Zhao Yunlan's quotations

[marycrawford]

(I've searched back through the type:questions tag and couldn't find it, so if anyone has already discussed this, please link me?)

I love how Zhao Yunlan pretends to be a plebe and a know-nothing, which is clearly as much of an act as his good-time guileless bro is, because he also seems to quote highbrow things all the damn time.

It's both endearing and frustrating, because I don't speak a word of Chinese, and I would really really like to know more about the things Zhao Yunlan quotes - sometimes the subs helpfully tell me it's poetry, like the line he quotes to Shen Wei when they're in the mountains in the Wear My Jacket I Insist scene. And sometimes it's clearly a proverb/saying, like "trust those you hire/hire those you trust" and IIRC he also quotes from the Art of War somewhere?

Has anyone more organized and knowledgeable than me made a list of ZYL quotations, or sources, or anything?

And is it me, or does Shen Wei, the polished 10,000 year old Professor, not do this at all?

Comments

[extrapenguin]

Yeah, this. I also think that since Shen Wei skipped 10 000 years and had to catch up to modern Haixing as an adult, he also plain knows less classics than Zhao Yunlan. He likely knows the popular ones, and the most-quoted sayings from the rest, but if Zhao Yunlan quotes something, Shen Wei's probably going to recognize that it's a quote but not where it's from.

[enviropony]

That's a good point. I always forget how much of this stuff we absorb as we grow up. I mean, it's either classic lit or movie & TV quotes, but everybody's got a pocket full of sayings from their formative days. And that's an experience Shen Wei just never had.

[extrapenguin]

Yeah, and a lot of Shen Wei's efforts were no doubt concentrating on acquiring skills like "how not to get hit by cars", with cultural stuff coming after the essential survival skills. He's learned so much, but he can't have learned everything.

[starriewolf]

This ^^^^^

Chinese literature is compulsory in schools so anybody who's gone all the way to university (aka Zhao Yunlan, because it's also a Chinese policy thing that he wouldn't be able to have that job without a university degree) would and should be using famous poetry lines and references automatically.

On the flip side, though, I help solo out with the Guardian subs sometimes, and some of the things Shen Wei says during climaxes are seriously the most esoteric references ever. It's easy to tell he's not a modern human being in those cases; the effect is like if you were walking down the street and somebody started speaking entire sentences in Middle English or something. Part of it's probably the novel's influence also, since in the novel he's a professor of classical Chinese literature...