"Make a pointless detour" — Phrase of the Week #98
"Make a pointless detour" — Phrase of the Week #98
Our Phrase of the Week is: make a pointless detour (冤枉路 yuānwang lù).
The context
2024 will see the first major Spring Festival travel rush, known as chūnyùn 春运, since the beginning of Covid.
Although China ended its zero-Covid policy on the 8th of December, 2022, before the Chinese New Year holidays of 2023, many people in China did not travel then due to illness or fear of catching Covid.
So there is a strong demand for train tickets this year, as people across China return home to celebrate the beginning of the Year of the Dragon.
Spring Festival train tickets first went on sale on the 12th of January. In just two weeks, 610.8 million tickets were sold for travel during the Spring Festival period, a 159% increase year-on-year.
China Railway Group (中铁集团) updated its ticketing app, the 12306 platform, to allow travelers to pre-fill their information for faster booking when booking starts. According to data released by the company, daily sales on the app peaked at nearly 19 million, with the highest daily website visits reaching over 6.2 billion.
Getting ready for what is often described as the largest human migration in the world, is a stressful time for many people in China.
Young people preparing to return home will compare prices of high-speed rail tickets, hard seat slow trains, and flights many times per day, setting their alarm several days in a row.
This year was made more challenging since the authorities announced in October last year that New Year's Eve (chuxi 除夕), which falls on Friday, the 9th of February this year, is not officially a holiday in China, meaning some people have had to leave it to the last minute before they can travel.
So there are many stories circulating on WeChat blogs of people sharing their experiences of getting home:
Originally, all I had to do was to get to the nearest high-speed rail station and then take a long-distance bus to get home. Now I have to change my plan and turn to travel platforms for different options. Among the options provided, the cheapest might require me to stand for 3 hours; another one offers a seat for the whole journey, but I have to make a pointless detour, taking the route of a triangle on the map of China before being able to reach home.
原本只要坐到离家最近的高铁站，再搭一班长途汽车就能到家，现在只能变更计划，转向求助旅游出行平台。给到的方案，一个是最便宜的，需要坚持3个小时无座。一个是全程有座的，但需要走不少“冤枉路”，至少在中国地图上走出个三角形才能回家。
Yuánběn zhǐyào zuòdào líjiā zuìjìn de gāotiězhàn, zài dā yì bān chángtú qìchē jiù néng dàojiā, xiànzài zhǐnéng biàngēng jìhuà, zhuǎnxiàng qiúzhù lǚyóu chūxíng píngtái. Gěidào de fāng'àn, yígè shì zuì piányí de, xūyào jiānchí sān gè xiǎoshí wú zuò. Yígè shì quánchéng yǒuzuò de, dàn xūyào zǒu bùshǎo “yuānwang lù”, zhìshǎo zài zhōngguó dìtú shàng zǒuchū ge sānjiǎoxíng cáinéng huíjiā.
And with that, we have our Phrase of the Week!
What it means
“Make a pointless detour” is the English translation of a three-character phrase in Chinese, which directly translates as: "unjust" or "unfair" (冤枉 yuānwang), and "road" (路 lù).
It's attributed to Lǎo Shě 老舍, a 20th-century Chinese novelist, known for The Rickshaw Boy (骆驼祥子 luòtuó xiángzi), and the play, Teahouse (茶馆 cháguǎn).
Our phrase is from another of Lao She's well-known works, Four Generations under One Roof (四世同堂 sìshì tóngtáng), a 1944 novel describing life in China during the Japanese Occupation.
The original passage is:
He wondered: "Why did he accompany his friend all the way when he was already so tired?"
他纳闷：“为什么已经这样的疲倦了，还陪着朋友走冤枉路呢？”
Tā nàmèn: Wèishéme yǐjīng zhèyàng de píjuànle, hái péizhe péngyou zǒu yuānwang lù ne?
In the context of young people returning home for Chinese New Year, and the experience of the blogger described in the passage above, a better way to put it would be: "a pointless detour," taking circuitous journeys to get home in time for new year celebrations.
Other related phrases are "money wasted" (冤枉钱 yuānwang qián), which uses the same idea of being unnecessary as "the pointless detour", and "stupid tax" (智商税 zhìshāng shuì), a previous Phrase of the Week.
Andrew Methven is the author of Slow Chinese 每周漫闻, a resource to help learners of Chinese maintain and improve their language skills, and keep on top of the latest language trends in China. Read more.