Never look a resolution in the mouth
The best thing about Chinese life, of course, is that you get two cracks at New Year’s resolutions. That thought ran through my mind the other day as the creme de menthe liegeoise (or some such) Belgian chocolate melted in my mouth, my ninth such delight in the space of about 20 minutes. Well, people will keep on giving boxes of chocolates as gifts for that other great festival, Christmas.
Thus another year of failed efforts and unrealized expectations began to draw to an end, the disappointment anesthetized by that menthe. Or was it absinthe?
As any motivational trainer will tell you, the key to meeting goals is to make them specific and realizable. However, as any realist like me knows — I revel in the aphorism that a pessimist is an optimist with experience — the more vague your goals are, the more likely you are to keep them.
Which is where my failure to meet this year’s goal of eating fewer chocolates was, from the get-go, a no-goer. Late last year, rather than reciting ad nauseam, “I shall eschew chocolates of all kinds next year”, it would have been better, as I undertook that day’s midnight raid on the fridge, to have blathered, “Must try not to stuff my face with too many chocolates next year. Terms and conditions apply.”
So what will your New Year’s resolutions be? A bit less shopping on Taobao? Chatting to your smartphone less and more with your partner? Doing more to improve your Chinese or English? Finally learning how to decline Finnish nouns? (Finnish has always struck me as a language that is very easy to decline.)
But back to that box of chocolates for a moment (if I must). Hanging on the wall in the office is a small picture that includes a short script in Chinese that ends with the characters li and wu, meaning gift.
As is my show-offish wont, I exaggeratedly spoke this out aloud one night this week so the only person within earshot would break out in applause and say something complimentary like, “So after more than six years in China you know two words — sorry, one word — of Chinese. Congratulations.” But she went one better. “Liwu?” she said.
“Yes, liwu, I replied, plastering my best Chinese tones on the top of it, mixed in, I guess, with a dash of Finnish that I must have picked up in my sleep.
“Oh, li ooh’, you mean?” she said, seeming to underline that, unbeknown to me, Chinese, or at least those who hail from the wushi (sorry, ooshi) part of the realm, live in a (w) orld of voiceless w’s.
So imagine my surprise to discover later, poring over a dictionary — after an earlymorning visit to the fridge — that with a poorly applied splash of tones a liwu can be transformed from a gift into a room or a bird.
Amid this linguistic madness can you really blame anyone who seeks solace in chocolates or couches their New Year’s resolutions in the flimsiest, and the most toneless, of terms?