"Take White As Black" — Lost in Translation

You’re sipping weak tea in a dusty antique shop in Xi’an when the vendor points to a Ming-era celadon vase and declares, “This is Song dynasty—take white as black!” You blink. Your brain stutters: *White? Black? Did he mean ‘black-and-white’? Is this some kind of optical test?* Then you catch the glint in his eye—not confusion, but quiet confidence—and it hits you: he’s not describing pigment. He’s invoking an ancient act of willful misrepresentation, where truth bends under power. The phrase isn’t about color at all. It’s about audacity dressed as certainty.

Example Sentences

1. A street-side noodle vendor squints at your order slip and says, “No beef today—take white as black!” (We’re out of beef, so we’ll serve pork instead.) — To a native ear, it sounds like a philosophical dare disguised as inventory management.
2. A university student writes in her English essay: “My professor said my thesis was brilliant—but then gave me a C. I don’t understand! Take white as black?” (How can something praised be graded poorly?) — The abrupt pivot from observation to rhetorical question gives it the raw, unfiltered logic of someone thinking aloud in two languages at once.
3. A backpacker posts on a travel forum: “The train schedule says ‘Departure: 8:15’, but platform sign says ‘8:40’. Take white as black?” (Which time is actually correct?) — Here, the phrase functions like a cultural shrug—polite, skeptical, and deeply aware that official information and lived reality often run on different clocks.

Origin

The expression springs directly from the idiom 指鹿为马 (zhǐ lù wéi mǎ)—“point to a deer and call it a horse”—a story from the Qin dynasty about Zhao Gao, a chancellor who tested courtiers’ loyalty by forcing them to deny obvious reality. The Chinglish version swaps deer/horse for white/black because “white” (bái) and “black” (hēi) are linguistically and culturally charged opposites in Chinese: purity versus corruption, truth versus falsehood, day versus night. Crucially, the structure “take X as Y” mirrors the classical Chinese verb-object-complement pattern (以…为…), which carries moral weight—it’s not just mistaken perception, but an intentional, socially consequential act of redefinition. This isn’t misnaming; it’s ideological recalibration.

Usage Notes

You’ll spot “take white as black” most often on handwritten shop notices, municipal bulletin boards in smaller cities, and in the spoken English of mid-career professionals who learned English before standardized testing reshaped pedagogy. It rarely appears in formal documents or coastal megacities—but it thrives in railway station announcements, factory floor memos, and the subtitles of low-budget regional documentaries. Surprisingly, younger netizens have begun repurposing it ironically on Weibo and Xiaohongshu—not as confusion, but as satire: a hashtag like #TakeWhiteAsBlack now tags posts exposing corporate doublespeak or bureaucratic euphemisms, turning an old mistranslation into a weaponized meme of quiet resistance. It’s no longer just lost in translation. It’s found its voice.