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Sifting through symbols

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-15 08:25

It was a cold, windy night as dark, ominous clouds started to gather around a bright full moon. I was standing at a lonely bus stop in the far eastern reaches of Chaoyang district waiting for my ride home. As I berated myself for not wearing an extra layer, I heard a bus grinding its gears in the distance, I turned to look, hoping it was the one I needed. Instead, to my horror, as a flash of lightening tore a bright gash in the night, I saw the numbers 666 on the bus slowly lumbering my way.

Childhood memories of Sunday school and apocalyptic movies filled my mind, all of which confirmed one thing; the number 666 is evil! "It's the bus to hell," I thought as I fled. I wasn't going to wait around to find out. I hailed a passing cab, jumped in and hightailed it out of there.

Granted, my story is slightly exaggerated but there really is bus 666 in Beijing and even today I haven't mustered the courage, well maybe the time, to see where it goes. It's probably not the bus to hell, but I just can't seem to shake that connotation and the imagery associated with the number 666 in the West. Sure it's silly, but then again symbolism affects us more than we might think and can led to awkward situations.

Chinese love numerology and use it all the time. There are numbers for making a lot of money "888" and those for of a long life "99". But there also is a number for death "4". That is why you should never give your Chinese friends four of anything. Numerology is also why every Wang, Liu and Zhang wanted to get married on August 8, 2008.

A number of years ago I attempted to take a Chinese class but things quickly turned sour when the teacher asked me what my favorite number was.

"Si," I replied in my terribly pronounced Chinese. The teachers face went pale. "No, no no!" She screamed.

"What do you mean no!" I responded in shock. "Yes, si is my favorite!"

"You ghost...you evil!" she said in heavily accented English.

I wasn't trying to cause trouble "4" really has been a favorite number of mine since I was young. Needless to say, I quickly lost that teacher. But the experience wasn't a total loss. It gave me a new favorite number "8" which I proudly declare safe in the knowledge that my Chinese friends will praise my choice.

Numbers are just one thing. I know a Chinese guy that loves to watch Western horror films. He likes watching Freddy and Jason rack up the body count, but one thing always puzzled him about such horror films...why is there always a full moon? To Chinese people a full moon is good luck. So why are Freddy and Jason out there causing pain and destruction on such an auspicious night?

"In the West a full moon is a sign of bad luck. It's when all the evil creatures come out to wreak havoc," I told him as I mimicked a vampire sinking his teeth into someone's neck. "So you don't celebrate the full moon like we Chinese?" he asked.

"No, in America there is no Mid-Autumn Festival when we families get together and gaze up at the full moon hoping it will bestow good fortune on us. Instead we have Freddy and Jason." I explained to him.

It was a revelation for him. "Now I will have to watch them all over again!" he squealed in delight.

And there's animals, which can also carry a great deal of symbolic weight. My biggest gaff to date involved the innocent chicken. I was teaching my class American slang and I wrote on the board "You're a chicken".

"What do you think this means?" I asked the class with a smile. I was met with a room full of blank stares.

"Teacher, we should not talk about this," the female monitor of the class said with slight irritation.

"Why not! Are you a chicken?" I said laughing. Not a good thing to say, of course, because while in America calling someone chicken means calling them a 'coward' in Chinese it refers to a 'female prostitute'.

It's nothing groundbreaking to know that symbols affect us, but sometimes it's hard to put that influence into perspective until you go somewhere where the symbols, by and large, are completely different.

It is time well spent to gain a basic understanding of a culture's symbolism and for those of us who seem, more often than not, to learn the hard way, it may help us keep our foot out of our mouth.