A father and his daughter are sitting at the kitchen table. She's nine — old enough to ask big questions, young enough to still think her dad knows everything.
“Daddy, why do Chinese people say ‘adding legs to a snake’?”
He laughs. “Well, imagine two guys racing to draw a snake. The first one finishes, looks at the other guy still drawing, and thinks: I'll make mine even better. So he adds legs. And he loses. Because snakes don't have legs.”
She thinks for a second. “So the lesson is: don't do extra stuff?”
“Kind of. But if I told this to a friend in America, he might say: ‘Why is adding legs bad? That's called innovation!’”
Her eyes go wide. “The same story can mean different things to different people?”
“That's exactly what this book is about.”
100 Chinese idioms. For each one, we look at what it means in Chinese — and then how someone from Germany, France, America, or Japan might see the same idea. — From the Introduction