Eveline Chao - Niubi!: The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School

Ta ble of Con t e n t s Title Page Copyright Page Acknowledgements Introduction CHAPTER ONE - Cow Pussy, Yes, Cow Pussy CHAPTER TWO - The Chinese Art of Everyday Abuse CHAPTER THREE - Swearing and Profanity CHAPTER FOUR - Men and Women: Flirting, Dating, Love, and Marriage CHAPTER FIVE - Sex and Body Parts CHAPTER SIX - Gay Slang CHAPTER SEVEN - Behaving Badly CHAPTER EIGHT - Internet Slang The Top Twenty-five Terms You Need to Know N IUB I! T h e R ea l Ch i n es e You Wer e N ever T a ug h t i n S c h ool ni (nyoo) awesome k (coo) cool tmde (tah mah duh) damn w c o (wuh tsow) fuck! b (bee) pussy EVELINE CHAO is a freelance writer and editor based in Beijing. She is extremely fortunate to have foul-mouthed friends willing to teach her words that most Chinese would be too embarrassed to reveal to a foreigner. PLUME Published by Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt.

Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Books (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First Printing, December 2009 Copyright Eveline Chao, 2009 Illustrations by Chris Murphy All rights reserved REGISTERED TRADEMARKMARCA REGISTRADA REGISTERED TRADEMARKMARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Chao, Eveline. Niubi! : the real Chinese you were never taught in a school / Eveline Chao; Illustrations by Chris Murphy. p. cm. eISBN : 978-1-101-14930-0 1.

Chinese languageConversation and phrase booksEnglish. 2. Chinese languageSpoken ChineseDictionariesEnglish. 3. Language and culture China. 4.

ChinaLanguages. I. Title. PL1125.E6C383 2009 495.183421dc22 009028618 PUBLISHERS NOTE The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014. http://us.penguingroup.com Acknowledgments Endless thanks first and foremost to Maya Rock for making it all happen. I am also grateful to my agent Al Zuckerman at Writers House and my editor Nadia Kashper at Plume. Chris Murphy deserves special mention for his wonderful illustrations. And finally, thanks to Lu Bin, Amani Zhang, Wang Bin, Rachel Zhu, Emilio Liu, Lisa Hsia, Sam Zhao of les+ magazine, and Cecilia Hu, Gissing Liu, and Vivid Zhu for their advice and help on this project.

Introduction O n my first day in Beijing, my roommate and old college friend Ann sent me off to IKEA with three of her best Chinese friends. They picked me up in a red Volkswagen Santana and passed around a joint, blasting the Cure and Sonic Youth the whole ride there. In the crowded cafeteria at IKEA, we ate Swedish meatballs, french fries, and kung pao chicken, and then skated around the store with our shopping carts, stepping over the snoring husbands, asleep on the display couches, and smiling at the peasant families taking family photos in the living room sets. I bought bedding and some things for the kitchen, Da Li got a couple of plants, and Wang Xin bought a lamp. Traffic was bad on the ride home; we were navigating through a snarl at an intersection when yet another car cut us off. Lu Bin stuck his head out the window and bellowed ! S h b ! (shah bee), or fucking cunt, at the other driver, then placidly turned down the music and, looking back, asked if I was a fan of Nabokovhed read Lolita in the Chinese translation and it was his favorite book.

For the next few months, I was too terrified to leave the apartment by myself and go make other friends, having not yet fully absorbed the fact that Id left behind four years of life and a career in New York City and suddenly moved to this new and crazy place. So with a few exceptions, those three boys and my roommate were the only people I hung out with. Da Li owned an Italian restaurant, of all things, and wed often meet there late in the evening and eat crme brle or drink red wine or consume whatever else we could beg off of him for free, and then pile into his and Lu Bins cars and head out on whatever adventure they had in mind. One night some big DJ from London was in town, spinning at a multilevel megaclub filled with nouveau riche Chinese. I bounced around on the metal trampoline dance floor and learned that the big club drink in China is whiskey with sweet green tea. Another night we headed to a smoke-filled dive to see a jazz band.

The keyboardist had gone to high school with Lu Bin in Beijing, studied jazz in New York, and now sometimes performed with Cui Jian, a rock performer whose music, now banned from state radio, served as an unofficial anthem for the democracy movement during the late 1980s. My friends had a party promoter frienda tiny, innocuous-seeming girlwho somehow got us into everything for free and would always turn and grin after rocking out to a set by a death-metal band from Finland, or a local hip-hop crew, and shout out, ! T i n i b ! (tie nyoo bee), or That was fucking awesome! Other nights the boys would want to drive all the way to the Korean part of town, just to try out some Korean BBQ joint theyd heard about. And some nights wed just drive around aimlessly and c h (chah), Beijing slang for shoot the shit, about music or art. Then wed go back to Lu Bins to drink beer and watch DVDs (pirated, of course). Most nights ended with deciding to get food at four in the morning and driving to Ghost Street, an all-night strip of restaurants lit up with red lanterns. There was one hot pot restaurant in particular that they liked, where, I remember, one night a screaming match broke out between two drunk girls at a table near ours.

It concluded with one girl jumping up and shouting, ! C o n m! (tsow nee ma), or Fuck you! before storming out the door. The bleary looking man left behind tried to console the other bawling girl, assuring her, M i s h , t h zu l e (may shih, tah huh dzway luh): Dont worry about itshe was totally wasted. Intermittently, some new girl, whom one of the boys had recently decided was the love of his life, would appear in the group. There was a comic period when Da Li, who couldnt speak any English, was s h u (show), or screwing, a tall blonde who couldnt speak any Chinese. Whenever they came out, one of us would inevitably get roped into playing translator in the long lead-up to the moment when they would finally leave us to go back to his place. Youd always get stuck repeating, over and over, some trivial thing that one had said to the other, and which the other was fixating on, thinking something important had been said.