Chinese sayings: 18 (不怒自威)

 

不怒自威

bù nù zì wēi 

“not angry naturally awesome/threatening”

I have unfortunately been blessed with a demeanour that looks angry even when I’m enjoying myself.  So many times I’d been at the computer screen, having a good time all focused on the task in hand, and someone would ask me what I was so angry about.  A lot of Chinese seem to have this body language, too, actually, so maybe it’s a cultural thing.  (However, an ex-student Patsy, who’s English, told me she’d often get told, “Don’t worry, it might never happen,” when she was sitting happily somewhere daydreaming away.)

    This misunderstood body language has had its dramatic effects in the classroom and the exam room.  

    Students will change what they’ve offered in translation purely on the basis of my asking “Why?”, instantly thinking I’ve asked because their version is wrong.  It’s the what-I-call “shake the tree” device in my teaching style, i.e., if they can justify why they’d parsed the sentence a certain way (interpreting a word as a verb rather than as a noun, e.g.), then they can be sure they’d got it right, rather than arriving by hit or miss.  If their tree is weak to start with (they’re just guessing wildly, pinning the tail on the donkey, rather than analysing the sentence based on actually knowing how the Chinese language works), it’d keel over at the slightest shaking.  They need to shake their own tree in real life, as I won’t be there to tell them if they’d been right or wrong.  

    Admittedly, it could be the way I ask “Why?” (too challenging a tone of voice), but one particular oral exam episode showed that I don’t even need to open my mouth.

    It was a final year oral exam, therefore two examiners present.  The other examiner was a colleague from Taiwan, who has smiling eyes even without moving her lips or feeling happy.

    The candidate on the day was presenting his arguments on some given topic (environmental pollution or human rights violation, which are common final year themes).  My colleague and I, seated opposite him, were making notes as we listened to him.  At one point, I looked up at random from my note-taking, not for any particular reason, and my eyes met the candidate’s.  He immediately stopped in mid-flow, and looked very nervously at me.  

    Exam over, I asked him why he’d done it.  He said the look on my face made him think he’d made a mistake (wrong grammar, or wrong usage of language / expression).  I said, “But I didn’t even open my mouth!  And I wasn’t thinking that at the time!  You weren’t saying anything wrong at that point.”  不怒自威 indeed.

    After that, I would remember to keep my eyes down all the time and not make eye contact, or prime myself to smile before I raised my head.

(London, 2000s)