The Misadventures of Zhou Haisheng: Mandarin Companion Graded Readers Breakthrough Level

Zhou Haisheng is a fun-loving and determined young boy whose life revolves around school and his family’s Chinese restaurant. Always well-intentioned, he finds ways to help out his hard-working parents with the family business. Whether it’s inventing his own noodle recipe, delivering the wrong order to a customer, or resorting to extremes when a competing noodle shop opens across the street, Zhou Haisheng manages to combine his mischief and wit to save the day.

Adaptation Notes

Writing a story can be easy. Writing a good story is challenging. Writing a good story limited to a constrained set of words is difficult. Doing all of this in Chinese with only 150 characters is a downright daunting task.

This story from the Breakthrough Level is an original story co-written by John Pasden and Jared Turner. It is different than other Mandarin Companion stories at higher levels, which are largely adaptations of existing and popular stories. The restrictions of the Breakthrough Level make it virtually impossible to adapt existing stories using this limited character set.

However, this story does tie into the larger “Mandarin Companion Universe” (we’d call it our “MCU,” but that nickname seems to be taken). You’ll read about the childhood and escapades of young Zhou Haisheng, specifically sharing life events which put him on the path to one day open his own restaurant. If you’re curious how things turn out for him, you’ll definitely want to prepare to read Emma, a Level 1 story. If you can read this book, you are already well on your way towards progressing to the Level 1 stories.
Character Adaptions

The following is a list of the characters from The Misadventures of Zhou Haisheng in Chinese followed by their corresponding English names from Pasden’s original story. There are, of course, other characters in the story besides these, but many do not have exact correspondences to the original. The names below aren’t translations; they’re new Chinese names used for the Chinese versions of the original characters. Think of them as all-new characters in a Chinese story.

• 周海生(Zhōu Hǎishēng) Zhou Haisheng
• 老周(Lǎo Zhōu) Mr. Zhou
• 周太太(Zhōu Tàitai) Mrs. Zhou
• 钱太太(Qián Tàitai) Mrs. Qian
• 马老师(Mǎ Lǎoshī) Ms. Ma