zaiShanghai

The Chinese lan­guage can be a bit of a beast to learn.  Back in New York I used to spend hours hunched over my char­ac­ter work­book, painstak­ingly draw­ing out the exces­sive num­ber of strokes for the verb "to dance" or 跳舞.  However, in the class­room, with a con­trolled vocab­u­lary envi­ron­ment, I was able to stum­ble my way through a les­son and make it back out the door with­out any major bumps or bruises.

When I arrived in China, how­ever, the sweet bliss of con­trol was thrown into pan­icked con­fu­sion.  The only time I could truly under­stand peo­ple when I first arrived in Shanghai was when they spoke to me like a five year old, and rather than feel at all con­de­scended to I was always greatly appre­cia­tive.

As I swam through days of obliv­ion as to what was going on around me, most of what I heard was a jum­ble of tones.  There were, how­ever, phrases that would con­stantly catch my atten­tion and pull me out of my language-induced daze.  In hopes of help­ing out future per­plexed trav­el­ers and incom­ing stu­dents, I present here three phrases you need to get jump start on your Chinese col­lo­qui­alisms. If you're lucky, it will save you a few "what the…?" moments on the long march to basic com­pre­hen­sion.

加油 "jiāyóu" | Literal mean­ing: "Add oil" Colloquial mean­ing: "Go!" "Do it!" "Step on it!"

You might hear your Chinese teacher use this phrase to get your class to stop com­plain­ing and just start work­ing (this phrase was often directed at me… ah, the life of a stu­dent). It's also what you might have heard dur­ing the Beijing Olympics as Chinese crowds cheered their favorite ath­letes on.

So any­way, I was pretty con­vinced in the first few weeks that my Chinese lan­guage teacher was obsessed with Bollywood.  Whenever the class would grum­ble at the start of another vocab­u­lary quiz, she would pump her fist in the air and excit­edly say, "Jia Ho." I thought she might have watched the end­ing dance scene of Slumdog Millionaire one too many times.

Turns out, of course, that I was just not hear­ing the words cor­rectly. This hit me in the face, quite lit­er­ally, when I almost walked straight into this sign post (see pic­ture), read the char­ac­ters that were point­ing to the direc­tion of the local gas pump, and real­ized she was telling our class to FUEL UP rather than become Bollywood stars.

欢迎光临 "huānyíng guānglín" Meaning: Welcome

Appropriate time to use this phrase: when you are a Uniqlo employer at the Cloud Nine mall and want peo­ple to buy your clothes.

As I took the four-story esca­la­tor up to the loom­ing floors of the gar­gan­tuan Cloud Nine Shopping Mall near the NYU Shanghai aca­d­e­mic cen­ter on a Wednesday after­noon, I couldn’t help but won­der why my ears were ring­ing with the sound of a heav­ily Chinese-accented voice telling me in English: "Good morn­ing, good morn­ing."  Looking at my watch to con­firm the time, I won­dered whether the sales lady was just attempt­ing to lure a bunch of white peo­ple into her store with the only English she knew.

Then I started hear­ing the same phrase every­where…the super­mar­ket, hair salon, park drink ven­dor store.  No mat­ter where I went, peo­ple were telling me dou­ble time "good morn­ing."  It baf­fled me.  Finally, I snapped and asked a Chinese friend why the Shanghainese seemed so keen to tell me good morn­ing, even at din­ner time.  This ques­tion was answered with a gig­gle and an slowed-down pro­nun­ci­a­tion les­son.  The women at Uniqlo were not telling me good morn­ing, but rather wel­com­ing me into their mecca of Westernized cloth­ing.

老外 "lǎowài" Meaning: for­eigner

Appropriate time to use this phrase: When you see some­one like me – tall, white, and freck­led – walk­ing in the midst of a sea of five foot tall Asians with black, black hair.

Break the word apart and you have two words with their own mean­ings.  老, lao, means old, and 外, wai, means out­side.  With my rudi­men­tary Chinese skills shoved care­lessly in my back pocket, I there­fore, couldn't help but won­der why the Shanghainese were so fer­vently point­ing at me and say­ing, "old out­side."  What on earth were they try­ing to get at?  Thankfully, a cou­ple weeks of point­ing, star­ing, and the occa­sional name drop helped me fig­ure out that there were mul­ti­ple names used (with kind­ness) by the Chinese to point out, just in case the glint of red in my hair didn't make the point clearly enough, that I'm not Chinese.  From the more for­mal 外国人, wàiguó rén "for­eign per­son" or 美国人, měiguó rén, "American" to the afore­men­tioned 老外, there were many ways to label me.  I soon real­ized there was a sort of fond­ness, though, in which store own­ers at the bub­ble tea place I fre­quented, would use when address­ing me as their lit­tle 老外, and soon enough I accepted it.