The nature vs nurture of food: 12 (Chilli with everything)

I've come to know quite a few Mauritians in the last five years or so.

    One of the things I've noticed about them is that they share Singaporean people's love of chilli / spicy food.

    An extreme example is from a visit to the home of two of them, a married couple. At afternoon tea time, which is supposed the English style with tea, cake and/or biscuits, the wife sat down to her biscuit with a fresh whole chilli between her fingers -- to be eaten with every nibble of her biscuit.

(Crawley, near Gatwick Airport, 2024)

The nature vs nurture of food: 11 (No chilli, no flavour)

A friend from my teenage days came over on a three-month course, before being joined by his wife and going off to Europe on a 21-day 19-city tour.

    When they came back to London for their last three nights prior to flying back, they stayed in the empty flat of someone I knew at the time.

    On their first night, I bought fish and chips for eating in. There was a brand new, 340g size bottle of chilli sauce in the flat. They poured so much chilli sauce over the fish and chips that it was a sea of red on the plate.

    I left them to their own devices on the following two nights, then went to see them off. They told me that they had fish and chips again on their third and last night in London, and that they'd replaced the chilli sauce because they'd used up the whole of the previous bottle.

(London, 1985)

The nature vs nurture of food: 10 (Chilli machismo)

In the 80s, when I had a telly, I saw a documentary about Mexicans being macho about chilli, proving to each other how hot they were able to endure the level of spiciness, often to the point of going far beyond the normal person's threshold of pain.

    In my younger days, I was considered a wimp at home for being the one least able to take the heat.

    I remember an occasion when a fish curry was served for dinner. I had to have a bowl of water by my dinner plate -- for rinsing off some of the spiciness first.

(Mexico, 1980s; Singapore, 1960s)

The pictographic element of the Chinese written script: 04 (Extended to make new concepts)

人 rén / human, person --> you can see the image (seen sideways) of a (headless) human being with one leg stretched out in front

大 dà / big --> the human stretches out both arms, so s/he becomes big

天 tiān / sky, Heaven (the ruling body in the ancient Chinese tradition) --> if the human starts to think s/he is big, above him/her is the sky / Heaven (the ruling body)

太 tài / excessive --> 大 dà is already big, adding one stroke to it makes it too much

The pictographic element of the Chinese written script: 03 (Body parts)

口 kǒu / mouth --> this is the most obvious representation

心 (心) xīn / heart --> it's more obvious if you think of the usual shape for a heart (♡) but broken up into four different bits -- a sad image indeed) 

目 mù / eye --> turn it round so that it's lying on the long side of the rectangle and you'll see that it's supposed to look like an eye. (Don't ask me why they couldn't have left it lying on the long side of the rectangle since it's more graphically obvious.)

手 shǒu / hand --> the horizontal lines are supposed to be the fingers.

足 zú / foot --> I'll leave you to work out the image for yourself.

耳 ěr / ear --> I'll leave you to work out the image for yourself.

The pictographic element of the Chinese written script: 02 (Animal characters)

The characters with the most obvious pictographic element are those for animals.  Here, I give the traditional version first, then the simplified.

    (For those who might not know this:  the simplified script, officially adopted by post-1949 mainland China [The People's Republic of China], was mostly artificially created for cutting down the level of illiteracy -- yes, it's hard for Chinese people, too, to learn their own written script.  I say "mostly artificially created", because a lot of simplified characters already existed in some simplified form or other in real life down the centuries, a sort of unofficial cursive / shorthand adopted by the users.  So, the Language Reform Committee seemed to have taken a lot of their inspirations from the grassroots level -- why not?

    Back in the 1960s, I remember my second sister writing the two halves of the character for "trust / letter" 信 xìn as 亻and 文, which is not on the official list.  After all, the character 這 (zhè / this) has been simplified to 这, with the 言 half reduced to 文, so why not the 言 in 信?  An oversight on the part of the Language Reform Committee?  That's another story to come.)

    Characters for animals:  you will see that the traditional forms are closer pictographically to the animals themselves, but all credit to the Language Reform Committee for trying their best to match the spirit while reducing the number of strokes required to write the characters.

馬 / 马 mǎ / horse

魚 / 鱼 yú / fish

鳥 / 鸟 niǎo / bird

烏 / 乌 wū / crow; black (can't see the eye in the bird)

爪 / 爪 zhǎo (/ [colloquial] zhuǎ) / claw

龜 / 龟 guī / tortoise

龍 / 龙 lóng / dragon

   If you can't visualise the animals from the characters (whichever version), you can google the brush stroke renditions for a more artistically realistic version.

The pictographic element of the Chinese written script: 01 (旦)

The Chinese script being pictographic, one might be able to work out the meaning of a character without knowing/remembering the pronunciation.

    Admittedly, one does need to know certain basic rules for a start to help with the guessing.  (I will cover some of the basic rules in a separate blog.)

    An example is the character 旦, which comprises 日 / sun (which one does need to know = / represents "sun") and a horizontal line at the bottom.  (I'm deliberately not providing the readings here for the purpose of this illustration.)

    旦 means morning / dawn, or day (vs night).

    You can visualise it here: the sun over the horizon, therefore = morning or dawn or day.

    (The reading is dàn, for those who might be interested.)