The Wonderful Use of Boasting
Lu Yin

Boasting is a kind of megalomania. Though moralists may call it a human failing, it does, however, serve extremely useful purposes in social intercourse. Without the capacity for boasting, you will be looked down upon by even a rickshaw puller, to say nothing of finding a good job.

Because of their earnest and down-to-earth approach to work, Westerners are, in the eyes of Chinese, smarties for the tremendous amount of energy they put into their activities. While Westerners go about whatever work they do methodically and patiently, never dreaming of reaching great heights in one step, we Chinese are always given to seeking a shortcut and regard the ability to boast as the master key to it.

Boasting is an essential art of life just as hyperbole is an indispensable rhetorical figure. The Tang poet Li Bai's famous lines "The Yellow River comes from the sky" and "My white hair of thirty thousand feet" are examples of hyperbole, which, to those who know little about the art of rhetoric, may sound like a gross exaggeration on the part of the poet.

That boasting is of extremely great use to one is beyond doubt. Man is a queer animal. Suppose you tell someone the plain truth about a certain matter without holding anything back, he will probably laugh at you scornfully instead of returning a congenial response. On the other hand, suppose, penniless as you are, you brag unabashedly to somebody who knows little about you, "Minister So-and-So is a good friend of my father's," "Politician So-and-So is my grandpa's sworn brother," " I know a certain business tycoon very well," or " My wife is a nominally adoptive sister of a certain warlord's fifth concubine." The listener will adore you like a deity or may even, at an opportunity moment, respectfully treat you to a big dinner featuring edible bird's nest!

People of every description, being aware of the usefulness of boasting, are doing all they can to put it into practice. But wait a minute! You've got to know enough about the person you are boasting to. Otherwise, you'll make a bungle of it and fail to touch a chord in his or her heart. Suppose you meet an unknown writer or a young student who worships men of letters and you want to pretend to be a senior, all you have to see is that Hu Shih is a close friend of yours or that Yu Dafu is your second self. And, what is better, you can try to find out by a roundabout way some trifling personal anecdotes about the two celebrities, such as what Hu Shih best likes to know and what Yu Dafu strongly dislikes, so that you can refer to them affectionately by their first names. Consequently, you'll end up becoming a personage on a par with both of them, and enjoying the respect of all.

When you meet a girl who is vain, just tell her that you have toured to various countries, such as Turkey and South Africa,… and at your own expense into the bargain! That suffices to prove you are not only a man of much learning and experience but also well-to-do. And you will thereby win her heart instantly.

When you meet a businessman, bureaucrat, politician or warlord, you can, after gathering each and every mood of them, start boasting wildly to cater to their likes. To sum up, you should brag about women to those who are fond of women, about money to those who are money-mad, about fame to those who are desirous of personal fame, and about power to those who hanker after a position of great influence. Like combating poison with poison, this trick will always work wonders.

Yes, bragging is of great use, but you need to be very skillful in the performance of it, otherwise you'll give away the show and end up in a complete fiasco.

And to be good at bragging, you also need a considerable amount of training. You should first of all be thick-skinned. For instance, although you have never authored a single book, you can nevertheless brazenly declare, "I've published a great many books, but unfortunately they've all been destroyed by a big fire!" When you are entertaining some stylish guests at dinner, you can, for appearances' sake, refer to the table set you have just bought for the occasion by saying, "we've been using it for as long as ten years." When your friends invite you to join them in a mahjong game, you, though worth only one silver dollar in your pocket, can tell them, "All my money is in a bank. I've no time today to go there to draw money." If your wife happens to complain you're sort of good for nothing, you can tell her that the eldest daughter of a certain Zhang family has been admiring you for the excellent poems you write and the daughter-in-law of a certain Wang family has been admiring you for being handsome and manly. That will make your wife instantly redouble her love for you.

I could thus go on and on enumerating various manifestations of self-praise.