A scale（一杆秤）
作者：Li Zongshan（李宗山） 翻译：Song Deli(宋德利）
On that day they moved into the new home, the gave the useless things to other or just threw them away only except for the old scale that the father hold in hand and insisted on taking it into the new house.
I said:"The scale is not antique. It is worthless and we had better sell it as garbage to the garbage collector. I bargained and he was only willing to pay twenty dollars." The father said:" This scale has been in our house for more than 50 years, how can it be casually sold out.You think it is worth an antique. It is more precious than cultural relic. No matter how much money it is paid, I never sell it out." The father opened the door and got into the car with the scale in his hand.
Along the way, I explained:"I just mean that we don't use this scale every day and moreover there is no enough place to put it in our new house." The father said:" The new house is bigger than the old one. How can it be that there is not enough places to put it in? I say:" Your original bed has four legs and it is empty under the bed, things can be put under the bed. But now it is different. You use a high-quality bed and under it nothing useless can be put." But the father said," No matter it can be or cannot be put down under it, there must be scale where I live." After that we had nothing more to talk about.
After moving into new building and chatting with my father that day, I mentioned the scale again. Father said with a sigh," That's the scale I borrowed from our neighbor Grandpa Liu and I failed to return it to him in time because I was force to go to the farm for a month. When I came back, liu had gone away. He lived by himself. Some people said that he went back to his old hometown and no one had any news from him from then on. I said:" Grandpa Liu will be over 100 years old if he is still alive so you cannot return it to him. In fact, it is better to sell it out when moving into the new home. If you still keep it at hand, it will make you suffer a lot in your mind." Father got his face red, stamping on the floor and said:" This is somebody else's stuff. Even if you cannot return it to its original owner, you can keep it as a reminder. How can it be that you do not allow a scale to be kept at our new home?"