Gesundheit!

For over a month now, I've been absentmindedly saying "bless you" when any of my colleagues sneeze at work.  It's just second nature to me to do so.  It has become increasingly clear to me that they don't understand what I'm saying.  Most of them don't even appear to understand that I'm talking to them -- leading me to wonder what they think their weird American colleague keeps saying at seemingly random points throughout the day.  Yesterday, I decided to investigate.  I asked one of my colleagues what the Chinese equivalent for "bless you" was.  He looked at me, nonplussed.  I tried again, explaining to him that in English, when someone sneezes, we tend to say "bless you" to them.  He still didn't seem to quite get it, but acknowledged that such an expression doesn't exist in Chinese.  I confirmed this with a few of my friends, both Chinese and Mandarin-speaking expats.  The basic consensus is that Chinese people don't have a traditional linguistic response to a sneeze a la "bless you," "salud," or "gesundheit."

This fits pretty well with my general impression that the Chinese are just culturally devoid of what Westerners would consider everyday manners.  Their concept of mianzi, or "face," apparently doesn't include ideas like personal space, and common niceties.  People generally don't say "excuse me" when they bump into each other.  The Chinese spitting habit is gross, and it is a rare pleasure when you come across someone who will at least look before he spits, to minimize any expectoral shrapnel hitting passersby.  Even the word "please" (请 or qing) isn't used nearly as often as it is in the West.  So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to learn that when someone sneezes here, the proper thing to do in response is, well, nothing at all.

One of my Chinese friends did give me two things she has heard people say, though she prefaced them by saying that she never does either of these things, and rarely if ever hears other people say them.  But they're still fun, from a cultural and linguistic perspective if nothing else.  First, she told me that people sometimes say baisui (百岁), which means "100 years old."  Chinese culture is obsessed with longevity, so if there is a Mandarin corollary to "bless you," it seems like it must be baisui, the idea being that you wish 100 years of life on the person who had the misfortune of sneezing.

She also said that in some more rural parts of China, she has heard that when someone sneezes, witnesses tend to tap the sneezer so as to superstitiously avoid the misfortune of sneezing.  Call me crazy, but if I wanted to avoid the misfortune of sneezing, superstitious or not, my first instinct would be to get as far away from the sneezer as possible.  Touching him would be the last thing I would want to do.  Then again, it's already been pretty well documented here that my cultural instincts tend to diverge from those of my Chinese hosts, so what do I know.