Table of Contents Title Page Dedication Acknowledgements USING THIS BOOK CHAPTER 1 - HOWDY CHINESE Hello What’s up? Long time no see Goodbye Hey! Me Sorry Excuse me Please Asking for help Nice to meet you Taking pictures CHAPTER 2 - FRIENDLY CHINESE Friends Titles Family Characters Regional stereotypes Types CHAPTER 3 - PARTY CHINESE Let’s go have some fun! Kick starting the night Getting your schwerve on Staying in Funny shit Cool shit Where Chinese go to play Booze and firewater Ordering drinks 100 degrees of wreckedness Party drugs CHAPTER 4 - BODY CHINESE The Chinese “beauty” The Chinese “ugly” Other body types Toilet Chinese Farting Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) CHAPTER 5 - HORNY CHINESE Fuck Penis Pussy Tits Ass Sexual positions & perversions Orgasm Sex toys Gay Chinese CHAPTER 6 - ANGRY CHINESE What the hell are you doing? Go to hell! Fuck you motherfucker! CHAPTER 7 - POPPY CHINESE Music Comedy Movies Fashion CHAPTER 8 - SPORTY CHINESE Other sports and games Cheering and jeering Working out Video games CHAPTER 9 - HUNGRY CHINESE Food Hurry up! Tasty International cuisine Fast food Chinese food Snacks Weird shit Yuck! Other Ulysses Press Titles About the Authors Copyright Page For Paul, an 89-year-old Chinese-American gentleman I met in a bar yesterday who has an even fouler mouth than I do! Acknowledgments Matt: Thanks to Brendan O’Kane, who taught me how to say, “fuck [my] grandpa’s piss-stinking asshole,” Hans Cui, the Canto-Canuck for his infinite filthiness, Huang Sui for her long distance kinkiness, Shanghai Lane for the long Logo sessions, Catherine Mathes and Derek Sandhaus for teaching me “how to get my swerve on,” Nick, Keith, and the good people at Ulysses Press for their endless patience, last but not least the Godfather of the China Blog Mafia—John Pasden—for hooking this up, keeping it real, and for teaching us all the dirty words we know in English and Chinese (We won’t tell about the kittens, John!). Edmund: For my parents, who taught me better, and my teachers, who will hopefully read this with the good humor and tolerance that got them through their classes with me. Thanks to Song Li for her patience, and Ulysses Press, for theirs. USING THIS BOOK Dirty Chinese assumes you know enough Chinese to get around, and if you don’t—that is, unless you really think it’s a good idea to learn how to say “fistfucking” before you can order food—then you might want to put this down, put a few months into getting a grounding, and come back later. It’s cool, we’ll still be here. The dirty little secret about “Chinese” is that it doesn’t exist: it’s a family of languages, rather than a single language, and a speaker of Cantonese will be able to understand a speaker of Mandarin about as well as a Portuguese person can understand a speaker of Italian. When we say “Chinese” throughout this book, we’re really referring to Modern Standard Mandarin, or putonghua—the national language of the People’s Republic of China. Some of the terms here may be more Beijing-y (these are mostly from Edmund) or more Shanghai-y (these are mostly from Matt), but all of them should be generally understood anywhere proper Mandarin is spoken. In some cases we’ve added Taiwanese slang terms, but in general we’ve confined ourselves to Mainland Mandarin so that in a few years when Taiwan gets “liberated” into the ground, this book will still be current. All of the sentences in this book are given in English, then in the Hanyu Pinyin Romanization, then in characters. (We’ve gone with simplified characters throughout the book.) There’s a quick and dirty guide to Hanyu Pinyin below, and you may want to take some additional time to get yourself up to speed with the system before reading on, just to make sure that every come-on, every blistering insult, every slurred request for “Jus’ onnnnne more” hits home.