Hong Kong English/Cantonese (XXXVII)

Get Bombed And Celebrate, Or Not

Hope you get the right bomb

I got “bombed” a few days ago.

Look at the quotation marks, I’m not injured. And I didn’t play any of the Bomberman game series recently, so it isn’t about the gameplay.

So what exactly happened? Before telling you, I should explain what “bombs” are and the two major types of “bombs” in our language.

This bomb (炸彈, Jyutping: zaa3 daan2) we are talking about aren’t pineapples. But still, it is something that comes in surprise and you can touch and hold.

It’s a letter. Some specific kind of letter, to be precise.

The kind which you can get a wallet cirrhosis.

So it’s the right time to tell you 2 specific kinds of bombs.

The first one is a red bomb (紅色炸彈, Jyutping: hung4 sik1 zaa3 daan2).

If you know well about Chinese cultures, you’ll notice that red is a colour of joy. Therefore, when you receive a red card (traditionally written in gold) in red envelope (which makes the name “red bomb”), you know some joyous event is going to take place.

This event is one of the most joyous across Chinese culture, for it is once-in-a-lifetime (normally, especially since about 900 years ago). It is an event where a man and a lady of two families come together and start a new one.

In modern day terms, it means that people can celebrate a couple getting their lives ruined by forcing the newly-weds to have babies ASAP but the couple will not get help, suitable for the new era, from the others as corporal punishment and/or emotional blackmails were how the people were brought up.

If people aren’t that mental, this really is something worth celebrating since two loved ones finally finish their “love marathon (愛情長跑, Jyutping: oi3 cing4 coeng4 paau2)” and step into the “love grave (愛情墳墓, Jyutping oi3 cing4 fan4 mou6)”. They can start a new family and take more responsibilities in some new roles.

Therefore, a red bomb is a letter to ask people to join the celebration of two people getting married, i.e. a wedding invitation.

As for why it causes wallet cirrhosis, I’ll have to explain what a 人情 (Jyutping: jan4 cing4) in a wedding is.

人情 has multiple meanings in Cantonese, here I'd ignore all but the one about wedding.

I guess people who are invited to a wedding would like to get some gifts to the couple to celebrate and for the two to commemorate this event. But it is not the case in Hong Kong. Gifting presents for a wedding is relatively rare unless the couple specified what types of presents they would like to get on the wedding day.

So, to avoid gifting embarrassing presents/gifting things that aren’t useful for the couple/to let the couple buy some presents for themselves/to kind of compensate the two families’ expenditures on the wedding banquet/…, people would gift cash (in a specific type of red packet different from a lai-see) dedicated to the bride/groom/the couple/the bride’s dad/the groom’s dad (and received by a member of each family as a representative, as the newly-wed are busy being the “display board” on the wedding day) depending on who you know.

And this red packet of gift cash for the couple’s wedding is the 人情 for the wedding.

As I said that there are two activities (for the guests) on the wedding day, first the registration or the ceremony, then the banquet, you would give that 人情 when you first arrive at the activities.

How much you should pay is heavily dependent on how many activities you join, which of the activities you join, how close you are with the one who give(s) you the red bomb and the venue for the wedding banquet. You can google how much you should pay and the price would be updated every year.

Oddly enough, some people also call a wedding invitation a pink bomb (粉紅炸彈, Jyutping: fan2 hung4 zaa3 daan2). Nobody knows/remembers exactly why.

Also, Pink Bomb is the nickname of Kukuri (歌莉, Jyutping: go1 lei6) in the anime Magical Circle Guru Guru, given by a villain.

However, bombs can come in other colours.

A green bomb (綠色炸彈, Jyutping: luk6 sik1 zaa3 daan2) is like a red bomb in the format, something green inside a green envelope, but this is not something that sparks joy.

A connotation of the colour is “feeling sick”, and this green bomb does make you sick.

It does not spark joy because this green bomb is the tax return form.

Take a look at how green (and dull and sick) it is:

I have never heard anyone who does not groan when they receive a green bomb. Every tax payer has to fill in this long form and send to Inland Revenue Department every year. It is painstaking as the form has 4 pages and not really good for trypophobic people.

Yes, Hong Kong’s income tax rate is pretty low. And the government doesn’t take your tax money directly from your salary here. Therefore, the Inland Revenue Department would send you a letter every year to ask you to pay your taxes.

How much you are going to pay is related to how much you earn that year and an expectation of how much you will earn the next year. Some people are lucky to pay a few hundreds, but some are more likely to be paying a month of salary. So this can really cause an acute wallet cirrhosis.

So when we say that we get bombed, it usually means we receive either of these red or green bombs.

Depending on the context, we can definitely simplify by just saying these letters a bomb. I don’t think you would/should talk about taxes when you are going to celebrate a wedding of a friend.

Here I should explain why I got bombed earlier this week.

Two friends of mine, a couple, who I know for a decade and saw them started dating, were engaged a few years back, but owing to what happened in Hong Kong in the past few years, they finally are getting married this coming Sunday!

So I got a red bomb that I’ve been expecting for three years. No matter what is going to happen, I am going to celebrate hard.

Update (16/7/2022):

Unfortunately, before the couple gets married, they have just got covid, and so the wedding gets postponed. How sad.