The Downtown Diner

Chinese is a concise language. You can say a lot with just a few words, or in many cases with no words at all.

I'll give you an example of how concise the language really is. I'm named after a character in the movie "Gone With the Wind" - Melanie, the sickeningly sweet one who invited Scarlett in for tea after she had seduced her husband Ashley. Anyway, whenever I moved to a new country and introduced myself to people, the title of that movie was always one of my most basic vocabularies.

In German the movie is called "Vom Winde Verweht." In Japanese it's "kaze to tomo ni sarinu." French is "Autant en import le vent". And in Chinese?

"Piao."

That's it. And it really does mean that the wind has carried something away.