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This is something I was going to write about in the early part of December, 2023, but got sidetracked by too many other things.  Now I'm going through my e-mail clutter to clean out old messages that I had neglected to take care of back then.  At that time, more than half a year ago, "PUA" was still very popular.  Although speech fashions change rapidly in China, it was so viral then that I suspect it is still relevant today, so let's take a good look at it.

When I first encountered "PUA", I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it (the same sort of feeling of being at sea when I initially heard "hawk tuah"), so I started looking around for what it might mean.  Clearly, from the contexts in which I was hearing it, PUA was not "Pandemic Unemployment Assistance", which was a federal and state government program back in the day.

I fairly quickly came to the realization that the term "PUA" is derived from the American English phrase “pick-up artist”.  Well, I'd never heard of that either, so had to educate myself about that too.

Pickup artists (PUA) are people whose goals are seduction and sexual success. Predominantly heterosexual men, they often self-identify as the seduction community or the pickup community. This community exists through various channels, including internet newsletters, blogs, seminars and one-on-one coaching, forums, groups, and local clubs known as "lairs".

The rise of "seduction science", "game", or "studied charisma" has been attributed to modern forms of dating and social norms between sexes which have developed from a perceived increase in the equality of women in western society and changes to traditional gender roles. Commentators in the media have described "game" as sexist or misogynistic.

(Wikipedia)

In Chinese internet slang, the initialism's meaning is much broader: to be “brainwashed” or “deceived.” It's used in the context of relationships, family, or work, with people often “PUA-ing” themselves.

(From this Facebook post, which also has a video in Mandarin, where you can hear the word pronounced: "P-U-A", like the English letters.)

From Diana Shuheng Zhang (12/8/23):

PUA, indeed it first means pick-up artist in English. Most importantly, it is a noun. In Chinese, it means "to manipulate, to gaslight" — but more important than semantics, it can grammatically be used in Chinese both as a verb and a verbal noun. For example, in Chinese, you can say:

Wǒ de qiánfū měitiān doū yòng wǒ yǐqián de liàn'ài jīnglì PUA wǒ, suǒyǐ wǒ líhūnle.

我的前夫每天都用我以前的恋爱经历PUA我，所以我离婚了。

"My ex-husband PUA-ed (mentally manipulated / gaslighted) me everyday with my pre-marriage dating experience, therefore I divorced [him]." (verb)

Bùyào zǒng shì zéguài zìjǐ, zhè shì duì zìjǐ de PUA

不要总是责怪自己，这是对自己的PUA。

"Don't blame yourself all the time, which is equivalent to PUA-ing yourself." (verbal noun)

Since "A" stands for "artist", or a person in English, there is absolutely no way to say "X pick-up artisted Y". I believe that syntax is the biggest difference between the use of PUA in Chinese and English.

To be honest, since the word PUA is so popular in China that I use it frequently while speaking Chinese, sometimes when I want to express similar things in English, I must try hard to stop myself from using PUA directly as a verb in English and say "manipulate" instead.

This is a fascinating example of the complex interactions among different levels of different languages.  We start with an English slang (!) expression, "pickup artist".  That is turned into an initialism, PUA, all the while remaining a noun phrase.  It is quickly picked up (!) by bilingual Chinese speakers who enthusiastically expand its grammatical and semantic scope, so that it becomes a verb with the self-referential meaning of gaslighting and manipulating, among other applications.  From those globally very active bilingual Chinese speakers, PUA goes in two directions to influence monolingual Chinese speakers who accept, use, and adapt it as a nativized Mandarin word.  In the other direction, the Sinicized PUA seeps into the language of bilingual speakers of English like me, and thence into the speech of monolingual English speakers with whom the bilingual English speakers are in contact.

PUA is just one such term derived from English that I learned about from Chinese speakers.  Another English initialism that I learned from Chinese speakers is VPN, but there are countless other such English > Chinese > English expressions.  Ditto for English > Japanese > English.  For a mind-boggling/blowing example of this sort of linguistic-cultural back-and-forth between languages, consider the case of karaoke.

This process of multi-directional language exchange is going on at a rapid pace and on a massive scale, enhanced by the ubiquity of the  global internet.  China Babel, that unpublished novel I wrote decades ago, is not a distant dream.

 

Selected readings

• "The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase" — especially this comment on the nature of "P" in Chinese
• "Old, new, and mixed Cantonese colloquialisms" (8/29/24) — contra "slang"
• "New expressions for karaoke: the phoneticization of Chinese" (9/25/21)
• "China Babel" (3/26/24)
• "New expressions for karaoke: the phoneticization of Chinese" (9/25/21)
• "China VPN redux" (7/17/24) — with lengthy bibliography

August 30, 2024 @ 11:59 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Acronyms, Bilingualism, Borrowing, Grammar, Semantics, Syntax

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