My favourite T-shirt

 

Is one that I have just been able to get back into (humblebrag) after finally dropping a few pounds. The t-shirt is about ten years old and was a present from Cro one Christmas, her having conspired with our lovely Chinese teacher in its manufacture.

The red 'chop' stamp at the bottom is the 'Double Happiness' that you often see associated with Chinese weddings, but the writing is the part I really like. Also, the calligraphy was done by our Chinese teacher, who is a remarkable woman herself, having lived through the Cultural Revolution and having spent many years working in a peasant village during that time, eventually ended up a scientist, working in the USA and in the UK. Her lovely, expressive script (cursive is how it is referred to, I think) presents these two lines:

我是知识分子

地位不高

This is pronounced 'Wo shi zhishi fenzi; diwei bugao' and it translates as 'I am an intellectual; my social status is not high'. This was Cro's joke about our status when we went travelling in China. A poorly-paid primary school teacher and an even more poorly-paid county councillor (don't get me started..) travelling around a country where hard work had transformed the place in the time we had been travelling there into a rich country with millionaires and billionaires who had built up empires after starting very small. By the by, my favourite story of a self-made entrepreneur is Tao Huabi, who started off selling tofu at her roadside stall and ended up as the head of a company whose Chilli sauces are sold all over China and all over the world. The brand is named 'Lao Gan Ma', which means 'Old Grandma' and they all have a picture of her face on the label. She is currently worth $1.05 Billion. Here is the Wikipedia page

Founder of 'Lao Gan Ma' sauces

The idea of a Westerner having a Chinese T-shirt that was legible and a joke always appealed to me, and when I next go to China I will most assuredly take it with me. Chinese people are generally very careful not to say anything that might make you lose face, and they may perhaps think I have been sold this T-shirt unwittingly as some kind of joke, but if I can one day engage one of my Chinese interlocuters in conversation I will explain whose joke it was, and keep a bit of Cro over in China in their knowledge of the jokester.