Today we had swearing, drugs, people that can’t keep their pants zipped, a monk driving a Lexus, and a cat who… ‘went swimming.’
Disclaimer: the Chinese grammar in this post is atrocious, and at this point there’s nothing we can do about.
Nose sh*t & the hazards of language learning
After spending the morning passing out ads for PEI, during which a dog ran up and pee’d on my bag of fliers, we hung out with the college-age group all afternoon. At one point we were talking about names for pets, and one of our good friends (whom we’re not naming) mentioned that in college her friend’s dog was named “Booger” in Chinese. Jessica asked how to say it, of course (can’t pass up a learning opportunity like that!), and our friend answered, “鼻屎.” She knew that we knew 鼻 (nose), so in a very matter-of-fact kind of way, she added, “屎 means sh*t.” Jessica, caught slightly off guard, gave a quizzical look.
Our friend repeated with extra clarity: “Sh*t.”
“So it means, ‘Nose sh*t’?” Jessica was beginning to laugh.
“Yes. Nose sh*t.”
Jessica started laughing so hard she almost knocked an old lady off the sidewalk who happened to be passing by.
Now, you have to understand, this particular friend is a leader in the young people’s group, a choir member, a prayer warrior, enthusiastic core member of the congregation… the kind of girl who ditched her boyfriend of 5 years when it became obvious that he was not interested in considering her beliefs. She knew what the word meant, but had no idea what she was saying. She felt a little embarrassed when we explained the various English terms for poop and their shades of meaning, so we haven’t named her here. But next time we’ll talk about meaning and context and everyone will have a good laugh.
It’s a great example of how you can “know” the meaning of a word, but not really understand it. Until you feel it like the natives feel it, you don’t really understand it. Roll that into your exegesis papers and smoke it!
Imported drugs, and more hazards of language learning
And speaking of smoking, we also learned another fine “Why tones are important” lesson at dinner tonight. We ate at a Malaysian food place, and the word used for that particular style of food was dà mǎ. So after the meal, I wanted to say, “Dà mǎ food is very good!” (“大馬吃是很好”.) What I actually said was, “大麻吃是很好” – the 2nd character is different, but I was unaware. The guy I was saying this to, whom we had just met this evening, looked at me blankly while our other friend across the table started laughing.
They explained that “Dà mǎ” (ma with 3rd tone) is the name for the food, and “Dà má” (ma with 2nd tone) means marijuana. I had said, “Marijuana eat is very good!”
“So then,” I asked, “jǐng chá lái shuō nǐ yǒu dà má mā? hé wǒ shuō dà má chī shì hěn hǎo!” [Police come say, you have marijuana? And I say, marijuana eat is very good!]
We all laughed pretty hard. (See that kids? You don’t need to actually take the drugs to have a good time.)
What to do when someone is standing in front of a group speaking, and their fly is wide open.
We went along with about 11 others from the young people’s group to visit an elderly couple in a nursing home this afternoon. We were seated in the lounge waiting for the couple to arrive when a girl in her late 20′s stood up in front of all of us to talk about what we’d do with the couple (sing and stuff). Her fly was 100% unzipped and it was impossible to not notice. She was the only one who didn’t know.
These are situations to which we pay exceptional amounts of attention. What will people do? How and who will react? How will the problem be neutralized? We’ve heard so much about “high-context culture” and “saving face” that we expect different rules to apply in situations like the one this afternoon.
One of the guys in the group stood up and walked to Zhi-ling who was sitting closest to the speaker and whispered to her. Then Zhi-ling whispered to the speaker, who laughed sheepishly, turned around, and promptly… neutralized the problem. Everyone had a quick chuckle of acknowledgment and then we went on. We’ve got plenty of questions about it for Zhi-ling that we’ll ask later. But just in case you wondering, that’s how a group of 20-somethings handled a friend’s public embarrassment in Taiwan.
And, we saw a female Buddhist monk get into a shiny new Lexus and drive off. I’m not sure what to make of that, but something’s going on.
ps – as as I’m typing this, the cat just fell in the toilet. I’m not sure what to make of that either. And this morning she actually flushed it all on her own. What a day!…
Two of our student’s parents run a video production company, and they offered for us to do the narrating for a video. I was the man voices; Jessica had the narration and the girl voices. It was fun, and Jessica is like a pro – her parts sound like a real actual voice talent person and she didn’t even blink reading the Chinese names. Mine sound like the people talking are sleepy. We got the script last night but we didn’t know what the video was about. And then, in the first paragraph, we read,
It ended up being about some kind of design school exhibition where they make everything out of foam. I talked about special foam hangers and design theory. Jessica did the intro and outro and talked about the school and the designers, and foam Christmas trees. 
