Chao Eveline - Niubi!: the real chinese you were never taught in school

Table of Contents

NIUBI!

The Real Chinese You Were
Never Taught in School
ni ( nyoo ) awesome
k ( coo ) cool
tmde ( tah mah duh ) damn
w co ( 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.

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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

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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 ! Shb ! ( 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, ! Ti nib ! ( 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 ch ( 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, ! Co 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, Mish, t hzu le ( 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 shu ( 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. Whatd she say again? Da Li would shout over the noise of the bar. K ( coo ), Id yell back: cool in Chinese.

After a couple of years here, Ive started taking Beijing for granted, and its harder for me to conjure up the same sense of magic and wonderment I felt at every little detail during those first few months. But then Ill go back home, for a visit, to the United States and be reminded by the questions Im asked of what a dark and mysterious abstraction China remains for most of the world. Does everyone ride bicycles? Are there drugs in China? What are Chinese curse words like? Is there a hook-up scene? Whats dating like in China? Whats it like to be gay in China? Is it awful? How do you type Chinese on a computer? Are the keyboards different? How do Chinese URLs work? One guy even asked, in gape-jawed amazement, if outsiders were allowed into the country.