Learn to Read Chinese, Book 3, Four Classic Love Stories in Simplified Chinese: Learn to Read Chinese, #3

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2021 – 2025 by Imagin8 Press LLC, all rights reserved.

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Written by Jeff Pepper

Chinese translation by Xiao Hui Wang

Cover and book design by Jeff Pepper

Artwork by Next Mars Media, Luoyang, China

Audiobook narration by Junyou Chen

Based on stories collected and published by Lin Yutang in Famous Chinese Short Stories, 1948, Pocket Books Inc., New York.

ISBN: 978-1952601590

Version 09

Acknowledgements

We are deeply indebted to the late Lin Yutang, who originally retold these four stories in Famous Chinese Short Stories (1948, Pocket Books Inc., New York).

Many thanks to the team at Next Mars for their terrific illustrations, and Arnaud Ysmal for his careful proofreading.

Audiobook

A complete Chinese language audio version of this book is available free of charge. To access it, go to YouTube.com and search for the Imagin8 Press channel. There you will find free audiobooks for this and all the other books in this series.

You can also visit our website, www.imagin8press.com, to find a link to the YouTube audiobook, as well as information about our other books.

Preface

Believe it or not, it’s possible for you to read and understand the stories in this book even if you start off not knowing a single word of Chinese! We won’t lie to you and say it will be easy, but with time and patience you can certainly do it.

Here’s how. You’ll notice that each story is shown in two versions: Chinese characters on the right-side pages, and phonetic spelling called pinyin on the left-side pages. These two versions are word-for-word identical.

There are no spaces between Chinese characters and no capital letters, so it’s sometimes hard for tell the difference between a name and ordinary text. So to make things a bit easier, we underline all proper names, for example 美兰.

Also, some Chinese words require a single character, but others are made from two or more characters. But don’t worry. Once you learn to recognize the characters, it becomes easy. Remember, a billion people around the world have already learned to read and write this language, so there’s no reason why you can’t do it too!

Let’s do a quick example. Look at the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first story. It’s at the top of page 15, just below the story’s title. It’s made up of four Chinese characters: 我叫美兰。Look across at the pinyin on page 14 and you’ll see that the first word is pronounced wǒ​[1]​. Look up wǒ in the glossary (it’s sorted alphabetically by pinyin), and you’ll see that it means I or me. Do the same with the second character, 叫, and you’ll see that it’s pronounced jiào and means to call or be called.

The third and fourth Chinese characters are underlined, which in our books indicates that this is a proper name. You can see in the pinyin page that 美兰 is pronounced Měilán, a Chinese name.

So, you’ve now puzzled out the entire first sentence: I or me, to call or be called, and Meilan. Chinese grammar can be quite terse sometime, so in English this is I am called Meilan or simply My name is Meilan.

If you want to double-check to make sure you got the correct meaning, go to the English translation in the back of the book.

These four tales are based on very old stories collected and retold by Lin Yutang in Famous Chinese Short Stories, originally published in 1948. Lin was born in China, educated in the US, China and Germany. He wrote dozens of books in Chinese and English, and has been recognized for his witty and warm style of writing, and for bringing Chinese culture to an English-speaking audience. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and 1950. He also invented the first workable Chinese language typewriter (the MingKuai, 明快) and a toothbrush that also dispensed toothpaste. He coined the Chinese word for humor, 幽默 (yōumò), and edited a Chinese humor magazine for many years.

These stories are all quite old, written between 500 and 1,500 years ago. In some cases they have been passed down and reinterpreted by several different authors. All have love and desire as their main theme, and in keeping with traditional Chinese storytelling style, all have a moral based on Confucian, Daoist or Buddhist teachings.

We hope you like them. And of course be sure to read the first two volume in this series, Learn to Read Chinese, Books 1 and 2.

Enjoy!

Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

June 2021

Revised May 2025

Jade

This story is based on a famous short story, The Carved Jade Guanyin (碾玉观音, Niǎnyù Guānyīn) written during the Song Dynasty in the 12th Century by an unknown author. Guanyin, the Chinese Goddess of Mercy, is the subject of the jade carving that’s central to the story.

The original version of this story was about true love overcoming death. In the original, a maidservant of the king who is described by one reviewer as ingenious, bold and violent,​[2]​ tries to elope with her lover, a poor jade carver. She is killed but carries her lover off to the underworld where they become a ghostly couple.

In 1948 the story was reinterpreted by Lin Yutang as The Jade Goddess in his English-language book Famous Chinese Short Stories. Lin made major changes to the story. He changed the heroine from a maidservant to a well-off young woman, allowed her to live, and refocused the story on the sacrifices that people make for the sake of art. Lin also added a lot of material not present in the original story.

The version you see here contains some elements of both versions. We have removed most of Lin’s extra material but kept his main plot line. And we’ve tried to make it easier to ready by using a limited vocabulary and simple grammar.

玉

Yù

我叫美兰。我今年80岁，是个修女​[3]​。这是我的故事。

Wǒ jiào Měilán. Wǒ jīnnián 80 suì, shìge xiūnǚ. Zhè