Content created: 2018-12-31
File Last Modified: 2019-01-06
Traditional Chinese morality held that widows ideally should not remarry, but remain as contributing members of the households of their deceased husbands. For a widower, marriage was a more realistic possibility, and was often actively encouraged on the logic that a man would be lonesome without a woman for his bed. (In the case of small households with children, obviously an even more compelling consideration was having a caretaker for them.)
For an older man, the marriage prospects were rarely bright, and the probability of a sexy beauty was very low indeed unless he was wealthy enough to effectively “purchase” a young girl. Ambition would therefore usually exceed capacity, a fact satirized in this verse.
A second theme here, though a muted one, is the scheming matchmaker. Grandpa is assumed to have used a matchmaker and to have been so eager for a pretty young wife that he let himself be persuaded to wed a girl seen only in dim light until after the wedding. The lying matchmaker is another traditional trope, one always considered amusing when someone else was the victim of the deception.
| Trim the wick and raise the lantern: Grandpa’s got himself a wife who’s bald. |
剔灯棍儿，打灯花儿， 爷爷儿寻了个秃奶奶儿。 Tī dēng gùn er, dǎ dēnghuā’r, yéyé’r xúnle gè tū nǎinai’r. 剔燈棍兒，打燈花兒， 爺爺兒尋了個禿奶奶兒。 |
| Her eyes slant; her mouth is crooked; Grandpa’s so mad he just stares into space. |
眼又斜， 嘴又歪， 气的爷爷儿竟发獃。 Yǎn yòu xié, zuǐ yòu wāi, qì de yéyé’r jìng fādāi. 眼又斜， 嘴又歪， 氣的爺爺兒竟發獃。 |
The Chinese text used here has been taken from:
The simplified-character version has been computer generated and may contain errors. The Romanized version was produced by Google Translate and lightly edited. For Pekinese ditties, my tinkering with the Romanization is generally mostly to spell the distinctively Pekinese final R sound as ’r rather than as a full syllable (but preserving the full spelling of whatever it is attached to), and to give the suffix le 了 its full reading as liáo where the rhyme or meter seemed to require it. Although Johnson provides English translations, the English translation given here is by DKJ. The Chinese and English texts here may be used for educational purposes without further permission.
(Poem Number 16)