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The sometimes-hilarious pitfalls of learning Chinese
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“XIAOJIE, qingwen...” is how I began every attempt at being polite when asking a woman for directions: where the bathroom is, what sort of food she was serving, and all other manner of inquiries. I noticed that they would give me a sort of look, something between surprise and dissatisfaction, before shrugging off whatever was bothering them and helping this naive laowai.
One day, I asked my tutor why I was getting such weird looks.
Before I could even get past my usual, polite, soft-spoken opener, my tutor both gasped and laughed, resulting in a hysterical coughing fit that finally culminated in her informing me that I had succeeded in calling every Chinese woman I’d ever met a prostitute.
This is only one of several examples of well-intentioned missteps that have occurred since I first arrived in the Middle Kingdom. Whether it’s in Shanghai, Qingdao, or Beijing, your humble servant has been able to guarantee the observation of at least one of these offenses during his stay there.
One of my personal favorites is when a classmate was ordering food for the first time in a small, Sichuan-style restaurant just across the street from the International Students’ dormitory at Qingdao University.
He looked over the menu with feigned comfort before realizing that he couldn’t read anything on it, so instead he called over the waitress and asked as calmly as he could, “Fuwuyuan, qingwen, ni de doufu (tofu) hao chi ma?” She stared blankly back at him while the rest of us erupted into laughter. When inquiring about a restaurant’s tofu dishes, you’re supposed to ask about their jiachangdoufu. Simply asking a lady if her doufu is hao chi is slang for asking if her lady bits are tasty. It also didn’t help our friend’s pride that we’d just learned this in class before lunch.
But it’s not only men who are victims of these unintended indiscretions; women can just as easily slip into an inquiry about things just as tasteless — or tasteful, depending on your point of view.
A female friend of mine was staying with her Chinese host family, and had, oddly, two Chinese host brothers. All of us had been told to not use our host families’ homes as our own personal hotel, but to practice our Chinese with them and to try to be an active member of the family. So my friend began by talking to the brothers, who seemed several years apart. She asked the older one, “Ni de xiaodidi duo da?”
The brothers looked at her, looked at each other, and then laughed for several minutes before the parents mercifully explained to her that she had inquired about the size of the older brother’s penis. Didi means “little brother” in Chinese, but by adding a superfluous xiao before it, you get, well, something else entirely.
While these moments are embarrassing, they can also be constructive for us waiguoren. They are teachable moments (rest assured, my friend will never ask a waitress about her doufu again), and they also make great stories for dinner parties and for the Chinese people fortunate enough to be witnesses.
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