Excerpts from Direct Translations: Words and Stories
O Terlyakova Yu · Southerly · 2010
Morning over a yum cha, a la Guangzhou style, which is cheap by Australian standards but expensive by Chinese standards. If you sit down and say no to tea you get told that you are charged for tea anyway, suggesting you might as well have tea. If you start ordering tea you find the cheapest is 10 yuan and, in our case, 20 for two. That's a lot of money for a mere morning meal for an ordinary Chinese who earn somewhere between 200 and 2000 yuan a month. Anyway, my thoughts wandered till they stopped at the words for 'thought' in Chinese: si xiang, and their structure. My mind's eye stares at them seeing two hearts in them for the first time, 'si' a field over a heart and, 'xiang', a togetherness over a heart. In a way, this makes sense, a lot more sense when you compare with the English word 'miss' if you say 'I miss you'. That has to translate into Chinese as 'I think you', 'think' or 'si' being a transitive verb. Structurally, it combines a heart with a togetherness. Thus, if you think someone, you want to be together with him or her. Nearly in most cases, I now recall, Chinese language, if not Chinese themselves, thinks with the heart, as shown in the expression, xin xiang shi cheng (heart thinks things achieved), normally used as a good wish, e.g., May you xin xiang shi cheng! May you achieve what your heart thinks! A most vivid expression, and also the most common, is the Chinese xin si (heart thoughts).