As we were riding in a van through the streets of Zunyi, Mark quizzed the kids to see if they knew the name for a crosswalk in Chinese. Since none of them knew, he explained to them that it’s called a斑马线 (Ban Ma Xian), which literally means “zebra stripes”. Chinese translations for western concepts often sound similar to the English counterpart (transliteration), such as 咖啡 (kafei, pronounced kahfay) for coffee. The modern word for computer, it is a logical translation; 电脑 (diannao) means electric brain. The Chinese word for crosswalk is visual, which Mark found amusing and wanted to share with the kids. Mark heard giggles and Lanie’s little voice from the back seat say, “Oh, that makes sense”. When he pressed her about what she meant, she explained that she’d seen a sign that said “Zebra Crossing”, and had even pointed it out to Saylor. Of course, we all wanted to see the sign after that. It wasn’t very hard to do, as they were up and down the main streets. Our driver could not understand why we asked him to pull over for a photo. Even when we explained it, he didn’t seem to think it was funny.
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