After the Chinese New Year holiday, a Laotian girl named Nanni (transliteration) returned from her hometown of Boten, a Laos-China border town, to resume work at a factory in Mohan, located in southwe ...

See? “By” originally means “bye” or byway. That’s why, in fact, some people still spell “by the by” as “by the bye”. By the way, “that is by the by or bye” in this sense (secondary) is an idiom that ...