My husband and I have been living in China for almost 7 years. We would always go for our vacations in Thailand. Usually for August and either January or February, depending on when Chinese New Year was. We would usually go for a month and relax on the postcard perfect beaches. But, we would always take our 'learn Chinese' books, a Chinese dictionary and usually some children's book used to help the kids learn to write the Chinese characters.
Every afternoon on the beach we would have our Chinese lessons, memorizing the spoken words and tones and repeating sentences from the text books. But, when that got too boring we would grab some sticks and have our Chinese character writing class in the sand. This usually got a lot of people asking what we were doing and a few people watching. We also had a few people telling us they had tattoos that were Chinese characters. They would tell us what they thought the character meant or what they had ask for and then wanted to know if it was right or not. We met quite a few guys who had simple characters, usually on their arms. Most of the simple characters were right, like strong, Li or love, Ai. But, the fun ones started when people had two, three or more characters. A lot of times the characters were missing strokes and if you are missing a stroke in a character it won't mean anything at all. Other people had translated something directly from Engli
My favorite one of all was a friend of our who we met in Guangzhou. He has two Chinese characters tattooed on his arm. He has wanted strong dragon. He was bone in the year of the dragon. But, the two characters were head and fire. Which basically meant hot head, short tempered. He lived in China and when people around saw his tattoo, they got really scared or just shocked!sh, so the Chinese characters together really meant noting. There are a lot of people walking around with Chinese character tattoos, that really mean nothing at all!
I did I quick search and found there are a million other stories just like these. These are a few that stood out to me.
Over 35 percent of NBA stars have some kind of Chinese-themed motif tattoos.
One of the few NBA players to have lived in China, the Denver Nuggets' Chris Anderson briefly played for the Jiangsu Nangang Dragons in 2000. He wanted the character for "good" on one arm and "bad" on the other - accurately summing up his character and performances. Unfortunately, something got lost in translation as the character for bad also means "nausea".
He's not the only one to get it wrong. Shawn Marion of the Toronto Raptors calls himself "The Matrix" and wanted to tell the world by inscribing it in Mandarin on his leg. But to Chinese it reads: "Demon bird camphor".
Justin Timberlake has the character "qu", which means "song", but also "bent, crooked or wrong". His character in the movie "Alpha Dog" he had extra tattoos added to his arm. They were supposed to make him look tough and hard core, but if you read his arm it says "ice skating" in Chinese characters.
Backstreet Boys' Nick Carter, has the characters "hai shen" for Poseidon. Mixing Chinese characters and Greek mythology is unique, even if it doesn't really signify anything.
So, if you are learning Chinese take your dictionary to the beaches and play 'what your tattoo really mean'. It's a fun game and a really easy way to learn new characters!
Here's a photo from the movie 'Alpha Dogs' The Chinese character tattoos on Timberlake's left arm are drawn on to make him look tougher. But if you can read Chinese characters, it says Ice Skating. Not so hard core is it?
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