Thank god for Pleco!
Edit: I still aced the test for the vocab words, so nice.
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That brings me to the first patch of sunlight I ever saw. That year, I was six years old. I remember having just caught water pearls –– water pearls are usually called chicken pox, but in my hometown dialect the term was water pearls. Back then I was enchanted by the beautiful name and forgot that it described an illness, feeling instead a mysterious pride. Whenever someone passed by my window and asked me if I had "water pearls", I would feel a kind of glory. That feeling is still imprinted onto my mind today. And because of this, I still remember my luxuriously content mood during the course of the disease. Even though it was no different from all the other times I'd been sick, that time I was quarantined inside a room to wait it out. That was the room farthest from the gate in our old compound; the courtyard was surrounded by whitewashed walls, with a row of three rooms on the north side. The middle room was an open hall. When I was sick I was in my mother's room, on the east side. The west side belonged to my aunt. My mother and my aunt were always doing women's duties with my grandmother in her courtyard, which was closer to the gate, so I was often the only master of those three adjoined rooms.
The experience of staying in those three rooms while sick was unbearable. Time passed extraordinarily slowly, especially during times when I was not sleepy. At first, I would exercise my sense of hearing on various sounds that seemed to be footsteps, yet also didn't. I would try to decipher the sounds' origin, then wait, hoping that someone would appear. Occasionally, I'd press my ear to the wall and listen to trivial sounds, the kind that arose from beneath the foundations of the wall and then vanished. After a while, I became impatient –– I don't remember why. I tiptoed towards the door, pressing down onto the wooden bed so as to make no noise. The door to the hall was slightly ajar, and I leaned against the doorframe, gazing at the outside world with curiosity.
It was approximately two o'clock in the afternoon. A large table that had just been cleared of the previous meal's plates was standing solemnly in the hall. A patch of sunlight had made its way onto the ground underneath the table, where it lay poured out and dispersed on the floor. The silent patch of glittering gold was shrouded in an environment of absolute quiet. For some reason, the sight provoked an abnormal oscillation in my six-year-old self's heart.
There was no extravagantly beautiful and artistic décor –– only a mundane old-fashioned dining table. If I remember correctly, not long ago the table had hosted an ordinary dinner that had consisted of dishes such as salted fish and pickled vegetables. But the child's heart had been stopped. Perhaps two eyes opened wide, looking about, as though looking for the answer to a question. Why was the beauty of that patch of sunlight so touching? I remember that I climbed onto the table text to the window and, intentionally or otherwise, I looked outside. In the courtyard, that same patch of golden color and warmth was scattered onto the whitewashed walls in a wholly different manner. At the same time, I opened an antique lady's mirror that lay near me, and shook the little row of drawers and the small copper weight carved in the shape of a basket of flowers. I could hear the fresh song of birds as they hopped from branch to branch with joy. Inside, I still held a vague wondrous uncertainty about that patch of sunlight.
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