水管工乔

Date: 2008.10.17 | Category: General | Tags:

I’m in Beijing for about 2 weeks. Yesterday I bought a newspaper (青年报, or Youth Daily, which seems to be one of the best and most lively, although a bit above my reading level) to see what they had to say about the US election, and also what they called Obama (奥巴马:ao4 ba1 ma3) and McCain (麦凯恩: mai4 kai3 en1). I was caught by a subheading with the 4 characters: “水管工乔” that I tried to make sense of as a cheng yu (成语), one of the 4-character phrases common in Chinese (sometimes crudely translated into English prefaced with “Confucius said…”). Didn’t work. It wasn’t until I looked it up that I realized that “水管工” (water pipe work/worker) is a plumber and 乔 “qiao2” is a surname pronounced somewhat similarly to “Joe.”

So the article did capture the heart of the ultimate 2008 U.S. Presidential debate.

Sigh.