As any student of a foreign language knows, a lot of what’s being said in a conversation is really what’s not being said. Satire, as an style, takes this one step further: if communication is about what’s not being said, therefore, an article that really did say what a satirical article seemed to be saying would be ludicrous.
But as language students also know, reading between the lines for satire is hard, and I personally am always plagued by doubt when I think I see satire in Chinese. It is embarrassing to not be in on the joke, but thinking someone’s joking when they’re actually dead serious is also a cultural faux pas.
So I should perhaps be more understanding of the people at the state-run media organ The People’s Daily, when they decided to post this wonderful headline and corresponding report from America’s Finest News Source, The Onion: North Korea’s Top Leader Named Sexiest Man Alive For 2012.
http://english.people.com.cn/90777/8035568.html
There is a false assumption amongst some who have studied Chinese that the language does not contain satire; actually, I’ve found there to be plenty of satirical writing, cropping up everywhere from online forums to my Chinese textbook. One article I saw on RenRen (a Chinese Facebook clone) talked about how an exchange student in the United States found Americans to be so bad at math they couldn’t work out how to give $5 in change when presented with $11 for a $6 bill. The underlying meaning is that while Chinese people may rightfully be able to say their math education is better than Americans’ (in some ways), the gap isn’t THIS large, and so Chinese people shoudn’t harbor any rash superiority complex about their education system when many parts of China don’t have electricity in their schools.
A second instance of satire from my textbook came from an article about Lei Feng, who is a Chinese heroic figure whose short life was painstakingly documented by propaganda sources and used as a model for Maoist behavior. The author commented that it was a fortunate thing that thousands of photographs had been taken of Lei Feng before his tragic and sudden death, so that people would still be able to learn from his good example. The subtext, of course, calls into question the unrealistic attention paid to Lei Feng, whose main merit was being a common person doing common duties with a common army reserve group.
Satire is tough to unpack and perhaps one day I will try to write a more detailed article about it; in the meantime, let’s just bask in the glory of these cultural miscommunications when they appear so brilliantly before us. Carry on, Kim Jung Un!