05-2020
Chinese Version
On Mother’s Day, many friends happily shared the photos of the Mother’s Day gifts they received from their “tie xin xiao mian ao”. I saw many pretty flowers, artistic balloons, lively plants, wines, cakes, and brunches…
“Tie xin xiao mian ao” is a very popular and sweet nickname for daughters in China. This nickname uses an ordinary cotton jacket to express a daughter’s meticulous care for their parents, its direct translation into English would be “little cotton jacket close to the heart”.
I seemed never heard a similar English expression for daughters. Therefore I wondered about the cause for the lack of a similar English nickname for daughters. Could the cause be the cultural differences between the East and the West in terms of familial affections?
Then I remembered a story told by a young professor in the chemistry department in CUA where I did my graduate studies in the early 1990s.
In the early 1990s, when I was a graduate student in the chemistry department in CUA, our department had a few married female graduate students who had no children yet. At that time, we had a young professor Cindy, who was a mother of two toddler boys.
Cindy was the youngest faculty member in our department. Because of this, she often chatted with us, a group of female graduate students during our breaks.
One year, after Cindy came back from Virginia for her father’s funeral, we, a few female graduate students, went to see her in her office to express our condolences for her loss.
We chatted a bit, then Cindy said to us: “If you have a chance, try to have a daughter. When I went back for my father’s funeral, my mother said to me: ‘Your brothers really did not know how to help me. I am so lucky you came back to help me.’”
Cindy’s story let me know that there are no cultural differences in terms of familial affection between the West and the East. The Lack of a similar English nickname for daughters probably showed that the Chinese language is more down to the earth than English is in cases like this.