I would give my right arm to know about it.

My comments:

If we guess correctly, your right hand is your good hand, i.e. the strong hand or the stronger hand in comparison with the left.

Kidding. To give an arm, left or right, is just a way of saying you’re ready to give, sacrifice a lot in order to gain something. In this case, the speaker wants to give his/her right arm to gain knowledge about it, whatever “it” is.

One foreigner who used to teach in Beijing once told me of the hospitality he received from all around when he first came here in the late 1980s:

“The Chinese are always ready to help. If you ask them for a finger, they’ll give you six legs, two of them their own, the other four borrowed from the village.”

Related stories:

sit sb down

hitch one's wagon to a star

fighting without fighting

on the back of

the buck stops there?

bargain for jobs

Build the case

Sound bites

Keep out of the park

Go places

Go to Zhang Xin's column

本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.