Waiguoren \ Wāiguǒrén \ 歪果仁 n. crooked nuts; a near-homonym for ‘foreigners’
A: My waiguoren co-worker always asks for non-spicy soup when we go to Sichuan hotpot.
B: This nut is crooked indeed. What is the point of going to Sichuan hotpot if you don't get the spiciest soup.
A: He is not used to it. He never had spicy food growing up.
B: You need to straighten up this crooked nut.
In the past year or so, people have become too lazy to do this. ‘Crooked nuts’ is now a good enough word to describe foreigners. In cut-throat contemporary China, no one has valuable seconds to spend on correct spelling.
Self-justification always follows laziness. Now, some say that ‘crooked nuts’ is actually the perfect word for foreigners because it is exactly what they sound like when they try to say ‘foreigners’ in Chinese and mess up the tones. Some say that foreigners are like the round pegs in the square holes of China’s social norms, and can therefore loosely be described as crooked. Plus, they seem slightly nuts from time to time.
Whatever the reasoning (or the lack thereof), the new waiguoren caught on.
Just to clarify: the word is not entirely making fun of the way foreigners mess up their tones (only a little). There are plenty of other words that were born this way. For example, the word ‘talented’ (yŏucáihuá) became ‘canola flowers’ (yóucàihuā); ‘Weibo’ (Wēibó) became ‘scarf’ (wéibó); and ‘what’ (shénme) became ‘magical horse’ (shénmă). This proves, once again, that laziness is the mother of all invention.
So next time you Google what Chinese people have been saying about you, don’t type in ‘laowai’ like it’s 2014. Try ‘crooked nuts’ instead. You can thank me later.
By day, Mia Li is a news reporter in Beijing; at night, she tries to turn that news into standup comedy.
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