Tschunggoj

Since I’ve moved to China two years ago I am occasionally overwhelmed by feelings of foreignness and strangeness

– a perfectly trite sentence; it could have been written by Elliot Rodger, had the “perfect gentleman” ever tried to bring his, as I see it, “great challenge not to get laid” to China, and nourish his self-pity there.

But how can I talk about the trite experience of strangeness in China without lapsing so quickly into triteness?

Maybe by first dropping the cue that so often kicks off the uncanniness: the word laowai (non-Chinese, foreigner, dear old foreigner, old pig foreigner, you name it.)

Don’t say it, don’t hear it, don’t think it.

Tschunggoj is my epithet for laowai.

中GOY. Zhonggoy. Delicious!

Like the goy, a tschunggoy does not belong to the club in question, the 中国人 Chinese of the People’s Republic or the 华人 Huaren racial Chinese.

Goy sounds a bit like guo, 国, country, the second character in Zhongguo, China.

It is the playful variant to the word laowai that I want to proffer. Spread the word.

Because I can’t stand to hear the word laowai, no matter out of a Chinese guy’s mouth or a tschunggoy’s (who sometimes take pride in being a tschunggoy, which is a different matter).

I recently when speaking with Chinese (in Chinese) adopted their word 洋人 yangren to designate foreigners. It means foreign man, mostly Western foreign man. (外国人 waiguoren outside-country-man as sort of politically correct term is too tame anyway, and a trite too.)

tschunggoy gives me the connotations I want, namely of strangeness, and succeeds in draining out of the conversation the pre-syllable 老 lao/old that is used in so many appellations.

These appellations may be appreciative or derogatory: their common ground is that the speaker pretends to some familiarity with the person he so calls a lao... anything.
Lao means “old”, it means “familiar to me!”, it makes you the connoisseur of what you see, the

lao shou (old hand),

lao tou (old bloke),

lao po (“old” wife),

lao wai (“old outie” – foreigner).

I know there are social functions to the word laowai. I don’t care about them.

I want the average Chinese guy who from his average WeChat clippings, his average CCTV exposure, his average bump into a foreigner and from his average thoughts claims to know what a laowai is, to give up his goddamn prejudice – and first meet a foreigner as a perfect stranger, not a known laowai.

In fact we all ought to meet all persons firstly as perfect strangers.

That said, I’m going to read A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish. I’ll download its Kindle edition as soon as I’m book-horny again (and finished some of my unread purchases).

It seems to be a treasure of historical research. It concerns mostly German speaking theologians in the middle ages who study Yiddish, and the reception they got in the Jewish realm.