CHINESE SLANG FOR ANY OCCASION

The modern scholar of Mandarin is more likely to be found squinting over a computer or a mobile screen than laboring over scrolls and calligraphy. In my own struggle to improve my language fluency I have found texting in particular to be a fine way to study the usage of particles, abbreviations, and colloquialisms. It is also an excellent way to practice slang.

As I’ve probably given out more than 100 business cards in the last 5 months I’ve collected more than a few text pals, people who I never see again in person but who write occasionally to remind me to stay warm in the cold weather or send holiday greetings. I can’t explain this other than to say that I am the only Chinese-speaking American many folks here have met personally and they think it is fun to have the modern equivalent of a pen pal.

Of course on occasion I encounter someone looking for a little bit more.

An example: returning home last night after ten I noticed that a Chinese fellow I had met at the Treehouse the weekend before and with whom I had exchanged brief “hey, aren’t you looking forward to Spring Festival” texts the night before, had sent me two texts in the last hour. I ignored them and sat down at my desk to write up some notes. Fifteen minutes later he called. I didn’t answer and minutes later he sent another text. Moderately irritated I consulted three separate dictionaries to be certain of the right term to express inappropriateness in the sense of impropriety rather than simple unsuitability and wrote him to say that as I hardly knew him, he shouldn’t be contacting me so late at night. I then fired off a text to my friend Wu Jie, first scanning this book

for an amusing synonym for “idiot” (I settled on 脑子养鱼 brain eaten by fishes) and telling her he was 烦死我了 (literally “annoying me to the point of death”). In the meantime he sent me two more texts.

Wu Jie wrote back and asked if I wanted her to make him stop bothering me. I wanted to reply to tell her not to bother, that I could handle it myself, but first I had to check the dictionary again. I knew there was a way to say something equivalent to the English “I’ll fix him!” but couldn’t remember if one was supposed to use 修理 (to repair), 处理 (to handle), or something else entirely. A short investigation revealed that the term was actually 收拾, which usually means to put things in order or clean up but can also mean “to settle with; punish”. Wu Jie replied with the universally-recognized smiley face symbol.

Texting is a great way to play around with slang that can be dangerous to say aloud but which is enormously fun to learn and can cast some very interesting lights on social change. I highly recommend the book above whose author was featured in an interview I posted a few months ago and whose title (literally “cow cunt”) means, if you recall “fucking awesome”. The author does an excellent job of introducing various subcultures (drugs, the sex industry, internet culture) and explains how strong each term is and among whom it is safe to use it (so, for example, while I could playfully call my Uncle Mu a 混蛋 (hundan, literally “slacker egg” and somewhat equivalent to the English term “lazybones”) I most definitely could not tell him the show I went to the night before was totally niubi).

Following is a selection of some of my favorite terms from the book, along with their pronunciation and accompanying explanations. I’ve kept it pretty clean and will leave it to you to guess what body part resembles, and is thus called “chrysanthemum” in slang. Buy the book and you will learn many, many things.

狗屁不通 gǒupìbùtōng（go pee boo tohng）

Incoherent, nonsensical. Literally “dog unable to fart.” Exclaimed in response to something, it means roughly “that makes no sense” or “that’s total bull.” Can also be used as an adjective to describe someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

小兔崽子 xiǎotùzǎizi（shaow too dzigh dz--zǎi rhymes with “high”)

Son of a rabbit. A gentle, teasing insult common among older people and directed at younger people. Ironically, parents often use this term to tease their children.

老不死的 lǎobusǐde（laow boo sih duh)

A rude term for an old person. Literally “old and not dead.”

叫你生孩子没屁股眼 jiào nǐ shēng háizi méi pìguyǎn (jaow nee shung hi dz may pee goo yen)

Literally, “May your child be born without an asshole.” Sometimes 没屁股眼 méipìguyǎn by itself (“no asshole,” or more technically “imperforate anus”) is used as a curse like “Damn!” Originated in Hong Kong and surrounding southern areas, but now commonly used all over China.

管你屌事 guǎn nǐ diǎo shì (gwan nee dyow shih)

Mind your own damn business. Literally “mind your own dick.” Similiarly, “It’s none of my damn business” or “I don’t give a shit” is 管我屌事 guǎn wǒ diǎo shì, literally, “I’m watching my own dick.”

去吃大便 qù chī dàbiàn (chee chih dah byinn)

Go eat excrement; go eat poop. Similar to saying “get lost.” Sounds mild and silly, so it’s mostly used by girls in a teasing way.

炒饭 chǎofàn (chow fahn)

Literally “fried rice.” Taiwan slang for having sex, because stir-frying rice involves a lot of flipping and turning.

满地找牙 mǎn dì zhǎo yá (mahn dee jaow yah)

Get beaten up. Literally “find [one’s] teeth on the ground.” Used in northern China.

瘾君子 yǐnjūnzǐ (een jwen dz)

Drug addict. Literally “addicted gentleman” or “addicted nobleperson,” because once upon a time only wealthy people could afford drugs, and opium was considered a status symbol.

我出来大酱油的 wǒ chūlái dà jiàngyóu de (wuh choo lie dah jyung you duh)

Literally, “I’m just out buying soy sauce.” This phrase, along with “soy sauce guy,” swept the Chinese internet by storm thanks to a widely viewed Guangzhou TV news clip of a reporter asking an average man on the street his opinion of the latest celebrity scandal. The man famously replied “管我屌事，我出来大酱油的”--I don’t give a shit, I’m just out buying soy sauce.” Internet users have taken up the phrase “buying soy sauce” as a cynical euphemism for “It’s none of my business” or “Who gives a fuck?” On the Chinese version of Facebook and other popular sites, one now commonly finds, among the possible answers to online polls, “I’m just buying soy sauce.”

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Excerpted from Niubi! The REAL Chinese You Were Never Taught in School, by Eveline Chao. Please don’t sue me.

IF MARGARET MEAD CAN EAT IT I CAN TOO*

I can't say that I remember what previously held the title of most disgusting thing I've ever eaten but I'd like to announce a new winner. Last night I was at another fancy restaurant in a private suite sitting at a table covered with fresh rose petals alongside my boss and a half dozen Chinese businessmen...

Our host insisted that I sit to his right, as his guest of honor, and kept an eye on how I was enjoying the fare. Everything I was served was tasty and appealingly prepared until I lifted the lid of a bowl that was delivered to my plate and was confronted with this:

Sea cucumbers. In broth. For eating. The arrival of the course was greeted with enthusiasm at the table; one guest asked me if we had them America. Yes, I said, but we don't typically eat them. Fools! He must have chuckled to himself, taking a lusty bite and telling me that it was extremely nutritious and quite expensive. And very fresh and delicious, added my host, urging me to dig in. I didn't want to be impolite, so...

It was worse than I had imagined. In texture, flavor, and in form it was unquestionably the very worst thing I have ever tasted. The sight of it quivering in my spoon churned my stomach and I raised it to my lips while freezing my features into an expression of enthusiasm, even appetite. My host approved and pressed me to finish. Bearing the heavy mantle of my profession and thinking of all those stoic eaters of manioc beer, beetles, and sheep's eyeballs that have come before me, I chowed down. And I finished it. With a smile on my face.

Proof:

* Do they eat sea cucumbers in PNG? I have no idea. But I AM fairly certain that our girl Maggie had to deal with a culinary challenge or two back in the day.

EVERYBODY LOVES ME --- SO WHY AM I SO GLUM?

I listen, I pay attention, I take notes; it’s part of the job description and it isn’t as if I have anything better to do. I still feel like a doofus most of the time but it seems that I am perceived as anything but. I have rapidly become a master of Beijing social life. In this context and this context only I can live up to one of my very first nicknames: I charm, I impress, I destroy.

I have an armory of anecdotes to deploy when conversation founders; any number of “high culture” proverbs to let loose; I know what to say to delight anyone from a shopkeeper or restaurateur to a high-powered lawyer or performer. This is in addition to the fact that my face delights. Many Chinese people doubtless think me a hulking foreign devil, but my comrades and hosts have nothing but good things to say. Either I am 双美 ("doubly beautiful", on account of being both from 美国 [meiguo, or America], the “beautiful country” and a 美女 [meinu, or pretty girl]), or I remind people of the 洋娃娃 (yang wawa, or “foreign doll”) with curly golden hair and pink cheeks they used to play with as children [Chinese in their 20s and 30s today only ever had access to the toys made in the south for the overseas market. There are now some dolls with Asiatic appearances produced for the domestic market, but yang wawas remain popular]. You would be surprised how often this comparison comes up. The possibility that I trigger someone’s childhood memory of toys and doll fantasy worlds concerns me slightly but as long as it makes them comfortable with me I’m happy.

There are parts of Beijing and of other cities in China where foreign faces are barely noted, but in the spaces I frequent I am almost always the only one. As a guest at a restaurant or a visitor to an office I add instant cache. My presence brings status and international panache. Some days on the subway I am grouchy and try not to make eye contact with anyone but on other days I play “how many eyes are on me”, looking around to count the people staring at me (my max so far = 14). This gets tiresome when I just want to blow my nose or when people on either side of me are reading the Chinese text message I’m writing over my shoulder but it’s just part of life here.

If I haven’t said it before, I should also add that the vast majority of people here are incredibly gracious and friendly. I couldn't count the times I’ve been taken out to dinner or treated to a show or a day trip. Taxi drivers, acquaintances, and people on the street often ask the same few rather invasive questions (where are you from? are you married? how long have you been in China? how much money do you make? etc), but they do so with enormously well-intentioned curiosity and so far I have never tired of engaging with them.

It helps a great deal that I love it here. I find it tremendously exciting and challenging; a project that my brain can wrap itself around and around. The place and the politics frustrate and anger me often, but many places do the same. I may worry endlessly about the direction the world is going in, and how it is being driven in part by this nation which composes nearly a quarter of the globe’s population, but that will never stop me from feeling a buoyant love for the people here: for my friends, for my landlords, for my “co-workers”, for people on the bus and the street, for the shy and respectful migrant students I volunteer to teach every other week. My compassion, my curiosity, my very heart - all are expanded by openness to this nation and this culture. I want to let people in. I want to learn.

So why is it so hard? Why do I not want to get out of bed most every day? All the logic I can muster reminds me how lucky I am to have this opportunity but all my logical defenses crumble in the face of daydreams of being at home. I don’t care much for money, having subsisted for a good long time on student-sized stipends, but right now I wish I had buckets of it: I want to fly back across the ocean for shows and birthdays, to fly everyone out here to get to know the country that has won me over and to see their minds blown.

Instead I sit in my office, on the bus, in the cars of my friends, staring out the window at the metropolis and making conversation, thinking of what I should write in my fieldnotes when I sit down to my computer and hoping that when I get home someone will be on skype. The point of this whole adventure, in the end, is to learn enough that I have something to share, enough so that in some small way I can increase cross-cultural (and particularly cross-national) understanding, compassion, and tolerance. I hope that is at the end of the road still but too often it feels like my experiences are only for me and I just don’t see the point of that. I didn’t come to be a dilettante, I didn’t come to be a star. It’s nice that so many people here think I’m great but it doesn’t bring the people I love any closer.

I miss you: Ryan and Montana and John and Mark and Vanessa and Sarah and Sara(h) and Carly and Mom and Gret and Dad and Rick and Nick and Georgia and Allison and Jessica and ELD and Austin and Emily and Carrie and Melissa and Paul and Kirk and Emmy and Marybeth and Matthew and Jason and so many others that I see only too rarely. I hope you feel how much I love you and how much I wish I could share this with you.

在后海骑冰车 (ICE-CYCLING AT HOUHAI)

One lovely crisp winter day last weekend I dragged my old classmate Ding Ding (who has a real English name which I just can't get accustomed to using) out to Houhai, having heard an appealing rumor that there one could rent some sort of ice-bike to traverse the lake's frozen surface.

It was true! After paying $1.5o to enter, we had an array of vehicle choices. There was the ice bike, as above, seating two and available in a variety of colors. There were ice skates. There were two-seater sleds propelled by vicious-looking ice picks.

(yes, there was also cotton candy, along with popcorn, roasted sweet potatoes, and kettle corn)

There was at least one sheep-drawn carriage:

For the kids, there was a mini-carriage pulled by a robot dressed in children's clothes and sometimes bearing the head of the sheep. It boasted a speaker that blasted shrill chorals and seemed only able to move in circles. Ding Ding and I both found it extremely creepy. This was as close as I was willing to get for a picture.

There were also at least two repurposed bumper cars which, though mechanized, didn't move very fast. I attempted to sort the different types of vehicles by quality and assign them by proportion to different segments of the population: elites, workers, cadres, the burgeoning middle-class. Ding Ding (below) threw popcorn at me until I shut up.

It was the best day I've had in weeks. Why don't we have these things in the States?

BECAUSE MARK SIANO SHOULDN'T HAVE ALL THE FUN*

We can't all be Mark Siano, but if we have a father who is handy with photoshop (thanks pops!) and a friend willing to take academic glamour shots of us on the streets of Beijing than we too can have our own promotional posters.

This photo, and those below, were taken one cold day in the historic hutong Nanluoguxiang, a pedestrian street and moderately cheesy tourist attraction near my home in central Beijing. Fulbright had demanded pictures of all of its grantees "doing research" for our conference in March and so I asked Wu Jie to take a few. I was hoping for a shot where I was foregrounded, looking intellectual, and there was a blur of frenzied consumers behind me. Unfortunately there weren't many people out that day strolling in the cold and so Wu Jie had me pose in front of a few shops, reflecting on the wondrous array of consumer goods. Of course my research has nothing to do with knit hats or Fidel Castro dolls, but I tried to pretend.

Wondering what astute observations I was recording on the notepad? I just kept writing 研究, the Chinese character for "research," over and over again and imagining what a jerk I must look like. Now I know. And I kind of like it.

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*SOME of the fun, certainly, but not ALL of it.

ON THE COMFORTS OF AUTOCRACY

Watching The Founding of the Republic got me thinking about how people feel about their leaders and the way they lead. It made me think of three things in particular, which I will share with you sequentially, for human brains remain more random and sometimes even more interesting than the internet.

1. The Sylvia Plath line “Every woman adores a fascist” in her poem "Daddy". Could this explain why I kind of want to stroke Mao’s shellacked coif?
2. The Erich Fromm book Escape From Freedom, which posits that it is terrifying to be in control of one’s own destiny and appealing to submit to an autocrat.
3. A scene from the Chinese television series 蜗居 (Narrow Dwellings), in which Su Chun tenderly asks his wife Hai Ping to treat him dictatorially. Screenshots and translations are below.

Don’t be too democratic towards me

I wish you'd treat me a little more dictatorially

People living under a dictatorship

have a sense of security, a feeling of dependability

[nuzzle and cut to bedroom scene]

Personally I’m a big fan of democracy, even if I wish it worked better sometimes, but I simply refuse the facile logic that everyone craves freedom. I also think one must account for statements like the above, even if one sees nothing vaguely comforting about living under a dictator. My travels and studies have not convinced me that people all over the world are fundamentally the same; quite the contrary: I think people all over the world are profoundly different from one other, across axes of culture, ethnicity, gender, and class, but I also think it doesn’t take too much to try and bridge those gaps and understand how and why. I don’t think it is too difficult to imagine the appeal of autocracy (a relatively enlightened one at least). Democracy takes a lot of work after all, and it would be nice if instead we could all just relax and leave it up to a godlike, all-knowing figure who could really lead us through troubled times, rather than relying on poll numbers to figure out how to fumble on through. The fact that such persons do not exist are one reason I won’t be rooting for a dictatorship any time soon.

This does not preclude, however, that some people might actually prefer living in a dictatorship, or at least see it as inevitable and tolerable. In the lead up to the Iraq war, it was treasonous to even whisper that maybe, just maybe, democracy wasn’t for everyone, and even if it was the best system, maybe it couldn’t be forced. I wish I could say that Americans have learned something from our failures there but I fear that instead many are just blaming the Iraqis for not taking advantage of the marvelous opportunity they were presented with.

Assumptions of the inherent superiority and “naturalness” of democracy, in the sense that it is assumed that democracy will always flourish when given the opportunity because people, by nature, love freedom, are embedded not only in foreign policy but in scholarly work. Although I tried to separate my own research project from this discourse, I still suspect that one reason I got funding was that many people are forever seeking out the sprouts of democracy, insisting that in some pocket of resistance somewhere, the Chinese people are asserting their rights and that this will inevitably lead to regime change. This is not my own opinion.

The parents of one of my teachers here, now in their late 60s, have been making frequent trips to Beijing from their home in the north to take care of her while she is pregnant. Each time they come to town they insist on visiting Mao’s mausoleum at the south end of Tiananmen Square. I would have thought one viewing of the Chairman’s embalmed body would be enough for a lifetime but my teacher tells me that it really means something to them to visit, that they have very strong feelings for the man.

There’s a well-known dictum that Mao's actions were 70% right and 30% wrong. I don’t know how this number was arrived at, but Chinese people are invariably delighted that I've heard the formula; saying it aloud is a failsafe method of winning a toast in your honor and just about any banquet.

Regardless of the numbers, and even, apparently, regardless of a great deal of misery (many history books now judiciously state that Mao “erroneously” started the Cultural Revolution), Mao Zedong has an undeniably strong place in the hearts and minds of the older generation who were raised memorizing his words, singing his songs, collecting badges that bore his image. He was George Washington, Johnny Appleseed, and Pokemon all rolled into one. For visitors of this generation to Mao’s Mausoleum, being so close to the man, even in death, must be quite a feeling.

China’s current leaders can never hope to inspire such devotion, but as long as they can keep delivering big growth numbers, corresponding infrastructural development, and a smattering of social welfare programs to even out the growing inequalities, their positions should be perfectly safe. I get the sense that sometimes people here just don’t want to have to think about the government -- they just want it to do its job -- and as of yet, that job doesn’t include safeguarding political or civil rights. They think we Americans are the one with a cult of personality, fawning all over our tall, young, handsome, charismatic president. Do you think any Chinese person would ever wear a Hu Jintao t-shirt with a clever slogan?

It would make an interesting social experiment at the very least - though not one I’d be willing to end up in jail for.

建国大业 (The Founding of a Republic)

I dug into my collection of mostly pirated Chinese DVD’s this sickly week and, in one dizzy 48-hour period, watched the following: Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her & Made in the USA, Oliver Stone’s W., recent James Bond film Quantum of Solace, and the Chinese blockbuster epic The Founding of a Republic. I spent the following 24 hours coming down, my mind a dense mass of jumbled images and tangled thoughts about consumer culture, Chinese nationalism, American imperialism, and the effects of technology on interpersonal relationships. Don’t think that because I’m a PhD student I’m smarter than you. Who else but academia would have taken me?

According to the Chinese lunar calendar, the coldest time of the year is this week and the one preceding it, the last fierce gusts of winter as the year of the ox readies to gives way to the year of the tiger. As predicted, this week has been all bitter winds and single-digit temperatures. I am typically a fan of winter until it gets REALLY cold, and even then I wouldn’t mind so much if not for the maddening cabin fever. I like very much to walk about and look at things but this is less fun when I can’t feel my fingers.

It would be ideal if I could take advantage of this weather to get all settled in my new fieldsite, but my “boss” there, who has taken a rather maternal attitude towards me, has forbidden me to come in until the weather warms up a bit. Auntie Zhang and Uncle Mu have taken the predictable stance that I should avoid going outside at all so as not to catch cold or fall on the ice and even many of my friends of my own age have been sending me texts of concern saying pretty much the same thing. But the sky is so blue and the air is so fresh! I think, and then I go out walking and get so cold so fast that I duck into a shop to warm up and come out with yet another item of apparel bearing a neck bow.

Although cautioned against it I’ve still been going out daily, at the very least to the gym or the grocery store, until a recent bout of food poisoning trapped me completely. I’ve always had a rather masochistic work ethic and feel slightly decadent just lying around watching movies but I could only spend so much time pacing my room and cutting my bangs. Besides, watching Chinese movies is almost work, especially if the movie in question is the highest-grossing domestically produced film in history and takes as it’s subject the years of civil war leading up to the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the establishment of the PRC.

Star-studded, big-budgeted (allegedly much of the funding came from the central government) and released to coincide with the PRC’s 60th anniversary last October, The Founding of a Republic was a blockbuster times a historical epic riding a tide of national optimism. The film was also hotly anticipated by the local expat community, most of whom were cynically curious about just how history would be officially spun.

What stood out most about the film, however, was just how impressive the casting was. Mao imitators seem to exist in China in almost Elvis proportions, as the image below implies.

I doubt there is much in the way of opportunities for Mao impersonators at used car sales or quicky weddings but there is no shortage of historical television dramas touching on various episodes of the leader’s life.

The performer who played Mao Zedong in the film, Tang Guoqiang, was a dead ringer for the big guy and managed to convey a great deal of the charisma and intelligence he surely possessed.

If he also came across as entirely beneficent and pure of heart that was more a factor of the script, which often placed him in scenes like the one below, where he and Zhou Enlai give piggyback rides to Mao’s daughters through a field of flowers.

More realistically, Mao was portrayed, as were many of his comrades, as incessant chain smokers. I was particularly amused by a scene in which a few of the top brass are forced to recognize that reform must proceed slowly when they realize that one thing capitalists are awfully good at is providing junkies with their fix:

Characters of little historical significance were often played by huge stars in tiny cameos. Jackie Chan, in heavy make-up, played a reporter in one small scene; in another Zhang Ziyi played a delegate to the women’s committee commenting on the flag design to be chosen for the new nation. The effect was slightly bizarre, like Brad Pitt suddenly showing up to fix the clock in Independence Hall in a film about the founding of the United States, or Julia Roberts in a brief cameo as Betsy Ross.

The most confounding casting choice of all was to put an Australian man, speaking with an Australian accent, in the role of the American Ambassador. How the hell did that happen?

In any history, however politically motivated, it is typically important to pay as much attention to what is omitted as what is included. The Founding of a Republic side-stepped many a sensitive area by leaving out individuals and moments that may have provoked discomfort or in any way dampened the patriotism the film attempted to stoke in its viewers (assuming few of you are scholars of Chinese history, I’m going to leave out what they left out). What remained was a vivid, rousing story with struggles and glories where the good guys win and the bad guys go to Taiwan.

Well not quite. One great surprise of the film was that Chiang Kai-shek (head of the Nationalist government or KMT), long reviled as a cruel, power-hungry dictator and a puppet of the Americans, came off as a guy who basically meant well but was too weakened by the corruption of his regime to challenge the mighty tide of Communist reform.

It may have been difficult to portray him any other way, as the audience knew from the start that he was going down quick. In the face of his inevitable defeat, the villain becomes tragic. That, to me, is one of the most troubling inherent flaws of historical drama of any kind: the way it makes events seem obvious, necessary, predestined and makes our view of them omniscient. I hope kids these days are still getting at least some of their history from books that add, rather than subtract, complexity and ambiguity. Failing that, I hope they at least are getting their history from films that don’t portray American ambassadors as possessing Australian accents.