The ages of life

To ask someone's age, Chinese has not one question but three, and the choice depends on the person in front of you. To a child, you say 你几岁了？ nǐ jǐ suì le?: 几 implies a small number, usually under ten. To an adult, 你多大了？ nǐ duō dà le?, literally “you are big by how much?”. To an elderly person, 您多大年纪了？ nín duō dà niánjì le?, or more politely still 您高寿？ nín gāoshòu?, “your high longevity?”. Careful: asking an adult 几岁 is treating them like a kid. The words that read age on a face (年轻, 中年, 老) are already on the page Appearance; this one follows life itself, from pregnancy to funerals.

The answer is not always the same, either. Age counted the Chinese way, 虚岁 xūsuì, counts one year at birth, then adds a year at each Lunar New Year, and not on the birthday: 虚 “empty, nominal” + 岁 “year of age” ⟶ age on paper. A baby born on the eve of the New Year is therefore two years old the next day (on paper, rest assured). Completed age, the one we use, is 周岁 zhōusuì, “the year that has come full circle”. The administration only uses the second, but many elderly people still give the first without thinking. I couldn't say in what proportion today. When in doubt, ask which one.

Birth has its rites. The young mother “does the month”, 坐月子 zuò yuèzi, literally “to sit the month”: thirty days of rest at home, sheltered from the cold and from draughts, with hot soups and (according to grandmothers) without washing her hair. Doctors today question some of these rules. Even so, the custom holds firm, to the point that big cities now have specialised centres, the 月子中心 yuèzi zhōngxīn. The baby, for its part, celebrates its 满月 mǎnyuè, “the full month” ⟶ its first month completed. At one year comes the 抓周 zhuāzhōu: 抓 “to grab” + 周 “the round of the year”. A brush, a book, money and a calculator are laid out in front of the child, and whatever it grabs first foretells its future. The rite is old: in the 红楼梦 Hónglóu mèng (Dream of the Red Chamber), little 贾宝玉 Jiǎ Bǎoyù grabs rouge and hairpins, and his father is furious.

For a long time, a Chinese childhood was that of a child with no brothers or sisters. From 1980 to 2015, the one-child policy produced a generation of 独生子女 dúshēng zǐnǚ and, in the press, “little emperors”, 小皇帝 xiǎohuángdì, pampered by two parents and four grandparents. The other face of the same China is the 留守儿童 liúshǒu értóng, literally “the children who stay behind to keep the house”: their parents work in the city, often hundreds of kilometres away, and it is the grandparents who raise them in the village.

For the ages of adulthood, Chinese has kept a literary vocabulary, drawn from Confucius. In the Analects (II, 4), the Master sums up his life: 三十而立，四十而不惑，五十而知天命… Hence 而立之年 ér lì zhī nián, “the age when one stands upright” ⟶ thirty, and 不惑之年 bú huò zhī nián, “the age without doubts” ⟶ forty. Note that the classic translation used on our page Chapter 2 of the Analects of Confucius reads this passage in a moral sense (at thirty, “I walked with a firm step on the path of virtue”). Modern Chinese, on the other hand, has taken it in a concrete sense: by thirty, you should have started a family and found your place, 成家立业 chéng jiā lì yè. The other ages come from elsewhere. 花甲 huājiǎ, sixty, refers to the sexagenary cycle: after sixty years, you come back to the first pair of signs, 甲子 jiǎzǐ (the 花 is said to come from the interweaving of the two series of signs, but explanations vary). 古稀 gǔxī, seventy, comes from a line by 杜甫 Dù Fǔ: 人生七十古来稀 rénshēng qīshí gǔ lái xī, “living to seventy has been rare since ancient times”.

That leaves death, which people seldom speak of directly. 死 sǐ is blunt; people prefer 去世 qùshì, “to leave the world”, or 走了 zǒu le, “he has gone”, as in English. (This is also why the number four, 四 sì, has a bad reputation: it sounds almost like 死.) Funerals are “white affairs”, 白事 báishì, because white is the colour of mourning, whereas weddings are “red affairs”. So be careful with white wrapping paper. And for the dead, people burn paper money, 纸钱 zhǐqián, so that they lack nothing in the other world.

In everyday life, 老 does not always refer to age. 老师 lǎoshī, the teacher, carries a 老 of respect, 老外 lǎowài, the foreigner, a familiar 老, and the mouse, 老鼠 lǎoshǔ, is not old at all. Likewise, 先生 xiānsheng, Mr or sir, is literally “born before” ⟶ the elder, then the master. Respect comes with age.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order is shown stroke by stroke, with the arrow that gives the direction of the movement.