My father had this joke, usually employed when my brother and I were stuck inside by the rain, being pests, complaining we had nothing to do. “Well,” he’d say, “you know what the Chinese do when it rains?”

They don’t, so I tell them.

My father, an early Jewish Buddhist.

“No, dad,” we’d say. “What’s that?”

“They let it rain.”

So when someone says to me, “What’re we going to do about this drought?”, I say, “You know what the Chinese do when it doesn’t rain?”