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2022

Kiana Zhao Six Massages, 2022 Chat Screenshot These six messages form a joke, where the phrase "dreams and reality are the opposite" rationalizes the reversal. The phrase comes from a long-standing Chinese folk book called “Zhougong jiemeng” 「周公解夢」(The Duke of Zhou's Explanation of Dreams), the origins of which date no later than the Tang dynasty (618-907). It consists of a certain number of fixed interpretations of presumably common dreams, each reduced to a pithy seven-character phrase. The central idea of this work is that all one needs to interpret a dream is its main motif; one event, image or set of images constitutes the decisive omen. The Duke of Zhou in the book is Zhou Gong Dan, the uncle of King Cheng of Zhou, who made great contributions to the establishment and perfection of the feudal system of the Zhou Dynasty. The dream of Confucius, "I don't dream of seeing the Duke of Zhou anymore"「吾不復夢見周公矣」, often appears in Confucianism. So after Confucianism became mainstream, he also became strongly associated with dreams. Unlike modern psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations of dream content, this book argues that what is dreamed can be used to divine future fortune. One of the main types of dreams is the "counter-dream", which refers to dreams that foretell the opposite future fate, where the extreme negative is auspicious and the positive is unfavorable. Chen Tuyuan said, "What is the counter-dream? There will be a good marriage romantic meeting and dream of crying, there will be crying, quarrels and dream of singing and dancing, cold and dream of warmth, hungry and dream of full ...... these are counter-dream dream, their types can also be deduced." 「何為反極？有親姻燕會則夢哭泣，有哭泣、口舌則夢歌舞，寒則夢暖，饑則夢飽……此反極之夢，其類可推也。」There is a theory that this is a method of breaking dreams. If having a nightmare, talking it out and calling it a counter-dream, unfortunate things will not happen.

In Chinese, the word “sailor” is made up of two Chinese characters, "水", meaning water, and "手", meaning hand. The word "hand" originally refers to the front part of the upper limb of the human body that can hold things, the front of the upper limb where people use tools. It is also derived as a verb, which means to hold, to hold with one's hands, to do with one's own hands, and also to refer to the ability, means, skill, etc., which can be used as a person who has mastered a certain skill or engaged in a certain occupation, similar to -ist or -er in English. The word "水手" refers to a person who is familiar with water and has knowledge and skills about water, that is, a person who is engaged in a shipboard occupation. Its composition is similar to that of the English word " seaman ", which consists of a noun closely related to the occupation plus a component referring to the person who is engaged in the occupation.

The word “ham” is also composed of two characters: "火", meaning fire, and "腿", meaning leg. The most famous Chinese ham is Jinhua ham from Zhejiang province. During the Northern Song Dynasty, Zong Ze, a famous general from Jinhua, presented a refined pork leg from his hometown to Zhao Ge, who was then the Marshal of the army and horses, and asked Zong Ze, "What is this pork leg called?" Zong Ze replied, "It is called 'hometown meat' and was sent by the folks back home as a reward for the army." After hearing this, Zhao Ge said, “This pork leg is shaped like a bamboo leaf, and when cut open the meat is red like fire and overflowing with aroma, so let's call it ‘火腿’ from now on." Since then, ham has been officially named.” Similarly, the Chinese word "火腿" consists of the word "fire", which describes the color, and "leg", which represents the part of the body. Etymologically, the English word ham refers to the "curved part". It comes from the Proto-Germanic word kham- (bent). Until the 16th century, the word referred to the "bent part behind the knee". The original meaning of ham is shown by the word hamstring. From the middle of the 16th century onwards, the meaning of the word gradually changed. First it meant "the back of the thigh" and then "the thigh". By the 17th century, it had come to mean "a meat product made from the cured thighs of livestock such as pigs".

As for the reason why "sailor"「水手」 and "ham"「火腿」 are opposite, it is related to the concept of "opposite". The Chinese characters "反" in Chinese means that two aspects of something are opposed or mutually exclusive. In addition to the meaning of "opposite"「相反」, which is very specific and must be a mirror image in reverse on the other end of the spectrum, it is also sometimes understood as " contrary"「相对」, which means a face-to-face spatial location relationship or, in the case of language, a correspondence in the system. "水" (water) and "火" (fire)  have long been contrasted in Chinese. The ancients said that "water means moisten-down"「水曰润下」. It means that water has the characteristics of moistening and downward. Derived from the cold, nourishing, downward running things, are attributed to water. The ancients called "fire means heat-up"「火曰炎上」. "Heat-up"「炎上」, refers to the fire has a warm, rising characteristics. So derived from the warmth, rising role of things, are attributed to the fire. However, often the counterpart to "手" (hands) is "足" (feet). But in traditional Chinese, the word "足" did not only refer to the feet at the beginning. Its oracle script resembles the whole lower limb with legs and feet. The original meaning refers to the lower limbs of a person, including the feet and legs. However, "足" gradually came to refer exclusively to the part below the ankle bone which is foot. So in a broad sense, "手" (hands) and “腿” (legs) can be seen as contrasted from a body structure perspective.

In this joke, the future possibilities of the little pig undergoes a dramatic transformation from sailor to ham. From a human identity that carries numerous cultural connotations to food; from a subjectified, free-willed, self-making, in-time, relatively fleshed-out, character-emotional image to an objectified, timeless, flattened, self-being thing, or, in another sense, to the homogeneous commodity. And in this narrative framework nested in everyday experience, the ham as ending can be seen both as a bankruptcy of the allegorical structure, a stripping away of the anthropomorphic fairy-tale fiction, and as an interpretation of the individual's fateful, tragic descent into alienation. Here, a duality of reduction and metaphor is established.