The Frog at the Bottom of the Well

One day a turtle walked up to a circle of rocks and peered down into a well. “Hullo-o-o-o” he shouted down. But instead of the echo he was expecting to come back he was met with a perky “Hello!”

The turtle looked down and saw that at the bottom of the well, the sun was shining on a small frog lounging on a sand bank.

“What are you doing down there?” shouted the turtle. “Want to come up here and play?”

“Why should I?” asked the frog. “I’ve got everything I need down here. I have sunshine and my own private beach. There are dozens of bugs I can reach with my tongue whenever I’m hungry. Giant leaves protect me from the rain. I’ve got it all”

The turtle thought for a while and then asked. “Don’t you ever miss walking through the forest or sliding down sand dunes or seeing the waves crash on rocks. How about butterflies and birds and amazing flowers I get to see every day on my walks?”

At that, the frog paused. He really didn’t have a response.

In Chinese, this idiom 成語 (chéngyǔ) is called 井底之蛙  (Jǐng Dǐ Zhī Wā) – “The Frog at the Bottom of the Well”)

I grew up with Aesop’s fables. I knew that the fox really did covet the grapes that he dismissed as probably being sour anyway. Sort of like the frog in the well who came to the realization that he might not have it all but was too proud to admit it. One of my great surprises when I started to learn Chinese was the wealth of fables and idioms that are woven throughout the fabric of Chinese history and literature.

I was born in Montana and  grew up in Oklahoma. About the closest I ever came to China was eating sweet and sour pork at the Pagoda restaurant at the corner of 51st and Peoria in Tulsa.  As life would have it, a few twists and turns set me on a course which would cause me to spend more than half of my life in China. I became fascinated by much of what I learned about China and Chinese – almost none of it through formal education.

The more I learned about China, the more “treasures” I uncovered. Poetry, philosophy, and language study opened doors into worlds I never knew existed. A few years ago, I wrote a poem about my journey through China I called “China Odyssey”, where I cracked a few doors opened, but not quite wide enough. With China being an ever more dominant player in the world we live in, I decided to revisit my poem and open a few of those doors just a little bit wider. So join me, if you’d like and explore China – one stanza at a time.

China Odyssey 1

When I was a young boy

my best friend would say

“If you dig a hole deep

and in just the right way

You will end up in China

a land full of mystery

of pandas and dragons

and whole lots of history.”