You know you’ve noticed it yourself. Couples of mixed Asian and white descent are 99-times-out-of-100 white guys with Asian girls. It’s a statistical “fact” (quotes because I just pulled the statistic out of my nose with no research whatsoever). But why? What’s the deal with that? Why don’t you see [...]

Here’s another Chinese idiom. The idiomatic English translation of 鹬蚌相争 (yù bàng xiāng zhēng) is “a snipe and a clam locked in combat”. Without hearing the story behind it, this seems to be ridiculously cryptic. But once you know the story, it makes perfect sense. The story goes…

One day, a clam [...]

Here’s another Chinese idiom with an interesting story. The idiomatic English translation of 自相矛盾 (zì xiāng máo dùn) is “contradicting oneself”. The story behind it goes like this:

In ancient times, there was a sword and shield salesman who would yell out to people passing by, “My spears are the sharpest in the world [...]

Huh?

Someone needs to explain to whoever wrote this that the pattern is “[adjective] is as [adjective] does” and that it doesn’t work with every adjective.