www射-国产免费一级-欧美福利-亚洲成人福利-成人一区在线观看-亚州成人

USEUROPEAFRICAASIA 中文雙語Fran?ais
Lifestyle
Home / Lifestyle / X-Ray

Being 'Yang' at heart not all bad

By Raymond Zhou | China Daily | Updated: 2015-02-13 07:56

Being 'Yang' at heart not all bad

[Photo by Wang Xiaoying/China Daily]

The sheep, the zodiac animal of 2015, may be easily led astray, literally or figuratively. But in Chinese folklore, it inspires by its spirit of self-sacrifice and its association with fending off hunger.

When I first ordered mutton for my daughters at a restaurant, I feared it might be a traumatizing experience for them. They have been fed a steady diet of the cartoon series mistakenly titled Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf. What would they feel if they found out they were chowing down on their favorite character?

Not bad, as it turned out. They just shrugged and kept gobbling it up.

Arguably China's most popular television cartoon, which has spawned a wide array of merchandise, Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf features a lovable cadre of sheep, humorously named after Chinese homonyms. In Chinese, the sound yang can refer to one of dozens of different words, each with its own meaning and forming even more variations when coupled with other words. Thus, the male lead is called Xiyangyang, meaning happy or cheerful, with nothing to do with the ovine animal if not spelt out, and the female lead Meiyangyang being the equivalent of Minnie to Xiyangyang's Mickey.

There doesn't seem to be a goat in the series, to the possible confusion of English speakers. The Mandarin word for goat is shanyang, literally mountain sheep. In my hometown on eastern China's plains with their web of canals and lakes, the default breed is huyang, or lake sheep. And we call lamb xiaoyang, small sheep. Unimaginative, isn't it, compared with specialized words like ram or wether (a castrated sheep).

There is a respected Chinese company with a long history of advertising its wool products by saying yang three times, in a child's voice. It's a cute way of reminding customers of the origin and quality of their wool. In 2008, it launched another campaign in which the other 11 zodiac animals were pronounced in the same way. The result was disastrous. While the public loved "sheep sheep sheep", they hated "pig pig pig" or "cow cow cow". It simply did not work as childish patter.

Chinese share with other cultures one major symbolic meaning of sheep, which is the characteristic of timidity or docility. While pigs, hardly adorable in the Chinese eye, put up a fight when slaughtered, sheep hardly utter a sound when shepherded to their fate. But the Christian connotation of sheep and lamb has not spilled over into the mainstream. The herd mentality of the animal, however, is acknowledged in the Chinese word for herd or mass, qun.

The Chinese word for shepherd is more often associated with the cow than with sheep. The archetypal image of a Chinese shepherd boy is one sitting on the back of a cow and roaming a rice paddy, widely different from the cowboy of the American West. The most famous Chinese shepherd who survived by herding sheep was not a child, but an emissary assigned to the northern nation of the Hun. Su Wu (140-60 BC) was detained by the Hun, but he refused to betray his own country. As a punishment, he was exiled to the grassland to be a shepherd. He did it for 19 years before he was released to return to his homeland. Now he is an icon of patriotism.

Previous 1 2 Next

Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US
主站蜘蛛池模板: 日韩精品一区二区三区中文字幕 | 中文字幕精品视频在线 | 亚洲一区在线视频观看 | 国产一区二区三区四区在线 | 国产午夜亚洲精品一区网站 | 91精品国产一区二区三区四区 | 国产成人亚洲综合网站不卡 | 男人都懂的网址在线看片 | 一区二区三区四区在线免费观看 | 国产高清三级 | 成人看的一级毛片 | 日本大臿亚洲香蕉大片 | 国产精品观看在线亚洲人成网 | 国产精自产拍久久久久久 | 最刺激黄a大片免费网站 | 亚洲视频免费观看 | 精品国产精品国产 | 久久久久久a亚洲欧洲aⅴ | a一级免费 | 极品精品国产超清自在线观看 | 一区视频在线播放 | 亚洲精品在线播放 | 国产精品久久久香蕉 | 国产精品一区二区手机在线观看 | 国产精品久久久久久久久久久久久久 | 国产精品久久久久久久久久直 | 久久极品 | 毛片亚洲毛片亚洲毛片 | 久久视频在线播放视频99re6 | 黄色a网| 亚洲一级毛片免观看 | 日本www在线播放 | 九九久久国产精品 | 久久国产香蕉 | 国产情侣久久精品 | 国产一区高清 | 国产精品1区2区3区在线播放 | 国产成人丝袜网站在线观看 | 国产一区二区日韩欧美在线 | 性欧美videos俄罗斯 | 国产亚洲精品久久久久91网站 |