Do You Have a 损友(SunYou)?

How do you define a friend?       

?友(you)means friend, 损(sun, pronounced more like the English word “soon”) means damaging, bad. Most people would say that a friend is someone who supports you, loves you and celebrates you, if you add the “no matter what”, that is loyalty and unconditional love. However when you define “friend” that way, then you look around, you’d suddenly find you have very few or no friend at all. That wouldn’t do. Human beings are not wired to be isolated one from another and feel perfectly peaceful and happy like that. Most people would rather have friends, even 损友 (SunYous).

What are 损友 (SunYous)?

Well, it’s a Chinese word describing a friend who doesn’t really support you, sometimes even try to demean you, pushing you down instead of lifting you up, who’d talk badly about you behind you or even in front of your face. It can be someone who occasionally behaves like that, he might or even say something like “you see, I’m your real friend, that’s why I tell you the truth! You are immature and an idiot!” You opened rounder your eyes, surprised, in the middle of nowhere, he’d get out something mean, you’d wonder, “Are you really my friend? With a friend like you, who needs an enemy?”, and yet, he’s your friend. He could have been around already for years, decades, or a lifetime.

 I have pondered its translation and here are some suggestions from my Linkedin connections:

Frenemy, Two-faced, Toxic friend, Phoney, Politician

The word SunYou means a little bit of all those. A SunYou can be intentionally or unintentionally mean, or mock at you in a goofy and funny way, but you never know, on the last day of life on planet earth, your SunYou might lend you a hand to board the last spaceship! But I wouldn’t count on that!

SunYou is still someone you can have fun with, even if he literally wanted you to be in the sxxx with him. There was a group of red guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. One night they were wandering around in an unfamiliar town and they came across a wall. Perching on it like a group of magic monkeys out of wits, it was too dark to know what it was on the other side. They then decided that one would jump down and tell the others what it was below. He jumped. It was a pool of sticky and stinky sewage water, when he was gasping for air, he yelled at his friends:

“Come down, it’s cool down here!”

One jumped down. When another asked the two who were already in the sewage water, they both answered it was fine down there!

It continued until everyone was in the dirty water, throwing excrement at one another, laughing.

What would you call them? They are friends right? Because the first one who jumped knew that if he told the truth, his other friends would just leave him there alone in the dirty water, they wouldn’t want to help him out. Once they were all in it, at least he wasn’t alone anymore.

A lot of people have SunYous, without knowing it.

Here is an example, about a devoted business partner in Jane Smiley’s novel- Good Faith.

The three friends in Good Faith, also real estate business partners are Marcus Burns, Joe Stratford- the narrator and Gordon Baldwin. Joe grew up with strict and religious parents but he claimed to have been re-molded into someone with less morals, more fun by Sally, who was the dead daughter of Gordon Baldwin. After Sally’s death, Joe was always seen by the Baldwins as family. Joe was actually sleeping with Sally’s married sister Felicity after he divorced. They all lived in a quiet small town where people trusted friends and honesty in business dealings. Then Marcus came into the picture and became their friends. Marcus Burns was a charismatic figure, Joe and Gordon had faith in him and their joint business, which was to develop a 580-acre farm land into a golf course and “exclusive housing”. It all went wrong, and slowly when you read the novel, you could see how Joe was bereaved of his last piece of possessions. First it was his car, then his furniture, then his phone, then his house. When he was literally living in the street, he still believed in Marcus Burns and that their business would eventually take off. Joe wasn’t totally unaware as to what was really going on. He told Marcus when he made him cut off his phone line: “You are full of sxxx!” However you found him in later pages consenting to Marcus’ demands again. Was that Good Faith or bad judgement? Aren’t we told that we should love but not judge our friends? “Love is without judgement”, and “love is GIVING”!!! Joe might simply be a loving friend, and had faith in Marcus Burns. And it was also a warm-water-boiling-the-frog process, even trusting Joe would have never agreed if Marcus stripped everything out of him all at once. Marcus was definitely a SunYou to Joe and Gordon.

Do you WANT a 损友SunYou?

Are you the kind who’d like to consciously keep a SunYou? Some people might have a personality that really enjoys contradiction or even conflict in general, for example, some people would deliberately set the GPS to one direction and drive towards another.

 Another way to understand the meaning of a word is to find its antonym, which makes me think of the French word BIENVIELLANT. BIENVEILLANT can also refer to a general personality trait of someone. It is often translated into English as BENEVOLENT, which includes charity, well in French it’s not about charity, I would translate it maybe into “kind regard”.

SunYou can be mono-directional, meaning it’s someone towards whom you have “kind regard”, while he’s your “SunYou”; it can also be something reciprocal. On Chinese social media, the word “互粉HuFen”(mutual following) often makes me laugh, I would allow myself to invent the word “互损HuSun” (mutually bothering or annoying) to describe mutual SunYous. If your eyes are wide open and you prefer to keep SunYous around because you find it stimulating and lots of fun, why not? In that case, it’s your free will, you are not a passive victim.

You can find it on my website: https://www.dreamstalents.com/articles-and-stories-about-human-relations.html