Thursday, 20 March

Twenty-third day of the second lunar month

Three days ago, a few of us gave a party at Zeng Qihui’s place to celebrate Wu Shangying’s fiftieth birthday. A small cup of wine made me drunk, and worse still, the stone in my bladder was troublingly painful for fully ten hours the next day, so when I received Dr. Wang Chonghui’s reply to my letter I sent him the following poem:

[Jokes in Cantonese – refer to original]