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

The Internet, in particular, is worth a special mention for its role in spreading slang and other new words. It was the sudden appearance of Internet cafés in the 1990s, for example, that first helped popularize the concept of coolness in China. The word 酷 kù ( coo ), a transliteration of the English word “cool,” first appeared in Hong Kong and Taiwan; young people in mainland China learned it over the Internet from their friends there and spread the term at home. By the late 1990s, kù was known on most college campuses across China.

Here’s the thing: you can live in China forever-you can even live in China forever and speak great Chinese-and fail to notice even the merest hint of the subcultures represented by the slang in this book. For many people, the Chinese are the shy and almost absurdly innocent students in their classes, who look embarrassed at the merest mention of dating or sex; the white-collar staff who never speak up at meetings and leave their Western bosses convinced they’re incapable of expressing an opinion or thinking up an original idea; the prim, strict tutors who conjure up an image of China as a land of studying machines; and the dolled-up, gold-digging girls who hang on the arms of rich men in shady bars late at night.

These impressions of China are not inaccurate-they just aren’t everything. Pay just a little more attention and you’ll notice a fuller array of people and have a more nuanced portrait of the life humming below the surface. You may notice that on Thursday nights this one Italian sandwich shop fills up with gay men grabbing dinner before the weekly gay night at the upscale bar around the corner, or that the old guy fixing bikes down the street is an ex-con who spent a couple of decades in prison, or that the middle-aged couple snuggling in the booth near you at that Hong Kong-style restaurant are clearly two married people having an affair, or that all the women’s bathrooms are locked in this one public building nearby because there’s a flasher who lurks in the neighborhood.

I have a running gag with an American friend of mine who, despite two years of living in Beijing, insists she has never heard a single Chinese curse word. I bombard her with text messages and e-mails every single day, itemizing every swear I hear on the street: 10:00 a.m.-middle-aged woman on bus yelling “Fuck!” into cell phone; 3:30 p.m.-two college-age guys walking behind me while standing at ATM saying, “That fucking shit was fucking ri-fucking-diculous”; 11:30 p.m.-two teenage girls in McDonald’s bitching about some woman they keep referring to as “that old cunt.” And every time I see her, my friend says again that she never hears anything, not a single “fuck” or “shit” or “damn.” And every time, I keep insisting: “You just need to know what to hear.”

How to read this book

So, how do Chinese keyboards work? The answer is 拼音 pīnyīn ( peen yeen ), literally “spell sound.” A system for the romanization of Chinese words using the Latin alphabet, it was adopted in 1979 by the Chinese government. Students of Chinese as a second language start out by learning pinyin and pinyin pronunciation, as do Chinese schoolchildren. And road signs in China often depict pinyin beneath the Chinese characters.

Using pinyin, the word for “me,” 我, can also be written wŏ (pronounced wuh ). That symbol over the o is a tone mark; there are four different marks each representing one of the four different tones-first tone, second tone, third tone, and fourth tone-that may be used to pronounce each Chinese syllable. (Because it is so cumbersome to type pinyin with the tone marks in place, people often leave them out or stick the tone number behind the syllable, as in “wo3.”)

Typing in Chinese is done using pinyin. It’s a cumbersome process because Chinese has a huge number of homonyms. Thus, the way most character input systems work, to type 我 you type in wo, and then a window pops up showing the huge range of characters that are all pronounced wuh . You scroll through, and when you get to the right one, you hit enter and the character is typed on the screen. It’s a slow process, and should you ever find yourself working an office job in China, your Chinese coworkers will be mightily impressed by how quickly you’re able to type in English.

There was once a time when pinyin was a contender to replace the character-based Chinese writing system altogether, but that never really panned out, and the government settled for simplifying many notoriously hard-to-write traditional characters into what is known as simplified Chinese, the writing system used in mainland China, as opposed to traditional Chinese, which is still used in Taiwan, Macao, and Hong Kong).

The words in this book are all presented in three different ways. First I give the simplified Chinese characters for the term. Then appears the pinyin, in bold, with tone marks. Then, for those who are new to Chinese and have not yet learned pinyin, I have written out, in italics and parenthesized, the word’s phonetic pronunciation (although pinyin uses the Latin alphabet, the letters do not correspond to English pronunciation, so you won’t be able to pronounce pinyin without having studied it first).

As mentioned, the words in this book are all given in simplified Chinese. There are, however, a very few instances when I list a slang term that is only used in Taiwan, in which case I also give the traditional characters, since Taiwan still uses the old character system.

You’ll notice that most of the terms in this book can be used throughout Mandarin-speaking China, but because I live in Beijing, words specific to Beijing and northern China in general are a bit more well-represented than southern and Taiwanese terms. However, as the capital of China, Beijing is used as the national standard and has an inordinate amount of influence; thus a great deal of Beijing slang winds up spreading throughout the country. In any case, rest assured that you won’t find yourself using southern terms with an uncomprehending northerner, or vice versa, as I have taken care to indicate whenever a term is native to just one part of China.

I have also been careful to note how strong or vulgar the insults and swear words are, and to situate the words within the appropriate context. After all, we don’t want to unleash, onto the unsuspecting Chinese populace, readers armed with utterly inappropriate words for inappropriate situations. With this book you won’t unwittingly yell, “You poopie head!” at the son of a bitch who grabs your ass while walking down the street or shout, “Motherfucking cunt!” when you stub your toe in front of a sweet old grandmother.

You should also be aware that many of the terms in this book are almost exclusively spoken, and never written, and thus may not have a set way of being expressed in characters-especially if the word originated out of a non-Mandarin dialect. Fortunately, the Internet has given people a reason to agree on ways to write various colloquial expressions, and so I have managed to give the most commonly used characters for every term in this book. But, especially with a few of the extremely localized words, you may find that not everyone will agree with the written form given or even know of a way to write the word.

And finally, it’s worth keeping in mind that alternative subcultures haven’t permeated Chinese society as thoroughly as they have in the West, where everyone knows about once-underground ideas like hip-hop and gay culture and surfers and stoners-the margins of society from which much slang is born. For this reason, entire sections of this book are filled with terminology that your average, mainstream Chinese will have never heard. At the least, you will in most cases need to be talking to someone from a certain subculture for them to know the words associated with that scene.