Frustrations

Ever had a frustrating dinner, at a restaurant with bad service, worse food, crying babies seemingly everywhere, and to top it all off you leave more hungry than you were to begin with?  Right, okay, everyone has.  This is not a sob story about a frustrating dinner.  It's about literally having frustrations for dinner:

Look again.  Just above the shadow in the picture.  This is the menu that was presented to me at a random Chinese restaurant I had dinner at the other night.  My Chinese is a little rusty - that's why I'm here, after all - particularly when it comes to foodstuffs, so I'm always grateful when a menu has English translations of the characters.  I suppose you could say I'm grateful for two reasons: either because it helps me pick what to order, rather than take a guess, OR, it provides with some blatant comic relief.  As it did here.  It baffles me that the same menu can correctly translate "mushrooms vegetables" and "spinach with garlic sauce" (using proper grammar there, even!) while also completely missing the mark with "Frustrations."  I should point out that I still don't know for sure what it should be.  My educated guess, from the characters, is some sort of pickled cabbage.  But I can't be sure, and I couldn't find it after a cursory dictionary search.

This is but the tip of the Chinglish iceberg.  For whatever reason, the Chinese seem incapable of accurately translating Mandarin into English.  I'm sure there is a reason for this, I just don't know what it is.  And I don't mean to sound insensitive at all - it's just the objective nature of the linguistic scene here.  It's hilarious.  And there is hilarious literature out there on it; books have been published with pages of pictures of funny warning signs throughout China.  One example of which I am particularly fond: there is a sign on the Great Wall that cautions against using cell phones while up on the Wall.  The story that I heard goes like this - several years ago, a woman was struck by lightening while up on the Wall, and happened to be using a phone when this happened.  So what does the sign say?  "Don't use cell phones or die."

Needless to say, I didn't order the Frustrations.  Instead, I got some double cooked pork (a Shanghai specialty), some soup noodles, and a Tsingtao beer.  Both plates were quite delicious.