Guest Post: Story Behind the Idiom: 塞翁失马 – A blessing in disguise

Hey hey, lookie here, an excellent guest post submitted by native Chinese speaker Yang from Learn Mandarin Now. This story tells us a bit about the Chinese chengyu (idiom),塞翁失马, which can mean “a blessing in disguise”, or can conversely mean “bad luck disguised as good”. It’s used to point out the hidden positives or negatives in a situation, so you might say it means “there are two sides to every circumstance”.

I’m loving this post for the fable-y language: “servant”, “steed”, etc. Plus, I learned a new favorite word in this one: 塞外 sài wài, meaning “Beyond the Great Wall”. In other words, a remote place near the outskirts or borders of China. Also, don’t forget, 匹 pǐ is the measure word for Horses, so you’re gonna see that a few times.

There’s one phrase we should probably get into in greater detail, because I don’t think it’s immediately clear what it means: 全国上下的年轻男子都被抓去打仗. Let’s take a look at this, word by word:

全国 – The whole country
上下的 – Everywhere
年轻男子 – young men
都 – all
被 – grammar word usually indicating that the subject of the sentence has had something unfortunate happen to them
抓 – grabbed
去 – go out
打仗 – fight

The key word here is 抓 zhuā, which usually means to “catch” or “grab”. In this case, the word means “drafted”, so it still means to “grab”, but in this case, it’s the ruling power (probably the king) doing the grabbing up (of potential soldiers). The 被 in this case functions as “were”, with a negative overtone. So this can be translated as “All the young men everywhere in the country were drafted to go fight a war.”

Learn Mandarin Now’s “How to Read Chinese” page for a basic overview on getting started with Simplified characters, and look at their new blog for some learning tips.