Compared to other years, nothing crazy happened. No one knocked over any Christmas trees, no family members with mental illnesses declared the Christmas Hot Pot poisoned, dumping it into the kitchen sink and storming off.
Not to say that Christmas wasn’t interesting. Mandarin, like always, is in italics.
(The scene: Ernie is outside an Asian Senior Citizens Center in Oakland on Christmas Eve, waiting to pick up his grandmother. He is on his cellphone.)
Ernie’s 93 year old Grandmother: HELLO?!
Ernie: Nai nai, I’m downstairs.
Grandmother: WHO IS THIS!?
Ernie: It’s Ernie.
Grandmother: WHO!?
Ernie: ERNIE. YOUR GRANDSON.
Grandmother: BERNIE?!
Ernie: No! ERNIE! ERRR-NEEE…
Grandmother: HOLD ON, I’M PASSING THE PHONE!
Ernie’s distant relative, in a thick Shanghainese accent: Ernie-ah, this is your gu jie!
Now, let me back up a minute. In Shanghai, Mandarin is the official language, but no one speaks Mandarin – they speak Shanghainese. I don’t think of Shanghainese as a language dialect as much as I think of it as a cruel joke for parents born in Shanghai to make fun of their American kids, who were forced to take Chinese lessons growing up in only Mandarin. When I was in China with my father a couple of years ago, he would talk at the dinner table fluently with Helen, the girl he would try to set me up with later on the trip. I could only stare in horror as I imagined what they were saying: “Oh, I don’t know Mister Hsiung, are you sure your son likes me?” “Why of course. He would love to take your hand in marriage and give you a green card to the United States, where you can produce many healthy, Chinese heterosexual offspring.”
On top of this, I didn’t know what a gu jie was. In the English language, a cousin on your dad’s side called the same thing as a cousin on your mom’s side. That’s that. In Chinese, they have a whole fucked up system to it. I hadn’t met the older couple until a year ago, so I was unfamiliar of the terms. And I had to be on my best behavior, which meant no smoking, putting the radio station to KOIT at the lowest possible volume, and bowing and smiling to practically everything they said, even though I couldn’t understand their think Shanghainese accents half the time.
Ernie: Hello, gu tie. I’m here to pick everyone up – we’re going to father’s house.
Grandmother: NO WE’RE NOT
Gu jie: She means, “are you sure? I thought the dinner was Christmas Day.”
Ernie: Hold on, guo tie. Let me call my father and ask.[on phone]
Ernie: Dad, I’m at grandma’s house with guo tie and…
Dad: What did you just call her?
Ernie: Guo tieh.
Dad: You just called your grandmother’s brothers daughter a potsticker. It’s gu jie.
And that was Christmas, for the most part. Eating dinner at a large dinner table, trying not to make eye contact with the relative I inadvertantly disrespected by calling her a tasty pan-fried meat dumpling. Hey, “pan-fried meat dumpling!” That should so be a pick-up line.
Aw … it’s not so bad. What if you had called her something really insulting?
This greeting’s a tad late, and from a complete stranger who’s been reading LYD for a while now … but Happy New Year to you, Ernie!
Pan-fried meat dumpling? Sounds delicious to me! Okay, now I’m hungry.
Ernie, didn’t you have a boyfriend a couple of years ago? When you realized your father was trying to hook you up with Helen, you could have said “Dad, what will my boyfriend think?” I would guess that would throw a monkey wrench in many a well-laid marriage arrangement … right?
LOL! I gotta kick outta that. Something similar can happen in a Jewish family where the grandparents and parents wil start talking in Yiddish to make sure the children/grandchildren don’t understand what the conversation’s about.
hahaha! i’m a chinese living in Singapore, so i understand all those titles one needs to address to all the relatives as a chinese. this is so funny u made me burst out laughing at the monitor at work!
btw, i love to eat guo tie!
When I read what you called your gu jie the first time, I thought “Why is Ernie calling her a fried potsticker?” I guess my Chinese is good when it comes to food vocabulary. Sad.
You know, there’s a t-shirt in there someplace. You know, the retro White Guy[tm] face with “guo tie” underneath and “pan-fried meat dumpling” on the back? That would rock!
oh Bernie, your life is so much more fun than mine.
With no older Polish-only speaking relatives, I can now only live vicasiously ethnic through your stories!
I wonder if panfriedmeatdumpling.com is taken?
sounds like the time my brother tried to ask for a screwdriver in navajo and ended up asking for a “sewing machine’s grandmother.” we still laugh about that.
I haven’t had guo tie in a long time.
Even if your family is crazy, homemade guo tie is still better than restaurant guo tie — that’s the bright side.
Best wishes for 2004, Ernie.
Fascinating.
But for us Jews, “meat dumpling” would qualify as a high term of endearment.
that was hilarious. and yes, the same thing does happen with Jews and Hebrew/Yiddish, i can attest to that…
little. yellow. different.
Ernie at little. yellow. different., relating a holiday mishap with a difficult dialect of Mandarin: [on phone] Ernie: Dad, I’m at grandma’s house with guo tie and… Dad: What did you just call her? Ernie: Guo tieh. Dad: You just
When I was a kid, we would visit my Dad’s family in western Louisiana at New Year’s. They all spoke Cajun French. My (German) Mom knows none, and I picked up only a few words. My aunt would usually do something like greet us, then turn to my Dad and say a whole paragraph in French, with my Mom’s name in there three times. When Mom would ask what she said, Dad would hesitate and then claim it was “She’s glad you brought a cake.”
Oh Ernie, I have been calling you “My Little Potsticker” for YEARS, literally.
Kinda reminds me of how often the words for “salted preserved soybeans” in Cantonese are often mispronounced to the words that roughly translate to “sh*t.” =b
Haha, that was hilarious… moreso because I know exactly what you’re talking about. Whenever I mispronounce my gf’s chinese name, it comes out as curry (ga lay), rather than beauty (GA lay) , or something.
Ernie,
It’s been awhile since I spoke in Mandarin, now that I’m in the land of the rising sun, however, I do seem to remember some embarrasing incident where my mother, instead of calling her teacher, “diao (sp?) lau shi” in the proper tones – was using the incorrect tones. She called that poor lady, who came to our house! who fed our dog with chopsticks! who was so very gracious! Professor Penis for a majority of her Mandarin mastering career…*sigh* Those were the good old days!
I guess this whole episode just makes you the “gu tie guy.”
OF course, things could be *much worse* in relative terms; if you were a stereotypical (in the worst sense) redneck up in the woods, anyone and everything could potentially be one term– “Your Baby’s Daddy.”
“Who’s that, ya’ll? Yor sister?”
“Nah– she’s mah Baby’s Daddy.”
Or some such.
Ernie, you need to use bold for the Shanghainese. This was too funny, all of it. And thanks for the interesting Chinese links. Anyway, we will know that Shanghainese is big time when there is Shanghainese rock music–at least, that’s what will do it for me–just like there is Cantonese, Mandarin and Hokkien rock music.
Hmm, I see some new slang emerging from this. You could use potsticker like a term of endearment, sort of like homie or dogg. “What up, potsticker?” I think it has a nice ring to it…
They have that “whole fucked up system” in Swedish too… although I’m not sure whether it’s just for grandparents or all relatives it can apply to. I think the latter.
You know, there’s a whole Chinese-American version of the Bend it Like Beckham script buried within your weblog. We should work up a treatment, shop it around, and become millionaires. Have your people call my people.
Frankly, if you called ME your little “pan-fried meat dumpling,” I’d be yours in a heartbeat. Half a heartbeat, even.
Something similar happened when I went back to Singapore and tried to ask for “more chilli” in Chinese [after not speaking any in 2 years]. The mandrin is “lah jiao”, but I came up with “lan jiao”, Hokkien for dick, thereby begging the nice hawker stall lady for more dick. Nice.
You crack me up, Bernie. Erm, ERNIE.
Found you in my referrals, read your Christmas story, and blogrolled ya.
Though not as funny, my grandfather – a first generation German-American – would tell jokes in English and then the punchlines in German.
We grandkids never knew if he was laughing at his own jokes or at the confused and befuddled looks on our faces…
Hi
just came accross your blog now, and from the amount of responses I´m guessing I should have been here ages ago 
I can so realate to the language fence 
(can´t really be called a barrier can it?)
Cheers from Iceland
At least you have the resources to know what these names mean!
In my WASP family we have adult blue blood relatives with names like GiGi, KiKi, NaNa, GoGo, Cookie and Binki. I don’t what any of that shit means. Perhaps we are all too drunk at family functions to enunciate *real* names.
Grandmothers are cute.
Charles Manson?
Hiya! Longtime reader, but I’ve never commented.
Ya know, I’ve got a t-shirt that says “I (heart) Guo Tie”. Maybe you could have used it. 
Very funny!! Your life is very interesting!
Hilarious!! Grandmas…
hey, i just want to say i really enjoy your blog. i’ve been reading it for a few months now and it’s incredibly funny!
“gu jie” sounds more Cantonese then it does Mandarin. It’s what I call my grandmother’s brothers daughter in Cantonese.
Strange.
Wait. If she said this in Shanghainese, shouldn’t it be “gu jah” or somesuch? Or maybe I’m just talking out of my ass. I’ve always called aunts from my dad’s side of the family by the Mandarin “gu gu”.
this is hilarious! I just stumbled onto your site and now am addicted.
gu jie guo tie – sounds like a tongue twister waiting to happen.
Heh. I’m married into a family in Taiwan. My gaffe was calling my father-in-law “baby”. That’s Bao-Bao instead of Ba-Ba. Everyone had a great laugh while I looked from face to face with a puzzled, polite smile. Then he called me “dude” and everthing was alright. Keeping the aunts and uncles straighted out has been quite a challenge too.
I’ve enjoyed reading your blog – you’re a damn fine writer.
Take care.
Ernie,
Your site has saved me from temp jobitis (the slow melting of your brain cells from sheer boredom)! Thanks for the hilarious insight insight into your life. I think you’ve inspired me to get a blog of my own. Any suggestions on a good host site?