This is my fourth set of experimental playing cards containing Chinese four-character idioms. This time, I’ve created them as a deck of playing cards. I selected 52 idioms containing the character “mouth” (a quare-like ideogram) of which 13 feature “mouth” as the first character, another 13 as the second character and so on. My choice is more or less influenced by their being popular cliches today. For the back of the cards, I singled out 13 single-character interjections containing the “mouth” radical, encompassing a full range of exclamations from sheer delight, blissful wonderment to frustration and utter disgust. These interjections comprise a full emotional spectrum, colourful sonic gems in their own right, annotated with (Cantonese) jyutping and (Putonghua) pinyin romanizations.

Danny Yung, 2023