Category: Chinese Corner

Undead with Chinese Characteristics

Are you still looking for a Halloween costume? It’s not too late! Just grab your bathrobe and your mandarin’s cap and you’ll be a jiāngshī – a Chinese zombie, that is.

Jiāngshī aren’t quite the same as the brain-eating undead of the West. In Mandarin, jiāngshī literally means “stiff corpse,” in reference to rigor mortis. They are reanimated corpses, either ancient and undecomposed or freshly undead, but with Chinese characteristics. For one, they wear the outfits of Qing dynasty officials: robes and domed hats. If they catch up with you, they suck out your life energy, your qì, instead of your brains. Their limbs are stiff, so they move by ...hopping. George Romero wasn’t consulted on this point.

The link between physical gesture and language – by Eveline Chao

Once, some Chinese guy lounging on a freight trike asked me if I was a hooker.

He whispered the question as I walked past in a Beijing alley. It was the middle of the day, and I was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers – not the most standard gear for advertising sex work.  

When I recounted the incident to friends later (secretly trying to feel out whether I had missed some sort of memo about gray New Balance sneakers becoming the internationally recognized symbol for a woman of the night), one offered an interesting theory. “You know,” he said, “I can usually tell Chinese-Americans from Chinese on the street. Something about the way they walk and carry themselves. Maybe he picked up that there was something ‘off’ about you, but misread what it was.”

How not to be tone deaf when speaking Mandarin – by Liz Carter

Many people are intimidated by the prospect of learning Chinese because it is a tonal language – the same syllable, pronounced differently, can mean a number of totally different things. Tackling Chinese may seem impossible, especially for the less than musically inclined, if perfect pitch is presumed to be a prerequisite.

However, tones are more of a speed bump than a brick wall. And the trouble with tones can best be tackled by breaking it down into three issues: whether it is feasible to learn tones; whether it is important; and how it can be done.

When Vulgar Meets Sublime in Mandarin – by Liz Carter

There is a special genre of Mandarin verse near and dear to my heart. I call it “admonishment poetry.” Like English poetry of the same kind, it appears most often as a rhyming couplet with a simple meter, not too long and not too complicated. The use of poetic devices drives home messages that others feel worthy of the reader’s attention - all variations of “don’t be an asshole.”

Bathroom poetry is one variety of admonishment poetry, and seems to be universal. The most commonly known bathroom poem in the English language is a four-line verse, made up of two rhyming couplets:

The first of our weekly language column, ‘Chinese Corner’ – by Liz Carter

Most of us are acquainted with Mandarin, and by that I mean the predominant form of Chinese. We often use the labels “Chinese” and “Mandarin” interchangeably, but in fact there are at least seven major varieties of Chinese, depending on whom you ask. For now, let’s start with Mandarin, what you would learn in school.

There are a lot of reasons to learn Mandarin: it’s beautiful, useful in all sorts of business endeavors, and would enable you to communicate with an additional billion people on this planet. The main problem most people have with Mandarin isn’t deciding whether or not they’d like to study it: it’s deciding where to start.