Of all our festivals, the Spring Festival is the most important to us Chinese.
Several days before the lunar new year, we spring-clean our houses and decorate them. Older people say that everything must be newand clean for the Spring Festival celebrations so that the new year will bring happiness and good luck.
Writing is hard work for almost everyone. It is difficult to do the intense and active thinking that clear writing demands. Perhaps television has made us all so passive that the active thinkingnecessary in both writing and reading now seems doubly hard. It is frightening to sit down before a blank sheet of paper and know that an hour later, nothing on it may be worth keeping. It is frustrating to discover how much of a challenge it is to transfer thoughts and feelings from one’s head onto a sheet of paper. It is upsetting to find that an apparently simple writing subject often turns out to be complicated. But writing is not an automatic process; we will not get something for nothing; and we can not expect something for nothing. Competent writing results only from plain hard work—determination, sweat, and head-on battle.
Marriage in the United States tends to look more like serial monogamy than lifetime partnership, especially in the major cities. Just under half of all marriages end in divorce. However, this statistic is misleading: many people, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Todd Fisher, marry repeatedly but three-quarters of Americans who marry for the first time stay that way. The others go through several spouses before settling down and approximately 10% of men and 5% of women never marry at all.
