路遥知马力，日久见人心 A long road shows a horse’s strength. A long time shows a person’s heart. The saying appears in a Yuan play, The Fight to Repay Kindness (争报恩).
信用 Credit, trustworthiness. The Handian dictionary defines it as “the trust gained by keeping one’s promises.” Its example: “He is a person who keeps his word. Since he said he would help, he will surely help.”
In chapter 84 of Journey to the West, the widow Zhao, who has run an inn for many years, welcomes the pilgrims. “My inn treats guests in three ways,” she says. “Now let us be petty men first and gentlemen afterward. Let us settle the price of the room first, so the bill is easy later.”
The saying 先小人后君子, first the petty man, then the gentleman, means to set out the terms plainly before treating each other with courtesy. The writer Wang Meng explained it as signing a contract first, fixing the division of profit and responsibility, “and then talking of cooperation and team spirit.”
In the Teochew dialect of Chaoshan, “our own people” sounds roughly like gaginang. Some write it 胶己人, but the linguist Lin Lunlun says the correct form is 家己人.
An article on Chaoshan identity describes the effect of the word among Teochew people far from home: “Wherever you go, if you say one word, gaginang, there is no one who will not help.”
The Shanxi draft banks hired only people from their home region in Shanxi. A study of the banks found that a new employee needed “two well-established guarantors to recommend him.” The guarantors also covered the losses if he proved dishonest.
Staff who proved themselves could later receive 身股, body shares, a share of the profits without putting in any capital. According to the same study, shares were granted after “more than three consecutive fiscal years with excellent performance.” A Chinese account adds that the books were settled every three to five years.
In Lu Xun’s story Kong Yiji, the narrator says that in the tavern, Kong Yiji behaved better than others. “He never left a debt unpaid.” When he had no cash, his drinks were “written on the chalkboard for the time being, but within a month he always paid, and Kong Yiji’s name was wiped off the board.”
Then Kong Yiji stops coming. Two or three days before the Mid-Autumn Festival, the tavern keeper takes down the board. “Kong Yiji hasn’t been here for a long time. He still owes nineteen coins!” He says it again at the end of the year, and again at the Dragon Boat Festival the next year.
见外 To see as outside. To treat someone not as a close person but with the politeness shown to a stranger. A dictionary example reads: 我一向把心腹待你，你不要见外. “I have always treated you as a confidant. Do not treat me as an outsider.”
交心 To exchange hearts. To say what is on one’s mind without holding anything back.
心里话 Words from inside the heart. One’s innermost thoughts and feelings.
In the 1980s, people from Wenzhou in Zhejiang settled in Beijing’s Fengtai District to trade. Their district became known as “Zhejiang Village.” The anthropologist Xiang Biao studied it. When people there needed workers in 1984, he writes, they wrote home or even went back in person, to mobilize relatives and find suitable girls through kin networks and in their own and nearby villages. “This was common in Zhejiang Village.”
“Our own people,” he notes, meant “direct relatives or good friends, who would speak up for one when needed.” By 1987, newcomers no longer needed a tie to someone already there. He counts 96,000 outsiders in the area beside 14,000 Beijing natives.
自己人 Our own people, those close to us.
胳膊肘往外拐 The elbow bends outward. Said of someone who helps outsiders against their own people.
肥水不流外人田 Rich water does not flow into an outsider’s field. Keep the good things within the family.