THE WISDOM OF THE NEW
I
Old Li Wang, the peddler, who had lived in the land beyond the sea, was wont to declare: “For every cent that a man makes here, he can make one hundred there.”
“Then, why,” would ask Sankwei, “do you now have to move from door to door to fill your bowl with rice?”
And the old man would sigh and answer:
“Because where one learns how to make gold, one also learns how to lose it.”
“How to lose it!” echoed Wou Sankwei. “Tell me all about it.”
So the old man would tell stories about the winning and the losing, and the stories of the losing were even more fascinating than the stories of the winning.
“Yes, that was life,” he would conclude. “Life, life.”