Seb was in Taiwan on a year-long scholarship for learning Chinese and sent back many stories about his experiences there.
One of them was about him joining a local package tour to Quemoy (金門 / Jīnmén / ”gold gate”), one of Taiwan’s “front-line” islands only about a mile off the coast of Fujian province in S.E. China. This missive was mainly about the Chinese style of sightseeing: visit a tourist attraction, a shopping break, visit a tourist attraction, a shopping break, and so on.
After one of these breaks, during which he had bought a wallet (called píbāo / 皮包 / ”skin wrap” in Chinese), Seb re-joined the group. In his characteristically gregarious fashion, Seb wanted to show off his newly-purchased wallet. As he bounded up to them, he meant to say, in Chinese, “Come, come, let me show you my wallet,” thrusting his hand into his front trouser pocket at the same time to fish out the said item.
Unfortunately, as has happened with endless generations of learners of the language, he got the word order of the two sounds in “wallet” wrong, and instead of 皮包 (píbāo / ”skin wrap”), it came out as 包皮 (bāopí / “wrap skin” — btw, only men have this feature).
Seb’s fellow package-tour mates, all Taiwanese and probably not that young (who below the age of 50 goes on these package tours??), reeled back in horror, thinking that the hand he’d plunged into his front trouser pocket was actually going to produce the item (包皮 / bāopí / “wrap skin”) for public inspection.
(Taiwan, 2002)
No comments:
Post a Comment