{"id":956,"date":"2008-12-12T19:20:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-13T00:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=956"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:38:14","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:38:14","slug":"great-expectorations-puke-spitting-and-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2008\/12\/great-expectorations-puke-spitting-and-face\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Expectorations: Puke, Spitting, and Face"},"content":{"rendered":"

What’s the difference between puking and spitting? Is one involuntary and the other on purpose? Joel, at China Hope Live<\/a> reports that maybe you see the difference differently if you’re Chinese or if you’re not.<\/p>\n

His nicely argued piece,\u00a0 Thinking Behind the Spitting<\/a> takes off from an interchange between a Chinese language teacher and a class of North American students. The teacher explained:\u00a0 “t\u00f9<\/em> means both ‘to spit’ and ‘to vomit,’ but if you change the tone \u2014 t\u01d4<\/em> \u2014 you can say ‘to spit’ with a third meaning: spitting to show your contempt for someone.” The big distinction in her mind was voluntary vs. involuntary actions. Spitting is involuntary.<\/p>\n

She was quite taken aback when her students explained that in their little culture, people controlled their spitting — what did they do, she asked, swallow <\/em>it?<\/p>\n

Spitting goes way back in the cross cultural dialogue. I recall hearing a friend of my parents retailing what I later found was a classic 19th century story:<\/p>\n

An American to Chinese: “I hear that in your country you eat dogs.”<\/p>\n

Chinese to an American: “I hear that in your country you blow your nose on a piece of cloth and put it in your pocket.”<\/p>\n

Responsible authorities in China have long worried about losing “face” in front of the world community. In the 1930s the Nationalist government’s New Life Movement<\/a> aimed, among other goals, to eliminate public spitting. Evidently they didn’t succeed in wiping out the habit as the following governments had a series of campaigns right down to the Olympics. Yet every meeting room that I went into in China had a large spittoon and people used them.<\/p>\n

Someone should have warned the Chinese 1970s factory that made decks of playing cards intended for Americans to use in playing “poker.” They labeled the package with two pinyin syllables that most closely represented the Chinese pronunciation: “Puke.”<\/p>\n

I wish that I had known about China Hope Live <\/a>when I wrote my piece\u00a0 “The Truth About Lies<\/a>,” a review of Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics<\/a> and Susan Blum’s Lies That Bind: Chinese Truth, Other Truths<\/a> which looked at “face” and “lies.”<\/p>\n

Joel has a bunch of insightful pieces, for instance “Chinese People Like it When You Lie to Them<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Another sharp piece talks about Chinese national face and the Olympics<\/a>, which includes a genial definition of “face” from Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Face cannot be translated or defined. It is like honor and is not honor…. It is amenable, not to reason but to social convention. It protracts lawsuits, breaks up family fortunes, causes murders and suicides….\u00a0 It is more powerful than fate or favor, and more respected than the constitution. It often decides a military victory or defeat, and can demolish a whole government ministry. It is that hollow thing which men in China live by. (195-196)<\/p>\n

Shakespeare’s Falstaff asks “What is<\/span> honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what<\/span> is that honour? air.<\/span><\/a>”<\/p>\n

Who’s right?<\/p>\n

I’m not too worried, but maybe I’m too phlegmatic,<\/p>\n

\n

\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What’s the difference between puking and spitting? Is one involuntary and the other on purpose? Joel, at China Hope Live reports that maybe you see the difference differently if you’re Chinese or if you’re not. His nicely argued piece,\u00a0 Thinking Behind the Spitting takes off from an interchange between a Chinese language teacher and a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[99,165,17,111,119,37],"tags":[248],"class_list":["post-956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs-and-carnivals","category-china","category-china-us","category-culture","category-english","category-foreign-views","tag-china-us"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-fq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4739,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions\/4739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}