Inked Talk

Like them or hate them, tattoos in Kanji or Chinese characters are still a popular trend among non-Asian tattoo aficionados. There is a whole lot of trust that goes in to having someone tattoo a character whose meaning you gleaned off of the Internet or perhaps off of some blurry printout on the wall of the tattoo studio. And for every trusting person out there, there’s someone who is willing to take advantage.

Zug.com is an admittedly hilarious humor website that described a cruel prank played by one of Zug’s contributors on his coworker. The coworker noticed that many people, including his obviously caucasian coworker, had a Chinese character for a tattoo. In his own words:

So I got an idea. I started by talking to the delivery guy from the Chinese take-out near my office. I made up a few fake Chinese phrases from words I saw in a Chinese newspaper, and started throwing them out at him. Now, I have no idea how to speak Chinese. I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce the stuff I had, or how to make sentences out of it, or what dialect it was, but none of that really mattered. What mattered was having the proper Charlie Chan accent and loud, confident delivery.

Eventually his coworkers believed that he spoke some Chinese. And then he began working on the target of his prank.

He greeted his tattooed coworker in his fake Chinese dialect. As he guessed, she didn’t understand a word he said.

You don’t speak Chinese?” I ask.

So I launch into the questions: what made her decide on a Chinese symbol, who was the artist, were they Chinese, everything except what the symbol stood for. She stammers through the answers, which boil down to no real reason for the Chinese, no real interest in Asian culture or language, just got the tat from some white American dude in a shop in Sayerville. Then she launches into an explanation of what it means: inner peace or some nonsense.

And then, the punchline:

“No,” he tells her, “it says ‘hao fu,’ which means bean curd.”

To really finesse the prank, he had even doctored up a Chinese take-out menu to include her “bean curd” character.

A cruel joke? Surely. The coworker got upset, cried, and was understandably quite angry. The coworkers unwittingly played a role in the prank as they assured her that he did appear to speak Chinese quite well. Eventually his guilt got the best of him and the truth came out.

Did that stop the folks at Zug.com from taking the prank another step further? Of course not. They dedicated an entire website to providing fake tattoo flash for unsuspecting Internet surfers.

Fake Free Kanji Flash Site

While I laughed a bit when I read the article, I don’t condone anything that Zug.com did. However, there is an important lesson to learn here: anyone getting any Chinese or Kanji tattoo should check their sources if Chinese or Japanese is not their native language. There are people out there who think that your permanent “Bean Curd” tattoo is good for their momentary laugh.

For the record, your author has a Kanji tattoo which she hopes means “Soulmate.”

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