We've Got Your Cultural Sensitivity Right Here

I dropped into 比胜客 (Pizza Hut) last night and tried one of their special promotion pizzas. Apparently following the New Year's World Celebration theme that ran from mid-January to early February, The 比胜客 executives decided to capitalize on the romantic vibes of our Valentine's Day with a new promotional roll-out: Arabian Nights. (Stay to watch the video; it's worth it.) Included on the specialty menu for the month are roasted lamb chops, "Magic Apple Tea," a plate of chopped lamb and hummus with something like pita bread, a curiously named dessert--the "Harem Sweeties"--that look like cookies, and the "Arabian Nights Pizza."

Last night I tried the lamb and hummus, and it was good enough (and close enough to Middle Eastern cuisine) that I decided to give the specialty pizza a go. I normally pass on any of the specialty pizzas, because shrimp (which sends me into anaphylactic shock) is a key ingredient in most of them, and Chinese cooks tend not to be great withholding one ingredient while making a dish. I carefully interrogated the waitress (her mouth coyly covered by a gauzy orange veil a la "I Dream of Jeannie") about what exactly was on the pizza, and once I'd determined that the pizza did not, would not, and wasn't supposed to ever contain any shellfish of any kind, I ordered a small. It turned out to be the best pizza I've ever had a 比胜客, in China or at home. Unfortunately, the recipe for the pizza isn't bound to help international relations that much.

The "Arabian Nights Pizza" is made with a special, savory sauce (which is what makes it so good), corn, garbanzo beans, red and green peppers, beef sausage and--here's the kicker--pork sausage: not exactly halal. I don't expect too many Middle-Easterners to be popping in to the restaurant to admire the waitresses' 可爱 little face-coverings and chow down on some pig intestines, though hopefully the little faux pas will be smoothed over somewhat by the very "Open" idea of honoring another culture's pre-hamburger history.

Bu Dui and Context-Blindness
Originally posted: 06:23, 2007-10-06

I've heard a lot of speculation about how China will one day take over the global market, crushing America's economic system, and I have to say I'm not particularly concerned. Yes, manufacturing and much unskilled labor are easily exported to China, and even some skilled labor (as in computer work) is coming here as well. I don't see China becoming an innovator anytime soon, though, and as long as America can keep up on the innovation curve, I'm sure it's future is safer than we expect.

The reason I don't see China becoming an innovator anytime soon is that there just isn't much creativity in China. Innovation requires a certain ability to see the larger pictures, and contextualization just doesn't seem to be a Chinese trait. For example, I go to a restaurant and am asked, "Ni yao he shenme?" ("What do you want to drink?") I respond, "Wo yao he xuebi." ("I want to drink Sprite") The immediate response is "Meiyou," despite there being cans of Sprite visible in the refrigerator. The problem is that my pronunciation of xue is slightly off, so it sounds as though I'm ordering "shuibi," which doesn't mean anything in a restaurant. Once I get up and point to a can of Sprite (this after trying to correct my pronunciation a few times to no success), the waitress will nod and say, "A xuebi." The waitress doesn't take the time to think, "Let's see this foreigner speaks bad Chinese. I asked him what he wanted to drink, and he said he wanted to drink something I didn't quite understand. What do we have to drink that sounds like 'shuibi?' Tea? No. Beer? No. Oh, xuebi! He must want that."

Granted, when it's all written out, it sounds like thinking through such things is a lot of work, but most Westerners make such adjustments all the time. If an Aussie visits an American bar and orders a be-ah, he can more or less rely on not being told, "Sorry, we don't serve bears."
The inflexibility goes a bit further than this though, even into the writing of clearly intelligible hanzi. I recently tried writing out the phrase "Qing man man shuo" ("Please speak slowly") while trying to hold a bilingual conversation with a man. Unfortunately, I switched the writing order of strokes five and six in the character qing. The result was that the entire phrase became meaningless. I rewrote the phrase, creating an identical version of it, only this time writing those two strokes in the correct order, and suddenly my chicken-scratch meant, "Please speak slowly."

Another illustration of this is the phrase 青井工牛, which I took a picture of in a public bathroom. This translates into something like "green well work cow" and is meaningless. I showed the picture to a number of Chinese people, and each time they laughed and said it meant nothing. I would ask why someone would write this in a bathroom, and nearly every time they would say something like "No one would write this. It doesn't mean anything." One person told me that it was probably an example of someone using characters that sounded like the proper characters in order to be cute, and that there was a huge movement to stamp out this sort of abuse of the language. "It's probably just someone's idea of a clever name," she said. Why would someone put this in a bathroom of all places? "Oh, sometimes people might think it's clever to put a clever name in a bathroom." Jia was the only person (after twenty) who took the context into account. It turns out the phrase just had a few missing pieces: 请讲卫生 , roughly, "Please be clean." It seems exactly the sort of thing you'd put in a bathroom, but only Jia took the time to consider the context.

This inflexibility extends to written English as well. Once the guy I was talking to proved incapable of reading Chinese written out of order, I tried writing from right to left "t-u-o-b-a," which shows on the page as "about." This, though, was also meaningless, simply because it was written in the wrong order. And while trying to get students to stop saying, "Oran-gee," I wrote "oran-zh" on the board, figuring the pinyin "zh" sound might help get the final across. "No, teacher," they cried, "Gee-ee, not zed aitch-a. Gee-ee." Everything is either dui or bu dui, right or wrong. Either everything is perfect and in keeping with normal practices, or it's just plain wrong.

But it doesn't stop there. If I want to eat sweet and sour chicken, I might try asking whether the cook can make tong su li ji with chicken instead of the usual pork. No, this is "impossible." If I ask whether the cook can cook chicken in the same sauce he uses for the tong su li ji, this is also "impossible"; there's no item like that on the menu. How could you possibly cook that?
It goes as far as a denial of basic reality in some cases. Recently, all the teachers from the school went out to eat. Unfortunately for me, the fried rice at the restaurant was cooked with shrimp, to which I'm allergic. One of the Chinese teachers was kind enough to order another fried rice without shrimp for me, and when the dish came out, of course, it had shrimp. (After all, that dish is made with shrimp. How could it not be made with shrimp?) Still, we had to work to convince the Chinese teacher that the dish had shrimp in it. "It's impossible. I said we wanted no shrimp." What were these shrimp-like things in the rice then? "That's ham." Why does this ham have a curly tail and pink and white stripes like a shrimp? "Oh, those are shrimp!"

So rest easy, America. Be sure that if anyone does actually manage to build a better mousetrap in Beijing, he will be sure to toss it out after repeatedly hearing, "That's not a mousetrap. Everyone knows what mousetraps look like, and this doesn't look like a mousetrap. Bu dui."