Post by Rebecca Lin
The other day I was chatting with my roommate in the kitchen, and he started preparing a tofu dish. Shortly after he finished cooking, another roommate of mine asked him, “can I eat your tofu?”
Upon hearing that, my Chinese roommate and I started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” asked my roommates who don’t understand Chinese.
“Well,” I took a deep breath and held my urge to laugh. “In Mandarin, if you say to another person, especially of another gender, ‘Can I eat your tofu? (我可以吃你的豆腐嗎？wǒ kě yǐ chī nǐ de dòu fǔ má?)’ it means, ‘Can I flirt with you’ or ‘Can I touch you inappropriately’?, it usually has a sexual implication….” I couldn’t finish my sentence, it was too funny for me to explain this, especially to my non-Mandarin speaking roommates.
After my explanation, my roommates suddenly realized why we were laughing. They then asked, “so how are we supposed to ask for another person’s tofu dish without sounding creepy?”
“Well, usually in Mandarin, we would specify the way that the tofu was prepared, for exampled, deep-fried, stir-fry, boil, etc. So the way to not sound inappropriate would be ‘May I try that stir-fry tofu?’ Also, not adding a possessive pronouns would also remove the suggestive meaning, since the expression ‘eat someone’s tofu’, the tofu here would refer to a person’s body, therefore, not specifying whose dish is it would be the perfect way to express your desire to try to dish itself.”
I found it fascinating that a simple phrase about tofu could start a conversation that lasted about 20 minutes. It reminded me of another expression “eat vinegar (吃醋 chī cù)”, which implies jealousy. If you say someone is eating vinegar in Mandarin, it means that this person is jealous, and it usually involves being jealous because the target person is ignoring him/her for someone else. It made me wonder, where did this expression originate?
This tale dates back to the Tang dynasty, when the emperor himself gifted a favoured prime minister with a beautiful young concubine. The jealous wife of the prime minister was well-known for her meddling and henpecking ways. She threatened to drink poison to commit suicide rather than submit to the emperor’s will. This moved the emperor, but he also wanted to test her commitment to her husband. Therefore, he forced the wife’s hand by giving her a vial of poison and threatening her with death if she did not accept the concubine. She consumed the vial without hesitation, only to discover that it contained vinegar. Since then, vinegar consumption has come to symbolize jealousy and envy.
In some cases, like the example of my conversations with my roommates, these kinds of expression could be somehow translated into another language. However, in most cases, these phrases would be extremely hard to translate, and it usually would not make any sense to others who don’t speak the target language. This reminds me that even when certain words are translated, they don’t convey the original meaning perfectly either. Below are some examples of what a Native Chinese Speaker (NCS) and a Native English Speaker (NES) would say, according to Jiang (2000):
- Steam bread vs. Hamburger
- Noodles vs. Pasta
- Jiaozi vs. Dumplings
- Congee vs. Porridge
- Rice vs. Risotto
As you can see, when certain words are being translated, sometimes it would be altered to something similar but not exactly identical due to localization purposes. Therefore, it would be interesting to observe how certain expression in your first language could be translated into another language.
Jiang, W. (2000). The relationship between culture and language. ELT journal, 54(4), 328-334.
