nose fruit

"You don't know what kind of person he is. You don't know if he's a sweet potato or taro root." -- my grandma (translated from Taiwanese)

There's almost too much to record in my journal these days, so I've just been trying to write down the pecularities of the languange. Years ago I gave my cousin Edward a dictionary of American idioms. He tells me there is no equivalent in Chinese; it's just passed down from generation to generation. For those of you who have read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Chinese (and Taiwanese) speech is sprinkled with about as many proverbs and sayings. And then there's the country folk speech, like my grandma's above, which who knows if they're common phrases or just something she made up. :-)

P.S. There really is a fruit called lemu, which is translated into "nose fruit".