Interpreting Humor

July 29, 2020

Before I write about Chinese humor, I want to point out the difference between Chinese and Western thinking. Europeans and Americans tend to have a linear-thinking pattern compared to most Chinese that start with the specific and move to the abstract creating thought metaphors.

While metaphors exist in English and Chinese, they are seen differently. For instance, the Academic Exchange Quarterly says the Chinese people consider themselves descendants of dragons. These metaphorical expressions always carry positive meanings and attitudes. Although dragons can be found in English literature, they are often described as evil monsters. If someone is referred to as a dragon in English, it is always associated with the derogatory connotation, meaning “a fierce person”.

The FluentU Mandarin Chinese Language and Culture Blog offers “5 things You Need to know about Chinese Humor.”

“Comedy is a tricky thing!” FluentU continues, “What is funny in English may not be funny in Chinese. In fact, a lot of things we find humorous in our culture can be downright offensive in Chinese culture. Don’t worry—it’s actually not that hard to get a grasp on comedy in Mandarin. It just takes a little studying on the subject of faux pas in Chinese interactions to understand what’s funny and what’s not.”

 


Chinese Humor from a Western point of View

 

Why is this important?

Because understanding what a culture finds funny is important when making friends from other cultures. Humor is a very precise thing among cultures. For instance, FluentU says that depressing irony is kind of hilarious in Chinese culture.  This form of comedy is often dark, sarcastic, and very ironic. This may be funny to some Westerners, but it may come off as too dark to most.

Lacking facial expressions is pretty funny to Chinese people, too. Western comedians are quite expressive, both in their faces and bodies. In China, a lack of facial expressions while delivering witty one-liners is considered much more entertaining.

If you want to learn more about what works and what to avoid when it comes to Chinese humor, I urge you to visit FluentU.com.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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The Little Known History of Racism in the United States against the Chinese

July 15, 2020

Thirty-six years before the 1921 Greenwood Massacre of African Americans in Oklahoma, there was a similar incident in Wyoming but the victims were Chinese.

“On September 2, 1885, 150 white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, brutally attack their Chinese coworkers, killing 28, wounding 15 others, and driving several hundred more out of town,” History.com reported.

“The Rock Springs massacre was symptomatic of the anti-Chinese feelings shared by many Americans at that time. The Chinese had been victims of prejudice and violence ever since they first began to come to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, fleeing famine and political upheaval (the Christian led Taiping Rebellion and the English and French led Opium Wars). Widely blamed for all sorts of social ills, the Chinese were also singled-out for attack by some national politicians who popularized strident slogans like ‘The Chinese Must Go.’”

The Rock Springs massacre wasn’t the only incident of racism against Chinese immigrants in the United States.

 

The Chinese Exclusion Act, a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, ended all immigration of Chinese laborers.  The African American Policy Forum says, “The Chinese Exclusion Act was an immigration law passed in 1882 that prevented Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first immigration law that excluded an entire ethnic group. It also excluded Chinese nationals from eligibility for United States citizenship.”

“During their first few decades in the United States,” The Library of Congress informs, “they (Chinese immigrants to the United States) endured an epidemic of violent racist attacks, a campaign of persecution and murder that today seems shocking. From Seattle to Los Angeles, from Wyoming to the small towns of California, immigrants from China were forced out of business, run out of town, beaten, tortured, lynched, and massacred, usually with little hope of help from the law. Racial hatred, an uncertain economy, and weak government in the new territories all contributed to this climate of terror and bloodshed. The perpetrators of these crimes, which included Americans from many segments of society, largely went unpunished.”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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What came first, Paper for Printing or for the Toilet?

July 8, 2020

Since COVID-19 struck like a venomous cobra killing thousand daily, toilet paper has become a very popular item in the United States and from what I am learning, the world.

March through May, I didn’t see much Costco toilet paper at the store where I shop. That started to change in June, and on Wednesday, June 17, 2020, I saw more of Costco’s Kirkland brand toilet paper in one place than I have ever seen before.

The Costco I shop at added more storage at the back of the store for toilet paper on the heavy metal shelves the chain uses that soar 30 feet from the floor to the ceiling.  At the checkout stand, I asked the clerk if that mountain of toilet paper was enough to satisfy demand, and she said, those shelves had to be filled three times a day to keep up.

The pandemic is in its fourth month and demand for toilet paper doesn’t seem to be ending. What are shoppers doing with all the toilet paper they are buying, insulating their houses with it?

On the way home, I thought about the history of toilet paper. I already knew that China invented paper just like they did the printing press centuries before they both showed up in Europe, but what about TP.

History.com says, “Although paper originated in China in the second century B.C., the first recorded use of paper for cleansing is from the 6th century in medieval China, discovered in the texts of scholar Yen Chih-Thui. In 589 A.D, he wrote, ‘Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes.’

“By the early 14th century, the Chinese were manufacturing toilet paper at the rate of 10 million packages of 1,000 to 10,000 sheets annually. In 1393, thousands of perfumed paper sheets were also produced for the Hongwu Emperor’s imperial family.

“Paper became widely available in the 15th century, but in the Western world, modern commercially available toilet paper didn’t originate until 1857, when Joseph Gayetty of New York marketed a ‘Medicated Paper, for the Water-Closet,’ sold in packages of 500 sheets for 50 cents. Before his product hit the market, Americans improvised in clever ways (don’t ask).”

Why did it take more than five hundred years for toilet paper to reach Europe and the United States from China?

I wonder if China had a toilet paper shortage like we did in the U.S. after the Chinese learned about COVID-19, and first warned the world on December 31, 2019. I found one answer dated in February from the South China Morning Post reporting that in Hong Kong there was a fear driven rush to buy all the toilet paper one could drag home.  Guo Yukuan, a senior researcher with the China Society of Economic Reform, a state-backed think tank, said the panic buying was irrational. “This is purely driven by panic and stress,” Guo said. “China’s production capacity [for toilet paper] can supply not just Hong Kong but the whole world.”

Next time, before you flush, thank the Chinese for inventing toilet paper.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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How close does China’s Great Firewall watch Tik Tok?

July 1, 2020

The BBC reports “US President Donald Trump sought help from Chinese President Xi Jinping to win re-election, ex-National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new book says.”

The allegations refer to a meeting between President Trump and President Xi at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in June last year. “Trump, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election [in 2020], alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Mr. Bolton wrote in his book The Room Where It Happened, released June 23.

 

What if Xi Jinping does not want to help Donald Trump win reelection?

 

Until yesterday, I didn’t know what Tik Tok was. Curious, I Googled it and discovered from Business Insider that this popular video-sharing app has more than 1.5 billion all-time downloads, and is owned by a Chinese internet company called ByteDance.

From Forbes, I learned that ByteDance, the Beijing-based Chinese Digital Giant and Owner of Tik Tok, had impressive 2019 revenue and earnings of $17 Billion.

 

Does that mean China’s President XI Jinping allowed Tik Tok Tokers and K-pop fans to Tank Trump’s Tulsa rally to embarrass Donald Trump?

 

After all, the Chinese Communist Party is well known for its Great Firewall. Internet censorship and surveillance have been tightly implemented in China blocking social websites like Gmail, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and others. The excessive censorship practices of the Great Firewall of China have now engulfed the VPN service providers as well.

The New York Times even reported, “We Should Worry About How China Uses Apps Like Tik Tok, illiberal innovations created for China’s vast surveilled and censored domestic market are increasingly popular overseas.

“To China’s surveillance state,” The NYT continues, “a video-sharing app offers much more than your dog dancing to Drake. Tik Tok’s domestic Chinese version, Douyin, is heavily censored and surveilled: Last year, the British cartoon Peppa Pig was purged from the platform after the authorities decided she had taken on subversive meaning. (It is unclear whether this was because of a direct government order or the company pre-emptively censoring itself.) … “To date, no evidence suggests that Chinese authorities have used their leverage over Douyin domestically to censor or surveil Tik Tok overseas. But given what we know about Beijing’s illiberal impulses, there is a gap between what is provable beforehand, and what it is prudent to presume.”

Since China keeps a close watch on its social networking sites like Tik Tok, why did its Great Firewall allow all those teens in China and around the world to sabotage Trump’s hate rally in Tulsa and embarrass the most unpopular president in United States history, not only in America but throughout the world?

After all, wouldn’t it be in China’s interest to see Donald Trump defeated in November 2020? Trump even answered that question when he said, “China wants me to lose reelection.”

If true, China would not be alone. Most of the world wants Trump to lose, and so do I. That is why I am asking China’s President Xi Jinping to please help Trump lose this year’s U.S. election and block Russia from helping him like they did in 2016.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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China’s Heritage Sites Growing in Popularity

June 24, 2020

China has 55 World Heritage Sites, and I have been to four of the top ten: the Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, Forbidden City, and the Terracotta Warriors. I have also been to the Ming and Qing Dynasties Imperial Tombs, South China Karst region along the Li River near Guilin, the West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou, the Grand Canal, and possibly a few others I did not recognize when I was looking at the list while writing this post.

In 2012, CNN.com reported, “Tourism boom threatens China’s heritage sites. … Places that were previously very remote and didn’t see a lot of (Chinese) tourists are now seeing enormous numbers arriving because they have the money to travel,” says Neville Agnew, group director of the Getty Conservation Institute, which has worked in China since 1989. “It’s an interesting phenomenon because it’s in complete contrast to the experience in Egypt, where almost all the visitors are foreigners.”

World Atlas.com also reports, “China’s Forbidden City gets more visitors (15 million) than any other UNESCO World Heritage Site.” The Great Wall had ten million.

World Atlas also said, “Although the high number of tourists visiting these UNESCO World Heritage Sites translates to high revenue for the receiving country, the cost of maintaining these sites is also significantly high.”

In 1971, the United States was central to UNESCO’s mission, and the People‘s Republic of China was isolated from the world. China had no world heritage sites and showed no evidence of public religious activity. That all changed after U.S. President Richard Nixon visited China in 1971. The Berkeley Center said, “By the 1980s, China had been recognized with its first World Heritage site and a massive religious revival was underway.”

Tragically, “Nearly half a century later, the United States (with 23 UNESCO World Heritage Sites) has withdrawn from UNESCO (because of President Donald Trump who values nothing but his power, his fame or infamy, as long as he is getting attention from the media, and money even when he has to cheat people to get it), and China eagerly seeks a greater role in the organization, which has recognized China with the second-highest number of World Heritage sites in the world.”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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My Splendid Concubine is now available to read through Kindle Unlimited.

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