Joy Oh Joy

Cross-Cultural Misunderstandings, Ex-Pat Interactions and ESL Humor. Personal stories of an English Teacher living in Taiwan.

I'm hyperbolic, in a diminutive kind of way.

Curtains De Vil

When Curtains bought a dog from one of our students most of us knew it was a classically bad idea. We even made a bet on how long it would take the woman who reels in disgust from the offer to touch our co-worker’s pregnant belly to kill the dog. Don’t worry, it’s still alive and well, but it’s no longer her property. It’s happily living with her boyfriend.

In a related story, Rodog channeling Grizzly Adams went up into his mountain village where he foraged for berries, worked on his tying knots, and built a fire using only tree bark and his glasses as a magnifying glass. He also found an abandoned dalmatian and hoped to find it a home. He asked if any of us were interested in the dog. Curtains half listening to half of the conversation joined in.

“Does someone own the dog?” she asked.

“No, it’s abandoned,” Rodog said, again.

“So it’s not anyone’s dog,” quizically, “but it’s still running around town. I don’t understand.”

I said to her, “You see Curtains, not everyone has a boyfriend to give their dogs to when they get tired of them.”

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I Commend Your Efforts Sir

I got on the bus the other day as I often do. The bus driver started in on his normal bus driver spiel.

In Chinese of course, “Please don’t eat, please don’t drink. Sit down, take a rest.” Pretty basic stuff until he got to this English sign off. “English I no say. I love you. I love you.”

I think it was meant for me and you know what, I love him too.

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Text Speak

Much like text speech is slowly ruining children’s ability to spell in America it is also slowly ruining children’s ability to write in Taiwan. Here characters are built in several ways on keyboards and cellphones. One is literally building characters from their component parts. The other, which leads to problems, is a system of inputting phonetic letters, then choosing the character you want based on the pronunciation. As I’ve been studying for and recently passed the 2nd level of the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language my Chinese is not too rusty. So I thought this was funny.

My students were passing around notes in class. I took the note to which my students almost always respond in Chinese, “don’t worry, he can’t read Chinese.” (Not according to your government kiddos.) So I think they were a little surprised when I said this.

Essentially, “You spelled ‘Do you know who I like?’ ‘Do you no who you like?’” I thought I had them there, but it was not to be had.

A somewhat aloof ‘whatever’ was all I got.

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I Think That Kind of Noodles is Under the Counter

I’ve been studying Chinese for over nine months now. It’s been a fun and fulfilling experience and right now I’m cramming for a test that will measure my Chinese ability, the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language. Along with me my newest co-worker Ballywhomp, whose Britishisms frighten and confuse me., I’m using Skritter to study and learn Chinese character and vocabulary.

Well the two of us were looking at the sign on a beef noodle restaurant when he asked me, “Wade, what does that sign say?” (Of course I translated this into intelligible English. What he really said was, “Guvner, wha’ are those Chinese scribblings trying to mouth wag?”)

“It says hand made noodles.”

Ballywhomp realized he had been bamboozled and said, “Yes, I suppose that makes more sense than hand job noodles.”

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Everything is Better, In Space

My parents are visiting me this month and we’ve been doing a lot preparation for the trip as well as having a lot of discussions.

“Taiwan is a very impressive culture. I’ve been reading about some of the art they have at the National Palace Museum. I’m continually impressed by the things ancient cultures were able to achieve with the technologies they had,” my mother told me.

“Yes it is quite impressive,” I said, “unfortunately we’ve lost so much of that knowledge due to political and religious persecution during different eras in history.”

“Unfortunate, indeed,” my mom replied.

“Just think, I could be living in Space Taiwan right now.”

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A Sundae by Any Other Name is Just Ice Cream

Walking into work today I noticed Gamma had and almost empty sundae container from McDonald’s, empty besides the chocolate. She had eaten the ice cream, but not the chocolate. Unstoppable thought this was unusual too. “I see you have a chocolate sundae Gamma.”

“It was a chocolate sundae, but I ate all the Sundae so now it’s just chocolate,” replied Gamma.

This offended Unstoppable’s chocolate loving tendencies. “Gamma why didn’t you eat the chocolate. Usually I try to get a chocolate sundae, with extra chocolate. So far, no success.”

Gamma said, “I don’t really like the chocolate, but you can’t just order a sundae with nothing on it.”

“Yes, you can. It’s called an ice cream cone,” I chimed in.

“Gamma,” Gamma said in classic Gamma fashion. “Okay fine, but what am I going to do with all of this chocolate?”

Unstoppable and I traded a quick glance, then started laughing. “Gamma,” I said, “I believe that’s the first time anyone has ever said that sentence.”

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Who is your daddy?

Shortly after I started to learn Chinese I tried to show off my cultural understanding to my co-worker Maven, of my co-workers she seems to be the most knowledgeable on the widest range of things. I wanted to know about the Tao Te Ching.

At a very basic level Tao Te Ching could be translated as The way of life. Te or de is of, depending on the tone and character. However that’s not the de used in the title, it is the same de I use in my name and it means virtue. Ching doesn’t actually mean life, it means classic. So the title actually is “Way of Virtue Classic.” That’s more than you need to know and in fact more than I really knew at the time.

“Maven,” I asked, ” do you know the tao te ching(dao de jing)?” All of this of course in an atonal accent, somewhat resembling Chinese. We then drifted off for awhile talking about how some words, while appearing to have similar meanings, in fact were quite different. Eventually we got to this point.

“Laozi wrote that didn’t he?”

“Wade, you can’t say it like that.”

“Why? What does it mean?”

“It’s like…I’m your father!”

I immediately thought of replacing this classic line(see below) with just one loud “LAOZI!”

On a related note Taiwan Mama doesn’t like Star Wars. What’s up with that?

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Good Touch, Bad Touch

I would like to share a story about my friend and classmate, Bradblog. She’s new to Joy Oh Joy, but she joins a proud tradition of people with poorly portmanteau’d (poormanteau’d) nicknames, i.e. Rodog. Although Rodog’s nickname came from an ironic boast about my ability to make nicknames and Bradblog’s comes from her writing a blog.

The two of us were enjoying some subs over at subcar when Bradblog started to tell me that she suffers from muscle pain occasionally. I suggested she treat herself to a massage over at the Royal Thai Massage.

“I’m already taking some medication for it,” she said to me.

“Either way,” I said, “when has it ever been bad to pay Thai women to touch you?”

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In This Case, It’s Over Their Heads

“I’m really warm,” Gamma said. It was an unusual thing to say considering we had the Air Conditioner was on.

Unstoppable offered an explanation to this conundrum, “pregnant women are known to be hot.”

“I’ll say,” I remarked.

Rodog, overhearing all of this said, “Wade, that went right over her head.”

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What is a Title Anyway?

Gamma and I were having a conversation about kids. She has one on the way and I’m interested in a general sense. We were trying to decide whether the children of teachers were generally better or worse than the children of other parents. I put forth that they were worse, considering the number of teachers children I’ve grown up with.

“Well what about Taiwan Mama’s Taiwan Little Guy,” Gamma asked. To be fair Taiwan Little Guy is a saint. Gamma turned to Taiwan Mama and explained our conversation.

“I’m not really a teacher,” Taiwan Mama said. We both agreed and got back to our conversation.

“Goofy and you are both teachers. If you have a kid it will be really bad,” Gamma commented.

I thought for a second, “if Taiwan Mama (who has been teaching at Joy for over a decade) isn’t really a teacher, then I definitely am not a teacher.”

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