Posts by Sam Duncan

 

偷吃还不知道怎么擦嘴" (tōuchī hái bùzhīdào zěnme cāzuǐ). This expression means you steal food (偷吃 tōuchī) but don’t know how to wipe your mouth clean afterwards (擦嘴 cāzuǐ), and is used to disparage someone sneaky enough to do the wrong thing but not smart enough not to get caught.

For example, I heard it used in response to a joke that's going around on the Chinese Internet about the MH370 missing flight. In the joke, someone asks help for a friend who went to visit his girlfriend, but told his wife he was going on a business trip to Malaysia, returning on MH370. Since the disappearance of the flight, the friend has been hiding out in a hotel and doesn’t know what to do, does anyone have any ideas?"

 

I’m back from a trip to Japan, where it was interesting to see the different uses of Chinese hanzi as Japanese kanji, the same characters with similar meanings but different pronunciation. This sign, for example, says parking prohibited (驻车禁止 zhùchējìnzhǐ) and is understandable if you read Chinese, even though in China they usually use a different character for park, 停 (tíng) rather than 驻 (駐 zhù), and you wouldn't be able to read it aloud.

Sitting on a bus in Wenzhou last month, I saw a noodle restaurant with a creative sign. The character for noodles, 面 (miàn), was written to make it look like a bowl of noodles with chopsticks. I might have been fooled into thinking 面 was a pictograph, if the traditional character wasn't 麵, with 麦 (mài, wheat) on the left for meaning and 面 on the right for pronunciation.

 

Even after living in China and Korea for more than eight years, being bombarded with ads for skin whitening creams, seeing people wear arm sleeves and carry sun umbrellas, and hearing them constantly compare skin colour, I’m still surprised at just how important women consider pale skin in terms of beauty. There's even a Chinese saying, 一白遮百丑 (yībáizhēbǎichǒu) – “white skin covers up a hundred flaws”.

The good, the bad, and the ugly – by Sam Duncan

 

The taxi system in Daqing, a city in China’s far northeast famous for its oil fields nearby, is an interesting beast. Drivers are in theory required to use their meters and not allowed to share rides, but in reality most fares are negotiated, whether the flag falls or not, and drivers will always want to pick up extra passengers along the way. It’s pretty fair, though. If you know the usual fare to your destination you can usually save a couple of kuai; if the driver picks someone else up you can use this to renegotiate the fare; and if you get in a taxi which already has passengers in it you know you can ask for a lower fare than usual.