Fuddland

For the first few weeks after I arrived in China, whenever I overheard a couple of elderly gents chatting in Chinese on a park bench, I found myself assuming that they were exchanging pearls of wisdom garnered from their experiences and learned readings of the teachings of Confucius. It wasn’t until I started to get a handle on understanding Mandarin that I realised that, most of the time, they’re talking about food, or the price of food, or how long its been since breakfast time.

On the first day of a new Business English course for an insurance company, held in their office meeting room, I gave them a few minutes of conversation practice based on the dialogues we had just gone through, and as they chatted to each other I wandered over to the display cabinet to look at the various certificates, plaques and trophies it contained. Given the intense growth of China’s economy in recent years, and having met and taught more than a few business professionals out here, I was assuming that they were all very serious “Business of the Year”-type awards. Office employees can work very long and hard hours—eight in the morning until eleven or twelve at night is the norm rather than the exception—so their efforts have to be occasionally rewarded with some sort of recognition, right?

Having learned a few characters of Chinese, I was able to spend a few minutes trying to figure out exactly what each achievement was. The largest trophy—a gold cup with an engraved plaque on its base—caught my eye, and I could immediately recognise the characters for Suzhou and the industrial park area in which many new companies are based, and the date: December 2002.

“Okay,” I thought, “this is going to be something like Best New Start-up or Employer of the Year.” But then I recognised two more characters: 乒 and 乓—pīng and pāng.

Yep: ping pong. It was a table tennis championship trophy. Disappointed, I turned back to the class to check on the progress of the business conversation exercise I had set.

They were all talking about food.