Mother Tells Stories

There are three channels for cultural inheritance: first, the oral tradition of living customs and ethnic groups, second, written classics, and third, physical objects. For a single person, a thing can be spread through his or her mouth for more than two hundred years. If he lives to be over eighty years old, and the things he heard from an eighty-year-old person when he was thirty-five years old are told to a three- to five-year-old child when he is over eighty years old, and the child is over eighty years old and then tells them to others, then this thing has been passed on through the mouth of this person for three hundred and eighty-two hundred and forty years. What I write here are 89 stories in total that my old mother told her children during her lifetime. These stories are the seeds of wisdom that bring motivation to my life. I can't bear to keep them to myself, so I publish them here in the hope that more people can benefit from them.