双十一是怎么来的？
Where did Singles Day come from?
Name: ________________ Date: ________
Key words
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 一直 | yìzhí | always; all along; continuously |
| 关系 | guānxì | relation; relationship |
| 结婚 | jiéhūn | to marry; to get married |
| 男人 | nánrén | man; men |
| 常常 | chángcháng | often; frequently |
| 节日 | jiérì | festival; holiday |
| 快递 | kuàidì | express delivery; courier service |
| 口语 | kóuyǔ | speaking (skill); spoken language; colloquial speech |
| 指 | zhǐ | to mean; to refer to |
| 用来 | yònglái | to be used for |
| 数字 | shùzì | number; digit; figure |
| 排 | pái | to arrange; to line up |
English (for the teacher)
Every year on 11 November, plenty of people in China have shopping baskets full to the brim and parcels forever on the way, but empty wallets. The funny thing is, the day started out with nothing at all to do with shopping. Its original name was Guānggùn Jié, “Singles Day”.
Literally, guānggùn means a bare stick; in everyday speech it means a man who isn’t married, and these days it’s often used for anyone who is single. Write the date in numbers and you get four 1s standing in a row: don’t they look like four lonely sticks?
The usual story is that the day began on university campuses in Nanjing in the 1990s. It’s said that in 1993, four young men sharing a dorm at Nanjing University were chatting before bed about how none of them had a girlfriend, and decided to call 11 November “Singles Day”. The joke soon spread to other universities, and then from campus to the rest of society.
Back then, Singles Day was a day for single people to laugh at themselves. Some ate four fried dough sticks and one steamed bun for breakfast: the dough sticks were the four 1s, and the bun was the dot between the two 11s. Others met a few single friends for dinner or went to blind-date events, hoping they wouldn’t be celebrating it again next year.
In 2009, Taobao Mall, which later became Tmall, held a sale on that day, with lots of things at half price. Partner or no partner, who doesn’t love a sale? Only 27 brands took part, yet that day they sold 52 million yuan’s worth of goods, reportedly ten times a normal day.
Later, other shopping sites joined in with sales of their own, and Singles Day slowly turned into Shuāng Shíyī, “Double Eleven”. In 2019, Alibaba alone sold more than 260 billion yuan’s worth on that one day. The sales grew longer and longer, in some years starting as early as October, so Double Eleven was no longer just one day.
Double Eleven has also given Chinese plenty of new words. As the shopping piles up, people who feel the pinch say they need to duòshǒu, “chop their hands off”: let’s see you shop without hands! To get deals like “spend 300, get 50 off”, people còudān, “top up the order”, adding a few more things to the basket until it reaches 300 yuan. And when all the money’s gone? Then there’s nothing for it but to chītǔ, “eat dirt”.
Every year around this time, someone online cries: “One more purchase and I’m chopping my hands off!” But by the next year, the hands have grown back.