I brought The Prince to school and wanted to tell his form teacher (a lady from China) about his condition on his penis, that the foreskin is a little red and she needs to call me if he complains that he is in extreme pain.

The problem didn't occur to me, until I spoke in Mandarin and got stuck after: "Teacher Sun, Jing-Jie (Aidan) had an infection over the weekend. It is at his ...erm... his..", and I couldn't find the mandarin term for penis. The word "ku-ku" was the default stored in my vocabulary and I doubt she knows this hokkien word.

Sun lao-shi looked at me blankly, waiting for me to explain to her where the infection was. I thought about whether I should say "小鸟" (little bird) but I will die of embarrassment if she still doesn't understand and burst out laughing instead.

So I did the next best thing. I bent over immediately and pulled down my son's pants and pointed to the problem area. My son would have died of embarrassment too, but lucky he is only 4 years old and his friends were not around then.

So I went home and asked my parents what is 'penis' and 'vagina' in Mandarin, what if I need to use the words in times of emergency in the future? Amazingly, they pondered for a while and remarked to each other that they haven't used the proper Chinese term before, it's always 'ku-ku' and 'nor-nor' to them, too.

My mum did give me the term after that, but it never registered. It's like telling me what is 'asphyxiation' in Spanish, it sounded totally foreign. But for the benefit of all, I went to www.freetranslation.com and found the term for the penis and vagina respectively: 阴茎 / 阴道.