Tag: Chinese Tutor

Between Laughter and Tears

Published on by Zhi-Juan Guo

At times, it’s no use to tell them to do this or to do that: they would just insist on imitating what you are doing. As I looked at the little girl on the screen and sent her a “clapping hands” for her effort, her eyes lit up and she at once asked me in an eager tone “how do you do that?”

She then said to me what I just said to her “我给你 Wǒ gěi nǐ….”(I give you……) and sent over what she chose to click.

“他在哭还是在笑? Tā zài kū háishì zài xiào?” (Is he crying or laughing?) I looked at it and asked her.

“Well, those are happy tears, he is laughing.” The little girl informed her slow-witted elder.

A piece of news I read later told me that this now re-popularized emoji was actually chosen by Oxford Dictionary in 2015 as the word of the year. “For the first time ever, Oxford Dictionary has chosen a ‘pictograph’ as its word of the year. They say the ‘face with tears of joy emoji’ best represents ‘the ethos, mood and preoccupation of the year’.

It’s said this emoji has been extremely popular in China. And unsurprisingly, there is actually a Chinese idiom to echo this ‘pictograph’: 哭笑不得 kūxiàobùdé literally ‘cry laugh not get’: not to know whether to cry or laugh, both funny and extremely embarrassing, between laughter and tears.

哭kū, to cry, at first sight it’s easy to mistake those two squares on the top for eyes and the dot below for the tear. Though the origin of this word comes not from the image of tears but from the sound of howling, the squares are not eyes but a wailing mouth:

The upper part actually is 口 kǒu, the bawling mouth, and the lower part is the image of a grief-stricken person who screams out his sorrow, he beats his chest, he stomps his feet.

The explanation of this character might, perhaps, remind you of a howling child you would occasionally see: they do bawl out in so loud and bitter a tone, waving their hands and stomping their feet in front of an–sometimes embarrassed, sometimes nonchalant–adult. And I often cannot help but look up amazed: what bitterness must inspire that hearty wailing? (Often, no doubt, it is small things like: he needs to go home to take his nap……)

At creating this character, the Chinese might have looked at the howling child, or he might have looked at an adult who is crying out his real woes:

The evolution of this character. The first one, you could see that the sad person opens his mouth big to cry, in the second one the mouths now are on the top and the person now has tears and grief-shaken legs, in the third one the person seems to be floored by the unbearable sorrow, and the fourth one is the one now we use today.

For the little girl–children, if you allowed them, have amazing ability to make up stories–it is happy tears, and who is to say it is not? And may we all in our long lives have more tears like those.

But what about yourself? What is a 哭笑不得 situation for you?

Sports and Enthusiasm

Published on by Zhi-Juan Guo

You cannot sham an emotion in that situation, and we like it because we know the joys and tears are all true. It would be impossible to feign the passion or pain that overwhelms you when you win or lose a gold medal. True emotions move and are contagious too. I found myself laughing as the gold medalist jumps in triumph, and eyes wet when they–and you could tell from their tears the effort and the trails they must have gone through to finally stand on that podium–cry.

Also, it does you good to witness someone does a thing so well. It’s a moment to be proud of being a human, and you marvel at, once and again, the capacity of the human body. They do, literally, swim like a fish, run like a lion, or a leopard, or any other animals that could run so fast…… Admiration rises in your heart as you watch the perfection of their skill, the grace of their movement.

Homer himself when narrating Odysseus’s long journey home, takes a break and sets up a scene of sports competition. And as far as thousands of years back, we see, as we watch today from a screen, the same sights: there is bad luck, bike crushed, boat overturned, ankle twisted……there is much talent in youth (初生牛犊不怕虎chūshēng niúdú bùpà hǔ, literally, new-born calves fear not the tigers), smooth-faced teenagers are winning gold after gold with seeming ease and enviable confidence……there is pride, the raising of a proud fist, the up-pointing of index fingers(I am Number One!)……there is arrogance, the strutting around in the stadium……there is grace and friendship, the taking of a humble bow, the gesture of embracing your rival after winning the gold……

The English word “compete” is from Latin competere, in its late sense ‘strive or contend for (something)’, from com-‘together’+petere ‘aim at, seek’. And its noun “competition” is from late Latin competitio(n-)’rivalry’.

And the Chinese word for compete or competition “比赛 bǐsàiis” formed by two characters “比” and “赛”.

比 bǐ now mainly means “to compare”, interestingly, in the beginning it only refers to two very close people standing side by side, and it indicates, of course, “closeness”.

Indeed, these two people are side by side next to each other: bending and bowing, maybe, to a coming guest.

And one version of it is to put two very big people together:

These are two big people with very long legs. The athletes, indeed, judging by the merit of their talents, become big, great people in our eyes.

Perhaps it’s human nature, when you put two people, or two things next to each other, you cannot help but to compare them, hence the modern sense of “compare and compete” derives from this same character that means “closeness” is not at all surprising.

赛 sài , when I look at this character in the dictionary, finding out its original meaning, I feel that as different as we, humans, all are, from different backgrounds and of different races, there must be continuous echos since the beginning of time from all different cultures. Here this echo I heard is the ancient Chinese shouted out to the ancient Greece: 赛, its original meaning is “give offering of thanks to gods”. Homer too, throughout his epic narration, also at the closing up of his scene of sports competition, never once omits offering sacrifices to gods.

This is one of the traditional versions of the character, while the upper part tells the pronunciation, the lower part tells the meaning: the gift, the sacrifice, money or gold or something valuable.

The modern version of the lower part of this character 贝bèi are now both a character by itself and a radical that related to money or gold or the valuables. And it all comes from the image of a seashell: for at one time in history, the Chinese apparently used one sort of seashells as currency.

Do they look like seashells to you?

So the athletes compete 比赛 and get their seashells, I mean gold if they win.

And competition must lie in the heart of human nature: the little girl looks back at me, gives me a challenging look and says: 我们比赛，看谁跑得快(Wǒmen bǐsài, kàn shéi pǎo dé kuài)! And off she runs, racing away!