The Chinese for "God has eyes!" (老天有眼) (Russia)

I once taught a class this phrase: 

老天有眼 lǎo tiān yǒu yǎn / “old heaven has eyes”

In traditional Chinese thinking, it’s 天 tiān that rules over us mortals.  天 tiān = sky, but in this context, it is Heaven, the ruling authority.  The emperor was the ruler because he had been given the mandate of Heaven to rule over the rest of the population.  (See also blog entry Mandate of Heaven.)

One of the students, Peter, then went off to Russia (on holiday or for work).  He had a horrible time there, finding the service indifferent and the mannerism curt.  The last straw was on the day of his departure when the officials were, he felt, rude and arrogant.

 

After he got back to London, he told me that as he got to the top of the boarding stairs (in those days you had to walk across the tarmac and walk up the pull-away steps), he turned round to face the country as a whole, shook his fist and shouted, “老 天 有 眼!”

He said, “I know they don’t know any Chinese but it made me feel better — to be able to threaten them with the wrath of God.  It was like placing a curse on them.  I walked to my seat with a smile on my face.” 

I still laugh after all these years. 

So when you are feeling helpless (e.g., exploited but can’t fight back), leave it to God: 老天有眼 lǎo tiān yǒu yǎn!

(Russia, 1995)

A glimpse into Chinese police practices?

In 1992, the Chinese government announced they were allowing greater freedom of speech.  A flurry of articles appeared in the Legal Daily 法制日报 on the subject of Extracting Confession by applying Torture.  This got Amnesty International very excited.  I was asked to go in and translate the articles.

What caught my perverse-humour eye, however, were two articles: 

不要用手铐锁住自行车 / Don't use handcuffs to lock up your bicycle

and 

警车要姓警 / Police car must be surnamed police

It seemed that policemen had been using handcuffs to lock up their bikes, so that when they actually caught someone, the handcuffs were not around for them to use on the person arrested!

The other article (警车要姓警 / Police car must be surnamed police) was about police cars being used for things other than police matters: weddings, lifts to/from the airport or train station for friends and relatives.  Hence, the appeal that police cars must be surnamed "police", i.e., be true to their original purpose.  Hahahahaha.

(1992)

So cute! (London)

 

Singaporeans like to say “so cute!” of things that please or amuse them.  

The latest example is my nephew’s response to my saying that the Korean for “sweetcorn/maize” sounds like “oh su su”, which matches the Chinese for it: 玉蜀黍 yù shǔ shǔ.  

(I’d been sending him examples of Korean words that I’ve picked up from the period dramas I’ve been watching, as evidence that Korean is very similar to Chinese.  I also notice two-character compounds that are different in word order from modern Chinese, which — just a hunch, as yet to be investigated — proves that Korean is from archaic Chinese.)

My nephew saying “so cute!” to the sweetcorn example brings to mind what happened in 1992 when my third sister and her husband came over to London. She’d been hospitalised for stress, then the doctor advised taking more time off, so they grabbed an off-season deal (it was February) and came to London.

I’d invited an evening student Frazer Gleig, 12 years older than I (a fellow snake and a pubbing pal after class), along to the dinner out in Chinatown, because Frazer was great fun and would provide nice variety of company for my visitors. 

At one point, Frazer trotted out his usual description of himself: 笨老头 bèn lǎotóu / “stupid old man”.  My sister laughed: ”So cute!”  

Frazer’s face was a right picture: Western men do not get called cute at 51. He didn’t know how to respond.

(London, 1992)

Coded communication

My nephew said a Hong Kong friend of his described her husband as “fat”, which is 肥 féi in Chinese, but she texted the character 肥 as 月巴 (breaking up the two components of the one character to form two separate characters).  

This reminds me of the time when an RI (Raffles Institution) friend’s wife came to London with her then-five-year-old daughter Yen Hua, and stayed with me.  

The mother would spell out words that she didn’t want Yen Hua to know, so she’d say things like, “She said he’s such an s-h-i-t.”  Yen Hua, however, knew more words than her mother realised, so she’d shout them out, e.g., “Shit!”  

The mother had to abandon this mode of “coded talk”.

Some people's thinking behind helping other people

Talking to Francesca about paying back has brought to mind something I wrote in my journal on my film shoot in 1988 in China, analysing the Chinese way of interacting with each other.

These are my own impressions/analysis, based on my own first-hand experience and what I’ve heard from other people.  (My friend Valerio will be sure to protest that not all Chinese think like that.  Yes, yes, Valerio.)

The Chinese traditionally think of doing good in terms of:

1. paying back, even to the point of doing something good (first), based on “I might need him/her at a later point.”  I don’t like this self-centred approach. Why only help someone because you might benefit later?  (A Libyan woman said to me, “I helped because that person might well be my mother, so I’d want someone else to be nice to my mother.”  But why can’t kindness be dished out just for its own sake? If I’m an orphan with no family or friends, I’d still help for the sake of helping.)

2. same approach as before but this time it’s “I will go to Heaven / be reborn into a better life next incarnation”.  Again, self-centred.

3. I don’t know the person seeking help but we have a mutual friend, so I’m doing it for that mutual friend.  Again, more often than not, it’s because I don’t want that mutual friend to think ill of me — cf. having no qualms about not helping a stranger with no mutual friend between us. So, it’s still self-centred.

Paying back / Paying forward

Have been helping Francesca with her job application.  She keeps expressing gratitude, saying she owes me lots. 

My reply to her:

The half-full way of looking at it is:  you’ve made an old lady feel useful.

I used to come back from my travels with little presents for my landlord Fred and landlady Nora: caviar from Sweden, chocolate from Switzerland, etc. 

One day, she came back from Portugal (where they had a time-share place), and gave me a small bottle of wine, the type we get on flights, so I knew it was free.  Still, it’s the thought that counts, not the cost.  In my Chinese-upbringing way, I immediately said, “Oh no, keep it for yourself!”

She said, “You are always giving people things.  You should let people have a chance to give you something back.”

I will always remember that.  By accepting something (a gift or help), we are giving the giver the joy of giving.

So, by letting me help you, you are making me feel useful.  I owe you too!

A phrase that’s started to pop up in the last decade (or two?) is, “I’ll pay it forward.” We usually try to “pay it back”, but it’s not always possible (can’t find the giver, e.g.).  What’s good about this approach is that passing the kindness onwards spreads it out more, rather than just between the two parties, so more people benefit. 

Thinking outside the box: 01 (London)

(from googling)

Quote

"Thinking outside the box" is an idiom that encourages creative and unconventional problem-solving. It means approaching situations with an open mind and considering solutions beyond the typical or expected. This type of thinking can lead to innovative ideas and solutions.

Unquote

I worked as a part-time telex operator at British Monomarks throughout my first degree at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), being self-supporting, not taking my mother’s money. 

Small companies didn’t have enough business to justify installing their own telex machine (too expensive if they only needed to send the occasional telex), so they’d open an account with British Monomarks for a small subscription fee.  Then they’d pay for however many telexes they sent/received — could be once/year (just exaggerating to illustrate the point). 

Customers would phone in and dictate their outgoing messages.

One day, I took a call from a customer who had been trying to get the other party (in Taiwan, as it happened) to settle a debt, with no success — the debtor never responded to their letters asking for payment; my customer couldn’t prove that the debtor had received the requests / demands.

Customer said he wanted to send a telex this time because our machine would show that the connection had been successful.

The procedure:  

1.  We’d dial the recipient’s number.

2.  Once we got through, their machine ident would automatically come up — this is called the answer back.

3.  At the end of the transmission, we always asked for the ident again (just in case the line had got disconnected during the transmission, which did happen every now and then). There’s a key on the telex machine for getting the answer back.

So we’d have their machine ident at the start of the message printout, then again at the end — double confirmation that the transmission had gone through successfully.

Customer said he wasn’t sure if it’d work as the debtor could still claim it never arrived. So how to proceed, he asked, he couldn’t think of anything else.

I suggested we send a telex to them via the Taiwan GPO [General Post Office] instead, for the GPO to deliver by hand — like the old-fashioned telegram/cable, whereby the postman would hand over the telegram/cable and the recipient would have to sign receipt for it.  One has to sign receipt for a post office delivery first without getting a chance to read the contents (i.e., they can’t conveniently pretend they never got the item after they’d seen that it was a demand for payment).  Also, my customer had a neutral third-party (the Taiwanese debtor’s own GPO) as witness if he had to take them to court. 

A few weeks later, the manager John Haste read out, and pinned up on the notice board, a letter from the customer saying my plan had worked and the debtor had settled, thanking me (by name) for solving the conundrum which had been plaguing him for quite a while.

(I was 25 at the time.)

(London, 1979)