Funny but true

When you live in Taiwan for a long time it is fairly easy to spot someone who is Japanese or Vietnamese. Japanese men, for example, tend to look a bit thinner than Chinese men, perhaps as a result of a different diet at home and Vietnamese women tend to be really short, something which is quite obvious if you see them in a group. (It's also true -and documented in Chinese medical books- that people in Southern China are shorter than people in Northern China so perhaps this is just an extension of this rule.) I was also once able to tell that a man was Japanese because he had a full beard, something you'll never see on a Chinese man.

I could also probably pick out the Chinese person out of a group of non-Chinese people: I actually did that back in Canada one time, namely pick out a Chinese woman out of a group of Korean women and start speaking to her in Chinese. She asked me how I could tell she was Chinese and I told her that it was because she was the prettiest one there. Yet for some reason she didn't give me her phone number. True story. Long before I ever met my wife, by the way.

Anyway, a similar thing happened to me a few weeks ago while I was visiting the National Taichung Institute of Technology: I spotted a student who looked very pale and thin and I asked him "Are you Japanese?"

"Hai (はい)," he said.

"You're not here studying English, are you? I mean you can do that in Japan."

He shook his head.

"So you must be here studying Chinese."

"Aso (あそ)," he said.

"Oh so Japanese people really do say that!"

"Eh?" he said.

"Nevermind," I said.

"Aso" is a well known expression in the West because Charlie Chan used to say "aso" in movies when he found a clue. It's Japanese for "So it is!" Why Charlie Chan would say something in Japanese when he found a clue is baffling. In movies I never hear Japanese people say "aso": rather they say "So des ne!" which I imagine is a more formal expression. Still, my Japanese textbook from back when I was a studying at McGill said that "aso" was a real expression meaning "So it is!" and I was delighted to find that the expression actually does get used by real Japanese people, especially when it the word keeps appearing in crossword puzzles.

Martin