Something I love telling people is that the Mandarin euphemism for ‘being horny’ is ‘I ate your tofu / I want to eat your tofu / they ate my tofu’. I feel like we should popularize that in pop culture. Like, you hear that in TV shows (mainly Taiwanese but also sometimes mainland Chinese)
When you want to order a iced soy milk drink with grass jelly in Singapore and southern Malaysia, you would order a ‘Michael Jackson’ because it’s ’black and white’ like the song (or)
The same euphemisms mean different things across the Sinophile world.. 仆街 (puk gai) means ‘drop dead’ in Hong Kong (fall on the street), but it means ‘to go bankrupt) in Singapore and Malaysia (pok gai), which has then become ‘pokai’ in Malay
Back to tofu. It used to refer mostly to unwanted sexual interaction, ‘don’t let someone eat your tofu!’ Was a common sex talk.
But it feels like it’s been reclaimed a bit to ‘yes you can eat my tofu’. Probably depends on where and who is saying it, like everything else in this language
Add comment