Chinese idiom · 成语
徙宅忘妻
Meaning
To move house and forget the wife; extreme carelessness.
Character by character
Origin and story
didactic anecdoteIn the Xian Jun chapter of Kongzi Jiayu (孔子家語), Duke Ai asks Confucius whether someone could really be so forgetful that he moved house and forgot his wife. Confucius answers that this is not the worst kind of forgetting: a person may forget himself. He then turns to the traditional account of the tyrant Jie, who neglected ancestral standards, indulged in pleasure, listened to flatterers, and brought destruction upon his rule.
The unnamed husband is therefore the opening image in a lesson about neglecting what matters most, not the hero of a detailed moving-day adventure. Later the four-character phrase became a sharp, sometimes humorous criticism of extraordinary absent-mindedness or carelessness.
Sources and further reading
In everyday life
行李都装好了，你却忘了买自己的车票，真有点徙宅忘妻的味道。
You've packed everything but forgotten to buy your own ticket—that's absent-mindedness on a remarkable scale.
A literary, exaggerated comparison for forgetting something essential; use gently, not as a clinical description.