Yiya! My name is Yiya!
I can parrot. Grandpa Marshal Ma's cough — I do it. Grandpa General Beng's swearing — I do it, and I got slapped for it. The old star-man's poems — I do them. The peddler's cry from down the mountain is my best: "Candied—haw—berries!" Go on, listen!
The grown-ups call me noisy. But the night the stele cracked, the whole mountain went quiet — a scary quiet — and it was me yammering "yiya, yiya" that snapped the stunned little monkeys out of it. Noise has its uses.
You say it, I say it back. Say more, and I'll know more. When I've learned every word on Flower-Fruit Mountain, I can speak for the ones who can't — like the stele, like the wind, like the monkeys who left and never came home.