We’re shaking up our longstanding Pop Cantonese series by inviting author Eva Wong Yi to offer her take on distinctly Cantonese expressions. Wong is known for her Chinese-language short stories, including the collections Ways to Love in a Crowded City (擠迫之城的戀愛方法) and The Four Seasons of Lam Yip (林葉的四季).
Arguing with someone from an older generation is hard. Arguing with a Chinese person from an older generation is extra hard. Even if you backed them into a corner with the most logical and evidence-based arguments, you’d still come out as the bad guy because you talked back to them and thus disrespected your elders.
That’s why I have given up on arguing with most of them, despite my years of dominating my opponents on the English debating team in school. When uncles and aunties came at me with unsolicited advice about my career choices (“Go to medical school and become a gynecologist because you’re a woman!”) or sexist ideas about my future marriage (“Don’t become a doctor or else you’ll be too busy to properly take care of all the housework, your husband, and all the children you will have!”), I would just sit there, shove dim sum into my mouth, and try not to point out exactly what’s wrong with their nonsense. The more I listened, the more apparent it was that my being present was a rare opportunity for them to impart wisdom as the more senior party, to demonstrate that, as they might put it, “I’ve eaten more salt than you’ve eaten rice” (我食鹽多過你食米 ngo5 sik6 jim4 do1 gwo3 nei5 sik6 mai5) – as if that was something even mathematically possible.
There are many variants of this expression in the Chinese language. In Mandarin, a common companion to the phrase translates as “I’ve crossed more bridges than you have walked roads” (我走過的橋比你走過的路多 wǒ zǒuguò de qiáo bǐ nǐ zǒuguò de lù duō), implying that the speaker has more life experience than whoever he’s lecturing. In Cantonese, there are all sorts of ways to juvenilise and thus discredit the younger party, most popular ones translating as “the soft spot on your head hasn’t even closed yet” (你腦囟都未生埋 nei5 nou5 seon2 dou1 mei6 saang1 maai4) and “you were still suckling when I started working” (我出嚟行嗰陣時你都未戒奶 ngo5 ceot1 lai4 hang4 go2 zan6 si4 nei5 dou1 mei6 gaai3 naai5). Other variants of this last insult involve diapers, reincarnation, being in your mother’s ovaries or your father’s testes – you get the gist.
These barbs work by highlighting differences in age and life experience, therefore activating the cultural script that young people should never challenge their elders. In the 2021 Marvel superhero movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the thousand-year-old immortal villain Xu Wenwu (played by Tong Leung Chiu-wai) was told off by a white-haired good-guy during a face-off. “The sins of your past would have destroyed this place,” said the good guy, justifying why he once drove the serial murderer away from his peaceful, secluded village. Wenwu, with his full head of black hair, looked at the good guy (played by veteran action film star Yuen Wah) and said in Mandarin: “Xiǎozǐ, gēn wǒ shuōhuà lǐmào diǎn, wǒ chīguò de yán bǐ nǐ chīguò de fàn hái yào duō” (小子，跟我講話禮貌點，我吃過的鹽比你吃過的飯還要多). The official English subtitles translated this line as: “Be careful how you speak to me, young man. I’ve lived ten of your life times.”
Although it did not carry over the absurd salt vs. rice imagery of the Chinese original, it did convey the ridiculous effectiveness in shutting someone up by invoking seniority in age and life experience: yes, Tony Leung was ten years younger than Yuen Wah in real life, but in the movie, Wenwu was a millenium older than everyone else in the scene. It doesn’t matter Wenwu’s ten lifetimes worth of experience were of running a gang of murderers, toppling governments and conquering kingdoms for centuries. It doesn’t matter how valid the villagers’ decision was to not let him move in. As long as Wenwu was older than the rest of them, he was culturally sanctioned to invoke the illogical salt-and-rice defence to demand respect, shut down accusations of his villainy, and continue to make demands to trespass and bring destruction to the village.
A simple Google search of the phrase 我食鹽多過你食米 yields many demonstrations of how ridiculous this expression is in literal terms. One online mathematician calculated that if we go by weight, my uncle would have to be ingesting rice bowls full of salt every day since birth for him to actually have ingested more salt by weight than I have with rice by the time I entered university. If we went by the number of grains, then I’d have to eat 30 times as many grains of rice as a normal person to be able to catch up with the number of grains of salt my uncle would’ve eaten, which is physiologically impossible for even a carb-lover like me.
The fact that the phrase is so absurd makes its infallible power to shut people up even more tragic: backed by hundreds of years of cultural indoctrination demanding unconditional respect for your elders, and the false assumption that age always comes with wisdom and expertise, a young person like me can only bite my tongue, and wait for them to eat their words when they need my help with modern technology. No matter how much salt or experience you’ve had in your life, your smartphone still isn’t coming off Do Not Disturb Mode until you actually admit I know something you don’t, uncle.