To get the joke, you need to understand Chinese.
Instead of playing the guitar in the music room, the man shifted his gear into the bedroom and practised whatever he fancied. I was sprawled out in a corner of the bedroom, reading. I wasn't wearing ear plugs. While I didn't mind some music, the beats grew heavier and turned into metal riffs; I definitely couldn't appreciate that. After an hour of it, I got up to retrieve noise-canceling headphones. Also mumbled in Chinese, "吵死人啦". Often, when I don't want the man to know what I'm saying, I would either say it in Cantonese or Thai, and he would be none the wiser. Heh.
The man heard and eyeballed me. "Oeh. I understood that. How dare you say I play music that could kill people?"
I literally ROTFL. Almost died. HAHAHAHAHA. No wonder his Chinese teachers gave up on him. Probably laughed for a good 10 minutes before I went over to pat his head and asked him to repeat what he said, and doubled over in fresh laughter. "Dude, that phrase meant, your music could wake the dead, or could disturb the dead! i.e disrupting the peace. Not to kill people."
The man certainly wasn't as amused. He refused to utter a word. There was this rather hilarious look on his face though...like...'bloody hell'. In response, he turned up the volume of the amp.
4 comments:
LOL
Oops.. haha..
Hmm. My understanding is the same as the man...though I have no credible source to back me up; it just makes more sense to me that way.
kikare: hehehe. I think it fits both meanings and the lack of a pronoun makes the phrase ambiguous. Swop out 吵 for any word, say 痛，叮 etc, and it still works. I suppose in English it can be translated into 'It's killing me', which will fit. But so far, many use it in the context of 'waking the dead' unless i say it as '疼死我啦', with a pronoun, then it's pretty clear.
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