A Man of Great Wisdom Appears Slow-witted

Today (Dec. 2nd in China) is my dad’s seventy-fourth birthday. His name is Liu Ruyu, meaning “appears slow-witted”. Sometimes I am puzzled why my grandfather named my dad “slow-witted”, although I have always thought that my dad was the most handsome man in our Petroleum University campus where I grew up.

I dare not say that my dad has “Great Wisdom”, but I know that he has taught me how to be organized and analytical in everything.

The university in the 70’s of China had not many food supplies for the staff, so my parents decided to raise some hens so my brother and I could have an egg each day. My dad prepared a little notebook with each hen’s name on one page. Each hen had a name according to its characteristics, such as Aloe hen, Crested hen, Skinny hen, etc. My dad would write down the date on each hen’s page if the hen laid an egg, and he also wrote down the shape, color, and texture of the egg for that entry. Then he would write the name of the hen on the egg so we were all trained to distinguish the eggs. He would analyze the frequency of the entries mathematically on a monthly basis maybe. If a hen was found with no entries on its page for a while, maybe a month or so, it will be on the dinner table one day.