks.
"I'm Tessa McAuliffe." She smiled, holding out her hand. "And you are?"
I opened my mouth to speak, but Tyler cut me off.
"Tessa," he interrupted, stepping up to me. "I need to speak with Ms. Bradbury." He smiled politely, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Please excuse us for a moment," he told everyone.
I narrowed my eyes, ready to object, but he grabbed my elbow and led me away from the group so fast I nearly stumbled along the brick path.
"What are you doing?" I whispered as he moved his hand to my back, continuing to lead me off the patio and into the house.
But he didn't answer.
Most of the guests were outside, but there were a few scattered about, browsing around the house, as well as servers gathering food and supplies to refresh the tables.
"Tyler, someone will see us," I whisper-yelled this time, trying to dig in my heels and stop him.
But once we were past the bustle of the kitchen, he took my hand and pulled me down the dimmed hallway and past the foyer to his den.
He opened the door, dragged me inside, and slammed it closed. Releasing my hand, he walked behind his desk and crossed his arms over his chest, locking eyes with me.
What the hell was wrong with him?
The woman simply wanted an introduction. Did he think I didn't know how to be discreet? She couldn't possibly have recognized me.
Or maybe he was angry about my behavior before she arrived. I guess I wasn't so discreet.
"What did he say to you?" Tyler barked out. "When he whispered in your ear?"
I cocked my head, choosing to be stubborn.
"Does it matter?" I played.
He shook his head, letting out a bitter laugh. "Not everything that's in your head needs to come out of your mouth," he scolded.
Ah, now we were getting somewhere.
"Are you angry because of what I said or because I drew attention to myself?" I inquired, crossing my arms as well. "Maybe I shouldn't wear any short skirts either."
He placed his hands palm down on his desk and glared at me. "That's not what this is about."
"Right." I smiled. "Let me guess. I forgot my place. Legs open, mouth closed, right?"
He pulled up, slowly circling the desk and looking down at me. "Don't be dramatic."
My skin tingled, and my heart sped up. "What are you really mad about?"
"What did he say to you?" His full bottom lip was tight with tension.
"I forgot." I shrugged. "Something about his dick."
His entire face hardened. "I should've hit him."
"Then why didn't you?"
"Because I'm not a child!" he bellowed. "I'm an adult who picks his battles. I don't just run off, half-cocked, no matter how much I wanted to see him bloody for even getting near you."
"Too bad," I taunted, a slight smile on my lips. "If you had, I'd be in here on my knees, sucking your dick right now instead of thinking about his."
His eyes flared, and he bared his teeth. Grabbing me by the jaw in one hand and hovering his lips just over mine, he slowly swung me around and slammed my ass against the desk, the small tray of file folders on the corner spilling to the floor.
My blood raced. _Yes._
I hopped up, planted my ass on the desk, and wrapped my hungry legs around his waist as he moved his hand to the back of my neck and came down on me, his lips hot and strong.
I whimpered, his tongue sending thrills down my body, spiraling in my stomach, and throbbing between my legs.
His hands were everywhere, underneath my dress, inside my panties, and gripping my ass.
"Tyler," I groaned, nibbling and kissing his lips.
"You drive me crazy," he breathed out, sounding angry as he sucked and bit my lip.
One of his hands left my ass and shifted to grip my breast through the dress. The other moved to my hair, holding my head back by the scalp.
He ripped his mouth away from mine, and I whimpered at the sting.
He glared down, tightening his hold on my breast. "Tonight you will be on your knees," he whispered, kissing me, "and I'm going to like the sound of you shutting up. Now, get out there and make me jealous." He pulled away, grabbing my upper arm and yanking me off the desktop. "It'll make your punishment more fun."
He walked around his desk, and I tightened the muscles in my legs to keep them from shaking. The fierce heat between my thighs ached, and I winced with the discomfort.
But I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing how worked up he'd gotten me. I could get what he gave me anywhere. At least that's what I'd lead him to believe.
Standing tall, I pivoted on my heel and walked for the door.
"And, Easton?" I heard him call.
I spun around to see him eyeing me with the phone to his ear as he made a call.
"Louisiana has had three female senators throughout history, not one," he said with a cocked eyebrow before looking away and dismissing me.
I let the corners of my mouth turn up before I walked out.
He might just have my vote, after all.
—
"All right." I held the racket in my right hand and the yellow tennis ball in my left. "Stand between the center mark and the sideline, and you have to serve into the opposite service court," I instructed Christian. "You can hit the lines, but if the ball shoots outside of those boundaries, you've lost that point."
He nodded, the same little scowl on his face that his father often wore. It was funny, because I think that look intimidated most people. It looked like he was angry, but it was just the look of him paying attention. I'd been getting it more and more in class lately.
Most of Christian's friends had already left the party, only a few still sticking around because their parents were still here. When I'd inquired about his tennis court, he'd said it had come with the house when his father bought it years ago. But to his knowledge, it was never used.
Still, it appeared well kept, though the net could be changed. It was stained from the heavy rains over the years and frayed.
I tossed the ball into the air above my head and swung the racket from behind, the dull popping sound of impact sending shivers up my arms. The ball flew over to the other side and landed in the other service court, bouncing several times before it finally came to rest against the fence.
"And then is it the other person's turn to serve?" he asked, his hands in his pockets.
I handed him the racket and walked over to the side in my bare feet, grabbing a new can of balls he'd brought out.
"No. You serve the whole game," I called back, looking over to the garden and seeing more guests begin to leave.
"The whole game?" he blurted out, sounding daunted.
I tried not to laugh. "Not the whole match," I pointed out, emphasizing the different vocabulary. "Just that game. Men's singles generally have two sets per match, a third if needed."
I peeled off the lid from the can and popped the sealed top, instantly dipping my nose in and smelling the new-ball scent. It reminded me of summers and sweat, Gatorades and sore muscles.
"Do you play any sports at school?" I asked him.
He reached his arm up, dipping his racket behind his head and throwing a practice swing.
"Yeah," he breathed out. "I play soccer, but . . ."
"But what?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. I just get . . . pressured, I guess," he confided, attempting more practice swings. "I don't think I'm very good. The other team or everyone watching sometimes gets in my head, and it's all I'm thinking about."
I smiled to myself, knowing exactly what he was talking about. It was very common for athletes to feel the crowd's expectations, and winning was as much mental as it was physical.
"Do you know what I realized when I played tennis?" I asked him. "I realized that you're playing a part in a way. When you put on that uniform or grab that ball, you sometimes have to become someone else to play the game. Braver, harder, tougher . . . When you're in a competitive situation, you're you times ten."
His eyebrows pinched together, like he understood what I was saying but wasn't sure what to do with the information.
"An easy way to put on that new mask is to do something to your appearance," I suggested. "I used to create elaborate braids before pulling my hair back into ponytails for a match. It kind of helped me get my head into the game and feel tougher," I told him. "Other athletes paint their faces . . ."
He nodded, looking pleased with that idea.
"Hello." A woman's voice interrupted, and I turned my head to see the blonde from earlier, Tessa McAuliffe.
I narrowed my eyes but quickly recovered. I'd thought she'd left.
Many of the guests had filtered out, and I was getting ready to grab my brother—who was deep in conversation with one of the mayor's assistants—and Kristen—who was chatting with the son of someone important from somewhere important—as well, to leave. Tyler had been in and out of the party, talking to a few people and making eye contact, probably to make sure I was having fun.
But I'd been fine.
I'd spoken to several guests, and my brother was in his element. Tyler had been on my turf a few times, so it was only fitting that I got to invade his.
And it had been eye-opening to see the people he surrounded himself with. Blackwell, other politicians, and members of the elite.
And then Tessa McAuliffe, who I remembered also hosted a morning news show. It was reasonable to believe Tyler had invited her due to the influence she held or her media connections, but I still didn't like the way she said his name.
Or the way she was so familiar with him.
"I tried to introduce myself earlier," she said, holding out her hand, "but he swept you away so quickly."
She gazed at me with a twinkle in her eye.
I nodded once and took her hand. "Easton Bradbury."
"Tessa McAuliffe."
"Yes, I know," I responded, turning away to hand Christian the can of tennis balls before facing her again. "From the morning show, right?"
She grinned, squinting her eyes playfully. "Not a fan?"
"Oh, no," I shot out. "I'm sure I would like it well enough, but pop culture isn't really my thing."
She nodded, and I let my eyes fall down her body for a moment. She looked like everything I wished I was.
Her red dress stood out against the other female guests' beiges and pinks, and she walked with grace in her tan heels. Her hair was neatly coiffed in an up-do, with locks of rich blond hair falling around her face. Her makeup was soft, and her posture was confident.
My dress seemed childish now, and the dark blue heels I'd rushed out to get to match the splatter of flowers on the dress were cheap compared to hers. It wasn't that I didn't have the money for designer things. I'd made a small fortune playing tennis and even modeling in ads for clothes and tennis shoes. I simply had no interest in spending my money on things I considered impractical.
Until now.
She was a woman, and I felt like a girl next to her, with my hair hanging in loose curls instead of up, looking sophisticated. I should've done something with it.
_What does Tyler prefer? Does he think she's prettier? More presentable? I—_
And then I cleared my throat, stopping myself.
Ridiculous. How the hell did I get filled up with all of these insecurities all of a sudden? All that mattered was me. How I felt comfortable and what I liked.
And Tyler certainly seemed to like something about me.
"And what do you do?" she asked, interrupting my thoughts.
I took a deep breath, stepping over to the side to slip back into my heels. "I teach at Braddock Autenberry."
"Where Christian goes to school?" she inquired. "What do you teach?"
My toes ached as I pushed them back into the tight-fitting shoes. "American and World History," I replied.
And then I stopped to look at her. "Are you here in support of Mr. Marek's campaign?" I asked, ready to find out exactly what she was about.
"Mr. Marek?" she joked. "Doesn't he allow you to call him Tyler?"
I straightened my shoulders, glancing at Christian to see him running to collect all of the balls he'd hit.
"He's the parent of a student," I clarified. "I wouldn't be so familiar."
"Not even when you two are alone?"
I held her eyes even though my pulse raced in my chest.
Was she really that perceptive?
Or had Tyler confided in her?
No, he wouldn't do that. It would be a betrayal to confide in another woman about his relationship with me.
She let out a small laugh. "It's not hard to figure out, Easton," she gloated. "I know most of the guests at this party, and none of them are teachers at Braddock Autenberry."
I heard Christian's footsteps off to the side as he ran back over to this side of the court. She must've seen him, because she inched closer.
"And judging by the way he scans the party from time to time, in search of you, I'd say he's very territorial," she pointed out, looking over her shoulder to the party.
I followed her gaze, seeing Tyler around a group of men, and as if on cue, he twisted his head and locked eyes with me at once, already knowing exactly where I was. Then his eyes narrowed, and his jaw tightened, making it clear he didn't like Tessa and me talking.
She turned back around, looking smug. "He's been doing it all day, you know?"
No. I hadn't known. And while I liked knowing I was on his mind, she might not have been the only one to notice. My brother, now Tessa—how long before others knew there was something going on between us?
Hell, Mason Blackwell probably recognized me from the Quarter the other night, too. My job, Christian, and Tyler's campaign . . . there was too much risk.
She smirked and turned around, walking away, obviously successful in doing whatever it was that she'd set out to do. Maybe she wanted me out of the way, maybe she intended to out us, or maybe she was just having fun, but one thing was clear: She wasn't on my side. She enjoyed making me squirm.
I quickly glanced back over to where Tyler had been and noticed him gone.
"Shit," I mumbled under my breath.
I looked over at Christian. I loved seeing how hard he was working. I wished I could stay on the court longer with him, but it was time to get out of here.
And never be anywhere in public with Tyler again.
After saying goodbye to Christian, I traipsed across the lawn and stepped back onto the walkway. I entered the house and searched out Tyler, starting with his den.
Peeking inside, I saw no one, but when I heard voices coming from the next room, I quietly pushed open the door and saw Tyler with three other men around a pool table.
An older man in a slate-gray suit hit Tyler on the back as he bent over the pool table to take a shot. "There's not enough money in the world to buy you charm, Marek," he stated, letting out a laugh.
Tyler shook his head and took the shot, slamming the six into the side pocket. His brother, whom I'd already met, leaned on his pool cue, while another man, a few years older, puffed on a cigar off to the side, all of them smiling and looking relaxed.
I straightened my back. "Mr. Marek, I'm sorry to interrupt." I opened the door fully and took a step inside. "My brother and I are heading out, and I wanted to thank you for the invite."
He stood upright, and I didn't miss the way his eyes drifted down my body.
The cigar guy let out a laugh. "Can I invite her to my next party?" he asked. "She's a pretty little thing. And pretty entertaining, too," he added, and I realized he must've been in the group of men outside.
And then Jay smiled. "Yeah, I've never heard anyone speak to Blackwell that way."
"You see?" Tyler turned to me, looking playful. "You can't go. Your charms are in demand."
"They're not charms," I shot back. "It's called an education. And I can't stay, unfortunately. I have plans this evening, so again, thank you for having me."
I turned to leave, making it only a few steps before a hand hooked the inside of my elbow and spun me back around.
"Wha—" But my protest was cut off.
Tyler's mouth covered mine, his hands holding my waist and pressing my body to his.
I squirmed, pushing against his chest even as the taste of him sent tingles down my thighs.
_What the hell?_
I grabbed his bottom lip between my teeth and bit, feeling him jerk back and break the kiss. But he didn't let me go.
"Gentlemen"—he spoke to them but looked at me—"would you excuse us, please?"
I heard some amused, low voices as they walked past us, out the door, but I was too embarrassed to look. My face felt flushed, and I wanted to hit him.
They closed the door behind them, and I didn't wait a second longer.
I slammed his chest, finally getting him to step away. "How dare you demean me like that in front of others!"
"You liked it," he retorted, turning around to replace the cue on the rack.
"They could tell someone!"
"The one in the tan suit is sleeping with his kids' nanny. The other one has his secretary keeping track of his mistresses, and the other one was my brother," he replied. "Most of us are gentlemen—outside of the bedroom anyway," he added, "and we don't share each other's secrets. You wanted me to claim you. So I did."
I hadn't wanted him to claim me.
Okay, maybe I had hoped he would've said or done something when Blackwell made an advance, but I didn't want to be treated like his personal piece of ass in front of a group of men.
I crossed my arms over my chest. "You just compared me to their illicit affairs."
He let out a sigh, dropping into a high-back leather chair. "What got you pissed off—again—that made you want to leave?"
I pressed my lips together and turned around, walking for the door.
"Tessa McAuliffe," he called out, and I stopped in my tracks.
Spinning around, I glared at him. "I couldn't care less," I told him. "And I'm not angry."
"No, but you're a hell of a lot of trouble," he retorted. "I think that's what I like most about you. You're worth every second of fucking frustration you give me."
He relaxed into the chair, his head resting on the hand he'd laid on the armrest.
I inched closer, swallowing the lump in my throat. "Have you slept with her?"
"Yes."
I let out a quiet breath. I didn't like that.
"When was the last time?" I asked.
He kept his eyes on mine and spoke calmly. "A couple months ago."
I got closer, hating everything I was hearing but unable to stop the conversation. Of course he'd slept with her. She was beautiful and sophisticated, and I was a hot mess.
I cleared my throat, my gaze faltering. "Were you exclusive with her?"
"No."
I moved my lips, barely getting the words out. "How many are there at one time?"
"Many."
I felt my chest shake, and I looked away, feeling my eyes burning.
So he didn't do monogamous relationships. No one kept his attention for long.
But that's what I wanted, right? I was the same. We were the same.
So why was what he told me so hard to hear?
"Jesus, you're stupid."
I shot my eyes up, seeing him shake his head and look down on me like I was pathetic.
He rose from the chair and walked toward me. "You're young and naive."
I breathed hard, pinching my eyebrows together and scowling.
"You ask the dumbest questions, and you're having the tantrum of a child," he charged. "It bores me."
I growled low, ready to leave, but he took my face in his hands and spoke hard, his voice and the heat of his breath taking me over.
"Yeah, I've had women," he admitted, baring his teeth. "Lots of women. I'm thirty-five fucking years old, for Christ's sake." He shook my head slightly. "Tessa McAuliffe is a beautiful woman, and we've enjoyed each other many times."
I rammed my palm into his chest, but he didn't budge. "Many times?" I raged.
He nodded, getting in my face. "Yeah, many times."
But as I felt my eyes pool with tears, he came closer and grazed my lips with his. "All before you," he whispered, making my breath stop. "There hasn't been anyone since you."
I stayed still, needing to pull away but wanting to stay.
"That's why you're stupid." He grabbed the backs of my thighs and lifted me onto the pool table. "Why the hell would I want her or anyone else when I've got this?"
And he pulled up my dress, pulled my panties to the side, exposing my pussy, and dove down, capturing my clit in his mouth.
My eyes rolled and my head fell back as his hand pushed the top half of my body down to the table.
"Tyler," I cried out. "You have to stop."
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to keep the tornado low in my belly from building further, but he was going too damn hard.
His lips covered my clit, sucking it in between his teeth and warming me with his hot breath against my entrance. He was sucking so hard.
And then he began dragging his tongue up and down my length, switching between that and more sucking as I slowly fell backward on the table. Reaching behind my knees, he pushed them up to where they nearly touched my shoulders, opening me completely for him.
My thighs instantly tensed, wanting to close, because I felt so exposed, but he started kissing and biting and do everything that drove me mad.
"The door's not locked," I pleaded.
But then he plunged his tongue inside me, and I cried out.
"Oh, God," I gasped, my pussy pulsing so hard I could barely think of anything except the need to fill it.
"Tyler, the lock," I gasped, whimpering. "Please."
I felt his mouth leave my skin, and I looked down to see his eyebrow cocked.
"I thought you liked standing in the middle of burning rooms," he challenged.
_Asshole._
He smirked and walked over, turning the lock on the door. Striding back to me in long steps, he slid his arms under my thighs and pulled me to the edge of the table. He then hooked his fingers in my panties and slid them down my legs, my heels having long since fallen off.
He dipped back down, lapping at my clit and swirling his tongue around the nub as he worked to unfasten his belt.
"When Tessa's happy, she smiles," he commented against my skin. "When she's angry, she smiles."
I threaded my fingers through his hair, listening.
He rose and pulled me up, reaching behind me and unzipping my dress. "You're the complete opposite," he said, staring into my eyes. "You say what you think and you refuse to indulge people you can't stand. You're like a ball of fire I can never hold for too long."
He pulled down the top of my dress, bra straps with it, and pushed me back down to palm my breasts and rub his thumbs over my nipples.
I groaned, letting my eyes fall closed.
"You belong in my bed every night, and I fucking hate that I can't have you there," he gritted out, his hands working between our bodies. "I want to buy you shit just to have you throw it back in my face, and I want to fly you to Fiji just so I can rip a bikini off of you." I felt the hot tip of his cock at my entrance, and I could feel the wetness between my legs.
"I said my dick was yours, and I meant it," he breathed out, grabbing hold of my hips as he slammed his dick inside of me.
I cried out, feeling the sweet ache of him stretching me. He clamped a hand over my mouth, pounding into me harder and harder. I loved the feel of him, how he fit me so perfectly. I loved the smell and taste of him, both of which excited and calmed me.
But what I loved most was his eyes watching me as he stood above me.
"You've been a bit of a brat today," he scolded.
I nodded, squeezing my eyes shut.
"You were jealous, weren't you?" he asked.
I bit my bottom lip, groaning as he took his hand away from my mouth and began to rub circles on my clit.
"Yes," I breathed out.
"Why?"
I swallowed, my mouth like a desert from the exertion. "She talked to me about you," I started, my breasts bouncing back and forth with his thrusts. "She talks about you as if she knows more about you. She gets to touch you in public and call you 'Tyler.'"
He came down, never once breaking pace as his face hovered over mine.
"She's not getting any of this, baby," he whispered. "She's not the one I can't stop watching or thinking about."
I gave a weak smile, and his knuckles grazed my cheek.
My pussy began to tighten and clench, and he rose up, thrusting harder and faster.
"Oh, God," I panted.
"Now are you going to be good?" he challenged, holding my hip in one hand and my breast in another.
I arched my neck back, taking everything he was giving me and closing my eyes. "Yes," I whispered.
But as the orgasm exploded between my legs and floated up to my belly, I smiled, knowing I could never keep that promise. And he didn't want me to, either.
# EIGHTEEN
TYLER
Life never follows your plan.
The truth was you could spend countless hours planning and preparing, and the only thing you could count on once you'd got your plan set was that it would be the one way things _won't_ happen.
This year was supposed to be about Christian—creating a relationship with him—and my future in the Senate.
But all it takes is for one woman to look up at you, her eyes saying everything that she doesn't want to admit out loud, and all of a sudden she's all you're thinking about.
Easton was jealous last weekend, not only of Tessa McAuliffe, but also of having to hide our relationship. She would never admit it, because she was too damn stubborn, but she wanted more.
The relief in her eyes and the weak little smile she gave me when I admitted how much I wanted her was tearing me up, because what I'd told her was the truth, and I didn't know what the hell to do about it.
I was thirty-five and had never been married, so why shouldn't I want something permanent? She was young, beautiful, smart, and well educated, and while her temper was a pain in the ass, she was also a force to be reckoned with. I liked the idea of having her at my side in life.
Patrick opened the door, and I stepped out of the car, buttoning my black pin-striped suit coat as I headed over the grass to the sidelines of the soccer field.
I'd missed the reminder for his soccer game on my calendar and had zoned out when the secretary had reminded me during a meeting, because I was trying to multitask too much at once, so now I was late.
As usual.
My father had always attended my games, on time, ready to cheer for me. He was also a busy man—and still was—but he'd managed to show up anyway.
He would tell me that I just didn't know how to prioritize, and that came from selfishness. I wanted what I wanted, and I didn't want to give up one thing in order to have another.
He never went easy on me and still regularly called me out as if I were twenty-two again and not a grown man who had built a worldwide corporation without any of his money giving me a head start.
I had big shoes to fill, and I wasn't measuring up.
Never measuring up.
"Tyler!"
I heard a stern voice cut through the cheers and whistles, and I turned, immediately inhaling a ragged breath.
Speak of the devil . . .
Tipping up my chin, thankful that my undoubtedly annoyed expression was covered by my sunglasses, I walked down the sidelines to a group of parents who had set up a couple of tents with a small buffet spread out and cushioned lawn chairs. Aluminum trays were heated by candles underneath, and an array of salads and other sides adorned the tables. Balloons and tablecloths in the black and forest-green school colors blew in the light wind, and women toasted with their mimosas, trying not spill anything on their designer scarves.
I strode up and scanned the field for Christian, seeing him stop the ball with his chest and then begin to kick it in the opposite direction before passing it off. He wore black and green face paint like a mask over his eyes, and I smiled, seeing that he was the only one daring to be different.
I wondered what had made him do that.
"So how are you doing, old man?"
I laughed, shaking my head. Matthew Marek was thirty years my senior, and yet he'd called _me_ "old man" since the first day I'd stepped into his classroom fourteen years ago.
As my professor, my father didn't treat me with any gentler a hand at school than he had at home. He'd said I must be ancient to have such a cynical world view, and I'd absolutely hated having him as my teacher.
Until, of course, nearly the last week of the course, when his advice had changed my life forever.
I understood then that, despite the old money and Marek family expectations, my father had been right to follow his calling to academics. He knew a thing or two.
I pushed my sunglasses back up the bridge of my nose. "I'll let you know once this day is over."
I could hear the smile in his voice. "Yeah, they all start melting together eventually," he agreed. "And judging by that gray"—he ruffled my hair—"I'd say time is moving faster than you."
"Bite me," I grumbled, smoothing my hair back down. "My hair is as black as yours was thirty years ago."
He snorted, crossing his arms over his chest, and I did the same, both of us watching Christian run back and forth on the field.
I quickly scanned the rest of the area, finally spotting Easton at the small concession stand, filling containers of popcorn.
I lingered on her, and the temptation of her bright smile as she exchanged snacks for cash was absolutely brutal. I bit the corner of my mouth to stifle the desire running hot in my veins.
She looked gorgeous. Her tan pants were tight, not inappropriate but definitely becoming, and showed off her form very well. She wore a long-sleeved white blouse buttoned up to the neck, and her wavy brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
I loved her teacher clothes. They gave a false impression of innocence and purity, like her lips weren't wrapped around my cock two nights ago when I'd called her at midnight, telling her to open her front door for me.
"I checked out your recent developments with Marek Industries," my father said. "Hiring local workers in the East with the same pay they would've made in the United States. That's positive change, Tyler."
I continued watching Christian as I spoke. "And in the meantime, my competitors are paying slave wages in those third-world countries and spending three times less."
"How much money does a man need?" he shot back.
I glanced over at Easton, her hands on her hips, chatting and smiling with Ms. Meyer.
"There's always more world to conquer," I said in a low voice. "Always things I want. There's never enough money."
"And that pursuit will take you away from everything that truly matters," he retorted.
He was always the teacher and never just my father. I faced the field again, barely seeing Christian as I braced myself.
"You still fight that battle," he went on. "Your conscience knows what's right, Tyler, but your ego keeps telling you to advance. It's not about speed. It's about direction. Clarify your goals."
"I want everything." I turned back, shooting him a cocky grin. "Those are my goals."
"But it's not about getting what you want." He shook his head. "It's about wanting what you get. In the end, is it going to make you happier? Was it worth it?" he asked. "You've got a thriving corporation that employs thousands of people worldwide. You've got a healthy son, but for some reason you're not content."
I gritted my teeth, seeing Christian score a goal, but it didn't even register, and I didn't clap.
Why did everyone want to fuck with me?
I managed real estate and relationships, dealt with banks and thousands of workers around the world, and I did a damn good job.
And I had noble intentions for the Senate. It wasn't some scheme to further my business interests.
I did my best. I managed everything to the best of my ability.
I just wanted more. I didn't want to have to live up to anyone else's expectations but my own.
"I just . . ." I searched for the words. "After all these years, I still feel like . . . like I haven't proven anything. I still feel like I'm twenty-two."
My father loved me, and I always knew that. But I guess, growing up, I resented the teacher in him. The one who couldn't say "Good job" or "That's okay; you did your best." No, the teacher always expected better, and after years of giving up and giving in to mediocrity, because I was afraid to fail him, he'd finally told me off in front of the whole class when I was forced to have him as a professor during my last year in college.
He'd handed me my ass and told me that success is earned and not given. A winner fights for it, and I'd been a loser.
"I know I can do better," I said, my voice turning thick.
I felt his eyes on me and then his hand on my shoulder. "Which is exactly why you have my vote if you ever get there," he added.
He turned and walked back to his friends, who'd probably invited him, knowing his grandson was playing today, but then I heard his voice again.
"Tyler, try to remember one thing," he insisted, and I kept my back to him but listened.
"You can do a couple things and succeed," he pointed out, "or you can try to do fifteen things and fail at all of them. Clarify your goals. What are you doing? And why are you doing it?"
And then I heard him walk away, leaving me with his rhetorical questions.
He was right. Every ounce of me knew that something had to give, and I'd end up having to let go of something I very much wanted just so everything else in my life didn't suffer. I was one person with limited hours in a day and too much desire to fill it.
And too many people with their own expectations.
I wanted Marek Industries to grow, because it was something I had built from scratch. I was proud of the work we did, and I could see its effect around the globe in the structures it had built and the people it employed.
I wanted to sit in a Senate seat in Washington, D.C., because I'd read too much and seen too much to trust anyone other than myself. I couldn't watch the news or read a paper without thinking about what I would've done differently.
I wanted my son to smile at me and joke around with me. I wanted to tell him stories about me as a kid, for us to watch football games together, and I wanted to teach him things. I had loved him since the first time I saw him, and I was desperate for him to know that my decisions weren't his fault. They were mine, and I regretted them.
And I wanted Easton.
I wanted to see her in a beautiful dress across a crowded room, knowing those clothes would be on my bedroom floor later that night.
I wanted some of these things more than others, but I didn't want to give up any of them.
"Ms. Bradbury!" someone behind me called. "Please have a seat."
I glanced to my side, my arms still crossed over my chest, and spotted Easton handing a rack of water bottles to one of the coach's assistants.
She twisted back around, sparing me a quick glance before turning to the small party where my father sat.
"Oh, no, thank you," she replied to Principal Shaw. "I'm just making the rounds. Helping out . . ."
She stood not five feet away, but it felt like much closer. I could feel her heat, and my whole body buzzed with awareness of her.
She looked at me again, nodding politely. "Mr. Marek," she greeted.
I nodded to her, seeing Shaw rise from his chair out of the corner of my eye.
"Ms. Bradbury has been doing wonderful things in her class," he told everyone. "We were all very hesitant at first, but it's working phenomenally. Mr. Marek," he called from behind, "Christian seems to be doing well. You must be pleased."
I twisted my head, eyeing Easton through my sunglasses but speaking to Shaw. "Yes, I'm very happy with her." I tried to keep the smirk off my face. "She has a very hands-on approach."
Her eyes widened ever so slightly, and she glanced at Shaw, looking half nervous and half enraged.
I snorted and focused back on the soccer match, letting my lips curl into a smile. But before I could enjoy that one too much, she retaliated, getting me back.
"And Mr. Marek has graciously accepted an invitation to speak on Career Day," she announced, sounding unusually cheerful. "I may have dangled a nice lunch to sweeten the deal," she told Shaw.
_What the fuck?_
"Well"—he laughed—"we beg, borrow, and bribe around here. Easton's catching on quickly."
Yeah, no shit. Career Day?
"Ms. Bradbury," I cut in, "may I speak to you about Christian's project, please?"
She nodded, her small smile saying she knew she'd gotten me, and I walked down the sideline with her following behind me.
Stopping just far enough that we were clear of listening ears, I faced the soccer match and spoke to her at my side.
"I meant what I said." I spoke softly. "I am very happy with you, you know? Especially with the way I woke up the other night."
I caught her sharp intake of breath and saw her thumbnail go immediately between her teeth. She was trying to hide a smile, and I found it endearing and frustrating. Hiding what was going on between us had an element of excitement and turned out to be great foreplay for later. We were living two different relationships, so it kept things constantly new and unpredictable.
However, I wanted us to have liberties that we couldn't have in public. I wanted her to smile at me and to be able to reach out and touch her.
But I couldn't, and that part was getting increasingly annoying.
"I want to do that to you again," she said softly, her breathy voice turning me on.
"Do you?" I played, remembering waking up and how my hands instantly went into her hair as she took me into her mouth.
"Yes," she responded, dropping her voice to a small whisper. "I've been thinking about it all day."
And I looked down at her, seeing her eyes locked on the match and an innocent blush cross her cheeks as she bit her nail.
_Damn._ I blinked, turning back toward the field, realizing I didn't know when I was going to see her again. And I needed her soon.
"Good job!"
She suddenly broke out in a yell, clapping her hands, and I shifted, refocusing my attention and seeing Christian and his teammates celebrating on the field.
I let out a frustrated sigh and clapped as well, feeling like a bigger asshole because I'd missed it.
_You can do a couple things and succeed, or you can try to do fifteen things and fail at all of them._
My son's black hair was shiny with sweat, and I smiled, seeing him enjoying the win with his friends.
"Mr. Marek, may we have a picture?" a woman asked, holding some high-tech digital camera.
I nodded, but Easton pulled out of the picture before she took the shot, adjusting her ponytail and trying to act nonchalant.
The woman shrugged with a polite smile and walked off.
I narrowed my eyes, studying Easton. "It's just a friendly shot for the school paper," I assured her, having seen the woman's school sweatshirt. "A parent and teacher talking isn't scandal-worthy, Easton."
She didn't make eye contact or say anything, and before I could pry, she smiled widely, seeing Christian heading over.
"Hey, great job," she exclaimed. "You did amazing."
"Yes, you did great," I told him, seeing his smile fall when he looked at me.
"Were you even watching?" he shot back.
I dropped my eyes, thankfully disguised behind my glasses. I didn't think he'd realized I was here, since I'd been late. But he'd known, and he'd seen that I was, again, distracted.
Inhaling a deep breath, I lifted my chin. "I thought we could go to Sucré for some dessert before dinner," I suggested. "To celebrate."
He shook his head, brushing me off. "I'm going to hang out with friends."
"Your friends can wait an hour," I pressed. "If Ms. Bradbury came, would you be less bored?"
No sense in coddling him with a softer approach. My son wasn't an idiot, and I wouldn't try to play him like one.
"Thanks, but I need to get home," Easton interrupted.
"Christian?" I prompted him for an answer, ignoring Easton's protest.
He looked between his teacher and me, seeming to consider it. "Can I drive?" he asked.
The corner of my mouth lifted, actually liking his boldness.
When I didn't answer right away, Easton stepped in, urging me.
"No, he can't drive," she answered for me. "Ty—" She stopped and corrected herself. "Mr. Marek, he doesn't have a permit," she pointed out.
I eyed Christian. "Have you ever driven before?"
"Not in the city but yes."
I nodded, giving in.
He turned and started walking for the parking lot, and I followed, glancing behind me to a baffled Easton.
"Get in the car," I ordered. "Don't act like you're thinking about saying no."
—
"No, wait," Easton burst out. "That's a light!"
"Shit," Christian cursed, and I shot him a glare. I didn't have a huge problem with swearing, and I didn't mind him working me a little, but I didn't want him taking advantage. Fourteen-year-olds shouldn't swear, especially not in front of their parents.
He'd stopped at the red light, just like a pro, but after a second he started to go through it, thinking it was just a stop sign.
"It's confusing," he barked. "There are so many stop signs, it throws me off when they have a light instead."
"And half the streets are only one way," Easton added from the backseat.
"And land in the wrong pothole," I contributed, "you could total your car. My car," I corrected, shooting him a warning look. "So be careful."
After Patrick had tossed the keys to Christian, we'd offered to give him a lift home for the night, but he'd said he'd rather take the streetcar, so the three of us just left together. Christian drove with me in the passenger seat, and Easton sat in the rear-facing seats behind Christian. All I had to do was look to my left and there she was.
"So many issues with the streets." She shook her head. "I don't suppose fixing any of these problems are on your platform."
"No, but I can get you in touch with the mayor," I replied, resting my elbow over the back of the seat.
The light turned, and Christian pulled forward, cruising the streets easily but looking a little nervous. I suspected he'd driven four-wheelers out in the country but never a big SUV on busy city streets. Thankfully, we were off the main avenues and coasting through the quieter, less-populated neighborhoods.
I glanced back at Easton, seeing her watching the road as well. With both of us, we were probably making Christian more nervous, but she was right. He was only fourteen, and if he got into trouble, he might find being Tyler Marek's son finally somewhat useful.
"There's no parking." He scowled, scanning the space in front of the shop.
Easton pointed to the right, just a few yards ahead. "Right there."
Christian jerked the wheel right and slid into the spot between two cars, his front end in the clear, but the back end still sticking out into the street. I turned away, not wanting him to see my smile at his attempt at parallel parking.
This was a big car. For a space that tight, he'd have to back into it.
"Shit," he cursed again. "This is ridiculous."
I shook my head. "First, stop swearing," I ordered. "And second, you've lived here your entire life. Haven't you ever paid attention to your mother while she drove, or were you too busy playing on your phone?"
"And what do you do while Patrick carts you around town?" Easton blurted out.
Christian laughed, and I pursed my lips in annoyance.
"Hey, how'd you know our chauffeur's name?" Christian asked, looking at Easton through the rearview mirror.
I caught Easton's eye as she clearly realized her mistake.
But she blew it off and changed the subject. Looking out the back window and seeing a car go past, she instructed Christian, "Okay, back out and pull up right next to the car ahead of you."
Christian gripped the wheel, looking worried. But he followed her instructions. After backing out, he pulled ahead and lined up with the car next to him.
"Okay—" Easton started, but Christian cut her off.
"But I'm in the driving lane," he protested. "There are people behind me waiting."
"And they'll wait," she assured him patiently.
I watched as she instructed him and led him back into the parking space with ease, and I was surprised by how different she was with him from with me.
Not that our interactions were bad, but she was almost never calm. With him, she stayed controlled and relaxed, easing his nerves about the cars behind us waiting to get by and stopping and correcting him without sounding brusque.
She was good with him and slid into her role with ease. I smiled to myself.
It was funny that I liked her being so calm with him while hoping she would never be that way with me.
Christian put the car in park and broke out in a huge smile. "I did it."
I shot Easton an appreciative glance and turned to Christian.
"Good job."
He shut off the car and took the keys out of the ignition. "Thanks," he said quietly, handing me the keys.
He didn't look at me, but it was a start.
After entering the shop and picking out a selection of macaroons and homemade marshmallows, we took our desserts and drinks to a small table perfect for watching clientele breezing in and out of the quiet atmosphere.
Easton had picked out some gelato, and I loosened my tie, drinking some coffee.
"I got an e-mail from your mother today," Easton told Christian, and I narrowed my eyes, not realizing that they were in contact.
I didn't know why I hadn't thought of it. Of course Brynne would be in touch with all of Christian's teachers to make sure she stayed abreast of his progress. I guess I had figured Christian was keeping her informed during their weekly video chats.
"She's thrilled with your progress," Easton went on. "We thought you might like to test for an AP class."
_Advanced placement?_
"Really?" Christian's eyebrows pinched together as he thought about it.
"Like an honors class?" I asked.
"Yes." She nodded. "It would be with a different teacher and the class would be even more demanding, but I think he'd be challenged more."
"You're pretty challenging," Christian retorted, and Easton laughed.
"Well," she inched out. "It's also about being with _peers_ that challenge you. Braddock Autenberry has an excellent student body full of students that excel, but there are always a few who could use a more stimulating environment."
Why hadn't I known about this? I'd stayed up on all the social media groups and e-mails from all of his teachers. I may have been late to his soccer game, but I wasn't dropping the ball on everything.
And it's not like I hadn't seen Easton. She'd had opportunities to tell me.
"Thanks." Christian shook his head. "But I like being in classes with my friends, and I like your class. The activities are fun."
She tried to hide her smile, but I could tell she liked hearing that. And I wasn't so sure I wanted Christian out of her class.
Of course, if she were no longer his teacher, our relationship wouldn't be such an issue, but I wasn't willing to sacrifice a good teacher that made him happy just so I could have what I wanted. If I had to make the sacrifice, I would. But not him.
"You could just take the test," Easton offered. "To see where you stand in case you change your mind."
"Does my mom want that?" he asked.
Easton's eye flashed to mine for a moment, and I knew she felt awkward talking about Christian's mother as if my thoughts didn't matter.
But I guess Christian had every right to trust his mother's opinion more than mine.
"Your mother wants to see you reach your full potential," she answered.
Christian sat silently for a moment, staring at the table as he chewed his macaroon.
And then he looked to me, his eyes thoughtful. "What do you want me to do?"
My eyebrows shot up, and I opened my mouth but nothing came out. He'd just asked for my opinion.
I searched my brain, trying to think of what he wanted me to say. Or maybe what my father would say.
This was an opportunity to not fail, so I struggled with what to tell him, because I honestly didn't feel strongly about the advanced-placement class. He'd have a bright future no matter what classes he took. I only wanted him to know that he was free to choose, and in my eyes, I'd be okay with either choice.
I locked eyes with his and spoke with certainty. "I want you to do what you want," I told him. "Just remember, you're the only one who has to live with the decision, so whatever you decide, just have a good reason for it."
And that was all I wanted him to learn. Bad decisions were made from either not thinking them through or for the wrong reason. As long as he had a good one, he'd feel confident about his choice.
He let out a breath and looked to his teacher. "I'll do the test," he told her. "Just to see what it says."
—
"You did a good job today," I told Christian, grabbing a couple of Gatorades out of the refrigerator and tossing him one.
I'd driven us back to the school tonight and watched while Easton got safely into her car and drove away. Bringing her home with me had been all too tempting, but it was impossible.
"Would you like to practice again tomorrow?" I asked. "Driving, I mean."
He twisted the cap and turned away, heading out of the kitchen. "I'll be busy."
Shit.
He was pulling away again.
I rounded the island. "You forgot you hated me for a little while today," I reminded him.
He stopped and turned around, his eyes faltering as if he was trying hard to stay angry because his pride wouldn't let him forgive.
"Come on," I urged, brushing past him down the hallway.
I pushed open the door to the den, hearing his reluctant steps behind me, and I headed straight for the cue rack, taking out two sticks.
He hovered in the doorway, slowly inching inside as he took in the large, darkened room. I'd told him my den was the only place off-limits when he moved in. It was two rooms joined, my office and the billiards room, great for entertaining and bullshitting with guests over cognac and cigars.
But I rarely used it, since I almost never had people to my home; last Sunday's luncheon was the first time in more than a year.
I racked the balls and then grabbed the pool cues and handed one to Christian.
He reached, looking annoyed as he took the stick.
"This is stupid," he grumbled.
"It's what I know," I told him. "My father always talked to me over a pool table."
Men and women were different creatures. My mother, before she passed away when I was fifteen, tried sitting with me and talking to me about her being sick. About the fact that she wasn't getting better and she wouldn't be around for very much longer.
She kept wanting me to react, to say something or tell her what I was feeling and how she could help, and all I remembered was feeling uncomfortable, like the walls were closing in.
So my father took me into his den, and we played pool. After a while, we started to talk, and by the end of the night, I'd let it all out. My anger and my sadness . . . how she couldn't die and how much I loved her.
In that respect, I knew my son. Forcing him to sit down and bare whatever was in his head would be just as uncomfortable for him as it would be for me.
We needed to be moving and doing something. We needed to have an activity together without the pressure of conversation. The communication would eventually come.
I started off, taking the first shot, the fourteen in the corner pocket and then the twelve, but missing.
Christian pocketed the one and then the six. I was pleasantly surprised and relieved. He wouldn't want me trying to teach him how to play right now, so I was glad he could hold his own.
Moving around the table, he shot the four but missed the two.
We took turns, and he won the first game. When I asked him if he wanted to play another, he simply nodded and stood silently by as I racked the balls again.
"I know why you're mad at me," I started after he took the first shot.
"You don't know anything," he threw back, taking the next shot and missing. And then standing back upright, he scowled at me. "Why do you even care all of a sudden?"
I bowed down to the table, aiming for the nine. "I always cared."
"You have a crap way of showing it," he shot out.
I pocketed the shot and moved around the table to take aim at the eleven. "You're right."
I'd helped support him, and I'd wanted to do good by him, but he was ultimately right. I couldn't argue that, and I didn't want to.
It was his turn to shoot, but he didn't budge. "It was kinda fun tonight, you know? We could've had that all the time. Why were you never around?"
I forced myself to meet his eyes. "I was a dumb kid, Christian. I didn't want to care about anyone but myself. And then later, I didn't want to fail, so I didn't even try."
"You still failed."
"No. I just haven't done it right yet," I replied, a small smile playing on my lips.
He rolled his eyes, but he wasn't leaving.
I wanted to be a man Christian could look up to. I wanted to show him that mistakes can be made but so can amends. I would never not look him in the eye again, and I would never let him think he wasn't wanted.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me or act like the past fourteen years didn't happen," I told him.
He pinned me with stern eyes. "Then what do you want?"
For a moment I blinked long and hard, hating that question. I knew exactly what I wanted, but I feared there would come a day when I had to admit I couldn't have all of it.
But he was first. He always had to be first. Before anything or anyone.
He may not want me as a father, and he may never forgive me, but what I had right here, right now, I had to keep.
I looked at him and spoke gently. "I want to play pool."
# NINETEEN
EASTON
Patrick held the door to the Range Rover open for me, and I climbed inside, adjusting the short dress Tyler had sent to me this morning.
But then I shot out my hand, pressing against the door to keep it from closing. "Wait, please."
Stepping back down out of the car, I jetted up the stairs to my apartment and twisted the doorknob, pushing at the door to check its security. Inserting each of my keys into the three separate dead bolts, I double-checked to make sure they were all locked.
I'd come home from school yesterday to find an upstairs window open, and I'd been running through the house all day, doing my Saturday cleaning and checking the rooms two or three times to make sure everything was in its place. Pillows sitting two to a corner on the couch, cabinet contents in alphabetical order, shoestrings tucked neatly inside my tennis shoes.
Maybe I'd left the window open. We'd had a nice evening after I got home from Sucré with Tyler and Christian. Maybe I'd opened it.
But no, I wouldn't have left it open while I slept.
I climbed back in the car, Patrick shutting the door behind me and walking around the back to the driver's door.
I rubbed my hand over my heart and took some deep breaths. The fact was, I'd gotten careless. My head was either on school and my work or it was consumed with Tyler. The flirty text he'd sent me or the glimpse I'd caught of him picking up Christian at school . . . I was constantly distracted, and I may very well have left the window and cabinets open.
But it still didn't make sense. Returning things to their place, taking a last glance around a room before I left to make sure nothing was out of order—these habits were second nature to me. I did them without having to think about it.
Could someone have been in my house?
Fear gripped me, thinking about all those years ago, when very much the same thing had happened.
It wasn't possible.
I forced myself to sit back in the seat and smooth my hand down my dress, willing the worried expression off my face as I relaxed my muscles.
No. Everything was fine.
I looked down at the dress that hugged my thighs, concentrating on how good it felt, and tried to be excited for the evening ahead.
I didn't often dress up for nights out, and the outfit was like a second skin. I was surprised Tyler knew my size.
But of course he knew my body.
This morning Patrick had delivered a box with the dress and a note saying he'd have Patrick pick me up at ten. I'd been annoyed on several levels. For one, he didn't ask; he directed. And second, he had bought me an outfit to wear.
The dress was black, long-sleeved, short and tight. It also featured goldlike jewels around the neck and on the straps running vertically down my naked back. I'd pulled my hair up in a sexy bun, and even though the dress was provocative, it wasn't distasteful.
After realizing that this meant he was taking me out, I gave in and kept the dress, telling Patrick I'd see him at ten. Which gave me plenty of time to finish tidying up the apartment, run errands, and work out before I had to get ready.
I held the clutch purse in my lap and looked to Patrick, who was making his way toward the French Quarter.
"Where are you taking me?" I asked, knowing Tyler wouldn't have had me get dressed up to go to his house.
"Veil," he answered over his shoulder.
_Veil?_
I'd heard of it, but it was the high end's version of a high-end club. _Tyler is taking me to a nightclub?_
I bit back my smile, having a hard time picturing it. Not that he gave off the vibe of being a drip, but—okay, yes, he did.
But that's one of the things I liked about him. I couldn't claim to know him all that well, but I could guess that there were ten other things he'd rather be doing than spending time in a club. There was only one place he let himself relax, and that was usually wherever he could get me alone.
"Will Tyler be waiting there?" I inquired.
I could only see the side of Patrick's face as he spoke, as he kept his eyes on the road. "He got stuck on a conference call overseas, but he shouldn't be too long," he explained. "He asked that I take you inside and stay with you until he gets there."
"No need," I assured him. "I can take care of myself."
"Sorry, miss." I could hear the smile in his voice. "Those are the orders."
I sat back and stared out the window, letting it go. I wouldn't be able to convince Tyler I didn't need protection, because I'd learned karate moves on YouTube. Yeah, right.
After Patrick navigated through the Quarter, slowing for the pedestrians and tourists constantly in the streets, we stopped on Toulouse Street, in front of a large black building with wide windows on the second and third floors. Neon blue and pink light flooded through them, and I noticed a barely visible sign on the front of the building next to the door that read VEIL. It was etched onto a plaque in black and then mounted into the black brick of the establishment, making it anything but obvious. Which I guess would account for its name.
I knew the club was members only, but obviously Tyler could invite guests.
Patrick handed the keys to the valet and circled the car to open my door. I took his hand, stepping out and tucking my small handbag under my arm.
The doorman opened the door and Patrick let me go first. I entered the arcane darkness with him following closely behind.
I stepped slowly, taking in my surroundings, because who knew when I'd ever get to see a private club again.
It was like stepping into a different world.
Of course, everything in New Orleans was old, aged, decrepit, and ruined, but walking past those doors, my eyes widened, and I felt like I'd left the city and entered some secret world hidden right under our noses.
Not that I didn't like what made this city, but it was a nice surprise to see something so out of place and new-looking.
It was dim but not dark once we entered, and as I walked over the slate marble floors, I suddenly realized why Tyler had bought me the dress. With the way everyone looked here, I certainly fit in.
The men wore sleek, dark suits, some with ties and some without, while the ladies wore tight dresses that showed off bodies they presumably paid for with three Spinning classes a week. I didn't like the idea of Tyler dressing me up to be like them, but he would've known the club had a dress code.
The long bar curved down the wall, looking like a white wave, and the walls were an architect's dream. Curving in and out in a cubed, geometric pattern, it made you feel not only as though you were in another world but another time. It was sleek, chic, and most of all, expensive-looking.
The massive oval-shaped columns in the middle of the room had to be four feet wide and were made of glass and filled with water that gave off a purple glow from a light hidden somewhere in the tanks.
I sat down at the bar and patted the seat next to me, urging Patrick to join me. He was always so quiet, and it felt awkward having him stand behind me like a bodyguard.
I ordered a gin and tonic, while Patrick settled for a Coke and insisted on paying for mine as well.
"Why does Tyler employ you?" I asked, twirling my straw around my drink. "Does he really need a driver?"
Tyler was very self-sufficient, but I wondered why he felt the need to be chauffeured most places.
"He says it saves time," Patrick answered, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down as he took a drink. "He can get work done in the car while I drive."
I curled my lips in a smile, thinking that made perfect sense for Tyler.
I spoke as quietly as I could over the beat from the speakers. "Do you think he'll make a good senator?" I broached.
"Of course." He answered quickly, his face never faltering as he smoothed his blond hair back over the top of his head.
"Is that a paid answer?" I challenged, and immediately regretted it.
His eyes narrowed on his drink, and he cocked his head to look at me.
He knew Tyler. Probably better than I did. His loyalty wouldn't allow him to betray his employer even if it was a paid answer.
We sat silently for a few moments, and I felt like I should apologize, but then he spoke up.
"I've driven him around for more than five years," he told me, his hazel eyes locked on mine. "Do you know how many calls he's made, deals he's negotiated, and people he's spoken to during those drives when he thought I wasn't listening?" he asked rhetorically.
"Being invisible has its perks." He went on, crossing his arms over his chest. "I've gotten to see all the arguments he's had with his father, with his brother . . . when they try to mold him into something he doesn't want to be."
He chewed the corner of his mouth, looking like he was thinking. I waited and listened.
"I've seen the frustration on his face when he worries about his kid," he continued. "I've seen how he responds to women, and I know when one means more than all the others." He paused, staring at me, his insinuation clear.
He took a deep breath. "I've had the privilege of seeing him more closely than probably anyone else, and I can tell you, his character isn't just for the camera," he disclosed. "Yes, I do think he would make a great senator."
"Patrick." A deep voice cut through the room, and we both jerked around to see Tyler standing behind us.
Patrick hopped off the bar chair and tucked it in. "Sir."
Tyler's eyes darted from him to me and then back to him, and I knew he'd heard at least part of what we'd been talking about.
"Thank you." He nodded at Patrick, but he looked and sounded curt. "I have my car, so you're done. Have a good night."
And Patrick left without another word, leaving me in Tyler's hands.
I decided not to feel bad about plying Patrick with questions. Tyler Googled me, after all.
I tilted my head and took in his appearance, surprised to see a difference. He wore a coal-black suit with a black shirt open at the collar and no tie. His short black hair shined in the light, and for some reason he looked younger than he usually did. Maybe it was the surroundings.
"You wore it." He let his eyes fall down my body as he commented on the dress.
I stood up, grabbing my bag and my drink. "You sound surprised."
He smirked, leading me away. "With you, always," he joked.
With a hand on my lower back, he guided me toward the elevator.
The doors opened, and we stepped inside. As soon as he pressed the button for three, the doors closed, and he hooked an arm around my waist, pulling me in.
"Hey," he whispered and then captured my lips, completely taking me over. His soft lips were gentle but fast and playful. He dipped in, nibbling and kissing, and then cocked his head the other way, going back for more as he grabbed my ass in both hands.
My knees buckled, and thank goodness his arms were wrapped around me, holding me up.
"You look beautiful." He spoke in a husky voice, pinching my chin between his thumb and fingers.
He kissed me one last time, then let me go just as the doors opened, and I clutched his arm, feeling like my muscles had turned to Jell-O.
A host stood outside the elevator and smiled as soon as he saw us.
"Mr. Marek," he greeted, bowing his head just a bit. "Right this way."
He led us through a spacious lounge, complete with a small dance floor and several square arrangements of sofas, sparsely filled. The third floor of Veil was much like the first floor, but what was white downstairs was black upstairs, which made the ambience darker and more cavelike.
The water-tank columns glowed purple and the black curved bar had an array of different bottles along the wall, each glowing with the light built into the backsplash. Several semiprivate booths lined the perimeter of the room, and it appeared right away that guests in here were on a different plane from what I was used to. Nearly all of the men had young, beautiful women with them, and champagne was everywhere. The chandeliers glittered in the dim light, and I had the strangest feeling of being in a dream.
"Marek," a man's voice called, and we both stopped, turning around.
A gentleman, about the same age as Tyler, approached him with a smile and shook his hand. "How are you? Haven't seen you around in a while."
Tyler rolled his eyes. "Busy as usual. What do you think?"
He quirked a smile at me and placed his hand on my back again. "This is Easton Bradbury," he told the man, and I felt a momentary shock that he'd introduced me so freely.
"Easton?" Tyler said. "This is James Guillory."
I shook the man's hand, narrowing my eyes as realization dawned. "As in oil?" I asked, shocked again.
The Guillorys owned half the oil rigs in the Gulf.
He winked at me, clearly interested in neither confirming nor denying it.
He slapped Tyler on the arm. "Keep in touch," he told him, and walked back to his table, packed with his buddies and their ladies.
Tyler led me to where the host had stopped and let me slide into the booth first. Our table was set in a semiprivate space with drapes on both sides, a three-sided couch, and a low glass table, making it easy to get up and move around.
Tyler sat down, ordered some champagne and began to relax, resting his elbows on the back of the sofa.
"So this is where the millionaires come to play with their secrets?" I looked around at the heavy flow of liquor and the pretty women who probably weren't their wives.
But Tyler had a different take on it. "It's where men and women who lead very controlled lives come to lose control," he clarified, looking around the room. "Everyone here is in the same position, Easton. They want to cut loose once in a while like everyone else, but someone is always watching."
And then he locked his eyes on mine. "This is one place where no one cares. We all have something to lose, so privacy is respected."
"I hope," I added with a smirk.
No one knew who Easton Bradbury the schoolteacher was, so I was grateful he'd brought me here. I was tired of quiet, secluded dinners and catching stolen moments whenever we could. It was fun to be out with him in public and in plain sight.
"Do you like the dress?" he asked.
I set my drink down and nodded. "Yes, I do."
"I'm surprised you weren't insulted." He laughed. "You always dress beautifully, but this place is a little different. Not to mention I wanted to see you in something short again."
_Yeah, again_. Every time I wore a short skirt or dress, he ended up inside me.
I leaned in, taking advantage of being with him somewhere where I could openly touch him, and slid my hand inside his jacket, rubbing his chest.
"I'll tell you what," I bargained. "You can dress me as long as you promise to undress me."
And I slipped my leg over his and kissed him, holding his smooth face in my hand and shivering when he ran his hand up my thigh.
"Do you like to dance?" I whispered against his lips, having seen a few couples and some women on the floor.
He ran a thumb over my cheek and held my face. "It's been a long time," he admitted. "College, I think."
"You were a lot different when you were my age, weren't you?" I pressed.
He shook his head, smiling as he took the champagne the waiter handed to him. "When I was your age, huh?" he repeated. "Way to kill the mood."
I shrugged. "Just keeping it real. You're only ten years younger than my father would be."
His eyes flared, and I gasped as he grabbed me, planting me in his lap so that I straddled him.
Gripping my hips, he growled against my mouth. "You're going to pay for that," he threatened.
I laughed quietly, meeting his lips as he dove in.
"Such a brat," he whispered before going deep and swirling my tongue with his.
I could feel him everywhere, and even though I liked being out with him, I felt a sudden need to leave.
"Easton?"
I pulled back and looked up, feeling my heart crash into my stomach.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. _Oh, no._
"Kristen?" My voice was barely audible, and I licked my parched lips.
_This isn't happening._ Of all the places to run into someone. _Here?_
"What . . . what are you doing here?" I blurted out.
Her eyebrows shot up, surprise written all over her face. "Um . . ." she stammered, looking like she was searching for words as she bit back her smile. "I'm tagging along with a friend who's here for a private party."
I looked at Tyler and slowly slid off his lap much too late to hide what had been going on.
"It's okay." She nodded, holding up her hands before I had a chance to say anything. "I actually think I'm too shocked to see you at a club to worry about who you're with."
Tyler snorted, and I scowled.
_I know how to have fun, thank you very much._
"Mr. Marek?" Kristen put her hands on her hips. "I'm taking Easton onto the dance floor. You stay."
She reached over and grabbed my hand, and I stumbled over Tyler's legs, trying to keep up with her as she pulled me out of the booth.
_What the hell?_
I cast a worried glance at Tyler, but he just jerked his chin to the dance floor. "Go ahead. I want to watch you."
As I followed Kristen, the slow beat of "You Know You Like It" vibrated under the floor and through my heels. There were only about six other people on the small floor, so we had plenty of room. I stood tall, smoothing my hands down my waist and thighs, suddenly a little nervous. The dance floor sat in the center of the room, so we were on display for anyone who cared to look.
Kristen turned around, facing me, and immediately began moving her hips and flipping her hair as she raised her hands into the air.
I looked down at my heels, arching an eyebrow, and then turned, kicking my shoes off to the edge of the floor. Glancing up at Tyler several feet away, I saw a smile spread across his face and his chest shake.
_Laugh it up, dude. You'll be thankful you aren't carrying me out of here with a broken ankle._
I started to move, closing my eyes as I reached up and pulled the pin out of my hair, letting it fall down my back. Swaying my hips slowly to the beat, I let the music guide my body.
When I looked over, I saw James Guillory take a seat across from Tyler, and they started to chat, but Tyler constantly looked up, watching me as we danced.
"I knew it," Kristen yelled in my ear over the music. "When he came to your room that morning, my panties practically lit on fire with the way he was looking at you. How long has it been going on?"
I wasn't sure what to tell her. Of all the damn places to run into someone we both knew, this was supposed to be the least likely.
She was very friendly, but that didn't mean we were friends. I had no reason to trust her. This was my job, Christian's stability, and Tyler's future on the line.
But he didn't seem worried to have run into her, and I kind of wanted to talk about it with someone. I was happy, and I hadn't been able to share it with anyone besides my brother.
I took a deep breath and admitted, "A couple of weeks."
Maybe three, but she didn't need every detail.
Nodding, she grabbed two shots of something brown off a waiter making the rounds and handed me one.
"Well, be careful," she insisted, actually looking serious for a change. "I'm sure he's great, but men like that take what they want, and what they want changes like the wind."
She tipped back her shot, and I hesitated a moment before shooting back mine.
I winced at the burn as my tongue felt like it had been bitten.
We handed our glasses back to the waiter, and he left. I guessed the rounds must have been complimentary.
I blew out a breath, trying to cool off my mouth. "What makes you think he doesn't need protection from me?" I challenged.
She threw her head back, laughing. "That's the spirit," she cheered.
Her black halter-top dress hugged her body as she moved, and I let my eyes follow her hands as they glided down her body.
Her red hair fell in waves, and I realized for the first time how pretty she was. I hated to admit it, but every time I looked at her, I assumed she was flighty and carefree.
Would Tyler find her attractive? I suddenly felt small, trying to figure out what the hell I offered him that he wanted so much. She was happy. I was discontent. She was playful. I was serious.
She moved in closer, and I almost moved to back up, but she put her hand around my neck and pulled me in, speaking in my ear. "So how is he?" she asked. "In the bedroom?"
I couldn't help the little smirk that escaped as I looked away, my skin heating up at the thought.
"Ohhh, I see," she cooed knowingly.
She didn't need it spelled out, but I was sure my face confirmed that Tyler Marek was keeping me very satisfied.
"Well, I'm completely bummed." She pouted. "You're having great sex with a handsome millionaire, and I'm here with a friend who's the friend of some pop singer I've never heard of."
I laughed, and we both turned our heads to the side, seeing Tyler with his elbows hooked behind the seat again, watching us as Guillory talked to him.
"Don't worry." I leaned in to Kristen. "I'm enjoying this for what it is and while it lasts. We'll eventually move on from each other."
She cocked her head, and I couldn't ignore how close we were as her eyes turned mischievous.
"I'm not so sure about that," she argued. "As long as you both keep finding ways to make it interesting."
And then her hands went to my hips, and I slowed my body, instantly feeling the heat of Tyler's stare on my back.
She licked her red lips and breathed against my face. "Let's play with him."
At first I narrowed my eyes, confused, but then I understood when I felt her hands run up my sides, in a slow and possessive gesture.
My pulse sped up, and I had a hard time keeping my breathing steady as her fingers dug into my hips and pulled me closer, her thigh fitting between my legs as she continued to move slowly to the music.
_What the hell?_
"Watch his face," she instructed in my ear.
But I was afraid to look. On the one hand, I liked playing games and turning him on, but on the other hand, I was scared he would get ideas.
Twisting my head to the side, I raised my eyes, instantly drifting to Tyler. Guillory had left, and he pierced me with that stare. I knew how he looked angry, and I knew how he looked relaxed, but shivers ran down my arms, and I felt myself growing wet as he watched us with his heated gaze.
I knew that look.
He was two seconds from bending me over in a bathroom stall.
I started to move more, rolling my hips into Kristen and running my hands over her waist and hips.
She took the back of my neck in one hand and dipped her head under my ear as we lightly grinded our bodies for him.
"I don't know whether he wants to see more or wants to tear me apart for touching you," she joked.
But I knew the answer. Tyler wanted a lot of things. He wanted everything. But he would never choose one over the other. It was what it was, and he would never claim me like that. I knew as much.
"How far are you willing to go to find out?" I asked, challenging her.
She raised her eyebrows, giving me a "try me" look.
I took her hand and led her back over to the booth, slowing and dropping to my knees to the sofa as I inched over to him.
He narrowed his eyes on me, and I could see the shallow breaths that he was trying to hide.
"Did you like what you saw out there, Mr. Marek?" Kristen crawled over to him on the seat cushions.
He ran a finger over his lips as he looked at me. "What's not to like?"
"I don't know," she answered, stopping and sitting back on her heels. "You looked . . . tense."
Her sexy voice was filled with desire, and I suddenly felt like I wasn't sure of what I was doing. This was a game. Someone was going to stop it.
Right?
"I was tense." Tyler looked over to her, tipping her chin up. "You two are beautiful," he allowed. "As long as you know she comes home with me."
"How about we both go home with you?" she suggested.
Had I wanted her to say that? I couldn't swallow past the lump in my throat.
Tyler didn't answer, and before I knew what I was doing, I dipped my head to his neck, kissing the soft skin under his ear.
I heard his sharp intake of breath, and I caught his skin in my mouth, dragging it between my teeth.
"Kiss her," I whispered. "Please."
I saw him out of the corner of my eye as he hesitated, and then, slowly, he reached out and took her by the neck, bringing her in, their lips meeting.
I squeezed my eyes shut and took hold of him, trailing deep kisses over his neck and across his cheek, trying to own what was happening.
The sounds of their kissing and her moaning turned my blood cold and made my heart ache.
_Kiss her_ , I thought. _This needed to happen._
I would force myself to watch the whole damn thing and take any desire I had for him—any need—and twist it into knots to where nothing good could be made from it and no part of what I felt for him could ever be recognizable again.
I couldn't have him. Not for good. He was sex, and he'd hurt me.
I'd have to let him go eventually. Why increase the inevitable pain on my heart when I could end it right now before he got a chance?
I didn't want to love him. This needed to happen.
A tear fell down my face, and I quickly wiped it away as I pulled back and watched him. Not them, just him.
His hand was on my thigh as he kissed her, and he tried pushing it under my dress, but I slowly inched away, out of the scene.
"Keep going," I urged. "Let me watch you."
His tongue was in her mouth, and his other hand palmed her breast over her dress, and I envisioned it. Him taking her home, pulling the top of her dress down as he planted her ass on his desk and fucked her rough and dirty.
Or maybe he'd take her to bed. Let her ride him as he watched her body move.
I inched far enough away that his hand lost contact with my thigh, and I just sat there on my knees, watching him make out with another woman while I felt like he was slowly getting farther and farther away from me.
His eyes were closed; he wasn't seeing me. My composure cracked, and more tears pooled in my eyes.
He didn't even know I was here. He didn't see me.
All he saw was her.
But then his hand started reaching across the sofa in search of me, and the next thing I knew, he pulled away from Kristen and pushed her off, glaring at me.
I stopped breathing, realizing that he was pissed. He was really pissed.
He looked at me like I'd betrayed him.
"I'm sorry," I gasped, nearly in tears. "That was stupid."
And I crawled back over into his lap, straddling him, ready to apologize.
"What the hell are you trying to do?" he barked, the vein in his neck bulging.
I shook my head, taking his face in my hands. "I don't know," I cried. "Just don't let me go, okay? I shouldn't have done that."
And I kissed him softly, my whole body shaking with the sobs I tried to hold back.
I didn't want to let him go. I was falling for him.
His angry breaths slowly calmed, and after a few moments, he wrapped his arms around me like a steel band and kissed me back.
I heard Kristen clear her throat next to us and then felt her shift off the sofa.
"Well, I'll just excuse myself," she said in a light tone, as if nothing had happened.
But then I felt her lean in and whisper in my ear, "And if you haven't noticed, he's in love with you, too."
I gripped his jacket, not even hearing her walk away as I closed my eyes and saw only him.
# TWENTY
EASTON
"You messed up my books," I commented, lying on my back on the floor of his study and gazing up at the bookshelves I'd so tirelessly organized a few weeks ago.
"Yes, I did," he admitted without hesitation.
I wore one of his long white shirts with the sleeves rolled up and was supporting a glass of Scotch on my abdomen with my feet crossed.
"Did you do it on purpose?" I pressed.
"Yes."
A smile spread across my lips, and I leaned my head up, taking a sip of the hearty liquid.
Christian was apparently spending the weekend with his grandfather across the lake, so Tyler brought me home with him from the club. It was one a.m., and neither one of us was the least bit tired.
I'd felt guilty about ruining our night out, but Tyler had said he didn't give a shit. He didn't like clubs anyway but had wanted to take me out.
After pulling me out of the club, he'd raced home, damn near getting into an accident on the way, and stripped off all of my clothes as soon as we'd gotten in the door. He'd carried me upstairs, my legs wrapped around his waist, and kept me good and occupied for more than an hour.
He'd gotten a few calls while we were busy, though, and since neither of us was sleepy, he'd come downstairs to take care of some business while I got drunk on his alcohol.
He stood behind his desk in gray lounge pants and no shirt, sorting through some papers.
"You're not going to fix them?" he suggested.
I tapped the glass with my fingers, staring up at the hodgepodge he'd made of the books.
"I'm considering it."
I heard his quiet chuckle. "Maybe you no longer need to be soothed," he suggested. "Or maybe you found something else equally effective."
"Cocky," I shot back, teasing.
But actually, he had a point. A few weeks ago, those books, sitting there out of order, some facing the wrong way, had driven me bananas, and I could not concentrate on a damn thing until I'd gotten them sorted.
Now it just kind of bugged me. I still felt the pull, but there was something else in the room tugging at me, too.
"It's such a strange feeling," I mused. "Suddenly abandoning a habit I've had for seven years. I feel more peace now than I ever had doing it, though."
"Seven years?" he repeated. "I thought you started when your parents died five years ago."
I let out a breath and closed my eyes. "Shit," I whispered under my breath, not loud enough for him to hear.
I'd forgotten that he didn't know.
"Easton?" he prompted, clearly waiting for an answer.
I swirled the glass in a circle, watching the brown liquid coat the inside. "Yeah, that story was never in the media, was it?"
In his Googling, he wouldn't have come across it, because my family had kept it under tight wraps.
"What story?"
I took a deep breath and set the glass down on the floor, tucking my hands behind my head as I started.
"I wasn't always the sophisticated, capable, and charming woman you see now," I joked.
He walked around the desk, leaning against the front of it and staring down at me.
"No?" He played along.
I looked up at him and, after steeling myself, opened up to him. "When I was sixteen, I was very naive and sheltered," I told him. "I didn't know how to make decisions or question anything. I had never even been on a date, and if my parents had had their way, I never would've been."
I stared ahead at the bookcase, remembering my perfect white house and my perfect pink bedroom and my perfect, strict schedule posted on the refrigerator.
"I was a twenty-four-hour tennis player, and the only people I spoke to were my family, newscasters, and my coach, Chase Stiles." I looked at Tyler. "He was twenty-six at the time."
His expression turned guarded. "Chase Stiles? Am I going to like where this is going?"
I gave him a soothing smile and continued.
"He was so devoted to me," I admitted. "Always encouraging me and spending so much more time working with me than what he was paid for. He would buy me things, and I liked it, because I thought he was the only one who cared about who I was on the inside. He asked me about my interests outside of tennis."
Tyler stayed quiet, and I hesitated, feeling my stomach knot as the old fear started to surface.
But I forced it out, keeping my eyes downcast. "I didn't see it as wrong when he started buying me outfits." I went on. "Tight shorts and sports bras to train in. And I didn't think it was such a big deal when he took pictures of me posing in the outfits he'd bought."
"Easton," Tyler inched out, apprehension thick in his voice. He didn't like where this was going.
I swallowed through the tightness in my throat, still not meeting his eyes. "But then he started getting familiar," I explained, chewing on my bottom lip. "Patting me on the behind when I did well or hugging me for too long." I blinked, pushing away the shame I felt creep up. "A couple of times he came into the locker room while I was showering, pretending it was an accident."
At the time, I'd felt like it was my fault. Like I was enticing him, or that what he was doing was normal. We'd spent a lot of time together. Training, traveling . . . We were close, so maybe he was just a really good friend or someone, like my parents, whom I should trust to never hurt me.
"I didn't tell anyone what was going on, and I didn't confront Chase about any of it," I told Tyler. "I just started getting more stressed, and I became angry. Very angry," I added.
"I started refusing his gifts," I continued. "And I threw fits when my mother would try to leave me alone with him on the court. After a while, I finally broke down and told them about his behavior."
"Did he force himself on you?" Tyler bit out, his voice turning angry.
I shook my head. "No. But the behavior was escalating," I explained. "My parents fired him, but they didn't press charges. They didn't want America's next tennis darling tainted with a scandal forever preserved in the newspapers."
I looked at Tyler and could see his fists balled up under his arms.
"And then, on top of that," he deduced, "you lost your parents and your sister two years later. That's a lot for a young person to go through."
I nodded. "It was."
Chase's abuse, and my parents' and sister's deaths, had almost killed me five years ago. I dove into a world of turning chaos into order and building such a tough outer shell that nothing bad could hurt me again.
It wasn't until recently that I'd realized, looking up at Tyler, that my shell protected me from all the good stuff, too.
"I started arranging and counting things as a coping mechanism, a way to have consistency," I told him. "To know what I could count on. Awareness of my surroundings, everything in its place . . ." I went on. "I didn't like surprises."
"You needed control," he assessed.
I nodded. "Yeah. After Stiles and then the accident, Jack and I tried to keep it going, but as you saw online, I couldn't get it together. My game fell apart. We sold our house and moved here, so I could have a fresh start and my brother could pursue his own dreams finally."
Tyler pushed off the desk and approached me, standing tall above me and looking down intently.
"And what's your dream?" he asked.
I inhaled a long breath and took my hands out from behind my head. Running one up his leg to the inside of his thigh, I whispered, "To not want you as much as I do."
—
The next week flew by, fall conferences having started, and I needed to get ahead on revising lesson plans that I'd already completed last summer.
I'd expected that to happen, as classes don't always go according to schedule and certain changes I'd decided to make at the last minute needed to be accounted for later. I didn't mind how my personal life had changed or even how unpredictable it had become, but I didn't want to lose control of my career. Being a good teacher was acceptable. Being a great teacher was my mission.
My sister, Avery, had wanted to teach, but I'd finally realized that I, too, was made for this. I enjoyed seeing my students engaged and interacting, and the rush of finally seeing them make a connection, discuss it, and ultimately teach one another fed my desire to do this every day.
Tyler had been out of contact a lot, being held up in constant meetings and campaign planning. He'd also had to take a day trip to Toronto on Monday that turned into two days away. His brother had stayed with Christian, and although I knew Tyler hated leaving him, he called and texted him regularly to check in.
In my classroom, I set up the laptop, positioning it in front of the three chairs at the table. Christian sat in one chair, playing on his phone, and I checked my watch, seeing it was four oh two, past time for our parent-teacher conference.
I then glanced at my phone, seeing no missed texts, so I hoped Tyler was on his way.
Bringing up Skype, I decided not to wait for him. I dialed Christian's mother, knowing that she was expecting my call.
I was in no rush to see her face-to-face, though. We'd spoken on the phone and had e-mailed several times. She seemed like a great parent and wanted to be kept informed of everything that was happening with Christian. She even belonged to the social media groups and participated.
I threaded my fingers together, trying to push down the uneasiness I felt at facing her.
"Hello?" she chirped, coming on-screen, and I forced a smile.
Of course she was beautiful.
Her long black hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail, and her ivory skin looked impeccable.
"Hello, Mrs. Reed," I greeted. "I'm Easton Bradbury, Christian's American History teacher."
"Nice to finally put a face with the voice," she commented with a bright smile.
"We're still waiting for Mr. Marek," I told her, "but he should be along shortly."
She nodded, an aggravated look crossing her face, but she recovered quickly.
"Put down your phone, Christian. I want to see your face," she ordered her son.
He rolled his eyes and set it down.
"I miss you," she singsonged.
"I know," he sang back, and we both broke out in a laugh at his sarcasm.
They chatted for the next few minutes, and I updated her on what we were currently studying and what we hoped to have covered by the end of the year.
Christian and his mother got along great, and I started to wonder a lot of things as I sat there, observing them. I'd never had so many insecurities as I had with Tyler, and I didn't like it at all.
Did he ever regret letting her go? Had he once loved her? What would she think of me if she knew how I felt about him?
That one scared me the most. Christian was my student, and every day I hated myself even more for doing anything that threatened his stability and happiness. I was supposed to make his life better, and I was very close to turning it upside down.
Clearing my throat, I looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly four fifteen. Where the hell was Tyler?
I smiled, trying to keep the mood going.
"You look like you're having wonderful weather there," I noted, seeing the white curtains blowing in the breeze coming through the open windows behind her.
"Oh, it's hot but beautiful," she clarified. "There's so much land to explore. I invited Christian to spend the holidays here, but he hasn't answered me yet."
She shot him a hinting smirk, and he sighed, shaking his head.
"I don't know," I teased. "Teenagers are hard. You might have to sweeten the deal. Ensure him he'll have Wi-Fi."
She laughed and turned her eyes to Christian. "We'll have Wi-Fi."
He tried to hide the smile, but I could see it.
I wasn't sure if Tyler wanted Christian home for Christmas, but a trip to Africa would be a wonderful experience for him.
I glanced at the clock again and picked up my phone. "I'll give Mr. Marek another call," I told her. "If he's running late, we may have to start without him."
I dialed Tyler's cell, knowing he would answer if he saw it was me. I called rarely, so he would know it was important.
"Hey, I'm on my way to a meeting. Can I—"
"Mr. Marek," I cut him off, putting on my teacher hat. "I'm here with Christian and his mother on Skype. Would you like us to wait for you?"
"Wait for me?" he shot out.
I gritted my teeth and smiled, keeping my voice even for Christian and his mom. "Christian's conference," I reminded him.
"Shit!" he bellowed. "Goddamn it!"
I let my eyes fall closed, hearing Christian laugh under his breath and shake his head. He'd heard that.
Tyler's heavy breaths poured into the phone. "I'm only a few blocks away," he gritted out. "I'll be there in five."
And he hung up, leaving me there feeling like an idiot.
I set my phone down. "He's on his way," I assured her. "But I think we can go ahead and start by looking at Christian's first-trimester test scores."
Over the next few minutes, I covered Christian's rough start at the beginning of the year, assuring his mother that I had every confidence it had to do with his transition from moving homes and starting high school. He'd caught up and continued to excel now, moving beyond several of the students in class.
Tyler blew into the room, and I stopped talking, taking in his appearance. He looked like a wolf that had lost its prey.
Some of his hair fell over his forehead, and his tie was wrinkled and hanging loose around his neck. The weight of a mountain rested on his shoulders, and I turned away, refocusing on the documents in front of me instead of worrying about him.
He took the seat next to Christian and glanced at me on his son's other side.
"Excuse me," he apologized.
And then he turned, nodding to Christian's mother. "Brynne."
"Tyler," she replied curtly.
Christian sat quietly, his eyes downcast.
"Mr. Marek, we already went over Christian's test scores and discussed some of his homework," I told him, handing him the documents. "You can take those home and review them in your spare time."
I looked to Christian's mother, careful not to make eye contact with Tyler, too afraid I would give something away.
I continued. "Christian will be given the opportunity to choose some of his assignments now," I informed them. "It's a technique I like to use for students I feel have earned the privilege. For unit projects and some daily assignments, he'll be able to choose from a selection, which will all be worth the same percentage of points, providing he puts in the same excellent effort," I explained, hearing a phone vibrate and seeing Tyler take it out and look at it.
My irritation grew, but thankfully, he put the phone down, ignoring it.
"Sounds wonderful," Brynne agreed. "Christian, would you like that?"
He shrugged. "Yeah, sounds fine." And then he looked at me. "When do I take the test for the AP class?" he asked, seeming more interested in it than he'd been at Sucré. After some time to let it absorb, he must have grown more interested.
"Thank you for reminding me," I burst out, taking out the permission form. "I'll schedule you for—"
But Tyler's phone buzzed again, interrupting my chain of thought, and I dropped the paper to the table, shooting Tyler a stern look.
"Mr. Marek, would you please turn off your phone?" I chided, not really asking.
He shoved it into his breast pocket, and I didn't care that he looked the worse for wear. He could be present for this.
"Excuse me," he apologized again.
Christian snorted, and I continued, explaining the class and that Christian was doing well in several subjects and might qualify for more than one advanced course. Then Tyler signed the permission slip, authorizing us to test his son, and I wrapped up any last questions they had. Tyler didn't have any, because his head was clearly somewhere else today.
"Thank you, Ms. Reed, for joining us from so far away." I smiled at her and tapped my folders on the table, making sure they were stacked neatly.
"Yeah, with the time difference, she still managed to be here," Christian jabbed, shooting his father a cold look. "I'll wait in the car."
And he walked out.
"Tyler," Brynne said flatly, "we'll talk later."
And she clicked off, no happier with Tyler Marek than their son.
I stood up and dropped the folders onto my desk, letting my anger show now that we were alone.
"You have secretaries," I pointed out. "A calendar of appointments and meetings on your phone." I turned around, seeing him stand and straighten his tie. "How could you forget?"
Out of all the things to be present for at school . . . It's not like his presence here was required often. He couldn't make this a priority?
"It was a simple mistake," he explained. "There's too much going on. I'm running around everywhere, and my head is crammed full with a million things. I'm doing the best I can."
"For you?" I threw back. "Or for Christian?"
# TWENTY-ONE
TYLER
My father's words of advice were a constant refrain in my mind lately: _You can do a couple things and succeed, or you can try to do fifteen things and fail at all of them._
I jetted down the stairs of the school, feeling my cell vibrate from my inside breast pocket and ignoring it.
Damn phone calls all day. The fucking loggers in Honduras were in the middle of a battle with the environmental activists over clear-cutting, which shouldn't have had anything to do with me other than it was my equipment they were using to cut down the trees. Now Jay was in a fit over the guilt by association.
After that I'd been forced to a waste time having lunch with the mayor just to maintain the connection, and then I'd gotten stuck on call after call all afternoon. That was, until all hell broke loose down at the docks, when my shipment of buckets for the dozers and loaders making their way up the Mississippi for the final assembly at the factory in Minnesota turned out to be several tons of coal that wasn't mine.
Everything that could go wrong was going wrong lately, and I didn't know what the hell to do. My head was almost never on work anymore, and I kept dropping the ball. When I wasn't worrying about Christian, I was thinking about Easton and when I could see her.
I'd been going over last weekend again and again in my head. Her stunt at the club and how she'd tried to push me away. I'd been enraged.
I didn't want Kristen Meyer.
The woman was a void, like every other woman I'd come into contact with since Easton.
But I would've played ball if Easton had wanted it. If she'd been a part of it.
I didn't need the excitement or the experience, but I'd enjoy it. Sure. What man wouldn't? Especially with how hot she'd looked on the dance floor, another woman's hands on her. However, I didn't want to go into it without her. There was no point if she wasn't involved. It was about us experiencing something together.
But then she'd pulled away, disconnecting herself from the scene, so that I would find pleasure in another woman and she could walk away, convincing herself that anything we had wasn't special.
There's no amount of red sufficient enough to explain the rage I'd felt when I reached out for her hand and found only air, then realized what she was doing.
But then she'd crawled into my lap and cried and kissed me, and Kristen had instantly disappeared.
There was nothing but Easton.
And then, later that night, when she'd told me her story and how that lowlife had victimized her, I'd wanted to erase it all from her life and make sure she had the best of everything. Happiness, love, consistency . . .
And then I wanted to find him and erase him. It made me sick to think of him out there, walking around. Did he know where she was?
Climbing in the back of the car, I unbuttoned my jacket and looked to Christian sitting across from me, staring out the window. "Room to Breathe" blared on the radio, and I reached over, turning it down from the controls in the back.
Leaning forward, I gave him my full attention. "I'm sorry I was late," I told him, tired of seeing that look on his face. For every step forward we took, it was another two steps back.
"You forgot." His sharp tone cut, his eyes still turned out the window. "You forget, because it's not important to you."
I sat back in my seat, hooding my eyes. "Is that what your mother tells you?"
"Yes," he stated matter-of-factly, twisting his head finally to look at me. "And then in private she tells my stepdad that you're a shitty, self-absorbed father."
I hardened my jaw, feeling like everything was slowly slipping through my fingers. I was losing everything.
Christian turned his head, speaking to Patrick.
"I want to walk," he said.
Patrick met my eyes in the rearview mirror, and I hesitated, not wanting him to get out of the car.
But dealing with Christian was like climbing a rope with one arm, and I was tired. Let him cool off, and I could think.
I finally nodded.
Patrick pulled over, letting him out. It was only a few blocks to the house and it was still light out, so I didn't worry.
My phone buzzed in my pocket as Patrick pulled away from the curb, and I closed my eyes, exasperated.
Yanking it out of my pocket, I saw Brynne's name on the screen and squeezed the phone, hearing it creak under the pressure.
Answering it, I held it up to my ear. "I don't need to hear it," I shot out.
"I was sitting there on a computer screen, Tyler," she barked. "You couldn't be there in person for Christian? You already missed one other conference this week."
"I'm not making excuses," I explained, "but it's not that I don't care. The campaign, the company . . . I'm very busy right now."
"All of which Christian couldn't care less about," she threw back. "I agreed to this, because you truly seemed to want to get to know him, and I didn't want to uproot his life while he was in school, but you're a mess! He knows he's not the most important person in your life, and he's wondering why. Do you have any idea how much he wants you to love him?"
"I do love him!"
"You're going to lose him forever!" I could hear the tears caught in her throat.
I rested my elbow on the door, holding the phone to my ear as I bowed my head and closing my eyes.
"That is, if you haven't already," she added, sounding somber. "Tyler, there comes a point when you've been disappointed or hurt too much that the bonds can never be repaired. You always wait for tomorrow. But let me clue you in. Tomorrow was yesterday."
I clasped the phone in my hand, staring out the window, deep down knowing she was right. When would I wake up and realize that it was finally time to make my son a priority?
My first priority.
I shook my head, my throat swelling with regret. I wouldn't realize it until it was too late. That's what it would take for me to wise up.
"If you can't get it together, I'm coming back to get him," she told me.
I swallowed and spoke quietly. "It's harder than I thought it would be," I lamented. "Trying to balance everything alone."
"I know," she replied. "Thanks to you, Tyler, I know that very well."
And she hung up, leaving me on my own just as I'd done to her all those years ago.
—
The weekend had passed slowly. More slowly than I'd thought it would, unfortunately.
I'd had a site in southern Florida to check out, so I'd taken Christian with me, handing over my social media and e-mails to Jay for the weekend just so I wasn't distracted.
Christian had joined me out in the heat and mud as we walked around, going over the plans for a plant to be built. Some of the workers had shown him how to handle the machines and even how to drive a loader. I don't think he understood exactly what I did, getting to see only the suits and clean offices at home, but on-site, it was dirty and loud, the ground being dug up and bulldozers roaring in every direction.
After a spell of trying to act disinterested, he'd joined in the fun, finally taking in the full impact of what Marek Industries was all about.
Sunday happened to be my birthday, so we'd spent it on a boat, fishing with some of my colleagues. I enjoyed seeing him smile so much that I'd decided not to press him about anything or to try to talk to him. Instead we would ease into it, learn how to be together comfortably, and let things happen naturally.
I knew one trip wasn't going to win him over, but I was glad for the opportunity to spend some time with him away from the day to day of the company and other distractions in New Orleans.
No matter how much I was still thinking about her.
I'd texted Easton to let her know I'd be out of town for the weekend, but other than that, I hadn't talked to her. She'd responded with a _Be safe_ , and I hadn't called after that.
And it wasn't that I didn't want to.
But it was time to face reality. It was still only October. She'd teach Christian for another several months, so was I going to continue to sneak around with her all that time?
And not to mention that, if Christian found out, I'd lose him instantly.
"Mr. Marek?" Corinne came over and poked her head in my office door. "Ms. Bradbury is here to see you, sir."
I turned around in my chair, from where I had been gazing out the windows, and felt a rush of heat. It was late Wednesday afternoon, and I hadn't seen her since the conference last Thursday.
_Why is she here?_
I nodded. "Send her in."
Corinne left, and I turned down the TVs on the wall
A moment later, Easton walked in wearing a long black coat, tight at the waist but flared at the legs, and her hair windblown beautifully around her face.
My breath caught. God, I'd missed her.
Her skin glowed, and her rose lipstick made her lips look plump and edible.
Corinne closed the door behind her, and I blinked, regaining focus as I tried to force nonchalance.
"You coming to my office can't be a good thing," I teased, remembering the last time she'd been here.
She clasped her hands behind her back, looking vivacious and flirty. "I missed your birthday this weekend," she pointed out. "And I wanted you to know I was thinking about you."
A smile played on her lips, and I leaned back in my chair, taking her in.
"You look beautiful," I told her. "How's school?"
She leaned forward, placing her palms on my desk and pinning me with a smirk. "Wouldn't you rather have your present, Mr. Marek?"
My pants instantly got tighter.
_Jesus._
I cleared my throat and played the game with her. Looking her up and down, I simply shrugged. "I'm not seeing it. Where is it?"
She stood upright and held my eyes, the blue hue of her gaze turning sensual and dark. She slowly began unbuttoning her coat, and my cock immediately stiffened with need for her.
She pulled the coat off, letting it slide down her arms, and then she dropped it on a nearby chair.
My lungs emptied, and I suddenly felt starved.
She wore black stockings with lace trim, a black necktie around her neck, and absolutely nothing else.
I groaned as I took her in. The beautiful olive skin of her hips and upper thighs looked soft and smooth, and I wanted my mouth on her flat stomach and full breasts. Her nipples were hard, and her hair floated across her chest, making me want to bury my hands in it.
"Just my size," I said in a low voice.
One corner of her mouth turned up. "Oh, this isn't your present," she admitted, turning around to take something out of the coat pocket.
My eyes landed on her ass, and I saw the little bruise she still had from the pool table.
Looking up, I saw her tear off a piece of duct tape from a roll and meet my eyes. "This is." She gestured to the tape. "No backtalk."
And she placed the strip over her closed lips and batted her eyelashes at me.
I started laughing, loving her ingenuity. If only she knew how much I really loved her mouth.
She rounded the desk, stepped out of her heels, and straddled me, slowly lowering her body down and resting her arms over my shoulders.
I reached out and ran both hands up her sides, kneading her skin, unable to help myself.
She moaned behind the tape, and I threaded my hand in her hair, grabbing a fistful of it and burying my lips in her neck.
But then I stopped. I let my forehead fall to her chest, wondering what the hell I thought I was doing.
_Christian._
He came first. He had to come first.
And this would hurt him.
I was thirty-six. What was I doing with a twenty-three-year-old teacher who taught my son?
I couldn't have this no matter how much I wanted it. Brynne was right. I was a mess.
Looking up at her, I saw the question in her eyes. She was wondering why I'd stopped, and then she ran her fingers across my forehead, pushing away the hair that had fallen forward, and I knew that I was in too deep with her.
I would hurt her, disappoint her, and throw away any chance with my son along the way.
I dropped my hands to her hips and gripped them hard, my resolve ready to cave, because I didn't want to choose.
Sitting back, I raised my weary eyes and slowly peeled the tape from her mouth.
"I'm sorry. I have a meeting," I told her. "I don't have time."
She sat still for a few moments, probably trying to figure out if I was really kicking her out when she knew I just wanted to keep her here.
I'd never not had time for her.
And that was the problem. I'd put her before everything else.
She rose off me, looking everywhere but at me, and walked around the desk, slipping on her coat as fast as she could.
I tightened my hands into fists, feeling like everything inside of me was hollowing out.
She turned to leave but then spun back around. "If you're pushing me away, just say it. Don't leave me guessing."
I clenched my teeth together as I stood up and forced a glare. "I said I have a meeting," I bit out. "I don't show up in the middle of your workday, do I?"
Her eyes widened, looking surprised. "Tyler"—she held up her hands—"when a naked woman sits on your lap, offering herself up, you take it. And if you can't—for whatever reason—you at least say sweet things to her. I can't believe I—"
"You want to know why I'm aggravated today?" I grabbed my phone and brought up Twitter. "Look at the negative comments on the tweets you've been telling me to post," I shot out. "And this morning someone wrote a blog post calling me 'immature' and 'unprofessional.'"
I tossed my phone down on my desk, feeling like the walls were closing in. She blinked several times, and I could tell she was caught off guard and hurt.
"You've also gained just over five thousand new followers in the past couple of weeks." Her voice cracked. "The more you put yourself out there, the more negativity you'll see. That comes with the territory. I was trying to help."
I planted my hands on the desk and steeled myself, forcing my eyes to stay on her despite the hurt I could see in her eyes. "I didn't want your help. I just wanted you in bed."
She pulled back, instantly straightening her posture.
The pain on her face disappeared, her expression turning to stone. "I see."
She looked just like the Easton at the open house. The one who was cold and distant and far away from me.
"I guess I'll see you, then," she said, sounding cordial.
But this was goodbye.
I nodded, forcing myself to meet her eyes. "Yeah."
She turned and walked out, and I immediately shot out from behind the desk, ready to go after her. But I stopped myself, planting my hands on the desk and bowing my head, trying to calm myself.
_Fuck._
I wanted her.
I needed her!
I slammed my fists down. "Goddamn it," I growled under my breath.
"She really is gorgeous," I heard behind me, and I recognized Jay's voice. "Just don't do it at the office, okay? Be more careful."
I brought my head up, scowling at him. He must've seen her leaving.
"Relax," I snapped. "It's over."
"Why?" he challenged, actually looking concerned. "You were definitely happy. I don't see anything wrong with it as long as you're both discreet."
He slipped some file folders onto my desk, and I shook my head, unable to admit to my brother what I could barely admit to myself.
I looked forward to her. More than anything else.
And I couldn't put her first anymore.
# TWENTY-TWO
EASTON
The cool breeze blew down St. Ann, and I closed my eyes for a moment, enjoying its caress in my hair.
Laurel's "To the Hills" drifted like a heartbeat through my earbuds, and I soaked in the sun and the wind blowing my off-the-shoulder blouse against my skin.
I'd been strolling all day, playing tourist and enjoying the atmosphere that I rarely took the time to experience even though I'd lived here for more than five years.
It was funny. I'd woken up this morning with a list and a plan. Clean the inside of the stove, work out, and then research field trips for my classes, since we'd been discussing so much war history, and New Orleans had some wonderful sites to visit.
But when I'd gotten dressed, I'd realized I wasn't in the mood.
I'd crumpled up the list, tossed it in the trash, and grabbed my little bag, which now hung at my hip with the strap across my chest, and walked out of the house.
I took a streetcar to Canal and hopped off, disappearing into the Quarter.
Around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral, with its madness of artists, musicians, and palm readers, I traipsed a block or two to Maskarade, a little shop I'd discovered last Mardi Gras when I was searching for my first mask.
I wasn't interested in the gaudy souvenirs sold in the French Market or tourist shops. I'd wanted handmade work by real mask makers, and I'd always intended to come back, perhaps to start building a collection for my wall.
When I stepped in, the rough wooden floors creaked under my sandals, and the woman behind the counter smiled at me before returning to her paperwork.
That was one thing I liked about New Orleans.
Merchants didn't jump on you the second you walked into their establishments.
Masks covered all of the walls but were divided into categories. Leather to the left, then animal-inspired masks and feathered work to the right. Many of the masks were styled simply for male customers, while others were jeweled, glittered, and ornate for even the most audacious buyer.
"It's almost Halloween," I told her, looking around and seeing the place empty. "I thought you'd be busier."
"It goes in spells," she explained. "Mardi Gras is the really busy time."
Yeah, I could imagine. I couldn't believe it was only about four months until the next carnival season began.
Nearly a year since the first time I'd met Tyler.
And—I let my eyes drop for a moment as I walked around the shop—it had been more than a week since the last time I'd talked to him.
I'd seen him—once.
He'd picked up Christian last Monday from school, and even though I wasn't sure, because I'd refused to look for him, he was most likely there every day this week to get his son.
I'd smiled at the parents, wished the students a good afternoon every day when they left, and returned to my classroom, closing my door and blaring Bob Marley as I worked late and didn't think of him.
Or tried not to think of him.
But then I'd see the bra in my drawer that no longer had matching panties and remember that they were left in an alley in the Quarter. Or I'd wake up hot, the sheets chafing my naked skin, and let myself fall apart, wishing my hands were his.
He was right, though. What we were doing was careless and selfish.
I turned back to the clerk. "Where are your metal masks again?" I asked.
She pointed behind me. "Through there on the left wall."
I saw the French doors in the middle of the room and gave her a small smile. "Thank you."
Walking into the next room, I gazed at the walls, all adorned with masks, much like the first room, and went straight for the small selection of metal masks they carried. Some looked very much like the one I had purchased here last winter, but that was another perk of this place. No two masks were alike.
I picked up an ornate gold one, shining with crystals built into the center part that sat in the forehead. Along the sides, curling designs traveled up both temples, and exotic eyes gave it an erotic look, like a mixture of sex and mystery.
A smile I actually felt crept out for the first time in a week.
I loved the black one I'd worn all those months ago. I didn't know where I would wear this one, but I was buying it.
I picked out a mask for my brother as well, since he had mentioned he had a Halloween ball to attend for his new internship at Greystone Bridgerton, letting her wrap both up and bag them before heading back up to Canal to catch a streetcar.
It was after three in the afternoon, and even though I hadn't accomplished anything useful today, I'd promised Jack I'd make him dinner.
The only things he cooked were Hot Pockets and scrambled eggs.
Carrying my bag, I walked under the fragrant lilac tree in my quiet neighborhood and crossed the street to my apartment.
But as I jogged up the steps to the porch, I slowed, seeing my front door open.
_What the . . . ?_
Fear attacked me, slicing across my chest like a giant claw, taking everything in its grasp, and I instantly backed up, stepping down the stairs.
_But I locked the door._
I remembered locking it, because a neighbor had greeted me, and I'd turned around to say hello before clicking the lock and jiggling the door handle to make sure it was secure.
I shook my head. _No. I am not going through this again._
I charged up to the door, pushing it open with my hand.
"Who's here?" I shot out, trying to keep the shakiness from my voice.
Air rushed in and out of my lungs as I quickly scanned the room, looking for any movement. The interior was dark. I'd turned off all the lights before I'd left, but the day's last light was coming through the windows.
"Who's here?" I shouted again, dropping the bag to my feet. "Come out right now!" I dared.
The cabinets, the window, the shower curtain . . . They weren't my imagination or lapses in concentration.
Someone had been coming into my house.
I forced down the lump in my throat and inched into the foyer, searching the area for anything out of place.
And then I widened my eyes, seeing the pile of wreckage in the center of the living room.
I rushed for the debris and fell to the floor, the skin of my knees burning on the area rug.
"No," I gasped.
Someone had broken into my house, and they'd known right where to go.
My shoulders shook as I cried silently.
My treasure box—the one Jack worried about—lay shattered on the floor, its contents scattered about and ripped to pieces.
I squeezed the scraps of papers in my hands, feeling the agony that I'd felt all those years ago when I'd locked them inside the box.
_Chase._
All of his letters. His threats. Everything he'd sent me after my parents fired him as my coach. Everything they'd hidden from me.
After they died, I'd found the file in their home office with his "love" letters to me. From the dates, he'd been mailing them since he was fired.
I'd found them and read them, and my instant reaction was to want to self-destruct. They made my skin crawl and made me hate my parents for never pressing charges. They'd confiscated my phone not long after the stalking began, and also cut off my e-mail, so these letters were the only proof of what he was doing. Hard proof to give to the police. Why keep this from me instead of using it to protect me?
How could they have read these letters—some of them disgusting and perverted—and not done anything?
And then I remembered that they were dead because of _me_ —because of what I'd done that night—and I didn't want to be rid of the evidence.
Jack would've burned them, but I kept them locked in this box, never opening it and yet keeping it in plain sight, as a constant reminder of what losing control of your own life does to you.
_Never again._
"Easton?" I heard a voice come from behind me.
I forced a deep breath.
"Easton," Jack's voice repeated. "What the hell happened?"
"You need to leave," I demanded, hurriedly taking the handfuls of paper and stuffing them into my arms.
"Easton, what are you doing?" He stopped next to me, but I ignored him.
Dropping to his knees, he grabbed a piece of paper and studied it as I took my armful to the kitchen to find a gallon bag to keep them in for now. This pile of trash had kept me on a straight track for five years.
"Easton, stop!" Jack called. "How did you get these?"
I charged back into the living room, grabbing more scraps from the floor, pushing the pieces of wood out of the way to get every bit of paper.
"Easton." Jack grabbed my arm. "You can't keep them!"
I pulled away, gritting my teeth as I marched back into the kitchen and stuffed everything in bags.
But Jack dove around me, taking the bags out of my hands.
"Leave me alone!" I shouted.
"Like hell!" he bellowed. "You're not keeping all of this. It's sick!"
My whole body felt tight, and I growled, shoving at his chest.
But he just dropped the bags and pulled me into his arms, wrapping them around me.
I instantly closed my eyes and shattered.
My chest shook, and I collapsed against him, sobbing. "Jack, please," I begged.
"I'm sorry, Easton," he nearly whispered, and I could feel his short breaths as his chest shook. "I'm so sorry."
I hated this. My brother had suffered enough. Suffering he shouldn't have had to go through if it weren't for me, and here I was again, center stage with the drama.
No more.
I pulled away, pushing at his chest to distance myself. "I don't need to be taken care of."
I stared up into his eyes and narrowed my own, forcing my tough outer shell into place. "Stop worrying about me and stop interfering," I demanded.
And I circled around him, picked up the ziplock bags, and ran upstairs.
—
On Monday I left school after the bell, having changed into my workout clothes, and crossed into Audubon Park for a jog. It was something I did every Monday and Wednesday, but instead of hanging around school a few extra minutes like I'd done the last week in some pathetic hope that Tyler would seek me out, I just left.
I'd spent the entire day yesterday filing a police report about the break-in, and then I'd cleaned the house from top to bottom, removing any trace that someone had been in my home.
This morning, before I'd left for school, I'd remade my bed twice, checking the corners, and then checked to make sure the windows were locked and all of the cabinets were closed.
Four times.
I'd pushed my car locks eight times, and I'd counted my steps into the school.
And then I'd sat down at my desk and laid my head in my arms, crying my eyes out before first period, because I didn't want to be scared anymore.
I didn't want to be like this.
I wanted to be how I was with him.
Not that Tyler could save me, but I'd been happy.
I was in love with him.
But I refused to miss him.
Tyler couldn't make me feel better anymore, and I wouldn't let him fix me.
So I dried my eyes and decided _no more_. I didn't know who had been in my apartment, but I would be the one to deal with it. I'd called the police and reported it, deciding that I wouldn't try to handle it quietly like my parents had. Instead, I'd be proactive and not sit and wait for anything.
I pounded the pavement, sweat running down my back as I completed my eighth lap and kept going. Shaman's Harvest's "Dangerous" charged my muscles, giving me the energy that my mood had depleted, and I started to feel more like myself for the first time in a long time.
It was a little chilly today, but I wasn't feeling it, despite the white workout tank and black shorts I wore.
I stuffed my earbud back in my ear, as it had started to fall out, but then something slapped me on the ass, and I jerked to a halt, yanking both earbuds out.
"Hey." Kristen jogged in place next to me. "You actually do this for fun?"
She smiled sweetly, looking a little comical, because she was losing her breath but trying to hide it.
I shook my head at her and continued jogging, not caring if she kept up. "What are you doing here?"
"Well," she breathed out. "I always see you run out of school at the end of the day in your workout clothes to go jog, and I think to myself . . . I could do that," she mused.
I couldn't help it. I snorted, my chest shaking.
"Made you laugh." She gloated. "You haven't been smiling the past few days—actually the past week—so I consider that my special skill."
"What?" I grumbled, trying to sound annoyed.
"Making you crack a smile," she pointed out. "I'm sure not everyone can do it. I might be like your hetero soul mate. Your other half."
I rolled my eyes, the breeze flying under the canopy of trees cooling my skin.
"I'm fine," I stated. "The honeymoon is over, is all. Teaching finally got hard."
"Amen, sister," she shot back. "But if I had your technique in the classroom, I'm sure I'd be very happy with my class. At least you're not dealing with behavioral issues up the butt."
No. I wasn't. And what I'd told her hadn't been the truth. Teaching was always hard, but that wasn't the reason for my mood.
I just didn't feel like telling her about everything.
Despite what had happened at the club, I liked her. It wasn't her fault, after all, and with the way she'd handled herself at school afterward, and her discretion, I'd grown to trust her.
And she seemed to like me, though I had no idea why.
"I heard Shaw asked you to conduct a lesson for the teachers at Staff Development on engagement techniques," she continued.
I nodded, draping my earbud cord around my neck. "I said no."
"Why?"
"Because I think it would rub other teachers the wrong way for someone as inexperienced as me to tell them how to do their jobs," I explained.
"Screw 'em." She waved her hand at me. "Just like the students, the teachers have to be willing to change in order to succeed." And out of the corner of my eye I saw her lean in, playing with me. "And you're so capable, I think you could get them to want to."
What did she know? Teachers usually hung on to their jobs for a lifetime, and they became creatures of habit. The idea that I could swoop in and tell them—people who had years of experience—how to improve was presumptuous.
Why would she care what I did?
I regarded her with a sideways glance. "Why are you so nice to me?"
She twisted her lips. "Skeptical much?"
"No," I answered. "I mean, I haven't really let you see anything about me to like."
She giggled. "Not true. You're a wonderful dancer. You do great things with your hands."
I knocked her on the arm, letting out a snicker as I slowed to a walk and headed for the grass.
She smiled wide, following me. "I like you," she panted, out of breath. "You do your job as if procedures weren't already in place. You're inventive. You do what you want, how you want."
I dropped to my ass and pointed to my feet for her to hold as I crossed my arms over my chest and immediately started curling into sit-ups.
"People respect that," she told me, kneeling down to hold my feet with her hands. "I respect that."
I shot up, keeping my abs tight as I leaned back and curled up again.
_Why shouldn't she be my friend?_ I didn't have many.
Or any, really.
And it had been a long time since I'd had one.
She was messy, and I could tell she enjoyed disorder. Everything I was against.
"I'm shy," I warned her.
"You're intolerant," she corrected. "There's a difference."
I gave her a small smile. "I'm cynical," I pointed out.
"Ohhhh, cynics are so cute," she cooed, and I shook my head in amusement.
"And I don't really like to party," I told her, laying down the law.
"And I do," she threw back, shrugging. "We'll meet in the middle."
# TWENTY-THREE
TYLER
Hearing the cheers outside the auditorium, I dug my phone out of my breast pocket and pressed the button, turning it off.
I'd learned a little something over the past couple of weeks. The world would wait.
I swung the doors open and entered, a flood of battle cries and high-pitched instruments surrounding me as I walked in and let the heavy door slam shut behind me.
_Jesus._ How the hell was I going to find Christian in all of this?
The entire gymnasium was packed, bleachers filled to capacity on both sides of the basketball court with parents, staff, and students, some forced to stand on the sides for lack of seating.
The Friday pep rally, normally held during the morning on days there would be football games in the evening, was being held in the afternoon this week due to testing earlier in the day. Christian had texted, asking me to come.
Most of the parents would be here, and over the past several days he'd been more and more interested in me seeing things that went on at school and meeting his friends.
I'd instantly agreed. I'd come for Christian, but I was doing a piss-poor job of ignoring the small hope that I'd see Easton. I'd looked for her every day I picked up Christian from school, trying not to but fucking failing miserably.
No matter how much I tried to ignore the pull, I always scanned the school grounds for her after school, but she was never there. She didn't come outside anymore to see the students on their way, and the only glimpses of her I got were online in the social media groups.
I scanned the bleachers, forcing myself not to look for her, but there was no way I was going to find Christian in this mess, either. I almost dug my phone out to text him when I spotted Jack, Easton's brother, watching the dance performance taking place in the center of the court from the sidelines.
I debated whether to greet him, but not saying hello would prolong the awkwardness.
"Jack." I stepped up to his side, folding my arms over my chest. "How are you?"
He twisted his head toward me, giving me a genuine smile. I guessed that Easton hadn't confided in him, or he might have reacted differently.
"Very well," he replied. "I'm taking Easton to dinner after this. I only hope she doesn't have to stick around to clean up the mess."
He laughed, and I just nodded, wishing I didn't love hearing even the littlest thing about her.
"Thanks for the introductions at your luncheon a few weeks ago," he said.
"No problem," I told him. "I hope it was helpful. I know how hard it can be to break into the right circles here."
"Do you?" he threw back, an amused look on his face.
I breathed out a small laugh, looking him in the eye. "I used my family's money to receive a good education, but I built my company on my own."
He seemed to take that in stride, because he turned back to the court and didn't say anything else.
We stood in silence for a few moments, and I caught Christian's waving hand from the bleachers.
I held up my hand, waving back, and he sat down with his friends, continuing to clap with the audience as the cheerleaders took the floor.
I let my eyes swing from left to right, but I still didn't see her.
I inhaled a long breath through my nose. "How's Easton?" I broached.
"She's good. _Newsweek_ wants to interview her."
" _Newsweek_?" I shot him a look, surprised. "Why?"
"For her teaching methods," he responded. "She's gaining some great publicity." And then a look crossed his eyes, and he turned back to the court. "As always."
I'd been in _Newsweek_ once. When I was a twenty-five-year-old entrepreneur, as part of a feature on twenty-four other up-and-coming entrepreneurs. She was being interviewed personally?
Jack shook his head. "No matter what she does, she's always a winner."
"And how does she feel about that?" I asked, suddenly worried. "After everything that happened, being in the press again, is she okay with it?"
Jack looked at me, suddenly appearing tense. "What did she tell you?"
I shrugged slightly. "She told me about your parents and sister." And then I dropped my voice. "And that she had a coach who was inappropriate and then fired."
"That's it?" he asked, pinching his eyebrows at me. "He was more than inappropriate. He stalked her."
"What?"
He dropped his arms, sliding his hands into his pockets. "My parents fired him, but that was only the beginning." He spoke quietly. "For two years, he terrorized her. E-mailed, called, left messages, showed up at her matches . . . He threatened her, broke into her hotel rooms, ransacked her things . . . My parents had to take away her phone, her e-mail, and eventually her freedom."
I looked away, wondering why she hadn't told me any of that.
No wonder she was so damn tough.
No wonder she hadn't looked for me like I'd been looking for her these past two weeks. Turmoil and disappointment were nothing to her anymore.
"She didn't tell me any of that." My voice was barely audible.
"Not surprising," he stated. "Easton hates talking about her problems. She thinks it makes her look weak." Then he added, "The fact that she told you anything is something."
I narrowed my eyes, knowing that was true. For Easton to open up to me meant she trusted me.
She _had_ trusted me.
He continued. "She was sixteen and in a constant state of stress," he said. "But it wasn't just him. It was me, our parents, our sister . . . All of us hurt Easton."
"What do you mean?"
"No one even considered going to the police," he explained. "My parents didn't want her name associated with a sordid mess, so rather than deal with Stiles, we just did our best to shield her."
He shook his head, gazing out at nothing. "But all we did was cage her in," he confessed. "She barely had any contact with her friends. She slept with the lights on, and she always had to wonder if he was in the stands, watching her play. She was disconnected from life, and she was lonely."
His eyelids fluttered, and I could see the regret he had for her.
"How could your parents let her go through that?" I charged.
"My parents loved Easton," he rushed out. "They always had her best interest at heart. They thought it would pass and didn't want the press causing more harm."
"Does she at least have a restraining order against him?" I shot out.
The last thing I wanted was this guy trying to come back into her life.
"Wouldn't be much point," he replied flatly. "He's dead."
"Dead?" I questioned, hoping I'd heard him right.
His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. "Two years after the stalking began, when Easton was eighteen, she'd finally had enough," he told me. "She got bolder. She started sneaking out for late-night jogs, leaving her hotel room door unlocked, getting a phone behind our parents' backs . . ." He looked up, meeting my eyes. "She was daring him," he clarified. "She was tired of being afraid, and she wanted her life back."
_How long would you stay?_
_Longer than anyone else._
"Standing in the middle of a burning room," I mused, remembering how she liked a dare.
"What?" he asked, confused.
I shook my head. "Nothing. Go on."
"One night," he continued, "Stiles left a note on her car, promising that she would never forget him."
I turned my head, trying to hide my anger.
"Later that night, Easton disappeared, and my parents were frantic." He leaned in, lowering his voice as much as he could manage with the noise. "They took Avery with them but left me at the house in case Easton came home, and they drove around looking for her, not knowing that she had gone to Chase's apartment to confront him."
_What?_
"When Chase never showed up, she came home, but the police were already at our house, giving us the news," he told me. "My parents had lost control of the car in the rain and swerved into the path of a semi."
"Jesus Christ," I whispered under my breath.
Easton and Jack had gone from a family of five to a family of two, and now I understood. Not so much in what Jack told me but in everything Easton hadn't.
She'd had her heart broken too much and didn't gamble on uncertainties.
But she'd opened up for me. Even just a little. She had shown me that she cared.
"Why wouldn't she tell me all of this?" I asked him.
"I'm sure she would've," he assured me. "Eventually."
"And Chase Stiles? How did he die?"
Jack hesitated, taking a deep breath. "He . . . committed suicide earlier that day," he admitted. "I'm guessing the note he left for her was a suicide note."
So Easton had gone to wait outside his apartment, and he was already gone. I was tempted to inquire how he'd killed himself, but if it didn't directly concern Easton, then I didn't want to know anything else about him.
"Easton died a little that night, too," Jack added, getting ready to leave as the music stopped and Principal Shaw wished everyone fun tonight.
I held Jack's eyes as he continued. "It's not that I don't like the woman my sister's become, but since that day, her heart is a machine," he cautioned. "She can start and stop it at will."
—
"Dad?" Christian called, running over to the car, his light blue button-down hanging out of his uniform dress slacks. "Would it be okay if Patrick picked me up after he takes you back to the office?" he asked. "I want to have some friends over."
I slid my phone back into my pocket. "I'm not going back to the office."
His forehead creased with surprise. "Really?"
I nodded, pushing up from where I leaned against the car. "I thought we could order pizza and watch the fight."
There was a match on Pay-Per-View I wasn't interested in seeing, but I definitely enjoyed spending time with Christian, so . . .
"Are you sure you don't want to work?" he pressed. "I mean, I appreciate the effort you're putting in, and it's the thought that counts, but . . ." He trailed off, glancing back to where his friends were joking around.
"But . . . ?" I inquired.
His arms hung at his sides, and he looked severely displeased. "Well, I wanted to have some friends over tonight without my dad hanging around, you know?"
I scowled. "You're fourteen."
And then it dawned on me.
"Are you inviting girls?" I exclaimed.
A nervous smile spread across his face, and he glanced behind him again. I noticed Clyde Richmond's daughter shifting her gaze over to us, and I immediately started shaking my head at my son.
"I may not be father of the year," I chided, "but I'm not stupid, either. You're not allowed to make me a grandfather for at least another fifteen years. Understand?"
He rolled his eyes, his shoulders dropping.
"But nice try," I allowed.
"Okay." He groaned. "Can I still have friends over, though?"
"Yeah," I allowed. "Let's see how many we can fit." And then I pointed to him, stopping before I turned for the car. "And no touching my pool table this time."
Last time he'd had friends over, I'd found a pizza stain on the ten-thousand-dollar table.
"Dad," he whined.
"I mean it," I shot out. "I'll have Mrs. Giroux order pizzas, and you and your friends can have the media room, but no one in my den. And don't even think about trying to break through the parental controls on Pay-Per-View."
"How come you can watch porn?" he blurted out sarcastically, and I heard a mother nearby gasp.
I leaned in, pulling him close by the back of the neck. "A. The controls are for R-rated movies, not porn," I lied. "B. Who says I even watch porn? And C," I continued, "I went to college, so I can do whatever the hell I want. Now, go get your friends."
He smiled, brushing me off as he left to go round up his classmates.
I moved to head for the car, but then I looked up and I stopped.
Easton was in her classroom, walking by the window, but as soon as I spotted her, she disappeared.
I tilted my chin up farther, trying to see her again, but she wasn't near the windows anymore, and I didn't know what to do.
_Leave her alone._ For her sake and for mine.
It wasn't even about Jack and what he'd just told me in the auditorium. I'd always known that Easton was a strong woman and she would be fine.
But my heart was racing, and I refused to think about what I was doing. I walked toward the school and climbed the steps, needing more than anything to look at her for just one moment.
Stopping at her classroom door, I watched her pad around in her bare feet, her heels lying next to her desk, and arch up on her tiptoes to stack books on top of a wardrobe cabinet.
Coming up behind her, I reached up and pushed the book into place for her.
She sucked in a sharp breath and whirled around, the long, sexy bangs of her deep brown hair falling over one eye.
"Mr. Marek." Her small voice sounded out of breath.
Her red blouse was only one inch from my chest, and her little black pencil skirt only reminded me of how well I'd feel her if I took her in my hands right now.
But I backed up, forcing some distance.
"I owe you an explanation," I told her.
Her expression turned emotionless. "No, Mr. Marek," she replied stiffly. "You don't."
I had never told her our relationship was over. I'd never warned her I wouldn't call again. I'd simply stopped. I owed her an apology and an explanation, and I wanted her to hear it.
"My son needs to come first," I explained.
She walked around her desk and turned to face me, her back and shoulders straight. "Of course he does," she agreed. "Christian is what's most important, and we were wrong. You made the right choice."
I narrowed my eyes on her. Why was she acting like that? Where was the sharp tongue? The temper?
_At least yell at me when you tell me you don't care._
"Are you attending the Greystone Ball on Halloween?" I inquired.
She shook her head. "No. Why would I?"
"Your brother is interning with their firm, right? I thought he'd be taking you."
"How did you know about the internship?" She squinted her eyes at me.
But I ignored the question. I wouldn't tell that I'd made the call after the luncheon to get him that position.
She waited for me to answer, and when I didn't, she sighed. "I'm not going."
I watched her, wanting her to know so many things. That I thought about her every day, nearly all day. There was hardly a minute when she didn't cross my mind.
That I couldn't smell her in my bedroom anymore, and that I wanted to touch her.
If nothing else, I needed her to know how much she had mattered to me and still did.
Stepping up behind her desk, I hovered over her, seeing her breathing turn shallow. "Being a man is making hard choices and living with them," I told her, "no matter how much it hurts."
And then I reached out and ran my thumb across her cheek. "I miss you," I whispered.
Her cold expression slowly started to crack, and her face turned sad.
Looking up at me, she shook her head. "You're wrong," she argued. "Being a man is having the wisdom—and the courage—to make the _right_ choices."
And then she took my hand off her face and evened out her expression.
"And you have," she told me. "You're a good father, Mr. Marek."
So cold.
_Her heart is a machine._
She turned away, but I reached out and pulled her in to my body, hearing her breath shake.
"Say you miss me," I begged, whispering in her ear. "If you say that, then I can leave you alone. I can stop risking my relationship with my son, who is standing right downstairs, and my campaign, knowing that it wasn't just sex."
As I spoke, I held her cheek with my hand, turning her lips to meet mine. "Say you miss me," I whispered against her mouth. "And that you won't forget me. Ask me if I think about you and miss you every day."
She softened and let her lips fall to mine, kissing me gently, and then looked at me with pity in her eyes.
"Oh, Tyler," she lamented, speaking quietly. "I don't ask questions I don't want the answers to."
And then she pulled out of my arms and calmly walked from the room, away from me.
# TWENTY-FOUR
EASTON
I finished writing out Twitter handles for the students to follow for homework and capped my dry-erase marker, turning around and calling to the students, "Flip."
"Wait, wait, wait!" Marcus shouted, keeping his head down and holding up his left hand while he continued writing with his right.
The rest of the students flipped their papers over, protecting their work from wandering eyes, and then Marcus sat back, putting his pencil down and finally turning his paper over as well.
"Stand," I instructed.
The students stood up, some rubbing their eyes and others yawning.
"Stretch." I locked my hands above my head and pushed up on my tiptoes, leading by example.
The rest of the class did their own stretches, getting their blood moving after sitting with their constructed response questions. I made them stand every fifteen minutes to keep them alert.
"Jump," I commanded, and we all started hopping or jogging in place.
I stopped, strolling up the aisle. "Now sit."
They took their seats, the desks shifting under their weight.
"Attack," I finished, issuing the last instruction and hearing their snickers and snorts as they continued with their tests.
"You have ten minutes left," I warned them, and locked my hands behind my back, strolling up and down the aisles.
They'd had a selection of ten different constructed response questions and had to pick three to answer. Judging from the amount of writing going on, I was going to have a very long weekend of reading.
Normally, we completed a lot of assignments online or with a Word document, which they e-mailed to me when they were done. With tests, though, I liked to keep it old-school. There was too much at stake to run the risk of losing a document in cyberspace.
Christian held his paper up, pencil in hand, and appeared to be rereading his work. This was the last class I would have with him, since he'd been transferred into AP History starting next week.
Principal Shaw told me he had e-mailed his father to let him know, but I hadn't heard anything from Tyler.
Christian's mother was thrilled, and Christian himself seemed to just roll with it. He'd gotten the assurance from me and Principal Shaw that if he didn't like it, he could come back to my class.
Part of me hoped he'd hate it. I wanted him back.
It didn't escape me that with Christian out of my class, seeing his father wouldn't be as much of a problem publicly—but that was never really our problem. Not really.
Tyler took what he wanted but cut loose what he didn't need. His upcoming campaign, his son, and his company were his priorities, as they should be, and he'd made a choice. While there may have been space enough for me in his life, he was too afraid to fail at anything else to make the room.
I had offered myself up, naked, in his office, and he'd let me go. We had come too close to the point where it was going to hurt too much to ever let go of each other. And then last week, I'd let him go. He'd been in my classroom, and I'd walked away from him.
Checking the clock, I turned and faced the class. "Is there anyone not done?"
Isabel Savers raised her hand, and I looked to the boy in front of her.
"Loren, can you take Isabel to Ms. Meyer's room?" I requested. "She can finish there. Thank you."
Once they walked out, I collected the test papers, and the students opened their laptops to continue gathering research for the simulations they were planning. It was a new teaching technique I'd discovered, where students re-create—live—what it was like to experience everyday life on, say, the _Mayflower_ or in a wigwam. I was excited to see what they'd come up with.
"Ms. Bradbury?" Christian approached my desk as I started grading the papers. "Since we have the rest of class for private study, can I watch my father's interview? It's streaming online."
"Um . . ." I shot up my eyebrows, for a split second thinking of telling him no because I wasn't sure I wanted to see Tyler.
But that was selfish. The fact that Christian was at all interested was fantastic.
I nodded quickly. "Sure," I told him.
But then I stopped. "Actually . . ."
I turned on the projector, my laptop screen appearing up on the front board.
"What site is it?"
"You don't have to put it on for everyone to see," he interjected, and I could tell he was embarrassed.
I switched off the projector, not wanting to make him uncomfortable.
"Okay, but I'd like to see it," I added.
"KPNN," he called over his shoulder as he walked to his desk.
I brought up the site and turned down the volume, grabbing my green pen, a rubric for grading, and the first student paper, listening as I read.
Tyler's face flashed on the screen, and I had to force my expression to stay as hard as stone. He looked so large and commanding, and I was afraid the shot of lust coursing through my body, making it hard to breathe, would be written all over my face.
He wore a black three-piece suit with an emerald-green tie, and I wished the camera would back up so I could see all of him. His jet-black hair had been cut since I'd last seen him and was styled up and off to the side, shiny, with every hair in place.
He sat at the conference table in his office, and I knew the expression on his face. The one that said he had better things to do.
Tyler hadn't officially announced his candidacy yet, but the whole city knew it was coming. I was interested in seeing how he handled the interview, knowing his aversion to prying eyes in his private life and his inability to indulge people and play nice.
And then I steeled every muscle in my arms and legs, seeing the camera flash to Tessa McAuliffe as the interviewer.
_Son of a bitch._
"Well, yes, Mr. Marek," she went on, continuing a conversation that I was catching the middle of. "But you employ no consultants. Your company has interests in the economy, agriculture, and construction, but what qualifies you to vote on legislation for, say, education?" she challenged.
"The fact that I go to the source and talk with teachers," he answered without hesitation. "Ms. McAuliffe, I don't need a conference table full of consultants and lobbyists advising me or influencing me on a topic from which they're also isolated," he explained, leaning back in his chair with one hand resting on the table. "To learn about construction, I visit my sites. To become aware of issues prompted by poverty, I can find that a block from my home. To know about education, I'll talk to teachers. Go to the source." He laid it out. "Ask questions. Read. Research. Find the answers you need in the purest form." And then he narrowed his eyes, speaking with command and certainty. "I learn some things from second – and thirdhand accounts, but even more from firsthand accounts."
I looked down at my paper, twisting my lips to hide the smile.
"What changes would you like to see in education?" she asked, unfazed.
He took a deep breath, and then a thoughtful look crossed his face as he thought about what he was going to say.
"A teacher's job is undoubtedly hard," he started. "They struggle with less and less funding and ever-growing class sizes." He looked at her, tipping his chin down. "They need support, and the curriculum and the methods need to change," he stated.
I put my paper and pen down, unable to concentrate on anything else.
He continued. "Teachers are finding it difficult to compete with increased technology use in the home but then are unable to use that same technology to maintain their students' attention in the classroom," he explained, and I smiled, a shocked breath expelling from my lungs at his statement. "They need cell phones, iPads, laptops . . . We're educating students for jobs that don't yet exist, and we're still using tools that are fifty years behind the times. It's long past time that those teachers got those tools and learned how to use them to engage students."
I felt my body flood with heat, and I closed the laptop, unable to keep the elation from making my stomach flutter.
He'd practically quoted me.
I felt something tighten in my throat. I couldn't believe he'd done that. Not only had he remembered what I'd said, but he was using it in his platform.
No matter how much I told myself that I didn't need him, I'd never thought that he might have need of me.
He'd hurt me by not choosing me, but it had never occurred to me that he was suffering from his decision, too. Even after he'd visited the classroom to see me, I'd still thought it was merely about sex.
I blinked, looking up, and found Christian sitting at his desk staring at me.
I straightened, evening out my facial expression, but he just sat there watching me like the wheels were turning in his head.
How long had he been looking?
The bell rang, and the students started stuffing their backpacks and jetting out the door.
"Okay, don't forget," I shouted, shooting up out of my chair. "Check out the new follows on Twitter in addition to your reading tonight!"
All of the students filtered out, and I sat back down, turning on "Paralyzed" by In Flames as I started looking over the tests.
"Ms. Bradbury?"
I looked up, seeing Christian standing on the other side of my desk with his laptop bag slung over his shoulder.
"Yes, Christian?"
He looked serious, and I took inventory of the room, seeing everyone else was gone.
"I don't like Tessa McAuliffe," he told me.
I tilted my head, studying him and wondering why he was telling me that.
"The TV commentator?" I clarified, and he nodded.
"But I like you," he said matter-of-factly.
And something about the way he just stood there, holding my eyes, made dread creep into my chest.
Oh, no.
"I saw you and my dad in here that day after school at the beginning of the year," he stated, a bitter edge to his voice. "I'd gotten done with soccer practice and saw that Patrick was here to take me home, but my father's car was also outside, so I came to look for him. You were fixing his tie."
_Fixing his tie?_ I let my eyes wander as I searched my brain for that, and then I remembered. The first time . . . on the desk more than a month ago.
A month!
I opened my mouth, but every damn hair on my skin stood up, and I was scared. Shit! What the hell did he see?
I wanted to crawl under the desk. Had anyone else seen anything?
"You're not going to lie to me, are you?" he asked.
I lifted my chin, though my dignity no longer existed. "No."
"Good," he shot out. "Everyone tries to handle me, and I'm not a baby."
I licked my dry lips and stood up. "Did you see anything else?" I asked plainly.
I needed to know how severe the damage was.
He shrugged. "Just that it was obvious something was going on." He arched an eyebrow at me. "I see how he looks at you. His face gets softer."
I dropped my eyes and let out a breath. What a mess.
"I didn't really care what the hell my dad did." He sighed. "But I thought it was pretty shitty of you. You're my teacher," he pointed out. " _My_ teacher."
I nodded right away, looking him in the eyes. "Yes, I am." I owned up to it. "You have every right to be angry."
"People are saying that a lot to me these days, as if that makes everything better," he threw back.
Christian was right. Mistakes can be forgiven but not always forgotten. And it was unfortunate that he was the one to suffer for others' shortcomings.
"Why aren't you seeing my dad anymore?" he pressed.
"Because it was wrong," I told him. "Because life sometimes has too many obstacles. We betrayed your trust, and you're the most important thing."
He pinched his eyebrows together, looking like he wasn't sure what to believe.
"Really?" he asked quietly.
"You're the most important," I repeated.
He turned for the door and started to walk away but then hesitated. "The thing is," he turned back. "I started to like my dad more. He was trying harder."
Was he insinuating that I had anything to do with that?
"He's around a lot now," Christian explained, "helping me with homework . . ." He nodded to himself. "But now he seems sad," he mused. "I'm not sure why I care."
Hearing that Tyler wasn't happy hurt. I couldn't lie to myself. I wanted him to miss me, and I wanted him to have given me up for a good reason. Christian was that reason.
Christian peered over at me. "When I go to the AP class, can you date my dad?"
I broke out in a small smile. "But then I wouldn't be your teacher."
"But you'd be around my house," he retorted, perking up.
I relaxed, seeing that he was no longer angry. I didn't know if he'd told anyone, but I wouldn't put the burden of a secret on him, either. If he talked, he talked, and I'd have to deal with the consequences.
Unfortunately, though, he thought his father had moved on because of my relationship with his son, when, in truth, it went far deeper than that.
"I'm always here for you," I assured him. "You always come first. Don't ever forget that."
# TWENTY-FIVE
TYLER
I planted my hand on the ornate marble railing and took a sip of my whiskey, gazing out over the bustle of cars, carriages, and lights in the cool evening of the Quarter. Conversation and laughter drifted outside from the Halloween masque through the doors behind me, but I narrowed my eyes, watching the gutter punks in the doorway down on the other side of the street beg for beer money instead.
Their ratty clothes, stringy hair, and "fuck it" attitude were something I had never understood, mostly because I'd barely noticed them before.
I guess, on the rare occasion I'd actually looked, I'd presumed they liked their lot in life. They were smiling as they chatted, after all.
But now I found myself wondering—as I felt my clean, crisp tux against my skin and the fragrant smell of the rich food from the ball going on behind me—where would they sleep tonight?
How long since that dog they were petting had eaten?
Where the hell were their parents?
I'd slowed my life considerably, trying to do a few things well instead of fifteen terribly, like my father wanted, but the more I'd taken the time to notice the little things around me, the emptier I felt.
Maybe they wanted more out of life and were just trying to get through the day. Or maybe they didn't, because they didn't know everything the world had to offer.
But I did know they'd be grateful for whatever money they got right now. They'd be grateful for food, drink, and a cigarette—or anything that made them feel good.
I wanted a lot of things, but—I realized, looking down at them—almost nothing I wanted would I treasure. Barely any of it would make me pause to feel grateful.
I'd missed what was truly important. I'd chosen wrong.
My phone vibrated from inside my breast pocket, but I just tilted the glass back up to my lips, ignoring it.
Jay was inside, constantly texting that I needed to get my ass in there and start chatting with people, but the luster was gone. It had slowly dwindled away the longer I went without her.
"Soooo," I heard a woman's voice say from behind me, and I looked to see my father and his wife smiling at me.
"When will you officially announce your candidacy?" she asked.
Rachel Marek was my father's second wife, and while I liked her, I barely knew her. My father didn't remarry for another ten years after my mother's death when I was fifteen. I'd long since moved out and started my own life by then.
I looked over, seeing Jay march through the French doors, clearly on a mission to find me and bring me inside himself.
I gave Rachel a halfhearted smile. "Somewhat redundant, I think. Everyone is aware of my intentions anyway."
But then I caught my father's "try harder" look, and I softened my response for her.
"Within the week," I assured her.
Jay stepped up next to me, and I nodded, telling him silently I would get my ass back into the party.
"Will you relocate to Washington, D.C.?" she asked, clutching my father's arm.
"Let me win first," I countered, trying to keep my expectations reasonable.
"Sorry." She laughed, glancing at my father. "We won't jinx you. We're just very excited for the next year. I love campaigns."
"We're all excited," Jay jumped in. "I've stocked up on PowerBars and Wheaties."
And I was still trying to figure out what the hell I was doing.
_How the hell could my desires change so quickly?_ I'd planned for this. Dreamed of this.
And now everything in my life except Christian felt fucking worthless. Worthless and pointless.
"Give us a minute," my father said, and I looked up to see him hand off his wife to my brother.
They headed back inside, and my father tilted his head, gesturing for me to walk with him.
"Senators, in a way," he started, leading me back inside the dim, candlelit ballroom, "have more power than a president," he told me. "While presidents come and go, with term limits, a senator can be a senator for life."
I already knew that, and my father, having a doctorate in political science was also well aware.
"I've known Senator Baynor for more than thirty years," he explained. "He tried to hire me to work on his staff, but I turned him down."
"Why?"
We circled the perimeter of the ball, the other guests congregating around tables and on the dance floor.
"I wouldn't have found it rewarding," he admitted. "It's too glamorous a life for me."
I laughed under my breath, liking how candid he could often be. Most people didn't associate politics with glamour, but it most certainly was glamorous. Power, wealth, and connections with people who could make or break you.
Senator Baynor was from Texas, and while he and my father were good friends, I was glad he hadn't uprooted Jay's and my life here in New Orleans to pursue a political career.
My father didn't climb mountains for the sake of climbing mountains. His goals were clear and his reasons made sense. He'd made a good choice.
He stopped and turned to face me, pinning me with a hard stare. "Mason Blackwell has a lot of support, Tyler. He's very popular," he pointed out. "However, he doesn't have the endorsement of a senior senator like Baynor."
I nodded, but then my eyes flashed to the right, and I stopped listening.
I narrowed my eyes.
_Easton._
She stood alone across the room, wearing a beautiful, fitted black gown with gold trim that showed off her arms and back. She was staring at a painting and looking so much like she had the night we'd first met.
My entire body warmed, and I felt her pulling at me like she had a rope tied around my heart.
"Is that what you'd like?" My father spoke up. "An endorsement?"
_What?_
I blinked, coming back to the conversation and looking over at him.
"You know better," I retorted.
I hadn't asked my father for anything, and I wouldn't.
He hooded his eyes, looking weary. "I thought so." He sighed. "You don't take anything you don't feel you've earned."
I pinned him with a stare. "You taught me that."
Taking a sip of my drink, I glanced over at Easton, noting that she was slowly making her way down the wall, taking in the paintings.
"I'm not your teacher anymore." My father spoke in a low voice. "I'm your father. A father who happens to believe you're one of the good ones."
At that I shot my eyes back to him.
He'd always been hard on me, which gave his rare compliments more of an impact.
"I'm proud of you," he told me, "and I would be proud to see you win this. I can get his endorsement if you want."
I inhaled a deep breath and shook my head gently. "You've never made anything easy on me. Don't start now."
And I set down my glass and walked away, leaving him to get back to his wife.
I didn't know what I was doing—as usual lately—and I didn't have a plan, but I knew where I wanted to be. And if I knew one goddamn thing about myself, it was that I wanted what I wanted, and right now I wanted to see her look at me.
Coming up behind her, I saw her holding a glass of champagne with her other arm folded over her chest.
I couldn't resist teasing her as I came to stand next to her. "Thinking of starting a fire?"
She twisted her head and met my eyes. Dark makeup accentuated her eyes, and I could see her shocked look through her gold metal mask before she regained her composure.
Letting her lips curl, she rolled her eyes. "I'm trying not to be so naughty these days."
_Hallelujah._ The idea of her getting naughty with anyone but me didn't sit well.
"Good." I nodded once. "I thought you said you weren't coming."
She shrugged, turning back to the abstract painting. "I didn't think I was. I knew I would see you, after all."
So she'd considered avoiding the ball because of me.
"So what changed your mind?" I pressed.
A stern expression crossed her face as she spoke in a low voice. "I decided I was tired of reining in my life because of men."
And then a little smile peeked out as she took a sip of her champagne.
I let my eyes fall down her body, where the straps of the long dress across her back only made her skin looked even more supple and glowing.
Her hair was in loose curls with half of it pulled up into pins and the rest hanging down, framing her face.
Her lips were red, her skin tan, and her scent exotic.
And I felt my desire steadily growing, as did my need to lead her away to somewhere dark and quiet.
"I saw your interview," she said, meeting my eyes again. "I thought it was wonderful."
I nodded, not really caring to talk about the interview.
She continued. "I don't know if you still feel like you have something to prove, Tyler, but I can tell you, even if I had never met you, I would vote for you."
In that moment, as I looked down at her, my lungs emptied.
I'd been told by friends and wives of friends, employees and colleagues, that I had their vote when election time arrived about a year from now, but I hadn't realized hers was the only one I'd wanted.
She actually thought I was worth a damn.
I couldn't keep the grin off my face as I stared at the Stricher in front of us. "The first moment I saw you"—I inched closer to her—"scowling at that Degas like it was shit on canvas . . ." I looked at her. "I wanted you more than I'd ever wanted anything."
The moment I'd set eyes on her, I had to have her.
A thoughtful expression appeared on her face. "A lot's changed."
"Nothing has changed," I shot back.
She turned to me and then looked around at something behind me. "Are you with Tessa McAuliffe tonight?" she prodded, and I glanced back to see Tessa in a beige evening gown happily schmoozing in the crowd.
I hadn't arrived with Tessa, nor did I plan to leave with her, but we'd had lunch before the interview last week and had spoken this evening.
"Some relationships need to be maintained," I pointed out. "Even though they're only professional."
"She needs you," Easton bit out. "You don't need her."
I reached out, grazing her cheek with my thumb. "I always loved it when you got angry," I mused, start to feel whole again.
She hesitated, letting me touch her, but then tilted her face away, breaking the connection.
"You must be proud of Christian." She changed the subject. "Transferring into AP History and also qualifying for advanced placement in Biology."
I dropped my hand, suddenly needing more air. "Yes." I sighed. "I'm taking him and some of his friends to an LSU game next Saturday to celebrate."
"He seems happy." She shot me a taunting smirk. "I think he's starting to like you."
I snorted. "I don't know," I grumbled under my breath. "Is one of the warning signs an aptitude for blackmailing me?" I asked. "Somehow he's weaseled a birthday bash at JAX Brewery out of me if he gets straight As this semester."
She breathed out a smile, shaking her head.
"Hello, Ms. Bradbury," Jay chirped, coming up next to me, and I inwardly groaned.
"Tyler." He leaned in, speaking in a low voice. "The archbishop is here."
I sighed, frowning.
Archbishop Dias was a big supporter, and I needed to at least greet him.
I glanced to Easton, torn between either taking her with me or telling her I'd see her later, but I had no right to infringe on her evening. I was the one to break it off, after all.
"Excuse me," I said, but she just turned back to the paintings without a word.
After saying hello to the archbishop and talking about the year to come, I moved from circle to circle, chatting with members of the media, local politicians, influential voters, and it was fucking painful.
I could do it. I wanted to do it.
But over the past few weeks I'd started to feel like I was trying to walk on one leg. Nothing came easy anymore, because something was missing.
I looked up every once in a while, scanning the party for Easton. She eventually moved from the outside of the scene to the center, sitting at a table with her brother and, I assumed, some of his fellow interns as they nibbled on hors d'oeuvres.
After a while I saw her in a group, laughing.
I looked at my watch, seeing that it was ten thirty, and I texted Christian to check in one last time for the night. He was crashing at a friend's house, since they had gone to the Krewe of Boo parade with his friend's parents.
How's it going? I texted.
I walked up to the bar and ordered another Chivas on the rocks.
We're hanging out, he texted back.
Where?
But after I'd gotten my drink and tipped the bartender, I continued to stand at the marble bar top, waiting.
Christian? I prompted again.
Taqueria Corona, he shot back.
I scowled, checking my watch again.
Are Charlie's parents with you? I typed, and hit _Send_.
Except I didn't get an answer, and heat rose from my neck up to my forehead.
Either get back to Charlie's, or I'm sending Patrick for you, I threatened, taking his silence as a no.
Taqueria Corona was a bar. A restaurant bar, but still a bar with a loud crowd, and how the hell did his friend's fucking parents not have them in the house yet? They were fourteen years old, for Christ's sake.
Come on! he challenged.
Are you arguing? I threw back to him.
The phone buzzed immediately. No.
I cocked an eyebrow, and another message came through immediately after.
Yes, he corrected, owning up. All right, we're heading to Charlie's.
I smiled, gloating, as I took a sip of whiskey.
Even though it's stupid early, he shot back.
I could practically hear his mope. My kid had an attitude, but I'd be lying if I said it bothered me. The fact that he got sarcastic meant he was comfortable with me. I saw it as a good sign. For now.
I jutted out my thumbs, typing quickly. The only way you can be outside of the house past ten at night is if you come to me at the ball. It's your choice.
I'd rather eat rats, his text read, and I broke out in a quiet laugh.
Shaking my head and still smiling, I typed, Ms. Bradbury is here. It wouldn't be that boring.
A moment later, his text came through. Really? he asked. Have fun with that.
My eyebrows nose-dived as I wondered what the hell he meant.
??, I typed, almost afraid to know.
My phone buzzed, and I set down my drink.
I'm fourteen, not stupid, he wrote. If you like her, I'm cool with it.
_What?_ How did . . . ?
I dropped my hand to the bar and stood up straight, tensing.
Christian knew?
A million things ran through my head. _What did he know exactly? Did anyone else at his school know? Did he see something?_
_And fuck! His mother._
But my main fear—my main reason—for backing off from Easton was Christian. Although I knew I couldn't be a good father, the head of Marek Industries, a senator, and her lover and balance all of those responsibilities well, my main concern was alienating Christian forever.
But he already knew. And he was fine with it.
Still perplexed, I typed slowly, my fingers shaky. Your friends might have something to say.
He could be ostracized.
Not if they know what's good for them, he replied, sounding cocky.
And then came another text.
I'm cool with it, Dad, he reassured me, and I smiled to myself in disbelief.
Running my hand down my face, I pulled at my collar, wishing I could figure out how to handle my personal life as well as I did business.
_Clarify your goals. What do you want?_
I placed my hands on the bar, bowing my head as my chest rose and fell harder by the second.
_What do I want?_
I pictured myself traveling to my work sites around the world, climbing the steps of Capitol Hill, accomplishing something that was supposed to be worthwhile and good for the world—and none of it held any luster.
None of it could replace her.
I clenched my fists and spun around, ready to charge over there and take her, but I stopped short, seeing Tessa standing before me.
"Dance with me?" she asked. "We haven't really talked tonight."
I glanced over to see Easton at the French doors, talking with her brother, when Mason Blackwell came up to them and shook her brother's hand.
Tessa followed my gaze, and I watched as he spoke to Easton. She didn't look like she was enjoying whatever she heard, but then he took her drink, put it down on the table, and I watched him lead her onto the dance floor.
I immediately snapped into action, brushing past Tessa, but she grabbed my arm.
"You were never photographed with her, were you?" she chastised. "Having an affair with your son's teacher would kill your campaign, Tyler."
I looked down at her, surprised to find that I didn't give a shit.
"Especially one as outspoken as her," Tessa sniped. "She's not built for discretion."
"But you are?" I inferred, catching her hint.
She licked her ashen pink lips with a hint of a smile on her face. "I think I'm everything you need."
And that's when it hit me. I had things I wanted but didn't need and things I needed but didn't want.
There were only two things I needed and wanted at the same time: Easton and my kid.
I spun on my heel and charged onto the dance floor, heading straight for Blackwell as he started to sway with Easton.
I stepped between them, forcing him out of the way.
"I'm leaving." I turned to Easton, telling her, "And I'm taking you with me."
Her worried eyes turned on me, and she shook her head. "Tyler, no," she urged, telling me I shouldn't be doing this.
But Blackwell stepped up, reaching for her.
"Keep your hands off of her," I warned, turning my scowl on him.
He backed off, crossing his arms over his chest. "I didn't realize she was here with you," he said calmly.
I was sure he was loving this, but I didn't give a damn anymore.
I took Easton's hand with my left and tilted her chin up with my right.
"Tyler, don't," she begged, looking around at whoever might be watching us.
Tessa's voice came up behind me. "Listen to her, Tyler."
I held Easton's eyes, seeing the tears pool there.
"You love me," I whispered softly enough for only her to hear.
"What's going on?" my father interrupted, stopping his dance next to us as he and his wife looked between Easton and me with concern.
Easton searched my eyes, still worried.
"I don't care," I told her. "I don't want to make trouble for you, but I don't care about the campaign if I can't have you. I don't fucking care."
Her desperate eyes pooled with more tears, and I cupped her face in both hands, caressing her cheeks.
"Aren't you the teacher that was featured in _Newsweek_?" my stepmother asked, inching forward in our tight circle as dancers moved around us. "You teach at Braddock Autenberry, right?"
"Braddock Autenberry?" Blackwell repeated, squinting at me. "Doesn't your son attend school there?"
And now it was done.
He knew, everyone would know, and Easton and I would have to weather this storm, but fuck it.
"Well, well, well," he mused. "My night just got better."
Easton started shaking her head, but I held her with my steady gaze, looking into her eyes.
"I don't care," I maintained. "I need you."
Mason Blackwell could ride this scandal to kingdom come. It would be a small price to pay to have her.
She clasped my forearms, and I grabbed her hand, ready to get her out of here.
"I almost feel sorry for you, Marek," Blackwell gloated when I turned around. "We all have our dirty little secrets, but most of us have the sense—"
"Yes!" my stepmother gasped, cutting Blackwell off. "You're the teacher who was a tennis player, right?" She gestured to Easton as my father listened with a stern set to his features.
"I was so sorry to read that part about your parents and sister. Oh, my goodness." She placed a hand on her heart, giving Easton a sympathetic look.
"Thank you," Easton choked out.
"What a horrible tragedy," Rachel consoled. "I can't imagine being eighteen years old and losing nearly your entire family."
Blackwell's eyebrows nose-dived as he listened.
Rachel continued. "And then you and your brother divided your parents' estate between several children's charities here in New Orleans?" she went on. "So generous when you had already lost so much."
I faltered, having not known that part.
"My brother must've told them that," Easton admitted, looking embarrassed.
I raised my eyes, locking on Blackwell's, and I saw it in his eyes. He could try to sling mud, but Easton's record and character spoke for themselves.
"You truly have given a lot to this city," Rachel stated, smiling. "I can't wait to see where your career goes, Ms. Bradbury."
Easton nodded, giving her a small smile. "Thank you."
"Excuse us for a moment." I grabbed her hand and pulled her away from everyone, rushing out.
Jay was somewhere. Her brother was somewhere. But we were leaving. I dug out my phone and quickly texted Patrick to bring the car around.
"Tyler," Easton urged as I jogged down to the stairs, holding her hand. "Tyler, what are you doing?"
I pulled her along, hearing her heels _clack-clack-clack_ as she kept up.
Reaching the bottom, I pulled her around the banister and led her out of the hotel and onto the sidewalk.
The Quarter was filled with people, and photographers from a local news station waited outside, covering the ball.
I scanned the area, but I didn't see Patrick, so I continued to lead her down the street. She pulled her hand out of my grasp, stopping me.
"Tyler!" she burst out. "We can't—"
But I interrupted her, taking her face in my hand. "I love you, okay?" I rushed out. "I love you like crazy, and I've never said that to a woman before, but I'm completely in love with you, Easton Bradbury."
I breathed hard, moving my hands to her waist.
Bowing my forehead down to hers, I tried to keep my voice low. "You're going to get me into trouble with that mouth of yours, and I may not get everything I thought I wanted out of life, but if I don't have you and my son, then the rest of it means nothing," I told her. "You make me happy, my kid likes you, and I feel like I could do anything if I knew I was going to see you every day. I need you."
I layered my lips to hers, breathing in her breath and feeling her shake. I didn't know if it was from me or the chill in the air, but I pulled her in close and wrapped my arm around her waist.
The heat from her mouth and the way her lips quivered drove me wild.
She ran her hands up my chest and circled them around my neck. "People are watching," she whispered.
"Are you scared?" I grinned.
She laughed quietly, and her sweet smile made my blood rush.
"No," she answered, and I knew she was lying. "You?"
I shook my head, playing with her. "Not a chance."
We were both scared shitless, but that was the best part. If there was no gamble, there was no reward.
I heard a camera click, and then I heard a car horn sound. I reluctantly twisted my head, seeing the SUV in the middle of the one-way road.
Taking Easton's hand, I pulled her into the street and through the car door that Patrick held open.
I let her climb in first, and then I hopped in, Patrick slamming it behind us.
"They took our picture," she warned.
"Good. I'll frame it," I shot back, closing the glass between us and Patrick as he climbed into the driver's seat and drove.
"Tyler, those pictures will be online soon," she worried.
But I dropped to my knees in front of her. "I don't care," I whispered.
Reaching behind her neck, I unclasped her dress and pulled the top down, gazing at her gorgeous body and beautiful breasts. Grazing my fingertips down her flat stomach, I pulled the dress down farther, meeting her eyes, so she could see mine.
"I need you," I growled low. "Right now."
And I yanked the fabric until she got the hint and raised her ass off the seat, so I could get the dress off.
"Jesus Christ," I groaned. "You weren't wearing panties?"
I looked at her hard in the eyes, like she'd betrayed me or something. Why was she not wearing underwear?
Her dark eyes behind the mask flashed with excitement, and she plastered her naked body against me, wrapping her arms around my neck.
"I like the feel of clothes against my skin," she taunted, leaving soft kisses around my mouth. "Like your clothes."
And then she started rolling her hips against me in small circles, and I groaned.
"Fuck," I breathed out.
She slid her hand down my hardening cock, rubbing it slowly and teasingly through my pants. As I bit my lip, she grew more needy and demanding, taking my hand and slipping it between her legs.
"Tyler." She quivered when I slipped a finger inside of her.
"Yes," I answered, slipping in another finger.
She sucked in a breath and squeezed her eyes shut. "Those photos?" she pressed. "Call your brother."
I grinned and took out my phone, dialing Jay.
Easton pushed me back into the seat and knelt down, unfastening my pants and belt.
"What have you done?" Jay answered without saying hello.
Easton took my cock out, her eyes looking up at me through the mask as she slid it between her lips, taking all of it down.
"All right." I breathed hard. "Get out in front of this," I told Jay. "Easton Bradbury taught Christian, but he's now in an advanced class with a different teacher. I am simply dating a teacher from the same school my son attends."
She sucked hard, and I felt the muscles in my legs tense as my dick grew even harder.
"Fuck," I gasped.
"What?" Jay blurted out. "What are you—?"
But I zoned out as she took my dick out of her mouth and kissed and sucked down the sides, fucking worshipping me.
"I'll speak to her superior tomorrow," I told Jay. "Just build her up. Use the _Newsweek_ article and her website. No interruptions until after nine tomorrow," I demanded, looking down and seeing the grin on her face as she licked the underside on one lone, taunting stroke with the tip of her tongue.
"Eh," I inched out. "Make that noon."
And I hung up.
Darting forward, I lifted her under the arms and put her on the seat across from me. Kneeling in front of her again, I pulled her hair gently, forcing her to arch her back so I could play with her tits. Taking one in my mouth, I tugged at her nipple, drawing it between my teeth and kissing the skin around it before moving on to the other one.
"I love you, too, Tyler," she breathed out. "Don't be careful with me, okay?"
Bringing her back up, I threw off my jacket and ripped my shirt open, her hands going straight to my chest.
"I trust you," she told me.
I kissed her hard, kneading her ass. "You didn't tell me about the stalking," I charged.
"I know." She nodded.
"You'll tell me everything, you understand?" My hands were all over her, touching her like I would never touch her again. "No one else educates me about you, Easton."
She wrapped her arms around my neck, whispering against my neck, "Are you sure?"
"Of course."
But as I tried to gently push her down, because I needed to kiss every inch of her, she stopped me and raised her eyes.
So I narrowed mine on her. "What is it?"
She looked away, growing tense, and then so did I.
"There have been a couple of break-ins at my apartment," she explained, looking solemn. "I don't know who it is, and they don't appear to be taking anything, but—"
"What the hell do you mean someone has been breaking into your house?" I burst out, my skin growing hot.
"I reported it to the police," she assured me quickly. "And I added more locks. So far it's been minor stuff," she rushed out. "They've left my cabinets open, and they destroyed a display box my parents gave me when I was thirteen."
"And you have no idea who it is?" I rasped, fear making my breathing turn shallow.
She shook her head. "No," she nearly whispered, "and I don't want you to worry about it."
"Not worry about it!" I barked. "You're under constant guard now, you hear?"
But much to my surprise, she laughed.
"It's probably just kids, Tyler, and I'm not fighting with you about this right now," she maintained. "I just wanted to be honest. We'll handle it, but I won't be the prisoner my parents tried to make me."
I squeezed her hips, studying her hard. I didn't like this at all.
I dipped my head to hers, whispering close, "I need to have you safe," I confessed.
The idea of someone in her home—in her things—enraged me.
And what were the chances? After her coach did very much the same thing, it was happening again?
"I love you," I nearly begged.
A soft smile spread across her lips. "You love me? So what does that make us?" she taunted, suddenly changing the mood.
I laughed under my breath, shaking my head. _Always playing game_ _s._
"I'm too old for girlfriends, Easton," I explained, nibbling her lips, satisfied that she was here with me now, at least, safe.
She moaned, and the taste of her skin started to make me hungrier.
I gently pushed her back and leaned down, sinking my mouth into her pussy.
"Oh, God," she panted as I licked and sucked her clit. "Tyler," she moaned.
"I want to talk about the break-ins more later," I warned her. "I want to know about your parents, your career, everything . . ." I demanded, stroking my cock as I kissed her heat.
"Tyler, please." She squirmed. "No more talking. Later, okay?"
"Always so hungry," I teased. "I love it."
"Then prove it," she fumed, arching her head up to look at me. "Or can't you keep up?"
I ground my teeth together, and my fingers tightened on her hip.
_Little . . ._
God, I fucking loved her.
Not thinking twice, I shot up and flipped her over onto her stomach with her knees on the floor. Yanking her thighs apart, I pulled her back to me and slid into her.
"Tyler!" she cried out, and I took a fistful of her hair, tugging slightly.
"You didn't want it slow, did you?" I pawed her breast possessively.
She shook her head. "Uh-uh," she whimpered.
I thrust into her harder and faster, groaning when she began backing up into it. Her pussy was so tight, squeezing my dick like a hand. I couldn't believe I thought I could do without her.
"Sir." Patrick came over the intercom, and I slowed. "Where am I taking you?"
I leaned down, turning Easton's head so her lips met mine. "You don't belong anywhere I'm not," I whispered.
She kissed me slowly, nodding.
I leaned back up, rocking into her and feeling her pussy clench and spasm.
"Home, Patrick," I choked out. "Take us home."
# TWENTY-SIX
EASTON
Nothing good ever comes easy.
The picture of Tyler and me together was all over the Internet—the news of our relationship had become public knowledge now, and there was no turning back. Saturday night he'd claimed me, throwing his ambitions to the wind and risking what he wanted for himself to have me instead.
I had never felt so loved by someone.
Even my parents had never put me first, above everything else. My career was more important to them, not my sanity or safety.
Tyler and I had spent that night at his house, and when he woke up the next morning, I was the first thing he needed. He didn't check his phone, his e-mails, or explore the damage we might have done to our careers. We screwed and laughed and ate, and then we talked to Christian when he came home from his friend's house.
All in all, we were very lucky. The spin Jay had put on the story minimized the damage, and Tyler had called Christian's mother yesterday to talk about the situation. Not that she needed to know the details, but we wanted her to find out from us before she did another way.
She was livid. She already didn't trust Tyler, and she didn't know me well, so she took it exactly how I expected. As a betrayal.
Until she talked to Christian. I don't know what he said, but I had a definite feeling I was still unaware of the magnitude of Christian's abilities.
He seemed to calm her down enough for her to not rush home. Although he did have to sweeten her up by agreeing to spend Christmas with her and his stepfather.
There would be some growing pains as we adjusted to the ramifications and the public attention to our relationship, but I already felt like I was so much luckier than I should've been.
On Monday morning I stepped into the school office dressed in khaki skinny pants and a long-sleeved blouse with a romantic-looking tie collar. My interview about my teaching methods was this afternoon, so I'd chosen to dress conservatively but fashionably.
"Does he have a moment for me?" I asked Mrs. Vincent as I stepped up to her desk.
She popped her head up, and a look crossed her face when she realized it was me. I couldn't tell if it was good or bad, but it was clear she knew what was going on.
"I think so." She nodded. "Go on in."
I approached the principal's office door, knocking even though it was half open.
"Mr. Shaw?" I broached.
He glanced over his shoulder, standing with his hands in his file cabinet, and offered a tight smile.
"Easton, hello." He sighed. "Come in. I'm glad you stopped by."
I walked in, making sure to close the door behind me, because I didn't need Mrs. Vincent knowing more than she already did. I kept my back straight and my shoulders squared, even though I felt like I wore a badge of shame.
I'd screwed a student's parent. I was a slut who was a threat to all of the other families in the school.
That's how some parents and other teachers might see it.
They wouldn't see that I was in love. That Tyler Marek was the one man to break me open and love and need everything he saw.
That he was the one man I needed in the same way.
I sat down in one of the chairs opposite Mr. Shaw's desk and placed my arms on the armrests. I cleared my throat. "I wanted to speak to you about—"
"I know," he cut me off, dropping the file folders he'd retrieved from his cabinet onto his desk. "I already spoke with Mr. Marek, and I saw the photo online," he told me, and then asked, "When did this start?"
I lifted my chin, owning up. "We met at Mardi Gras last February," I explained. "But we didn't begin pursuing a relationship until this school year."
He squinted, studying me. "Even knowing that you could lose your job?"
I faltered, dropping my eyes.
But then I looked back and faced it head-on. "Mr. Shaw," I started.
But he held up his hand. "Ms. Bradbury—"
"Please, Mr. Shaw, let me say this," I rushed out, quieting him.
I needed to tell him the truth, so no matter what happened, he would know that I didn't take my actions lightly.
"I could never claim to be a person who was used to sacrificing what they wanted for the betterment of someone else," I confessed. "I've been selfish and defiant many times in my life, most of which I regret," I told him, remembering all too well my parents and sister.
"But I love what I do," I maintained, "and I do it with everything I have. I'm committed to my career, and that hasn't wavered. Mr. Marek" —I stopped and corrected— "Tyler is . . ."
I looked down, inhaling a long breath.
"I can't do without him." I stood my ground, owning my decisions. "I don't want to. I love teaching, and I would hate to lose my job or your confidence, but I'm not sorry that I love him."
I folded my hands in my lap, knowing I would do it all again. "I'm simply sorry things happened this way," I admitted.
He sat there for a moment, looking like he was thinking about what I said.
I would hate to lose my job, hurt my reputation with the students and parents, or be the butt of someone's joke, but I wasn't tormented about the situation. Knowing that I would do nothing differently gave me peace.
He sighed and looked at me. "I'm not going to fire you." He smiled gently. "I wasn't going to."
My eyebrows shot up. "Really?"
He shrugged, leaning on his desk. "You're an excellent teacher," he pointed out. "Your methods are drawing much-needed publicity for the school, and if I can be frank, your . . ." He waved a hand at me. "Mr. Marek will quite possibly be a senator. I can't fire his wife."
I dug in, shaking my head. "Wife?" I repeated. "Oh, no, we're not engaged."
He laughed and looked at me like I was stupid. "He went public with a love interest during a campaign, Easton," he replied. "He may not yet realize he intends to propose, but his intentions toward you are definitely permanent."
_Okaaaay._
"Christian has been reassigned to the AP class," he continued, standing up, "so there's no longer a conflict of interest there. He is aware of this development, I assume?"
I nodded. "Of course."
"Good." He nodded once. "You'll no doubt have to field some gossip with the staff and parents, but I think you'll find Mr. Marek's status and reputation will go a long way in making sure it passes quickly. Let me know if you need anything."
That was it?
He turned around and started rummaging through his file cabinet again.
I hesitated, feeling like there was still another shoe to drop, but when he didn't say anything more, I slowly rose and began to leave.
"Thank you," I said in a low voice.
"Easton," he called, and I turned around.
"When the news crew observes your class today," he instructed, "you represent this school and Tyler Marek now."
And then he turned back around, leaving my stomach flipping with his little hint.
Yes. I represented Tyler.
For possibly a while to come.
—
"Principal Shaw says that you'd been offered opportunities to lead some staff developments," the newscaster asked, "possibly taking days to go to other schools as well, but you turned him down?"
I smiled, the camera behind Rowan DeWinter, the Channel 8 anchor, fixed on me as I stood in front of the school.
The students had left for the day thirty minutes ago, and the interview was almost finished. They'd spent the last couple of hours observing classes and recording lessons before wrapping it all up with a final Q&A.
Jack, Tyler, and Jay all stood off to the side, observing and being here to support me. Jack knew I was apprehensive about being in front of a camera again, while Tyler and Jay were here to make sure I wasn't messed with.
"I enjoy my methods," I explained, "and I believe they work. But do I feel confident enough to teach other teachers?" I asked hypothetically. "No, not with only a few months' teaching experience. I think a teacher's place is in the classroom, and that's where I'll stay."
Tyler grinned, and Jay shot me a thumbs-up.
"So you're not taking any time off to help Tyler Marek with his campaign?" she queried.
But Jay stepped in, shaking his head. "This interview is about her—"
"It's fine." I held my hand up and met Ms. DeWinter's eyes again. "I will absolutely help Mr. Marek in any way I can," I assured her. "Even if it means stuffing envelopes. But he understands that I've made a commitment to my class and to Braddock Autenberry. If there's one thing I love . . ." I suddenly stopped, feeling like I shouldn't have given that away.
But then I started again, committing to it. "If there's one thing I love about him, it's that he's just like me. We're devoted to our promises."
She smiled, accepting that answer, and Jay winked at me as if to say, _Good job._
I rolled my eyes, his praise making me feel like I was an act in a circus.
After the news truck left and the school had emptied of teachers and nearly all the staff, Tyler led me over to his car and opened the back door, digging out a bouquet of white orchids.
"I'm sure you've received lots of flowers in your short years"—he paused, handing them to me—"but I've never given them, so . . ."
I looked at the abundance of white flowers, their curved petals so soft and fragile-looking. I had received lots of flowers over my tennis career, from my parents and from fans, but I loved these the most.
I was even glad they weren't roses. I would've loved anything he gave me, but I'd definitely seen enough roses.
I peered up at him, cradling the bouquet like a baby. "You've never given flowers?" I teased.
"I've sent them," he rushed out, quick to clarify. "But I've never . . ."
He trailed off, laughing at himself, and I broke out in a smile, thinking that it sounded like him. Of course Tyler Marek hadn't taken the time to give flowers.
Until me.
He stepped up, a heated look entering his eyes as he pinched my chin. "I wanted to see the look on your face," he whispered.
I leaned in, grazing his lips. "Well, I love them."
"You should," he shot out. "Orchids are temperamental. Just like you."
I pushed him away, shoving the flowers to his chest as he laughed.
"Let me go get my things," I told him, unable to keep the smile from my face as I shook my head. "I want you to come to my apartment before dinner. There's something I need to show you."
I spun around and headed up the stairs, back into the school. We were taking Christian to dinner, but I needed to take care of one more thing before I moved on.
Even though there was still the unresolved issue of someone being in my apartment, I wasn't going to waste one more minute of my life being scared. I wouldn't move. I wouldn't sleep with the lights on.
And I wouldn't run to Tyler for protection.
I'd lock my doors, be aware of my surroundings, and never let anyone hold me hostage again.
If someone wanted to hurt me, they would find a way.
But what I really needed to do was get rid of the letters. And I wanted Tyler there when I did it.
Walking down the dim hallway, I veered right and slipped into my dark classroom, going straight for my wardrobe to retrieve my handbag and then to my desk for the folder of papers I needed to grade tonight.
But I glanced up and jumped, surprised.
"Jack?" I gasped, seeing my brother in the back of the classroom with his arms folded and staring out the window.
I'd thought he'd left.
Putting my stuff down, I slowly rounded my desk, watching him. "Jack, what are you doing here?" I asked.
He didn't move, only stared out the window, looking deep in thought.
"The cameras still follow you around," he mused. "Even now."
_What?_
And then I remembered the interview he'd been here for earlier and how strange it was to be back in front of a camera again.
I studied Jack, but it was already growing dark outside and there was no light in the classroom. I couldn't make out his face.
I inched toward him, shrugging. "I don't mind it so much anymore," I confessed. "It was to help the school."
But then he turned his face toward me, and I saw pain written all over his expression.
"Dad loved baseball." He spoke in a sad voice. "I was the oldest. Why didn't he name me Easton?" he challenged. "Or any name related to the sport for that matter?"
I narrowed my eyes, half confused about why he was talking about this now and half wondering where it was leading.
Our father had named me after the Easton baseball bat. I never told people that, because I found it embarrassing, but Jack was right. Our father loved the game.
He even wanted me to play when he started noticing I had a penchant for sports, but my mother thought tennis was close enough and had a wider range of opportunities for a woman. Instead of swinging a bat, I swung a racket.
"Well, at least you got to play baseball," I told him.
He shook his head and turned his gaze back out the window.
"I got that job at Greystone because of you," he bit out. "Marek put in a word for me. A perk when your sister sleeps with powerful people, I guess."
My heart began racing, and I froze. "Jack, what's wrong with you?"
My brother never said things like that to me. Plus, he looked like he hated me right now.
He turned, locking eyes with me. "I was happy," he told me. "When Chase Stiles drove you inward, started messing with your game . . ." he explained. "I was happy about that, Easton."
I felt my stomach roll, and I backed away.
"I hated seeing you hurt," he choked out, tears caught in his throat, "but I loved seeing your career go to hell," he admitted.
His face grew hard, and his eyes pierced me. "I loved seeing our parents lose their grip on you as you got more and more defiant," he bit out. "I loved seeing you fail."
"Jack." I could barely breathe.
I shook my head, trying to take short breaths, but barely any air was getting in.
He stepped forward. "I love you," he professed. "I do, and I want good things for you, but, God, Easton," he gritted out, tears pooling in his eyes. "I hated you, too."
I let my eyes fall to the ground. What the hell was going on? in Jack had always supported me. Always tried to protect me.
I thought he was okay. I thought the amount of attention I got or the fact that our parents treated me just a little bit better was something he'd moved past.
But deep down it was still there. I couldn't believe he'd never let on about any of this to me before.
I closed my eyes, feeling weary. "I'm sorry," I said, meaning it. If I were in his shoes, I'd no doubt have a lot of resentment, too.
He sniffled, evening out his expression. "It's not your fault," he maintained. "It never was. You didn't make our parents favor you. You didn't excel at tennis out of spite." And then he spoke slowly. "You're a winner, Easton. Everything I want to be."
I moved to go to him, but he backed up.
"It was me," he shot out.
"What was you?" I breathed out.
"The cabinets, the calls, the treasure box—it was all me," he confessed.
_What?_
Rage curled my fingers into fists. He'd opened all of the cabinets, the shower curtain, been in my closet, opened my window, and smashed the box, tearing up all of the letters.
"Why?" I cried. "I don't understand."
"Because it was supposed to be my turn!" he shouted, glaring at me. "For the past five years, it was my turn to have the attention. You leaned on me!" He hit his chest. "You needed me."
I slowly shook my head, backing away from him. My face cracked, and tears started streaming down my cheeks.
I swallowed, choking out my words. "How could you?"
"I wanted you to be okay." His voice was barely audible. "I wanted you happy with friends and loving the life you lived, but . . ."
"But?" I pressed.
He hesitated, looking up at me.
"He's going to be a senator," Jack stated. "If your relationship went the distance, you'd be back in the limelight."
"You were trying to get me to shrink away again," I cried, turning angry.
But he went on. "And then _Newsweek_ and the interview today . . ." he pointed out. "It doesn't matter what you do, you'll always outshine me!" He hardened his jaw, scowling. "Why couldn't you just stay quiet? Why couldn't you just be normal like everyone else? Just be my sister! Let me have something!"
I continued backing away, thinking about him doing those things. He'd known it would hurt me.
"You made me think someone was in my home," I charged. "In my things! You terrified me!"
He closed his eyes, looking like he was ready to break.
"I often wondered what made Chase Stiles give up," he rasped. "Why did he take his own life?"
I stared at my brother.
"He knew he was going to hurt you," he concluded. "And he didn't want to."
Yes. The final stage of stalking was physical violence. Chase's abuse had been growing more and more threatening, and Jack was probably right. I didn't know why Chase killed himself, but I did know he was losing his grip. Or what grip he had left.
And my brother? Would he go that far?
He seemed to see the flash of awareness and understanding in my eyes, because he rushed forward.
"I would never hurt you."
But it was too late. Spinning on my heel, I ran out of my classroom and into the hallway with Jack yelling behind me.
"Easton!" he called.
But I raced down the hall, needing to get away from him.
I wasn't sure if he would hurt me, but up until this morning I wouldn't have thought he could've done any of the things he'd done. I had thought, next to Tyler, Jack was the person I could trust most in the world.
Why would he have wanted me to live in fear?
I ran outside, but Jack's voice was right behind me. "Easton, stop!"
He grabbed my wrist, and I cried out, stumbling in the heels and slamming with all my weight against the wrought-iron railing of the staircase.
"Jack, please!" I cried, grabbing on to his hand with both of my own as I screamed, falling over the side.
"Jack!" I cried out, again grasping at his hand with both of mine.
He hung over the railing, grunting as he tried to pull me back up, but my legs flailed fifteen feet above the cement ground below, and I gripped his hand so tightly, my knuckles turned white.
I twisted my head, seeing the distance to the ground below me and crying out as my arms felt like they were being ripped from their sockets.
Jack grabbed underneath my arm with his hand, fear in his eyes as he tried to pull me back up.
"Jesus Christ!" Tyler bellowed, swinging his torso over the side and grabbing me, too. "What the hell happened?"
I breathed as fast as my heart beat, and I cried out as both of them pulled me back up over the side of the railing.
I instantly fell into Tyler, both of us slamming to the ground.
He pulled my body in to his, holding me tight. I hugged him close, hearing his heart race through his clothes as I laid my head against his chest.
"Come here," he soothed, wrapping his arms around me.
I opened my eyes, seeing my brother on his knees by the railing. His broken eyes were filled with regret.
"Easton, please," he whispered. "I would never hurt you."
"What's going on?" Tyler shot out.
But I just looked at my brother, my tears making him blurry. "You already did hurt me," I told him. "You broke my heart."
And then I looked up to Tyler, his brows pinched together in concern.
"Take me home," I begged.
# TWENTY-SEVEN
EASTON
Tyler's body shifted under me, and I opened my eyes to see him reaching over and switching on an iPod dock. The soft tune of Bush's "Glycerine" drifted out of the speakers, and I closed my eyes, hearing the light rain tap against his bedroom windows as well.
"You put an iPod in here," I said just above a whisper, nuzzling into the safe heat of his body.
His fingers grazed up and down my back as he kissed my forehead. "I've started taking time to enjoy the little things again," he answered. "Rediscover my youth . . ."
My body shook with a little laugh. It was all I could manage, I was so tired. Mentally and physically.
"Yeah," I joked. "I think I was two when this song came out."
He snorted. "Well, listen and learn," he shot back. "This comes from the last time music was good."
"Mmmm," I moaned, sliding my leg over his hip and laying my body on top of his.
I soaked up the sensation of his naked chest against my bare breasts, both of us completely unclothed under the sheets.
"Are you okay?" he asked gently, rubbing his hands up and down my side.
"Don't ask me that," I told him, lying on his chest with my eyes closed. "Ever."
"Okay," he replied quietly. "How do you feel?"
I laughed, loving how he'd gotten around that one.
I was sick of being worried about, coddled, and spending my time on things that didn't bring me happiness.
Tyler was my happiness, and at that moment I was exactly where I wanted to be and doing exactly what I wanted to do.
"Safe," I replied.
After we'd gotten home last night—and left my brother alone inside the school—we'd taken Christian to dinner at La Crepe Nanou. After I'd cried in Tyler's car, argued with him about just staying at home for the night, and then dried my eyes. I wasn't letting anything else get in our way. We'd promised Christian dinner out, and we weren't disappointing him.
I was heartbroken over my brother's betrayal, and I had no idea what we were going to do, how I would ever feel safe around him again, but I was done spending time holding myself back from life.
After dinner I'd dived into Tyler's shower, neither of us caring that Christian probably knew I was spending the night. It wouldn't be a habit, and we would be discreet, but Tyler wouldn't let me go home after the episode, and Christian seemed thrilled to have me around anyway.
"I don't want Jack around you," Tyler insisted, taking my ass in both hands.
"Neither do I," I assured him. "Not right now anyway."
"Easton," he warned, not liking the sound of that.
I opened my heavy lids and pushed myself up, my dark hair tickling my breasts.
"He wouldn't have hurt me," I said, staring down at him and running my hands up his chest.
"You don't know that," he pointed out. "He needs help."
"I know." I nodded. "I won't agree to even the possibility of being in touch with him unless he gets some help first."
I looked down at Tyler, ready to cry because I loved him so much. I touched him everywhere, my hands running over his chest and down his arms and then coming up to graze his face with my fingertips.
I rolled my hips, feeling him grow hard under me.
"Can you take me to my apartment in the morning?" I asked. "I need to take care of something."
He kneaded my hips and ass, his breathing growing labored. "Of course," he answered. "But I want you to stay here for a while."
I shook my head, giving him a gentle "no."
"Easton," he bit out, looking at me with less patience.
I fell forward, planting my hands on both sides of his head. "Yes, Mr. Marek," I sang out.
I heard his sigh.
"It's not that I don't want to be here," I rushed out, "but it's my apartment, and I'll come and go as I like."
"Then I want Patrick taking you to and from—"
But I got in his face and scowled at him as he tried to tell me what to do.
"All right," he bit out. "You're right. It just doesn't make it any easier."
I grabbed his lips, nibbling and kissing softly.
"Really?" I cooed. "Could you say that again?"
He chuckled. "Say what?"
"The part about me being right," I shot back.
"I didn't say that," he growled into my mouth as I began grinding on him.
I moaned, feeling his tongue flick my upper lip and then catch my bottom lip between his teeth.
"I love you, Mr. Marek," I teased, closing my eyes and kissing him back.
The wet heat of his mouth as I plunged my tongue inside sent me reeling, and I ground myself against him faster.
He whipped off the sheet and reached between us, grabbing his cock.
"Do you feel safe?" he asked me again. "I just need to make sure you're okay."
I arched my neck back and lifted up, positioning his cock at my entrance and slowly sitting back down, sliding him inside of me.
Smirking, I started moving up and down his dick. "My OCD hasn't kicked in, if that's what you're wondering."
He gripped my hips, dragging his bottom lip between his teeth as he felt me from the inside. "I kind of miss it," he breathed out. "It was cute."
I smiled, rolling my hips faster and harder.
"I'm all for eight orgasms tonight if you want," I told him. "Do you have Viagra?"
"Viagra?" He scowled and shot up, rolling me over onto my back and breathing against my lips as he ground between my hips. "You're going to pay for that."
—
After school the next day, Christian attended soccer practice, and Tyler took me to my apartment. The last time I had been there had been only a little more than a day ago, before the interview and before my brother's confession.
Tyler hadn't wanted me to deal with returning this morning before school for fresh clothes, so he had called a shop and had Patrick pick me up a new outfit.
But I needed to come back today. To rid myself of bad memories and move on.
Coming back downstairs, I met Tyler, who waited in the living room in front of the fireplace. Holding the ziplock bags in my hands, I stared at the letters, seeing my former coach's writing peeking out from the mess of torn paper.
"They're all the letters that Chase wrote me," I told him. "His obsessions, threats . . ." I trailed off. "I had never seen them before my parents died, and it was only afterward that I realized the full extent of how he threatened me and my family."
"Why did you keep them?" he questioned.
I looked up at him, his navy blue tie loosened against his white shirt and heather-gray suit.
"My parents, my sister, Avery . . ." I began. "They died because I put them on the road that night. I took a risk I shouldn't have for my own selfish reasons, and I deserved to remember that."
"Did you think you would forget what you lost?"
I paused and then dropped my head, sighing. _No, I will never forget._ I felt the pain of their deaths every day. But back then, taking any kind of a risk made me feel like there was no control. There was no "careful."
For so long I had felt like I was in a stalemate with Chase, waiting for something to fucking happen, and when I finally chose to give up the control and say "Fuck it, let's see what happens," I liked it.
But I hadn't realized that I wasn't just risking myself. There were others I didn't think about.
"I deserved to be punished," I told him.
He touched my face, meeting my eyes. "You could never have known."
No, I couldn't. But carelessness brings consequences. I should've known that.
Which accounted for my behavior of making my life afterward as controlled as possible.
"Easton, there's no line you can walk that's safe enough," Tyler implored. "You didn't do anything out of malice. Crimes deserve to be punished. Mistakes deserve to be forgiven."
I nodded, finally understanding the truth behind his words. And I was ready.
Opening the bags, I dumped the contents into the fireplace and lit a match from up on the mantel. Leaning down, I lit the scraps on fire and stood back upright, both of us watching them turn to ash.
Taking his hand, I breathed out a sigh of relief, finally feeling better than I had since before I could remember.
"Are you ever going to be careful with me?" I asked quietly, watching the flames burn bright.
"No."
I looked up at him, my lips curling into a small smile. "Good."
# EPILOGUE
"Chin up," the photographer instructed, smiling behind her camera.
I tilted my head up an inch, keeping it cocked slightly to the right, my relaxed smile still plastered on my face.
_The shit I do for him._
I sat on the arm of a rich, brown leather chair, my legs crossed and my arm resting on Tyler's shoulder as he sat in the chair, both of us posing for our engagement photos.
Correction: engagement-slash-campaign publicity photo representing our perfect American family's high moral fiber. _Riiiiight._
I dropped my eyes, feeling a blush heat my cheeks, remembering all the _immoral_ things he'd done to me last night in our bed.
"Excellent," the photographer cooed, snapping a few more shots as she leaned down again behind her tripod.
I kept my left hand on my thigh, the round black onyx stone set in a platinum band and surrounded by freshwater pearls visible in the pictures.
Tyler had pushed for a diamond ring, wanting the best, but Jay liked my idea of environmental awareness as good publicity. So many diamonds came from war-torn countries, so I decided to go with something different.
Hell, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, rocked a sapphire engagement ring. The times were changing.
Actually, I just liked the pearls. It was Jay who was selling the war-torn story.
"You look incredible," Tyler commented, his white tie matching my cream-colored dress.
"Thank you," I whispered.
Over the past few months, we'd dived deeper and deeper into the campaign, but elections were still six months away, and I knew he was concerned that _his_ life took too much of our time.
I looked down, running my thumb over the _fff_ tattoo I'd gotten on the inside of my wrist when he'd proposed this past Mardi Gras at the very same annual ball where we first met the year before.
_Family, fortune, and future._
He'd had the same letters tattooed, but his appeared on the outside of his wrist, right under where his watch sat.
To ensure that we never took our gifts for granted or lost track of what was truly important, we had promised each other to prioritize.
Family came first. Always first. We took care of each other and relied on each other. Without the family and without Christian, everything else would be worthless.
Fortune came next. It almost seemed shallow to have fortune before future, but we realized that fortune was more than wealth. It was health, goals, and maintaining what we had in the work we wanted to contribute to the world. Our fortune was the things for which we were thankful and the things we had to give.
Future came last. Private ambitions, plans for the years down the road, and other goals that could possibly take our attention away from each other and our jobs would be considered only if everything else was strong.
Christian had wanted to get the tattoo, too, but we'd told him that he had to wait until he turned eighteen.
And then Tyler took him to get the tattoo anyway.
That was fine. He could deal with Christian's mother when she came home in July.
Tyler's arm behind my back shifted, and I jerked, feeling his hand rub against my ass.
I cleared my throat, and I could feel his smile as he squeezed me.
Christian sat behind the camera, playing on his phone, while Jay stood off to my left, periodically instructing the photographer on what shots to take and what angles to shoot, as if she didn't know already.
Walking up to me, he tried to pin something to my chest, and I knew right away that it was a flag.
I shot out my hand, shooing him away.
"Easton, really," he chided.
"It's tacky," I burst out. "This is my engagement photo."
I wasn't turning it into a political statement. We'd already had that argument.
"Tyler." Jay groaned. "A little help, please?"
Tyler simply shook his head, probably sick of Jay's and my bickering.
"You're handling the publicity," I pointed out, glaring at Jay, "and I even let you pick the wedding date, because you whined about how good it would be for the campaign, but when you start to dress me, that's when we have problems," I snapped. _"Capisce?"_
"Everyone who's anyone has a personal shopper, Easton," he whined. "She can tell you which clothes are best for your coloring—"
But I yelped, cutting off Jay's lecture, as my fiancé's hands grabbed me and I fell into Tyler's lap. His lips came down on mine, and I moaned, holding his face in my hands.
We pulled apart, laughing at each other, and I heard the camera click.
"Ah," the photographer sang. "That's the cover of _New Orleans_ magazine."
She looked at the screen of her digital camera, smiling.
"Now, Mr. Marek," she instructed. "Would you stand, please, and move to your fiancée's other side?"
Tyler rose from the chair and moved around to my left side, while I remained sitting.
She looked to me and asked, "Would you turn to him slightly and then cock your head a bit?"
I followed her directions, placing my arm around Tyler and leaning in to him as I tilted my head.
"Chin up," she chirped, and disappeared behind her camera again.
Tyler's scent invaded my head, and as much as I'd grown to love Christian, I was glad he was joining his friends in the country during spring break. Which started in a few days.
I still kept my apartment and would until the wedding in October, but it was getting harder and harder to stay there. Tyler and I found our time together when we could, and even though Christian wasn't stupid—he'd caught me there early one morning, probably figuring out I had stayed the night—we did make a huge effort to not make it obvious or inappropriate.
I was still a teacher at his school, after all.
And I'd decided to stay there, even taking on tennis coaching responsibilities for the girls' team for the next school year.
After the election, though, if Tyler won, we'd reevaluate whether or not we needed to relocate to Washington, D.C., for the length of his term.
For now, though, we simply worked on his campaign and planned the wedding, which we decided to have at Degas House to commemorate the paintings we discussed when we first met.
"I want my son in some photos as well," Tyler said, and the photographer nodded.
I looked over at Christian, loving how close he and Tyler had become. They didn't always have the same interests, but they'd found a lot of common ground and enjoyed doing things together.
Christian had even started tagging along with Tyler on some of his campaign trips around the state, touring factories and neighborhoods, and he was very interested in his father's business. Not the office work part of it, but when Tyler had to take a trip to see equipment or check out a building site, Christian loved to join him as much as his school schedule allowed. Tyler was a good father, and he hardly went anywhere without Christian now.
Which got me thinking . . .
"We still haven't talked about that," I said under my breath just to him.
"What?" He glanced at me.
I licked my lips, not sure how I would answer the question I was about to ask. "Do you want children?" I questioned, and then corrected myself. "I mean, _more_ children?"
Tyler blinked, looking surprised, and then I saw his gaze go to Christian before turning back to me.
"Yes," he answered. "If it's with you."
My lips curled, and I felt strangely excited. A baby?
"You?" he hinted.
I inhaled a long, deep breath. "I think so." And then I looked at him, nodding as realization hit. "Yeah. I'd love to have one or two."
He leaned down and kissed me, his teasing lips making me promises for later that I couldn't wait for.
"Do you think we can balance it all?" I spoke against his lips. "Our careers, the campaign, children . . ."
He let out a sigh and stood back upright. "All we can do is try," he stated. "But we don't break our commitment. Family, fortune, future," he dictated. "None of it means anything without him or you."
I tightened my arm around him, not giving a damn that I needed him so much. I'd gotten very good at being weak, and I wasn't ashamed of it.
But in truth, I knew it wasn't weak to need people. To need love and connection.
You're only strong if you can stand on your own, right?
Nope.
The truth was, you're happier when you're needed and stronger when you're loved.
I could survive without Tyler, but why would I want to? Ever?
Nothing could replace him or erase him.
Except . . .
I opened my mouth, narrowing my eyes. "I forgot to ask." I looked at him with amused curiosity. "Which political party do you belong to?"
He broke out in a laugh, his chest shaking as he looked down at me.
"How is it that you don't know that?" he exclaimed. "You researched me online."
I shrugged. "I went to your website and social media, nosing around, but that was it."
Although we'd had discussions about his platform, and I'd accompanied him here and there, I realized it was the one thing that never came up.
He shook his head and stared at the camera.
"So?" I hinted.
"So what?"
I instantly hooded my eyes, unamused. "Which political party are you a member of, Tyler?"
"Does it matter?" he played.
"It might," I shot back.
But he just turned and wrapped me in his arms, bending me backward with the force of his kiss. I squealed under his lips and then let my eyes roll back, my head feeling dizzy, as his tongue entered my mouth.
"Ew." I heard Christian's complaint from across the room.
And then Jay. "All right," he chastised. "I'm getting the child out of here."
Tyler didn't break the kiss as he shot out his hand, waving goodbye to them, while I tried not to giggle.
He definitely knew how to shut me up.
# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, to all of the teachers in the world—the days are endless, the workload only increases, and you're not paid nearly what you're worth. But you're the greatest of all artists. Some paint with brushes, while others play guitars, carve wood, or perform onstage. But you work with living minds and diverse spirits and create dreams that cultivate futures. Thank you for everything you do!
Next, to the readers—this was the first book and the first characters I dived into after finishing the Fall Away series. So many of you have been there, sharing your excitement and showing your support, and I am continually grateful for your continued trust. I know my adventures aren't always easy, but I love them, and I'm glad so many others do, too.
To my family—my husband and daughter put up with my crazy schedule, my candy wrappers, and my spacing off every time I think of a conversation, plot twist, or scene that just jumped into my head at the dinner table. You both really do put up with a lot, so thank you for loving me anyway.
To Kerry Donovan and the rest of the team at New American Library—you've all been a joy to work with, and you've helped make one of my dreams come true. Every time I see my book in a book store, I know I didn't do that alone, and it makes me feel on top of the world. Thank you for helping me be the best I can be and for believing in me.
To Jane Dystel, my agent at Dystel and Goderich Literary Management—there is absolutely no way I could ever give you up, so you're stuck with me. I mean, I would literally wrap my body around your leg and chain myself to your hip. I hope you like the way I smell, because I'm with you to stay.
To the House of Pendragon—you're my happy place. Well, you and Pinterest. Thanks for being the support system I need and always being positive.
To Vibeke Courtney, who is always in my acknowledgments—thank you for teaching me how to write and laying it down straight.
To Lisa Pantano Kane—you challenge me with the hard questions.
To Ing Cruz at As the Pages Turn Book Blog—you support out of the goodness of your heart, and I can't repay you enough. Thank you for the release blitzes and blog tours.
To all of the bloggers—plain and simple, oh, my goodness! You spend your free time reading, reviewing, and promoting, and you do it for free. You are the life's blood of the book world, and who knows what we would do without you. Thank you for your tireless efforts. You do it out of passion, which makes it all the more incredible.
To Abbi Glines, Jay Crownover, Tabatha Vargo, Tijan, N. Michaels, Eden Butler, Natasha Preston, Kirsty Moseley, and Penelope Ward for their encouragement and support over the years. It's validating to be recognized by your peers, and authors supporting authors cultivates mutual respect. Positivity is contagious, so thank you for spreading the love.
To every author and aspiring author—thank you for the stories you've shared, many of which have made me a happy reader in search of a wonderful escape and a better writer, trying to live up to your standard. Write and create, and don't ever stop. Your voice is important, and as long as it comes from your heart, it is right and good.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. There is a twelve-year age difference between the protagonists of _Misconduct_. Do you believe the age gap made a difference as far as life experiences and maturity? How much of an age gap would be too much for you?
2. Easton fantasizes about standing in the middle of a burning room in chapter 1, but then she blows out the candle as she leaves the masquerade ball. Is there a significance in this action?
3. Tyler is stubborn about many things: social media, accepting campaign donations, taking on more responsibilities than he can handle. Why do you think Tyler is initially so inflexible? Is he naturally resistant or did he have good reasons for the fights he picks?
4. Why did Tyler question Easton's teaching methods? Do you believe he had a genuine fatherly concern?
5. Easton avoids intimacy, choosing to keep her distance from forming any real attachment to men. What's different about Tyler? Did she let him into her life, or did he force his way in?
6. So much of the city of New Orleans plays a part in this book. Have you ever visited the city, and, if so, what was your most memorable experience?
7. Had Easton's parents and her sister not died, would Easton have stayed with tennis, or would she have discovered her gift for teaching?
8. If Easton's parents had gone to the police about Chase Stiles, how do you think Easton's life would have been different?
9. Easton uses social media tools to teach her students. If you were a parent, would you embrace this practice in your child's school? What would be some of the advantages and/or disadvantages of using social media for instruction?
10. Tyler has a difficult relationship with his son, which he tries, throughout the novel, to fix. Given the demands in Tyler's life, do you believe his actions to improve that relationship were commendable, or would you have tried something different?
11. Easton has some fun at Tyler's house during the rainstorm, such as organizing his books in his study. Do you have any urges to organize something in other people's homes when you visit? If so, what do you find yourself needing to organize?
12. Tyler is ashamed of his role—or lack thereof—in his son's life when he was younger. Is what he said true, that it's never too late? Or do you believe what Brynne said on the phone call, that there comes a time when we've been disappointed too much to ever repair the bonds?
13. How do you think Christian felt when he would hear his mom and stepfather talking badly about Tyler?
14. Keeping in mind that Tyler promised he wouldn't hook up with anyone else, why did he entertain the idea when Easton presented him with Kristen?
15. In the end Easton and Tyler agree that Jack needs help. Knowing the amount of pain and stress Easton has suffered in her life, do you believe she'll be able to reconcile with her brother?
16. Based on the relationship that Tyler and Easton share, who is more dominant?
17. Were Tyler's reasons for ending the relationship in chapter 21 justified? Why or why not?
18. What do you think made Tyler finally see the light about what was truly important and helped him get his priorities straight?
19. As Tyler is running for office, and with politics filtered daily into our lives through the news and social media, do you believe Easton's statement of "the most popular wins" to be a true statement? Do you research a candidate on your own without the influence of media before you vote?
20. Christian speaks his mind a lot in _Misconduct_ , even showing up the adults in his life from time to time. Do you feel that he was right to hold Easton more accountable for her affair with his father? Why do you think her actions hurt him more than his own father's?
21. Why did Christian keep his knowledge of the affair secret?
22. Do you feel that we place too much pressure on our children to excel at too many activities such as sports? Do you feel that the pressure Easton felt with her tennis career exacerbated her OCD tendencies, not just the counting but the need for perfection, or did the trauma of her parents' and sister's deaths contribute more?
23. Easton did not know Tyler's political affiliation in his senate run. Which party do you believe she supports? Which party do you believe he supports?
24. Easton states to Tyler throughout their relationship not to be careful with her. What do you believe she means?
_Don't miss Penelope Douglas's_
FALLING AWAY
_Available now._
_Continue reading for a preview._
#
Three whole years.
I'd had a boyfriend for three whole years, and I still had more orgasms when I was by myself.
"Damn, baby, you feel good." His sleepy whisper felt wet on my neck as he dragged his lazy lips over my skin.
_Packing_. That was what I'd forgotten to add to my to-do list for tomorrow. It wasn't likely I'd forget to pack for college, but everything needed to go on the list so it could be checked off.
"You're so hot." Liam's fish lips tickled my neck in short, slow pecks. It once made me giggle, but now it kind of made me want to bite him.
_And a pharmacy run,_ I remembered. I wanted to stock up on my pill so I wouldn't have to worry about it for a while. _Packing and the pharmacy. Packing and the pharmacy. Packing and the pharmacy. Don't forget, K.C._
Liam thrust his hips between my legs, and I rolled my eyes.
We were still clothed, but I wasn't sure he realized that.
If I weren't so tired, I'd laugh. He rarely got drunk after all—tonight only because it was an end-of-summer bash. And although I'd never been overwhelmed with a desire for sex, I did love that he tried to jump my bones at every opportunity. It made me feel wanted.
But it just wasn't happening tonight.
"Liam," I grunted, twisting up my lips as I pushed his hand off my breast, "I think we're done for the night, okay? Let's lock up the car and walk to your house."
We'd been in his car for over a half hour—me trying to indulge his fantasy of sex in risky places and him trying to . . . Hell, I didn't even know what he was trying to do.
I felt guilty for not being more into it lately. I felt guilty for not helping him get into it tonight. And I felt guilty for making mental additions to my to-do list while he was trying—keyword, _trying_ —to get it on with me.
We hadn't made love in a long time, and I didn't know what my problem was anymore.
His head sank into my shoulder, and I felt the weight of his hundred and eighty pounds collapse on my body.
He didn't move, and I let out a sigh, relaxing into the passenger seat of his Camaro, my muscles burning from trying to support his body weight all this time.
He'd given up. _Thank God._
But then I groaned, registering that his body had gone a little too still, except for the slow, soft rhythm of his breathing.
_Great._ Now he was passed out.
"Liam," I whispered, not sure why, since we were completely alone in his car on a dark, quiet street outside my friend Tate Brandt's house.
Arching my head up, I spoke into his ear that was nearly covered by his blond hair. "Liam, wake up!" I wheezed, since his weight was hindering my oxygen intake.
He moaned but didn't budge.
I slammed my head back onto the headrest and ground my teeth together. What the hell was I going to do now?
We'd gone to the Loop tonight for the last race before college started next week and then Tate and her boyfriend, Jared Trent, had thrown a party at his house, which just happened to be right outside, next door to her place. I'd told my mom that I'd be sleeping over at her house when I was really planning on spending the night with my boyfriend.
Who was now passed out.
Tate's house was locked, I didn't know how to drive Liam's car, and the last thing I was ever going to do was call my mother for a ride.
Reaching for the handle, I swung the car door open and pulled my right leg from under Liam. I pushed against his chest, raising him off me only as much as I needed to squirm out from underneath his body and stumble out of the car. He groaned but didn't open his eyes, and I wondered if I should be worried about how much he'd had to drink.
Leaning in, I watched his chest rise and fall in quiet, steady movements. I grabbed the keys he'd dropped on the floor and my wrist purse with my cell phone and slammed the door shut, locking the car.
Liam didn't live too far, and even though I knew it was a lot to ask, I was going to have to wake up Tate. If Jared was even letting her get any sleep at all.
I ran my hands down my strapless white summer dress and powered quietly down the sidewalk in my rhinestone sandals. Pretty dressed up for the race track earlier, but I wanted to look nice at the party. It was the last time I was going to see some of these people. For a while, anyway.
Squeezing my little purse—small enough for my phone and some money—in my hand, I traipsed up the small incline into Jared's yard and up the front steps of his house. No light shone from inside, but I knew there had to be some people still here, since the street was littered with a few unfamiliar cars and I heard the low beat of music still pouring out. Lyrics saying something about "down with the sickness."
I turned the knob, stepped into the house, and peered around the corner into the living room.
And stopped. Dead. _What the . . . ?_
The room was dark, not a single light showing other than the blue glow from the screen on the stereo.
Maybe there were other lights on in the house. Maybe there were other people still here. I couldn't say.
All I could do was fucking stand there as my eyes stung, and a lump stretched my throat, at the sight of Jaxon Trent damn near naked on top of another girl.
I instantly looked away, closing my eyes.
_Jax._ I shook my head. _No._ I didn't care about this _._ Why was my heart beating so fast?
Jaxon Trent was Tate's boyfriend's little brother. Nothing more. Just a kid.
A kid who watched me. A kid I rarely ever talked to. A kid who felt like a threat just standing next to me.
A kid who was looking less and less like one every day.
And right now he wasn't coming up for air. I jerked my body toward the door, not wanting him—or her—to see me, but . . .
"Jax," the girl gasped. "More. Please."
And I stopped, unable to move again. _Just leave, K.C. You don't care._
I squeezed the doorknob, sucking in quick breaths, but I didn't move. Couldn't move.
I didn't know why my hands shook.
Chewing my bottom lip, I inched around the corner again and saw him and the girl.
My heart pounded like a jackhammer in my chest. And it hurt.
The girl—I didn't recognize her from school—was completely naked, lying on her stomach on the couch. Jax was sprawled on top of her from behind, and judging from his jeans pushed down below his ass and his thrusting hips, he was inside her.
He didn't even get fully undressed to make love to a girl. He couldn't even look her in the face. I wasn't surprised. With the arrogance he displayed around school, Jax could do whatever he wanted, and he did.
Holding himself up with one arm, he used the other to wrap around her face and twist her chin toward him before he leaned down and covered her mouth with his.
Liam had never kissed me like that. Or I'd never kissed him like that.
The girl—long blond hair fanning around her face and spilling over her shoulders—kissed him back with full force, their jaws moving in sync as his tongue and teeth worked her.
Jax's smooth, sculpted hips ground into her in slow, savory movements while his hand left her face to run down her back and then slide underneath her body to cup her breast. He didn't do one thing at a time. Every part of his body was in this, and everything he did looked as if it felt good.
And why wouldn't it? Jax was coveted by the girls in this town for a reason after all. He was suave, confident, and good-looking. Not my type, but there was no denying that he was sexy. According to Tate, he was part Native American.
His skin was like toffee—smooth, unblemished, and warm-looking. His hair was a deep brown, almost black, and it hung halfway down his back. He often braided pieces of it before tying it back into a ponytail midskull, which he did _all_ the time. I'd never seen his hair hanging loose.
He had to be six feet tall by now and would probably be exceeding his brother in height in no time. I'd seen Jax on the lacrosse field at school and at the gym where we both worked out. The dips in his biceps and triceps flexed as he held himself above the girl and worked his body into hers. With the moonlight coming through the window, I could just make out the V in his torso as it descended to his abs and lower.
He didn't break pace as he whispered in her ear, and as if she were given an order, she dropped her foot to the floor, bent her knee, and arched her back.
Jax let his head fall back and bared his teeth as he sank deeper into her, and I stared, absently tracing the scar on the inside of my wrist.
I wanted it to be like that for me. I wanted to be breathless like her. Gasping and desperate. Passionate and hungry.
Liam had made me happy once, and when he messed up, I took him back, because I thought the relationship was worth it.
But now, seeing this . . . I knew we were missing something.
I didn't know when the tear spilled over, but I felt it drop onto my dress, and I blinked rapidly, wiping my face.
And then my eye caught something, and I blinked again, noticing someone else in the room. Another girl, nearly naked in her bra and panties.
I swallowed a gasp, sucked in air, and then swallowed again.
_What the hell?_
She walked across the room—she must've been over by the windows, because I hadn't seen her until now—and leaned down, kissing Jax hard.
Acid bile crept up my throat.
"Ugh!" I growled, and stumbled backward, hitting the opposite wall in the entryway. Scrambling, I yanked open the front door and flew outside without looking back.
Jumping the steps, I had hit the grass running when a deep voice commanded behind me, "Stop!"
I didn't.
Screw him. Screw Jaxon Trent. I didn't know why I was mad, and who the hell cared?
Running across the lawn, I bolted for the sidewalk, wishing I'd worn sneakers instead of sandals that flopped around on my feet.
"Stop, or I will take you to the ground, K.C.!" Jax's loud bellow threatened behind me, and I brought myself to a sudden halt.
_Shit._ My eyes darted from left to right, searching for an escape. He wouldn't really do that, would he?
I inched around slowly, watching as he stepped off the stairs and walked toward me. He was wearing pants, thank God. But I guess that was easy, since he never really took them off. The dark-washed jeans hung off his hips, and I got a damn clear look at the muscles framing his abs. He had a swimmer's body, but I wasn't sure if he was actually a swimmer. From the way the top of his jeans barely hung just above his hairline, I guessed he wasn't wearing boxers . . . or anything under the jeans. I thought of what was just beneath his pants, and heat warmed my belly. I clenched my thighs together.
I shot my eyes down to the ground, wondering how I could stand the sight of him. He was just a kid. Did he do things like that with a lot of girls?
He came up to stand in front of me, hovering down, since he was nearly a half foot taller. "What are you doing here?" he accused.
I locked my mouth shut and scowled at the air around him, still avoiding eye contact.
"You left with your dipshit boyfriend an hour ago," he pointed out.
I kept my hot eyes averted.
"K.C.!" He shoved his hand in my face, snapping his fingers a few times. "Let's process what you just saw in there. You entered my house uninvited in the middle of the night and witnessed me having sex with a girl in the privacy of my own home. Now let's move on. Why are you roaming around in the dark alone?"
I finally looked up and sneered. I always had to do that to cover up the way my face felt on fire at the sight of his blue eyes. For someone so dark and wild, his eyes were completely out of place but never seemed wrong. They were the color of a tropical sea. The color of the sky right before storm clouds rolled in. Tate called them azure. I called them hell.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I took a deep breath. "Liam's too drunk to drive, all right?" I bit out. "He passed out in the car."
He looked down the street to where Liam's car sat and narrowed his eyes before scowling back down at me. "So why can't you drive him home?" he asked.
"I can't drive a clutch."
He closed his eyes and shook his head. Running his hand through his hair, he stopped and fisted it midstroke. "Your boyfriend is a fucking idiot," he snarled, and then dropped his hand, looking exasperated.
I sighed, not wanting to get into it. He and Liam never got along, and while I didn't know why, I did know it was mostly Jax's fault.
I'd known him for almost a year, and even though I knew small details—he was into computers, his real parents weren't around, and he thought of his brother's mother as his own—he was still a mystery to me. All I knew was that he looked at me sometimes, and lately, it was with disdain. As if he was disappointed.
I tipped my chin up and kept my tone flat. "I knew Tate was staying with Jared tonight, and I didn't want to wake up her dad to let me in the house to crash. I need her to help me get Liam home and to let me in her house. Is she up?" I asked.
He shook his head, and I wasn't sure if that meant "no" or "you've got to be kidding me."
Digging in his jeans pocket, he pulled out keys. "I'll drive you home."
"No," I rushed. "My mom thinks I'm staying at Tate's tonight."
His eyes narrowed on me, and I felt judged. Yeah, I was lying to my mother to spend the night with my boyfriend. And, yes, I was eighteen years old and still not allowed the freedom of an adult. _Stop looking at me like that._
"Don't move," he ordered, and then turned around, walking back to his house.
After less than a minute he walked back out and started across the lawn to Tate's, jerking his chin at me to follow. I assumed he had a key, so I jogged up to his side as he climbed the porch steps.
"What about Liam?" I couldn't leave my boyfriend sleeping in his car all night. What if something happened to him? Or he got sick? And Tate's dad would have a fit if I tried to bring him inside.
He unlocked the front door—I wasn't sure if he had Tate's or Jared's keys—and stepped inside the darkened foyer. Turning to me, he waved his hand in a big show, inviting me in.
"I'll get Jared to follow me in his car while I drive Dick-wad home in his, okay?" He hooded his eyes, looking bored.
"Don't hurt him," I warned, crossing the threshold and walking past him.
"I won't, but he deserves it."
I swung back around to face him, arching an eyebrow. "Oh, you think you're so much better, Jax?" I smiled. "Do you even know those skanks' names in there?"
His mouth instantly tightened. "They're not skanks, K.C. They're friends. And I'd make damn sure any girlfriend of mine knew how to drive a manual, and I wouldn't have gotten so drunk that I couldn't keep her safe."
His quick temper threw me, and I immediately dropped my eyes, hating the rush of guilt that prickled my skin.
Why was I trying to cut him up? Jax definitely got under my skin, but he wasn't a bad guy. His behavior at school was certainly better than his brother's had been in the past. And Jax was respectful to teachers and friendly to everyone.
Almost everyone.
I took a deep breath and straightened my shoulders, ready to swallow a mouthful of pride. "Thank you. Thank you for driving Liam home," I offered, handing him the keys. "But what about your . . ." I gestured with my hand, trying to find the right word. "Your . . . dates?"
"They'll wait." He smirked.
I rolled my eyes. _Oooookay._
Reaching up, I worked my messy bun loose, pulling my mahogany hair down around my shoulders. But then I shot my eyes back up when I noticed Jax approaching me.
His voice was low and strong, without even a hint of humor. "Unless you want me to send them home, K.C.," he suggested, stepping closer, his chest nearly brushing mine.
_Send them home?_
I shook my head, blowing off his flirtation. It was the same way I'd reacted last fall the first time I met him, and every time after that when he made a suggestive remark. It was my safe, patented response, because I couldn't allow myself to react any other way.
But this time he wasn't smiling or being cocky. He might've been serious. If I told him to send the girls away, would he?
And as he reached out with a slow, soft finger and grazed my collarbone, I let time stop as I entertained the idea.
Jax's hot breath on my neck, my hair a tangled mess around my body, my clothes ripped apart on the floor as he bit my lips and made me sweat.
_Oh, Jesus._ I sucked in a breath and looked away, narrowing my eyes to get my damn head under control. _What the hell?_
But then Jax laughed.
Not a sympathetic laugh. Not a laugh that said he was just kidding. No, it was a laugh that told me I was the joke.
"Don't worry, K.C." He smiled, looking down on me as if I was pathetic. "I'm well aware your pussy is too precious for me, okay?"
_Excuse me?_
I knocked his hand away from my collarbone. "You know what?" I shot out, my fingers fisting. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but you actually make Jared look like a gentleman."
And the little shit grinned. "I love my brother, but get one thing straight." He leaned in. "He and I are nothing alike."
_Yeah._ My heart didn't pound around Jared. The hair on my arms didn't stand on end around him, either. I wasn't conscious of where he was and what he was doing every second that we were in the same room together. Jax and Jared were very different.
"Tattoos," I muttered.
"What?"
_Shit!_ Did I just say that out loud?
"Um . . . ," I choked out, staring wide-eyed in front of me, which just happened to be at his bare chest. "Tattoos. Jared has them. You don't. How come?" I asked, finally looking up.
His eyebrows inched together, but he didn't look angry. It was more . . . befuddled.
Jared's back, shoulder, arm, and part of his torso were covered with tattoos. Even Jared and Jax's best friend, Madoc Caruthers, had one. You would think with those influences, Jax would've gotten at least one by now. But he hadn't. His long torso and arms were unmarked.
I waited as he stared at me and then licked his lips. "I have tattoos," he whispered, looking lost in thought. "Too many."
I didn't know what I saw in his eyes at that moment, but I knew I'd never seen it before.
Backing away, he wouldn't meet my gaze as he turned and left the house. He closed the door, locked it, and walked down the porch steps quietly.
Moments later, I heard Jared's Boss and Liam's Camaro fire up and speed down the dark street.
And an hour later, I was still lying awake in Tate's bed, running my finger over the spot he'd touched on my collarbone and wondering about the Jaxon Trent I never got to know.
Copyright © Penelope Douglas
**Penelope Douglas** is the author of the _New York Times_ bestsellers _Bully_ and _Until You_. Born in Dubuque, Iowa, she earned a bachelor's degree in public administration and then a master's of education at Loyola University in New Orleans before becoming a teacher. She now writes full-time and lives in Las Vegas with her husband and their daughter.
For information on Penelope's other works, upcoming projects, playlists, bonus scenes, and events, please visit her Web site.
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1. Cover
2. Praise
3. Also by Penelope Douglas
4. Title Page
5. Copyright
6. Contents
7. Dedication
8. Playlist
9. Letter to the Reader
10. Epigraph
11. ONE
12. TWO
13. THREE
14. FOUR
15. FIVE
16. SIX
17. SEVEN
18. EIGHT
19. NINE
20. TEN
21. ELEVEN
22. TWELVE
23. THIRTEEN
24. FOURTEEN
25. FIFTEEN
26. SIXTEEN
27. SEVENTEEN
28. EIGHTEEN
29. NINETEEN
30. TWENTY
31. TWENTY-ONE
32. TWENTY-TWO
33. TWENTY-THREE
34. TWENTY-FOUR
35. TWENTY-FIVE
36. TWENTY-SIX
37. TWENTY-SEVEN
38. EPILOGUE
39. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
40. Readers Guide
41. Excerpt from Falling Away
42. About the Author
1. Contents
2. Cover
3. Start
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2. iv
3. v
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5. ix
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| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
} | 6,209 |
\section{Introduction}
Time series data recorded by sensors become ubiquitous in many areas including healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing and many others~\cite{madakam2015internet}. However, many of these data are highly confidential, e.g., patient records, which may cause privacy or accessibility concerns when using them~\cite{aggarwal2008privacy,Park2018,choi2017generating,yoon2019time,esteban2017real}. Generating synthetic data for applications, e.g., follow-up machine learning tasks has recently become one of the promising solutions~\cite{esteban2017real,choi2017generating}.
Although lack of theoretical guarantee, recent works proved that the generated data can be resilient to membership inference attack~\cite{Park2018}, patient re-identification~\cite{choi2017generating}, etc. More importantly, the generated data are often of higher utility than anonymization/perturbation methods~\cite{choi2017generating}.
Generating realistic time series data is a challenging problem~\cite{xu2020cot}.
A good generative model should not only capture the multidimensional distribution at each time point but also the temporal dynamics across time.
Further, synthetic time series should reflect corresponding global features, e.g., static features like age and the labels of our interests such as mortality in clinical data.
Recently, due to the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)~\cite{goodfellow2014generative} and its variants~\cite{arjovsky2017wasserstein, gulrajani2017improved}, it is natural to extend the GAN framework for time series data generation by applying recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as the generator and the discriminator. Following this paradigm, several works were proposed to solve the generation problems on time series data~\cite{mogren2016c,esteban2017real,yoon2019time, lin2020using, xu2020cot}.
However, these works are usually targeted at generation for simple, well-formatted time series data, thus may not be applicable to real-world time series data generation as shown in our empirical studies.
\begin{figure}[tb!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=1\linewidth]{example.pdf}
\caption{An example for real-world time series (\textit{NaN} denotes missing value).
}
\label{fig:example}
\end{figure}
The imperfect real-world time series data raise new challenges to the data generation algorithms. 1) Long sequences with variable lengths. The lengths of real-world time series data can be long, variable and sometimes critical, e.g., in survival analysis~\cite{ranganath2016deep,ren2019deep}. However, many existing methods~\cite{esteban2017real, yoon2019time, xu2020cot} were only evaluated on short, fixed-length time series, leaving their performance on long, variable-length time series unexplored. 2) Missing values. Missing values are very common in real-world time series data. An example in clinical data for mortality prediction is shown in Figure \ref{fig:example}. These missing values can be informative~\cite{rubin1976inference}. For instance, missing values in clinical data can reflect the patient's situation and the physician's decision~\cite{sterne2009multiple}. And more and more works are focusing on exploiting the missing patterns to improve prediction performance~\cite{che2018recurrent, cao2018brits, luo2018multivariate, luo2019e2gan, tang2020joint, srivastava2020forecasting}. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of the existing works has considered generating time series with informative missing values.
In this paper, we propose the Real-world Time Series Generative Adversarial Network (\textit{RTSGAN}), a novel generative framework to tackle the aforementioned challenges. \textit{RTSGAN} consists of two key components: 1) an encoder-decoder module, which learns to encode each time series instance into a fixed-dimension latent vector and reconstruct the whole time series from the latent vector via an autoencoder; and 2) a generation module, in which a Wasserstein GAN (WGAN)~\cite{gulrajani2017improved} is trained to generate vectors in the same latent space of the above autoencoder. By using the generator and the decoder, \textit{RTSGAN} is able to generate real-world time series data which respect the original feature distributions and the temporal dynamics. To better address the informative missing issue, we extend \textit{RTSGAN} to \textit{RTSGAN-M}: an observation embedding is proposed to enrich the information at each time step, and a novel decide-and-generate decoder is also proposed which first decides the time and missing patterns of the next step and then generates the corresponding feature values based on both local and global dependencies.
Empirical studies on four real-world time series datasets show that synthetic data generated by the proposed framework are not only more ``realistic-looking'', but also with higher utility for downstream machine learning tasks in the ``train on synthetic, test on real (TSTR)'' setting~\cite{esteban2017real}.
Our main contributions are summarized as follows:
\begin{itemize}
\item We propose a novel time series data generation framework named \textit{RTSGAN} to tackle the challenges raised by real-world time series data.
\item To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to investigate the problem of generating time series with missing values, in which an observation embedding and a novel decide-and-generate decoder in \textit{RTSGAN-M} are proposed to achieve better generation performance.
\item Detailed experiments are conducted on four real-world datasets including both complete, fixed-length time series and incomplete, variable-length time series, in which \textit{RTSGAN} outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of synthetic data utility in downstream classification and prediction tasks.
\end{itemize}
\section{Related Work}
Our work falls in the realm of time series data generation. Mogren~\cite{mogren2016c} first proposed the C-RNN-GAN method, using RNNs for both the generator and the discriminator to generate sequential data from random vector sequences. Using a similar architecture, RCGAN~\cite{esteban2017real} was then proposed to generate real-valued, labeled, medical data. However, traditional framework and loss function of GAN are not sufficient for multivariate time series generation because we need to capture not only the multidimensional feature distribution at each time point but also the temporal dependencies. Lin \cite{lin2020using} also identified these key challenges and designed a custom workflow called DoppelGANger. COT-GAN~\cite{xu2020cot} introduced a new adversarial objective based on optimal transport theories. But this method is unable to handle time series with variable lengths.
Autoencoders (AE) have also been exploited along with GANs,
which has shown success in computer vision \cite{makhzani2015adversarial} and natural language processing~\cite{zhao2018adversarially, haidar-etal-2019-latent}. For time series generation, TimeGAN \cite{yoon2019time} generates data from a learned embedding space which is optimized by binary adversarial feedback and stepwise supervised loss.
The dimension of their embedding space is proportional to the sequence length because it still generates a sequence from a sequence of random vectors.
By contrast, we aim to generate a sequence from a latent space whose dimension is invariant of sequence length. In this respect, the proposed method is similar to RNN-based variational autoencoders (VAE) \cite{fabius2014variational, bowman2015generating}. However, the assumption that the latent distribution is Gaussian is not always realistic and restricts the generation performance because real-world data may follow a much more complex distribution.
Since we aim to generate time series with missing values, this work is also related to missing data analysis.
Che~et al.\@\xspace~\cite{che2018recurrent} first introduced trainable decays to utilize missing patterns by incorporating masking and time intervals into a deep model and achieved better classification results. Efforts were later devoted to forecasting~\cite{tang2020joint, srivastava2020forecasting} and imputation~\cite{cao2018brits, luo2018multivariate, luo2019e2gan} for further exploiting informative missing values. Despite their success, these tasks are different from time series generation. Imputation aims to impute missing values for downstream analysis, and forecasting predicts feature values according to the past observations. Our goal is to generate time series with missing values which is more in line with real data.
\section{Problem Formulation}
Generally, each instance in the time series data mainly consists of two types of features: dynamic features (which change over time, e.g., heart rate of one patient) and global features (which include static features, e.g., age, and the global properties of observed sequences, e.g., the label of our interests).
Each feature in both dynamic features and global features can be continuous or categorical. We denote one instance in a time series training set $\mathcal{D}$ as $(\mathbf{X}, \mathbf{y})$. Here, $\mathbf{X} = (\mathbf{x}_1,...,\mathbf{x}_l)^\top \in \mathbb{R}^{l \times d_{x}}$ represents a $d_{x}$-dimensional multivariate time series which contains $l$ observations. $\mathbf{y} \in \mathbb{R}^{d_{y}}$ represents the global features of the time series.
In reality, time series data can be incomplete. In other words, missing values in time series data can commonly occur in both dynamic and global features as shown in Figure \ref{fig:example}. To formulate this problem, we denote each instance as $(\mathbf{X}, \mathbf{y}, \mathbf{M}^{(x)}, \mathbf{m}^{(y)})$.
The mask matrix $\mathbf{M}^{(x)} \in \mathbb{R}^{l \times K}$ is introduced to represent the missing values for $K$ dynamic features, where $M^{(x)}_{i,j} = 1$ if $j$-th feature at the $i$-th observation is observed and 0 otherwise.
Similarly, $\mathbf{m}^{(y)}$ represents the missing values in the global features.
The goal of this work is to use the training set $\mathcal{D}$ to learn data distribution and generate a synthetic dataset $\hat{\mathcal{D}}$ which is realistic-looking and has high utility. Downstream machine learning tasks, e.g., classification and sequence prediction, can be performed on the synthetic dataset $\hat{\mathcal{D}}$ and the resulting downstream models can have similar performance compared to those trained on $\mathcal{D}$.
\section{The Proposed RTSGAN Method}
\begin{figure}[tb!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=1\linewidth]{model.pdf}
\caption{Architecture of the proposed \textit{RTSGAN}. The blue lines indicate the training phase of AE and the dashed blue lines indicate targeted designs of \textit{RTSGAN-M} for incomplete time series generation. The red lines indicate the training phase of WGAN. Once training is finished, the generation process flows through the green lines: first generate a latent representation $\hat{r}$ via the generator and then synthesize time series autoregressively via the decoder.
}
\label{fig:RTSGAN}
\end{figure}
In this section, we present the real-world time series data generation framework --- \textit{RTSGAN}. As described in Figure~\ref{fig:RTSGAN}, \textit{RTSGAN} consists of two key components:
\begin{itemize}
\item {\bf Encoder-decoder module}. We first train an autoencoder to encode time series into a fixed-dimension latent space whose dimension is invariant of sequence length and then reconstruct inputs from this latent space;
\item {\bf Generation module}. After the training of encoder-decoder module is finished, we adopt the WGAN framework for generative modeling of the latent space so that the generator can output synthetic latent representations in the above latent space.
\end{itemize}
To generate time series, we just need to feed synthetic latent vectors from the generator to the decoder.
Previous GAN-based methods usually requires discriminating a \textit{sequence} of vectors in either the feature space \cite{esteban2017real, lin2020using,xu2020cot} or the latent space \cite{yoon2019time}. By contrast, our framework only requires discriminating a \textit{single} latent vector. When the time series data become complicated, e.g., with variable lengths and missing values, it would be easier for \textit{RTSGAN} to capture the original data distributions.
Next, we will describe the details of \textit{RTSGAN} on both complete time series and incomplete time series.
\subsection{RTSGAN on Complete Time Series}
We first present \textit{RTSGAN} for generating complete time series without missing values.
\subsubsection{The Encoder-Decoder Module}
This module consists of an encoder to encode the input sequence into a latent vector and a decoder to reconstruct the input sequence from the latent vector. Before feeding into the autoencoder, all features are transformed into $[0, 1]$, using min-max scaling for continuous features and one-hot encoding for categorical features.
{\bf Encoder}. Unlike the encoder in TimeGAN \cite{yoon2019time} which encodes each time series into a sequence of latent vectors, the encoder in our design aims to encode each time series into a compact representation whose dimension is invariant of sequence length. We first concatenate the global features $\mathbf{y}$ on the dynamic features $\mathbf{x}_i$ at each step as $\mathbf{e}_i = [\mathbf{x}_i, \mathbf{y}]$, and feed it into an $N$-layer Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) \cite{cho2014learning} with hidden dimension $d_\mathrm{AE}$ to get the hidden states $\mathbf{h}_{i}^{n}$ of each step $i$ for each GRU layer $n$ as follows:
\begin{equation}
\mathbf{h}_{i}^{n} = \mathrm{GRU}(\mathbf{e}_{i}), \ i \in [1,\ l], n\in [1,\ N].
\end{equation}
To better capture the temporal dynamics and global properties of time series,
we further apply pooling operations on the hidden states from the last layer of GRUs $\mathbf{h}_{i}^{N}$ to enrich the representation as follows:
\begin{equation}
\mathbf{s} = \mathrm{FC}([\mathrm{AvgPool}(\mathbf{h}_{i}^{N}),\ \mathrm{MaxPool}(\mathbf{h}_{i}^{N}),\ \mathbf{h}_{l}^{N}])
\end{equation}
Here, $\mathrm{FC}$ denotes a fully connected layer which aggregates the pooling results into space $\mathbb{R}^{d_\mathrm{AE}}$, and $\mathrm{LeakyReLU}$ \cite{maas2013rectifier} is used as activation function. Then, we concatenate the global information $\mathbf{s}$ and the last hidden state together to get a latent representation $\mathbf{r} \in \mathbb{R}^{(N+1)d_\mathrm{AE}}$ for a time series as follows:
\begin{equation}
\mathbf{r} = [\mathbf{s},\ \{\mathbf{h}_{l}^{n}\}_{n=1}^{N}].
\end{equation}
{\bf Decoder}. The decoder aims to reconstruct the whole time series from the latent representation $\mathbf{r}$. It includes two steps: 1) first reconstruct the global features $\hat{\mathbf{y}}$ via a fully connected layer and 2) then reconstruct the dynamic features $\mathbf{h}_{l}^{n}$ via a GRU. The global features $\hat{\mathbf{y}}$ is reconstructed as follows:
\begin{equation}
\hat{\mathbf{y}} = \mathrm{Act}(\mathbf{W}_{y} \mathbf{s} + \mathbf{b}_y). \\
\end{equation}
In the $\mathrm{Act}$ function, we apply softmax for categorical features and sigmoid for continuous features.
Next, we reconstruct the dynamic features. The decoder for the dynamic features is another $N$-layer GRU with hidden dimension $d_\mathrm{AE}$ which takes $\mathbf{h}_{l}^{n}$ as the initial hidden state $\hat{\mathbf{h}}_{0}^{n}$. The reconstruction process is autoregressive aiming to model each of $p(\mathbf{x}_i|\mathbf{x}_{1..i-1}, \mathbf{y})$ as follows:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
& \hat{\mathbf{e}}_{i} = [\mathbf{x}_{i-1},\ \mathbf{s}], \
\hat{\mathbf{h}}_{i}^{n} = \mathrm{GRU}(\hat{\mathbf{e}}_{i}, \hat{\mathbf{h}}_{i-1}^{n}), \ n\in [1,\ N]. \\
& \hat{\mathbf{x}}_{i} = \mathrm{Act}(\mathbf{W}_{x} \hat{h}_{i}^{N} + \mathbf{b}_x). \\
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
The initial input at the beginning of the autoregressive process is $\hat{\mathbf{e}}_{1} = [\mathbf{0}, \mathbf{s}]$. To deal with time series with variable lengths, we include sequence length $l$ as one of the global features. So after global features are reconstructed, we can control the dynamic feature reconstruction exactly by $\hat{l}$.
For the training of the autoregressive recurrent networks, we can use teacher-forcing \cite{graves2013generating, sutskever2011generating} which always uses ground-truth data $\mathbf{x}_{i-1}$ as the next-step input, or sampling \cite{bengio2015scheduled} on previous prediction $\hat{\mathbf{x}}_{i-1}$ and ground truth $\mathbf{x}_{i-1}$. The overall loss function is a linear combination of reconstruction loss for global features and dynamics features:
\begin{equation}
\label{eqn:loss}
L_\mathrm{re} = \frac{d_y}{d_x+d_y}L_{y}(\hat{\mathbf{y}}, \mathbf{y}) + \frac{d_x}{d_x+d_y}L_{x}(\hat{\mathbf{X}}, \mathbf{X}).
\end{equation}
Cross-entropy (CE) loss and mean squared error (MSE) loss are used for categorical features and continuous features respectively.
\subsubsection{The Generation Module}
As shown above, both global features and dynamic features are encoded into the same latent space, so that $\mathbf{r}$ naturally contains various relations inside time series and the autoregressive decoder itself maintains the temporal dynamics of time series. Therefore, we can synthesize a representation in the latent space and decode it autoregressively to generate the whole time series instead of producing synthetic outputs directly from the feature space.
Since the dimension of the latent space is invariant of sequence length $l$, it is much easier for the generation module to synthesize latent representations. Here, we employ the improved version of WGAN~\cite{gulrajani2017improved}. The generator in WGAN aims to minimize the 1-Wasserstein distance $W(P_{r}, P_{g})$ between real data distribution and synthetic data distribution, with the help of an iteratively trained 1-Lipschitz discriminator. The optimization objective of the WGAN is defined as follows:
\begin{equation}
\min_{G} \max_{D} E_{\mathbf{r} \sim \mathrm{encoder}(\mathbf{X}, \mathbf{y})}[D(\mathbf{r})] - E_{\mathbf{z} \sim p(\mathbf{z})}[D(G(\mathbf{z}))].
\end{equation}
Here, $G$ and $D$ denote the generator and the 1-Lipschitz discriminator respectively. In practice, we use a multi-layer perception (MLP) with layer normalization \cite{ba2016layer} for $G$, and three fully connected layers for $D$. $\mathrm{LeakyReLU}$ \cite{maas2013rectifier} is used as activation function for both $G$ and $D$. After the training of WGAN, we can generate time series data as follows:
\begin{equation}
\hat{\mathbf{X}}, \hat{\mathbf{y}} = \mathrm{decoder}(G(\mathbf{z})),~ \mathbf{z} \sim p( \mathbf{z} ).
\end{equation}
Some previous AE-GAN-based generation methods~\cite{choi2017generating, spinks2018generating, haidar-etal-2019-latent} require fine-tuning the parameters of the decoder during the process of GAN training because they need to further discriminate real data and synthetic data on the feature space. However, we find that the proposed method can achieve good generation performance without fine-tuning when only discriminating data on the latent space. So we just train the encoder-decoder module and the generation module separately to simplify the training process.
\subsection{RTSGAN on Incomplete Time Series}
We now extend \textit{RTSGAN} to generate incomplete time series, in other words, to generate time series with missing values.
The main idea is to generate both missing vector and feature vector at each time step, then mask the corresponding feature values according to the generated missing vector. A simple way to achieve this is to treat missing information of each feature as an additional binary feature and generate it as complete time series.
However, the high rate of missing values in the real-world time series data may result in a catastrophic collapse in traditional GAN training since directly discriminating incomplete time series may not provide informative signals for the generator, which has been empirically shown in our experiments.
It also poses a challenge for the generative models to find the underlying correlations between the missing values and the observed values.
To this end, we propose a variant of \textit{RTSGAN} named \textit{RTSGAN-M}, in which the same AE-GAN framework is adopted but with new designs for better generation performance on time series data with missing values. More specifically, we propose two techniques in the encoder-decoder module: 1) observation embedding, which can enrich information at each observation; and 2) decide-and-generate decoder, which first decides the time and missing patterns of the next observation and then generates the corresponding feature values based on both local and global dependencies. Note that the generation module is unchanged in \textit{RTSGAN-M}.
\subsubsection{Observation embedding}
As mentioned above, high missing rates (e.g., $\sim$80\% missing in the PhysioNet dataset~\cite{silva2012predicting}) can make it difficult for the generative models to fully capture useful information from time series. Therefore, before feeding time series into the encoder-decoder module, we add an observation embedding layer to enrich the representations of time series at each step.
First, it is natural to consider the last valid observations at each step because some features can be stable which will not be measured frequently. Second, the time point $t_i$ of each observation should be emphasized especially in irregular sampled time series, because the time points of the observations are often related to missing rates ~\cite{luo2018multivariate} and time intervals often reflect the influence of the previous observations. Despite the capability to capture the order of sequences, the RNNs may not be sensitive enough to capture information from time intervals~\cite{shukla2020multi}. So similar to the positional encoding used in Transformer~\cite{vaswani2017attention}, we need an embedding layer for the time points to fully exploit temporal information.
Therefore, we build an observation embedding by using the feature values, missing patterns and time point as follows:
\begin{equation}
\mathbf{e}_{i} = \mathbf{W} [\mathbf{x}_i, \mathbf{pre}_i, \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_i, \mathbf{y}, \mathbf{m}^{(y)}] + \phi(t_i),
\end{equation}
where $\mathbf{pre}_i$ denotes the last observations of the dynamic features before the $i$-th observation. The $\phi(t_i)$ therein is a learnable time representation which is proposed by \cite{kazemi2019time2vec}:
\begin{equation}
\phi(t)[j] =
\begin{cases}
w_0 t+b_0 & j==0, \\
\sin (w_j t+b_j)& \text{otherwise}.
\end{cases}
\end{equation}
By doing so, it will be easier for the encoder-decoder module to capture the relations among time points, missing values and observed values. The parameters of the overall observation embedding are shared between the encoder and the decoder.
\subsubsection{Decide-and-generate Decoder}
In many real-world applications, informative missing values can be related to sampling decisions~\cite{sterne2009multiple}, e.g., a physician may decide which dynamic features should be measured next time according to a patient's situation. Therefore, it is more reasonable to model $p(\mathbf{x}_i, \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_i|\mathrm{info}_{i-1})$ by the following conditional distribution:
\begin{equation}
p(\mathbf{x}_i, \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_i|\mathrm{info}_{i-1}) = p(\mathbf{x}_i | \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_i, \mathrm{info}_{i-1}) p(\mathbf{M}^{(x)}_i|\mathrm{info}_{i-1}). \\
\end{equation}
where $\mathrm{info}_i := \{\mathbf{x}_{1..i}, \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_{1..i}, \mathbf{y}, \mathbf{m}^{(y)}\}$ denotes all the information until the $i$-th observation. $p(\mathbf{x}_i|\mathbf{M}^{(x)}_i, \mathrm{info}_{i-1})$ models the dynamic feature distribution conditioned on the other information and $p(\mathbf{M}^{(x)}_i|\mathrm{info}_{i-1})$ models the missing data distribution conditioned on the previous information.
Following the above idea, we split the dynamic reconstruction into two steps: decide and generate. The decision step consists of $N_\mathrm{dec}$-layer GRU and generates the time point and masks of the next observation as follows:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
& \hat{\mathbf{e}}_{i} = W [\mathbf{x}_{i-1}, \mathbf{pre}_{i-1}, \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_{i-1}, \mathbf{y}, \mathbf{m}^{(y)}] + \phi({t}_{i-1}). \\
& \hat{\mathbf{h}}_{i}^{n} = \mathrm{GRU}(\hat{\mathbf{e}}_{i}, \hat{\mathbf{h}}_{i-1}^{n}), \ n \in [1,\ N_\mathrm{dec}]. \\
& \hat{t}_i = \sigma(\mathbf{W}_t \hat{\mathbf{h}}_{i}^{N_\mathrm{dec}} + b_t) + t_{i-1}. \\
& \hat{\mathbf{M}}^{(x)}_i = \sigma(\mathbf{W}_{m} \hat{\mathbf{h}}_{i}^{N_\mathrm{dec}} + \mathbf{b}_{m}). \\
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
With certain thresholds, we can decide which feature values will be generated at the $i$-th observations according to $\hat{\mathbf{M}}^{(x)}_{i}$. After making a decision about $\hat{t}_i$ and $\hat{\mathbf{M}}^{(x)}_{i}$, we need to model $p(\mathbf{x}_i|\mathbf{M}^{(x)}_i, \mathrm{info}_{i-1})$ by taking a generation step. Here, we introduce the concept of time lag: time interval between two consecutive valid observations for a feature. Formally, we calculate the time lag matrix $\mathbf{\delta} \in \mathbb{R}^{l \times K}$ for $K$ dynamic features as follows:
\begin{equation}
\delta_{i, j} =
\begin{cases}
t_i - t_{i-1} & \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_{i-1,j}==1, \\
\delta_{i-1, j} + t_i - t_{i-1} & \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_{i-1,j}==0 \ \text{and } i>0, \ \\
0 & i==0. \\
\end{cases}
\end{equation}
The previous works~\cite{che2018recurrent, luo2018multivariate} have shown that changeable time lags are important and the influence of the past observations should be reduced if some features have been missing for a long time. Following this idea, we also introduce trainable decays as follows:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
& \mathbf{\beta}_{i} = e^{-\max(\textbf{0}, W_{\beta}[\mathbf{\delta}_{i}, \ \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_i] + \mathbf{b}_{\beta})}. \\
& \mathbf{q}_i = \beta_{i} \odot \hat{\mathbf{h}}_{i}^{N_\mathrm{dec}}.
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
$\mathbf{q}_i$ is the estimated local information at the next time point $\hat{t}_{i}$. We use it along with the global information $\mathbf{s}$ to generate the dynamic feature values with $(N - N_\mathrm{dec})$-layer GRU:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
& \hat{\mathbf{h}}_{i}^{n} = \mathrm{GRU}([\mathbf{q}_i, \mathbf{s}], \hat{\mathbf{h}}_{i-1}^{n}), \ n \in [N_\mathrm{dec}+1,\ N]. \\
& \hat{\mathbf{x}}_{i} = \mathrm{Act}(\mathbf{W}_{x} \hat{\mathbf{h}}_{i}^{N} + \mathbf{b}_x)
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
Recall that $\mathbf{s}$ comes from the pooling operations on the whole time series and later is supervised by the global features, we can explore both local and global dependencies simultaneously for better feature reconstruction using $\mathbf{q}_i$ and $\mathbf{s}$.
\subsubsection{Loss Function with Missing Values Handling}
Here, we present the loss function for training the encoder-decoder module under the incomplete time series data setting. It consists of a feature reconstruction loss and a missing reconstruction loss. For feature reconstruction of incomplete time series, we only calculate the loss of valid observations. For missing reconstruction, we use binary cross-entropy (BCE) as the loss function. Since missing values of some features can frequently happen, we should try to maintain the observations for the dynamic features which are seldom observed in each time series. Thus, we set the rescaling weight $w_{i, j}$ for the dynamic feature $x_{i,j}$ according to the overall missing rate $\rho_{j}$ of the $j$-th dynamic feature as follows:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
& w_{i, j} \propto (1 - \rho_j) \cdot (1 - \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_{i, j}) + \rho_j \cdot \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_{i, j}. \\
& L_{Mx} = \frac{1}{K \cdot l} \sum_{j=1}^{K} \sum_{i=1}^{l} w_{i,j} \cdot \mathrm{BCE}(\hat{\mathbf{M}}^{(x)}_{i,j}, \mathbf{M}^{(x)}_{i,j}). \\
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
The new loss function for dynamic features are as follows:
\begin{equation}
L_{x}^{'}= L_{x}(\hat{X}, X, \mathbf{M}^{(x)}) + L_{Mx}(\hat{\mathbf{M}}^{(x)}, \mathbf{M}^{(x)}, w).
\end{equation}
The loss for global features $L_{y}^{'}$ can be similarly decomposed into two components as above. Then, the overall loss function can be derived from Equation~\ref{eqn:loss} as
$L_\mathrm{re}^{'} = \frac{d_y}{d_x+d_y}L_{y}^{'}(\hat{\mathbf{y}}, \mathbf{y}) + \frac{d_x}{d_x+d_y}L_{x}^{'}(\hat{\mathbf{X}}, \mathbf{X}). $
\section{Experiments}
We evaluate \textit{RTSGAN} in two aspects: 1) realistic-looking, i.e., if the distributions of synthetic data are consistent with those of real data, and 2) high-utility, i.e., if the models trained on synthetic data can achieve decent performance on real data.
\subsection{Complete, Fixed-Length Time Series}
\subsubsection{Datasets}
We first compare the performance of \textit{RTSGAN} against previous methods on two real-world complete, fixed-length time series datasets as follows.
\textbf{Stocks}. We use the daily historical Google stocks data from 2004 to 2019\footnote{https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/history?p=GOOG}. Each time step consists of 6 continuous-valued features: the volume and high, low, opening, closing, and adjusted closing prices. The sequences are aperiodic but features are highly correlated.
\textbf{Energy}. We use the UCI Appliances energy prediction dataset~\cite{candanedo2017data} which contains regular measurements over time. Apart from timestamps, there are 28 correlated features at each time step, including temperature, humidity, energy usage and weather information from a nearby airport.
\subsubsection{Settings}
Following the setting from the previous work \cite{yoon2019time}, the length of time series from these two datasets is set as 24. In total, 3,773 sequences are extracted from Stocks and 19,711 sequences are extracted from Energy. For a fair comparison, we use the same 3-layer GRU with hidden dimension 4 times the size of input features ($4\times d_x$) for the autoencoder of \textit{RTSGAN}. Since there is no global feature $y$ in these two datasets, we ignore that part in \textit{RTSGAN}. The detailed hyper-parameter setting can be found in the Appendix~\ref{appendix:complete}.
\textbf{Compared Methods}.
We compare \textit{RTSGAN} with COT-GAN~\cite{xu2020cot}, TimeGAN~\cite{yoon2019time}, RCGAN~\cite{esteban2017real}, C-RNN-GAN~\cite{mogren2016c} for complete time series generation. Additionally, we consider the performance of WaveNet~\cite{oord2016wavenet} and its GAN counterpart WaveGAN \cite{donahue2018adversarial}. We follow the same metrics used in~\cite{yoon2019time} to measure the diversity, fidelity and utility of synthetic data from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.
\textbf{Quantitative evaluation}. We adopt the following metrics to quantitatively evaluate the synthetic data. \textbf{a) Discriminative Score}. It is a quantitative measure of similarity between real data and synthetic data. We train a 2-layer LSTM \cite{hochreiter1997long} to distinguish between time series from the real and synthetic datasets as a supervised learning task. We can then get classification accuracy on the held-out test set and the discriminative score is $|0.5 - \mathrm{accuracy}|$. Lower discriminative score indicates higher similarity between the real and synthetic datasets.
\textbf{b) Predictive Score}. To evaluate how well the synthetic data maintain the temporal dynamics, we perform next-step prediction task under the ``train on synthetic, test on real'' (TSTR) setting \cite{esteban2017real}. We train a 2-layer LSTM predictor and evaluate the model on the original dataset. Predictive score is calculated by the mean absolute error (MAE) and a lower score indicates better performance.
\textbf{Qualitative evaluation}. We apply t-SNE \cite{maaten2008visualizing} and PCA \cite{bryant1995principal} on both the real and synthetic datasets after flattening the temporal dimension. This gives us qualitative assessments of how close the distribution of the synthetic data is to that of the real data in 2D space.
\subsubsection{Results}
\begin{table}[]
\centering
\caption{Performance comparison on complete, fixed-length time series datasets. Boldface indicates the best discriminative score and predictive score (lower the better).}
\label{tab:complete}
\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{\large
\begin{tabular}{ccccc}
\toprule
\multirow{2}{*}{Methods} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Stocks} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Energy} \\
\cmidrule(lr){2-3} \cmidrule(lr){4-5}
~ & Discriminative & Predictive & Discriminative & Predictive \\
\midrule
RCGAN & 0.196±0.027 & 0.040±0.001 & 0.336±0.017 & 0.292±0.005 \\
C-RNN-GAN & 0.399±0.028 & 0.038±0.000 & 0.499±0.001 & 0.483±0.005 \\
WaveNet & 0.232±0.028 & 0.042±0.001 & 0.397±0.010 & 0.311±0.005 \\
WaveGAN & 0.217±0.022 & 0.041±0.001 & 0.363±0.012 & 0.307±0.007 \\
TimeGAN & 0.102±0.021 & 0.038±0.001 & 0.236±0.012 & 0.273±0.004 \\
COT-GAN & 0.083±0.036 & 0.038±0.000 & 0.389±0.049 & 0.269±0.002 \\
RTSGAN (ours) & \textbf{0.024±0.024} & \textbf{0.037±0.000} & \textbf{0.228±0.006} & \textbf{0.252±0.000} \\
\midrule
Original & & 0.036±0.001 & & 0.250±0.003 \\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}
}
\end{table}
\begin{comment}
\begin{figure*}[h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{visualization.png}
\caption{t-SNE (top) and PCA (bottom) visualization results on Stocks. Red and blue points denotes original and synthetic data respectively. The results of TimeGAN, RCGAN and WaveGAN are reported in \cite{yoon2019time}. }\label{fig:visualization}
\end{figure*}
\end{comment}
\begin{figure*}[h]
\centering
\subfigure{\includegraphics[width=0.49\linewidth]{visualization1.pdf}}
\subfigure{\includegraphics[width=0.49\linewidth]{visualization2.pdf}}
\caption{t-SNE (top row) and PCA (bottom row) visualization results on Stocks (left 3 columns) and Energy (right 3 columns). Red and blue points denotes the original data and the synthetic data respectively. }\label{fig:visualization}
\end{figure*}
As shown in Table \ref{tab:complete}, \textit{RTSGAN} achieves the state-of-the-art results on both datasets in terms of both discriminative score and predictive score. Remarkably, the predictive scores of \textit{RTSGAN} are much better than previous methods and nearly in line with those of the original datasets. This demonstrates that the synthetic time series data generated by the proposed method has much higher utility for the sequence prediction task.
Figure~\ref{fig:visualization} shows the t-SNE and PCA visualization results on the Stocks and Energy datasets. We can find that the synthetic data generated by \textit{RTSGAN} match the original distribution better than the previous state-of-the-art method. In addition, we can observe that our synthetic data is more diverse, which can help to explain why \textit{RTSGAN} achieves better discriminative scores (i.e., harder to discriminate) in Table \ref{tab:complete}.
\subsection{Incomplete, Variable-Length Time Series}
\begin{table*}[]
\caption{Statistics of the two real-world time series datasets with missing data.}
\label{tab:statistic}
\begin{tabular}{cccccccc}
\toprule
Dataset & \# of train set & \# of test set & missing rate & \# of dynamic features & dynamic feature type & \# of static features & Avg.Len \\
\midrule
Physionet & 3600 & 400 & 80.67\% & 36 & continuous & 5 & 74 \\
MIMIC-III & 17737 & 3236 & 63.68\% & 17 & continuous, categorical & 0 & 77 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
\subsubsection{Datasets}
Next we evaluate the performance of \textit{RTSGAN} on variable-length time series with informative missing values using two real-world clinical datasets.
\textbf{PhysioNet Challenge 2012 dataset (PhysioNet).}~\cite{silva2012predicting} It is a public electronic dataset which provides 4000 multivariate clinical time series from the intensive care unit (ICU). Every ICU stay is a time series with 41 features which contains both static features and dynamic features. The task is mortality prediction, i.e., predicting whether a patient dies in the hospital.
\textbf{MIMIC-III.} Harutyunyan~et al.\@\xspace~\cite{harutyunyan2019multitask} provided healthcare benchmarks using the data from Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III) database \cite{johnson2016mimic}. Here, we also use the data from the in-hospital mortality prediction task which contains the measurements of the first 48 hours of an ICU stay. We merge the categories with the same meaning for categorical features and set outlier ranges for continuous features to mitigate the data noises.
More detailed statistics about the two datasets can be found in Table~\ref{tab:statistic}. We can see that both these two real-world datasets are with high missing rates and long average sequence lengths, which raises challenges for data generation.
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{Dataset utility comparison on the MIMIC-III dataset. Boldface indicates the best AUC performance.}
\label{tab:mimic3}
\begin{tabular}{ccccccccc}
\toprule
\multirow{2}{*}{Methods} & \multicolumn{3}{c}{min-max scaling} & \multicolumn{4}{c}{standard scaling} & \multirow{2}{*}{Avg.} \\
\cmidrule(lr){2-4} \cmidrule(lr){5-8}
& LR & zeroRNN & lastRNN & LR & zeroRNN & lastRNN & discreteLSTM & \\
\midrule
TimeGAN & 0.6240 & 0.6171 & 0.6098 & 0.5583 & 0.5670 & 0.5767 & 0.5595 & 0.5875 \\
DoppelGANger & 0.7632 & 0.6377 & 0.6535 & 0.6553 & 0.6245 & 0.5751 & 0.5214 & 0.6330 \\
RTSGAN (ours) & 0.8009 & 0.7755 & 0.7682 & 0.6609 & 0.7450 & 0.7532 & 0.7940 & 0.7568 \\
RTSGAN-M (ours) & {\bf 0.8209} & {\bf 0.8108} & {\bf 0.8068} & {\bf 0.7769} & {\bf 0.7753} & {\bf 0.7893} & {\bf 0.8221} & {\bf 0.8003}
\\
\midrule
Original & 0.8242 & 0.8424 & 0.8388 & 0.8509 & 0.8574 & 0.8509 & 0.8550 & 0.8457 \\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
\begin{table}[]
\centering
\caption{Dataset utility comparison on the PhysioNet dataset. Boldface indicates the best AUC performance.}
\label{tab:compare2012}
\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{\large
\begin{tabular}{cccccc}
\toprule
\multirow{2}{*}{Methods} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{min-max scaling} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{standard scaling} & \multirow{2}{*}{Avg.} \\
\cmidrule(lr){2-3} \cmidrule(lr){4-5}
& zeroRNN & lastRNN & zeroRNN & lastRNN & \\
\midrule
TimeGAN & 0.6575 & 0.6885 & 0.6493 & 0.6282 & 0.6558 \\
DoppelGANger & 0.5794 & 0.6375 & 0.5266 & 0.5356 & 0.5698 \\
RTSGAN (ours) & 0.7866 & 0.8172 & 0.7371 & 0.6555 & 0.7491 \\
RTSGAN-M (ours) & {\bf 0.8152} & {\bf 0.8242} & {\bf 0.8134} & {\bf 0.7857} & {\bf 0.8096} \\
\midrule
Original & 0.8317 & 0.8414 & 0.8291 & 0.8353 & 0.8344 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
}
\end{table}
\subsubsection{Settings}
Since this is the first work to investigate time series generation with missing values, there is no baseline method to compare with. Thus, we modify existing methods to deal with this setting as follows: we treat missing patterns as additional binary features and concatenate them with the original time series. The missing values are imputed with zeros after data scaling. We also tried imputation with the last valid observations but it did not affect the overall generation performance. Then, we treat the pre-processed time series as complete time series for data generation. After generation, we transform the synthetic time series into its incomplete version according to the synthetic missing patterns.
In this setting, we compare \textit{RTSGAN} against TimeGAN~\cite{yoon2019time} and DoppelGANger \cite{lin2020using} because they are designed to handle both static and dynamic features of time series, and they can also generate time series with flexible lengths. For \textit{RTSGAN} with the observation embedding and decide-and-generate decoder, we name it \textit{RTSGAN-M} to differentiate it from \textit{RTSGAN} with the above modifications. More implementation details can be found in the Appendix \ref{appendix:incomplete}.
\textbf{Quantitative evaluation}.
We evaluate the utility of the synthetic data under the TSTR setting. For both PhysioNet and MIMIC-III, the downstream task is to predict in-hospital mortality.
To be more comprehensive, we train different downstream classification models: 1) \textbf{zeroRNN}, which imputes the missing values with zero and takes the concatenation of static features, dynamic features and missing patterns as the input features for an RNN classifier; 2) \textbf{lastRNN}, which imputes the missing values with the last valid observations (zero if no such observation exists) and takes the concatenation of static features, dynamic features and the time lags as the input features for an RNN classifier. Both two methods are implemented with a 2-layer GRU and imputation is performed after data scaling. Based on our observations that different data scaling methods on the synthetic data can affect the post-hoc classification performance, we apply both \textbf{min-max scaling} and \textbf{standard scaling} from scikit-learn\footnote{\url{https://scikit-learn.org}} in the experiments.
In total, we have four ($2 \times 2 $) classification settings.
The MIMIC-III benchmark has two strong baselines, so we adopt them to evaluate the utility of the synthetic datasets:
\begin{itemize}
\item[--]\textbf{Logistic Regression (LR)} uses a more elaborate version of the hand-engineered features described in \cite{lipton2015learning} to train a logistic regression model. We additionally tried min-max and standard scaling to normalize the features.
\item[--]\textbf{discreteLSTM} first re-samples the time series into regularly spaced intervals. Then it uses a 2-layer LSTM which takes new dynamic features and missing patterns for classification. This method uses standard scaling for numeric inputs.
\end{itemize}
In summary, we test four classification models on PhysioNet and seven models on MIMIC-III. The detailed descriptions can be found in the Appendix \ref{appendix:classification}. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) score is used to measure the classification performance because of the non-balanced datasets. We evaluate the utility of the synthetic datasets by averaging the classification performance over all models.
\begin{figure*}[t!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{heatmap_mimic.pdf}
\caption{
Pearson correlation heatmaps of missing rates of each pair of dynamic features on the MIMIC-III dataset and three synthetic datasets.}\label{fig:heatmap_mimic}
\end{figure*}
\textbf{Qualitative evaluation}.
We also evaluate how well the synthetic data maintain the original missing patterns by visualization. We use the following two ways to visualize them.
a) {\bf 2D visualizations}. We sample from both the original and the synthetic datasets and calculate the missing rates of the dynamic features in each instance. Then we get the statistic vector of missing values for each instance and apply t-SNE and PCA for visualization. This can qualitatively assess the diversity of the synthetic missing patterns, and how close the distribution of the synthetic missing patterns is to that of the original missing patterns in 2D space.
b) {\bf Heatmap of the Pearson correlations}. Missing rates of the dynamic features are often correlated with each other. Some features are often measured together while some measures would be unlikely to happen at the same time. So we calculate the Pearson correlations about missing rates of each pair of dynamic features and visualize them by a heatmap. This helps us to understand the global properties of missing values in the dataset.
\subsubsection{Quantitative Results}
\begin{figure}[t!]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=1\linewidth]{visual_mimic.pdf}
\caption{t-SNE (top) and PCA (bottom) visualization results on MIMIC-III dataset. Red and blue points denote the missing patterns of the original and synthetic instances respectively. }\label{fig:visual_mimic}
\end{figure}
Table~\ref{tab:mimic3} and Table~\ref{tab:compare2012} present the dataset utility comparison results on MIMIC-III and PhysioNet, respectively. We have the following observations:
a) In both Table~\ref{tab:mimic3} and Table~\ref{tab:compare2012}, we can see that \textit{RTSGAN} outperforms TimeGAN and DoppelGANger consistently when using different downstream classification methods. Although DoppelGANger introduces some targeted designs to address the challenges in time series data generation, it is still difficult to train a traditional GAN framework directly due to the high missing rates in the feature space of time series data. TimeGAN also combines the AE and GAN framework, but it does not perform well maybe because it is hard to optimize the generation of synthetic sequences of latent vectors especially when the lengths of time series data are long and variable. By contrast, the synthetic data generated by \textit{RTSGAN} and \textit{RTSGAN-M} have better utility for the mortality prediction task with the help of the encoder-decoder module in our design.
b) \textit{RTSGAN-M} further outperforms \textit{RTSGAN}, especially for classification methods using standard scaling, which demonstrates that the proposed observation embedding and decide-and-generate decoder can better deal with the missing values. This also implies that simply treating missing patterns as additional binary features (used in \textit{RTSGAN}, TimeGAN and DoppelGANger) is not enough to generate high-utility time series with missing values.
c) We observed an interesting phenomenon in Table~\ref{tab:mimic3} that using standard scaling to normalize features generally leads to better AUC scores when the post-hoc models are trained on the original dataset. However, when they are trained on the synthetic dataset, using standard scaling will lead to a performance drop compared to using min-max scaling.
Similar performance gap between using min-max scaling and standard scaling is also worth noting in Table~\ref{tab:compare2012} when training a \textit{lastRNN} on the synthetic dataset.
This phenomenon should be explored in the future work.
\begin{table}[]
\centering
\caption{Ablation study on the PhysioNet dataset. }
\label{tab:ablation2012}
\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{\large
\begin{tabular}{cccccc}
\toprule
\multirow{2}{*}{Methods} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{min-max scaling} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{standard scaling} & \multirow{2}{*}{Avg.} \\
\cmidrule(lr){2-3} \cmidrule(lr){4-5}
& zeroRNN & lastRNN & zeroRNN & lastRNN & \\
\midrule
RTSGAN-M & 0.8152 & 0.8242 & 0.8134 & 0.7857 & 0.8096 \\
\midrule
w/o embedding & 0.8040 & 0.8238 & 0.8067 & 0.7709 & 0.8013 \\
w/o two-step & 0.8016 & 0.8213 & 0.7668 & 0.7076 & 0.7743 \\
\midrule
RTSGAN & 0.7866 & 0.8172 & 0.7371 & 0.6555 & 0.7491 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
}
\end{table}
\subsubsection{Qualitative Results}
Here, we examine the visualization results on MIMIC-III and do not show the visualization results on PhysioNet due to the same observations and the space limit.
Figure~\ref{fig:visual_mimic} shows the t-SNE and PCA visualization results on MIMIC-III. We can see that the missing pattern distribution of \textit{RTSGAN-M} is significantly closer to the original than those of TimeGAN and DoppelGANger. This indicates that \textit{RTSGAN-M} can better capture the missing data distribution than TimeGAN and DoppelGANger. In addition, the closer missing pattern distribution can also help to explain the better utility of synthetic data generated by our method.
Figure~\ref{fig:heatmap_mimic} shows the Pearson correlation heatmaps on MIMIC-III. From the heatmap of the original dataset, we can observe various correlation patterns between the missing rates of each pair of dynamic features. For instance, the missing rates of the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th features are positively correlated because they are all measurements about ``Glascow'' coma estimations; The missing rate of ``Fraction inspired oxygen'' (the 3rd feature) and the missing rate of ``Glascow coma scale total'' (the 6th feature) are negatively correlated because the fraction of inspired oxygen tends to be constant when continuously observing the patient's comatose state.
Compared to TimeGAN and DoppelGANger, the heatmap of the synthetic data from \textit{RTSGAN-M} looks the most similar to that of original data. It further confirms the superior performance of our proposed method in the incomplete time series data generation setting.
\begin{table*}[tbh!]
\centering
\caption{Ablation study on the MIMIC-III dataset. }
\label{tab:ablation_mimic}
\begin{tabular}{ccccccccc}
\toprule
\multirow{2}{*}{Methods} & \multicolumn{3}{c}{min-max scaling} & \multicolumn{4}{c}{standard scaling} & \multirow{2}{*}{Avg.} \\
\cmidrule(lr){2-4} \cmidrule(lr){5-8}
& LR & zeroRNN & lastRNN & LR & zeroRNN & lastRNN & discreteLSTM & \\
\midrule
RTSGAN-M & 0.8209 & 0.8108 & 0.8068 & 0.7769 & 0.7753 & 0.7893 & 0.8221 & 0.8003 \\
\midrule
w/o time & 0.8270 & 0.8062 & 0.8032 & 0.7746 & 0.7475 & 0.7645 & 0.8142 & 0.7910 \\
w/o two-step & 0.7982 & 0.7966 & 0.7855 & 0.7189 & 0.7218 & 0.7382 & 0.7928 & 0.7646 \\
\midrule
RTSGAN & 0.8009 & 0.7755 & 0.7682 & 0.6609 & 0.7450 & 0.7532 & 0.7940 & 0.7568 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
\subsection{Ablation Study}
To validate the effectiveness of each design in \textit{RTSGAN-M}, we conduct the ablation study on both the MIMIC-III and the PhysioNet dataset. We adopt the following variants of \textit{RTSGAN-M}: 1) ``w/o embedding'', in which we directly feed the inputs of the embedding module without using the observation embedding; 2) ``w/o two-step'', in which we use the decoder structure in \textit{RTSGAN} which outputs the missing patterns and values simultaneously instead of using the decide-and-generate decoder. As shown in Table~\ref{tab:ablation2012} and Table~\ref{tab:ablation_mimic}, both two designs can contribute to the utility of synthetic datasets. Relatively, the decide-and-generate decoder plays a more important role in \textit{RTSGAN-M} which better utilizes the informative missing patterns in data generation, without which the performance of \textit{RTSGAN-M} will drop significantly.
\section{Conclusions}
We proposed a novel time series generation framework \textit{RTSGAN} which produces realistic time series data with high utility for down-streaming tasks.
Besides generating time series data with variable lengths, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore generating time series with missing values.
Moreover, equipped with the observation embedding and decide-and-generate decoder, the extended version \textit{RTSGAN-M} can effectively handle the missing values and generate high-utility synthetic data. The experiments on both complete and incomplete real-word time series datasets have shown the superiority of the proposed methods.
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
| {
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The Intelligible Soiree smilingly celebrates the quests and conquests of MD's first two decades. The anniversary event showcases the company's undying passion to redefine contemporary dance while always being precise, dynamic and versatile. Taking us back through the years, the show features glimpses of memorable productions such as Mari Rosendahl's 400 Steps, Tommi Kitti's Leap, Tero Saarinen's Loopit and Anniina Kumpuniemi's From This Point On. You'll probably recognize a few other familiar moments from the past, too.
Celebrating MD's 20th Anniversary – Dear People, It's Party Time!
There are only three performances! Be quick!
DANCE CURRENT CONTEMPORARY DANCE FESTIVAL CELEBRATES 20TH ANNIVERSARY WE ARE ON SUMMER HOLIDAY 19.6.-24.7. | {
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A 56-year-old woman who was reported missing Sunday afternoon from the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side has been found, according to a missing person's alert from Chicago police.
Barbara Williams had been last seen at 3:30 p.m. in the 4500 block of South Calumet Avenue. She was located Saturday evening, police said. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
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Outcry in Pakistan over Quran desecration in Norway: Pakistan summons Norway's ambassador
Asia Pakistan
A young man was hailed as 'Muslim hero' for stopping an attempt to burn the Quran
Published: November 24, 2019 12:42 Ashfaq Ahmed, Associate Editor - Online
Screengrab of a video showing a young man kicking a person who tries to burn the Holy Quran during an anti-Islam rally in Norway Image Credit: Social media
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Dubai: Pakistan's Foreign Ministry says it has summoned Norway's ambassador to convey the deep concern of the government and Pakistani people over the recent attempt to burn the Quran by a Norwegian man caught on video.
The Norwegian ambassador was summoned on Saturday after a man desecrated the Holy Quran in the Norwegian city of Kristiansand during an anti-Islam rally.
The Foreign Minister's statement says: "Pakistan's condemnation of this action was reiterated. It was underscored that such actions hurt the sentiments of 1.3 billion Muslims around the world, including those in Pakistan. Furthermore, such actions could not be justified in the name of freedom of expression."
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The statement demanded action against the person in the city of Kristiansand who desecrated the Quran at an anti-Islam rally last week.
Pakistan's reaction comes after a video surfaced on social media showing a man tried to burn the holy book.
Muslim hero
In the video, a Muslim youth is seen jumping over a fence and kicking the person who attempted to burn the Quran. The incident drew nationwide condemnation, with many Pakistanis praising the youth as a hero for defending the Quran.
Pakistan also called on the Norwegian authorities to prevent the recurrence of any such incident in the future.
"The Ambassador of Pakistan in Oslo has also been instructed to convey Pakistan's protest and deep concern to the Norwegian authorities," according to the statement.
Who wanted to burn the Quran
A scuffle broke out after the leader of the "Stop Islamisation of Norway (SIAN)" rally, Lars Thorsen, tried to burn a copy of the Quran in the city of Kristiansand despite warnings from local police officials.
In a video on social media, a young man who is now called "the Muslim hero" could be seen jumping into the barricaded circle to save the holy book from being desecrated.
The rally then turned violent, after which police took Thorsen and his attackers into custody.
The man who stopped Thorsen from burning the Holy Quran was identified as Ilyas on social media, but his exact identity could not be ascertained, according to Geo News.
Netizens took to social media to praise Ilyas and also raise alarm over the rise of Islamophobia in Europe and around the world.
Tweet by Pakistan military spokesperson
Pakistan's military spokesperson also took to twitter and hailed the man for his courage in a bid to stop burning of the Quran.
"Salute to brave Ilyas for displaying courage to stop an absolutely deplorable action. Such Islamophobia-based provocations only promote hatred and extremism. All religions are and must stay respectable. Islamophbia is threat to global peace and harmony," tweeted Major General Asif Ghafoor, Director General of Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR).
Ministers condemn the incident
Minister for Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony Noorul Haq Qadri said Pakistan would lodge its protest with the Norwegian government on the matter. The minister stressed that Western countries should take steps towards checking such shameful acts, Dawn news reported.
Renowned religious scholar Mufti Taqi Usmani urged the Muslim nations to raise the issue at international level and called for the release of Ilyas.
Mufti Usmani, in a Twitter post, said the West that lectured the Muslim fraternity on tolerance had reached the lowest level of cowardice by holding rallies to desecrate the Holy Book of 1.3 billion Muslims.
Call to release 'Muslim hero'
The cleric said it was a duty of Muslim states to raise the issue globally and work to ensure that Ilyas was released.
Prime Minister Imran Khan had eloquently raised the issue of growing Islamophobia in his speech at the 74th session UN General Assembly.
"Islamophobia since 9/11 has grown at a pace which is alarming," he said and blamed certain Western leaders for it.
Why it happens in Norway
The extreme right-wing group 'Stop the Islamisation of Norway' (SION), attempted to burn the Quran during a protest in Norway's Kristiansand last week.
This action sparked anger among Muslims and raised questions about rising far-right sentiments in Norway.
The Scandinavian nation is well known for its prosperity, beautiful nature and generally moderate politics. There are more than 150,000 Muslims living in Norway out of a population of five million. Norway has been accused of remaining silent and inactive against rising anti-Muslim sentiment in the country.
In August, a gunman attacked a mosque 'inspired' by the New Zealand and El Paso anti-Muslim attacks. Two bystanders stopped the would-be gunman opening fire on worshippers in the city of Baerum.
The populist Right Wing Party (Fremskrittspartiet, FrP) entered parliament in alliance with the Conservative Party for the first time in 2013. The FrP was established in 1987 on an anti-Muslim and anti-immigration platform.
What Norwegian Prime Minister says
In August this year, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg had moved forward with plans to tackle expressions of hatred against Muslims in Norway.
Four of her government ministers launched the plan, just weeks after a young Norwegian man attacked a mosque and murdered his adopted Chinese sister after becoming a white supremacist.
"We already have a string of surveys that show there's hostility towards Muslims in Norway, and that there's a need for a plan to address that," said Culture Minister Trine Skei Grande of the Liberal Party when unveiling the new plan in August this year. Ministers from all four government parties, including the anti-immigration Progress Party, took part in the formal presentation of the anti-hate plan.
The Norwegian government already has plans for tackling racism and discrimination in general, along with anti-Semitism. Grande will now be in charge of the new plan that mostly aims to make Muslims feel safe and accepted in Norway. Several other ministries will also be involved, including those in charge of justice, education and foreign aid.
Survey shows anti-Muslim sentiments
A report from Oslo's Holocaust Centre in 2017 showed that negative stereotypes about Muslims are alarmingly widespread in Norway. Some 39 per cent of those questioned said they believed Muslims pose a threat to Norwegian culture.
Another 31 per cent agreed with a statement that Muslims "want to take over Europe," while 48 per cent supported the claims that "Muslims have much of the blame themselves for the rising hatred towards them."
- With inputs by agencies
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Pakistani convicted murderer takes top school score | {
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Spectrum News
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Spectrum is Grateful for Your Business as We All Say Goodbye to 2020 - Spectrum Coating
Last year started out with a bang when our team attended the Las Vegas 2020 SHOT Show! The show offered 630,000 square feet of exhibit space – the size of nearly 11 football fields or the New Orleans Superdome. Attendees are shooting, hunting and outdoor trade and commercial buyers and sellers of military, law enforcement and tactical products and services. As a buyer of coating products, we had attended the show before, we decided to be an exhibitor at the SHOT Week Supplier Showcase, held Jan. 21-22 with the opportunity to grow our business. At the show, we ran into a several of our customers including Kel-Tec, Iver Johnson and Diamondback. Additionally, we were able to connect with a number of international manufacturers and suppliers of firearms including customers within industries that focus on law enforcement, outdoor gear, cutlery and even the U.S. Military.
As a certified Cerakote applicator, we came home with a ton of leads and a lot of enthusiasm only to have a flash-bang wallop which halted the world as we knew it with the announcement of a novel coronavirus. February began with us wondering if we might have to soon change how business we did business because of COVID-19. The coronavirus was first detected in Florida on March 1 which really was just the start of many disruptions for residents and businesses. Within weeks many graduation and conference cancellations began, most mass gatherings scheduled for the year were canceled and people began to hoard toilet paper, canned goods and hand sanitizer. Theme parks closed in mid-March and the first of our state's stay at home orders were in effect by the end of the month.
Though our business had still been fairly steady to that point, we shut down following the Florida Governor's orders in hopes of doing our part to flatten the curve of the viral spread. That said, as a small family business, we took advantage of more family time and stayed busy with a good Spring cleaning in our shop. It was a good use of our time!
By April, face coverings were becoming the new fashion trend and as our country has seen in the past a national emergency also equals a trend in increasing gun sales. Analysts have indicated that most of the concerns about personal safety came from both the virus and our free fall economy as business were shuttered. Though mid-summer concerns about the virus and the economy continued, it is thought that the increase in firearm ownership was possibly tied to widespread protests, and discussions of defunding the police.
For responsible gun-owning citizens, it is not surprising that people respond to concerns about their safety by increasing their access to private provision. Statistics match what Spectrum staff heard from our customers – from first time gun owners to collectors, no matter their income, sex, race or age, their basic interest is an increase in the desire for personal protection.
Spectrum saw an increase in our coatings business overall, with most of the increase from the firearms side of our business. This matches the fact that gun range rentals have been up along with a demand for gun safety classes, and an approximately ninety percent increase in gun sales nationally compared to last year. Much of the increase has been a result of first-time buyers which also mirrors our increase in business.
On behalf of everyone at Spectrum, we would like to thank you for your unwavering loyalty to our services and for trusting our company during these trying times. You have helped us achieve a record-breaking year, and we couldn't be more appreciative of the opportunity to serve both new and long-standing clients. As we continue to navigate this odd but new normal, thanks for following along and considering us for custom bulk orders and personalization projects at our shop in Cocoa, Florida.
P.S. ShotWeek 2021 has been cancelled, but we are making big plans for 2022!
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Władimir Cziczinowicz Marganija, ros. Владимир Чичинович Маргания, gruz. ვლადიმერ მარღანია, Wladimer Marghania (ur. 8 lutego 1928 w Oczamczyrze, zm. 6 września 1958 we wsi Adziubża, w rejonie oczamczyrskim) – abchaski piłkarz, grający na pozycji bramkarza, reprezentant ZSRR, olimpijczyk.
Kariera piłkarska
Kariera klubowa
Wychowanek Szkoły Dziecięco-Sportowej w Suchumi. W 1945 roku rozpoczął karierę piłkarską w miejscowej drużynie Dinama Suchumi. W 1946 został piłkarzem Szachtara Stalino, a w 1947 roku przeniósł się do Dinama Tbilisi, w którym występował do przedwczesnej śmierci w 1958.
Kariera reprezentacyjna
W 1952 został powołany do reprezentacji Związku Radzieckiego, ale nie rozegrał żadnego meczu. W jej składzie zdobył złoty medal na Olimpiadzie w Helsinkach 1952.
Zginął 6 września 1958 w wypadku samochodowym we wsi Adziubża w rejonie oczamczyrskim.
Sukcesy i odznaczenia
Sukcesy klubowe
wicemistrz ZSRR: 1951, 1953
brązowy medalista mistrzostw ZSRR: 1947, 1950
Sukcesy reprezentacyjne
złoty medalista Igrzysk Olimpijskich: 1952
Sukcesy indywidualne
wybrany do listy 33 najlepszych piłkarzy ZSRR: Nr 3 (1951, 1953)
Odznaczenia
tytuł Mistrza Sportu ZSRR
tytuł Zasłużonego Mistrza Sportu ZSRR: 1952
Medal Za dzielność w pracy: 1957
Bibliografia
Abchascy piłkarze
Reprezentanci Związku Radzieckiego w piłce nożnej
Radzieccy medaliści olimpijscy
Medaliści Letnich Igrzysk Olimpijskich 1952
Piłkarze Dinama Suchumi
Piłkarze Dinama Tbilisi
Piłkarze Szachtara Donieck
Gruzińskie ofiary wypadków drogowych
Urodzeni w 1928
Zmarli w 1958 | {
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Cacao is the seed from which cocoa and chocolate are made, from Spanish cacao, an adaptation of Nahuatl cacaua, the root form of cacahuatl ("bean of the cocoa-tree"). It may also refer to:
Plants
Theobroma cacao, a tropical evergreen tree
Cocoa bean, the seed from the tree used to make chocolate
Cacao paste, ground cacao beans. The mass is melted and separated into:
Cocoa butter, a pale, yellow, edible fat; and
Cocoa solids, the dark, bitter mass that contains most of cacao's notable phytochemicals, including caffeine and theobromine.
Places
Cacao, French Guiana
Cacao, Carolina, Puerto Rico
Cacao, Quebradillas, Puerto Rico
Cacao Alto, Patillas, Puerto Rico
Cacao Bajo, Patillas, Puerto Rico
Hacienda Cacao, Yucatán, Mexico
Other uses
Maria Cacao, a mountain goddess in the Philippines
See also
Cacau (disambiguation)
Cocoa (disambiguation)
Coca (disambiguation)
Kakao - a Korean messenger app company named after the cocoa or cacao seed | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
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John Benjamin Broussard (born December 18, 1983) is a former American football wide receiver. He was drafted by the Jacksonville Jaguars in the seventh round of the 2007 NFL Draft. He played college football at San Jose State.
Broussard was a member of the New York Giants Chicago Bears and Detroit Lions. He is the younger brother of San Jose SaberCats wide receiver Jamall Broussard.
Early life
Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Broussard graduated from Kingwood High School in Kingwood, Houston, Texas in 2002.
College career
As a senior at San Jose State, Broussard helped the Spartans to a victory in the inaugural New Mexico Bowl as well as helping SJSU to its first winning season in 6 years.
Professional career
Jacksonville Jaguars
On September 9, 2007, in the Jaguars first regular season game, Broussard caught the first pass of his career, a 47-yard touchdown pass from quarterback David Garrard. Broussard was waived by the Jaguars on August 26, 2008.
New York Giants
Broussard was signed to the practice squad of the New York Giants on September 24, 2008 after wide receiver Taye Biddle was promoted to the active roster. Broussard was released on October 8 to make room for Biddle on the practice squad.
Chicago Bears
Broussard was signed to the practice squad of the Chicago Bears on October 15, 2008. After finishing the season on the practice squad, he was re-signed to a future contract on December 29, 2008.
The Bears waived Broussard on August 31, 2009.
Personal life
Broussard's brother Jamall, who also went to San Jose State, played for the Cincinnati Bengals and Carolina Panthers as a return specialist in 2004.
External links
San Jose Spartans bio
1983 births
Living people
African-American players of American football
Players of American football from Houston
American football wide receivers
San Jose State Spartans football players
Jacksonville Jaguars players
New York Giants players
Chicago Bears players
Detroit Lions players
Sportspeople from Port Arthur, Texas
People from Kingwood, Texas
21st-century African-American sportspeople
20th-century African-American people | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
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{"url":"http:\/\/mathoverflow.net\/questions\/152180\/a-definite-integral-of-hypergeometric-function-2f1","text":"# A definite integral of hypergeometric function 2F1\n\nI am wondering whether there exists a closed form for the definite integral $$F(x)=\\int_0^1t^{-a}(1-t)^{N}(1-xt)^{-a}{}_2F_1(-a,k-a-1\/2,k-a;4xt(1-xt))dt,$$ where $a\\in(0,1)$ and $N,k$ are positive integers.\n\nIt seems that I cannot apply Kummer's quadratic transformation formula directly. So I tried to follow the method of proving Kummer's formula by expanding $_2F_1$, and I require some formula for $_2F_1(A,-A,C;x)$. However I cannot find anything relevant in many literatures.\n\nDo you have some other ideas?","date":"2014-03-07 15:08:44","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9702330827713013, \"perplexity\": 126.39446250964744}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2014-10\/segments\/1393999645327\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20140305060725-00083-ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Joe Kates
Tagged: 2017 North American Tour
air force / Airshow / demo teams / europe / Formation Flying
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"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
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Q: php - two file inputs two different folder I'm here to ask (cause I've searched today tons of internet for this)
Here's the case:
got one form with some fields,
and then it have 2 inputs type="file".
The point is that I want the file A go to folder A, and the file B go to folder B.
what I tried:
this is projs_upload.php
$uploaddirb = '../images/projects/';
$uploaddira = '../images/projects/thumb/';
$uploadfile = $uploaddira . basename($_FILES['min_img']['name']);
$uploadimg = $uploaddirb . basename($_FILES['img']['name']);
move_uploaded_file($_FILES['min_img']['tmp_name'], $uploadfile);
move_uploaded_file($_FILES['img']['tmp_name'], $uploadimg);
this is form:
require("common.php");
if($_POST){
$query = "
INSERT INTO projects (
`idprojects`,
`cat`,
`name`,
`desc`,
`min_img`,
`img`,
`ext_url`
) VALUES (
:idprojects,
:cat,
:name,
:desc,
:min_img,
:img,
:ext_url
)
";
$query_params = array(
':idprojects'=> "",
':cat' => $_POST['cat'],
':name' => $_POST['name'],
':desc' => $_POST['desc'],
':min_img' => $_FILES['min_img']['name'],
':img' => $_FILES['img']['name'],
':ext_url' => $_POST['exturl']
);
try
{
$stmt = $db->prepare($query);
$result = $stmt->execute($query_params);
}
catch(PDOException $ex)
{
die("Failed to run query: " . $ex->getMessage());
}
include ("funcs/proj_uploads.php");
header("Location: ?p=manage_projects");
die("Redirecting done");
}
<form action="?p=manage_projects" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<input type="text" placeholder="kategoria" name="cat" />
<input type="text" placeholder="nazwa projektu" name="name" />
<input type="text" placeholder="link do projektu" name="exturl" />
<textarea placeholder="opis" name="desc" />
</textarea>
<input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="512000" />
<input type="file" placeholder="miniatura" name="img" />
<input type="file" placeholder="duży" name="img" />
<button type="submit" class="expand">Zapisz</button>
</form>
and "?p=manage_projects" refers to the form page.
A: Your $uploaddirb path needs to end in a /, otherwise files will be uploaded into images/projects as files thumbsomename:
$uploaddirb = '../images/projects/thumb/';
If this doesn't solve it for you, update your question with more information, i.e. both HTML and PHP code, do both files not work?, have you checked the directories exist and have proper permissions?
A: Both your file input tags are called img.
You should have one called img and one called min_img
So do:
<input type="file" placeholder="miniatura" name="min_img" />
<input type="file" placeholder="duży" name="img" />
instead of:
<input type="file" placeholder="miniatura" name="img" />
<input type="file" placeholder="duży" name="img" />
NB: This should be easily spotted with a var_dump($_FILES) in your if($_POST) block.
| {
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Tapinoma muelleri este o specie de furnică din genul Tapinoma Descrisă de Karavaiev în 1926, specia este endemică în Indonezia.
Referințe
Tapinoma
Himenoptere din Asia
Insecte din Indonezia
Insecte descrise în 1926 | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 4,299 |
A program of the
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Woman to Know: Deborah Savage
Meet Deborah Savage
When Professor Deborah Savage attended our inaugural (2014) symposium for Catholic women scholars, I quickly discovered why this petite seminary professor is regarded not only as an intellectual and apostolic powerhouse, but as a woman of wit, humility, and overflowing love as well. Deborah is a Professor of Philosophy and Theology at St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity, University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Program Director for the Masters in Pastoral Ministry at the seminary, and the Director of the Siena Symposium for Women, Family, and Culture. The title she wears most proudly, though, is "mother" to Madeline. I hope you'll enjoy "meeting" Deborah and learning about her fantastic work.
CWF: Deborah, although the culture suggests that love is a zero-sum game, your experience is the opposite—love multiplies! Put that in context for us – tell us about your family.
DS: I am married to Andrew and this April we will celebrate our 29th wedding anniversary! We have a daughter, Madeline, now 15, whom we adopted as a newborn. She has been the greatest gift of my life – a gift that keeps on giving in every way. I did not know you could love someone that much – or that love keeps growing.
CWF: You have often said that you continually see the hand of God at work in your life– through Madeline, certainly—but what about your work? Tell us about your work and how you got there.
DS: I certainly experience my work as a calling; at least I would say I believe I have found my vocation. But it took me a long while to discover it and there were several twists and turns. I was born in California and put myself through college working in the Silicon Valley as a factory operator, finally earning a BS degree in Business Administration. I thought I would go on to law school but I became disenchanted with that possibility so, after graduation, I remained in the manufacturing industry, gradually taking on positions of greater responsibility. Eventually, I became a sort of "expert" in what is called "quality management," an approach to management more or less perfected by the Japanese in the 70's and 80's.
I eventually opened my own consulting firm to help organizations apply the same methodologies. I had learned that the Japanese had succeeded at those methods because of the spiritual traditions that undergird Japanese culture, especially Confucian virtue ethics. This caused me to ask what had happened in the West: why do we go to Church on Sunday and work on Monday with no real sense of the first having much to do with the second? There seems to be a big gap. This question just kept nagging at me: was something missing from our tradition that meant it could not inform our work behavior in the same way? I simply had to find out.
So I decided to go to graduate school. I studied both philosophy and theology. My dissertation was on the subjective dimension of human work and the conversion of the "acting person." In the course of my studies, I became a life-long student of Thomas Aquinas and have spent most of my efforts so far investigating the work of John Paul II. The meaning of human work is still a strong interest, though most recently I have focused on the question of the nature of man and woman and the complementarity that characterizes their relationship. Of course, the topics are related since men and women share in the work of caring for creation. I never pictured myself teaching at a Seminary; I thought I would probably end up teaching business ethics. But here I am – and it is a great privilege to help prepare future priests and lay leaders for their service to the Church.
CWF: I love how through unexpected paths the Lord leads us to serve him so beautifully! What would you say to women about the call to serve, given our current cultural climate?
DS: I think we are living at an amazing (and also admittedly scary) time in human history, especially for women of faith. The Church has been pleading with us – really since the papacy of Pius XII – to bring our gifts to the task of recovering the culture. And it is very clear that, in large part, it is the prophetic voice of women that is both largely missing and desperately needed in our times. Though things might seem a bit dark, it is at this precise moment that humanity needs us to speak, to act in the service of authentic human flourishing.
The Catholic Women's Forum is certainly a bright spot, as is Helen Alvare's Women Speak for Themselves, and the Siena Symposium in Minnesota. There are many other initiatives ordered to making it possible now to contribute. Though I would argue we need a theology of complementarity more than we do a theology of women, the Holy Father's call for a greater focus on women is just another signal that the Church is ready to hear our voices. We simply have to be sure that the Church Fathers hear from many, many faithful women or our voices risk being drowned out by those who seem more inclined to dissent from Church teaching.
The culture at large seems also to be desperate for our wisdom, even if prominent thought leaders often insist on looking the other way or marginalizing the Catholic perspective on the "woman question." The #MeToo phenomenon is just one indication of that. The time clearly is ripe for the "new feminism" John Paul II speaks about in Evangelium Vitae – and he is very clear that it is up to us to create it.
CWF: In that light, what projects are you working on?
DS: My research right now is almost totally focused on developing a robust theology of complementarity. In my scholarly opinion, it is not possible to consider fully the so-called "feminine genius" apart from the genius of man. I would argue that there is actually a war on men underway in our culture and that it is because we have never made explicit what man's "genius" really is, just as, until John Paul raised the issue, we failed to formally consider what constituted the genius of woman. The nature of man and woman in relation to each other actually has never been fully explored in our tradition and the myths surrounding that relationship have confused it for centuries – leading to the mess we are in now. I am trying to make an impact on the gender confusion that confronts us, by offering a constructive account of man and woman, one grounded in science, philosophy, and Scripture. I hope this effort will lead to a clearer vision of the ways men and women can bring both their humanity and their distinct gifts to the tasks of human living – and work together to return all things to Christ.
CWF: The recent Popes have called for a greater integration of women's presence and gifts within the Church. What should this look like, and how does it tie into your ideas about complementarity?
DS: I think the current interest in a greater role for women in the Church is critical and I hope it bears fruit. But if the focus is narrowed to a formal role, one where we think the problem is solved only if women end up on the "organization chart" somewhere, we will have missed the mark. This is a particularly masculine way of understanding the issue – that such things are settled when someone finally gets a "position" of some kind, one that has some measure of power. If that happens, women will actually lose the "power" they have already. The role that women play is more like a fragrance, one that should permeate the atmosphere of the Church; it needs to be everywhere, not just somewhere. This does not mean that I think women should not be involved in decision making somehow. Quite the contrary. But it cannot be just an imitation of the roles that men have played. We need to think about this question for ourselves.
CWF: Deborah, you also lead the Sienna Symposium in the St. Paul – Minneapolis area. Tell us about that.
DS: The Siena Symposium for Women, Family, and Culture at the University of St. Thomas, an interdisciplinary "think tank," includes both faculty scholars and practitioners. It was founded in 2001 to respond to John Paul II's call for a new and explicitly Christian "feminism." We invite women and men into a dialogue on ways to establish a culture of life. Our work is grounded in the anthropology of the human person, created male and female, equal in dignity but different—complementary. We hold public events, workshops, and engage in scholarship to explore these ideas and their implications for human relationships and society. We also give an annual Humanitarian Leadership Award to a woman who, with courage and grace, has made significant contributions to efforts to recover our culture. We also serve the local Church in various ways at the behest of the Archbishop.
Most recently we co-sponsored a day-long symposium on Man, Woman, and the Order of Creation. It was an attempt to offer a constructive account of what it means to be a man or a woman within the context of contemporary disputes about sex and gender. We considered lived experience, science (biology, neuroscience and social science, philosophy and theology, and pastoral practice. Close to 1000 people from the local community attended and it was a sign of hope that, as a community, we are still able to have civil conversations on controversial topics.
CWF: Ending on a completely different note…Tell us something fun or "unexpected" about you.
DS: I love exercise; I guess I am a bit of a jock. I was a competitive swimmer, both before and during high school – an Olympic hopeful (I swam for the same team as Mark Spitz) – and an avid downhill skier. I later took up running and have run five marathons and countless races. I still work out almost every day.
CWF: Thanks so much for joining us, Deborah, and for all you do to serve the Church. May you always "run the race" with such passion!
Editor's Note: In our "Women to Know" series, we introduce you to Catholic women who inspire us with their leadership and their witness to a flourishing Catholic life. To propose a "Woman to Know," please contact Natalie Robertson at nrobertson@eppc.org
Articles by Woman to Know: Deborah Savage
Communio's Date Night Challenge
Fertility awareness website founders inform women on scientific, holistic alternative to birth control
Podcast: The Supreme Court and a Post-Roe World
The Dignity of the Sexed Body: Asymmetry, Equality, and Real Reproductive Justice
Profiles of pro-life women: A Q&A with Elizabeth Kirk
Announcing: Given Academy Season 2
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© 2023 Catholic Women's Forum. A program of Ethics & Public Policy Center. All rights reserved. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,458 |
Open Source MIS for Educational Institutions
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 4,906 |
Q: Avoid user to scroll to index -1 and 2 with UIPageViewController I have a UIPageViewController with 2 VCs (index 0 and 1) and I want to avoid the user to scroll to the right on the first view (index 0) and to scroll to the left on the second view (index 1).
Is there anybody who can tell me how can I do that?
Thanks!
A: Try these datasource methods:
@SWIFT Version
public func pageViewController(pageViewController: UIPageViewController, viewControllerBeforeViewController viewController: UIViewController) -> UIViewController? {
var index = viewControllers.indexOf(viewController)
if index == 0 || index == NSNotFound {
return nil
}
index--
return viewControllerAtIndex(index)
}
public func pageViewController(pageViewController: UIPageViewController, viewControllerAfterViewController viewController: UIViewController) -> UIViewController? {
var index = viewControllers.indexOf(viewController)
if index == NSNotFound {
return nil
}
index++
if index == viewControllers?.count {
return nil
}
return viewControllerAtIndex(index)
}
@OBJC Version
- (UIViewController *)pageViewController:(UIPageViewController *)pageViewController viewControllerBeforeViewController:(UIViewController *)viewController {
NSInteger index = [viewControllerArray indexOfObject:viewController];
if ((index == NSNotFound) || (index == 0)) {
return nil;
}
index--;
return [viewControllerArray objectAtIndex:index];
}
- (UIViewController *)pageViewController:(UIPageViewController *)pageViewController viewControllerAfterViewController:(UIViewController *)viewController {
NSInteger index = [viewControllerArray indexOfObject:viewController];
if (index == NSNotFound) {
return nil;
}
index++;
if (index == [viewControllerArray count]) {
return nil;
}
return [viewControllerArray objectAtIndex:index];
}
A: You can use the Index value of UIPageViewcontroller to achieve this. But this is quite painful... let you check it.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,623 |
Vermilion Voyage
"The Vermilion, by its union with the gulph, forms the natural communication of its inhabitants with the sea. The time is not far remote when many thousands of people will exist on the shores of this river…" - William Darby, A Geographical Description of the State of Louisiana, published in 1817
The course of the Vermilion River and what happens along its banks, like every other river in the world, have changed with the times.
For millennia throughout the prehistoric era, each time sea level made a drastic change, so would the course of what we now call the Mississippi River — and the Mississippi's changes affected all the waters in its vicinity.
At some point between 25,000 and 125,000 years ago, the course of the Mississippi shifted to the west. In fact, for a while, the river flowed right through the Lafayette area, where it cut a new course through the coastal plains. When the course of the river shifted eastward, the mighty river left in its wake a course through the prairie — a channel for the eventual Vermilion River.
Because the Vermilion and surrounding Attakapas Country "lay at some distance from the first centers of colonization, it was not encroached upon to any great extent until late in the eighteenth century," as recorded by John Reed Swanton in 1911.
By the 1740s, early settlers had a profitable fur and deerskin trading business along the Vermilion River. The Old Spanish Trail reached the Vermilion right about where the current Pinhook Bridge is located. The Pinhook Bridge landmark has been the epicenter of the Vermilion for centuries. Underestimating the significance of that site in terms of the history of the river and region is almost impossible.
In the midst of traders, ranchers and smugglers, the area around the Pinhook Bridge was the hub of what little commerce and activity happened along the Vermilion at the time. The small settlement was called Petit Manchac and served as a trading center for Native Americans, trappers and colonists.
During low water periods, Petit Manchac, later called Pinhook, was the farthest inland up the Vermilion River that smugglers could deliver goods up — making the Pinhook Bridge point the traditional head of navigation for the waterway. Above the Pinhook Bridge, it was called Bayou Vermilion. Below Pinhook, it was called the Vermilion River.
In 1760, Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire, originally from France, bought all the land between the Vermilion and the Bayou Teche from the Eastern Attakapas Chief Kinemo. This initial sale of land began a long string of land sales on both sides of the Vermilion.
By 1762, when France ceded Louisiana to Spain, the hardy pioneers along the Vermilion were primarily trappers, ranchers and smugglers. Some built their "stores" on barges that carried gunpowder, traps, tea and other goods to the scattered settlers, who offered furs, hides and farm products in exchange.
The Acadians began arriving in 1765. The census of 1766 listed 150 inhabitants in the Attakapas District — including 37 people in 17 households at Cöte Gelee (present day Broussard). By 1769, the population of the entire district was up to 409, according to a census taken that year by acting Gov. O'Reilly.
In the midst of the Acadians' arrival to the Attakapas Country, smuggling along the Vermilion River was rampant. During the Spanish period, it was known as a smugglers' "highway." By the early 1800s, smuggling expanded to include the illegal slave trade.
"The bewildering rapidity with which the country was transferred from Spain to France and then to the United States cause a great deal of confusion. Neither the laws of the United States nor its language were understood…" - The WPA Guide to Louisiana (2013)
Since settlers had arrived in Attakapas Country, raising cattle provided the most prosperous livelihood along the prairies of the Vermilion River. However, about 1830 most cattlemen opted to plow up their grasslands and plant cotton or sugar cane — with the intent to use the river as the primary means to transport the heavy goods. Steamboats made transporting the cotton and hogsheads of cane sugar an easier possibility than transporting by land.
As the 1850s brought rising economic prosperity to the free people of the region, tensions between the North and South were also increasing. Eventually, the great national debate of slavery and westward expansion reached a boiling point and the Civil War was launched. Because of the region's bounty of agricultural resources, both Union and Confederate forces brought significant naval troops to the bayous throughout the Acadiana region. Early in the Civil War, the Confederate army used the region as a major foraging area.
In 1865, after the war ended, the region struggled economically. Because of extensive wartime damage along the upper Vermilion — crops were burned, livestock was killed, homes were destroyed — the region's farmers had little to nothing to send to market. During that time and considering the problems associated with navigating the Vermilion, what cargo was ready to be sent to New Orleans likely went along the Teche.
With so much energy focused on recovery from the Civil War and the additional activity along the Vermilion, the region clambered for improvements along the Vermilion, which were slow to materialize. In 1879, Congressional legislation commissioned an engineering survey through the Army Corps of Engineers.
In June 1880, Congress appropriated $5,000 to fund the removal of navigational hazards between Abbeville and Pinhook Bridge. In February 1881, the Corps of Engineers signed a contract for $4,750 to clear "22 miles of river." In March 1881, Congress appropriated $4,900 to underwrite the cost of closing the Vermilion's "eastern entrance, at its mouth, by a low-water dam, and applying the balance that may remain to clearing the banks of overhanging trees, and the bed of the river of all trees, logs, and snags that may be found in it."
Because the railroads didn't reach New Iberia and Abbeville until later, the late-blooming steamboat traffic along the lower Vermilion thrived for years after it had virtually disappeared in other places. But the railroad eventually reached those communities too, and steamboat traffic disappeared.
By 1881, the railroad made its way from New Orleans to Houston and the region was referred to as the Attakapas Country began to grow and prosper again. The Civil War and Yellow Fever epidemic of the mid-1800s behind them, the city changed its name from Vermilionville to Lafayette in 1884.
As the ease and speed of train travel began to morph society, the Vermilion River's place of prominence began to diminish.
In the 1930s, in response to the great flood of 1927, levees constructed around the Atchafalaya Basin cut off the flow of fresh water to the Vermilion River. This hydrological isolation led to better flood control and navigation but came at a great price to the river. The lack of fresh water led to continued pollution and pollution accumulation, leading it to gain the infamous title of "Most Polluted River in America" on national television in the 1970s.
In response to the river's pollution, in 1984 the state of Louisiana created the Lafayette Parish Bayou Vermilion District with the primary purpose of improving the water quality and beautifying the Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette Parish in an effort to promote the bayou as a recreational and cultural asset.
After more than 30 years of work, progress is happening and the river's water quality, oxygen levels and aquatic life are in a healthier state. Recreation on the river has also continued to increase with Bayou Vermilion District maintaining three boat launches, four canoe/kayak launches and three public parks all located along the Vermilion.
Slowly but surely the Vermilion River is returning to the tidal river it once was.
Jesse Guidry
Seven years ago I had no knowledge of the main river flowing through the city I call home. Driving over bridges throughout Lafayette and the surrounding areas, it never once crossed my mind the impact a river and its tributaries could have on a community. That is until I started working at the Bayou Vermilion District, an environmental and cultural organization that conserves and manages boat, canoe and kayak launches in addition to public parks along the Vermilion. Through my work with the Bayou Vermilion District I not only began a personal relationship with the Vermilion through paddling, but also with the concept of a watershed. Many years later I have paddled the majority of the Vermilion more times than I can count. One thing I had not done, and to my knowledge no one has done, was continuously paddle the length of the Vermilion, which runs 70 Miles throughout three parishes. But that would soon change.
After my work with the Bayou Vermilion District I settled into my role with Lafayette Travel, the local Convention & Visitors Bureau, where part of my job was to develop and curate content for the blog. Having a passion for paddling and with outdoor seeming to be an untapped market for Lafayette I decided to explore the idea of developing an overnight paddle trail along the Vermilion as a way to boost ecotourism. The concept of the blog series was simple enough, recruit an avid outdoor photographer who had never been to the South, let alone paddled a river, bayou or swamp, and capture the paddle trip that would see us on the Vermilion for 60 miles over the course of four days and three nights.
Finding the right person to anchor the series proved to be easy enough. A simple search for outdoor photographers gave me more options than I knew what to do with. Narrowing it down to three, I sent the request out and very quickly got a response from Nathaniel Martin, a native of Vancouver who develops content for Monument and always seemed to be on some adventure on his Instagram account. After some back and forth about all that was entailed he was in and all that was left was the planning. Knowing that I would need help and paddling is always more fun with a group I set out to recruit locals I knew had either a specific skill set that was needed or an existing relationship with the Vermilion. The end of planning would see a total of 10 paddlers, including myself-four photographers, one cook, two guides, Lafayette Travel's creative director and intern as well as myself.
The culmination of everyone's efforts results can be seen in the below series. The stories and images that follow are the experiences shared by the people on this trip captured through their words as well as images.
It was a cold and misty morning in Lafayette when our team rolled out of the Vermilionville parking lot. Outside the window moody clouds still hung in the sky, reminders of the downpour from the night before. We were on our way to Lake Martin, a wildlife preserve just east of the city. From Lake Martin our team would paddle 60 miles over four days, following the Bayou Vermilion all the way to the Intercoastal Waterway.
Our truck rounded a corner and we came to a stop in a muddy parking lot near the shore. We launched our vessels into the swamp. Five kayaks, three canoes, and a paddle board. Lake Martin was still and black, a perfect mirror if not for the rippling of our paddle strokes. One by one we floated through the stands of cypress trees, observing a wide array of birds lighting onto gnarled branches. Spanish moss hung lazily from the trees like curtains. The entire lake felt more like a forest in many respects. Instead of pine needles and grass this forest floor was made up of floating fields of lily pads and layers of foamy algae. It was truly unlike any place I've ever been. After about an hour of exploring we leisurely made our way back to the Evangeline Canal, and put into the Bayou Vermilion.
The Vermilion is a tidal river. Long ago high waters from the Vermilion Bay pushed their way northward until eventually intersecting with a southbound distributary. That is how the river was formed, and as a result its currents are sometimes subject to a change in direction based on rain, tides and wind. Aside from the clouds on the first morning the first three days of our trip we were met with nearly perfect conditions for paddling. Bluebird skies and gentle tailwinds allowed us to take the river at our own pace. We covered a truly diverse set of landscapes.
For the first leg of the journey took us through lush marshland. The dark green canopies of the river's banks meeting in the middle to form a tunnel of sorts. Occasionally large herons and egrets would fly out in front of us, stirred no doubt by the sound of our voices breaking up the heavy silence. As we neared Lafayette the untamed forests began to give way to rural homesteads and eventually industrial waterfronts and towering cement bridges. The river became a guide of sorts, revealing Lafayette from a different vantage. We followed it from the bustling city airport, to historic Vermilionville, to charming riverfront neighborhoods until eventually the sounds of the city subsided and we found ourselves in the wild once more.
On this trip it was those long stretches of isolation that were the most meaningful. Not isolation from people per se, because we were a group of ten, but that sense of escape that comes from leaving what is familiar and routine. With every turn of the murky brown river came some new experience. One afternoon after drawing together for lunch we decided to latch all our boats together and create a flotilla. What was once a fleet of canoes and kayaks had become one giant raft. A couple of the guys jury rigged a sail out of two oars and a tarp and we sat there, laughing in the sun, letting the wind push us further southward.
Another time I found myself alone on the river. As I paddled I could hear the unique grunting sound of egrets along the trees lining the east bank. Eventually I found a stream that seemed to be flowing from where I had placed them in the forest. I followed the water into a marsh and found myself in the middle of a nesting ground. Hundreds of white egrets and pink spoonbills lined the branches of lofty cypress trees. I watched in silence as they flew from tree to tree, feeding their young before meeting back up with team and continuing south.
Our last day on the river was by far the most challenging. From the first few paddle strokes it became apparent that there was a shift in tides on the river. Brackish water from the gulf met us head on, accompanied by strong winds. Our pace was slowed to a crawl as we struggled against the strong current. After battling our way to the Intercoastal Waterway we decided to put in at a harbor and call it a day. It was hard for me to leave having come only a few miles short of our goal, but it's just another reason to come back to Louisiana and paddle the Vermilion once more.
Leah Graeff
It seems as though the more time I spend on Lake Martin or the Vermilion River, the more I feel I'm already looking at a photograph.
They both have a way with stillness. Wind blows through cypress and tupelo trees so delicately that it's as if the moss is fixed in its fullest expression. Herons wait patiently to glide downstream along the treetops while wood ducks blend with the shadows on the water. If I am not as still, I could miss them all.
As an artist my work focuses on relationships between the environment and the viewer, and I expected that for this trip, forming a connection to the landscape would be a priority, only I wasn't sure how I wanted to approach it in a way I hadn't done before.
I've paddled the Vermilion, and have more times than not, brought my camera along, usually leaving the images, if any, to chance. However, for these photographs, they weren't secondary. I needed an agenda, which wasn't anything out of the ordinary, but I was nervous that as many times before, I'd succumb to the stillness and not be able to close the shutter.
I was excited at my first experience of a collaborative photography project, which meant being on the river with four photographers, two guides, and four other project collaborators. It was a challenge, each of us on the same schedule, each looking for that "decisive moment" while being respectful of each other's space, particularly that of our guest Nathaniel, who traveled from Canada and was experiencing the landscape for the first time.
I will admit it was a challenge to let another photographer have a shot, since it's very difficult for a photographer to "see a photograph" and settle with not having it. When I do that, I see the image every time I close my eyes, and I say to myself, "Damn, I should have taken that shot." However, I do tend to make things more difficult for myself, and quickly settled into playing the game of chance and control.
Over the first two days of getting used to being with a large group on the water I kept going back to the word stillness and began to search for it in my environment. I paid closer attention to moments when I was alone, when I found an object that was alone or I where I felt still or found an object I felt was very still. This also served my desire to observe. Not looking to exploit the landscape but to conserve those moments of hush.
On the third day of our trip, we paddled from The Richard Sale Barn to Palmetto Island State Park. And that's where I found the equivalent to my own little blackberry bush (sadly, I didn't find any actual blackberry bushes). The Vermilion wound through acres of grain silos and hidden barns. Through hundred year oaks wrapped in resurrection ferns and forgotten houses we made plans to buy. I found my piece of the river, where I wanted to be fixed, just as the moss, in my fullest expression.
Joseph Vidrine
During my time working on the Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette Parish, I regularly used my phone's camera to document the amazing beauty of the bayou. Though the grandeur of the bayou was sometimes found in the trash problems I was tasked with alleviating, I felt it was important to record the bayou in an authentic way. Through my experience on the bayou, I formed an intimate relationship with the waterway, so when I was offered the chance to make this voyage I jumped at the opportunity.
The trip would last four days, traversing both Lafayette and Vermilion Parish, to finally reach Intracoastal City, 60 miles from our starting point. Riding on the force of a massive amount of runoff water pouring out of Lafayette's urban core, myself and ten other paddlers/photographers embarked on the trip of a lifetime. As we launched our boats on a calm, foggy morning, there was an excitement amongst the group of what was to come.
The Bayou Vermilion is the natural feature that has shaped the physical and cultural environment that is Acadiana. What was once a thriving economic highway for the area has over the years lost its luster in the hearts and minds of most who live in proximity. The bayou is viewed by many as a polluted ditch of sorts-- ridden with dead cows and discarded washing machines. What people may not know is efforts to clean and improve the condition and perception of the waterway have been carried out for years. The Bayou Vermilion District's bayou operations division is tasked with daily trash abatement practices, water quality testing, and the clearing of navigational obstacles within Lafayette Parish. Though the BVD's presence in the natural system is beneficial, the organization alone cannot eradicate the trash problem without the help of citizens of Lafayette and surrounding parishes. It is necessary for all to properly store and dispose of waste as well as prevent it from escaping into the natural environment.
My interest in the bayou has always been the interaction of humans with the surrounding environments. How is it that someone can cross over Pinhook bridge every day for work, but overlook the natural beauty that flows beneath? When did we become so disconnected from our waterway and is this a problem unique to the urban setting? Does it reach the more rural locations along the bayou as well?
The voyage south was the furthest I've had the opportunity to paddle on the Bayou Vermilion. Observing from a paddle craft offered a unique perspective that allowed me to capture the bayou from water level. It is exciting to recognize familiar Lafayette river-front residential properties and float underneath landmark bridges with cars buzzing overhead. Southside Park, just past Eloi Broussard road in Lafayette, would be where we would set up camp for the first night, followed by the Richard Sale Barn and Palmetto Island State Park for the second and third nights.
As the current took me further south past the parish boundary, the bayou started to widen and slow down. Even on an early spring day, young jet skiers enjoyed a ride on the bayou, while family party barge excursions passed by in opposite directions. Oil and fishing industry became more evident as we paddled on, fleets of shrimp trollers, pogey boats and jack up oil rigs lined the banks of the water way. Cypress groves and bottomland hardwood forests soon became distant scenes. Roso cane and spartina marsh grasses started to appear. I started to feel a familiar gulf breeze and the water became more salty. The pull-out point, Maxie Pierce boat landing in Intracoastal City, marked the end of our float and the entry back into the reality that is Lafayette rush hour traffic.
On the last morning of the trip, I took the opportunity to do some paddling on my own and went ahead of the group. An hour or so into my paddle I rounded a meander in the bayou just south of Palmetto Island State Park-- a bald eagle flying overhead caught my attention. As I floated closer, there was its pair perched in a tree on the west bank. My boat drifted toward it and the massive eagle wearily stared at me then swooped down from its resting place and flew away. The eagle is a symbol of many strong things. For me in that instance, it represented the natural beauty that can be found almost anywhere in the world-- the beauty that is found in our backyards. My hope is that the photos and words of this project influence someone to take advantage of the natural beauty that encompasses our beautiful state and I challenge future generations to explore, fish and care for the Mighty Bayou Vermilion.
Kristie Cornell
As a geologist, naturalist, and traveler, I have always found myself interested in the intersection of landscape and culture. Rivers and streams sculpt the Earth's surface and serve as important focal points for settlement. I was excited to join this crew to see for myself, as well as through the eyes of others, how the Bayou Vermilion shapes the region I call home.
Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to make the whole trip to Intracoastal Waterway because of work commitments, so I would have to make do with only two days and just over thirty miles of paddling.
We met at Vermilionville to load up our gear and transport everything to nearby Lake Martin, where our trip would begin. I knew and had paddled with many of the people involved, and was looking forward to more time on the water with them. Lake Martin at daybreak is one of my favorite places to kayak, and this morning was no exception. Our boats cut through the thick fog and still water as the silence gave way to the chattering of awakening birds. We were fortunate to catch glimpses of great egrets, great blue herons, anhinga, a great horned owl, and a bald eagle perched amongst the cypress and tupelo.
Portaging across the levee at the northern end of the lake, we continued westward towards the Bayou Vermilion along the Evangeline Canal. The canal cuts through a large wetland area, and leaning trees and overhanging branches arch across the waterway, making a long, straight tunnel to the bayou. The bright green of their new growth reflected in the smooth surface of the silty water, and large patches of spiderwort were blooming along the banks.
Meeting the Vermilion, we paddled on through the wetlands and into increasing development as we approached Lafayette. Rounding a bend in the river along the runway of the Lafayette Regional Airport, we made our first stop at Vermilionville for lunch at their restaurant, La Cuisine de Maman. After a quick walk through the grounds of Vermilionville, we were back on the water and traveling through Lafayette proper.
Seeing a city from the water is to view it from a much different perspective than what we are used to. Backyards are centered on enjoying the view, and we saw lots of people taking advantage of patios and decks, having coffee and waving as we passed. I often found myself losing a sense of where we were geographically, my mind so accustomed to the network of roadways through town and less familiar with the route of the bayou. My sense of direction would reorient itself occasionally when we passed landmarks of familiar neighborhoods or bridges.
The end of our first day came after over sixteen miles of paddling. Thanks to the generosity of the Bayou Vermilion District, we were allowed to set up camp for the night at Southside Park, a public park with a beautiful pavilion overlooking the bayou, and a canoe/kayak launch and dock that gives convenient access to boaters.
The second day of the trip was an additional sixteen miles from south Lafayette to Abbeville. This section of the river brought us out of the city, south through the town of Milton, and into more rural stretches of Vermilion Parish. This was a less wild, but beautiful section of the river, and we spotted quite a bit of wildlife, from red-eared sliders to hawks, and even a swallow-tailed kite.
We pulled the boats out of the water at the Richard Sale Barn in Abbeville, and while the rest of the crew set up their camp for the night, I was able to wander around the old barns, and see the beautiful auction house turned music venue. In addition to being able to see my home from a different vantage point than I'm used to, this trip was also fun because of a personal connection to the river. My aunt and uncle live in the house my grandparents built on the Vermilion, and I was able to stop to visit my aunt for a minute when we passed their house. My dad also lives on the river, farther downstream in Milton. He also came out to wave as we went by. But what really made the trip memorable was the group of people that came together for this adventure. From kayaks, canoes, paddleboards and rafts, we paddled, floated, and sailed down the bayou and had a blast along the way.
back to home lafayette travel back to top | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 4,918 |
Q: Filter out rows that contain duplicate numbers The second row in the following matrix contains two 3's. All the other rows don't contain duplicates.
A = [1 2 3;
1 3 3;
4 5 6]
What's an efficient way to filter out rows containing duplicates such that the result is the following?
A = [1 2 3;
4 5 6]
A: I think this is reasonably fast:
A( all(diff(sort(A,2),[],2), 2), :);
If A is M×N, then the complexity of this is O(M·N·log(N))...I have a hunch this is the fastest way possible, but I'm unable to prove this. Anyone?
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 6,045 |
Lieutenant-General Sir Samuel Robert Wesley ( – 5 January 1877) was an Anglo-Irish Royal Marines officer who served as Deputy Adjutant-General Royal Marines.
Early life
Wesley was the son Robert Wesley and Ellen Butt of Lismoat or Lismote Castle, County Limerick, Kingdom of Ireland, where he was born around 1791.
Military career
Wesley was commissioned into the Royal Marine Artillery. He saw action in Spain during the First Carlist War before becoming Assistant Adjutant-General at Headquarters Royal Marine Forces. He became Deputy Adjutant-General Royal Marines (the professional head of the Royal Marines) in December 1854 and directed the involvement of the Royal Marines during the Crimean War before retiring in January 1862.
References
1790s births
1877 deaths
Military personnel from County Limerick
Royal Marines generals
Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath
Military personnel of the First Carlist War
British military personnel of the Crimean War | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 474 |
Q: Encoding class style attributes with special characters I am try to populate two svg elements with style attributes. One with strokedashoffset and the other with transform: rotate. This is my expected css:
<circle class="progressbar-line-timer" id="timerOffset"
style="strokedashoffset: 76.1942px;" r="48.5" cx="50" cy ="50"
/>
<circle class="progressbar-marker-timer" id="timerRotate"
style="transform: rotate(270deg);" r="6" cx="50" cy="1.5" />
I have created a function to calculate those two values.
I am attempting to use getElementById() to populate the values. I have assigned an ID's to the svg elements.
<circle class="progressbar-line-timer" id="timerOffset"
r="48.5" cx="50" cy ="50" />
<circle class="progressbar-marker-timer" id="timerRotate"
r="6" cx="50" cy="1.5" />
Because these style attributes have special characters - dashes, colons, and parens, I am using encodeURI to encode the string for I read that it can handle special characters.
I cannot seem to get the correct values to encode correctly. I am getting this error on the document.getElementById("timerOffset") statement:
VM88:31 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'style' of
null
at <anonymous>:31:47
(anonymous) @ VM88:31
Here is my javascript code:
//calculated values rotateTimer
// offsetTimer
// using escape to recognize the double quotes
timerURIComprotateHold = ('\"stroke-dashoffset: '+rotateTimer+'\"')
var timerURIComprotate = encodeURI(timerURIComprotateHold);
console.log('timerURIComprotate '+timerURIComprotate );
// erroring on this statement
document.getElementById("timerOffset").style.timerURIComprotate;
// calculated value of timerURIComprotate %22stroke-dashoffset:%20125.99999999999999px;%22
Isn't %22 quotes and %20 a space and shouldn't this work?
I've tried encodeURIComponent as well with no luck.
Is there another encoding method I can try?
The encoding needs to be to handle parens too for they are in the style attributes of the second element i want to style.
Thank you for your help.
A: If your JavaScript isn't successfully getting an element by its ID, it may be that your JavaScript is being loaded before the element has been rendered. That is: at the time your JavaScript is being run, the browser doesn't "know about" the <circle> elements.
Web browsers execute your code line-by-line, going from top-to-bottom and left-to-right of the code you wrote, so if your JavaScript is in a <script> tag in line 5 of your HTML, and your <circle> element is in line 32, your web browser is going to run the JavaScript before it has read the <circle> HTML. That's why it's saying it can't modify the style "of null" -- it's trying to modify something that doesn't exist yet.
To prevent this, you need to tell the browser to not run the JavaScript until the DOM's content -- all the HTML elements -- have loaded. This is usually done in one of two ways:
*
*window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded') (see examples at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/DOMContentLoaded), or
*Putting your JavaScript in <script> tag after the rest of your HTML, usually right before the closing </body> tag.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 6,730 |
module.exports = StrikeRepresentation;
StrikeRepresentation.prototype = Object.create(Phaser.Sprite.prototype);
StrikeRepresentation.prototype.constructor = StrikeRepresentation;
/**
* Strike/Tick representation of a number.
* @param {Object} game - A reference to the Phaser game.
* @param {number} number - The number to represent.
* @param {number} xPos - X position.
* @param {number} yPos - Y position.
* @param {number} size - Width and height of the representation (default 100).
* @param {string} color - The color of the representation (default '#000000').
* @param {number} max - If you have a range of numbers, set this to the highest one,
* that way the height of the individual strikes will be the same
* (default argument number).
* @return {Object} Itself.
*/
function StrikeRepresentation (game, number, xPos, yPos, size, color, max) {
size = size || 100;
max = max || number;
max = Math.abs(max);
if (max < number) {
max = number;
}
var diagTop = 0.8;
var diagBottom = 0.2;
var width = size/10;
var half = width/2;
var padding = width*1.25;
var offset = 2;
var height = size/Math.ceil(max/5) - offset;
var pos = (size - width - padding*2) / 3;
/*
* For more information about context:
* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CanvasRenderingContext2D
*/
var bmd = new Phaser.BitmapData(game, '', size, size);
var ctx = bmd.ctx;
ctx.fillStyle = color || '#000000';
ctx.beginPath();
var x = padding;
var y = offset/2;
for (var i = 1; i <= number; i++) {
if (i % 5 === 0 && i !== 0) {
ctx.moveTo(0, y + height*diagTop - half );
ctx.lineTo(size - half, y + height*diagBottom );
ctx.lineTo(size, y + height*diagBottom + half);
ctx.lineTo(half, y + height*diagTop );
ctx.lineTo(0, y + height*diagTop - half );
x = padding;
y += height + offset;
} else {
ctx.fillRect(x, y, width, height);
x += pos;
}
}
ctx.closePath();
ctx.fill();
Phaser.Sprite.call(this, game, xPos, yPos, bmd); // Parent constructor.
return this;
} | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 7,219 |
{"url":"https:\/\/labs.tib.eu\/arxiv\/?author=Max%20Klimm","text":"\u2022 ### Distance-preserving graph contractions(1705.04544)\n\nFeb. 13, 2019 cs.DS\nCompression and sparsification algorithms are frequently applied in a preprocessing step before analyzing or optimizing large networks\/graphs. In this paper we propose and study a new framework contracting edges of a graph (merging vertices into super-vertices) with the goal of preserving pairwise distances as accurately as possible. Formally, given an edge-weighted graph, the contraction should guarantee that for any two vertices at distance $d$, the corresponding super-vertices remain at distance at least $\\varphi(d)$ in the contracted graph, where $\\varphi$ is a tolerance function bounding the permitted distance distortion. We present a comprehensive picture of the algorithmic complexity of the contraction problem for affine tolerance functions $\\varphi(x)=x\/\\alpha-\\beta$, where $\\alpha\\geq 1$ and $\\beta\\geq 0$ are arbitrary real-valued parameters. Specifically, we present polynomial-time algorithms for trees as well as hardness and inapproximability results for different graph classes, precisely separating easy and hard cases. Further we analyze the asymptotic behavior of contractions, and find efficient algorithms to compute (non-optimal) contractions despite our hardness results.\n\u2022 ### Revenue Gaps for Static and Dynamic Posted Pricing of Homogeneous Goods(1607.07105)\n\nApril 15, 2019 cs.GT\nWe consider the problem of maximizing the expected revenue from selling $k$ homogeneous goods to $n$ unit-demand buyers who arrive sequentially with independent and identically distributed valuations. In this setting the optimal posted prices are dynamic in the sense that they depend on the remaining numbers of goods and buyers. We investigate how much revenue is lost when a single static price is used instead for all buyers and goods, and prove upper bounds on the ratio between the maximum revenue from dynamic prices and that from static prices. These bounds are tight for all values of $k$ and $n$ and vary depending on a regularity property of the underlying distribution. For general distributions we obtain a ratio of $2-k\/n$, for regular distributions a ratio that increases in $n$ and is bounded from above by $1\/(1-k^k\/(e^{k}k!))$, which is roughly $1\/(1-1\/(\\sqrt{2\\pi k}))$. The lower bounds hold for the revenue gap between dynamic and static prices. The upper bounds are obtained via an ex-ante relaxation of the revenue maximization problem, as a consequence the tight bounds of $2-k\/n$ in the general case and of $1\/(1-1\/(\\sqrt{2\\pi k}))$ in the regular case apply also to the potentially larger revenue gap between the optimal incentive-compatible mechanism and the optimal static price. Our results imply that for regular distributions the benefit of dynamic prices vanishes while for non-regular distributions dynamic prices may achieve up to twice the revenue of static prices.\n\u2022 ### Tight bounds for undirected graph exploration with pebbles and multiple agents(1805.03476)\n\nMay 9, 2018 cs.DS, cs.CC\nWe study the problem of deterministically exploring an undirected and initially unknown graph with $n$ vertices either by a single agent equipped with a set of pebbles, or by a set of collaborating agents. The vertices of the graph are unlabeled and cannot be distinguished by the agents, but the edges incident to a vertex have locally distinct labels. The graph is explored when all vertices have been visited by at least one agent. In this setting, it is known that for a single agent without pebbles $\\Theta(\\log n)$ bits of memory are necessary and sufficient to explore any graph with at most $n$ vertices. We are interested in how the memory requirement decreases as the agent may mark vertices by dropping and retrieving distinguishable pebbles, or when multiple agents jointly explore the graph. We give tight results for both questions showing that for a single agent with constant memory $\\Theta(\\log \\log n)$ pebbles are necessary and sufficient for exploration. We further prove that the same bound holds for the number of collaborating agents needed for exploration. For the upper bound, we devise an algorithm for a single agent with constant memory that explores any $n$-vertex graph using $\\mathcal{O}(\\log \\log n)$ pebbles, even when $n$ is unknown. The algorithm terminates after polynomial time and returns to the starting vertex. Since an additional agent is at least as powerful as a pebble, this implies that $\\mathcal{O}(\\log \\log n)$ agents with constant memory can explore any $n$-vertex graph. For the lower bound, we show that the number of agents needed for exploring any graph of size $n$ is already $\\Omega(\\log \\log n)$ when we allow each agent to have at most $\\mathcal{O}( \\log n ^{1-\\varepsilon})$ bits of memory for any $\\varepsilon>0$. This also implies that a single agent with sublogarithmic memory needs $\\Theta(\\log \\log n)$ pebbles to explore any $n$-vertex graph.\n\u2022 ### Online Best Reply Algorithms for Resource Allocation Problems(1805.02526)\n\nMay 7, 2018 cs.GT, cs.DS\nWe study online resource allocation problems with a diseconomy of scale. In these problems, there are certain requests, each demanding a set of resources, that arrive in an online manner. The cost of each resource is semi-convex and grows superlinearly in the total load on the resource. An irrevocable allocation decision has to be made directly after the arrival of each request with the goal to minimize the total cost on the resources. We focus on two simple greedy online policies that provide very fast and easy approximation algorithms. The first policy is to minimize the individual cost of the current online request with respect to all previous requests that have been allocated before. The second policy is to minimize the marginal total cost over all requests that have arrived up to this point. In the literature, these type of algorithms is also considered as one-round walks in congestion games starting from the empty state. We consider the weighted and unweighted version of the problem. In the weighted variant, and for cost functions that are polynomials with maximal degree $d$ and positive coefficients, we proof a tight competitive ratio of $\\left(\\sqrt[d]{2}-1\\right)^{-(d+1)}$ for the marginal total cost policy. This interestingly exactly matches the approximation factor for the corresponding \\emph{multiple}-round walk algorithm. Our work indicates that one-round walks that start in an empty starting state are exactly as efficient as multiple-round walks. We also show that this does not carry over to the unweighted version of the problem. For unweighted instances, we provide lower bounds for both policies that are significantly larger than the corresponding multiple-round walks. We complement our results with an upper and lower bound on the solution quality of the personal cost policy for weighted and unweighted instances.\n\u2022 ### Demand-Independent Optimal Tolls(1708.02737)\n\nFeb. 17, 2018 cs.GT\nWardrop equilibria in nonatomic congestion games are in general inefficient as they do not induce an optimal flow that minimizes the total travel time. Network tolls are a prominent and popular way to induce an optimum flow in equilibrium. The classical approach to find such tolls is marginal cost pricing which requires the exact knowledge of the demand on the network. In this paper, we investigate under which conditions demand-independent optimum tolls exist that induce the system optimum flow for any travel demand in the network. We give several characterizations for the existence of such tolls both in terms of the cost structure and the network structure of the game. Specifically we show that demand-independent optimum tolls exist if and only if the edge cost functions are shifted monomials as used by the Bureau of Public Roads. Moreover, non-negative demand-independent optimum tolls exist when the network is a directed acyclic multi-graph. Finally, we show that any network with a single origin-destination pair admits demand-independent optimum tolls that, although not necessarily non-negative, satisfy a budget constraint.\n\u2022 ### Hiring Secretaries over Time: The Benefit of Concurrent Employment(1604.08125)\n\nMay 30, 2017 cs.DS\nWe consider a stochastic online problem where $n$ applicants arrive over time, one per time step. Upon arrival of each applicant their cost per time step is revealed, and we have to fix the duration of employment, starting immediately. This decision is irrevocable, i.e., we can neither extend a contract nor dismiss a candidate once hired. In every time step, at least one candidate needs to be under contract, and our goal is to minimize the total hiring cost, which is the sum of the applicants' costs multiplied with their respective employment durations. We provide a competitive online algorithm for the case that the applicants' costs are drawn independently from a known distribution. Specifically, the algorithm achieves a competitive ratio of 2.965 for the case of uniform distributions. For this case, we give an analytical lower bound of 2 and a computational lower bound of 2.148. We then adapt our algorithm to stay competitive even in settings with one or more of the following restrictions: (i) at most two applicants can be hired concurrently; (ii) the distribution of the applicants' costs is unknown; (iii) the total number $n$ of time steps is unknown. On the other hand, we show that concurrent employment is a necessary feature of competitive algorithms by proving that no algorithm has a competitive ratio better than $\\Omega(\\sqrt{n} \/ \\log n)$ if concurrent employment is forbidden.\n\u2022 ### Sensitivity Analysis for Convex Separable Optimization over Integral Polymatroids(1611.05372)\n\nDec. 8, 2016 cs.DM, cs.GT, cs.DS, math.OC\nWe study the sensitivity of optimal solutions of convex separable optimization problems over an integral polymatroid base polytope with respect to parameters determining both the cost of each element and the polytope. Under convexity and a regularity assumption on the functional dependency of the cost function with respect to the parameters, we show that reoptimization after a change in parameters can be done by elementary local operations. Applying this result, we derive that starting from any optimal solution there is a new optimal solution to new parameters such that the L1-norm of the difference of the two solutions is at most two times the L1 norm of the difference of the parameters. We apply these sensitivity results to a class of non-cooperative polymatroid games and derive the existence of pure Nash equilibria. We complement our results by showing that polymatroids are the maximal combinatorial structure enabling these results. For any non-polymatroid region, there is a corresponding optimization problem for which the sensitivity results do not hold. In addition, there is a game where the players strategies are isomorphic to the non-polymatroid region and that does not admit a pure Nash equilibrium.\n\u2022 ### Scheduling Bidirectional Traffic on a Path(1504.07129)\n\nApril 27, 2015 cs.DS\nWe study the fundamental problem of scheduling bidirectional traffic along a path composed of multiple segments. The main feature of the problem is that jobs traveling in the same direction can be scheduled in quick succession on a segment, while jobs in opposing directions cannot cross a segment at the same time. We show that this tradeoff makes the problem significantly harder than the related flow shop problem, by proving that it is NP-hard even for identical jobs. We complement this result with a PTAS for a single segment and non-identical jobs. If we allow some pairs of jobs traveling in different directions to cross a segment concurrently, the problem becomes APX-hard even on a single segment and with identical jobs. We give polynomial algorithms for the setting with restricted compatibilities between jobs on a single and any constant number of segments, respectively.\n\u2022 ### Sharing Non-Anonymous Costs of Multiple Resources Optimally(1412.4456)\n\nFeb. 4, 2015 cs.GT\nIn cost sharing games, the existence and efficiency of pure Nash equilibria fundamentally depends on the method that is used to share the resources' costs. We consider a general class of resource allocation problems in which a set of resources is used by a heterogeneous set of selfish users. The cost of a resource is a (non-decreasing) function of the set of its users. Under the assumption that the costs of the resources are shared by uniform cost sharing protocols, i.e., protocols that use only local information of the resource's cost structure and its users to determine the cost shares, we exactly quantify the inefficiency of the resulting pure Nash equilibria. Specifically, we show tight bounds on prices of stability and anarchy for games with only submodular and only supermodular cost functions, respectively, and an asymptotically tight bound for games with arbitrary set-functions. While all our upper bounds are attained for the well-known Shapley cost sharing protocol, our lower bounds hold for arbitrary uniform cost sharing protocols and are even valid for games with anonymous costs, i.e., games in which the cost of each resource only depends on the cardinality of the set of its users.\n\u2022 ### Resource Competition on Integral Polymatroids(1407.7650)\n\nJuly 29, 2014 cs.DM, cs.GT, math.OC\nWe study competitive resource allocation problems in which players distribute their demands integrally on a set of resources subject to player-specific submodular capacity constraints. Each player has to pay for each unit of demand a cost that is a nondecreasing and convex function of the total allocation of that resource. This general model of resource allocation generalizes both singleton congestion games with integer-splittable demands and matroid congestion games with player-specific costs. As our main result, we show that in such general resource allocation problems a pure Nash equilibrium is guaranteed to exist by giving a pseudo-polynomial algorithm computing a pure Nash equilibrium.\n\u2022 ### Complexity and Approximation of the Continuous Network Design Problem(1307.4258)\n\nNov. 12, 2013 cs.GT, cs.DS, math.OC\nWe revisit a classical problem in transportation, known as the continuous (bilevel) network design problem, CNDP for short. We are given a graph for which the latency of each edge depends on the ratio of the edge flow and the capacity installed. The goal is to find an optimal investment in edge capacities so as to minimize the sum of the routing cost of the induced Wardrop equilibrium and the investment cost. While this problem is considered as challenging in the literature, its complexity status was still unknown. We close this gap showing that CNDP is strongly NP-complete and APX-hard, both on directed and undirected networks and even for instances with affine latencies. As for the approximation of the problem, we first provide a detailed analysis for a heuristic studied by Marcotte for the special case of monomial latency functions (Mathematical Programming, Vol.~34, 1986). Specifically, we derive a closed form expression of its approximation guarantee for arbitrary sets S of allowed latency functions. Second, we propose a different approximation algorithm and show that it has the same approximation guarantee. As our final -- and arguably most interesting -- result regarding approximation, we show that using the better of the two approximation algorithms results in a strictly improved approximation guarantee for which we give a closed form expression. For affine latencies, e.g., this algorithm achieves a 1.195-approximation which improves on the 5\/4 that has been shown before by Marcotte. We finally discuss the case of hard budget constraints on the capacity investment.\n\u2022 ### Optimal Impartial Selection(1310.8631)\n\nOct. 31, 2013 cs.GT\nWe study the problem of selecting a member of a set of agents based on impartial nominations by agents from that set. The problem was studied previously by Alon et al. and Holzman and Moulin and has important applications in situations where representatives are selected from within a group or where publishing or funding decisions are made based on a process of peer review. Our main result concerns a randomized mechanism that in expectation awards the prize to an agent with at least half the maximum number of nominations. Subject to impartiality, this is best possible.\n\u2022 ### Packing a Knapsack of Unknown Capacity(1307.2806)\n\nJuly 10, 2013 cs.DS\nWe study the problem of packing a knapsack without knowing its capacity. Whenever we attempt to pack an item that does not fit, the item is discarded; if the item fits, we have to include it in the packing. We show that there is always a policy that packs a value within factor 2 of the optimum packing, irrespective of the actual capacity. If all items have unit density, we achieve a factor equal to the golden ratio. Both factors are shown to be best possible. In fact, we obtain the above factors using packing policies that are universal in the sense that they fix a particular order of the items and try to pack the items in this order, independent of the observations made while packing. We give efficient algorithms computing these policies. On the other hand, we show that, for any alpha>1, the problem of deciding whether a given universal policy achieves a factor of alpha is coNP-complete. If alpha is part of the input, the same problem is shown to be coNP-complete for items with unit densities. Finally, we show that it is coNP-hard to decide, for given alpha, whether a set of items admits a universal policy with factor alpha, even if all items have unit densities.\n\u2022 ### Improving the H_k-Bound on the Price of Stability in Undirected Shapley Network Design Games(1211.2090)\n\nMarch 22, 2013 cs.GT\nIn this paper we show that the price of stability of Shapley network design games on undirected graphs with k players is at most (k^3(k+1)\/2-k^2) \/ (1+k^3(k+1)\/2-k^2) H_k = (1 - \\Theta(1\/k^4)) H_k, where H_k denotes the k-th harmonic number. This improves on the known upper bound of H_k, which is also valid for directed graphs but for these, in contrast, is tight. Hence, we give the first non-trivial upper bound on the price of stability for undirected Shapley network design games that is valid for an arbitrary number of players. Our bound is proved by analyzing the price of stability restricted to Nash equilibria that minimize the potential function of the game. We also present a game with k=3 players in which such a restricted price of stability is 1.634. This shows that the analysis of Bil\\`o and Bove (Journal of Interconnection Networks, Volume 12, 2011) is tight. In addition, we give an example for three players that improves the lower bound on the (unrestricted) price of stability to 1.571.\n\u2022 ### Congestion Games with Variable Demands(1012.1938)\n\nDec. 13, 2010 cs.GT\nWe initiate the study of congestion games with variable demands where the (variable) demand has to be assigned to exactly one subset of resources. The players' incentives to use higher demands are stimulated by non-decreasing and concave utility functions. The payoff for a player is defined as the difference between the utility of the demand and the associated cost on the used resources. Although this class of non-cooperative games captures many elements of real-world applications, it has not been studied in this generality, to our knowledge, in the past. We study the fundamental problem of the existence of pure Nash equilibria (PNE for short) in congestion games with variable demands. We call a set of cost functions C consistent if every congestion game with variable demands and cost functions in C possesses a PNE. We say that C is FIP consistent if every such game possesses the alpha-Finite Improvement Property for every alpha>0. Our main results are structural characterizations of consistency and FIP consistency for twice continuously differentiable cost functions. Specifically, we show 1. C is consistent if and only if C contains either only affine functions or only homogeneously exponential functions (c(x) = a exp(p x)). 2. C is FIP consistent if and only if C contains only affine functions. Our results provide a complete characterization of consistency of cost functions revealing structural differences to congestion games with fixed demands (weighted congestion games), where in the latter even inhomogeneously exponential functions are FIP consistent. Finally, we study consistency and FIP consistency of cost functions in a slightly different class of games, where every player experiences the same cost on a resource (uniform cost model). We give a characterization of consistency and FIP consistency showing that only homogeneously exponential functions are consistent.\n\u2022 ### Strong Nash Equilibria in Games with the Lexicographical Improvement Property(0909.0347)\n\nSept. 2, 2009 cs.DM, cs.GT\nWe introduce a class of finite strategic games with the property that every deviation of a coalition of players that is profitable to each of its members strictly decreases the lexicographical order of a certain function defined on the set of strategy profiles. We call this property the Lexicographical Improvement Property (LIP) and show that it implies the existence of a generalized strong ordinal potential function. We use this characterization to derive existence, efficiency and fairness properties of strong Nash equilibria. We then study a class of games that generalizes congestion games with bottleneck objectives that we call bottleneck congestion games. We show that these games possess the LIP and thus the above mentioned properties. For bottleneck congestion games in networks, we identify cases in which the potential function associated with the LIP leads to polynomial time algorithms computing a strong Nash equilibrium. Finally, we investigate the LIP for infinite games. We show that the LIP does not imply the existence of a generalized strong ordinal potential, thus, the existence of SNE does not follow. Assuming that the function associated with the LIP is continuous, however, we prove existence of SNE. As a consequence, we prove that bottleneck congestion games with infinite strategy spaces and continuous cost functions possess a strong Nash equilibrium.","date":"2019-11-18 07:54:37","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.6524961590766907, \"perplexity\": 445.41752869766793}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": false}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2019-47\/segments\/1573496669454.33\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20191118053441-20191118081441-00149.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: Conditional rendering in "Segments" So I have the following spark partial
<default extension="null" footer="null" header="null" type="string"/>
<div class="mod ${extension}?{extension != null}">
<div class="inner">
<div class="hd ${header}?{header != null}">
<render segment="hd" />
</div>
<div class="bd">
<render />
</div>
<div class="ft ${footer}?{footer != null}">
<render segment="ft" />
</div>
</div>
</div>
I think that segments are really cool, but I only want it render if I use it. Maybe something like this:
<default extension="null" footer="null" header="null" type="string"/>
<div class="mod ${extension}?{extension != null}">
<div class="inner">
<render segment="hd">
<div class="hd ${header}?{header != null}">
<!-- write content here -->
</div>
</render>
<div class="bd">
<render />
</div>
<render segment="ft">
<div class="ft ${footer}?{footer!= null}">
<!-- write content here -->
</div>
</render>
</div>
</div>
Usage like:
<mod>
<p> My content </p>
<segment name="hd">
<h1> My Header </h1>
</segment>
</mod>
Basically I'm trying to get spark to only render segments that are used. In this instance I wouldn't want the <div class="ft" /> to render and I would want the <h1> wrapped by the <div class="hd">
A: Does something like this work for you:
<default extension="null" footer="null" header="null" type="string"/>
<div class="mod ${extension}?{extension != null}">
<div class="inner">
<div class="hd ${header}" if="header != null">
<render segment="hd" />
</div>
<div class="bd">
<render />
</div>
<div class="ft ${footer}" if="footer != null">
<render segment="ft" />
</div>
</div>
</div>
This would have the effect of not rendering the divs at all if header or footer was null. You could do the same for extension of course but I assumed you always want to at least render the body so I left it the way you had it. You can put an if="condition" on any node in Spark.
Am I missing something here?
Cheers,
Rob
| {
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Abcdin () es una cadena chilena de tiendas la cual realiza ventas de artefactos para el hogar. Fue creada en 1950 como una subsidiaria de Empresas Copec. En abril de 2005 fue vendida al grupo Yaconi-Santa Cruz, quienes la fusionaron con las multitiendas Din en julio de 2008. Actualmente es una división de dicha empresa.
Historia
En la década de 1950, a modo de incentivar el uso de gas licuado, la compañía de gas Abastible, de Empresas Copec, comienza a comercializar productos que consumen gas licuado, como cocinas y estufas.
En 1966, se inicia formalmente las ventas de la tienda ABC, bajo el nombre de Abastible, con la venta de productos de línea blanca y electrodomésticos.
En 1976 se crea la sociedad Abastecedora de Combustibles Comercial Ltda., que quedó encargada de las ventas de productos para el hogar, renombrando Abastible por ABC.
En marzo de 1989 deja de ser una subsidiaria de Abastible, quedando bajo el nombre de ABC Comercial Ltda., razón social que mantiene hasta el día de hoy. Ese mismo año, lanzan la tarjeta de crédito ABC, con el fin de financiar las compras. También se crea el nombre de fantasía Supertiendas ABC el cual mantuvo hasta octubre de 1996 con el eslogan de 1987 «El ABC de la Economía»
En octubre de 1996, se cambia la imagen corporativa de la compañía, pasando del nombre Supertiendas ABC a solamente ABC con el nuevo eslogan «Sabemos más», ese mismo año abandona el primer puesto en ventas de productos para el hogar en Chile, debido a la adquisición de Equs por parte de Din, encargada de la venta de electrodomésticos, línea blanca, electrónica y muebles.
El jueves 1 de abril de 2005, el grupo Angelini vende al grupo Yaconi-Santa Cruz, propietaria de las tiendas Din, todas las operaciones de ABC Comercial Ltda., entre ellas las operaciones de las tiendas y las tarjetas de crédito.
En junio de 2006, tras fusionar su negocio financiero con el de Din, cambia su imagen corporativa, con el eslogan: «El ABC de la tecnología», la que mantuvo hasta la unión definitiva de las marcas ABC y Din.
En julio de 2008, finalmente se fusionan las dos marcas, naciendo así abcdin. También se cambia el eslogan por «Sólo por ti» y Stefan Kramer realiza sus primeras campañas publicitarias.
En 2010, Abcdin cambió su eslogan por el clásico eslogan de las Supertiendas ABC: «El ABC de la economía».
En enero de 2011, Abcdin vuelve a cambiar sueslogan por «La felicidad cuesta menos».
En el año 2013, la marca adquiere la cadena de tiendas especializada en vestuario, Dijon. En el año 2016, la empresa lanza su tarjeta ABCvisa, reemplazando a la Tarjeta ABCdin.
Tras el estallido social ocurrido en Chile, en noviembre de 2019, AD Retail informó que sus filiales Abcdin y Dijon se acogieron a la Ley de Reorganización y liquidación de empresas para evitar la quiebra. En abril de 2020, la junta de acreedores de ABCdin aprobó el plan de pagos propuesto por la cadena de tiendas para hacer frente a la deuda cercana a los US$100 millones que mantenía a la fecha. Cuatro meses después, se anunció el cierre definitivo de las tiendas Dijon.
En noviembre de 2021, la tienda lanza su primera sucursal en Providencia, siendo además la primera sucursal de la empresa ubicada en el sector oriente de Santiago.
ABCDin
Hasta julio de 2008, las tiendas ABC y Din operaban comercialmente como tiendas independientes y a cara del cliente eran competencia. En julio de ese año se produce la fusión de dichas marcas, naciendo ABCDin, la cual llegó a tener más de 180 sucursales, pero en mayo de 2010, sólo les quedaban 100 tiendas, debido a un proceso de eficiencia en el cual se fusionaron algunas sucursales y se incrementaron los metros cuadrados de otras. Actualmente poseen 156 tiendas a lo largo de Chile.
Tarjeta ABC
En julio de 2008, se lanzó la nueva tarjeta de crédito Abcdin, quedando la tienda con tres tarjetas asociadas con dos emisores distintos: Cofisa S.A. (emisor de la tarjeta Abcdin y la tarjeta Multicompra Din) y ABC Inversiones Ltda. (emisor de la tarjeta ABC). Entre las tarjetas Abcdin, ABC y Multicompra Din no había diferencias en costos para sus clientes ni diferencias comerciales.
Luego de que el grupo Yaconi-Santa Cruz compró las tiendas de vestuario Dijon —fundadas en 1978 por la familia Wurman bajo el nombre inicial de Top Shop— en enero de 2013, la empresa unificó las tarjetas para ambos comercios y cambió su nombre a Tarjeta ABC a mediados de 2015.
En 2016 se lanzó la tarjeta de crédito AbcVisa, y en 2021 se lanzó la tarjeta de crédito AbcVisa internacional.
Véase también
Din (tienda)
Referencias
Enlaces externos
ABCDin
Dijon
Tarjeta ABCDin
Grandes almacenes de Chile
Empresas fundadas en 1950
Marcas chilenas | {
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