Chinese sayings: 13 (幸災樂禍 / 幸灾乐祸)

 

幸災樂禍

xìng zāi lè huò

“rejoice disaster happy disaster”

Another obvious one: to rejoice and be happy about disaster.  

    The (commonly but not exclusively) four-character format of Chinese sayings means that there’s no room to specify whose disaster it is one is rejoicing in.  As usual with the Chinese language, there's a lot of logical deduction expected (what I call the “You know what I mean” element).  This is why I keep telling my students: “You won’t get Alzheimer’s learning Chinese.”

    Only the German language, as far as I know, has an equivalent for it: Schadenfreude.  

    Now, what does that say about the two cultures if they have a word/saying for taking joy in other people’s suffering, I ask you?

Chinese sayings: 12 (七竅生煙 / 七窍生烟)

 

七竅生煙

qī qiào shēng yān

“seven apertures produce smoke”

The seven apertures here are in the human head: the eyes, ears, nostrils and mouth.

    This is a very graphic description of how one gets so angry that smoke is coming out of the seven apertures.  

    Perhaps it’s the inspiration behind cartoon caricatures since it’s apparently from the 16th century Ming dynasty novel 西遊記 (xī yóu jì / Journey West / The Monkey King)?

Chinese sayings: 11 (騎虎難下 / 骑虎难下)

騎虎難下

qí hǔ nán xià

“ride tiger difficult descend”

This is a saying that makes me with my wicked sense of humour laugh.  The English equivalent is to paint oneself into a corner without the hairy element.  

    Not sure why one would get onto a tiger in the first place anyway…  The only reason I can think of is it seems to be the only way to get away from the tiger — by jumping onto its back so that it can’t eat you.

Chinese sayings: 10 (飢不擇食 / 饥不择食)

飢不擇食 / 饥不择食

jī bù zé shí 

“hungry not choose food”

This is fairly obvious:  when one’s hungry, one doesn’t get picky about the food.

    The S.African woman I'd met at the bus stop said how she absolutely hates food wastage, saying how shocked she was at being turned down by homeless people when she offered them food.  I told her my own experience of offering food to homeless people and being asked first of all, “What is it?”  

    I am aware that it could be that they were vegetarian/vegan or allergic to certain types of food.  Of course, the more common reason is usually that they just don't like that kind of people (like Chinese people not liking cheese), but it doesn’t feel right that they should be so picky when they more likely than not don’t eat three meals a day.  (Actually, I’ve just remembered here that a student of mine who helps out as a volunteer at a charity for the homeless said a lot of the people who go for the free meals there are often very choosy, wanting this instead of that.  That was my own experience too, helping out at a church cooking breakfast for the homeless, with a woman in her 30s asking if she could have fruit yoghurt instead of the plain one being on offer that day.) 

    I added another account of mine about my first day picking up two children from school.  The younger one was eating a fruit salad.  It was one of those already cut up into bite-size chunks, in a plastic container about 4”x 4” costing at least ￡2 at the time (two years ago).  The boy ate half of it, then binned the rest.  I couldn’t believe my eyes: “Did I just see you bin the rest of the fruit salad?!?”  He said, “I didn’t want anymore.”  I told him he could’ve kept it for the next day.  He shrugged his shoulders.  It’s true that in the case of this 7-year-old, he was not homeless, his mother would take them to eat out regularly, and would leave her food rotting in the fridge.  (Maybe that’s where he’d learned his bad habits from…)

(London, 2023, 2021)

Meeting a stranger at the bus stop (London)

I was waiting for a bus opposite my house when an African woman took the initiative in greeting me without our having made eye contact.  

London is generally a stranger-friendly place: people who happen to have made eye contact with you in the street or on the bus/Tube will smile instantly, spontaneously.  Unlike in Singapore where my own experience is that the default is a glum almost-hostile look if your eyes happen to meet, never mind if you were to actually smile at them which will be treated with suspicion.  (Except, I’d noticed in my visits over the last two decades or so, older Chinese people fresh from mainland China who are ever so keen to be accepted or to make friends — or just happy to be allowed into Singapore as an immigrant, so popular it seems to have become.)

It’s usually old people who are keen to talk to strangers, but this African lady is not that old — I’d say in her 50s.  So I guessed that she must be a visitor.  Sure enough, she turned out to be from South Africa, asking me how to get to Manor House Tube station on foot.  I said I’d go with her as the weather was sunny and pleasant.

She commented on the rain we’d had the last few days, saying what a relief it was not to have all that deluge.  I said, coming from Singapore, I’m ever conscious of not having enough water, as we still import our water from Malaysia and pay for every drop.  I asked her about the water situation in S.Africa, which then got moved on to how she absolutely hates wasting food — another pet hate of mine, it so happens.

So the half-mile (3-bus-stop) walk to Manor House turned out to be taken by two like-minded strangers.  As we were parting, I asked her for her name, to add it in when saying how much I'd enjoyed meeting her.

Her name?  One guess.  (Yes, same as mine!)

(London, 2023)

The putrid smell (England)

 

Derek had given up his job as an English schoolmaster to go and do a Chinese degree because of his interest in the Chinese culture: the history, philosophy, literature and language.  

    Being a Westerner and as it was early days for Sino British trade, there wasn’t much scope at the time (he graduated in 1980) for him to be employed in anything that would use his Chinese language skills, so he did a Swedish massage course and got a part-time job working as a masseur at a health spa.  It was a fairly new concept at the time, I think.  

    Derek would be on duty, waiting for anyone who’d booked in for a weekend stay at the spa to come for a massage when they wanted one — for relaxation rather than for treating any particular problem like a bad back.

    Derek added his own pre-massage routine to the session: running his hands a couple of inches above and along the person’s body to get the qì (氣 (/ 气 / vital energy) going first.

    On this occasion, when his hands got to the liver area, Derek got a putrid smell.  He said to the woman, “You should get your liver seen to.”  

    She nearly fell off the massage table in surprise, “How did you know that?  Even my doctor couldn’t tell without the X-ray results, which only arrived yesterday.  That’s why I’m here for the weekend spa, as the results are not good and I’m stressed out.”

(England, 1981?2?)

Chinese sayings: 09 (會做人 / 会做人)

 

會做人 / 会做人

huì zuò rén

“know-how-to be person”

This means knowing how to be a member of the human society, behaving according to the standards set by that society.  It covers being diplomatic, knowing how to say/do the right things, knowing how to behave / conduct oneself in the bigger, human community.  

    It can be in the positive (會做人), or in the negative (不會做人: offending people, treading on people’s toes, being tactless, not knowing how to butter up or please the right people).

    There are lots of Chinese stories about intellectually challenged people.  One of them features a man with one such wife who never got it right socially, so he said to her that she 不會做人 / 不会做人 / “not know-how-to be person”.

    The verb 做 zuò can be “to do/be”, but can also be “to make”.  The wife took it literally, so when the husband came home after telling her off for being tactless, she presented him with a batch of freshly made Chinese equivalent of gingerbread men, saying, “You say I don't know how to make people.  Here, this proves that I do!”

Bird behaviour (London)

I was house sitting in south London, in a leafy private road with two-storey four-bedroom detached houses surrounded by trees.

    One day in January, the weather got quite squally.

    On the bare rooftop of the house (to the left) across the road was an upright, grey, heron-like shape next to the 2ft-high chimney pot: taller than it, sitting very still, slightly hunched. Not quite believing my eyes (why would a bird sit out there, unsheltered, in the wind and rain?), I watched it for a long time, waiting for some movement, to check that it was really a bird rather than something bird-like erected on the roof that I hadn’t noticed before. It didn't move for quite a while, and I gave up. When I went back later to the window and looked out, the heron shape had gone. So, it had indeed been a bird. With so many trees around for it to hide in, it was obviously up there to be lashed by the wind and the rain, as there was nothing else on this rooftop for it to experience. 

    (I was judging that heron with my own human standards: why sit out there in the wind and rain? Reminds me of once, after work in Taipei, when colleague Peggy walked me to the street a few blocks away from the Conoco office to catch my bus home. It was drizzling. When Peggy was going to leave me at my stop, I said I’d like to walk on for a bit more. Peggy immediately became concerned, “Would you like to talk about it?” It seems that if someone wants to walk in the rain alone, it must be because they have something on their mind. That's how films and stories present it.) 

    A few hundred yards away, beyond the other house opposite (to the right), the tops of the copse of a dozen 100ft(?)-tall fir trees were swaying wildly, as the rain pelted down. 

    I love watching the swaying of tree tops (among other things) — used to spend most of the day at home childminding the two daughters on school holiday when I was staying with an ex-schoolmate in Sydney, watching the tops of the eucalyptus trees a few hundred yards away swaying, imagining a Heidi sort of scene, although I didn’t have the sound effects. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi) 

    I then noticed that a huge flock of birds (at least 30, if not 50) were flying around the top of these fir trees and actually landing on the upper branches, even though the wind was strong and it was raining quite heavily. The gusty wind meant they didn’t always get a firm foothold, if at all, with the tree tops swaying so violently, but they kept returning. Shaken off balance, they’d have another go at landing and hanging on, again and again and again, for ages and ages. 

    One would’ve thought that they’d go and hide under some big tree somewhere out of the wind and rain, so it must mean that they were actually doing it on purpose, treating it as a game: to see if they could land, and how long they’d stay on the branches before being shaken off. Or perhaps merely to land and experience the swaying as entertainment, like humans enjoying a roller-coaster ride.

    Interesting behaviour. 

(London, UK, 2023)

Machine translation: 03 (Italian to English)

I was approached to edit a batch of stories written in Italian that the author wished to publish in English as well.  So I copied the original, pasted it into a machine translation app, and edited the English version.

    The English rendition was confusing and incomprehensible in places — which is actually better because False Friends* are the most dangerous, leading you into complacent acceptance.  At least if it obviously doesn’t make sense, you can check with the author.  

    One hilarious bit, in the context of rockets falling, came out as “the silence fell with a bang”, which had me laughing for days.  After changing it, I then thought it might actually be great fun to leave it like that, juxtaposed, as word play (which I love).  Unfortunately, the author said that the original is meant to be “suddenly”, that it’s the difference between “botto” and “di botto”.  What a pity.

*Linguistic False Friends are pairs of words that are spelt or pronounced the same way in both languages but actually mean different things, e.g., pain in French and pain in English.  (See also: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2012/01/true-role-of-pain-in-french-dining.html.)

Chinese sayings: 08 (刀子嘴豆腐心)

 

刀子嘴豆腐心

dāozi zuǐ dòufǔ xīn

“knife mouth beancurd heart”

This saying is obvious and is used to describe people who have a sharp tongue but are actually soft-hearted and mean well.  The Chinese equivalent of a person’s bark being worse than his bite.

Beginner Level oral test (London)

 

The oral test for the Beginners class was about three minutes.  

    That is a long time for someone who’d started learning Chinese from zero level, doing under two hours a week (a 10-minute break means it’s not the full two hours that’s advertised) for 25 weeks or so.

    I primed them by doing a chart with a bubble in the middle, and satellite bubbles around that.

    The middle bubble is Self: their surname, personal name, age, nationality, where they live, marital status, have children or not. 

    The satellite bubbles are: 

Family born into (parents, siblings); 

Family created (partner, children); 

Occupation: student (subject, their teachers and fellow students).

    For Occupation, I told them to be students, as it’s harder for them to say what kind of work they do at that level (one is an IP law expert, e.g.).

    For the Family bubbles, I told them all to have lots of siblings, and to be married with lots of children.  

    This means that time would be taken up describing all these people in their lives.  Three minutes easily filled up.

    Dennis, who didn’t even have a girlfriend at the time, said during the oral test that he had a wife (and he giggled at this point about the lie), with two children (giggling again).

    Englishman Tom, single like Dennis, came up with Gubo for his son’s name and Palanka for his daughter’s.  Gubo and Palanka are the names of the two Westerners in the textbook used for the course — they’re not standard English names.  My eyebrows shot up, and I said, “Gubo and Palanka!??”  Tom said impatiently, “Oh, you know what I mean!” but his face actually said, “Well, it was YOU who told us to play this silly game in the first place!”

    The taiji group, who always went to the pub after the lessons, said, “We wore only the colours we could describe, and you didn’t even ask us anything that involves colours!”

(London, 1986?)

Chinese numbers (vs Western numbers) (Kuwait)

I was interpreting in Kuwait in 1986, with 50 Chinese (from different provinces) and 50 Arabs (from the various Gulf states) looking up at me on the podium. 

I was interpreting for No.2 man in the State Council of China when he was giving his speech.  

As usual, the Chinese love stats, so I thought I was being clever pre-empting him/this by writing out on an A4 sheet of paper the numbers in Western clusters (in 3s) and in Chinese clusters (in 4s), as a quick visual aid for conversion when I was up there on the podium looking down at 100 faces.

As predicted, he trotted out figures left, right and centre:  "We signed up deals of ... million/billion USD with x, y and z", blah blah blah, on and on and on, example after example.  He was spewing out the stats so fast I was struggling with the conversion after 5 or 6 sets of stats.  

I was so overwhelmed at one point (my brain was frying), when yet another huge figure was trotted out, that I gave up and said to the 50 Arabs :  "A LOT, A LOT of money."  

I still laugh at the memory, and it creases my students up too, whenever I tell them the story to make them feel better for not converting their numbers fast enough.  (I'm always happy to tell stories about my mistakes and failures to make the students feel less "stupid" — a word they often use to describe themselves when it comes to learning Chinese.)

(Kuwait, 1986)

For those who don't already know and are interested, Chinese numbers work in clusters of 4:

(Western) ABC, DEF, GHI, JKL

ABC = billion cluster (100bn, 10bn, 1bn)

DEF = million cluster of 3 (100mn, 10mn, 1mn)

GHI = thousand cluster of 3 (100K, 10K, 1K)

JKL = unit cluster of 3 (100, 10, 1)

(Chinese) ABCD, EFGH, IJKL

ABCD = yì 億 / 亿 cluster of 4 (thousand-yì hundred-yì ten-yì one-yì)

EFGH = wàn 萬 / 万 (= 10K) cluster of 4 (thousand-wàn hundred-wàn ten-wàn one-wàn)

IJKL = thousand, hundred, ten, one

Melanie (London)

 

[Melanie: not her real name]

I was given a few teaching hours on the full-time degree programme.

One year, I was given Year Two to teach.  This was the year before the students went away for their Year Abroad.

Two years later, I ran into Melanie in the corridor, waiting to see the head of the section.  As the head was nowhere to be seen and Melanie had been hanging around for a while, I thought I’d keep her company, asking how her Year Abroad had been.  Somehow, at some stage of the conversation (the head never put in an appearance), Melanie said she thought I didn’t like her.

Melanie was the best student in her class when I taught them, so how did she get that impression?  

From my experience, it’s usually the struggling students who (more often wrongly than not) think the teacher is picking on them to show them up publicly.  I’d said to them, “The teacher must be very sick to want to shame the students publicly.  What’s the point of it?  The teacher already knows more than the student [in the subject anyway], so there’s no need to show off.”

Melanie said she’d got that impression because “every time I gave you a translation in class, you’d come up with another version.  You were never satisfied with my rendition.”

I said to her, “Poor you, spending a whole year thinking the teacher disliked you!  If the student were really not up to more than just the one version, the teacher would be less demanding and accept what the student offers.  It is precisely because your brain is capable of absorbing synonyms and alternative ways of expressing something that I did it.”

To this day, I still remember the look on her face: not only of enlightenment (“Oh, I see, the teacher didn’t hate me after all!”) but also of great joy that the teacher had actually held her in such high regard.

After she graduated and found a job that dealt with trade with China, she asked me to be her tutor/mentor for the first few months of her new job, to guide her through Business Chinese.

(London, late 80s?)

Dominick: 01 (London)

 

[Dominick: not his real name]

One of the evening programme students was a retired Maths teacher. 

He cycled in to class.  (This is noteworthy because most, if not all, Chinese retirees would not do it on account of the exertion.)

He carried a vanity case — pale blue if I remember correctly.  This, in itself, was an eyebrow raiser, but then, during the break, he’d open it and take out his sandwiches!  

Quite a character.

(London, 1987?88?)

Dominick: 02 (London)

[Dominick: not his real name]

Dominick was on the part-time degree course.  

The polytechnic (upgraded to university status in 1992) would run a week-long intensive-revision course for them just before the exams.  

The timetable included language revision (listening, speaking, translation) and talks on topics related to the culture, such as Confucianism or TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine).  For the talks, the students would (i) listen and make notes; (ii) then break up into small groups for Q&A and discussion, for extra listening and speaking.  

I happened to be the teacher for Dominick’s Q&A and discussion group that year.  Whenever he made a mistake in his Chinese, I’d correct him.  He said, “Stop interrupting me!  You wait until I’ve finished saying what I have to say, then you correct me.”  Fair enough, as his flow of thought was being disrupted — but then, when I tried to go over the list afterwards, he denied everything, “No, I didn’t say that.”

(London, 1987?88?)

Dominick: 03 (London)

[Dominick: not his real name]

It was my idea to have a two-teacher system for each grade, so that the students could have exposure to more than one accent, one style of teaching, etc.  

The teacher co-teaching Dominick’s class was a fresh arrival from Taiwan, who told me about this episode with Dominick.

In his typical cantankerous style, Dominick kept interrupting the teaching, asking questions about this, that and everything else.  

The teacher from Taiwan, a soft-spoken gentle bookish soul, said, “He wound me up so much that I just flipped.  My English wasn’t very good at the time, so I don’t know where I found so much, and the appropriate level of, English to tell him off.  I said to him, ‘You’re on a Chinese course, so you have to observe all the cultural behaviour rules that come with learning the language.  This means respecting the teacher and not interrupting the teaching, as it’s very disruptive.’  

He was dumbfounded by this tirade, delivered in fluent English, and was on his best behaviour from then on, even the subsequent weeks, not just for the rest of the lesson.”

(London, 1987?88?)

The new trousers (London)

A lady who had been an associate professor in Taiwan married a Shanghai-native academic from Hong Kong teaching over here, and became a lecturer herself at the same institution.  

She told me this story one day over a cup of tea.

Her husband, being a bloke [sorry, generalisation!] and a bookish man, was not very good at looking after himself, so she had to do almost everything, down to buying his clothes and shoes for him.  

(Another generalisation:  it is almost standard cultural practice for a Chinese woman to know how to run a household.  The old Chinese terms for referring to one’s own spouse are 外子 wàizǐ / “outside person” and 内子 nèizǐ / “inside person”, which give a good indication of the clear delineation of their roles.)

One summer, she went back to Taiwan to spend time with her ageing parents.  Returned to London to find that her husband had bought a new pair of trousers.  She was suitably impressed, “Oh, he’s learned how to do such things for himself!”

She later discovered that what had happened was: he was trying to iron a pair of trousers but managed to burn them, so had to go and get a replacement pair.  (Maybe it was the only decent pair he had, or he didn’t want his wife to notice that pair missing.)

(London, 1997?)

Banana skin: 01 (London)

I was transferred in my last three years at the university to the full-time degree programme.  This means teaching not mature students but school leavers.  I say this because being 18-year-olds fresh from A-levels / high school, their life experience is different from that of the mature students on the evening programme, and therefore their sense of humour too.

During a break in one of the classes one day, a student was eating a banana.  I said to her, “Can I have the skin when you’re done?”  She asked, “Why would you want the skin?”  I said, “The university pays me too little.”  Stunned silence from the whole class.

(London, 2008)

Justin (London)

On Registration evening, I saw that a new student was called Justin Smith.  I took him to one side, and asked him, “What are your parents’ names?”  He was taken aback, “What?  I have to give my parents’ names as well just to register on a language course?!”

Back in 1976, a Schlumberger engineer John Smith and his Irish wife Mary arrived in Taipei for his stint on our [Conoco’s] offshore rig.  She was eight months pregnant, and they’d flown in on the last possible day for her to fly.  The following evening, she went into labour, so they said they’d name the boy Justin Taipei Smith.  Hence my asking this young man, who looked about the right age, for his parents’ names.  Given that they’d been in Taipei and he was born there, it wouldn’t be surprising that he might be wanting to learn Chinese.  No, not them, but how amazing it’d have been to be meeting them again in this way.

(London, 1995)

Instant word play (London)

One of the pieces I’d set for Listening Comprehension for the Tuesday group features a Brit called Thomas who is a new colleague at the bank of the speaker (/storyteller).

The Chinese rendition of Thomas is 湯姆/汤姆 Tāngmǔ, which is supposed to be purely phonetic, as it’s a Western name, therefore whichever characters that happen to fit the sounds in the original. 

(The Chinese wicked sense of humour, however, means that, wherever possible from the range of homophones available, those characters will often be chosen for the meanings behind them to reflect their opinion of the target — either to have a laugh at them, or, worse, to show contempt.  More in another blog.)

I often say outrageous things to attract the students’ attention (and laughter), which will therefore act as a mnemonic as well, so I give them the literal breakdown of 湯姆/汤姆 Tāngmǔ: “soup nanny”.  Thereafter, whenever we dipped into the next paragraph, he’d get referred to as Soup Nanny.

At one point of the story, Thomas and French wife are invited to a reception held by the bank, to welcome them.  The Chinese colleagues try to teach the couple how to use chopsticks, with the wife quickly succeeding, but Thomas still unable to grasp [ha! pun!] the technique after a long while.  

Singaporean Amy Lim in the class piped up:  “He won’t need to learn how to use chopsticks, since he is a Soup Nanny!”

These students are really catching on...

(London, 2023)