Chinese sayings: 28 (漏洞百出)

漏洞百出 

lòu dòng bǎi chū

“leak holes hundred emerge”

This saying is pretty much self explanatory:  that loopholes emerge all over the place.

    Met a couple last year on the allotment, and have been helping out with watering and weeding.  

    Also giving them massage and Long G (Longevitology / 長生學 / 长生学) energy adjustments for their aches and pains.  Portuguese husband is a builder, Brazilian wife a cleaner, so they’re constantly sustaining fresh inputs of pain.  

    My massages do not claim to be so effective as to achieve 100% pain relief after just one session (although there have been the occasional miraculous successes which surprised even me — or maybe they claim to have become pain-free just to avoid another torturing session??), so it’s an ongoing project, going to them regularly for massage and Long G.

    Wife tries to make me stay for dinner each time to thank me for my time and effort.  I try to decline if I can, for various reasons — one of which is not to add to their food costs, even though I’m not a big eater (and certainly not as a guest — see more on this in https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2014/10/chinese-hospitality-etiquette-01-china_25.html).  So I have, of late, come up with the reason of dropping in on Supermarket X on my way home, to get some shopping done — which is true.

    Yesterday, I’d gone to them with some pork steaks as a treat for them, marinaded Chinese style (bean paste, ginger, garlic) but can be cooked Western style (pan fried or grilled or oven roasted).  

    Husband had told me that the Portuguese people don’t like to eat things cut up into small pieces like how the Chinese do it, although he does like Chinese food, especially if ginger is used.  So, I went for a compromise:  Chinese marinade ingredients, but cooked and eaten Western style as a chunk of meat. I also wanted to save her work, because she was always having to go and cook dinner after the massage, hence the 4pm start for her massage and Long G. 

    It turned out that they were going to make a big meal so that they wouldn’t have to cook today.  This means that my original plan of the dinner taking very little time to cook went up the spout. 

    It was already 8pm when he started cooking after his massage and Long G.  The supermarket closes at 10pm, so after waiting until 9pm, I said I had to leave, to catch them before they shut. 

    The wife insisted I stay for dinner.  I said, “Next time, next time.”  She kept insisting, so I said, “Food is not important.”  The husband said dinner was almost ready, offering to let me take a bento box of food away with me if I really couldn’t stay.  (Watch out, Chinese people:  the Brazilian and Portuguese people seem to have equally good, if not better, stamina when it comes to trying to persuade the guests to eat.) 

    To make it convincing that I really had to turn down their kind invitation, I said I had to go to the supermarket “to shop for food”, since it’s a staple.  

    Brazilian wife’s English is not that good, but she came up with a clever retort, “You said food is not important, so no need to go to the supermarket to buy food!”

 

    I’d tripped myself up, hadn’t I, using those self-contradictory arguments?  Haha.