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Every Chinese schoolchild knows the idiom “sleeping on brushwood, tasting gall.” It means — roughly — that grueling hard work will always pay off in the long run.
The quote is a couplet by writer Pu Songling in the 1600s, who wrote it after repeatedly failing the notoriously difficult Qing Dynasty-era civil service exam. But the idiom predates Pu.
You have to back pretty far in Chinese history to find the source of the saying, to the war-filled Spring and Autumn period. In the early 400s BCE, King Goujian of the Yue state was defeated by the Wu state ruler and forced to be his servant for a time, before being allowed to return home. Goujian kept his resolve strong with hard living, eating peasant food and literally tasting bile to remind him of the bitterness of servitude. He eventually triumphs over his nemesis — who leads a more luxurious, lazy life — and annexes his rival’s kingdom.
Today, people are urged to become a “21st-century Goujian” through hard work. But they might want to consider Pu Songling’s case, too. Sometimes hard work takes too long to pay off. Pu, a schoolteacher, lived and died in relative obscurity, despite having written numerous short stories about the supernatural. It was not until some 50 years after his death that he gained a following as a writer. Too late for Pu to enjoy it.
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