10. Mandarin is a tonal language.
If you say "hua hua" with a rising tone, it means "slippery". If you say it with a flat high tone, it means "licentious" or "womanizing". If you saying with a descending tone, it means "drawing".
If you are tone deaf, congratulations! You are going to make a lot of Chinese people laugh.
Situation: A street vendor has asked you if you wish to buy a tiger claw (for medicinal purposes).
You meant to say: "不要. Bu yao (descending tone). I don't want it."
You have actually said: "不咬. Bu yao (dipping tone). Please don't bite me!"
9. It is very hard for foreigners to memorize proper nouns.
If I tell you my name is Max, all kinds of neurons fire. Maybe you think of a dog named Max. Maybe you call me Maximus and you picture me in the gladiator arena. Maybe you just fixate on that sexy "x" in my name. Or maybe you picture me in M.C. Hammer pants "taking it to the max". Which, of course, I do on a daily basis.
If I tell you my name is Li Feng, no such images are elicited. Not a damn one. To you it's just a random string of letters. Without those silly, fleeting associations to serve as subconscious cement, no memory is formed.
Situation: You run into me on the street after just having met me.
You meant to say: "立丰，你好. Li Feng, ni hao. Hello Li Feng."
You have actually said: "Um….. 凤梨，你好. Feng Li, ni hao. Hello Pineapple."
8. You will be tempted to translate directly from English and it won't work.
高 means "high".
潮 means "tide".
So 高潮 means "high tide", doesn't it?
Nope, it means "orgasm". I found this out the hard way when I asked someone about surfing during high tide.
7. Hangman becomes a *lot* more difficult.
6. The bad dictionaries are worthless.
My electronic dictionary translates 发紫 as "empurple", 更改 as "rejigger", 品尝 as "degustation", and 荡漾 as "popple". Which are really fancy ways of saying "to turn purple", "to update", "to try (food)", and "to ripple", respectively.
Who in Sam Hill wrote this? Clearly someone who is more intimate with the Oxford Dictionary of Pompous Twaddle than he is with actual English-speaking human beings.
5. The good dictionaries are worthless too.
Look up 蛋 and you'll see that it means "egg". Simple enough.
But it's wrong, wrong, wrong. 蛋 only refer to eggs that are similar to chicken eggs. Try asking where you can buy fish蛋. Chinese people will imagine that a sizable, oblong egg with a hard shell has come tumbling out of the fish's cloaca. Then they'll laugh at your ignorance of basic aquatic reproduction. And certainly don't use 蛋 to describe human eggs.
On a similar note, Kleenex is hard to translate because the same word is used for both facial tissue and toilet paper. The word for "toast" refers to sliced bread whether it is toasted or not.
4. Chinese typos totally alter the meaning of the sentence.
Chocolate. Chocolat. Chocklit. Chokomut. Whatever. They all mean the same thing.
Chinese is typed by punching in the romanization of the character. An autosuggest program will then pick the best character among many homonyms based on context.
Your typos will not be shown an ounce of leniency.
Situation: I was IMing a friend once, inattentively letting the autosuggest do its thing.
I meant to send: "你有没有申请圣地亚哥的大学? Did you apply to any universities in San Diego?"
Two mistyped tonal numbers resulted in: "你有没有深情圣地压歌的大学? Do you have deep feelings for the Holy Land's university of squashed music?"
3. Idioms Gone Wild
Chinese is full of idioms that don't make sense when read literally. For example, if your Chinese friends take you to eat the best dumplings in town and you can't taste the difference, they might say "Play piano for a cow!"
What they are really saying is that the art of the fine dumpling is lost on an ignorant cow like you.
马屁精means "brown-noser", but character for character it could mean "essence of horse butt". Wow! Is that by Calvin Klein?
2. The Chinese language reflects a difference in thought, not just a difference in expression.
How do you say "You got the check? Are you sure? Well then, thank you." in Chinese?
Answer: You don't.
Instead you say "NOOOOOOOOOOO!" Then you steal the check from him forcibly. Bat off his attempts to recover it and foist your cash on the waiter before he can.
1. You guessed it: it's the writing system! The number 1 reason why Mandarin will kick your ass is that it has 6500 pissed-off, knuckle-dusting characters in common use.
"Damn!" says Pierre, reading the daily news.
"怎么了? What's wrong Pierre?" I ask.
"日本人真可恶! It's those damned Japanese!" he says, slamming his fist on his desk.
"Oh. You hate them for historical reasons," I say.
There's a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment in China. It reared its ugly head a while back when the Japanese government printed textbooks overlooking the Rape of Nanjing. Chinese citizens launched bricks into the windows of local Japanese restaurants.
Which is why I never, ever tell anyone here that I am part Japanese.
"It's not just the rape of Nanjing; it's their entire bloody culture. Tell me Max, do they even have a culture? Who knows! Name one cultural product that came from Japan," he says, smiling at me and poking me in the ribs.
"Sushi?" I offer in a pitiful attempt to defuse the situation with humor.
"There's only one, and I'll name it for you: porn!" Pierre states defiantly. "That's the whole of Japanese contribution to modern culture, nudy flicks."
I think of my wonderful host mom, Masumi, frying tonkatsu for me back in Tokyo. The impish grin on this doofus' face makes my blood flash boil in my veins.
Quom, the bigger-than-life boss of the apparel department, pokes her head into the room.
"每天要洗澡！不洗会臭!"
"SHOWER EVERY DAY! IF YOU DON'T YOU WILL BE SMELLY!"
Somewhere, a young woman laughs.
"这里不准笑!"
"THERE WILL BE NO LAUGHTER IN THIS OFFICE!" Quom snaps before shuffling off.
Why can't we all just get along?
"PIIIIINK!"
Quom, fifth horseman of the apocalypse, comes barreling across the office with a pink collared shirt in her thick hands. She stops in the vicinity of my workstation and rubs her crew cut vigorously, staring down the room. Quom yells when she's mad. She yells when she's happy. She yells when she's describing what she had for lunch. She would have made an excellent Viking.
"PIIIINK! 你们看这件PINK的衬衫。谁敢穿? 举手!"
"PIIIINK! JUST LOOK AT THIS PINK SHIRT. WHO WILL WEAR IT? HANDS UP!"
Her voice pierces the entire floor of forty silent apparel buyers, half of whom report to her. The seasoned among them pay her no heed.
"HOW ABOUT YOU PIERRE," she yells, singling out my unfortunate neighbor. "ARE YOU A PINK MAN?"
Pierre giggles deferentially like a mewly-eyed schoolgirl before a pop star. Tee hee. Tee hee hee. Quom contemplates him menacingly like a disgruntled silverback before sauntering over to my desk.
"你呢，MAX. 你穿不穿PINK? 说!"
"YOU, MAX. DO YOU WEAR PINK OR NOT? SPEAK!"
"Umm… sometimes?"
She turns to face the room.
"PIIIIIIIIIIINK!" she bellows, pointing at me with one hand and energetically waggling the shirt with the other.
A few tense seconds pass. Quom snatches the used umbrella casing on my desk and hands it to me.
"脏!"
"DIRTY!"
I toss it in the trash and she gives me a reckless smile before moseying back from whence she came.
I love you Quom. Will you marry me?
Who’d have thought the soccer scene would be so healthy in Shanghai? I
joined an expat league here, and racial clustering being what it is, the
league is unofficially segregated by race. The American contingency here,
sucking on baseball bats and growing third chins in left field, failed to
field a team, so I find myself with a bunch o’ Brits. They’re a great bunch
of guys. I’ll shank the ball twenty feet above the goal and they’ll just
say “Unlucky!” and pat me on the back. Then we all hit the pub after
practice and order pot pies.
I’ve been playing with the locals too. Chinese soccer is a little
different. For starters, there’s a lot of smoking. Players smoke on the
sidelines. Our goalie was smoking on the field, casual as you please. On
the other team’s attack, he’d wedge his cancer stick between piggies number
2 and 3 and put up his hands, ready for the block. He deflects the ball
back to the midfield, loosens up, and then he’s back to sucking on his adult
pacifier.
Many of the local players are pansies. They play tricksy soccer, dancing
like sprites on the ball in a charming game of one-on-one keep away, even
deep in their own backfield. They’re deft, no doubt, but when push comes to
shove, they fall over too easily. They cry foul and massage the spot where
I barely stepped on their foot (by accident) and glare at me, the
perpetrator who dared to interrupt his little leprechaun jig. Sorry pixie
man. Try passing the ball next time.
A few locals on my team played in university, so they know the drill.
They’re fighting hard for possession and drawing even colder stares than I
am.
“It’s just a friendly match!” says a pixie man, tendering his calf.
“What game are you playing? In real soccer there is pushing,” retorts my
teammate. It’s your own fault for not being stronger, and you’re blaming
me?”
Our team is on the sideline for a round, so I drink in my surroundings. The
field we’re on is a real people-fest, four simultaneous games on a standard
pitch. Too many bodies, not enough space. Bats flap about the nighttime
sky, attracted to the stadium lighting. They’re cute little guys, small
enough to pass for sparrows if you don’t look carefully.
One player catches my attention, a shirtless guy with a sizable belly.
There’s something monumental about him. It’s the defiant grimace painted on
his face in angry strokes. It’s his posture, legs planted firmly a yard
apart, ready to tackle a bull. It’s the sweat dripping down the smooth
surface of his turgid burger baby. He’s a living monolith. The star
player, a skinny guy in his early 20s, does a few loopy-loops and spins
right into fatty’s stomach, falling over. Fatty just watches him fall and
doesn’t budge an inch, doesn’t bother paying attention to the ball.
Laughter ripples through the body of onlookers. The fazed star player looks
like he ran into a wall. Which, by all means, he did.
It’s still the beautiful game out here, but for different reasons.
Ah work. What have I to say about thee. Here are three things I hate about the retail industry:
1: Meeting with simpering baboons. A few days ago we held audience with a gutless, kowtowing American who was all form and no function. His ridiculous opening statement about "bridging oceans" and “cherishing our synergy” had me projectile vomiting against the walls of my closed mouth. Fortune cookie say: Exporting headphones to China does not make you a modern Marco Polo.
2: Trying to motivate people who have no fiscal incentive to do anything but stew in their own gastric pudding. We met with a store manager whose boss ordered him to reduce in-store theft of certain items. His solution was to take those items off the rack and mark them out-of-stock.
3: Company cheers. Sorry FroggyMart. Max doesn’t do hand-clapping. He is not going to recite your mantras about low price and great service. It’s not that I’m above it; I can see our high powered MBA execs are diving right into it. It’s just that I’d rather equip a fat guy with cleats and let him play Dance Dance Revolution on my unfurled penis than partake of your unholy ritual.
Three things to love about the retail industry:
1: Seeing how the world ticks. Retail gives you the skinny on all kinds of industries. Thanks to a vendor meeting this morning, I could now talk your ear off about the past, present, and future of olive oil.
2: Promotions are a fun time for all. Think your grandmother makes a mean deviled egg? Cook up a demo batch in the store and see if it catches on with the customers. Is the makeup district a little confined? Put up some mirrors and screw with people’s heads. I get to be a runway model in a fashion show at our flagship department store next week. That never really happened when I was a programmer.
3: Freebies galore. We get to “appraise” new food items all the time. Even goods that are already in our stores get “inspected”; it is not uncommon to see bakers and deli chefs running around our HQ with “product samples”.
Any TexMex manufacturers reading this? Come hither. You have a market in Shanghai of at least one freeloader.
An inside scoop has it that more than 10,000 retailers in Shanghai are going to start offering fingerprint payment by early next year. Sweet Mother of Neptune! That just can't be true!!
I hope my little piggies are safe. Can you imagine some bad guy going on a shopping spree with your dismembered pinky? If he really wanted to sneak it by the cashier, he could hollow it out and wear it over his own pinky like a magician’s thumb.
Gross... but feasible? Retailers, let’s disincent the weirdos. Keep the credit limit on our body parts low please.
]]>Damn you, unknown Chinese character.
I see you sitting there. Complacent. Smug. You think you’re all that because you’ve got 18 strokes.
Want to hear a secret?
I think you suck big doody.
You weren’t at my fifth birthday party, when I was getting to know basic buddies like 王, 大, and 中.
You weren’t there for me for me in my Chinese school reader when I was 12. You know who was? 香蕉 was. So were 葡萄 and 草莓.
My first day of college. Did you think to say hello then? No, but communist propaganda did. Lesson 1: 毛主席，祝你万岁! (Mao Zedong, may you live 10,000 years!)
You weren’t there for me then, you weren’t there for me ever. And I don’t want you here now.
What’s that? Are you calling me illiterate?!
*sob*
Fine. I will look you up. Just this once. But then you’re out of here. What happens tonight stays just between you and me. 王大中 does not need to know.
*flip flip flip*
Now you've made me angry. Where is the heck is your radical? You've got so many extra bits, I can’t tell your 横 from your 竖. Hìjole... you don't need a definition, you need a shave.
I bet you’re one of those kinky characters. I’m going to tear out all my hair, and at the end of the day, I’m going to find you in bed under some one-stroke radical.
You know what? I’m not going to give you the pleasure. I don’t care what you mean or how you used to be pronounced. Your new meaning is “enormous mole with straggly, two-inch hairs trying to escape from it”. I see it all the time here, so there might as well be a character for it. Your new pronunciation is “aaaaaaah”, since I'm looking at you now and that's the sound coming out of my mouth.
I can't wait to butcher you the next time I sing karaoke.
Felix’s brother and I are waiting at the airport to receive some foreign hotshots. The plane is an hour late, so I have a rare opportunity to engage one of Thailand’s mightiest business honchos in light conversation. We talk about terrorism and housing bubbles. Eventually the topic turns towards philandering.
“I have a theory about why men are more inclined to cheat than women,” I say.
“Let’s hear it.”
“If you believe in evolution, then you believe that we are programmed to sow our genes as widely as possible.”
“OK,” Jeff assents.
“Faithful man: one baby. Unfaithful man: many babies. Faithful woman: one baby. Unfaithful woman: Still one baby, but minus the protection of a husband.”
Jeff mulls over this gross oversimplification of love for a bit, then laughs.
“I have a theory too,” he states.
“Let’s hear it.”
He draws a graph with a single bell curve.
“Do you know what this is?”
He marks the x-axis with two ticks. “Good” at the far end. “Evil” at the origin.
“This is what most people think human morality looks like. Martyrs on one side. Murderers on the other. Most people fall somewhere in between.”
“Seems to makes sense,” I concur.
‘Well, I think this model is entirely inaccurate.’
He draws a new graph. One little spike over Good. One big spike over Evil. Flatline in the middle.
“You can give to charity and give up your seat for little old ladies,” he says, pen hovering over the Good Spike.
“Or you can have a red-hot temper and a penchant for theft,” he says, migrating to the other side.
“But when true crisis knocks, none of that matters. The courageous may suddenly tremble and cower. The deadbeat who usually lives faint as a whisper may suddenly ignite, possessed by the hero instinct. On a very deep level, underneath behavior guided by society’s hand, underneath your own self-perception, you are either fundamentally selfish or you are not. There is no middle ground. You will never know where you stand until you are tested.”
The Evil Spike looms over the Good. So many souls who want to believe they are morally outstanding. So many lives a petty endeavor of self-preservation.
I’m at lunch with one of our suppliers. Perrin specializes in bamboo products. Bamboo has all kinds of qualities that make it superior to wood. It’s hard as a hammer. It grows to full size in two years. What really surprised me is that it regenerates. You can lop it off at the base and it’ll come back from the dead like a starfish growing zombie arms. That’s right all you environmentalists, no depressing stump graveyards when you cultivate bamboo.
She asks how I came to be in China, so I tell her. She ponders me briefly.
“你会不会觉得中国很落后？”
“Do you think China is a backwards country?”
This is the second most common question I get from Chinese people. People here cannot go abroad easily. To them, the outside world exists in print only. They know the headlines, but the details of life across the big blue remain a mystery. Like any dreamers are wont to do, they fill in the information gaps with solid gold of their own starstruck manufacture.
Some of my local friends tell me that, to them, an ABC is like an exotic bird-of-flight descended on an island, a journeyman with the unfiltered, full-bodied story of faraway lands. Hopefully it is one that will corroborate their rose-tinted visions.
To the people who ask this question: Firstly, Las Vegas and Manhattan are not representative of our whole country. Secondly, you now live in one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world. Your telecom is better than ours. Your electronics are better than ours. You also have the world’s first maglev for commercial use. Us Yanks don’t hover at 420 km/h over superconducting tracks.
I say as much to Perrin. She nods.
“那，科技方面中国可能还好，可是福利方面美国应该好很多吧?”
"OK, China’s not so bad technologically, but America is still better in terms of social welfare right?”
I think of the few mainlanders who’ve managed to visit my family in San Diego. They catch their first glimpse of America through our car window. They see wide streets, one-story buildings, trees galore, and they ask: “So how far are we from the city?” Then we pull into our driveway, and they say disappointedly, “Wow, you didn’t tell me you live in the countryside.”
Yes Perrin, we have more purchasing power. It is easier to secure a steady flow of food and shelter in the States. But if you want to dream big, if you want towering, cherry-topped visions of the future, you needn’t look further than your own backyard.
Ah, the line-cutting. Oh, how the lines here are cut. The average Westerner here responds with a standard sequence of emotions.
First comes shock, shock that ten little old ladies have just cut in front of him. His mouth hangs open in disbelief. He whispers to his friends, “Did they just do that? I can’t believe they just did that! Should I say something?”
Next comes bitter resentment. He stops leaving any space between himself and the person in front of him in line. Ten little old men dive in from the sides at the head of the queue. He roils and boils, he spumes and fumes… but he does nothing. “Surely this will stop soon. Next time… if it happens next time I will say something for sure.”
What happens next is anyone’s guess. Some people spontaneously explode. Some continue on indefinitely in indignant resignation. My soccer teammate Brian started picking up line-cutters and physically placing them in line behind him. They look up at his six-foot tall, bald-headed figure and laugh nervously. “Heh heh, you caught me.” He just glares back.
Good for you Brian. Get even. Win that dignity back. Dump that bad mojo out on the street where you found it, so you can laugh loud and live large when you go home to your loved ones.
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