Gaijin Jump

By Craig Chapin. First published in July 2000.

I cheated. This comic strip does not retell an actual event. Rather it is a juxtaposition of two common events.

During my first couple of years in Japan, I was generally pretty emaciated. (My poor cooking skills had something to do with this.) Japanese people often commented on this. In doing so, they almost always described me as “smart,” a word borrowed from English but given the meaning “slim.” It took me a while to figure out that they didn’t think I was brainy.

I spent a summer in China and had put on a little more weight by then. My students there often commented that I was “strong.” This also was a word borrowed from English, but for them it carried the meaning “fat.” (They meant it as a compliment, I am told.) Again, I took this in the wrong sense at first and felt flattered. To me, as to most Americans, “fat” is not a compliment.

So I put these two parallel phenomena together to form this strip. Xiao Li is the thin, Chinese guy. Taro is the chunky, Japanese guy. Though I gave them names, they are not patterned on specific people. The names were a way of hinting that one was Chinese and one Japanese. Xiao means “small,” and Taro means “plump son.”