Solution: 东西
Answer: TIGHTLY
Written by Xue Heng
This puzzle is about literal chinese translations. Solvers might get the aha in several ways: the easiest is probably by directly googling any of the phrases “add oil”, “five flower meat” or “beautiful country”. The title suggests a chinese theme to the puzzle and the flavor text hints at literal translations - “thing” in chinese is 东西, the title of the puzzle, which literally translates to “East West”.
Several of the clues are direct. The enumerations might look strange, until solvers realize that they represent the number of letters in the Hanyu Pinyin romanizations of each of the answers (in chinese). There are 24 clues in total, which correspond to 24 sets of given words/short phrases. This suggests that we should have a one-to-one mapping between a clue and a set of words. Solvers might also come to the realization that each word/short phrase in the given sets is literally translated from english to chinese and put together in the given order to form an answer to one of the clues in chinese.
For example:
Add - Oil: “Add” translates to 加, and “Oil” translates to 油, and 加油 (pinyin: jia you) is the answer to the clue “A form of encouragement - come on!” - “jia you” matches the 3 3 enumeration given. We extract the third letter - A.
Bear - Cat: “Bear” translates to 熊, and “Cat” translates to 猫, and 熊猫 (pinyin: xiong mao) is the answer to the direct clue “Panda” - “xiong mao” matches the 5 3 enumeration given. We extract the first letter - X.
Note that the clues are given in alphabetical order, so the ordering we should use is the order in which the sets of words/short phrases are presented.
The answers to the clues in order of the given sets of words from top to bottom are as follows:
| Clue | Answer | Literal Translation | Pinyin | Letter Extracted | Corresponding letter in flavor text |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Something trivial or unimportant | 鸡毛蒜皮 | Rooster Feathers Garlic Skin | ji mao suan pi | M | T |
| A hopeless illusion or futile attempt | 猴子捞月 | Monkey Son Fish for Moon | hou zi lao yue | A | H |
| Steering wheel | 方向盘 | Square Towards Plate | fang xiang pan | P | I |
| Speaking to an ignorant or unappreciative audience | 对牛弹琴 | To Ox Play Piano | dui niu tan qin | T | N |
| It’s not too late to fix a mistake | 亡羊补牢 | Dead Goat Mend Prison | wang yang bu lao | O | G |
| An experienced person is a good guide | 老马识途 | Old Horse Knowledge Way | lao ma shi tu | L | I |
| Assert false authority | 狐假虎威 | Fox Fake Tiger Prestige | hu jia hu wei | E | S |
| Owl | 猫头鹰 | Cat Head Eagle | mao tou ying | T | L |
| Wait idly for opportunities | 守株待兔 | Guard Tree trunk Wait Rabbit | shou zhu dai tu | T | I |
| America | 美国 | Beautiful Country | mei guo | E | T |
| Pork Belly | 五花肉 | Five Flower Meat | wu hua rou | R | E |
| Helicopter | 直升机 | Straight Rise Machine | zhi sheng ji | S | R |
| Kangaroo | 袋鼠 | Bag Rat | dai shu | I | A |
| Be driven to desperate action | 狗急跳墙 | Dog Urgent Jump Wall | gou ji tiao qiang | N | L |
| Africa | 非洲 | Not Continent | fei zhou | F | L |
| Pitcher plant | 猪笼草 | Pig Cage Grass | zhu long cao | L | Y |
| A form of encouragement - come on! | 加油 | Add Oil | jia you | A | E |
| Feasting and pleasure-seeking | 灯红酒绿 | Lamp Red Liquor Green | deng hong jiu lv | V | A |
| Adding the vital finishing touch | 画龙点睛 | Draw Dragon Dot Eyes | hua long dian jing | O | S |
| Cactus | 仙人掌 | Fairy Person Palm of hand | xian ren zhang | R | T |
| Weather | 天气 | Sky Energy | tian qi | T | W |
| Penguin | 企鹅 | Enterprise Goose | qi e | E | E |
| Panda | 熊猫 | Bear Cat | xiong mao | X | S |
| Ruin the final product by appending superfluous features | 画蛇添足 | Draw Snake Add Feet | hua she tian zu | T | T |
Solvers might notice that several words are missing from the given sets of words. Namely, there are twelve missing words, corresponding to the twelve chinese zodiac animals - all of which are bolded above.
The clue phrase tells us to “map to letters in flavor text” - there are 24 letters in the flavor text, exactly the same as the number of clues/answers! The last step is to extract letters from the flavor text corresponding to the answers with missing animals, and re-order those extracted letters in the order the animals appear in the chinese zodiac. This gives us ANS IS TIGHTLY, so we submit TIGHTLY.
Author's Notes
Being ethnically chinese, I’ve wanted to write a puzzle involving literal chinese translations for a while, given how scarcely the language is featured in puzzle hunts as compared to other languages which share more common features with english.
Bearing in mind that the majority of our target audience do not know chinese, I deliberately made as many of the clues as direct as I could. I also tried to make sure most of the proverbs can be found by a Google search query along the lines of “ruin the final product by appending superfluous features chinese idiom”, for example.
Unfortunately, due to the restrictions on the letters I needed in some of these answers, and the restriction that each zodiac animal appears exactly once and in separate answers, a few of the answers ended up being too obscure for my liking. In light of this, I tried to make sure that solvers didn’t need all the answers to solve this puzzle. There exist many chinese proverbs that contain two or more zodiac animals which have interesting literal translations in their own right (horse-horse-tiger-tiger, for example), but due to the extraction method used in this puzzle I was unable to include some of those.
I hope that it wasn’t too frustrating for non-chinese speakers!