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交个朋友多条路，树个敌人多堵墙: Make a friend, make another road. Make an enemy, build a wall.

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If we give a friend a watch or any device that has time on it, we are insinuating an early death for them. It’s only a matter of time before they are no longer with us; thus, it is deeply frowned upon to buy timepieces as gifts.

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It is then, even as one walks amid the crowds, not so difficult to imagine when it all began here.

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I was engaged for a grand total of a month and a half, when I was pretty and skinny and seventeen, as arranged by my parents who wanted nothing but the best for me.

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Baijui tastes like turpentine. It is one of the most god awful things I ever drank. I would drink a few shots of it over a cigarette with the ex-military cab driver who owned a little dive just outside my apartment in Fuzhou: a filthy concrete hovel with a kitchen the size of a coffin and a dining room that could seat no more than a dozen…