A Chinese-American Dive Into Vernacular Rebellion
By: Alaast Kamalabadi
The mythical "cao ni ma", or "grass mud horse" — the unlikeliest of mascots for anti-establishment sentiments.
Image by: Alaast Kamalabadi
Editors note: Profanity
Slang is, by definition, on the edge.
Slang is construed as “a class of deviant registers of language,” says anthropologist Asif Agha. In an essay titled “Tropes of Slang,” he explains how slang operates antithetically to formalized, standardized language. According to Agha, slang instills among its users a sense of divisional, oppositional belonging to a social group, caste, or demographic. The more fringe the jargon, the more exclusionary it becomes. Fewer people can comprehend and use it proficiently, signaling their belonging in the in-group as they navigate what Agha terms as “microspaces of interaction linked to specific social practices and groups.”
Code-switching, too, can be an exclusionary or inclusionary practice and an act of rebellion. As an American of dual Chinese and Iranian heritage raised in a multilingual environment, I am a veteran of code-switching. In stressful social situations, code-switching from English to Chinese allows me to carve a private space amidst the public, “subtly, reflexively chang[ing] ... between different cultural and linguistic spaces and ... identities,” in the words of NPR’s lead Code Switch blogger Gene Demby. Only those with whom I share the same linguistic background are privy to my venting. This is exclusion at work.
I also code-switch from English to Chinese in the presence of a Chinese-speaking demographic. Code-switching signals my inclusion in their spaces. My attempts to code-switch are not always successful. Despite my fluency and textbook accent, my lack of distinctive Chinese physical features supersedes any impressions that may be formed on the basis of speech and codes me as un-Chinese. I often wind up othered as a curiosity. I persist doggedly despite this form of exclusion because China is my cultural heritage and I feel entitled to the affiliation. Furthermore, I take pride in embodying subversion.
I used to think exclusively in Chinese. I had tutors in Farsi. Nonetheless, at some point, English supplanted their seats and sprawled itself across the porous, vulnerable spaces in my head. I preferred English. Chinese was difficult — so many strokes, and so much meaning and history concealed in every logograph, each so hard to unpack. English, conversely, felt egalitarian and straightforward. Every syllable cut straight to the point. Eventually, I began to formulate thoughts in English rather than in Chinese. This transformation, however, did not occur out of mere personal preference.
Globalization and U.S. imperialism both had lasting effects on China, especially Shanghai, the burgeoning metropolis where I lived from birth until the age of 15. English was rapidly becoming a boon, even a necessity, in business and foreign affairs. Public schools mandated English-language lessons in its curriculum. Most private schools upheld English as the primary language of instruction. My identity as an expatriate and a third-culture kid of mixed race became intrinsically tied to my command of English.
Now, I continually find myself returning to Chinese, fascinated by the way it has evolved since the age of the Internet, and by its inventive rebellion. Chinese slang follows conventions entirely foreign to an English-centric viewpoint. Chinese is logographic, comprising of strokes that each denote meaning or sound. It is not a sequence of alphabets strung together. Chinese characters often embody abstract notions or semantics by themselves, which can be further modified by compounding characters. As it is a highly tonal language, many different characters often assemble under one selfsame sound.
Chinese slang generally operates under the ambiguity afforded by this quirk — characters with different semantics but the same sound can act as a proxy for the original character. One such slang term, “cao ni ma” — which literally translates to "grass mud horse", a hoax creature said to resemble an alpaca — is a good example of this. It is a wordplay on the slur "fuck your mother," whose phonemes are almost identical.
Despite the relentless censorship of speech in Mainland China, Chinese bloggers and activists invent slang and code at an alarming speed to circumvent censors. It’s a supercharged push-pull dynamic, in which the government requires a period of time to familiarize itself with this code and glean what it means by looking at its context, then bans certain strings of characters, at which point the process of invention begins anew. You only need to go looking for a list of terms censored by the Chinese government to get a sense of the legal and humanitarian battles fought on the web, and of which political and social issues consistently invoke polemics and ire from the Mainland Chinese establishment. Slang exposes the government's deepest-seated fears.
“Cao ni ma” is extensively censored in Chinese news media and on social media sites. What appears to be mere vulgarity at first glance belies a deeper protest; “fuck your mother” teems with anti-communist and anti-establishment sentiment because it pokes fun at China’s censorship practices and because of its association with Chinese activist-artist Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei posted a nude photo of himself crudely censored with a stuffed "cao ni ma" toy over his genitals with anti-establishment caption "草泥马挡中央", romanized as "cao ni ma dang zhong yang", meaning, literally, "grass mud horse covers the center" — another wordplay that hinges on the Chinese quirk of characters sharing phonemes.
While the caption may seem benign, it may also be read as "fuck your mother, Party Central Committee." The characters "党中央", culled from the full name of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, shares phonemes with the last three characters of Ai Weiwei's captions, "挡中央". Furthermore, "Ma", or “Mother”, is an epithet for the Communist party and “motherland”, dating back to the conception of the People’s Republic of China. Folklore Institute of East China Normal University Professor Li Mingjie confirms its political undertones, saying,
“[Ma] is a canny form of linguistic subversion that seeks to wrest back an element of power from the social and political elite.”
Ai Weiwei's post plays on reasonable doubt — after all, under such stringent censorship, double entendres are the only resort for rebellion. The layer of ambiguity obscuring his post certainly did not fool Chinese censors, however, which swiftly expurgated all instances of the post in circulation. Senior party officials allegedly received it as "a direct and obscene insult", and it may even have played a role in his 2011 arrest, according to a Washington Post article analyzing Ai Weiwei's appropriation of the "cao ni ma" meme in his art and activism.
There is another unique breed of Chinese slang that has been rising in prominence within the Chinese and American slang-o-sphere: Chinese-English hybrid slang. Colloquially known as "Chinglish," this pidgin, linguistically subversive vernacular is especially popular among the millennial demographic on the Chinese Interweb.
Professor Henning Klöter of Modern Chinese Languages and Literatures at the Humboldt University of Berlin confirms the significance of English as a well-tapped source for Chinese slang and is particularly fixated on slang developed through instances of Chinese-English code-switching inserted directly into vernacular speech.
The most fitting illustration of this phenomenon would be the internet idiom “no zuo no die,” which Urban Dictionary defines as karmic intervention — “if you don't do stupid things, they won't come back and bite you in the ass.” With almost 8000 upvotes, this term has enjoyed surprising penetration into both Chinese and international popular culture. Interestingly enough, the word “zuo,” pronounced in the first tone in pinyin, has its origin in subregional Chinese dialects, in particular Shanghainese. Urban Dictionary defines "zuo" as "act[ing] silly or daring (for attention)."
English-Chinese hybrid slang also owes its conception and prevalence to the pervasiveness of certain English slang terms — e.g. “cool” — in casual Chinese vernacular. Such terms have been absorbed and assimilated completely into common parlance. They are common figures of speech, internationally mediatized through the process of globalization.
Not only does “no zuo no die” illustrate a global, integrative approach to slang, it also reflects the effects of the internet on the production of vernacular rebellion. As a robust internet meme that often spawns alongside an illustration of an anthropomorphic panda bearing the likeness of famous basketballer Yao Ming, the proliferation of “no zuo no die” and similar memes can be explained through Dawkin's neo-Darwinian hypothesis of internet memes as units of cultural conduction and transmission, according to sociologist Gabriele de Seta. "Shortness" and "memorisability” [sic] reinforce its effectiveness as web-cultural artifacts. One’s savvy of slang becomes “a social regularity of positive evaluation,” in the words Agha.
I have witnessed first-hand how memetic slang disseminates and sometimes even intermingles with political slang on Chinese social media sites, such as weibo.com, to form hyper-effective, rebellious, integrative, multicultural and hyper-penetrative slang. In the age of the Internet, where the dissemination of ideas grows faster and more localized than ever, slang and other deviant language practices often shed insight into the modern-day dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, subversion, and rebellion — and this is illustrated, paradoxically, most vividly in a space as restrictive and hostile to rebellion as the Chinese interweb.