Not long ago I received an email from Kevin Chang, our much beloved Chinese Program Director, in which he asked my opinion about a catchy Chinese phrase that he thought CAIS ought to use in our print material celebrating the Chinese New Year—the year of the ram. It is a testament to Kevin’s genuine gentlemanliness that he would even ask me. I mean, Kevin is an educated native speaker who spends his days contemplating matters of the Chinese language—am I really capable of issuing an opinion that would trump his? No. Just no. But Kevin is a super polite guy, so he asks me about these things. The phrase was míng yáng sì haĭ which means something like “make your name known throughout the world.” This phrase is usually written in Chinese as 名扬四海, but Kevin had written it as 名羊四海. Notice that the second character in each sentence is different. In the first sentence the character 扬 is used which means “to make known.” In Kevin’s sentence, however, the character 羊 is used. The pronunciation of these two characters is identical—yáng. “Kevin made a mistake in Chinese, and I caught him!” I thought, smugly. Surely he had typed pinyin into his computer and carelessly selected the wrong character for yang among the choices the computer had provided. (Those of you who read Chinese know where this is going). I wrote back, pointing this out. Well, the character Kevin used, 羊, means “ram.” The shortest unit of measurable time known to exist is that instant between the time you hit “send” on an email and the time you realize you should not have sent the mail. “It’s a clever pun!” I realize—too late. Duh. Kevin wrote back with a politeness that outdid his usual tone, and he explained to me that this type of pun was common during the New Year. He asked if I wanted to change it to the literal meaning (i.e., render the phrase less meaningful and less fun). Like I said, am I really capable of issuing an opinion that would trump his? Duh.
What this story illustrates (aside from Kevin’s graciousness) is one of the (many) great things about the Chinese Language; there are limitless (to this second language learner) opportunities for word play. Chinese is incredibly rich in homophones. Sure, in English we have homophones too (two, too) such as pair, pear and pare; where, wear and ware . . . (for a fun game, ask your children to identify as many as they can). But English simply cannot compare in this regard. Don’t believe me? Well, if I look under the pinyin pronunciation of “yang” in my Cihai (辞海 Sea of Words) dictionary, there are 67 separate characters, all with the same pronunciation—such as 扬 meaning “to make known” or 羊, meaning “ram” or 65 others. Think that’s a lot? The famous linguist Zhao Yuanren 赵元任 (1892-1982) who taught at UC Berkeley in the ’50s once wrote a 
92-character poem (shown to the right) composed entirely of characters pronounced shi. There are 125 characters pronounced shi listed in my Sea of Words dictionary. As an experiment, I counted the number of characters in Sea of Words pronounced ji, because I had a hunch that there were more than 125. I was right (and without the help of Kevin Chang!); there are 219 characters pronounced ji.
As we approached the New Year, word play abounded. Your children learned all sorts of clever phrases such as nían nían yŏu yú which either means “every year we eat fish at the New Year” or “every year is more abundant that the previous one,” depending on which character is used to represent the sound yú. Guess what most Chinese families eat for dinner on New Year’s Eve?
And speaking of the lunar New Year’s Eve, here’s an example of how word play can get political. Every year the Chinese government announces the dates of national holidays—such as the lunar New Year—dictating when hundreds of millions of people may take off of work. For as long as anyone can remember, the lunar new year holiday has officially begun on New Year’s eve. Until last year. In an unexpected and unexplained turn of events, last year the central government announced that the holiday would officially begin a day later, on New Year’s day; New Year’s Eve was a work day. The Chinese term for lunar New Year’s eve is chú xī, which is written as 除夕. But this sounds a lot like chú Xī (a slightly different tone on the second character) which can be written as 除习—the second character is the surname of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the phrase means “get rid of President Xi.” Speculation on Chinese social media was that in the first year of Xi Jinping’s presidency, the first day of the most important holiday of the year could not be a homophone for “get rid of President Xi”! How is President Xi doing these days? One indication, is that this year the official beginning of the lunar New Year holiday has returned to New Year’s eve.
Amidst all the variations and layers in meaning, one understanding is abundantly clear: your children should be admired mightily for embracing this incredibly complicated and nuanced language!
And Happy New Year, and by that we mean Happy New Year.
Best,
Jeff
Enjoy a video of the Mass Greeting 2015 performances to welcome the Year of the Ram.