Grammar and Tones

I poured my three-year-old a glass of orange juice and put it in front of him.

He: Can I drink that?

Me: Yes, it’s for you!

He took a sip, then took another bite of it ham sandwich, and then asked again:

He: Daddy, can I drink that?

Me: Yes, that’s why I poured it. It’s for you to drink.

He took another sip. Then another bite, and then he’d ask:

He: Daddy, can I drink it up?

Me: Yes, you can, son, drink!

He: No, daddy, I mean can I drink it all up?

Me: Yes, you can drink it all up!

It’s such a cute conversation with the little gentleman, that’s happened a few times last week. What makes it even cuter is that it shows me how similar he is to his mommy: Since we know each other, my wonderful wife has been asking me funny, cute, and silly questions like this. Only, to her I would typically answer with irony. I’d pour her a cup of tea, say.

Wonderful wife: Can I drink that?

Me (shouting out with a big smile): Don’t drink that! It’s highly poisonous!

My wife would quickly put the cup down, then watch me drink my cup of tea, and seemingly forget about the issue. After a moment I’d say

Me: That was ironic. It’s tea. Yes, you can drink it.

Wonderful wife: Oh. (starting to drink)

I don’t know if that’s a Chinese thing, or just my wife, but seemed to be completely unable to get irony. And I get it. It’s a difficult concept: you are saying one thing but mean the opposite. How could it be more confusing.

She would throw opportunities to tease her little bit at me. She liked to look out the window and clearly see the pouring London rain and ask: “Is it raining outside“, to which I’d reply “No, it’s beautiful sunshine!“. But then she’d walk out in a t-shirt and quickly dash back in and say: “No, it does seem like it’s raining outside“. So after a few times, I tried to make the irony more obvious:

Wonderful wife: Is it raining outside?

Me: No, it’s raining inside!

She would look at the ceiling and look confused, till I’d say: “That’s irony, wonderful wife!“. I explained her the concept of irony many times, but it took her a long time to identify it. Once, we had booked a theatre ticket for Saturday afternoon. On Friday evening she asked me: when do we have to take the tube to the theatre tomorrow? And I said: 5am in the morning, latest! She said “ok” and turned round to sleep, and I realised that she would probably wake me up in the middle of the night at 4am to remind me to get up to catch the train. I quickly told her “that was irony” to avoid this.

Now after 10 years together, of course, these type of jokes don’t work on her anymore. She has learnt irony.

But her parents haven’t! I get along with her mom very well, so I take the liberty to sometimes take the Mickey out of her. She loves chocolate, and is chocolate is not that easy to get in many places in China, I once brought her a jar of Nutella, which she found very intriguing: bread is are rare exotic food, chocolate is a rare exotic food, chocolate spread is a rare exotic type of a rare exotic food, and the very concept of putting some sort of topping on a slice of bread is very foreign and exotic. She tentatively spread a tiny little razor-thin bit of Nutella on her slice of bread, looked at me and asked “like this?“, to which I shouted out with a big smile: “Nooo, not so much!“

How mean of me! For all she knew, it could have been Marmite! I quickly gave her a hug and confirmed to her that yes, you can just put as much Nutella on your bread as you want and it’s gonna be delicious. But I didn’t know the Chinese word for “irony”, so explaining her the concept of irony had to wait for a while. She still loves Nutella, but she must have been thinking that her foreign son-in-law just has a really weird sense humour… Germans and humour don’t go together well…

Years later, when we had a baby, my wife had started to enjoy irony, too. Our baby was born in June, when it can be up to 40 °C in Beijing, but Chinese are generally quite concert that babies might get cold (but that’s a topic for another day). Mum-in-law might say something like “there is a bit wind, should I put a jumper on him?” and my wife and I would respond something like “No, you should put at least three jumpers on him“.

We only did this once though, since a moment later we saw a sweating hot baby and realised: grandma doesn’t pick up irony.