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Bo Gu / NBC News
"Hand Shredded Ass Meat" is an unusual translation of an item at a Beijing noodle restaurant NBC's Bo Gu saw recently.
BEIJING – Overseas tourists often find the menus here befuddling, for good reason.
After all, what Westerner has experience with foods like these? “Cowboy leg,” “Hand-shredded ass meat,” “Red-burned lion head,” “Strange flavor noodles,” “Blow-up flatfish with no result,” or “Tofu made by woman with freckles.”
As proud as the Chinese people are of their thousands of years of gastronomic culture, even a Chinese native can feel disoriented when going to another province, given all the different styles of cooking. Many of the food names, often unique to different provinces, get lost in translation, especially in booming cities starting to embrace overseas tourists.
With few English speakers, restaurants usually translate their menus word by word directly from an English-Chinese dictionary. Or they just Google the Chinese characters. A photo that made the rounds online a few years ago got a chuckle from a lot of people: a restaurant with a large “page not found” sign above its door as its English name.
But the Beijing Municipal government hopes to end such unintended jokes with its new guidebook intended for the public and restaurants alike, “Enjoy Culinary Delights: The English Translation of Chinese Menus.”
The effort began in 2006 with a “Beijing speaks English” campaign. By the 2008 Summer Olympics, officials had created a draft guide with translations for major restaurants to meet the demand for arriving athletes and tourists.
“After 2008, we felt like the book was in a good demand, so we kept working on it and collected more menus. Finally we translated over 2,000 Chinese dish names,” said Xiang Ping, deputy chief of the “Beijing speaks English” committee, in an interview with NBC News.
The cover of the new guidebook, "Enjoy culinary delights: the English translation of Chinese menus," that hopes to make it easier for foreigners to make sense of restaurant menus in Beijing.
Some of the dishes kept their original names, which people familiar with Chinese food may understand: jiaozi, baozi, mantou, tofu or wonton.
Some more complicated dishes come with both Chinese pronunciations and explanations: “fotiaoqiang” (steamed abalone with shark’s fin and fish maw in broth); “youtiao” (deep-fried dough sticks); “lvdagunr” (glutinous rice rolls stuffed with red bean paste),
and “aiwowo” (steamed rice cakes with sweet stuffing).
Chen Lin, a 90-year-old retired English professor from Beijing Foreign Language University, was the chief consultant for the book.
He told NBC News that about 20 other experts – like English teachers and professors, translators, expats who have lived in China for a long time, culinary experts and people from the media – helped develop the final version.
So next time you're in Beijing and you are confronted with a menu item like "hand shredded ass meat," hopefully you can crack open the book to get some guidance. It means "hand shredded donkey meat."
Leave a Comment:
lol! "Hand shredded ass meat"! Mmmmmm! Now them's good eats!
My guess? Shredded flank steak.
I really do have to recommend the black chicken leg soup over there. Very tasty. Just watch out for the beaks (no, not kidding).
Those were probably toe nails....I think I'd rather have the beaks...
I just saw "Human Centipede 2: The full Sequence" which is currently streaming on Netflix. I know what ass meat is.
I watched The Human Centipede for the first time last week, which is why I'm avoiding Human Centipede 2!
The Japanese translation below it says ロバ肉 (roba niku) which means donkey meat...
*SIGH* Rather childish of the author for not pointing that out!!!
However the site engrish.com has plenty of similar lost in translation faux pas, if you're interested in such humor.
How about some Joy Luck Dangling Balls to go with the ass meat!?
Author might have assumed most people, after a moment's reflection, would figure it out. I rather appreciate authors who assume the reader has a brain. All too rare these days.
Hand shredded ass meat (HSAM) sometimes describes a Colombian hooker who pulled an all night gig at a Cartagena hotel.
@patter123,
Maybe... But you sure as hell can't tell which ones assume so from these posts!
I would rather eat ass meat not knowing it is donkey meat. Oh so gross!
When my siblings and I were young and at our "peak" my Mother used to offer us "hand shredded a$$ meat" and she would occasionally hold true to her offer. Ahhh, sweet, sweet memories.
Donkey meat, huh?
Figures. One of my former coworkers told me they have a particular saying in China:
"Best meat in heaven is dragon. Best meat on Earth is donkey."
Never tried either.
saw a sign for "fried beef" as a breakfast special. otherwise known as chicken fried steak
Hand shredded ass meat served on Fridays with a side order of pink slip.
lol
“Tofu made by woman with freckles"?
Don't tell me...ginger tofu?
Thanks a lot for not bothering to answer the question in the story.
Enjoy your ass meat.
Ass meat no questions, and I'll tell you no lies.
The last paragraph says:
I Don't know if knowing it's shredded donkey meat makes it better or worse.
Perhaps this restaurant in located in a kinkier part of the Red Light District and the translation is correct!
If it were a red light district worth its name, the kinkier part of the red light district would be the red light district.
When we were in Beijing, all the food tasted the same. It probably had more to do with the restaurants/hotels the Chinese government arranged for our group to use. We weren't given the choice of ordering from a menu. It was all buffet. The only thing we really liked was the beer - Local Beer was the name. We drank plenty of that stuff.
Not many headlines make me laugh out loud but this one did the trick. I love Fridays.
Go USA, you could have left the tour and done some exploring on your own, no, or were you on a subsidized shopping tour? I was on a tour but the government never mandated we stay with the group 24/7. In fact, I don't believe the government had anything to do with our tour and we went everywhere even without the group. We tried several good restaurants in Beijing. They can be difficult for Americans with the language barrier but the folks really tried to help us out.
And don't drink the Great Wall wine. Really, really bad. Stick with the beer. This book is a great idea but I still wish I knew what Hand Shredded a$$ meat is. Maybe the reporter could clue us all in?
So what is "hand shredded ass meat?" One has to love a reporter who throws out a teaser to entice readership, and then leaves said readers high and dry ....
Yeah, what IS it?
It is Donkey( you know as in Ass) hand shredded :) If you try it let me know how it was :)
Hand-shredded ass meat? My guess is it's pulled pork. That's made from pork shoulder, a cut we often call "pork butt". Hence, "ass meat".
Of course, it could just be donkey. Different cultures eat different foods, after all.
No doubt shredded ass meat is from a donkey.
And again another correction. A shoulder is not a butt; a Ham is a butt! Even the American can't translate English!
J Keith, a correction for your correction, a butt (Boston Butt) is the butt end of the shoulder vs the shank end. The hind leg is the ham, look at any chart of pork cuts. The butt (butt end of shoulder) has a lot of connective tissue and is slow cooked/smoked to make bar-b-q and pulled pork. Check it out.
Boston butt is indeed pork shoulder, ask any meat smoker. A ham is not referred to as a butt.
I'm confused about the photo of the book. Is the photo turned sideways, or is the Chinese printed sideways on the book cover?
Yeah, that caused me to scratch my head, too. Why would they print the titles so that you have to turn the book to read both?????
engrish.com
...but it tastes like chicken ?!?!
The headline "What exactly is hand shredded ass meat?" AND THEN THEY DON'T TELL YOU!!!
Please tell me that you read that guidebook before writing this article.
A different odd name on a menu which puzzled a few people...it was 'Sum Yung Guy.' Is that for real? Ewww!
Donkey meat, not ass meat.
Let me see???? Hand shredded ass meat??? Personally I think it is either pork butt or dog butt because as I am sure many of you have head, dog meat is considered quite the treat in China. However, regardless of what the origins of the meat in question is, I simply would not order that dish as it would bring to mind so many strange images that I would not be able to eat the stuff even if I tried. Remember one simple piece of advise while ordering a meal when traveling in underdeveloped countries; if you can not tell what it was before it landed on you plate, you know a shrimp, some chicken or the like don't order it, order something else that you can half way figure out what the hell it was before the cook dropped it on your plate.
Maybe it's a translation from "butt", as in "shredded pork butt", and the hand part meant it was shredded by hand rather than mechanically shredded? I was hoping to learn the actual answer from reading the article, but obviously, am still as clueless as before I read it! Thanks for not telling us.
I really am curious to know what the Japanese name of that dish (it is written below the English) says! Anybody out there read Japanese?
The last time I asked my wife if she felt like a little bit of hand shredded ass meat, she just glared at me with that sweet and sour glazed page not found stare. :D
I don't read Chinese very well, but the last character is the one for meat, and the one before that has the character for "horse" in it, so maybe it really is meat from an ass or mule!!
Doesn't anyone reading this read Chinese??
Strange that it the character for donkey is in tranditional, not simplified. Maybe it is a Cantonese restaurant in Beijing??
Umm, the pic is a dish in a Chinese Restaurant in JAPAN-MSN needs to get its geography straight!! That is JAPANESE, NOT CHINESE characters!! (I can understand Japanese fluently) P.S. Homesick yank, the last character in the title in pronounced "niku", and it simply means meat. NOT Horse!!
I finally got a hold of my Japanese hubby, it does mean donkey meat.
And Eri, the restaurant is in China, it has the meat dish translated into two languages. Look at the price, nothing could cost 28 yen!! It is 28 yuan.
Re: the language: I was referring to the Chinese ideogram (not the Japanese kanji) in the first line (not in the Japanese line, which is after the English) before the Chinese character for meat (which is the same as the kanji for niku, which is the same as the Chinese written form).