Editing Content :: Admin Scraper

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83/ONECENTIMETRE She must rescue the situation! At night, after Xiao Ye has gone to sleep, Tao Ying straightens his little legs so that he is lying as flat as a piece of newly shrunken fabric. Tao Ying then stretches her tape from the soles of his feet to the top of his head—one metre nine centimetres. She decides to write a letter to the administrators at the temple. She picks up her brush but suddenly realises that this is harder than she thinks! Seeing her deep in thought with knitted brows, her husband says, ‘So what do you imagine might happen even if you wrote to them?’ He is right, she doesn’t know if anything would come of it. But in order to melt the ice in her son’s eyes, she must do something. At last the letter is done. There is a man in the factory nicknamed ‘the Writer’. People say he has had some small articles published at the back of a news rag once. Tao Ying finds him and respectfully offers up her literary work. ‘This sounds like an official communication. Not lively enough, not moving.’ The Writer traces the letter with his nicotine-stained fingers. Tao Ying doesn’t know what an official communication is but she detects a tone of dissatisfaction in the scholar’s voice. She looks at the lines he is pointing to, and nods in agreement. ‘What you need to do is this. You must open with a strong and righteous claim, fawned by a passage of stunning originality so that your work stands out and grabs the attention of the editor. This would make him pick it out of a large pile on his desk. It has to catch his eyes like a blinding light, an apple in a mound of potatoes. But most important of all, your letter must touch his heart. Have you heard of the saying, grieving soldiers always win?’ Tao Ying keeps nodding. The Writer is encouraged to continue: ‘Let us look at the opening paragraph—it should go something like this: ‘‘The power of the Buddha is surely infinite! The foot of a five-year-old boy has scarcely touched the threshold of the temple and he has grown two centemetres; but alas, the power of the Buddha is finite after all—on his return home Reprint 2026-27