By Lin Qingxuan

Happiness has a lot to do with attitude.There are those times when it looks like it is going to be just another one of those boring, humdrum days, when most of us out there would roll our eyes and check out at the first sign of boredom. But to push through it takes the power of patience. At the end of the day it is those simple,unadorned moments that count for the most. This is why between sweethearts who are truly in love, a five-dollar rose could mean as much as a five-karat diamond.

That reminds me of a folk song that everybody ought to know calledBallad of the Tea Harvest:

Oh, tea of green,

Oh, water of blue,

Clear water, hot tea,

It's my heart I give to you.

Dearest love in the mountain

Slow your haste and sit a spell,

Linger with me, enjoy a sip,

The love of my heart is what it tells.

Every time I hear this song I'd be moved practically to tears. This was supposed to be a simple ballad that a young woman sang while picking tea leaves. The green tea and blue water represent her emotions in what is ostensibly a pretty run-ofthe-mill confession of love. If a person's affection could be as verdant as the tea brewed amidst jade mountains and floating mist, and as clear as the waters of a babbling brook streaming through the canyons, then something like this would truly be worth its weight in gold. It would be like a precious jewel given out of true love and tender devotion.

A cup of green tea could also be like sentiment,making the lovers' longing all the purer. In the fiery love-today, hate-tomorrow intensity of the contemporary generation, this is absolutely inconceivable. But to understand the purity of true love and explore deeper into the essence of life, we have to keep our own emotions as green as tea or clear as crystal-pure water. Yet it is a shame that the modern generation is so used to that joyful buzz they get from wine that few of them know about the robust flavor of aromatic tea brewed with pure water.

In the Ming Dynasty, there was a mountain song nearly as evocative asBallad of the Tea Harvest:

No words of love, no poetic rhyme,

Oh, my love I pine for thee, I pine all the time.

I send to him my kerchief of white,

I show to him my soul alight,

‘Tis my love in thine hand,

‘Tis my heart, oh my beaux,

Why dost thou blink thrice,

Why dost thou wonder so?

A lowly kerchief woven of silken thread,

My love thou knowest not ‘tis that which hath fied.

A white kerchief could have a person's heart woven snugly within its folds. This call of love is something that most of us have no idea about.

Affection, emotion, love. These are the strongest and most potent feelings a person could ever experience. If the heart could be like green tea or a white kerchief,then, be it love requited or love lost, the affection for that person would never die. It would never turn from intimacy into enmity,nor from love into hate.