Post #2345436

@runoutgroover@cloudisland.nz I greeted a Swiss person in German not long ago and got a stern "I'm Swiss, not German" back. What a weird interpretation, I thought – it isn't only Germans who speak German. She routinely speaks German with her husband! Greeting me in Chinese is a minefield challenge, though, and maybe a similar situation. If you're clearly a state servant, I take "níhǎo" as an oppressive political assertion. My great grandfather was locked in a cage, too small to stand or lie down in, by the Red Guard. That was after they'd forced him to dive into the village pond, searching the icy muck for several hours to find a couple of guns – which never turned up. After they released him he tried to hang himself but was brought down and eventually revived by my great grandmother and his sister. His daughter in law, my grandmother, went through years of being taken from the house in the small hours of the morning to confess her capitalist thoughts while kneeling on shards of shell and glass. That Red Guard is whom you side with if, as a policeman or whatever, you greet me with "níhǎo". But if you're just an everyday person, it's fine! I speak a little of the common dialect, too, and do understand the newfangled informal greeting when it doesn't come from government.