Kinda Fun

At the risk of propelling this blog outside the realm of objectively observant and into the depths of culturally insensitive, here are some more funny things that Chinese people say and do!

• There's something going on with the phrase "wait a moment."  It is said all the time.  I think it's just because the literal, word for word translation of the Mandarin phrase "deng yi xia" (pronounced dung ee shya) is "wait one moment," but "deng yi xia" is really just a colloquial way of saying "hang on."  In any event, whenever a Chinese person wants you to cool your heels, they invariably say "wait a moment."  This is all well and good, except it sounds a bit out of place in, say, a restaurant, when you place your order and your waiter says "wait a moment."  I'd kinda hope that my steak takes more than a moment to cook, thank you very much.
• What a great segue...to the word "kinda."  In that last sentence, I used it pretty much the way any colloquial speaker of English would.  The same can't be said for a colleague of mine, who copied me on an email this morning looking for a previous year's contract.  The email said: "Do you have this?  I'm kinda not the one who took care of this who last year."  I laughed out loud at my desk.
• Back to waiters, for a second.  Whenever you order something here, they respond "Just one?"  That doesn't really make sense when you're sitting by yourself at a restaurant.  I ordered a sandwich the other day and was asked "Just one?" to which I considered replying, "Now that you mention it, I'd like seven."
• My colleagues run through the office.  Like literally sprint.  Frequently I look up, and someone is darting from one desk to another, desperate to speak to someone without wasting any time.  I think this probably has to do with the whole "face" concept, that if they know someone wants something, it doesn't occur to them to walk from point A to point B.
• Phone calls are interesting.  You know that someone is circling for a landing when they say some combination of the words/sounds "mmm....hao de...byebye" in quick succession.  "Hao de" just means "good" in Chinese.  "Byebye" means, well, "byebye" in Chinese...I guess.  The weird thing is that the call doesn't end until they go through 4-9 cycles, rapidly, of "mmm...byebye...mmm...byebye...hao de."  And I can only hear one end of the conversations, so I can only assume that they're just volleying this exchange back and forth, like two cutesy lovers saying "no YOU hang up first."

Anyway, I should say that I know for a fact that my Chinese sounds hilarious to them when I try to speak, so all of this is in good fun.  And given that I struggle with my Chinese so much, it's incredibly impressive to me that these people can actually conduct real business in English.  I'm not sure I'll ever get to that point in Chinese.

In other news, this was posted in the window of the restaurant where I ended up eating lunch today:

You can understand why I decided to dine there, right?  Who doesn't want Loose Women with their midday meal?  To be honest, I felt I had to go there before seeing the sign, since it's called Judy's and I felt I needed to try it out of deference to my loving mother.  But the sign put me over the edge.  I stormed in, seeking out the loose women (rather than following the sign's warning), but, alas, received only a hot plate of Sichuan Mapo Tofu.  It was quite good.