When the Gentle Giant (my Swiss boyfriend in the 80s) and I first met, one of the things that we found we had in common was how Sino-centric we thought the mainland Chinese are in calling Westerners 外国人 wàiguórén / “external country person” / foreigners when they are in the West.
One day, when I was over in Zurich, we were walking by the river when we saw two mainland Chinese men coming from the other direction. We looked at each other and knew immediately what we were going to do to them: as the two men walked past us, we muttered, “外国人! 外国人! / wàiguórén! wàiguórén! / Foreigners! Foreigners!” After we passed them, we turned round, folded our arms and stood back to watch their reaction. Sure enough, they’d suddenly registered that they’d heard “foreigners, foreigners” in Chinese, and turned round to see who’d uttered it. The Gentle Giant and I then pointed at them, repeating, “外国人! 外国人! 你们就是外国人。/ wàiguórén! wàiguórén! nǐmen jiù shì wàiguórén! / Foreigners, foreigners, YOU are the foreigners”.
Whether the message had sunk in or not, or for how long, we had our bit of fun all the same, giving them a dose of their own medicine.
(Switzerland, 1988)
No comments:
Post a Comment