the golden monkey

Yesterday I went to a Chinese market store (props to Jen) in search of a mug with a cover. This sounds mundane and crazy, I'm sure. But you see, I like to eat oatmeal in the morning, and if my mug had a cover I wouldn't have to warp my CD cases by using them as covers as my oatmeal cooks.

Anyhow, so I find the mugs and there end up being about 30 different designs and styles of mugs with covers. Some are attached by string, most are not. Some have fancy calligraphy, some have Snoopy. They range in size and weight and stability, and the selection is more than a little overwhelming.

So I finally decide on a medium-sized white mug that has a little cartoon monkey standing in front of a lotus blossom. He's cute and will no doubt be a conversation piece, so I decide to spend the $2.95.

This morning I was eating my oatmeal and saw that the other side of the mug has four chinese characters painted on it. Being a one-time student of the language, I decided I would make it my morning mission to determine the meaning of the characters...without asking any of the Chans or Wangs in the office. Four characters. How hard could it be?

Damn hard. Chinese is killer like that. There's no alphabet so you can't just look up a word. You have to break it down into smaller pieces, count the number of strokes it takes to write them, look up the little piece by stroke number, then add up the number of other strokes in the character, and try to find it in a list under that stroke number. That will tell you how to pronounce it, but not what it means. So you then have to look it up under the pronunciation to find the meaning. It's a total pain in the ass.

It's 11:00. I've been at it since about 8:50. And in a little over two hours of scrolling through microscopic characters online, I've decided that my mug says "The Golden Monkey Wishes You ____." For the life of me, I can't find the last character. Part of the problem is that it's handwritten, which is like trying to read someone's cursive writing in English--sometimes it doesn't look the way it's supposed to. But I know there's a roof or a spear or water involved. That's what the little pictures say.

I'm searching my vast empty mental database of Chinese proverbs to try to guess what the Golden Monkey wishes me. Prosperity? Fortune? Health? No, no, and no. For all I know, the reason this mug was so cheap in the first place is because of a typo, and the Golden Monkey winds up wishing the bearer death, or jaundice, or bitterness. (Chinese proverbs love to use the word bitterness.) What if he wishes me spiders? Or chronic nosebleeds? Or explosive diarrhea? And I, the stupid american, bought right into it.

Well, "jin sun he blank." (Jeen soon huh blank.) There. Now I've wished it on you, too, whatever it is.