little. yellow. different. A weblog by Ernie Hsiung

the return of ernie’s mom

Yesterday night, 10:45pm. The phone rings. (Chinese is contained in <BLINK> tags italicized.)

Ernie: Hello?
Voice: Where the hell have you been? You haven’t picked up your phone in three days. Are you dead? Did something happen to you? Are you living somewhere else now?
Ernie: Hi, Ma.
Mom: I was worried about you. You never tell me anything.
Ernie: I found a job now. At Yahoo!. It’s an Internet company.

I say the word “Internet” in English, like my mother actually understands the concept of the Internet. Actually, my mom does have an idea of the Internet: it’s how her darling son met his bad sodomite friends and it’s the reason why he lives in sin. Also, it helps him make money. I don’t know what she calls it in Chinese.

Mom: So when do you leave the house?
Ernie: I work pretty long hours, ma. 7:30am, and I just got home 10 minutes ago. I wake up before 7 now.
Mom: What a relief! I haven’t heard from you in days, I was going to call the police! I thought you were missing!
Ernie: (I haven’t ran away from home. Yet.)
Mom: What did you say?
Ernie: Nothing! Good night!

That conversation sounds eerily familiar. Except that I don’t work for an internet company. My mom uses “e-mail” synonmyously for “internet” (it’s quite, actually!).

Evil sin Shenanigans. Arrr! Ernie.

Now that you pass by her house on your commute, you should stop by once in while. Maybe have her cook you dinner?

BETTER YET - You can move back in with your parents! Think of how much closer to work you’d be!!!

I still can’t believe she called all those times last Saturday.

I’m lucky if I talk to my mother once a month.

国际互è?”网. That’s what it is in Chinese. Wonder what TCP is.

Interesting — I can see the Chinese characters, except there are three ?s before the last character — I’m guessing that’s not what I’m supposed to see. What is the direct transliteration of those characters?

Also, congratulations on the new job, Ernie.

Well at least she only thought you were missing. My mother always thinks I’m dead. Occasionally by my own hand.

Duh. Just to clarify my question: what is the direct transliteration of all the characters that together mean “Internet” in Chinese, not “what is the direct transliteration of the three question marks,” which is what I seem to be asking.

internet translated to chinese:

wong2 ru4.

directly translated means

webbed road.

sometimes the noun si4 jie4 meaning the world is added to it.

So yeah, the web is where we meet our sodomite friends.

I’m a sodomite!

Not quite - wang luo is ‘network’ - the second character shares a phonetic component with lu ‘road,’ but has the ‘threads’ radical, making it ‘net, twine.’

Usually, people just say wang. Occasionally you’ll read yintewang, but that’s a shitty transliteration and it only gets used if ‘wang’ doesn’t sound like enough. So ‘internet company,’ for example, would probably be yintewang gongsi. On the other hand, Yahoo!, being a website, is more like wangzhan (net station). A single webpage (i.e., one HTML file) would be wangye, ‘net page.’

my mother knows nothing about the internet as well. she thinks it’s full of sex crazed drunk pot smoking freaks. oh wait. hey, i guess she does know plenty after all!

My mom uses an AOL account and still composes her emails (infrequent though they are) in all caps. She’s a real estate agent and no one really supervises her. Sometimes I’m surprised she has the number of clients she does, but bitchy middle-aged asian women seem to make good no-bs agents. At least that’s what I think.

Internet is wanglu 網路. If your ma reads any newspapers or watches any TV that’s what she knows it as.

does this mean you know how to say Yahoo! in Chinese?

When the hurricane came through D.C., my mom was certain I was dead. Oy.

there is increasing evidence here that my mother is living a double life as a chinese woman in san francisco.

your mom sounds like a typical chinese mom right out of a movie, pretty funny, but i wouldn’t want her to be my mom.

youd be surprised at how many government folks call outlook or IE “internet”. “I can’t get on my internet!”. meanwhile, it’s something much more specific and rarely actually related to the connection.

p.s. my mother, god bless her heart, is quite computer illiterate, but actually remembers the things i’ve taught her. she’s recently mastered keyboard shortcuts in certain programs that she uses. this makes me very happy.

your mom may come around

when I worked at yahoo about 6 years ago, I told my mom who was out in Erie, PA that I got a job there…she hadn’t even cruised the internet yet mind you. So i told her I am working at Yahoo,she said, “Oh yeah I like that drink.”…that’s humility at its best:)

ah, the joys of having a chinese mom. Mine speaks engrish though, and I have blessedly forgotten all of my chinese from childhood. When she gets really mad, I just nod and act sullen and wonder if I really want to know what she’s saying. But that doesn’t stop her from setting the definition of “overprotective” in engrish.

Ernie..call your Mom more often hon.