My parents had some friends over for dinner the other night — an eccentric philosopher and his sharp-eyed (sharp-tongued?) wife. At some point in the evening the woman stood up and examined the books on the shelf in the living room.

“Someone in this house has a little existential angst.”

There, on the tight canvas of the edge of a Chinese-English dictionary that I’m sure has not been touched in approximately eight years, appeared the gloomy assertion “Life sucks.”