When I was in college in the mid '70s, I was visiting a friend who had moved to Central Valley in California. He was living in a student-dump type place, and temporarily had a relative staying with him. "F.O.B.," he told me. "Fresh off the boat. He escaped from the Red Guard and made it to the USA." (Friend's family were Chinese, originally from Macau.) A bit later, friend showed us a ceramic cup his sister had made in her pottery class. I had been studying Old English in school (read Beowulf in the original, the whole bit), and started talking about the drinking horns the Anglo-Saxons used, and how they had no legs, so you'd have to drink the whole contents before putting the horn down on the table if you didn't want a mess.
Friend translated all this for F.O.B., who knew about three words of English. F.O.B. made a short response. Friend laughed: "He says you guys would still be drinking out of those things if it wasn't for the Chinese!" posted by Creosote at 9:15 AM on March 24, 2006
When I was in college in the mid '70s, I was visiting a friend who had moved to Central Valley in California. He was living in a student-dump type place, and temporarily had a relative staying with him. "F.O.B.," he told me. "Fresh off the boat. He escaped from the Red Guard and made it to the USA." (Friend's family were Chinese, originally from Macau.) A bit later, friend showed us a ceramic cup his sister had made in her pottery class. I had been studying Old English in school (read Beowulf in the original, the whole bit), and started talking about the drinking horns the Anglo-Saxons used, and how they had no legs, so you'd have to drink the whole contents before putting the horn down on the table if you didn't want a mess.
Friend translated all this for F.O.B., who knew about three words of English. F.O.B. made a short response. Friend laughed: "He says you guys would still be drinking out of those things if it wasn't for the Chinese!"
posted by Creosote at 9:15 AM on March 24, 2006