Turtle Egg

This is one that only Chinese speakers will get.

One day I’m going to write a book or a screenplay.  In it will be a character named Dan Wangba.  At some point he’ll go into a deli or laundry owned by a Chinese immigrant and he’ll act like a real asshole.  After he leaves the Chinese character will say, “That guy is a real bastard.”

Funny. Years ago on a trip from Yokosuka to Guam, we pulled into Hong Kong for a couple days of liberty. One of the guys came back to the boat drunk with a new tattoo.
He said he wanted his name written in Chinese characters and it took him nearly an hour to convince the artist to do the work. I never had the heart to tell him what the characters 王八蛋 meant in English.

Ha!  That’s fucking brilliant!  Which just goes to prove this point I made a few months back.

Yeah, it bugs the shit out me now that everyone’s getting character tattoos. Nearly 30 years ago, when I started getting inked, one of the first tats I had done was a chengyu expression: 披荆斩棘.
I thought it was poetic and it had personal significance to my life at the time. I went to the trouble of finding a calligrapher in Chinatown to write the character stencil for me, because my Chinese penmanship is atrocious. Now when people see me, they see an old fuck going through a mid-life crisis, trying to look cool.

“Throws over Jing Zhanji”

OK, that means zilch to me....

Chengyu is like that. The four character expressions are literary and don’t do machine translation very well. The only Chengyu I know that means the same in Chinese and English is 打鐵趁熱 or ‘strike while the iron’s hot.’
披荆斩棘 (pi jing zhan ji) literally means brush aside the thistles and cut away the thorns. Figuratively it’s telling you to overcome all obstacles and achieve complete success.  At the time, it meant quite a deal to me.

We should hunt down Tom Cruise, have that tattooed above his ass…

This is what Tom Cruise should get tattooed on his ass.

富人疯狂人邪教 控制 他