Posts by Sam Duncan

This intricate composite character is a combination of 日日有财 (rìrìyǒucái), and means "see riches every day".

It's made up of two 日 (rì – day) on top, 有 (yǒu – have) in the middle, and 财 (cái – wealth) on the right, with the 月 component of 有 forming the 目 component of the traditional version of 见 (jiàn – see), 見. Cleverly, if you double up that 見 it reads 日日有财见 (rìrìyǒucáijiàn).

What's more, if you ignore the 见 radical of 财, it becomes 才 (cái – ability), making the meaning closer to 日日有才见 (rìrìyǒucáijiàn) "learn something new every day". Whichever way, we wish it for Anthilll readers in 2014!

I haven’t posted any chengyu [idioms] for a while. Here’s one which I’ve heard a couple of times in reference to myself: 乐不思蜀 (lèbùsīshǔ). It’s used to describe someone who is having so much fun abroad that they forget about their country and family back home. Could be especially relevant to expats staying in China over Christmas.

Shu (蜀) refers to Shu Han (蜀汉), one of the Three Kingdoms (220–280 AD). When Shu was defeated by Wei, the last emperor Liu Shan (刘禅), also known as A Dou (阿斗 – a word that has come to mean a weak and incompetent person) lived comfortably ever after in the Wei capital, where he claimed not to miss his old kingdom at all. And so the idiom was born. Almost two thousand years later, people are still saying it.

The Chinese expression for “strike while the iron is hot” is more or less exactly the same: 趁热打铁 (chènrèdǎtiě).

There has been heavy snow in Harbin lately, and apparently people were taking advantage of the situation to charge drivers whose cars had become stranded on icy roads 30-50 yuan to help push them out of trouble. This behaviour was described as 趁雪打劫 (chènxuědǎjié), replacing 热 (hot) with 雪 (snow) and 打铁 (strike iron with 打劫 (rob/plunder/loot). The result could be translated as “Steal while the snow falls.”

In English, a typical age guessing exchange might go something like this:

A: Guess how old I am

B: 30?

A: Older

B: 35?

In Chinese, it's the opposite:

Talking garbage – by Sam Duncan

Yesterday I was walking home when the old lady who collects garbage in my apartment complex in Daqing spotted me from afar – she has eerily good eyesight – and yelled something at me. Usually she calls out one of two things: “Have you finished work?” or “Do you understand me?” But this time she said something different. I thought maybe she was talking about a butterfly. As I got closer she repeated herself, and I thought she was asking me something about my father. One of her favourite topics of interrogation was my family and why I don’t live with them.