PASSING THE WOK

By Sun jiahui (孫佳慧)

PASSING THE WOK

By Sun jiahui (孫佳慧)

The world isn’t fair, not by a long shot, and sometimes you need a scapegoat. In Chinese, we have a scape-wok as in 背黑鍋(bēihēiguō, carry the black wok on one’s back), because 鍋 (guō) sounds like 過 (guò, mistake or fault). Colloquially, people often leave out the“black” and just say 背鍋 (bēiguō). For example: 她沒做錯什么，卻替董事會背了鍋。 (tā méi zuò cuò shénme, què tì dǒngshìhuì bēi le guō. She did nothing wrong, but carried the wok on behalf of the board.)

Similarly, you have 接鍋 (jiēguō), which literally means to “accept the wok,” as in, His predecessor screwed everything up, so he prepared to accept the wok before coming to power. (他的前任把事情搞得一團糟，所以他在上任之前就做好了接鍋的準備。tā de qiánrèn bǎ shìqing gǎo de yì tuán zāo, suǒyǐ tā zài shàngrèn zhīqián jiù zuò hǎo le jiēguō de zhǔnbèi.)

Victims of scapegoating are sympathetic figures, so they can earn the heroic title of 接鍋俠 (jiēguōxiá, wokaccepting knight). Though unfairly in most cases, they are always the ones taking responsibility with chivalric aplomb. However, let’s remember that for someone to accept the wok, someone has to give it away; for that, we have the expression, 甩鍋 (shuǎiguō), meaning “throw off the wok,” or “throw the wok to somebody.” If a sports team loses, the coach might put all that blame on the players, so you might say: “The football team lost the match, and the coach did nothing but throw the wok to his players. (足球隊輸了比賽，可教練卻只會甩鍋給隊員。Zúqiúduì shū le bǐsài, kě jiàoliàn què zhǐhuì shuǎiguō gěi duìyuán.)”However, wok-throwing hardly ever works and you may have to take responsibility. For this, we have分鍋 (fēnguō, distribute the wok), which roughly means to distribute blame, as in, The project has failed. It’s time for the team to distribute the wok. (項目已經失敗了，現在是分鍋的時候了。Xiàngmù yǐjīng shībài le, xiànzài shì fēnguō de sh!hou le.)

Sooner or later, the wok comes for us all. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, thus, sometimes, 天外飛鍋 (tiān wài fēi guō), a wok just falls from heaven.