The Best Kind of English
This week was a weather [smog] rollercoaster, ending in lung-shriveling air quality yesterday and today. I spent Thursday and Friday in a face mask hunting for cheap vegetables and taking hazy photos at tourist destinations. But the visuals I came away with were lackluster, so I’m taking advantage of my time indoors to finally write about clothes. Specifically, clothes with English words on them.
Remember when it was cool to get Chinese characters tattooed on yourself? (Hellooo 1990s). In Beijing it’s currently cool to wear shirts, jackets, bags and hats printed with English words and phrases. Chinese-to-English translations on public signs are sometimes funny, but the words-on-clothing thing is its own kind of hilarious. At first I figured the whole phenomenon was more about how the words and letters look than the messaging—in the same way that we think Chinese characters are aesthetically cool, regardless of what they mean. But after seeing more examples, I’m not sure it’s that simple—it’s possible that there's a twisted bilingual genius behind these clothes.
For example, our first week here I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt that said “Monday you bastard” on it, and within the same city block I saw a kid wearing a T-shirt that said ”Porcshe." One is an incredibly worded truth bomb, and the other is a brand name spelled wrong. In between these two types of clothing-English are lengthy, nonsensical phrases that are funny in their own right. I’m always questing for full-fledged, semi-logical phrases because they bring me great joy.
Without further ado, a gallery of real-life examples—not my finest photography so please forgive.
If it sounds like I'm making fun of people, please know that I laugh at the English above while painfully aware of my own inadequate Mandarin—when I speak Chinese, my sentences sound to locals like the clothing-English sounds to me. Let’s also not forget that many a Chinese visitor to America has probably laughed until they cried at nonsensical Chinese phrases tattooed on American skin.
As time goes on, I’ll add more photos to this collection—the best ones I’ve seen in real life went un-photographed because I didn’t want to be rude and blatantly take pictures. I’m waiting for them to come around again.
That’s the brief update for today. On another note, I added more photos of Beijing dogs to my earlier post. Check them out here (scroll to the bottom of page).