Sitting on the second floor of a bar in Khao San Road, I
spotted the only one of the multitudes of cheap t-shirts in Bangkok that I had
to have. From the second floor, it looked something like this:
When I got downstairs, I bought the shirt, after what I
recall was an expert piece of bargaining (the trick is to be wasted on blue
daiquiris and not care too much if you get the item in question). I also recall
my wife rolling her eyes at the shirt (or maybe at my reaction to the shirt)
somewhere in the process. Nevertheless, I felt quite pleased with my purchase
as we headed back to the hotel.
However, the next morning I looked a bit closer at the
shirt, and saw that the word balloon actually said this:
To my tolerant white person self, this rang a few alarm
bells. ‘Ching chong’ – had I inadvertently bought a t-shirt that was offensive?
How did I not realise the implications of the phrase the night before? Well, it
was probably because I was loaded up on blue daiquiris … I thought it was just
a cool t-shirt with gangsters playing Rock Paper Scissors. My smugness in
relation to my well-bargained purchase started to fade a little.
Since then, whenever I have seen the t-shirt in my wardrobe
it has bothered me a little. Could I wear this t-shirt in public? I thought
perhaps I could wear it around the house at least, but that seemed a waste (of less
than $10, but still … ). So on Monday, I resolved to find out what the phrase
‘ching chong chai’ actually meant. I typed the phrase in Google and came up
with this:
Seeing those second and third results didn’t exactly do a
lot to ease my fears. The first result looked more promising – perhaps this would
uncover the English translation of the phrase. If I knew the translation, then
whenever people looked at my t-shirt and then at me skeptically I could say ‘I
know what you’re thinking, but that phrase is actually Chinese for … [insert
English translation here] So, uh, yeah … ’ However, the link
offered no translation at all, and suggested that the phrase was just nonsense
faux Chinese. This didn’t reassure me either.
Nevertheless, I decided to back my choice - I wore the t-shirt
down to basketball that night, although on the way down I pondered whether I
could get my handy wife to sew a patch over the offending word balloon for future
outings. At basketball, I felt another pang of worry as I saw that the team
that we were playing possibly had some members of Chinese descent. And yes, the fact that I couldn’t tell if they
were of Chinese descent or not didn’t make me feel any better.
P.S. That night, I mentioned my worries to my wife, who told
me that ‘Ching Chong Chai’ was what you say before you choose rock, paper or scissors.
Ahhhhh…..
That made me feel better – it was an accepted phrase then.
People (or some people at least) would know what it meant. Now I could wear the
t-shirt without undue worry … (That is, as long as I conveniently ignored that
the phrase still probably had a derogatory origin.)
