chinese tuesdays

I found this gem of a poster stuck on the back wall of the grimy kitchen in my new apartment in Daqing, Heilongjiang. It's titled 20个不能混吃的食物 (bùnénghùnchīdeshíwù) or "20 Food Combinations to Avoid", and seems to be the paper from a now-closed Harbin restaurant food tray. My favourites are number 5: rabbit meat + celery = lose your hair (兔肉 tùròu＋芹菜 qíncài＝脱发 tuōfà); number 10: crab + persimmon = diarrhoea (蟹 xiè＋柿子 shìzi＝腹泻 fùxiè); and number 16: tofu + honey = deafness (豆腐 dòufu＋蜂蜜 fēngmì＝耳聋 ěrlóng).

虎毒不食子 (hǔdúbùshízǐ) – As vicious as a tiger is, it doesn’t eat its own cubs. This is used to talk about parents who harm their own children. It suggests that those who do are worse than beasts, always a big smackdown in Chinese.

兔子不吃窝边草 (tùzibùchīwōbiāncǎo) – A rabbit doesn’t eat the grass close to its burrow. Don’t make trouble close to home. That means being good to your neighbours, but it can also be used about dating classmates or colleagues.

After looking up macaque and finding out that it's a kind of monkey, I had a good chuckle to myself over the Chinese calling kiwifruit macaque peach, 猕猴桃 (mí hóu táo). What a silly name, I thought – maybe they look like the back of a monkey’s head? The Baidu Baike page on macaque peaches says they are so named because macaques consider the fruit one of their favourite forest delicacies. It even has some peeling methods, with helpful pictures.

Editor's note: Chinese Tuesdays, our weekly feature in collaboration with Sam Duncan's blog, is now opening up to submissions from anyone with a language titbit to share, though Sam will still be writing most of them. Here's one from me.

I came across 夜梦鬼交 (yè mèng guǐ jiāo) via pg-robban on this Reddit thread, who seems to have found it accidentally by searching for "dreaming" in the Pleco dictionary app. It translates as "dreaming of intercourse with ghosts". Naturally, that piqued by curiosity ...

Eating dinner last night, someone pointed to a dish containing snow peas and said, “You know how in China we call them Holland beans? [荷兰豆 hélándòu] In Holland they call them Chinese beans!” I expressed my opinion that this was unlikely to be true, but promised to ask a Dutch friend of mine.

He got back to me quickly and said that in a way it is true, because while technically snow peas are called something else, certain species of green beans are indeed called Chinese beans in Dutch. I wonder how that happened.