Time passed swiftly. One day Liu Hong went off on official business to a distant place.

光陰迅速, light and shade move fast — the standard way a Chinese storyteller skips months without accounting for them. Four characters, and we are at the birth.

The lady, in the yamen, brooding on her mother-in-law and her husband, sat sighing in the flower-pavilion.

花亭 is a garden pavilion, the one place a woman of the household could sit by herself. She is grieving for a mother-in-law left behind at an inn and a husband she watched die. Neither grief is as final as she thinks.

Suddenly her body grew weary and her belly pained her; she swooned to the ground and, without knowing it, gave birth to a son.

暈悶在地, to faint away onto the ground. The birth happens while she is unconscious and occupies half a clause; the novel has no interest in the labour, only in the arrival. 子 here is full zǐ, a son — which is the answer to the question she has been carrying since the boat.

By her ear a voice charged her: 'Mantangjiao, hear my charge:'

叮囑 is instruction given with real urgency, the kind a parent delivers on a station platform. The voice uses her second name, Mantangjiao, which is a small intimacy coming from a god.

'I am the Star Lord of the South Pole, come at the command of the Bodhisattva Guanyin to bring you this son.'

南極星君, the Star Lord of the South Pole, is the god of long life: the smiling old man with the enormous domed forehead and a peach in his hand, still turning up on greeting cards. Here he is a courier. The sender is 觀音菩薩, the Bodhisattva Guanyin, and 法旨 is the order he is carrying out. 子 is zǐ.

'In days to come his name shall be great and far-reaching, no common thing.'

非比等閑, not to be measured against the ordinary — the same 等閑 the blinking fish was said not to be. This is the first flat statement that the baby is Tripitaka.

'If the villain Liu returns, he will surely kill this child; you must guard him with all your heart.'

此子, this son, again zǐ. The god does not promise protection; he assigns it. Everything in the next passage is this instruction being carried out.

'Your husband has already been saved by the Dragon King; in time husband and wife shall meet again,'

相救 and 相會 both take the mutual 相, xiāng. She is told in passing that a Dragon King has saved her husband — and she will still be asking, in the closing passages, how on earth he came back to life.

'mother and child be reunited, and the wrong be wiped clean and avenged in its day.'

子母團圓, child and mother made round again, with 子 as zǐ. 雪冤 is to snow a wrong away, to wipe the grievance clean the way snow covers ground. And 團圓 is the word the chapter's happy ending will be named for.

'Mark my words well. Wake now, wake!' — and with that the voice was gone.

言訖而去, spoke and was gone: the standard exit for a supernatural visitor. 快醒，快醒 — wake up, wake up. The god shouts her awake into the worst morning of her life.