jon wang

Before I was old enough to walk home from school, I ended up in day
care for a good two or three hours until one of my parents could come
pick me up such that I could go home and immediately do chores.
 
In daycare I got a lot of snide remarks and a variety of jeers from
other white kids because I was chinese. The thing is, I could be mad,
but compared to what the black and hispanic kids got, there was
nothing to really cry home about. At the time I remember there were
only two types of jokes, the first was directed against my slanty eyes
and the second was a mockery of my language as an expression of 'ching
chong chang'. The second one must be some kind of meme among white
people because I got the same treatment in Urbana-Champaign, IL and
when I moved to Brea, CA.
 
Most of my days were just spent looking at kids making slant-eyes at
me for a couple of hours before I could go home, until this one
particular kid got a hold of a new one, which then spread around like
a dirty needle among a bunch of hippies. I am sure some of you were
the butt of this elaborate joke.
 
The perpetrator would first hold out his/her arms (as if he was about
to pass a volleyball) with his fists in a clamshell formation. He/she
would then ask me to 'open the refridgerator', which can safely be
assumed as a metaphor for his/her fists, whereupon I found an
imaginary 'can of coke' in this 'refridgerator' that I was asked to
'drink'.
 
After drinking, however, I discovered that it was indeed laced with an
undesirable contaminant. This is revealed to me through song and
dance (slanty-eyes preferred, but optional) with the following lyrics
to the tune of This Old Man:
 
"Me chinese, me play joke, me go pee-pee in your coke."
 
This was met with roaring laughter from both the joker and the
bystanders. The white kids had finally found their holy grail, and I
have to admit, it was pretty revolutionary. Since I was one of two
asians in daycare (the other being my sister), now they didn't have to
seek me out and wait in line to make fun of me; they could just
pretend to be me, slant their eyes, do a little dance and tell the
joke for the other kids, and wah lah, big LOLz all around.
 
The first time I heard it I didn't think much of it, and then after
the 15th time I was enraged. I didn't know how to respond other than
"Me chinese, me play joke...on your SKULL", whereupon I grabbed the
kid and gave him a noogie, and then a few Indian burns on his arm for
good measure. I was sent to time-out, which is basically sitting
against a wall in solitude for fifteen or thirty minutes. Sometimes I
would sit until day care was closed.
 
It wasn't until one of these timeouts when one of the daycare
counselors expressed empathy in my situation and offered a little
secret to get me out of my jam. I was seven years old with a 30 year
old, white, female informant by the name of 'Miss Genie'. Apparently,
the classified, get-out-of-jail free response to the above 'me
chinese' joke was the following, again to the tune of This Old Man:
 
"I, American, I so smart, I don't drink the pee-pee part."
 
I looked at her with my slanted eyes, and with my head down I muttered
an exasperated "哎呀", pronounced ai1 ya3, which is chinese for you
guessed it, ching chong and chang.

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My mom is a real stickler when it comes to food, especially preparing
food, because as a kid she looked out for my uncles and aunt. My mom
also has advanced degrees in Microbiology and Food Science, including
a long tenure with Conagra (from a merger with Hunt-Wesson). So, not
only does she know what shes talking about, she also likes to make
sure that I follow exactly what shes talking about.
 
In Latin American culture, the age of fifteen is the great
quinceanera, while thirteen is the exciting Bat/Bar Mitzvah for Jewish
culture. The equivalent, but dreaded, coming of age milestone for
Chinese people is ten, when one is physically old enough to be a
kitchen apprentice to the chef, a la my mom. At this age I washed
dishes, peeled broccoli, washed vegetables, steamed rice, etc. But,
time was well spent in this brigade de cuisine system as today I am
very well capable of feeding myself--on microwave burritos.
 
One of the things my mom stressed repeatedly was food safety and
sanitation. With the constant outbreak of E. coli and Salmonella, its
very important to prepare food with clean tools in an equally clean
setting. At home my mom used two sets of knives, or chinese cleavers,
as well as two sets of cutting boards. The idea was that fresh,
ready-to-eat vegetables and fruits were cut with one knife on one
board, while the other set was used to process raw meats.
 
Living on my own, I tried to adopt the same system as my mom but I was
just lazy. I had multiple cutting boards but I used the same knife
for virtually every transaction. Needless to say, my mother was not
very happy about that. One day, my visiting mom thoroughly bleached
my cutting boards and purchased a new knife for me to use. The
cutting boards were color coded so that I could recognize what and
when to use, so that was no problem, but the knives unfortunately had
matching handles, with one slightly darker color than the other. I
always got confused and my mother would try different methods, like
putting one knife on the left side of the rack to indicate 'raw' and
the other side to indicate 'ready-to-eat'.
 
I still got it wrong, and finally my mother would take a sharpie and
write on one of the wood handles in chinese '生’, pronounced sheng1, for a
definition of 'uncooked' and 'raw'. Because the character '生' ranks
in the top 25 of memorable first words for a chinese speaker, my
mother thought this was a foolproof plan, as there is was no way for me
to feign illiteracy. It would be impossible for me to use the wrong
knife. Turns out, I still managed to get it wrong and get confused.
 
Whenever my family eats American cuisine, we also have to eat salad
with it, because its for sure the healthiest of whatever else is
served. There is no word for 'salad' in Chinese, so the phonetic
translation is basically '沙拉', pronounced sha1 la1, which has the
literal meaning of 'sand pull'. I don't know what it is but my
parents wont use phonetic translations in front of us, yet they also
refuse to use the English term. As an example of this, when I was in
Taiwan ordering a hamburger I asked for cheese, except I didn't say
cheese, but said '乳酪', which is ru3 luo4, basically the Mandarin word
for cheese, which sounds nothing like cheese. The guy behind the
counter had no idea what I was talking about while my Taiwanese
friends laughed and told the cashier that I wanted cheese with my
burger, in english. Apparently, nobody says '乳酪' as that is
considered old-fashioned. I am not even going to go in-depth about
the amount of irony in this situation.
 
So with my parents refusal to say 沙拉 for salad, my mom instead
substitutes it with the term '生菜', pronounced sheng1 tsai4, for fresh
(ripe) vegetables. In general, any ready-to-eat vegetable is
considered 生菜 by my mom. You can see what kind of problems this
causes. Here I have a knife that is labeled '生', but I do not know if
I should use it to cut raw, unprocessed meats or use it to make a
cucumber salad. A dilemma indeed, so all I could do was guess at the
solution, and, long story short, I guessed wrong. I'm sure the
readers out here all agree that I should've just called my mom to
clarify, but there is no way I wanted to suffer additional derision to
go with the answer. My mom discovered this when I was cutting orange
slices for the family one night. I had been using the wrong knife for
three months since that label.  I suffered derision for the rest of
the night including breakfast the next morning. 
 
Now that my mom left my house, I found a new label for the other knife, and
it says '熟', pronounced sho2, which is the definition for 'cooked'.
My mom must believe my chinese is good enough because she would 
limit using characters of 7 strokes or more. Now I have no excuse.
Maybe I should just keep to cutting the cheese, or for my taiwanese
friends, cutting the '乳酪'.

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Its always funny to hear me make mistakes when I speak mandarin, but
its also quite humorous to hear my parents attempt to speak english
accurately as well. Usually the end result causes more confusion than
clarity, and its mostly with my dad. Case in point:
 
Recently, I was eating lunch with my parents when the conversation
delved into a discussion on the word limits placed on essays for
graduate school. I argued that the word limit is not an invitation
for the applicant to demonstrate proficiency by merely maximizing the
number of words allotted, but to tell an impactful story in an
appropriate length. My mother agreed and replied, "well son, as a
writer one needs to be concise", except she pronounced 'concise' as if
saying 'coin-cise'. I asked her to say 'concise' again and again she
replied 'coincise'.
 
Whats funny is that in mandarin there is no real sound for '-on' and
the closest thing we have is 'ㄤ' , which is the phonetic alphabet
character pronounced 'ong'. We do have a sound similar to '-oi' which
is 'ㄛ', another alphabet character with the pronunciation best
described as the average of the sounds 'ooh' and 'aah'. As a
character, chinese people use '喔' for 'o3' as an expression to the
english equivalent of 'oh' or 'i see'.
 
After correcting my mother's pronunciation, my father, who had been
paying attention but was waiting for a moment to chime in, began to
correct us both and pointed out that we were using the wrong word
entirely. I wasn't sure what he was talking about until he began
talking about it in mandarin.
 
My dad thought that the correct definition of 'concise' was '相同',
pronounced 'xiang1 tong2' , which means 'similar' and/or 'matching'.
I thought about this for a minute and realized that my dad, upon
hearing 'coin-cise' from my mother, had mistakenly assumed the
definition for the word 'coincide'. So after explaining to my dad the
two definitions for 'coincide' and 'concise', he says:
 
"喔? so what does coincise mean"
 
I let my mom take over at this point.

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Growing up, some of the things my dad used to say around my sister and
I were idioms, and some, well, were just emotionally fed-up,
nonsensical statements made by him in response to figuring out how to
cope with our ungrateful American attitudes.
 
One of these things I remember vividly is '鴨死', ya1 si3, for a literal
translation and meaning of 'duck dead'. let me explain the origin
 
My dad used to say this all the time when my sister and I would end
any sentence with the popular American expression, 'geez', basically
expressing our exasperation. My dad never noticed that the word was
an abbreviation for 'gee-whiz', which my mom used frequently to prove
to us she was fully assimilated, and since we weren't Christian, he
had no idea it was also used to avoid taking the Lord's name in vain.
 
Rather, I think he focused mostly on the way it was said, and my
sister used to do it to annoy him because she would practically yell and
stress the 'Gee' part and hold the 'z' sound like the end of the last
note in a symphony. So to my dad it sounded like saying 'ji-si' which
is a romanization of the chinese pair of words '雞死', for ji1 si3, that
translates to 'chicken dead'. Always the unnoticed man with the witty
repartee, my dad would then sarcastically respond with '還有鴨死!', for
hai2 yo3 ya1 si3, which is translated to 'also duck dead!'. the hai2
yo3 part generally means 'also', 'and' but in this delivery it is
similar to 'not to mention', and 'don't forget there is...'
 
here is a sample exchange of its use.
 
my sister: why do i have to wash the dishes before dinner
my dad: so we can prepare dinner with a clean sink
my sister: thats wasting my time
my dad: no its not, wash the dishes
my sister: FINE, ALRIGHT. GEEZ.
my dad: 還有鴨死!
 
After using this term for quite some time, I was able to deduce the
connection between 'chicken dead' and 'duck dead' but I couldn't
figure out why my dad used a duck instead of a wolf, cow or a moose (I
don't even know what 'moose' in chinese is, truthfully). Alas, when I
was 15 my dad explained that, on paper, he thought the expression was
a hip spelling of 'geese' that teenagers used, so he figured that the
duck was a distant cousin and of the main animals in chinese cuisine,
well, pork, chicken and now, of course, duck. Genius. Or, 鴨-nius?

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My friend Dan Greenberg was visiting and to make sure he upheld his
tradition, we decided to go to the seder, and what better venue than
the Berkeley Hillel?
 
Dan and I used to be partners at an mobile electronics design company
we founded back in 2005 during our days at Purdue. We decided to fold
up shop when Dan founded another personal business, the business of
annoying and frustrating the crap out of me.
 
During our run I went to Connecticut to stay with his parents and
brother. I even went to synagogue and wore a tallit, a prayer shawl,
and touched the torah, the most holy (holiest?) of sacred writings in
Judaism. From someone whos previous experience with Jewish culture
was lox on bagels and Matisyahu, I am definitely getting closer to
that honorary title.
 
Along the way Dan taught me some things about the Hebrew language,
notably the pronounciation of the 'ch', like the act of clearing your
throat, but not to the extreme of clearing your lungs. So I was
trying to say things like 'chag sameah' which is Hebrew for 'happy
holidays'. The 'chag' part threw me off because I was expecting a
spelling equivalent to 'hog'. Likewise, I also learned 'le chaim',
used in a cheer or toast 'to health'.
 
When we got to the Hillel, I donned on the yamulke Dan lent me, I wore
the green one and made Dan where the white one because the white one
looked more like a doily. When we got inside there was just a mess of
people without an idea of an agenda. There was also a bit of 'choose
your own adventure' involved, with 3 different seders to choose from,
perhaps for each persons level of jewishness, if that even makes
sense.
 
There was the 'Just Jewish' seder, which was explained as a bit of
song, prayer and mostly eating, so a light beer equivalent. Up next
was the 'Traditional' seder, which I suppose is where all the regular
Jews go. The last one, was the 'Social Injustice' seder, which Dan
and I later discovered is where the leftist Jews against Corporations
set up shop.
 
The degree of Jewishness is actually something I can relate to as a
Chinese person. I know some of my friends don't and are unwilling to
go to karaoke because they, are 'not that' Chinese. My friend Dhara
used to perform in South Asian Awareness Week at Berkeley and she
would tell me of friends that wouldn't participate because they were
'not that' Indian. I am curious as to what other people think,
because I guess when I compare myself to Mainlanders and those from
Taiwan, you can bet that I am 'not that' Chinese either. I've been
grappling with this sort of identity crisis my whole life, and doing
what I do now makes it even funnier because I have to maintain the
image of 'that' Chinese but not 'that kind' of Chinese such that I
lose my intrinsic status as an American, which is highly valued by
those that are 'that' Chinese or 'that' Japanese. Its highly ironic.
Am I making any sense?
 
I've digressed. Anyway, I had a fun time learning what the afikomen
(ah-fee-ko-men)was, and why at one point you open the door for Elijah.
 I tremendously enjoyed the fact that there was an obligation to drink
the four cups of wine.
 
I learned a few hymns, particularly Hine Ma Tov (hee-ney). The
handouts for these lyrics weren't particularly helpful to me because
it was a) missing the pronounciation, and b) the key and tempo. So I
just nodded along, but now I can remember the tune, so you can be sure
to invite me to your next seder, I will sing along.
 
Heres a picture of us enjoying the seder, all of this makes me hungry
for a Hebrew national hot dog. Le Chaim!

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Some of the mandarin idioms I use frequently come from living with my dad as a kid. While the literal translations are a bit off, their
meanings in english are very similar and do the job pretty well. 

One of these sayings is '你的頭', which is ni3 de5 tou2 for, 'your head'. It has the same meaning as the american expression 'my ass', for asarcastic display of disbelief or disapproval, with the added bonus of calling out the person.

The usage is very powerful and similar as a response to an inane comment, such as:
 
"the olive garden is good italian food"
 
in which case 'good italian food, my ass' or 'good italian food, 你的頭'
are both socially acceptable.
 
However, if one were to make the standalone statement "the olive garden is good italian food, my ass", in english this is acceptable;
to use '你的頭' does not work as it can only be used in the form of a response, since its 'your' head (Remember you need to call out the person too).  To effectively change the sarcasm direction one must substitute the '你' with '我' which is wo3, for 'my'.

Growing up, my dad used this as a template all the time because a simple 'no' did not add any additional insult or ridicule, and as a Chinese person, one cannot just end there.  Since it was my 'head' the saying clearly singles out the stupid person with the stupid comment.  This is a very important element to understand as part of a Chinese family. 

So when I asked for a hamburger, a nintendo, bicycle brake pads, basically anything unnecessary, I was met with ', 你的頭'

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I figured I would kick start the blog with a series of posts known as
'realizations - calling things by the wrong name'

 Here is #1

 Last week I read a recipe out of Pei Mei's Cookbook requiring lemon
juice. Pei Mei is analogous to the Julia Child of chinese cooking.
Anyway, I didn't recognize the chinese characters so I looked it up on
my electronic dictionary. It was then that I realized the word
'lemon' is '檸檬' which is pronounced ning2 mong3.

 This is embarrassing because, for 10 years I had always thought it was
pronounced ling2 mong3, which is what I personally believed to be a romanization of 'lemon'.

 I guess my pronounciation was made worse because I knew the romanization of
'lime' is '萊姆', or lai2 mu3. 

 That really threw me off.  But, basically this means that I've incorrectly said 'lemon' how ever many
times like a jackass since the year 2000. 

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