... and then i was looking for witch gorillas. (in which homonyms ruin my life)

*note: this blog entry will be a different experience for chinese and non-chinese readers, but the end result will be the same, and there is no requisite understanding or non-understanding to read this entry.

when i was young, there was a very surreal experience that involved me getting to stay up late (yay!), driving out to an empty field with my mom and her friends (um...), and looking for "hui4 xing1." i didn't know what that was, but i didn't bother asking on the car ride out because, well... that was later, so i didn't care about it.

so when we got to the field, my mom told me to look for "xing1 xing1" with "sao4 ba3." i, being a child of probably 3 (holy shit... i never thought about that. how do i remember this?), figured that i should be looking for gorillas in the field we happened to be facing. gorillas who, for some reason, happened to have brooms.

i looked, and i looked, but it was just too dark to see anything, even on the flat terrain we were facing. i mentioned this to my mom, who responded that i should be looking in the sky.

w. t. f.

so, of course, being 3, and not having a great grasp of what i should actually be doing in this situation, i started looking for gorillas. with brooms. in the sky. and it made total sense to me. because, you know, the gorillas with the brooms seemed like a stupid notion, but *witch* gorillas... well, that explains the brooms.

brilliant.

i still couldn't see them.

i said as much, and someone mentioned that i was probably too young to appreciate it anyway, so i was left to sleep in the back of the car (the adults were not *away* from the car; they just weren't *in* the car).

***

*note: this is the part i'm actually fuzzy about, and might actually be made up. no matter, since it's actually the previous sequence of events that is relevant.

on the trip home, i asked my mom if she saw the gorilla witches. she was confused by my question, and i came to find that she was actually telling me to look for a *star* with a *tail.* the tail part might have come up while i was still looking, though the interchangeability of the terms "tail" and "broom" while she was speaking probably contributed to the image of a witch gorilla in my head.

anyway, this, of course, means i was supposed to be looking for halley's comet.

***

still confused? gather round for the explanation!

first, let's just get this out of the way: it's easier to be ambiguous about plurals in chinese, especially when speaking to children. nouns have no plural forms, and you must rely on articles to convey cardinality (by which i mean singular vs. plural). when there are no articles, it's ambiguous.

gorilla == xing1 xing1 == star in kid-speak.
strictly speaking, it's
gorilla == xing1 xing1 (or, according to mandarintools.com, da4 xing1 xing1. da4, in this case, is "big." i'm not sure if it's required)
star == xing1
however, the kid-speak version is fairly common (think "mommy" for mother), and makes appearances in common usage, such as in "twinkle twinkle little star."

and semantically,
sao4 ba3 == broom == hui4
had i partially understood "hui4 xing1," i might have been looking for a gorilla with a broom anyway. i know gorilla is "xing1 xing1," but to make compound words, you generally go with just "xing1" (which is, apparently, and entry in mandarintools.com as "ape.").

however,
hui4 xing1 == comet
it's a different character for hui, but, again, homonym.

so this is what it comes down to. i had some trouble interpreting some homonyms when i was 3. i have to wait till i'm nearly 80 to make up for it.

homonyms.