Why I'd rather be called 'laowai' (old outsider) than 'gweipo' (devil hag)
Cecilie Gamst Berg finds the slang they use in China for foreigners more endearing than the Hong Kong version - but takes exception to being called 'laowai' in a restaurant near her home in the city
The first time I heard myself described as a " ", having been in Hong Kong for only a few weeks, I was taken aback. After checking the dictionary, that is. : devil or ghost. : grandmother, hag, old woman. So, I was a devil hag, eh?
That was not exactly a compliment, seeing as I was 28 at the time.
It sounded harsh and much more negative than the slang (racial slur) for Caucasians I had become used to in China: . As well as being gender neutral (I have to chuckle sometimes when I hear foreign women in Hong Kong glibly refer to themselves as " women" - for the record, only men can be : "devil geezer"), is slightly more endearing, perhaps on a par with "Johnny Foreigner", "Taffy" or "Jerry".
means "old" and "outside", short for : "outside country people". But " " doesn't only mean old in years but also "venerable" and it's what many in China call each other instead of Mr and Mrs to indicate familiarity. So, a hell of a lot better than "devil hag".
Wherever I went in China, the streets and markets had reverberated to excited cries of " ! !" followed by giggling. Maybe they were just pointing out to their friends that I was foreign in case they thought a blond, blue-eyed woman was some kind of weird Asian.
In 2002, I stayed for a month in a remote village in Sichuan province. On the first day I took a walk along a long, empty, ruler-straight stretch of road through rice paddies and sunflower fields. Two peasants stood watching me approach from about a kilometre away. They stared and stared as I came closer and closer, staring still as I passed them. When I was a few metres away, I heard one of them remark knowingly, " ".
"Yep," the other one agreed. Then silence.
I thought of the Sichuan geezers the other day while having a not very good lunch in the food court at Tung Chung's Citygate. There I was, chewing something called "Taiwanese noodles with chicken cutlets", when I smelled the familiar whiff of cheap Chinese cigarettes and heard a raspy voice say, " ". A Chinese tourist with brown teeth stood grinning, his wife gawping behind him.
Suddenly I didn't like "". When I'm visiting them, no problem, but here they were on my turf - not far from my house, in fact - and still thought I was an "old outside".
Not the same. Not the same at all.
