Yellow Snow

Q: What do these Chinese women have in common?

yellow snow

A: They all have the Chinese name 黄雪, which in English means “Yellow Snow.” (Comedic gold, this is!) The surname Huang is fairly common, and it’s not unusual for girls’ names to include the character 雪.

If you want to see more Chinese yellow snow, you can do a Baidu search for 黄雪. Unfortunately, the term more often seems to refer to snow in northern China (and Korea) that mixes with the yellow dust. Not as funny.

Thanks to John B for bringing this Chinese name to my attention!

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John Pasden

John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning.

Comments

  1. That really is comedy gold!

    Reminds me of the time I saw a Japanese businessman (salaryman) sitting in the first-class compartment of a train here in Germany, working on his laptop. Very dignified by appearance, the elder gentleman with silvery hair was dressed nicely, wearing a suit jacket, but was wearing not a shirt, but a t-shirt under it (for a more relaxed journey I suppose). This t-shirt, sure enough, identified him as a “Yellow Snow Machine”.
    I pissed myself at the thought.

  2. John, you’re such a cunninglinguist….

    By the way, congrats on the two NCAA Championships (football & basketball).

    I always get a lot of flack over my Chinese name being a girl’s name. HunagXiaoFang….

  3. misterguofen Says: January 16, 2007 at 12:30 am

    Dude, I’m in Harbin, Heilongjiang where we have real yellow snow because people just pee on the ground and it’s so cold here it never evaporates. It just freezes. Not everybody does this but WAY too many people do! I’m sooooo not making this up. 🙁

  4. schtickyrice Says: January 17, 2007 at 8:36 am

    黄雪and 黄冰冰 may not be such good names, but who would think twice when 黄河 and 黄海 get such poetic treatment?

  5. […] This, as you know, is an apolitical blog, and stories like this are among the least interesting to me personally. But this guy’s name demands to be noticed. His name is 刘铁男. That’s “Liu Iron Man.” His parents named him “Iron Man.” That’s kind of awesome. I haven’t been forced to take notice of a name like this since I discovered the lovely lass named 黄雪 (“Yellow Snow“). […]

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