Chinese sayings: 41 (狗急跳牆 gǒu jí tiào qiáng)

 

狗急跳牆

gǒu jí tiào qiáng

"dog hurry jump wall"

(Here, the "急 jí / hurry" character can also mean "desperate", hence = hurry: to be desperate because one's in a hurry, or to be in a hurry because one's desperate.  The best example I can think of is the Cantonese saying 急 for needing to go to the loo desperately, therefore must hurry [to find / get to one], or there might be embarrassing consequences.)

狗急跳牆 gǒu jí tiào qiáng is another expression that is very visual when you look at the meanings of all the characters in it:  when the dog is desperate or in a hurry, no wall will be any barrier, the dog will jump over it.  The English equivalent is Desperate times call for desperate measures.

    With my perverse sense of humour, I used it on myself in Taiwan when I was working there (1975–6).  A Taiwan-born colleague (of Nanjing parentage) laughed at me, saying, "No, no, no, you can't use the phrase on yourself!"

Note:  The Chinese sense of hierarchy wouldn't permit comparing a human (especially oneself) to a dog, unless it was as a criticism / denunciation (cf. Shakespeare's use of the word "cur").  My own impression is that in the old Chinese tradition, dogs were pretty much treated like slaves – often mis-treated, to go by our modern standards:  they were around to guard the house, rarely (if ever) kept as pets; given scraps to eat; maybe kicked at in a fit of pique, etc.

Chinese characters: 06 (綏 / 绥 suí)

 

綏 / 绥 suí originally refers to the rope used for holding onto a vehicle (when seated or for climbing onto it – think the early days vehicle, which would be a horse or donkey cart rumbling along, probably over a gritty surface).

    This is another character where one can work out what is happening by doing a breakdown of all the parts:

* silk radical (糹/ 纟sī), therefore something made of fabric, silk in this case

* claw (爪 zhuǎ,zhǎo) over woman (女 nǚ) = 妥 tuǒ / appropriate (covered in the blog about characters with the woman / 女 nǚ radical – see below for link)

    So, something made of fabric that is appropriate for helping to keep one's balance while on a vehicle, or for helping to steady oneself while climbing onto it = 綏 / 绥 suí.

    The extended meaning of this character is comfort, stability, well-being or a state of retreat or relaxation.  One can see how the connection is made:  if one has a rope to hold onto the vehicle / to steady oneself, one would not fall off, hence one is in a state of stability, and therefore comfort or well-being / one is relaxed.

    Chinese characters might appear at first sight to be just strokes (of the writing implement) thrown together to form some kind of image for the written representation, but a lot of them can actually be broken down for one to make sense of why those parts are used, i.e., there's logic to how the character was born.

Chinese characters: 05 (Characters with 女 nǚ radical)

https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2025/07/chinese-characters-05-characters-with.html 

An unusual encounter (Singapore)

 

In my Pre-U 1 year at RI (Raffles Institution), I'd go to the National Library to study after classes ended at 1pm.

    One evening, as I was walking out of the library around 6:30pm, a taxi came to a halt in front of it, two Westerners emerged, and the cab drove off.  

    The two men looked around, then asked me, "Is this the National Theatre?"  Ah, the cab driver had misheard them.

    No, I said, and started to try and show them where it was:  go along the road behind us on the slope, go over the bit of hill, then...  

    I decided to take them there, as they were obviously non-local, and might get lost.

    On the way, I found out that they were flamenco guitarists who were due to perform at the National Theatre.  Ah, they were from Spain!  I said, "I know the tune Maria Elena!" and started to hum it.  They recognised it immediately and were right chuffed (presumably because there was something in common between them and a local), joining me in the humming all the way.

    At the door, they thanked me and said, "Come back tomorrow, tell the doorman to let you in.  We want you to enjoy the performance as our guest, to thank you for helping us arrive in time for our performance."

    The show turned out to be by a flamenco artist, presumably famous since it was simply called "Antonio!".

    I arrived the following evening but of course the doorman wasn't going to let me in just because I (a local girl) said two of the musicians had invited me.  

    Luckily, they happened to be walking past the door just as I was about to leave and go home, so I did get in after all.  

    The doorman escorted me all the way to my front row seat, no less, a couple of seats away from a local family – a couple with a daughter about my age (17) who kept casting me curious and most unfriendly side glances, which looked very much to me like, "What are YOU doing here??  YOU don't look like you'd be old enough to be able to afford a front row seat, unlike us!”  (Such was the snobbish and materialistic mentality at the time.  I couldn't help thinking:  if only she could've witnessed how warmly I'd been welcomed by two of the show's artistes at the door – that might have made her less smug about her financial superiority.) 

    The musicians had said to wait for them after the show.  They took me to the dressing room and told all their fellow musicians about me.  They, too, welcomed me warmly.  I was offered a lift in their mini bus, just to spend more time together.  The whole busload of musicians and I hummed Maria Elena all the way to their hotel, where we then parted company.  

    It was a very memorable evening for a 17-year-old local girl who probably wouldn't be able to afford a front row ticket at the National Theatre, yes.

NB:  Maria Elena, written by Mexican composer Lorenzo Barcelata in 1932.  Googling it tells me it's a bolero tune.

(Singapore, 1971)

The Oriental Yes / No answer: 02

 

In the mainland series I'm watching on YouTube, the older brother discovers that his younger sister is in a relationship with next door neighbour's boy with whom she'd grown up.

    The boy doesn't have a good track record, mostly being naughty, getting into scrapes, and not doing particularly well at school – just to name a small handful.  The younger sister, on the other hand, is a model student and well behaved at home.

    The older brother asks, "爸妈林叔叔宋阿姨都不知道这事吧?"  (Short translation: "Our parents and his parents don't know about this, I suppose?")

    In English, the pair of young lovers would be saying, "No." (No, they don't know.)

    In the film, however, they both nod, i.e., agreeing with the question: "Yes, you're right, they don't know."

How Chinese parents name their children

 

This is such a big subject that this blog can only hope to cover one tiny section of the tip of the iceberg.  It is also my personal and a light-hearted take on the topic, not a scholastic one.

    One of the criteria Chinese parents use for selecting names for their children is based on what the Chinese almanac says about the child's future, using the child's astrological details (year, month, day and hour of birth) called the 八字 bā zì / Eight Characters.  This is my simplistic explanation of a complex system.

    The 八字 bā zì of a particular child might say that his time of birth means that he is short of water in his life, so characters written with some element of water would be chosen for his name, e.g., 海 hǎi / sea; 江 jiāng / (bigger) river; 河 hé / (smaller) river.  (It's almost always the boy's name that would be worthy of consideration / more important to get right, as girls would be dependent on their husbands for their future livelihood, therefore no need for them to carve out any brilliant future path for themselves.)

    Another criterion is based on the parents' wishful thinking, a bit like praying to the gods with the child's name repeated so many times that their wish might get heard and therefore granted.  The most common ones that I can think of are names with 强 qiáng / strong for boys and 秀 xiù / elegant/elegance for girls.

    A couple of decades ago, a friend gave my name to an agency for interpreting at medical appointments.  I always used the waiting time to talk to the patient, firstly to break the ice but more so, to save the doctor time by extracting the medical details before the patient actually went in, e.g., what his/her condition was, how bad it was, etc.  This also gave me a bit of time to get used to the accent a little, as well as think about how to translate the symptoms if they were not the run-of-the-mill ones.

    On one particular occasion, the patient was male with the name of 招男 zhāo nán / "beckon-to male", which was an unusual name (in my experience, anyway).  I asked, "Were your parents hoping for another boy?"  One guess for what the answer was.  And did they go on to produce another boy after him?  I can't remember now what he said.

    A historical name that would be strong evidence against this wishful-thinking way of doing things is 霍去病 Huò Qù Bìng (霍 Huò is the surname).

A note here:  

* Chinese surnames, being clan/family names and therefore higher in status/rank than personal names, come first in the string, under the Rule of Hierarchy.  They are just clan/family names passed on down the generations, with the descendants not having a say in the choice of them.  They are not to be translated, even if they do mean something on their own, e.g., surnames 马 mǎ / "horse" or 李 lǐ / "plum" remain Ma or Li, one doesn't call Mr Ma "Mr Horse" or Miss Li "Miss Plum".  

* Chinese personal names are often chosen for their good meanings (e.g., "brave", "clever", "wise" [almost always for boys by cultural default]), with these qualities immediately popping up in the head of the person who comes across (or calls out) names with those characters.  So, a man with the characters of 國強 (/ 国强) / "nation strong" in his name would be called verbally Guó Qiáng with the qualities automatically invoked with the sounds.

    The characters 去病 Qù Bìng in the personal name of 霍去病 Huò Qù Bìng mean "to-do-away-with illness".  It is an unusual combination of characters for a personal name and one cannot always account for the logic behind parents' choice of characters for their children's names, but I'd hazard a guess that they were hoping to have the boy grow up fit and healthy.

    霍去病 Huò Qù Bìng was certainly not lacking in bravery and military prowess.  He was a famous general who fought against the Xiongnu (匈奴 / Huns) during the reign of Emperor Wu (漢武帝 / 汉武帝, 156 – 87 BC) of the Western Han Dynasty (西漢 / 西汉, 206 BC – 9 AD).

    His dates?  140 – 117 BC.  So, he lived for only 23 years.

    The cause of death?  Illness.  (That's what the historical records say.)

Special lawnmower (Singapore)

 

When I was growing up, we used to have a kind of grass on our lawn that looks like couch grass.  

    They grow in separate clumps, leaving gaps in between which then become muddy tracks on rainy days, especially during the monsoon season when the rain drops can feel like needles on one's skin, so heavy the downpours are.

    My uncle had procured, for his small front lawn, some lawn grass which looks and feels like a crew cut or the modern astro turf, growing in fine blades that close up all the spaces and are kind to the bottom for sitting on.  We called it carpet grass.

    We cut out a block for ourselves, dividing it up into strips for planting at six-inch intervals, which then grew sideways and met up to form a smooth surface at first.  It'd continue to grow, however, so the mowing still had to be done.

    When I moved on from frogs to guinea pigs for my 'A' level biology dissection classes, I'd go and buy one a week ahead of the lesson, as I had to go to a special street downtown for it.  (Keeping guinea pigs as pets wasn't a common Singaporean hobby in my childhood days – maybe not now either.)

    To keep the guinea pig alive until the next dissection lesson, I decided to set it to work.  After all, I had to go and track down grass for it, so why not just put it out to graze on our carpet grass?

    The only equipment I had for making sure it didn't escape was a half globe, round chicken coop.  Every hour or so, I'd go and shift the coop to another spot.  The lawn ended up with round patches of cropped-down lawn grass, leaving tiny circular triangles of uneaten grass where the circles didn't touch.

    We lived on a main road, so people could see our lawn from the buses that went by.  They would ask what kind of lawnmower we used for producing that effect.

    If I'd known about crop circles back then, I'd have told them that aliens would come down and do our lawn when we were asleep...

(Singapore, 1960s)

Linguistic False Friend (Singapore)

 

For those who might not know:

(from googling)

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Linguistic false friends are words in different languages that look or sound similar but have very different meanings, causing misunderstandings for language learners. For example, the Spanish word embarazada (pregnant) looks like the English word "embarrassed". Other common examples include English "gift" (present) and German "Gift" (poison), or French "librairie" (bookstore) and English "library" (a place to borrow books).

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    I did a short stint as a temporary teacher (supply teacher it's called here in the UK) in 1973 while waiting for my 'A' level results from the University of Cambridge.

    I was given various classes at this English stream school, teaching English and PE (Physical Education) to 13-year-olds, one of whom was a girl called Honi from Indonesia.

    She was one of a group of Indonesian Chinese youngsters at that school whose parents decided to send them to Singapore for their schooling.  They were aged 10 to 16, pitched into a school where all the subjects (except Second Language, which was compulsory) were taught in English.

    A bit of background here.  In those days (in the 1960s and 1970s), Singapore's schools were in four different streams:  Chinese stream, Malay stream, Indian stream and English stream.  The first three types were attended by mostly, not exclusively, children from those respective ethnic groups, with the second language (compulsory) being English (no choice).  English stream schools had children from any of the three ethnic groups (plus Eurasians), and they had a choice of second language.  Children from Chinese backgrounds would generally choose Mandarin for their second language (or Malay for Peranakans – Chinese people who have adopted the Malay lifestyle: in dress, language, food, etc).  Children from a Malay background would generally choose Malay.  Those from an Indian background would generally go for Tamil (the officially chosen language for representing people from the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka [Ceylon]).

    Back to those Indonesian children, freshly arrived and dropped straight into Secondary One (aged 12) or higher in an English stream school, with very little working English, which meant that they had to work extra hard (and engage a private tutor to help them with all their school subjects – I was that private tutor for a year).

    One day, Honi came to me, feeling very hard done by.  She'd sat a Science test, with one of the questions being:  "Give an example of a liquid state."  She'd written "Air", which got marked wrong.

    The Linguistic False Friend at work here:  In Indonesian, the working language in Honi's head, the word for "water" is "air" (pronounced ah-yer), which of course came out wrong in a test conducted in the English language.  If Honi had been thinking in Malay, which has "water" written as "ayer" (there are street names in Singapore with "ayer" in them:  Kreta Ayer Road, Telok Ayer Street), she would've written down "ayer" for the example of a liquid state, and the teacher would've guessed what she meant, even though "ayer" is not an English word.

(Singapore, 1973)

One ancient travellers' practice (China)

 

This blog is further to 以毒攻毒 (see link below), although they're not quite the same thing.

    My brother told me a few decades back that he'd heard about a traditional travellers' way of doing things in China.  I don't know how geographically wide this practice was, or when (historically) it was in common practice.

    By "traveller", presumably it is more someone who went around the country sourcing / selling goods, or someone going to visit relatives in another area, rather than our modern-day concept of travelling as a tourist, as tourism wasn't that common in those days.

    The practice was in a few steps:

* go to the loo upon arrival at the new place – to clear the system of whatever's been accumulated from the previous place or on the way;

* have a shower – to wash off the dust from the previous place and the journey (and presumably whatever germs that might've been picked up on the way);

* drink the water from the local well – to get the system acclimatised to the local conditions (e.g., microbes).

(From googling)

Quote 

Microbes, or microorganisms, are incredibly tiny, living organisms that are too small to be seen without a microscope. They are found in almost every environment on Earth, including the air, water, soil, and within our bodies. Common types of microbes include bacteria, fungi (like yeast and mold), archaea, protozoa, and some microscopic algae. While some microbes can cause illness (known as pathogens), many are harmless or even beneficial, playing vital roles in digestion, decomposition, and nutrient cycling.

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以毒攻毒：https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2025/08/chinese-sayings-39.html