China Hope Live » Teaching English

Don’t eat that! You’ll get ‘wind’ in your ’stomach’!

Joel — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:19:35 +0000

So I’ve just got off work and I’m about to leave the building for the ten minute walk to the subway. One of my upper level English students sees that I’m planning to eat a pear on the way and she’s immediately concerned.

“You’re going to eat that outside?”

“Of course!”

“But it’s cold and windy! You can’t eat that outside!”

“Why not?” I know exactly what’s coming.

“You’ll get wind in your stomach!” The other students voice their agreement.

I know what she’s talking about because I’ve heard this before. Fear of getting cold “wind” in your “stomach” is considered at least as reasonable as covering your mouth when you cough to avoid spreading germs. But this time, instead of having the same old predictable conversation about how foreigners don’t know anything about getting “wind” in their “stomachs” or our “fire” going up and down, I decide to have fun with it.

“It’s no problem. Foreigners can’t get wind in their stomachs. Only Chinese people can get that disease. Getting wind in your stomach is a special disease only for Chinese people.”

She doesn’t believe me, and gives me an annoyed look to boot, like she’s not sure if I’m making fun of her/China/Chinese medicine or not. And I’m not, mostly; I’m just curious to see what will happen if I appeal to inherent biological differences between foreigners and Chinese (something that’s not uncommon for Chinese people to do in other situations) instead of chalking it up to cultural differences that affect how our respective societies understand health.

When Tianjiners wear face masks (口罩) in public it’s not because of air pollution or swine flu. These are cloth face masks, not medical face masks, and people wear them because it’s cold outside and they don’t want to get “wind” in their “stomachs” (受风 — to receive/suffer wind). I put quotes around those words because in Chinese medical theory they both carry important nuances and added dimensions that don’t correspond exactly with what we normally mean when when we say wind and stomach. (I borrowed this image from a Chinese website. It’s supposedly from Tianjin.)

For more about Chinese medicine:

When it comes to Chinglish, fair is fair

Joel — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:38:21 +0000

One of my friends in particular loves to practice his Chinglish on me. I in turn refuse to reply in English, opting instead to inflict him with my own Chinglish. For example, he just sent me this text:

Great! man I will going to the shan xi road on this Sunday. I’ll waiting for you at entrance. Time is 10:20am. Don’t be late,man! By the way! Don’t forget one thing. I needs give your lilian add hers cloths. Winter already was coming! I’m a superman. I can’t feel cold. Haha! How interesting! I said. All right then! Good night! Man Wish your baby has a sweet dream! See you soon!

I have no doubt that my Chinese sounds like this ~~sometimes~~ often. It always helps to keep a little perspective!

(P.S. – Friends don’t let friends use Grand Theft Auto to study English.)

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Today’s commute by the numbers

Joel — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:47:43 +0000

What a half-hour’s bike ride during Friday morning rush hour can get you in Tianjin:

People who stared at me: 4
People who took no notice of me: hundreds
Red lights: 8/11 (meaning I had to stop for 3)
Buses I wanted to curse at: all of them, but 4 especially noxious ones in particular
Groups of migrant construction workers protesting their late wages: 1
Cars on fire: 1
Buildings I should be able to see but can’t because of the air pollution: dozens? scores? hundreds?
Years shaved off my life due to the air pollution: incalculable

Five days a week I bike half an hour one way to work; so 13.2 kilometers total there and back according to google maps. The numbers above are only for the morning commute to work. There really was a car on fire this morning.

What’s in a (Chinglish) name? I’ll tell you…

Joel — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:30:27 +0000

I like that Chinese people sometimes choose unusual English names or transliterate their names into English (when they can), not because we get to laugh at the occasionally odd results (though that is fun), but because a good Chinglish name often contains some self-expression while still being workable in English (Apple, Moon, Star, Rainbow, etc.); in perhaps an indirect or vague sort of way it expresses part of them and the fact that they’re Chinese and Chinese people do names differently than we do. Why shouldn’t they carve out their own space in the English name landscape? Of course other names, while nice in Chinese, are simply no good in English (Drizzle, Ripple); they’re too strange or silly to actually function as truly usable English names. I’ll let you decide for yourselves which of my current students’ names below have real potential. They’re listed in the order they came to mind:

AK (yes, like the gun, she picked it on purpose because she likes guns.)
Falcon (formerly Eagle: he had an annoying coworker named after some other kind of bird in Chinese, Sparrow I think, so for his English name he chose a bird that eats his coworker’s kind of bird.)
Gaga
Florra (She wanted to be different, but a bunch of other Chinese women who also wanted to be different already had the idea of using the Spanish word for flower, so she added an r.)
Enya
Eack (was supposed to be “Ike”, but somehow he spelled it wrong).
Kobe
Bryant
Carter (we knew a “Spippen” in Taibei).
Ray (don’t know why she picked this).
Cherry
Candy
Duke
Evian
Edword (because he likes words).
Win (I forget why she said she picked this)
Queena
Long (going for “dragon” (龙)? I don’t know.)
Sharpay
Coco

(This is exactly why it took me several months before finally settling on a Chinese name.)

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A 16-year-old priviledged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history

Joel — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:52:32 +0000

“That is SOOO so so so FAKE!” exclaims my 16-year-old English student from Beijing this morning when I show her the iconic China photo on the front page of today’s Vancouver Sun. She isn’t angry but she’s keyed up, the strength of her feelings quickly exceeding that of her English vocabulary. After insisting that the man never actually got run over and that he voluntarily put himself in harms way, she changes targets, “…was one of the student leader, and she SOOO so so so SO SUCKS!” I know which particular student leader she’s referring to and I’ve heard this character assassination before. So apparently she’s heard something about the event. This is one of the ESL students to whom I gave some Google and YouTube homework about this particular event a month ago.

Before I showed her the paper, I asked her, “Did you know that today is special? The whole world is thinking about China. All the major newspapers have stories about China. Do you know why?” She didn’t. Her guess: swine flu.

Today’s Vancouver Sun, which I’d nabbed from the staff room before my morning one-on-one tutoring session, carried two decent articles and some photos to mark this historic day. I was curious about how much or how little my student knew about the event, plus I wanted her to see some decent representative examples of how Canadians think and write about China.

I didn’t argue or push it with her, as I didn’t think that’d be appropriate. I guessed correctly that she’d be interested in how China is portrayed in the local papers and was curious about her reaction. After a bit we discussed another unrelated story illustrating interesting aspects of Canadian society and before calling it a day.

(P.S. – Comments are closed on this one. This topic is still officially taboo in China and I’m not here to be political, so I’m not gonna risk getting blocked over it.

P.P.S. – If you’re concerned that I was being unethical with this student, please see this clarification of what actually happened.)

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Joel — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 01:11:13 +0000

A rather Vancouver moment.

Today we took one of my Chinese students, a teenager from Beijing, to the Crystal Mall in Vancouver, B.C. for lunch and shopping. On the way home we were listening to Vancouver’s mostly-Chinese radio station, 96.1 FM, when a little English lesson segment came on introducing “The jig is up!” to the Chinese population of Vancouver. We listened to see how they’d translate it (完蛋了！), but I couldn’t help laughing and shaking my head when they gave the unfortunately appropriate example sentence: “The police found marijuana in his car. The jig is up!” At least Vancouver’s Chinese immigrant population is learning locally relevant English…

My Chinese students say the Crystal Mall is the current big Chinese hang-out (Chinatown is apparently for the older generation of Hong Kongers). If you combined a Tianjin supermarket with a Tianjin vegetable market, cleaned it up, made it a little less crowded, mixed in some 繁体字, and improved everyone’s English, you’d have the Crystal Mall. You can use Chinese in all the stores and they’ll hardly bat an eye.

We all had fun (Sara’s first time on the Skytrain), and it was good Chinese speaking time for us. I think we’ll do this again.