"Face" in Chinese Culture: What Does "Don't Want Face" Really Mean?

Concepts dealing with "face" can be difficult to translate. "Bu yao lian," which means, literally, "don't want face," is a case in point. To understand this phrase, you need to understand that in Chinese culture "face," or how other people view you, is very, very important.

It's important in non-Chinese cultures too, of course, but even more so in places like China, Taiwan, Singapore and anywhere else where there's a majority of ethnic Chinese.

"Bu yao lian," therefore, means that you don't care about your "face" - how others view you. You have no shame, you're shameless, and this is considered a bad thing.

For example, my wife and I had no more use for a stroller and wanted to throw it away. It was in perfectly good shape, but we didn't need it any more and didn't know who to give it to. (And we didn't want to go through the hassle of selling it.) So we put it out on the curb, hoping a passerby would take it.

Someone did take it, eventually, and that person happened to be a close neighbor. Now, every day, I see my neighbor taking her child out on the stroller, our old stroller. "Bu yao lian" would apply to her. Not because she took the stroller, necessarily, but that she knew it was ours and would be using it in full view of us. To put it bluntly, she was using our cast-off item, our "garbage."

Here in the United States some people might think my neighbor's behavior a bit odd - and I, of Northern European descent, admit I feel a touch awkward when I see her. But I shouldn't, really, right? My neighbor is actually smart. She got a perfectly good stroller for nothing and is making good use of it.

But in Chinese culture her behavior would constitute a loss of face, and to so blatantly act in such a way would mean my neighbor doesn't care about face. This is a big no no.

To confuse things, there are actually two terms for face in Chinese: "lian" and "mian zi." Traditionally, "lian" would refer to issues of moral character and personal integrity, whereas "mian zi" would mean a person's image in society.

A loss of "lian" would then be much more important - meaning you are bringing shame and disgrace to yourself and family. A loss of "mian zi," on the other hand, would mean you don't care about your public image, and in some cases this can be interpreted as a good thing: that you're genuine, "down to earth."

As with all languages, however, Chinese is changing, and "lian" and "mian zi" are be used more and more interchangeably, especially among the young. If you visit chat boards, for example, you'll see people calling each other "bu yao lian" over the smallest things.

You'd think the above case of the stroller would be about "mian zi," but when I was living in Taiwan this would have merited a "bu yao lian!"

Source: "Communicating Effectively with the Chinese," by Ge Gao, Ko Kao, Stella Ting-Toomey; SAGE Publishing, 1998