Chaufa & Chop suey (Chop suey)

The other day when I was watching Big Bang Theory, an American sitcom about 4 nerds and one girl, I noticed one of the nerds said “I got fired because I don’t kaotow.” Immediately I related the word kaotow to a Chinese resource 磕頭 (ke tou2), a traditional ritual practiced by Chinese to the emperor or their superiors, which requires your forehead, knees and palms all touching the ground.

Later I read a report on English vocabulary with Chinese origins and proved my assumption for kaotow. It’s not surprising to know this because languages interact, or even “marry” each other like people do. Yesterday I talked about Chinese smartly translated from English. Today I can do the reverse and chat about some English words with Chinese origins.

A lot of them are about Chinese cuisines. Tofu is 豆腐(dou4 fu3). If you know someone who has a very tender and sympathetic heart but doesn’t seem so because he often speaks of his mind straightforward and hurts people’s feelings, we’ll say he has a mouth of a knife but a heart of tofu. 刀子嘴，豆腐心 (dao zi3 zui3, dou4 fu3 xing) Dim sum is Cantonese for snacks, 點心(dian3 xing)

Kung Pao Chicken 宮保雞丁(gong bao3 ji ding) is also a well-known cuisine. The dish is named after Ding Baozhen (1820–1886), a late Qing Dynasty official, whose title is宮保, a palatial guardian. Actually 宮保also refers to a way of cooking. You not only use chicken but other meats in 宮保 cuisines.

Another similar example is chop suey, or sometimes we call it 李公雜碎(li3 gong za2 sui4) Here李公 refers to 李鴻章(li3 hong2 zhang), a Qing Dynasty official. 雜碎 means assorted ingredients. Basically you use what is left in your kitchen and put them together to make this dish. So it’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that. That’s why I put my writing that don’t go under any catalog such as idioms, homophones, or xieuhouyu in “chop suey.” That’s a similar notion from cooking.

But be careful don’t call anybody chop suey, or you might get into trouble. When we use the term to call a person, it means “scum,” since the term implies something trivial and worthless.

Another thing you should take care is that chaufa, 炒飯(chao3 fan4), implies more than fried rice. In Taiwan, I don’t remember since when, it has become a euphemism for having sex, which inevitablly makes it on the list of what I try not to say in class.

磕頭=磕头

點心=点心

宮保雞丁=宫保鸡丁

雜碎=杂碎

李鴻章=李鸿章