Pronounced: guāzǐ liǎn
Means: Melon-seed Face. One of the ideal Chinese face shapes.
Albert at Laowai Chinese introduces two ideal and two undesirable Chinese face shapes: The Four Faces of Chinese People (women, really)
Pronounced: lín fēng zi
Means: “Linsanity”
Turns out they play with Jeremy Lin’s name in Chinese, too! Here are the Top 5 Jeremy Lin Puns in China and Taiwan.
Pronounced: Dǎng / Guó
Literally: Party (Communist Party) / State; Nation
Also means: Examples of generic surnames assigned to orphans in China that were recently outlawed in order to help protect orphans from discrimination later in life. See:
- Authorities to ban names that identify orphans (China Daily)
- Chinese orphans to no longer receive generic names (Global Post)
- China to ban names that signal ‘orphan’ status (MSNBC)
Pronounced: guó bǎo
Literally: National Security/National Treasure
Means: The two terms are homophones, and “national treasure” often means “panda”. A writer at Seeing Red in China explains the rest: “how panda becomes the symbol for Chinese security thugs: Chinese national security (more like secret police) is called 国保 (guó bǎo) for short, and it’s pronounced exactly the same as 国宝, national treasure. Netizens sometimes refer 国保 as 国宝, jokingly, hence Panda, China’s national treasure. Kungfu Panda movies provided the basis for Panda to be a martial character.”
With the recent confrontation between Batman actor Christian Bale and some infamous Chinese security thugs, online Chinese are been passing around “Pandaman vs. Batman” jokes, and photoshopping “Pandaman” into all kinds of scenarios, including movie posters and images from other security embarrassments and scandals. See here, here and here for more.
Pronounced: hēi gǎi kǔ jiào
Literally: dark reform bitter education
Means: “The labour camp is dark and reeducation through labour is bitter.”
Related phrases include:
- 劳动改造
láodòng gǎizào
(Reform through labour) - 劳改
láogǎi
(1. shorthand for 劳动改造; 2. a prison camp) - 劳动教养
láodòng jiàoyǎng
(Reeducation through labour) - 劳教
láojiào
(shorthand for 劳动教养)
You can see/hear some of these terms, with English subtitles, between 7:10 and 8:47 of this Al-Jazeera investigative report.
The sign says:
Who are you
What is this place
Why have you come here
You can find the answers to those questions in the video linked above.
Pronounced: xīn yǎn
Literally: heart/mind eye; eyes of the mind
Means: calculating, wily
The post “Dumb Americans”and one of its comments explain it this way:
“To many Chinese, Americans don’t have xin-yan (心眼, meaning, literally, eyes of the mind; or figuratively, calculating, wily), they trust what you say, and they believe you are doing what you say you are doing. For that, they are dumb. …to speak your mind straightforwardly, to defend your position forcefully, and to uphold what you believe without compromise, are all signs of childishness. A lot of Americans, alas, fill that bill.” [Link 1]
“There is another xinyan word/phrase: 实心眼。 It means solid, blocked 心眼 (note that 眼 also means “hole”), and, figuratively, honest, lack of wily flexibility. It is sort of like 没心眼，the difference being, 没心眼 means no 心眼 at all while 实心眼 means not necessarily the absence of of 心眼，but the insistence on doing things in a more principled way. It is generally recognized that, in China, 实心眼吃亏 — if you are too principled, you stand to lose, you suffer, and you are dumb.
“I read somewhere that the Eskimos have a lot of words for snow; and heck, we Chinese have tons of words for 心眼!” [Link 2]
Pronounced: shā jī gĕi hóu kàn
Literally: kill a chicken, show the monkeys (also 杀鸡儆猴)
Means: punish or make an example of someone as a warning to others.
Pronounced: gǒu xiě
Literally: dog blood
Means: cheesy, cliché, melodramatic, contrived. As in, “This Korean soap opera is too dog blood!” 我看的韩国剧太狗血了！ Wǒ kànde hánguó jù tài gǒu xiě le!
I’ve wondered how to express “cheesy” in Chinese for a long time. The World of Chinese gives an interesting explanation of where this gory term came from and how it evolved into the meaning it has today.
Pronounced: Hàn jiān
Means:
traitor of the Han (race);
traitor of the Chinese people;
sometimes translated “race-traitor”.
What you get called if you dare slander Chairman Mao (and thereby aid Western civilization in its quest to overthrow the Chinese civilization), like this guy.
For more on the psychological connection between the Chinese race, Chinese nationalism, the Chinese Communist Party, and China’s history with the West, see: Why Mainlanders are taking it personally, racially, and facially – the short answer
Pronounced: máomao chóng
Literally: hair-hair worm
Means: caterpillar
And here’s a Chinese translation with English and pinyin mouseover pop-up of the classic children’s book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar“.
