Confessing to Chinglish

It's time for me to come out and say it in public. Hi, my name is Dave, and I, I... I love Chinglish. Heck, more than that - I'm addicted to it. There. I said it. I.. I...

I am a Chinglishaholic!
(...muffled sobs and gasps as the weight finally lifts from my shoulders...)

Did you spot the hidden poetry latent in this sign?

China, as you may know, is loaded with Chinglish - bad, often funny or strange translations of Chinese into English. For a long time, I've had an anti-Chinglish policy on this blog. After all, after a year of being in this country, my Chinese is still at what I've taken to calling the Teletubby level*. Who am I to criticize another person's flawed, but better knowledge of English?

All too often, most mentions of Chinglish on the internet (mine included) come across as snarky and rude. It seems as if the speaker is so overwhelmed by the new culture that they need to find something, anything to say to make them feel superior again. So they take a picture of a strange T-shirt or a bizarrely misspelled sign, post it online, and call it a day.

As a result, it seems to be an unspoken rule in the long-term expat community (both in person and online) to not comment on Chinglish too often, if at all. Admitting that you love Chinglish is like - hmm, I don't know - admitting that you have a secret stash of Archie comic books that you still read daily, maybe.

So what, you may ask, sparked my Chinglish conversion? In a word, Surrealism. Specifically, thinking a lot about surrealism in art, and why I love it so much. Surrealism usually gets a bad rap in the art world. It brings to mind geeky teenage boys poring over a set of Salvador Dali prints. "Whoa, dude, that giraffe is on fire, man. Trippy!" It seems very adolescent and self-absorbed.

Surrealism at its best however, does something entirely different. It allows us to consider that the mundane world is, in fact, much more extraordinary than we think. It takes ordinary objects and re-images them as fantastic creations. It reminds us that what we see is often more strange and wonderful than anything we can imagine. It suggests the possibility that the dream has the potential to become real.

So, I invite you to enter the world of Chinglish - a world which contains Famous Scissors and an actual Love Medicine Company. A world where golf is an acronym, and you can always go hang out in the "Resent Place" if you're feeling particularly surly. Instead of "Lost in Translation", it's more like "Spontaneously Generated in Translation." Enjoy! And remember - Civilization and Tourism are Together. You too can have a Peace and Harmonious Win-Win.

(*Yes, I mostly understood one entire episode of the Chinese equivalent of the Teletubbies, which, being even more surreal than the Western version, is worthy of an entire post in an of itself. You all may send me adoring notes of congratulations now.)