i'm Pasta

Dear reader,

I was delighted by Tao Lin’s recent post “Taiwan English” on all the hilarious translation errors, correct yet awkward translations, and downright goofing around with English text he saw around Taiwan – a bag of chips labeled “Cheese and Egg Overload,” a store named “I’m donut?”

I noticed this too when I was in Taiwan, and wrote about it in Taipei Story:

But the Taiwanese played with English all the time, and often not very well.

Nonsense English was everywhere in this city. In a single afternoon I saw T-shirts reading “Live FreE or Butterfly,” “I like eat cows and you,” and “Pussy cat pet pussy.” Once I saw a prim, middle-aged woman proudly wearing a velvet cardigan with repeating block letters that read, “GO FUCK.” These seemed like more than a case of a bad translation. I couldn’t imagine what the source text would have been. Someone had to be messing around. Someone was misusing a language just because it was funny: because they just liked the look of a letter or the position of a comma.

In the cluster of lunch spots north of campus, there was a pizza and pasta restaurant called I’m Pasta with a sign in English that read: “Once, I hate pasta. Now, it’s my life.”

(The pasta – pretty good!)

The “GO FUCK” shirt is based on a sweater my mother once showed up in while I was waiting to drive her to the hospital. She was so proud of that sweater; she’d been wearing it around all winter. When I told her what it said she disappeared into the cafe bathroom and came out wearing it turned inside out.

I clicked around trying to learn more about the aesthetic intentions behind such incredible labels. Sometimes it’s just a translation error; sometimes it’s an ironic fashion statement; sometimes it really is just playing around. If you scroll through the Taiwan Chinglish Facebook group that Tao Lin’s post mentions, you’ll find a lot of these gaffes rather demonstrate a deep understanding of the rules of both English and Chinese. I wish there were more novels that featured linguistic play like this, and if you can recommend any please let me know.

Anyways, that sums up the sweet, absurd tone of much of Taipei Story. You go to a language program in a country your family has never lived thinking that with the power of a few flashcards you’ll magically find your way back into a culture where you don’t belong, and by the end of the summer you’re switching back to English to ask for water on the plane. But you’re starting to get the jokes. Once, you hate Pasta. Now it’s your life.

Some books I’ve recently enjoyed:

• Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, for instruction on how to write sprawling narratives across centuries and settings

• Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (reread)

• Ursula K. Le Guin’s No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

Love,

Rebecca