Chinese symbol on windchime upside down. Should I right it?
January 22, 2021 7:49 AM   Subscribe

Hi. I am gathering possessions from my mother's home after she recently passed away. She has windchimes that have a Chinese symbol and I was able to determine that the Ji symbol (good luck) is on it, but it's upside down! Factory error or deliberate. Should I dismantle and turn around or keep it the way it is? Thanks so much in advance.
posted by Jandoe to Writing & Language (7 answers total)
 
If you're talking about the character fu, or 福, this is often purposely displayed upside-down in Chinese culture. The word for "upside-down", dao, 倒,is a homonym for "dao", 到, "to arrive", so the idea is that "luck (or good fortune) is arriving.
posted by bearette at 7:57 AM on January 22, 2021 [18 favorites]


The only intentionally upside-down luck character I know of in Chinese is (fu), as bearette mentions. I have never seen what I think must be (ji) on your wind chime upside-down. Did the maker of the chime speak Chinese? Because I wonder if they looked up “luck”, saw both 福 and 吉, made the chime component bearing a 吉, and then read about the upside-down factor without reference to the difference in character, leading them to assemble the chime with 吉 upside down.
posted by mdonley at 8:20 AM on January 22, 2021


Response by poster: Thanks for the responses so far. I've read about the deliberately upside down fu. And no, it's not that. It's definitely the Ji. I realize that it's probably made in some cheap factory by someone who knows nothing of Chinese. But it obviously meant something to my mom whom I now can't ask. Maybe I should have tagged this as "appropriated new age woo woo" instead of Chinese. But I just wonder if anyone has any ideas about it I should right it or reverse it. I mean would it be considered bad luck to have it upside down in the first place, or to change it?
posted by Jandoe at 8:47 AM on January 22, 2021 [2 favorites]


How about taking the empirical approach? If your mom had good luck, keep it the way it is. If she had bad luck, flip it! (I am being a little silly here, but maybe thinking of it that way will be helpful?)
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 10:29 AM on January 22, 2021 [7 favorites]


Fifteen years ago at the Maryland Renaissance Faire (largest in the world!) I noticed a vendor making custom leather bracelets with Arabic letters. (As a Persian speaker I can read the alphabet.) I politely pointed out he was spelling the words backwards-- that Arabic is read from right to left. He was not interested in my cultural correction. I wonder just how many people out there are sporting their cool wristband with TERAGRAM instead of MARGARET on it. This is the world of facile global cultural appropriation that we live in. I'd really like to find a way to address these issues that actually worked.
posted by seasparrow at 12:21 PM on January 22, 2021 [7 favorites]


I was going to say that if this was multiple characters and reversed left-to-right or top-to-bottom part was upside-down that some of that is at least common in Japanese in thing like signs and banners that are cloth with characters painted on them that bleed through to the other side and it's sorta not-a-thing that the thing you're seeing is like a backwards image from what you'd see from the front. The shape of the characters and reading them forwards and backwards is not any weirder than seeing AMBULANCE in mirror image on the front of an ambulance because you'll probably see it in a mirror. That is you're looking at the sign from the back but that makes no appreciable difference to the meaning... i'ts just a thing.

But it's interesting to know about the upside-down homonym thing.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:11 PM on January 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


Maybe it's meant to be read by the hanging upside down ringer inside the windchime. :)

It's chiming so hard that the character appears on the outside upside down.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:13 PM on January 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


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