An unintended secret ingredient.

“What should we bake?” I asked.
“Something that’s not typical Chinese,” Lisa said.
“Of course, but what?”
“Well, how about a cinnamon roll? Cinnamon is a Christmass-y taste, and Spring Festival is like the love child of Christmas and Guy Fawkes, it could satisfy both cultures?”
“Okay, do you know the word for cinnamon?”
“No, let’s look it up on our way to the market.”

Cinnamon we learnt was guìpí. Having moved to China four months prior with suitcase in one hand, and not a lick of language skills in the other, learning cinnamon meant increasing my survival repertoire. My biggest challenge in taming this beast of a language was trying to be consciously aware of tones, and understanding that in raising or lowering my voice I could change a perfectly innocent syllable like ‘ma’ from meaning ‘Mother’, to ‘horse’. We practiced saying guìpí going to the market, and managed to buy it with zero hassles.

We were baking cinnamon rolls because our unofficial Chinese grandfather Laoban (the boss), had asked Lisa and I to come join his family for Spring Festival. With a resounding ‘YES!’ followed by absolute confirmation in the form of ganbei (the national salute to alcoholic camaraderie) the battery acid we drank solidified in his eyes our dedication to immersing ourselves into China.

We arrived at his house about 2PM, and settled into an afternoon of jiaozi prep, to which his wife found hysterical as she watched my dumplings fall. “They’re sleepy”, she told me, hiding them in-between her own perfect production line. In the evening we all gathered around the table, chasing down each mouthful of dumpling with thimbled sips of baijiu. By the time dessert was served I’m sure I had consumed my weight in dumplings, and had a blood to alcohol ratio of 50:50.

Picking up a cinnamon roll I wanted to show off my new vocabulary addition and proudly attempted in Mandarin “Aren’t these cinnamon rolls good?”

The most horrified looks descended on the faces of my Chinese hosts. Laoban hesitated before asking “are you sure you meant to say goupí?” My imbibed tongue had changed guì to gou, and I quickly checked what this new goupí word was in my dictionary.

Goupí translated to skin of dog.

After many apologies, and many toasts to mistranslations, we demolished the plate of rolls and skipped outdoors to set ablaze the night sky with our fireworks. Naturally, the stray dogs who had taken up residency nearby howled after each bang.