Comment by mc32
1 year ago
That’s kind of funny. Chinese and Taiwanese transplants call natural born Americans, whether black, white or latin, “foreigners” when speaking in Chinese dialects even while they live in America.
Oh, your husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend is a “foreigner”, ma?
No, damnit, you’re the foreigner!
I enjoy that “ma” has ambiguous meaning above. Does it mean mandarin question mark word or does possibly mean mother?
It's both a particle and a question mark word. [Ta]是外國人嗎?
This is how the question would be asked in the mainland or in the regional diaspora of Chinese speakers where foreigners are few. Where foreigner often is a substitute for the most prevalent non-regional foreigner (i.e. it's not typically used for Malaysian or Thai nationals in China) So for those who come over state-side they don't modify the phrase, they keep using foreigner [外國人] for any non-Asian, even when those "foreigners" are natural born.
They clearly knew that, but was joking about the dual meaning of the question mark and mā as in 妈/mother, which is ambiguous when written out in an English comment where it's not a given why there isn't a tone mark (or whether or not they intent the English 'ma', for that matter).