Seduced into a golden 'smilence'
By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-10 09:54
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New words that are creeping into the Chinese language indicate how vibrant the mother tongue of Confucius has become
Recently, I hosted a forum that discussed the translation of new words and phrases from Chinese into English. Instead of the usual crop of bureaucratic jargon, this time the focus was idioms spreading like a prairie fire at the grassroots, some of which had to be explained before they could be understood by senior members of the forum.
This is language at its most vibrant, breaking out of fractured rocks like the legendary Monkey King, spurning conventions and hopping from treetop to treetop.
The hottest word of the year could well be geili, or literally "give power or force". Reportedly it originates from a dialect, but we could not determine which one - some say northern China and others Fujian or Hainan. After it was used in the dubbing of a Japanese comic of the Monkey King story, it caught on, as the latest buzzword for "cool" or "awesome".
Then The People's Daily used it in its headline, taking many by surprise. I happened to run into its editor on a recent trip to New York. She laughed it off as a storm in a teacup: "People see us as stodgy, but we not only used the word but turned it into a verb." In which case it means "energize", "beef up" etc.
The surprise did not end there. Geili soon took on an English form, patterned after the soundalike "believable". As such, "gelivable" is an exclamation of being impressed and "ungelivable" one of disappointment.
Most memes carry more social and cultural connotations than geili. They come predominantly from news stories, especially those that stoke the public imagination and give voice to a feeling or attitude that cannot be neatly conveyed by existing expressions.
There is an assortment of words that describe the living conditions of today's urban youth - those who have graduated from college and are seeking better opportunities in the nation's metropolises. They live like ants in the far suburbs, hence "the ant tribe". They put themselves up in "capsule apartments", basically beds that can be locked up and take up as little space as bunker beds. One young man even invented an "egg home", slightly more elaborate than a tent, that he set up in the courtyard of his company to save rent - until it became a news item and the local authority moved to shut it down.
All these are manifestations of "dwelling narrowness", the English name of a popular television drama series that clicked with the public and, ironically, had to be removed from the tube. At the translation forum, some suggested using "pigeonhole", or "poky room" to better convey the meaning. But I ruled out "humble abode", which, in the Chinese original, is a polite way of referring to one's own home - even though that home may be a mansion.
New coinages abound in the realm of demographic formations and shifts. Apart from "ant tribe", we encountered a more difficult term - "surplus women". It refers to women who are beyond the perceived age of marriage but are still available. The Japanese call them "3S ladies", standing for "single, seventies (born in the 1970s) and stuck". An alert was raised at the forum that the term itself implies prejudice and should be handled with caution.
Another untranslatable tag for emerging demographics is "peacock women" and "phoenix men". The former refers to those who have grown up in urban areas and have never faced hardship in their lives, and the latter to rural boys who have successfully overcome adversity and now carry the burden of an entire family. As the symbol of the birds may not be self-evident to English-speaking readers, we at the forum opted for the plainspoken but less colorful "pampered girls" and "self-made men".
In a similar vein are "lever women" and "budget men" - women who use their connections as a leverage to help their husbands and men who may not make much money but do not have expensive habits either. Some translators suggested "low-maintenance men" for the latter. I thought that adjective is more suited to women or their habits. Besides, the men in question are not just frugal homebodies, but a step lower than the so-called "golden tortoise men", men born with silver spoons in their mouths. It is said more women in China have lowered their expectations, choosing pragmatic men over those privileged ones.
There were questions whether existing terminologies can be accurately ascribed to the Chinese situation. Take "vacancy rate". The dictionary defines it as the percentage of all units, as in hotels, that are unoccupied or not rented at a given time. If you come upon a business report about Beijing's real estate market, how do you interpret its "vacancy rate"? Units not sold or rented out? Actually it goes beyond that and includes those units deliberately left vacant because the owners have bought them as pure investments and are waiting for housing prices to keep skyrocketing. For them, rental income is just peanuts. How does "vacancy rate" account for that?
If you live in China, you've probably seen waves of transliterated words. They are no longer confined to hutong, laobaixing, baozi and so on, but take on lives all their own just like "gelivable", described in an earlier paragraph.
Chinese are traditionally demure. If you read old novels, a typical reaction - whether a person is the target of commendation or ridicule - is to smile and say nothing. Some genius merged "smile" and "silence" and came up with "smilence", which perfectly captures that quintessential Chinese prudishness or stoicism.
The Internet is a great platform for innovation in kvetching. If you hear people talk about the "Chinternet" (Chinese-style Internet), "goveruption" and "livelihard", and refer to themselves as "shitizen", you'll probably have a sense of the level of unhappiness with the way things are.
"Suihide" has a back-story so rich and ironic it deserves an etymological flourish. In 2009, a 24-year-old man died while under police custody in Yunnan province. The cops said he hurt himself playing hide-and-seek in the cell. The excuse was so lame it has since come to epitomize all explications assigned to suspected victims of police brutality, which invariably take some form of suicide as justification.
Most of these words may never gain currency in the English language. But the fact they were coined at all and spread as part of pop vernacular is indication of linguistic globalization, if it can be so called. Even many of the Chinese words and phrases in vogue will lose their potency after a period of intense use.
China does not have the equivalent of the Urban Dictionary. It does have scholars like Huang Jiwei who compile witty - and often new - sayings collected from every corner of the universe of speech. But much of the grassroots wisdom will be lost like "fleeting clouds", another hot term of the year.
One of the phrases Huang cherry-picked was an utterance by poet Ye San, who wrote: "Words are the basement I built for myself." And, maybe, for a few like-minded friends - virtual or otherwise. The Chinese language has been through thick and thin, and the new age of Web surfing is injecting a heavy dose of vitality into the mother tongue of Confucius and Li Bai.
Who knows, some of the hot words may have longer staying power than the tech platforms that enabled them.